Innes Lloyd

Innes Lloyd was a British television producer of BBC drama. He was the third producer on Doctor Who and responsible for casting the second Doctor, Patrick Troughton.

Following service in the navy towards the end of the war, Lloyd trained as an actor at the Central School. He joined the BBC in the 1950s initially in presentation, moving into outside broadcasts. As an outside broadcast producer he covered many important sporting events such as tennis at Wimbledon, golf, and motor racing. He also produced important state events such as the Queen's Speech and Sir Winston Churchill's state funeral.

Lloyd began his drama career working on popular series in the 1960s. His duration as producer on Doctor Who ran for two seasons between The Celestial Toymaker and The Enemy of the World (excepting The Tomb of the Cybermen which was produced by Peter Bryant as a test piece to show he could take over from Lloyd). 

Lloyd and story editor Gerry Davis came up with an intriguing way of writing the Doctor out - as he was an alien being, they decided that he would have the power to change his body when it became worn out or seriously injured, a process that would later become known within the mythology of the series as regeneration. Whereas John Wiles, the previous producer to Lloyd, had intended to replace Hartnell with another actor but playing the same character, Lloyd and Davis elected to change the entire personality and appearance of the Doctor. They cast Troughton, having considered character actor Peter Jeffrey, and Troughton first appeared fully in the show on 5th November 1966 after the changeover from Hartnell had been seen at the end of the story The Tenth Planet the previous Saturday. That serial also introduced the Cybermen, villains who would return to face the Doctor on several subsequent occasions. Indeed, Lloyd oversaw something of an era of monsters on the programme, introducing durable and memorable enemies such as the Ice Warriors and the Yeti.

Lloyd also worked on Thirty-Minute Theatre, the football soap United! and Dead of Night, but he is best  remembered as the producer of more prestigious drama. As a BBC drama producer in the 1970s and 1980s, his chosen projects were often biographical. Collaborating with authors such as Roger Milner and Don Shaw, he brought to the screen biographies of a diverse range of often flawed heroes, ranging from Orde Wingate and Arthur "Bomber" Harris plus Donald and Malcolm Campbell to the first Director General of the BBC, John Reith. He also explored notions of Englishness in the 20th century with productions such as England, Their England (directed by Stephen Frears), East of Ipswich (written by Michael Palin) and An Englishman's Castle (1978) starring Kenneth More - a dystopian vision of the consequence of losing the Second World War. He was also a frequent collaborator with Alan Bennett. That relationship started in 1972 with Bennett's poignant comedy A Day Out and continued with landmark productions such as the first series of Talking Heads until Lloyd's death in 1991. Bennett's An Englishman Abroad told the remarkable true story of the chance meeting between actress Coral Browne (playing herself) and spy Guy Burgess (Alan Bates) in Moscow in 1958, while A Question of Attribution (finished shortly before Lloyd's death) was a logical sequel, showing the radically different fate of Keeper of the Queen's Pictures and fellow traitor Anthony Blunt.

Biography from the Wikipedia article, licensed under CC-BY-SA