Doctor Who: Classic TV Adventures Collection One

Gerry Davis became a BBC story editor in 1965 at the invitation of Head of Serials Donald Wilson, who had been impressed by a course he had written on TV scriptwriting. He had previously been a newspaper reporter, a merchant seaman and a writer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and had studied opera and worked as a cinema translator in Italy. His first BBC assignments were on 199 Park Lane and United! and he was then given the chance to take over from Donald Tosh on Doctor Who. Although he never saw entirely eye to eye with producer Innes Lloyd, he remained in this post for over a year before moving on to edit another show, First Lady. He later returned to freelance writing, his greatest success coming in the early Seventies with the BBC's ecological drama Doomwatch, which he co-created with Kit Pedler. From the mid-Seventies he spent most of his time in Hollywood, writing for American films and TV series and teaching screen-writing courses at the UCLA Film School. He died on 31 August 1991, aged sixty-four.

Malcolm Hulke was a prolific and respected television writer from the 1950s until the 1970s. His writing credits included the early science fiction Pathfinders series, as well as The Avengers. Hulke was first approached to write for Doctor Who when the series first started, but his idea for The Hidden Planet was not pursued. In 1967 he wrote The Faceless Ones (with David Ellis) for the Second Doctor. By 1969, Hulke's friend and occasional writing partner Terrance Dicks was Script Editor for Doctor Who and needed a ten part story to replace other scripts and write out Patrick Troughton's Doctor. Together, they wrote The War Games, which for the first time explained the Doctor's origins and introduced his people, the Time Lords. Hulke continued to write for Doctor Who, providing a story for each of the Third Doctor's series. Malcolm Hulke died in 1979, soon after completing his novelisation of The War Games.

DOUGLAS ADAMS was born in Cambridge in March 1952. He is best known as the creator of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which started life as a BBC Radio 4 series. The book went on to be a No. 1 bestseller. He followed this success with The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980); Life, The Universe and Everything (1982); So Long and Thanks for all the Fish (1984); Mostly Harmless (1992) and many more. He sold over 15 million books in the UK, the US and Australia. Douglas died unexpectedly in May 2001 at the age of 49.