Innes Lloyd

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George Innes Llewelyn Lloyd (24 December 1925 – 23 August 1991) was a Welsh television producer. He had a long career in BBC drama, which included producing series such as Doctor Who and Talking Heads.

Early life and career[edit]

George Innes Llewelyn Lloyd was born December 24, 1925, in the town of Penmaenmawr, Wales. Lloyd received his education from Ellesmere College in Shropshire, England. His ambition was to join the Royal Navy, but was denied entry to Dartmouth Naval College due to his poor eyesight. The outbreak of World War II finally allowed Lloyd to volunteer in the Navy.^[1]

Acting career[edit]

Following his service,^[2] Lloyd decided to pursue acting. He studied at the Central School of Speech and Drama, graduating in 1949. That Christmas, he played the role of the Chinese Emperor in a version of Aladdin produced in Ashford, Kent. The following year, Lloyd joined a repertory company called the Palace Players, based at the Gaiety Theatre in Douglas, on the Isle of Mann. Throughout 1950, he performed twice every night in a variety of shows, including the The Light of Heart by Emlyn Williams and See How They Run, by Phillip King.^[1] In 1951, Lloyd joined the rep comedy at the David Garrick Theatre in Lichfield, appearing alongside Lionel Jeffries in a variety of plays, such as The Recruiting Officer and The Bishop Misbehaves. In August of that year, Lloyd played a doctor in the John Perry melodrama A Man About the House, earning him a positive review in the Lichfield Mercury. In February 1952, Lloyd gave his first performance on London's West End, appearing in the first run of the murder-thriller Silent Warning at the Watergate Theatre.^[1]

Television career[edit]

Wishing to work as a producer or director, Lloyd wished to join the BBC, which he attributed to his love of organisation. He joined the BBC Presentation Department in 1953, and soon moved into Outside Broadcast.^[3] As an outside broadcast producer he supervised live coverage of many important sporting events such as the 1959 Wimbledon Championships, the 1960 Eurovision Song Contest, a World Cup qualifying match between England and Luxembourg, and Winston Churchill's state funeral. He also produced several series of Top of the Form, an inter-school quiz championship. After producing coverage of the 1965 Wimbledon Championships, Lloyd began to work on narrative series. In 1965, he directed two episodes each of The Flying Swan, the football drama United!, and the soap opera The Newcomers.^[3]

Doctor Who[edit]

In January 1966, BBC Head of Drama Sydney Newman asked Lloyd to take over production of the popular science fiction series Doctor Who. Lloyd recalled telling Newman "I don't like science fiction at all - in fact I dislike it intensely." Newman responded by telling Lloyd that he would either produce the series or leave the BBC, prompting Lloyd to accept.^[3]

Lloyd began his tenure as Doctor Who's producer by overseeing the production of scripts that his predecessor John Wiles and former story editor Donald Tosh had commissioned.^[3] Lloyd and the newly hired story editor Gerry Davis oversaw the completion of the scripts as the serials The Celestial Toymaker and The Gunfighters, which both ran in 1966. The former saw the Doctor, the series' protagonist, trapped in a fantastical universe by the title villain,^[4] while the latter was a historical set around the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1881.^[5] Newman complained to Lloyd that the quality of The Gunfighters was "awful," prompting Lloyd to give more consideration to the quality of future scripts. Lloyd wished to imbue future serials with a sense of realism, planting "everything as much as possible in the present day." To that end, Lloyd oversaw the replacement of astronaut Steven Taylor and orphan Dodo Chaplet as the companions of the Doctor, introducing contemporary Ben Jackson and Polly Wright in their place.^[6]

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^[7] (with the exception of The Tomb of the Cybermen, which was produced by Peter Bryant as a test piece to show that he could take over from Lloyd).^[8]

Lloyd made the series more action-orientated and less whimsical than it had been previously, which he had regarded as old-fashioned. He attempted to make the show more realistic, to this end hiring Kit Pedler as an unofficial scientific advisor.^[9]

During his tenure as producer the concept of regeneration was introduced, 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. 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.

Lloyd's era as producer of Doctor Who became known as a monster era. It saw the introduction of recurring monsters such as the Cybermen, the Ice Warriors and the Yeti. He also terminated the purely historical stories^[10] prominent in the first three seasons of classic Doctor Who.

Other work[edit]

Innes Lloyd also worked on Thirty-Minute Theatre, the football soap United! and Dead of Night. 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)^[11] was a logical sequel, showing the radically different fate of Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures and fellow traitor Anthony Blunt.

Personal life and death[edit]

Innes was one of his two middle names as well as his mother's maiden name. Lloyd died of cancer on 23 August 1991, aged 65.^[12]

References[edit]

External links[edit]

• Innes Lloyd at IMDb