Sydney Newman was offered a job by Walt Disney in 1938, but couldn’t accept due to an inability to secure a work visa. He returned to his native Canada and found work as a film editor. By 1954, he’d become CBC’s Supervisor of Drama Productions, and exports of his television work secured an invitation to the UK, becoming Head of Drama at ABC before being lured to the BBC where he assembled the team required to create “the Saturday serial.”
“We required a new programme that would bridge the state of mind of sports fans, and the teenage pop music audience, while attracting and holding the children’s audience accustomed to their Saturday afternoon serial. It had to be a children’s programme and still attract both teenagers and adults. Also, as a children’s programme, I was intent upon it containing basic factual information that could be described as educational, or, at least, mind opening for them. So my first thought was of a time-space machine with contemporary characters who would be able to travel forward and backward in time, and inward and outward in space. All the stories were to be based on scientific or historical facts as we knew them at the time.”
Sydney Newman (1917–97)
