Born: 20th September 1925 (as Christopher Chisholm Barry)
Died: 7th February 2014 (aged 88 years)
Episodes Broadcast: 1963-1966, 1971-1972, 1974-1976, 1979

Christopher Barry was born in Greenwich, London. During the Second World War, he was briefly evacuated to the United States, but he returned to the UK while the war still raged in order to attend Cambridge. Upon graduation, he again travelled across the Atlantic -- this time to Canada, where he trained as a navigator for the Royal Air Force. However, the war ended before Barry saw action. In 1950, Barry was married; he and wife Venice would have children Robin, Rosalind and Matthew. When he decided that he wanted to make his career in the film industry his father, Gerald, a well-respected newspaper editor, was able to arrange for his son to become a script reader at Ealing Studios.

Barry soon shifted into production and, by the mid-Fifties, he was working as an assistant director. However, the British movie industry was beginning to contract, and Barry decided to move into television instead; his only prior experience in this medium was as a writer, having co-authored a 1953 installment of BBC Sunday-Night Theatre. In 1955, Barry joined the BBC as a production assistant. He soon parlayed his Ealing experience into a promotion to director, starting with the soap opera Starr And Company in 1958. Other credits included Compact and No Cloak -- No Dagger before he was assigned to the fledgling Doctor Who.

Barry's camerawork helped inspire a wave of Dalekmania

Asked to direct four episodes of the seven-part The Daleks, Barry's camerawork helped inspire a wave of Dalekmania which propelled Doctor Who into television immortality. A year later, he was back to introduce the first new companion, Vicki, in The Rescue. In 1966, Barry was called upon to direct The Power Of The Daleks, the first serial for Patrick Troughton as the Second Doctor; Barry and Troughton had recently worked together on Smuggler's Bay. Other Sixties credits for Barry included Z Cars, The Further Adventures Of The Musketeers and The Newcomers.

Wary of being labelled as a Doctor Who director, Barry then took a five-year hiatus from the series before being lured back in 1971 for The Daemons, an adventure for Jon Pertwee's Third Doctor. In 1974, Barry again helped introduce a new Doctor -- this time Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor, in Robot. Barry's ninth and final Doctor Who serial was The Creature From The Pit in 1979; sadly, it proved to be an unhappy and frustrating experience for the director.

In the meantime, Barry's resume continued to expand throughout the Seventies, with his work encompassing everthing from Moonbase 3 to Angels to All Creatures Great And Small, with more episodes of Z Cars thrown in for good measure. Barry earned a rare credit as an associate producer on the period drama Nanny, for which he also directed several episodes. Barry then left the BBC in 1983 to become a freelance director, starting with The Tripods.

However, Barry then struggled to find additional freelance assignments; his last televised work was a 1989 episode of Dramarama. Effectively forced towards retirement, Barry worked on industrial videos and directed the Reeltime Pictures video drama Downtime in 1995. This unauthorised Doctor Who spin-off brought together former companions Victoria Waterfield, Sarah Jane Smith and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart against the robotic Yeti. Barry passed away on February 7th, 2014 after a fall.