Doctor Who: The Highlanders

Gerry Davis

Sep 2012 · BBC Digital Audio · Narrated by Anneke Wills

About this audiobook

History books don't always tell the whole story. Certainly there is no record of an episode that occurred when the Scots, led by Bonnie Prince Charlie, were defeated by the English at the battle of Culloden in 1746... And the presence at the time of a blue police box on the Scottish moors seems to have escaped the notice of most eye-witnesses... The Highlanders sets the record straight. And while the incidents described may not be of great interest to historians, for Jamie McCrimmon they mark the beginning of a series of extraordinary adventures. Anneke Wills, who played the Doctor's companion Polly in the original BBC TV serial, reads Gerry Davis's complete and unabridged novelisation, first published by Target Books in 1984.

About the author

Gerry Davis became a BBC story editor in 1965 at the invitation of Head of Serials Donald Wilson, who had been impressed by a course he had written on TV scriptwriting. He had previously been a newspaper reporter, a merchant seaman and a writer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and had studied opera and worked as a cinema translator in Italy. His first BBC assignments were on 199 Park Lane and United! and he was then given the chance to take over from Donald Tosh on Doctor Who. Although he never saw entirely eye to eye with producer Innes Lloyd, he remained in this post for over a year before moving on to edit another show, First Lady. He later returned to freelance writing, his greatest success coming in the early Seventies with the BBC's ecological drama Doomwatch, which he co-created with Kit Pedler. From the mid-Seventies he spent most of his time in Hollywood, writing for American films and TV series and teaching screen-writing courses at the UCLA Film School. He died on 31 August 1991, aged sixty-four.