"Doctor Who": The Mind Robber

Peter Ling started his writing career early, and had his first novel, Voices Offstage, published in 1947. He served as a Bevan Boy in the Second World War, working in the Pay Corps, and on being demobbed he entered a sanatorium, suffering from tuberculosis. It was there that he started writing for radio and began sending material on spec to several radio and TV comedians; he later wrote comedy linking material for a BBC magazine series called Whirlygig (1950). It was here that he met up with Hazel Adair, subsequently collaborating with her on an early BBC soap opera, Compact. They subsequently developed Crossroads for Lew Grade, and Ling was to work on this for twenty-three of its twenty-four years, until it finished in 1988. His sole Doctor Who script, The Mind Robber, was transmitted in 1968, following which he suggested one further Doctor Who idea - about a planet on which time ran backwards - but this was rejected as being too complex to realise. Ling originated the BBC Radio 2 soap opera Waggoners' Walk in 1969. He wrote several novels, including High Water (1991), Flood Water (1992) and Storm Water (1993), grouped together as the Docklands Saga, and he also wrote strips for Eagle magazine between January 1953 and April 1959. In the 1990s Ling returned to writing scripts for radio, as well as adapting Sherlock Holmes stories and an Arnold Bennett novel, Imperial Palace. Peter Ling died on 14 September 2006.