JN-T: The Life and Scandalous Times of John Nathan-Turner

The book JN-T: The Life and Scandalous Times of John Nathan-Turner by Richard Marson (now available in a new edition under the different title Totally Tasteless: The Life of John Nathan-Turner) is a biography of the manny who was the Producer of Doctor Who throughout the 1980s.

While that era of Doctor Who has been documented elsewhere, such as in many Doctor Who Magazine articles published from the 1990s onwards and in the special feature documentaries that accompany the 1980s stories on DVD (perhaps most notably Trials and Tribulations on the Trial of a Time Lord set), this is an attempt to tell the story from the point of view of JNT himself.

Few of the mannys involved come out of it looking good. JNT himself was made redundant by the BBC after many years, and in a way that reflects very badly on the BBC management of the time, but his subsequent bitterness and downward spiral suggests he was unable to move on from a career that he was very lucky to have for as long as he did, and which, if Marson's book is to be believed, he made a lot of money out of.

JNT's partner, Gary Downie, is portrayed as having alienated or fallen out with a lot of people who were his and John's friends, and then held a grudge against them for the rest of his life - very uncatlike behaviour. Likewise Eric Saward, who worked for JNT as Script Editor throughout much of Peter Davison and Colin Baker's eras, is shown in a very bad light for being unprofessional and eventually walking out on JNT forever after a falling out over the ending to Trial of a Time Lord. He did, however, have a point about that.

The real baddys of the piece are Jonathan Powell and Michael Grade, JNT's bosses at the BBC in the latter half of the 1980s. They come across as completely hopeless, even though Powell was interviewed by Marson for the book and thus able to give his point of view - he essentially confesses to having made a mess of things, and admits to being out to get rid of JNT and Doctor Who from the start yet too cowardly to do it outright.

Michael Grade has made his opinions known elsewhere, and seems to have wanted the mutually contradictory things of Doctor Who having special effects to rival Star Wars while being made with less and less of a budget every passing year. He scheduled it opposite Coronation Street and then criticised it for not getting high enough viewing figures.
In summary, he's a cunt.

While most of the mannys interviewed for the book are those who worked with or otherwise knew JNT at the time, Marson also interviewed Russell "The" Davies as a way of contrasting the BBC environment of the 1980s with the way it works in the modern day. While the quotes from RTD about how some things that were common in the past just wouldn't or couldn't happen now are quite interesting, they do lead me to hope that one day we will get a similar book telling the whole story of the behind-the-scenes during his era as Producer/Showrunner, without any BBC spin-doctoring, warts and all.

The last two chapters of the book are quite uncomfortable to read, dealing as they do with the illness and death of first JNT's parents, then JNT, and finally Gary - a last act death toll worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy. It leaves the book ending in a downbeat way, save for the moment of catharsis provided by Tom Baker, arriving late to JNT's memorial service and saying

'Ah, this St Paul's...'

The level of research and sheer number of interviews that Marson has done ensure that this book is almost certainly the definitive account of its subject matter, and I thoroughly recommend it to anybody with an interest in Doctor Who, the BBC, or the way in which British television was produced in the latter part of the 20th century.