Doctor Who: The Pescatons

Victor Pemberton’s career started in radio when his flatmates challenged him to write a play because he was criticising another. The result was The Gold Watch in 1961, the first of many radio scripts. His first television script was for Associated Rediffusion’s Send Foster (1965), concerning the exploits of a junior reporter on a local newspaper. He also worked as an actor to supplement his writing income and this led to director Morris Barry casting him in Doctor Who (The Moonbase).

After a brief stint writing and script-editing Doctor Who in the mid-Sixties, Victor contributed to Timeslip and Ace of Wands and wrote numerous other scripts for radio and television. He produced Fraggle Rock in the 1980s, as well as setting up a Writers’ Television Workshop in Lagos, Nigeria, and working in Kuwait on a drama series about the daily life of a Gulf Arab family (Bait Abu Khaled).

In 1990, Headline books invited Pemberton to write a novelisation of a BBC Drama series he had penned called Our Family. This was published in 1991 and led to a successful career as a novelist, and to date he has published fifteen ‘family saga’ novels, including Where the Swallows Come Again (2008).