A rare television interview with William Hartnell from 1967 has been discovered and will be included as an extra on the upcoming DVD release of Hartnell’s final story, The Tenth Planet.
This came to light yesterday following the BBFC’s classification of extras which included the Hartnell interview.
Restoration team member Steve Roberts confirmed that the interview was in-vision, meaning it was on screen as opposed to being audio only, and revealed the interview had been discovered by his fellow team member Richard Bignell.
The interview was conducted by Roger Mills for Points West, the BBC’s regional news programme, and was recorded in Hartnell’s dressing room in the Gaumont Theatre in Taunton, where he was appearing in the pantomine Puss in Boots. The interview aired on Tuesday 17th January 1967.
The extra is 3 minutes 16 seconds long, and Bignell detailed the discovery of what is now the only known on-screen interview with Hartnell known to exist:
A few years ago, I was doing research into the article I was preparing for Issue 3 of Nothing at the End of the Lane on Hartnell’s rather disastrous performance as Buskin the Fairy Cobbler in the pantomime Puss In Boots, which toured around four different venues in December 1966 and January 1967, just three months after he had completed work on The Tenth Planet.
Whilst doing some work at the BBC Written Archive Centre, I checked the respective Programme-as-Broadcast sheets for the period, looking specifically at the local BBC news programmes to see if Hartnell’s appearance in panto was deemed worthy of a television report.
He was in fact interviewed twice. Once in the first week of the tour in Ipswich (shown on Look East on 27th December 1966) and again during the final week in Taunton for Points West, shown on 17th January 1967. As I’d built up some contacts in the BBC’s regional news libraries working on the DVDs, I dropped the respective archives a line to see if there was any chance the two interviews survived.
The first interview for Look East had long gone, but the ladies in the Bristol News Library very quickly got back to me to say that the interview done in Taunton still survived. We arranged for the footage to be sent over to London, where it was duly transferred. It shows Hartnell in his dressing room doing his make-up for one of his performances, with his “Doctor’s ring” on the table and a Berwick Dalek playsuit stuffed in the corner. Hartnell speaks about his problems acting against the Daleks and how pantomime isn’t “legitimate” theatre! Enjoy!!
The Tenth Planet DVD will be released on Monday 18th November and is available to pre-order