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C.E. Webber

C.E. “Bunny” Webber (1909–69)

Wilson, noting the following requirements for “the Saturday serial,” tentatively called The Troubleshooters:

  1. It must attract and hold the audience.
  2. It must be adaptable to any [science fiction] story, so that we do not have to reject stories because they fail to fit into our setup.

and outlining its principal cast:

The handsome young man hero
The handsome well-dressed heroine aged about 30
The maturer man, 35 – 40, with some “character” twist
[Sydney Newman would add “a kid to get into trouble”]

The “maturer man” would subsequently age several hundred years and one could argue his “`character’ twist” might be that he was neither a man, in the broader sense of a human native to Earth or—per Newman’s hypothetical suggestion in 1986 or the fact of 2018—in the sense of gender. Nevertheless, C.E. Webber (1909–69) was among the earliest key contributors to a legend.

Webber (left), is pictured with Enid Bagnold and John Whiting in this photo from the Bentley Archives.