Rather like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who got rather fed up with Sherlock Holmes Waris Hussein also wants to put a little distance between himself and his baby, Dr Who.
The story goes that back in 1963 when the BBC devised Dr Who as a new science fiction series, no established director would touch the project because everyone assumed it was doomed.
Waris was asked as a 24-year-old BBC recruit to take on Dr Who. He directed the first seven episodes and “basically rescued Dr Who,” now the corporation’s most profitable franchise.
The early days of Dr Who were portrayed in a 2013 BBC 50th anniversary television film, An Adventure in Space and Time, in which the young Waris was played by the actor, Sacha Dhawan.
Waris was born in Lucknow on December 9, 1938, came to Britain with his family in 1946, attended Clifton College, a public school in Bristol, and read English at Queens’ College, Cambridge, where he developed a passion for drama.
Now, over half a century later, the British Film Institute (BFI) is to devote all of February 2018 to showcasing the range and diversity of his TV work.
Waris directed Shirley MacLaine in The Possession of Joel Delaney in 1972; Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Divorce His, Divorce Hers in 1973; Laurence Olivier and his wife Joan Plowright in Daphne Laureola in 1978; and Barry Manilow in Copacabana in 1985.
The BFI season will begin on February 6 with A Passage to India, which Waris made for the BBC in 1965 — in black and white, of course. Before making his big screen version, David Lean “borrowed” Waris’s film for six months and copied a couple of scenes.
Waris remembers going to Cambridge to persuade a “cantankerous” EM Forster to give him permission to adapt the book. He says the 1924 novel “has echoes of my own life in terms of my origin and also has a lot to say about the disparity between the cultures as we know. We are still living in all sorts of complicated ways with the result of empire.”
“Virginia McKenna will attend the screening of A Passage to India, Janet Suzman will come for Hedda Gabler, Ian McKellen for A Touch of Love, and Claire Bloom for Intimate Contact,” adds Waris.
