Born: 16th March 1935 (as Donald Hugh Tosh)
Died: 3rd December 2019 (aged 84 years)
Episodes Broadcast: 1965-1966

As a boy, Donald Tosh spent time in his parents' native Scotland before eventually relocating to Bristol. His interest in theatre was stoked by an uncle who took him to plays in London, and so Tosh set out to become an actor following his National Service. When these plans were stymied by stage fright, he instead began offering comment on scripts, which led to a job at Granada Television in 1957. While there, Tosh was an early proponent of Coronation Street. A move to the BBC in 1963 was ostensibly to work on classics serials, but Tosh was soon pressed into service as the story editor on the soap opera Compact when his predecessor, Betty Willingale, fell ill.

After eighteen months on Compact, Tosh asked to move on. Given a choice between two programmes, he balked at working on another soap opera -- 199 Park Lane -- and instead opted to become the new story editor on Doctor Who, replacing Dennis Spooner. He began trailing Spooner during The Chase and earned his first screen credit for the subsequent serial, The Time Meddler, written by Spooner himself, although in reality the overlap period was much longer. Around this time, Tosh married Dorothy Coysh.

Tosh and new Doctor Who producer John Wiles quickly formed a strong working relationship

A few months after Tosh joined Doctor Who, the programme gained a new producer in the form of John Wiles; the two men quickly formed a strong working relationship. Tosh found himself performing significant rewrites, first on a set of under-running scripts by Terry Nation for The Daleks' Master Plan. He then substantially altered John Lucarotti's The Massacre Of St Bartholomew's Eve, to the extent that he was given a co-writing credit on its final installment. However, when the BBC vetoed Wiles and Tosh's plan to replace William Hartnell as the Doctor at the conclusion of The Celestial Toymaker, Wiles quit the show. Tosh likewise decided to move on, both out of loyalty to Wiles and because his vision of Doctor Who clashed with that of incoming producer Innes Lloyd. Tosh's final contribution to Doctor Who was meant to be an overhauled version of The Celestial Toymaker but a dispute with his successor, Gerry Davis, resulted in Tosh removing his name from the credits.

After writing episodes of Mystery Hall and Thirty-Minute Theatre, Tosh was appointed script editor of the Peter Cushing-led Sherlock Holmes. He also submitted a story idea for Patrick Troughton's Second Doctor, but other projects impeded Tosh's work on “The Rosemariners” and it went unmade until being revived in 2012 as an audio drama by Big Finish Productions' The Lost Stories range.

In 1970, Tosh was intended to be a writer for a new programme called The Regiment, about a British military unit around the turn of the century. His involvement in the programme ended prematurely when he was assigned to script edit Ryan International. However, when a pilot for The Regiment was televised, Tosh was outraged to discover that the production team had ignored months of work he had invested into ensuring its historical accuracy. Such was Tosh's vehemence that nobody in the industry was willing to hire him again; his final broadcast work was for BBC Radio in 1971.

Tosh spent much of his later years working as a caretaker for English Heritage, including at St Mawes castle in Cornwall. In 2013, he made a cameo appearance during a party scene in An Adventure In Space And Time, a drama about the early years of Doctor Who. Tosh died on December 3rd, 2019.