Am I Annoying?
He wrote absolutely every Doctor Who story in the early 1980s, but he still thought that the actors were a load of old tripe."There's no way I was annoying, but bloody JN-T was", carps...

Name

Eric Saward

Resume

Script editor of Doctor Who in the first half of the 1980s, but fell out with John Nathan-Turner and did a runner in 1986, taking his script for the last episode of Trial Of A Time Lord with him.

Votes cast

October 2003

Total votes

25

Why he might be annoying

Didn't think Peter Davison was a good choice as the Doctor

Didn't think Colin Baker was a good choice as the Doctor

Refused to allow clips of Revelation Of The Daleks to be included on The Colin Baker Years

He thought that Trial Of A Time Lord was a good idea

His hair looks like a Lego man's

 

Why he might not be annoying

Maybe he was right about everything

He wrote Earthshock and therefore metaphorically killed Adric

He created Richard Mace

He wears a nice leather jacket in "Thirty Years In The TARDIS"

His ending for Trial was rather good... shame it was never used

 

Some Comments From Voters


he tried to turn the show into a harder sci-fi series, probably prolonging the life of a series that had begun a downward spiral towards the end of Toms' era.


You've got to love his hair, haven't you?
 

I'm not convinced that anyone who wanted to turn the Doctor into an action hero actually understands what is unique about the show.

The show worked in the eighties in spite of Saward, rather than because of him.
I'm sure everyone was finding it tough in 1985, but they didn't all leave the show in the lurch and resign leaving the season to be finished without a script editor.
it's one thing to bitch about someone in private, but quite another to run to the editors of Starburst to vent your spleen in public. It's called professionalism.
Anything he did right was more by accident than design
I voted him annoying though for his smugness in the Earthshock documentary. The way he takes such delight over recounting the tale of some petty injoke over script paper with JNT. It annoyed me!