Born: 13th April 1929 (as David R Fisher)
Died: 10th January 2018 (aged 88 years)
Episodes Broadcast: 1978-1980

David Fisher was born in Australia, but bankruptcy soon forced his family to return to his father's native Birmingham, West Midlands. Fisher was interested in writing from an early age and, after his National Service with the Royal Air Force, he was employed in advertising. He lived in France and South Africa before returning to the United Kingdom, where he contributed to Sight & Sound magazine and wrote animated shorts for Ealing Studios. Fisher also found work with Scottish Television, scripting a number of admags -- advertising-oriented narratives -- prior to their prohibition by Parliament. In the early Sixties, he provided comedy material for The One O'Clock Gang.

In 1964, original Doctor Who story editor David Whitaker was forwarded a science-fiction proposal that Fisher had developed called The Face Of Fire. Although it did not suit Doctor Who, it led to Fisher offering the production office several ideas starting with “The Whirlpool Of Time”, although none of them were ultimately pursued. Nonetheless, Fisher began to establish himself in drama as the Sixties wore on, writing for programmes such as Orlando, This Man Craig and Dixon Of Dock Green. His friend Anthony Read brought him onto The Troubleshooters, to which Fisher would contribute eleven scripts. During the Seventies, Fisher wrote no fewer than forty episodes of Crown Court. Other credits included The Lotus Eaters (again for Read), General Hospital and The Mackinnons.

Fisher credited his vividly-characterised female villains to a number of aunts in his family tree

Fifteen years after he originally pitched to write for Doctor Who, Fisher renewed contact with its production office when Read became the script editor. He had also worked with Doctor Who producer Graham Williams on Sutherland's Law five years earlier. Fisher quickly contributed consecutive serials for Doctor Who's 1978 season: The Stones Of Blood (which returned to the stone circle theme of his 1963 submission) and The Androids Of Tara. They chronicled the efforts of the Fourth Doctor, Tom Baker, to find the third and fourth segments of the Key To Time. From the outset, one of Fisher's Doctor Who trademarks was the inclusion of vividly-characterised female villains -- to which he credited a number of “awful”, “frightful” aunts in his family tree.

Fisher was invited back to write The Creature From The Pit in 1979. A second serial the same year endured a rockier journey to the screen, as the strain and upheaval of divorce proceedings prevented Fisher from crafting the final version of City Of Death. Nonetheless, the combination of Fisher's original ideas and substantial rewrites by Williams and new script editor Douglas Adams -- credited to the pseudonymous “David Agnew” -- produced an enduring Doctor Who classic. Fisher's final Doctor Who serial was 1980's The Leisure Hive, which heralded a significant overhaul of the programme for the new decade. It came about only after two other storylines -- “The Psychonauts” and “The Castle Of Doom” -- were rejected by incoming producer John Nathan-Turner. Meanwhile, Fisher had a brief and unhappy tenure as script editor on the family medical drama Why Can't I Go Home?.

Fisher's last television work again came via Read, on the anthologies Hammer House Of Horror and Hammer House Of Mystery And Suspense. In the early Eighties, Fisher began to pursue opportunities in other media, including a musical stage play entitled A Kind Of Game about Soviet double agent Kim Philby. He and Read started collaborating on a series of non-fiction books -- most of which focussed on World War Two -- beginning with Operation Lucy: Most Secret Spy Ring Of The Second World War, published in 1980. Fisher was outraged to learn that two of his Doctor Who serials had been novelised by Terrance Dicks for Target Books, and so he successfully campaigned to write the prose versions of The Creature From The Pit (in 1981) and The Leisure Hive (in 1982). In 1984, he married his second wife, a pediatric nurse named Barbara Weller.

Late in his life, BBC Audio's range of Doctor Who talking books provided Fisher with the opportunity to tackle the two stories he had not novelised himself. The Stones Of Blood was released in 2011, and The Androids Of Tara followed a year later. Prose versions would follow in 2022, four years after Fisher's death on January 10th, 2018.