Is There Life Outside The Box?: An Actor Despairs

I bought this book on Nicholas Whyte's recommendation; although Davison is quite familiar to me, he doesn't loom large in my life.

David Tennant's foreword begins, “As a child who grew up obsessed with television, I recall Peter Davison was absolutely all over my childhood.”

Unlike David Tennant, I'm only 3 years younger than Davison, so I was adult myself by the time he started appearing in “All Creatures Great and Small”; and a travelling life gave me much less exposure to and interest in British television, so I never saw that series, although I was peripherally aware of its existence.

I vaguely remember him in “Doctor Who”, despite having seen only parts of his three-year run; and that's about it.

Of course he's had a full acting career that I was mostly unaware of, and this book gives the whole story, although it's concise enough to avoid boring people.

The main characteristics of this book are modesty and wry humour. Initially the modesty predominates, to such an extent that it begins to seem like “justifiable modesty”. After “Doctor Who”, which is dealt with relatively briefly in Chapters 9 and 10, Davison gets into his stride and it becomes an amusing and quite accomplished theatrical memoir, in which growing confidence and ingrained modesty cohabit somehow. I found it very readable despite having seen nothing of his performances apart from the Doctor.

He was a Doctor Who fan from when the series started, in 1963. Although he's careful not to say so, I get the impression that he found his time as the Doctor a disappointing experience, because of the showrunner (John Nathan-Turner), the scripts, the low budget, and the companions he was given to work with. He's polite about Janet Fielding and Sarah Sutton, and indeed they were good enough that they might have shone with better scripts, direction, and budget; but Matthew Waterhouse and the late JNT don't seem to have endeared themselves to anyone.

He comments that Tom Baker consistently refused to have anything to do with the other Doctors, and was consequently unpopular with them. I was unaware of this, being a relatively casual fan of the show; but it was already clear from other sources that being the Doctor for 7 years was the most important part of Tom Baker's life, and apparently he felt he owned the part.

Most actors barely manage to scrape a living, as I know because my sister was in the business (I think she also did better than average). Davison has done a lot better than the average actor, staying in work throughout his life and earning quite well, with a period of financial difficulty only because he'd been overspending.

At the end of the book, he muses that he was the first actor in his family, and yet his descendants all seem to be going in for it.

“I have been luckier than most, but not as lucky as some, and that's fine with me. As for those in my family about to roll the dice and wondering what the future will bring, there is always me: the bloke from the vet series, the Fifth Doctor and all that other stuff that my children barely noticed. They can look at me, pictured in sci-fi magazines, immortalised in six-inch-high figures with articulated limbs, and in various re-runs on any number of cable channels, and think with some confidence – if he can do it, anyone can.”