Peter Davison: ‘I think Doctor Who is a good role model because he’s a hero who doesn’t beat people up’
When Peter Davison was 15, his parents gave him a book of Cole Porter lyrics. “I’ve always played the guitar and we had a piano in the house, so I’d bang out chords Paul McCartney style,” he says. “But mainly I wanted to be a songwriter. Because I am quite a traditionalist, Cole Porter always appealed to me.”
Several decades on, Davison is finally starring in a Cole Porter musical, playing the General in Bartlett Sher’s revival of Porter’s glorious jazzy rom com Kiss Me, Kate, about a warring ex-couple staging a musical version of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. A somewhat pompous chap from Georgia who is engaged to the leading lady Lilli Vanessi, the General, alas, is not a singing role for an actor whose CV includes the theme tune to the delightful 1980s children’s programme Button Moon. Davison both sang the song in a very sweet tenor and composed it with his then-wife Sandra Dickinson.
What does he think of the gender politics in Porter’s musical within a musical, in which the off-stage relationship between Lilli and her ex-husband, Fred, the director, at times mirrors the distastefully abusive one playing out on stage? “Well, the issue is in Shakespeare’s title, isn’t it. Taming, and shrew. That’s your problem right there,” says the 73-year-old. “We do say in this production that it’s 1948, it’s not like it’s 2024. I think the tweaks are fairly subtle. But I do worry about the updating of old scripts. I’ve been thinking I might set up a company called the Original Script Theatre Company. It’s patronising to assume audiences can’t grasp that a play was written in a different era, particularly when it’s written by a great writer.”
Those who remember Davison’s golden age during the 1980s heyday of British TV will know him from either the BBC’s All Creatures Great and Small (1978-1990), in which he played the charismatically feckless Tristan Farnon, or as the fifth Doctor Who (1982-1984). His particular knack for conveying a very British flustered charm meant he was a staple presence on the small screen for many years, although a highlight was A Very Peculiar Practice: Andrew Davies’s surreal cerebral comedy set on a medical university campus.
This sublime 1986 satire made Davison realise “what a good script looks like. You don’t tend to get that sort of writing anymore. Back then, people such as Ken Riddington, who produced A Very Peculiar Practice, were simply allowed to ask themselves ‘what would I like to make now? What would I like to see?’ It was an incredibly creative position to be in. But the BBC has lost that quality a little bit. People are told what they should make by others higher up and so they churn stuff out.”
Davison still retains that raffish old-fashioned affability associated with some of his most famous roles. He speaks his mind and is entirely without actorly affectation. Perhaps this is because as a child he always dreamt of being the next Bob Dylan rather than Hollywood and drifted into acting almost by accident, applying to Central School of Speech and Drama after scraping three O-Levels because it felt like a “cool thing to do”. His mixed-race father, an electrical engineer from British Guiana who had fought for Britain during the war, at one point almost brought the family to ruin after he opened a grocer’s shop in a village outside Woking, which failed to make any money.
“My mum, who was the clever one [she worked for GCHQ after the war] had to go back to work and ended up making much more money than he ever had.” Did his dad ever experience any racism? “People often wanted to touch his hair, but he never thought of anything that happened as racist. He was really pleased to be here and it was extremely important that he had managed to get a decent job [as an engineer] and buy a proper house by himself.”
On graduating in the early 1970s, Davison got his first major acting job in ITV’s Love for Lydia opposite Jeremy Irons and Mel Martin in 1977. The following year he was cast in All Creatures and became famous overnight. Has he watched the acclaimed Channel 5 remake, starring Samuel West, which has just been renewed for a fifth series? “No, but I’m very supportive of it. I do miss that sort of gentle TV, although I’m not sure if this is because I’m old. But I sometimes feel we don’t attend to what audiences want. We think about the audience inside our little London bubble but not the people out there in the wider country.”
In 1980 he was offered the fifth Doctor, and was adamant he would only play the role for three years. Nevertheless, Doctor Who has become entwined within the DNA of his family. Davison’s actress daughter with Dickinson, Georgia Moffett [Davison’s actual surname], starred in a 2008 episode when a certain David Tennant was playing a particularly antic tenth Doctor. “She wasn’t at all intimidated by David because, as she basically told him, ‘my dad has already played the Doctor. So you don’t impress me at all’. And I think he rather liked that.” Evidently so: the pair married in 2011 and between them now have five children.
In 2017 Davison found himself in the middle of a row after he suggested it was a shame Jodie Whittaker had been cast as the first female Time Lord because he thought the Doctor “was a good role model for boys”. “I was misquoted over that,” he says. “My point was that the Doctor is a Don Quixote-type figure who rides into situations and the character who always puts him right is his female companion. And if you reverse that, you’ve got the difficult dynamic of a man telling a woman what she can and cannot do. But I do also think the Doctor is a good role model because he is a hero who isn’t beating the s--- out of everyone.”
He hasn’t recently watched the show, but he is aware it has faced criticisms for its signalling of a morally virtuous agenda. “Doctor Who was always liberal and progressive. It would have a go at corporations, at the arms race, whatever. But the point was: it never announced that that was what it was doing, As soon as you do that, it changes the optics.”
Davison continues to work steadily on the small screen. “I think I would feel a failure if I did not provide for my family,” he says, and it’s clearly a feeling he can’t shake off even though his two sons with his third wife Elizabeth Morton are now grown up. He is a TV regular and is often associated with the writer Sally Wainwright, starring in Gentleman Jack and At Home with the Braithwaites. He regards her “as one of the great writers of TV”. “I’ll always take a note from Sally.”
In 2020 he starred in Mike Bartlett’s marital drama Life, playing the condescending Henry opposite Alison Steadman. “I liked the fact he was so unpleasant. Men can do pretty horrible things, but in their heads they are thinking they are being witty. Honestly, the male logic is often so flawed.” He admits roles like Henry are rare. “It was nice to play a man who is not the hero of the piece. I find I’m more able to come up with a defence for people’s actions the older I get. But perhaps it’s because we have such a polarised view of people today. We do tend to like to categorise people in terms of either good or evil. And most people aren’t like that at all.”
Kiss Me, Kate previews from this evening. Info: barbican.org.uk
