Actually, no one. He wasn’t there and instead recorded some extremely jarring links from the edit suite. I’m not sure why they bothered – much as I love the Briggs – when on screen captions to cue up the next bit of the story would’ve been smoother. But, for the sake of the question you’ve asked me, he was talking to Christopher Hamilton Bidmead.

Script editor of Doctor Who for one season – the eighteenth – and writer of Logopolis, Castrovalva and Frontios.

The copyright date is 2006 but there’s no helpful intro to explain the finer points to those of us who care.

Chez Hamilton Bidmead. Sat in front of a book case that I occasionally squinted at to see what sort of books he reads and DVDs he watches. The house is slightly relevant because when asked to look back on his year on Doctor Who he does remark that "Doctor Who paid for this house". Tom must’ve been in a generous mood that day.

Nope. Not unless you count Briggs’s rather off-putting interjections and personally I don’t.

He started out as a rather arrogant actor. Not my words – his own. He went to RADA and did rep for a while before ending up as part of BBC Radio’s troop of regular artistes. He had a habit of spouting forth about how terrible the scripts were and his fellow performers eventually told him either to shut up or write something better. So he wrote something better.

He then took us through the writing process in those days. He used an early form of cut and paste which involved literally cutting bits of typed text out of a sheet and stapling it to a different one so he could keep the bits he liked and bin the rest. This was fine up to a point but – and he doesn’t advise anyone to do this if they want a career in the profession – by the time he’d finished his first proper serial he was so depressed by the pile of stapled paper that he picked the whole lot up, took it to the BBC, gave it to the drama department and told them to read it if they wanted to. Amazingly, they did and the serial – now properly typed by young ladies – was a big success. Bidmead confesses that if a young writer had done that to him when he was a script editor it would’ve gone straight in the bin.

He got the Doctor Who job because he’d bought a television a year or two earlier and really liked Shoestring. So he wrote a fan letter to Robert Banks Stewart telling him how much he enjoyed the programme. Banks Stewart discovered Bidmead was a writer himself and next thing he knew, C. Hamilton Bidmead was being interviewed for the job of script editor on Doctor Who. The only problem was that he’d seen a few episodes and didn’t like the show. He went into the interview and told JNT and exec producer Barry Letts that he thought Doctor Who was silly and that he didn’t want the job. This was music to Letts’s ears as he wanted to get rid of the silliness and return to something approaching serious drama and Bidmead got the job.

His biggest problem was that he had no scripts and not very long to assemble some. His first choice was Nigel "Quatermass" Kneale but he refused on the flimsy grounds that he hated Doctor Who with a passion. So it was left to Bidmead to gather together a mix of what he called (though he apologised for how the term might be interpreted) old hacks and new writers who had wonderful ideas but no idea how to write a script.

The Leisure Hive was by one of the old hacks and Bidmead remembers that he was almost certainly the one who put the tachyonics stuff in there. Meglos isn’t mentioned once even though it featured new writers, it was very silly and he only worked on seven stories so skipping one entirely was odd.

He didn’t see eye to eye with Terrance Dicks during the writing of State of Decay. Having fished it out of an old rejects pile during his early, desperate days, Bidmead and Uncle Terrance disagreed on the subject of rewrites. Hamilton wrote on one of those new-fangled microcomputers which let you edit text, move things around and generally tinker without having to do a full rewrite every time. Terrance on the other hand used a typewriter and found this young chap telling him that every opportunity to rewrite a script was a blessing because it meant you could improve the script rather galling.

Full Circle and Warriors’ Gate both had people with boundless imagination, excellent ideas and no concept of how to write for fairly cheap studio based television. So it was down to Bidmead to fashion their ideas into a set of workable scripts before the cameras started rolling.

Keeper of Traken brought up JNT’s habit of suddenly announcing, on a whim, that something major should happen. In this case it was the return of the Master but there were other game-changing proclamations from the producer during his tenure. For Bidmead this was a challenge and – as mentioned before – any opportunity for rewriting was an opportunity to make it better. Because he had a microcomputer. Though the BBC didn’t understand this and insisted on re-typing his printed scripts and ensuring they were worse than they were when he submitted them.

Finally, he had to write out the Fourth Doctor and write in the Fifth. He tells the story about how Tom would always go to the producer at the start of each season and say he thought it should be his last and the producer would beg him to stay. Until JNT surprised him by agreeing that yes – it was time he should go. Bidmead doesn’t go into any detail about the ideas behind Logopolis or Castrovalva (save for mentioning the Escher picture which inspired it) which is a shame as they are packed with concepts and I for one wouldn’t have minded hearing more about them.

And that was it – after a year of being script editor without really knowing what the job of script editor was meant to involve, he formulated a description of the job he was actually doing, asked the BBC to be paid what he felt that job was worth and they said no. He would’ve liked to have done a second series – the money issue didn’t seem to be a polite way of resigning – and I wish he had done.

His interest in microcomputers lead to a new career as a computer writer with columns in various magazines. He also novelised his three stories and was offered the chance to novelise "several" unmade scripts of his but the latter offer was not backed up by as much cash as he felt it ought to have been and he declined. Though he now says he would do them for nothing because he’s discovered how much he loves writing novels. Since recording this, one of those scripts has been produced by Big Finish as part of the first season of "Lost Stories". He also wrote an original script for them – Renaissance of the Daleks - but creative differences over rewrites (ironically enough) mean it now bears the credit "From a story by Christopher H. Bidmead".

What a lovely man. He had a tough time on a show he didn’t previously like, he left because they wouldn’t pay him what he was worth and yet this job has followed him round for the next quarter of a century. And despite all that he talks with a rare passion and enthusiasm about his time on Doctor Who. Soemtimes these interviews leave me cold, sometimes they leave me a bit hero-struck but rarely do they make me want to sit down with the interviewee and just have a really long chat about stuff. Christopher Bidmead is one of that rare group and from everything he said I can even kid myself that he wouldn’t mind chatting to me about stuff. Losing him after a year was a terrible creative blow for the series. Saward did ok for the first two or three years of his tenure but had Bidmead been around during the transition to Colin Baker we might’ve been spared some of the bad decisions and directions embarked upon during that ultimately disastrous time.

The DVD itself is a mixed bag – it feels very sparse in places with (as mentioned) no mention of Meglos at all and very little discussion of Bidmead’s own scripts. The interview runs to 56 minutes and there are 12 minutes of deleted scenes (though why they’d delete scenes when they didn’t have a time limit and then included them as extras anyway confuses me). I could happily listen to double that.