Robert Sloman
Born: 18th July 1926
Died: 24th October 2005 (aged 79 years)
Episodes Broadcast: 1970-1974
Robert Sloman was born in Oldham, Lancashire but raised in Plymouth,
Devon. He joined the Royal Air Force in 1944 and, after demobilisation,
attended Exeter University, where he became involved in amateur
dramatics. This led to work as an actor and a stage manager in repertory
theatre at Newton Poppleford. There he met actress Mary Saffery, whom he
married in 1954; they would have a son, Guy, and a daughter, Carol.
Unhappy with the plays being performed by his company, Sloman decided to
write his own, and continued even after taking up a new job with the
Sunday Times circulation department.
Sloman soon formed a writing partnership with Laurence Dobie, a
Sunday Times colleague. Their play The Gold Hunter was
adapted for television in 1961. Another, called The Tinker, was
made into the 1962 movie The Wild And The Willing, which provided
John Hurt with his first film role. Sloman and Dobie's Dynamite
became a production for German television as Dynamit in 1969. The
pair also wrote for radio. Meanwhile, Sloman had met Barry Letts through
their respective wives. When Letts became the producer of Doctor
Who, he suggested that they collaborate on a serial. Sloman agreed,
on the condition that a pseudonym be employed to avoid giving the
appearance that his partnership with Dobie had ended. The result was
1971's The Daemons; the
much-loved adventure was credited to “Guy Leopold”, an alias
drawn in part from the name of Sloman's son.
Sloman wrote three more Doctor Who stories over the next three
years, each time working in tandem with Letts, albeit now under his real
name. The Atlantis-set The Time
Monster was a replacement for an earlier storyline, “The Daleks In
London”. In The Green
Death, Sloman helped write out companion Jo Grant. Lastly, Planet Of The Spiders was the
final adventure for Jon Pertwee's Third Doctor, who had featured in all
of Sloman's scripts for the show. With Letts moving on from Doctor
Who, Sloman decided to wind up his involvement as well; he offered
one further submission in November 1974, which went unproduced. Around
the same time, Sloman left the Sunday Times, and became the
wholesale distributor for all the Sunday newspapers. He would never
earn another screen credit after his work on Doctor Who; indeed,
he ceased writing professionally, which he found increasingly taxing.
Sailing became increasingly important to Sloman, especially following
his retirement from the newspaper business, when he began living
part-time in Spain. Sloman died on October 24th, 2005.
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