In 1962–63, Troughton played Daniel Quilp in the BBC’s epic interpretation of Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop, something he mentioned as a career highlight in 1983. ‘I did a lot of Dickens… the dwarf Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop was a big success and a part I look back on with great love and excitement.’
Diversity was the watchword of Troughton’s career and next he played the blind man Phineas in the film classic Jason and the Argonauts.
The movie opens with King Pelias, an evil dictator, receiving a prophecy from a Soothsayer regarding a golden fleece. He learns that a baby that will grow into a man will thwart him: Jason, a man with one sandal.
When grown, Jason saves a man – King Pelias – from drowning, and when Jason loses a sandal, during the incident, Pelias knows that the prophecy is drawing closer to a conclusion. Indeed, Jason doesn’t help himself. He tells the king that he is on a quest to regain his throne and kill the evil Pelias. Knowing that he could never kill Jason in one-to-one combat, Pelias tells Jason that he isn’t ready to confront the king and tells him to gather good men and a ship and prove himself first by capturing the golden fleece.
Jason and the Argonauts is a well-thought-out script with cutting-edge special effects for its day. When Jason eventually arrives at Phineas’ abode and witnesses Harpies (winged demons) stealing his food and tormenting the blind man, the film takes on a mystical edge. Before Jason obtains the advice he seeks from Phineas, he sets up a trap to capture the Harpies, which his crew perform by catching them in a huge net thrown down from the top of a ruined temple. The temple used in the scene is a real ancient temple in Italy, and the actors were given special permission to climb on it.
To create any stop-motion animation requires some level of improvisation from the actor. There are no model creatures or actors in suits roaming around during shooting, so the actor is left to visualise what is going on and act solo, with the creatures being inserted afterwards. Ray Harryhausen explained the process with regard to Troughton’s scene: ‘For the Harpies sequence I designed several “contacts” with humans. The first where the blind Phineas is fighting off the demons and we see his stick and belt yanked from him by the creatures… Both objects were attached to off-screen wires and on my signal a member of the crew pulled them away from Patrick Troughton. Later in the animation studio I would animate the models… as though they were snatching the objects.’
Jason and the Argonauts took two years and three million dollars to make, but the end result is a magnificent piece of cinema with a great cameo role from Troughton.
Several years later, in 1966, Troughton was making a film in Ireland called The Viking Queen when he was asked if he would like to become the second Doctor Who. At first he didn’t want to do it, feeling that it wasn’t the right type of part for him. ‘I was astonished that they asked me,’ he said later. He had watched the show with his children and really enjoyed Hartnell’s Doctor, but was unsure if it could continue when Hartnell left. ‘I thought it would last about six weeks after Billy Hartnell had finished,’ he said in 1983. ‘The whole concept of the Doctor going on… was quite a new idea, and one was jumping in at the deep end.’
The BBC were persistent and finally convinced Troughton who felt he should black up for the part, simply because as soon as he left the role he knew that everybody would know him as the Doctor and therefore he would be typecast.
It was Sydney Newman who brought Troughton back down to earth and shaped his interpretation of the Doctor, with a throw-away comment: ‘Do what you like with him. Play him like Charlie Chaplin if you want to.’ (Doctor Who – A Celebration, Two Decades Through Time and Space, Peter Haining, W H Allen, 1983). This appealed to Troughton, so that’s what eventually happened, but only after other ideas such as ‘playing him like a Windjammer captain’ (very tough and hardy) had been thrashed out (Blue Peter interview, 1983).
It’s difficult to say if the Chaplin idea was finally Troughton’s or Newman’s. It appears that Troughton went off the idea and Newman asked, ‘Whatever happened to the cosmic hobo?’A compromise was eventually achieved, with Troughton playing the part very clownishly to begin with, but mellowing as time went on.
He reminisced on TV magazine show Nationwide (1983): ‘First they put a wig on me and I looked like Harpo Marx, then they dressed my hair like a Beatle,’ so the zany Chaplin image was toned down from very early on.
Troughton needn’t have worried about being accepted as the Doctor. He was fondly regarded from the off, as highlighted in the Doctor Who Annual (1967): ‘Our new Dr Who is more “with it”; he is more “switched on”, more in tune with the 20th Century. There are, of course, still traces of his old personality and, characteristically, he still wears the same clothes, which are a trifle baggy on his new figure.’ So the cosmic hobo was thoroughly accepted.
The cast accepted him as well, as Doctor Who companion Anneke Wills (companion Polly) remembers, ‘We played our little joke on Patrick the first day he started. Michael Craze [companion Ben Jackson] and I ordered some special T-shirts and we greeted our new Doctor with the words: “Come back Bill Hartnell” blazoned across our chests. It was a ghastly joke, I suppose, but dear Patrick took it very well.’
Troughton remembered his three years as the Doctor with fondness: ‘Of all my… years as an actor, I think these were the happiest three years. I particularly enjoyed acting with Frazer Hines, who played Jamie [Troughton’s main companion in the series]. We never once had a cross word all the time we worked together.’
Frazer Hines confirms this: ‘For three years Pat… and I had an absolute ball together. I think there’s always room for fun when you’re working – except, maybe, if it’s Chekhov or Shakespeare – and I’ve always been a practical joker.’
Troughton got on well with all the regular cast and production crew, as he recounts, ‘Innes Lloyd [who took over from Verity Lambert], the producer when I started, and Peter Bryant were [also] great to work for. I had a lot of fun.’ (From The Making of Doctor Who, Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks, Pan Books, 1972.)
Troughton enjoyed the fantasy of the show. He thought it was great that the Doctor could change his appearance, as he explained at the time of ‘The Three Doctors’, ‘We are all different aspects of the same character. Of course it’s bound to be a bit of a mystery to us, but in the Doctor’s space-time machine the so-called past just doesn’t exist.’
Like Hartnell before him, Troughton said that it was difficult to stop being the Doctor when the cameras were off, but, unlike Hartnell, Troughton’s Doctor was not a crotchety old man, but a cosmic hobo, as he explained, ‘When you’re playing a part for a long time you certainly take on some of the mental attitudes of the fellow you’re playing. Luckily the Doctor was a very jolly fellow and I just bubbled along.’
He would also say that having young children at the time – three under ten years old – allowed him to keep in touch with the part of the Doctor, as children loved the character so much. So again, like William Hartnell, there was that Pied Piper aspect to Troughton’s Doctor and not just in the pipe – recorder – he played, but in regard to the children who followed him. He mentioned the younger viewers in 1983: ‘It [Dr Who] also gave me great pleasure coming into contact with children, for if I had not been an actor I would quite like to have been a teacher. Children keep one young.’ In fact, Troughton followed up by stating that the continuing success of the show was due to new children