Classic director dies

Horror master Maloney dies.

Not many directors have casued a national bed-wetting epidemic. David Maloney wasn't popular with Mary Whitehouse, the self-appointed media guardian, who objected to the mattress-dampening effect of his amazing Tom Baker stories.

Under Maloney the series was at its most frightening, with slow-mo massacres, freeze-frame drownings, and blood-drenched psychopathic puppets.

He first worked on the series in 1965 as a production assistant on The Time Meddler. By 1968, he was in the director's chair for the surreal adventure The Mind Robber and oversaw Patrick Troughton's final story as the Doctor, The War Games.

It was Genesis of the Daleks, with its brutal depictions of warfare, and The Deadly Assassin's use of freeze-frame as the Doctor appears to drown that led to Doctor Who coming under the beady-glare of TV campaigner Mary Whitehouse.

David's final work on Doctor Who, The Talons of Weng Chiang, took the Doctor and his companion Leela to Victorian London to battle giant rats, a killer ventriloquist dummy and the insane Magnus Greel. A firm fan favourite, the story has regularly topped popularity polls ever since it was first shown in 1977.

Away from Doctor Who, he went on to produce Blake's 7 and the terrifying 1981 TV adaptation of John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids.

David Maloney died on 18th July at the Marie Curie Hospice, Hampstead. He is survived by his wife, Edwina and children, Paul, Matthew and Sophia.