Christopher H. Bidmead

Christopher H. Bidmead was born in 1941. He trained as an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) and pursued this career for a number of years, winning many roles on stage, television (he was a regular in Emergency-Ward 10 (1957)) and radio (including numerous episodes of the BBC's "Waggoner's Walk"). Gradually however he turned to script-writing, including in the early seventies on two Thames TV shows, Harriet's Back in Town (1972) and Rooms (1974). He then worked successfully as a journalist, specializing in scientific and technical subjects, until late 1979, when he was recommended by Robert Banks Stewart for the post of script editor on Doctor Who (1963), working with the new producer John Nathan-Turner. Bidmead agreed with Nathan-Turner and executive producer Barry Letts that the series had become too humorous under the previous team of Graham Williams and Douglas Adams, so they resolved to bring a more serious approach to it for Tom Baker's final season. Having remained in this post for a year, which included writing two key stories in the form of Logopolis: Part One (1981) and Castrovalva: Part One (1982), which saw the transition from Tom Baker to Peter Davison, Bidmead returned to freelance projects. These included a third contribution to the series, Frontios: Part One (1984), and novelizations of all three of his scripts for Target Books. Bidmead remains, along with 1960s scientific advisor Kit Pedler, a significant figure as one of the few people to have brought genuine science into the fantasy-orientated world of Doctor Who (1963) or Doctor Who (2005). He continues to work as a scientific and technical journalist, including on the magazine "Wired".