NervousPete wrote:
When yet another allegation surfaces regarding a 1970's/80's light entertainment figure emerges I sometimes wonder if Chinny is sinisterly sneaking around framing our beloved and badly-barbered TV chums, planting evidence and bribing 'witnesses', all to keep them in the public eye and justify nostalgia driven threads about the golden age of Saturday night TV. I expect a, "Interceptor Man tried to get my child in his helicopter on walk home from school!" headline any day now.
(In all seriousness Chinny, keep the L.E trivia posts coming, they're a Beex highlight for me!
)
The JNT rumours have been knocking around for years. Just checked some forums and some of the fanboys are really upset. They see it as an attack on the series. But the outline of this stuff was widely known. And perhaps its a good idea to clear some of this stuff up. One of the wilder accusations had been that he had died of an AIDS related illness. This was fuelled by the fact his partner died just a couple of years later. In fact it was liver disease caused by alcoholism. Alcoholism fuelled by the fact he never worked in TV again and had every single pitch and concept he put to a TV company turned down. Small industry, people know each other, etc.
He was a divisive figure. For sure he pulled the series up by the scruff of the neck in 1980 and managed to get more from its meagre budget than ever before. He understood it was a big show and had appeal beyond these shores. However he was also a man who was more concerned about some star casting or costuming than storylines. It was only when he had a new young firebrand script editor in the final years that story actually came to the fore. I was reminded reading The Wife In Space that modern Doctor Who didn't start in 2005, it started in 1988 with Remembrance of the Daleks, a story often singled out by the Moff himself.
The book isn't out yet but the snippets so far are fascinating. Its not a stitch up job either, the writer has interviewed over 100 people and is an ex-BBC producer himself who departed under a cloud (he was the Blue Peter producer who rather unfairly took the blame for the cat phone-in scandal). He knows the Beeb inside out.
It's also important to note, and the author has already been at pains to point this out, that JNT was not a peado. There is no evidence at all to suggest this. The author himself says:
Quote:
I think if I’d discovered darker things than I did, I might have backed off. But actually, this is not to say that subsequently people won’t come forward and say, “You didn’t know about this,” or, “You didn’t know about that.” But I did a lot of research, and I think what you had was a promiscuous gay bloke in a position where his social life was very actively busy, and he had the opportunity to meet a lot of young people, and did like getting off with young guys. I don’t think he was predatory particularly, I don’t think he forced himself on the unwilling, I haven’t found any evidence of that. I think the whole thing about the age of consent – and you’ve to remember in the 1980s it was 21, which a lot of people at the time thought was extremely unreasonable, and is now obviously in line with the heterosexual age of consent – is it’s controversial and people will be very divided. I found I was much more cautious about his partner Gary, than I was about John. I think John was just a go-with-the-flow, life-is-a-party, you know, “I’ll try it on and if somebody says yes, then that’s up to them.” I have less of a benevolent view of Gary. I think one of the themes of the book is that, in falling in love with Gary Downie and in making his life with Gary, that was another massive issue in terms of the unravelling of his life and career.
Source: http://www.starburstmagazine.com/features/interviews/4661-interview-richard-marson-author-of-the-life-and-scandalous-times-of-john-nathan-turnerOne thing the fans are right about, the Daily Fail will get hold of this book and will delight in stories of a Doctor Who producer being sucked off under his desk while on the phone to Biddy Baxter.
For me, May can't come soon enough. It looks like the book of the year.
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