Innes Lloyd

Innes Lloyd (24 December 1925 in Penmaenmawr, Wales – 23 August 1991) was a British television producer of BBC drama programmes.^[1]

Early life and career

Following service in the navy^[2] towards the end of the war, Innes Lloyd trained as an actor at the Central School. He joined the BBC in the 1950s initially in presentation moving into outside broadcasts. As an outside broadcast producer he covered many important sporting events such as tennis at Wimbledon, golf and motor racing. He also produced important state events such as the Queen's speech and Churchill's state funeral.

Doctor Who

Lloyd began his drama career working on popular series such as Doctor Who in the 1960s. He was the third producer on the programme and his duration as producer ran for two seasons between The Celestial Toymaker and The Enemy of the World^[3] (excepting The Tomb of the Cybermen^[4] which was produced by Peter Bryant as a test piece to show he could take over from Lloyd). His most important contribution to the programme was in developing the notion whereby the lead actor in the programme might be replaced. This arose following continuing health difficulties with William Hartnell as the lead actor.

Lloyd and story editor Gerry Davis came up with an intriguing way of writing the Doctor out - as he was an alien being, they decided that he would have the power to change his body when it became worn out or seriously injured, a process that would later become known within the mythology of the series as regeneration. Whereas John Wiles, the previous producer to Lloyd, had intended to replace Hartnell with another actor but playing the same character, Lloyd and Davis elected to change the entire personality and appearance of the Doctor. They eventually cast character actor Patrick Troughton, having previously considered another actor, Peter Jeffrey, as well as Peter Cushing, who had played Dr. Who in two Dr. Who movies. Troughton first appeared in November 1966 after the changeover from Hartnell had been seen at the end of the story The Tenth Planet. That serial also introduced the popular Cybermen, villains who would return to face the Doctor on several subsequent occasions. Indeed, Lloyd oversaw something of an era of monster on the programme, introducing durable and memorable monsters like the Ice Warriors and the Yeti, and terminating the purely historical stories prominent in the first three seasons of classic Doctor Who.

Other work

Innes Lloyd also worked on Thirty-Minute Theatre, the football soap United! and Dead of Night, but he is best be remembered as the producer of more prestigious drama. As a BBC drama producer in the 1970s and 1980s, his chosen projects were often biographical. Collaborating with authors such as Roger Milner and Don Shaw, he brought to the screen biographies from a diverse range of, often flawed, heroes ranging from Orde Wingate and Arthur "Bomber" Harris, the Campbells Donald and Malcolm, through to the first Director General of the BBC John Reith. He also explored notions of Englishness in the twentieth century with productions such as England, Their England (directed by Stephen Frears), East of Ipswich (written by Michael Palin) and An Englishman's Castle (1978) starring Kenneth More; a dystopian vision of the consequence of losing the second world war. He was a frequent collaborator with Alan Bennett. That relationship started in 1972 with Bennett's poignant comedy A Day Out and continued through landmark productions such as the first series of Talking Heads until Lloyd's death in 1991. Bennett's An Englishman Abroad told the remarkable true story of the chance meeting between actress Coral Browne (playing herself) and spy Guy Burgess (Alan Bates) in Moscow in 1958, while A Question of Attribution (finished shortly before Lloyd's death) was a logical sequel, showing the radically different fate of Keeper of the Queen's Pictures and fellow traitor Anthony Blunt.

Innes Lloyd died on 23 August 1991, aged 65.

References

External links

• Innes Lloyd at the Internet Movie Database

Preceded by Marcel Cravenne	Eurovision Song Contest Director 1960	Succeeded by Marcel Cravenne