Between October 1965 and March 1967, the BBC produced and broadcast 147 episodes of the football-based soap opera United! At the end of its second season, the BBC cancelled the show due to low viewing figures, and, as was common practice at the time, they wiped all the master tapes for reuse. Whilst many "missing" episodes of TV shows that have been lost in this manner have been recovered over the years, allowing us to at least get a glimpse of how they looked, United! has not been so fortunate, and not a single episode is known to survive, not even on audio. The most common context for the series to come up in these days is somebody pointing out the large crossover the show's production crew had with Doctor Who, but nobody has ever made an exhaustive list of who worked on both shows, and when.
Until now.
Monday 4 October 1965, 7pm, then, and the very first episode of United!, The Kingpin, is broadcast, and already we're off to a good start: the show itself was created, and naturally the very first episode was written, by one Brian Hayles, who just six months later would have his first ever Doctor Who story, The Celestial Toymaker, broadcast (2 to 23 April 1966). Hayles would go on to contribute five more serials between then and the end of the Jon Pertwee era in 1974, all but one of which featured his most famous creation, the Ice Warriors. The first episode was directed by John Davies, who directed a single Who serial: The Macra Terror, transmitted in March 1967.
Davies handled all of the first four episodes, but in the show's third week Derek Martinus took over the director's chair; Martinus had already helmed one recent Doctor Who serial, September 1965's Galaxy 4 (plus the single-episode Mission to the Unknown), and would be recalled to the show shortly after for William Hartnell's swansong, The Tenth Planet, in October 1966. He would direct for Who three more times, including a reunion with Hayles for 1967's The Ice Warriors. One week later, the director of United! was Innes Lloyd, who was shortly to take over as producer of Doctor Who; indeed, his very first serial as producer was Hayles' own The Celestial Toymaker. That week's episodes would be his only contribution to United!, but he remained at the helm of Who until 1968's The Enemy of the World.
In the week beginning 1 November 1965, Bill Sellars was directing United!, and he would soon go on to make his one and only contribution to Doctor Who... directing The Celestial Toymaker, which thus far debuted a writer, producer and director who had all come from United! (It seems worth noting at this stage, however, that the scripts for The Celestial Toymaker were heavily rewritten by the script editor and bore little to no resemblance to what Hayles originally wrote.) The 1 November 1965 episode was the first of United! to have a writing credit for someone other than Hayles - Max Marquis, who perhaps surprisingly never had a Doctor Who credit (his other writing credits included The Avengers and Z-Cars).
Move on another week to 8 November 1965, and United! was on that evening written by David Ellis, who again would get his one and only writing credit on Doctor Who not long after: 1967's The Faceless Ones, co-written with Malcolm Hulke. Later that month, Pat Dunlop also contributed to United!, whose sole contribution to Doctor Who actually went uncredited: he was commissioned to write the scripts for The War Machines, William Hartnell's antepenultimate story, but quit after he proved too busy with United! to do so, with Ian Stuart Black taking over.
The Who connections slow down a little after this initial barrage, and also for some reason the show does away with episode titles, although between December '65 and March '66 one of the show's regular cast members is Derrick Sherwin, an actor-writer who also wrote several episodes of the show after he left the cast, then became Doctor Who's story editor in 1967, co-wrote The Invasion in 1968, and even briefly served as the show's producer for Patrick Troughton's final story, The War Games, and Jon Pertwee's debut, Spearhead from Space.
Two episodes in January 1966 were slightly unexpectedly written by John Lucarotti, a man otherwise chiefly associated with action and sci-fi, including three classic Doctor Who historicals: Marco Polo, The Aztecs and The Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve, the last of which went out shortly after his United! scripts aired (although following extensive amendments to his scripts by Who story editor Donald Tosh, Lucarotti requested his name be removed from them, although as all four episodes of The Massacre are missing we're not actually sure if he was credited for them or not). Later that month, we get our first United! writing credits for Malcolm Hulke (already mentioned as co-writer of The Faceless Ones; he also co-wrote The War Games, wrote Doctor Who and the Silurians, extensively amended David Whitaker's scripts for The Ambassadors of Death, and wrote Colony in Space, The Sea Devils, Frontier in Space and Invasion of the Dinosaurs) and Gerry Davis (who not long after started as Doctor Who's script editor, making his debut in that role on The Massacre and staying until shortly after The Faceless Ones, also co-writing The Tenth Planet - for which he co-created the Cybermen - and scripting The Highlanders, The Tomb of the Cybermen and Revenge of the Cybermen.)
Another amusing acting connection pops up in March 1966, when Ysanne Churchman - formerly Grace in The Archers, and the voice of Alpha Centauri in two of Hayles' own Doctor Who scripts in the 70s (as well as reprising the role for a new series episode over four decades later) - guest stars in two episodes. This is otherwise a bit of a dry period (there are several directors who, given their CVs, it is perhaps surprising they never helmed a Doctor Who story), although I am intrigued by this synopsis for an episode that same month. In June 1966, Richard Hurndall - later to take on the role of the First Doctor for one night only in 1983's The Five Doctors - guest stars in an episode, although it seems unlikely that his link to United! was the crucial factor in his Doctor Who casting. In July 1966, a more interesting name turns up as a writer - Dick Sharples, whose only contribution to Who, The Prison in Space (intended for broadcast circa 1968/69), did not make it to screen after the production team decided not to go ahead with the story at the last minute, likely because of the script's blatant misogyny, although Big Finish would release an ill-advised audio adaptation in 2010.
In September 1966, another directorial crossover pops up: Tristan de Vere Cole, who would go on to direct a Doctor Who in March 1968, The Wheel in Space (having previously worked as a production assistant on the sci-fi show in 1966; United! was his first director credit). United! quietly limped to the end of its run without any further Who names, although we do have one interesting note in February 1967: this is seemingly the point that the Radio Times realised that with the show being broadcast twice-weekly, they only needed to list the cast and crew under one of the two listings. Well, I found it interesting. But United! wrapped up in March 1967, with its final episode being listed as such in the Radio Times, and Brentwich United being favourites for promotion, although tragically it seems unlikely we'll find out if they ever made it or not.
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