Robert Banks Stewart
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Robert Banks Stewart is an accomplished writer for television.
For Thames Television he contributed scripts to the programmes Callan, Special Branch, The Sweeney and Owner Occupied.
He also wrote The Avengers scripts The Master Minds and Quick-Quick Slow Death.
In casting about for new writers for Doctor Who script editor Robert Holmes invited Stewart to discuss ideas for the programme. After their meeting in early 1974, Stewart devised a storyline for a six-part adventure called The Secret Of Loch Ness. Stewart felt that the Scotland's legendary Loch Ness Monster would make an ideal basis for a story because there were so few details about the mythical creature. Stewart's Although at first focusing on the Loch Ness Monster itself, Holmes encouraged Stewart to concentrate more on the Zygons, the shape-shifting aliens of the story. As the story evolved, it was known variously as The Loch, The Secret Of The Lock, The Loch Ness Monster, The Zygons and finally Terror of the Zygons.
The following year he wrote The Seeds of Doom for Doctor Who, though both stories were actually broadcast as part of Season Thirteen. This second script drew from such sources as the horror serial The Quatermass Experiment and the John Wyndham novel The Day of the Triffids; both featured the idea of flora attacking mankind, and the former also depicted a man being infected by alien matter which began turning him into a plant. There is some disagreement as to whether or not The Seeds Of Doom began life as a four- or six-episode serial. Stewart himself maintains that it was always intended to be six parts long, but other sources suggest this was not the case. The sources indicate that a four-part Seeds was scheduled to follow a two-parter by Eric Pringle, called The Angurth, commissioned in late summer 1975. When this fell through, producer Philip Hinchcliffe sought permission to shorten Season Thirteen to twenty-four episodes, but Head of Drama Serials Bill Slater vetoed the proposal. Instead, script editor Robert Holmes and the director assigned to the story, Douglas Camfield hurriedly reworked the opening of the story to include a two-part prologue set in Antarctica.The Seeds Of Doom was Robert Banks Stewart's last credited Doctor Who serial, although a story outline written for the subsequent season would form the basis for Holmes' The Talons Of Weng-Chiang.
Robert Banks Stewart continued working in television as a writer, script editor and producer, helping to develop programmes like Shoestring, Bergerac and The Darling Buds Of May.
