Sylvester McCoy

Sylvester McCoy (born 20th August 1943) played the seventh incarnation of the Doctor from 1987 to 1989, beginning with "Time and the Rani" and ending with "Survival"and in the 1996 Doctor Who television movie. He is sometimes credited as Sylveste McCoy.

He was born Percy James Patrick Kent-Smith in Dunoon, Scotland. In his youth, he trained for the priesthood, but gave this up and spent time working in the insurance industry. He worked in The Roundhouse box office for a time, where he was discovered by Ken Campbell.

He came to prominence as a member of the comedy act "The Ken Campbell Roadshow." His best known act was as a stuntman character called "Sylveste McCoy", whose stunts included putting a fork and nails up his nose and stuffing ferrets down his trousers. As a joke, the programme notes listed Sylveste McCoy as played by "Sylvester McCoy", and after a reviewer missed the joke and assumed that Sylvester McCoy was a real person, Kent-Smith adopted this as his stage name. Notable television appearances before he gained the role of the Doctor included roles in Vision On (where he played Pepe, a character who lived in the mirror) and Tiswas. McCoy also portrayed in one man shows on the stage two famous movie comedians, Stan Laurel and Buster Keaton. He also appeared as Bowers in the 1985 television mini series about Robert Falcon Scott's last antarctic expedition, The Last Place On Earth, and had a small role in the 1979 film version of Dracula, with Laurence Olivier and Frank Langella. (McCoy had also played the title role onstage.)

He took over the lead role of Doctor Who in 1987 from Colin Baker, and remained until the series was shelved in 1989. He actually has the distinction of having played two incarnations of the Doctor; when Baker declined an invitation to record the regeneration scene in Time and the Rani, McCoy put on a wig and, with his face obscured by special effects, filled in on the role. He played the Doctor in the 1993 charity special Dimensions in Time, and again in 1996, appearing in the Doctor Who television movie where he handed the role over to Paul McGann. In his first season, McCoy, a comedy actor, portrayed the character with a degree of clown-like humour, but script editor Andrew Cartmel soon changed that. The Seventh Doctor developed into a much darker figure than any of his earlier incarnations, manipulating people like chess pieces and always seeming to be playing a deeper game. McCoy generally approved of this, as it allowed him to play more of a dramatic role.

A distinguishing feature of McCoy's performances was his manner of speech. He used a slight Scottish accent, rolled his 'r's, and often placed emphasis on unusual syllables or words. This has the added (possibly intentional) effect of sounding a little alien, and wrong-footing the audience. It also made the viewer question established speech patterns often taken for granted. At the start of his tenure he used proverbs and sayings adapted to his own ends (eg. "There's many a slap twixt cup and lap" - Delta and the Bannermen), although this characteristic was phased out during the later, darker seasons of his tenure.

Although McCoy only appeared as the Doctor for three seasons (plus Search Out Science, Dimensions in Time, the telemovie, and audio dramas), fandom treated him as the "current" Doctor from 1987 to 1996. This view can be argued not just because he was the last actor to play the role, but also due to the Seventh Doctor's continuing presence as the Doctor in original novels and comic strips. Accordingly, some consider him to have beaten Tom Baker's seven year record as the Doctor, although by some criteria McCoy's record is beaten by Paul McGann who would be identified as the current Doctor from 1996 until 2005.

Through the 1990s, some Doctor Who fans blamed McCoy for the shelving of the original series, though ratings competition from Coronation Street seemed a far more likely reason. The rec.arts.drwho Usenet group became especially notorious as a place where one could be branded and attacked as a "pro-McCoy troll" for no other reason than expressing a liking for the Seventh Doctor.

McCoy's television roles since Doctor Who have included Michael Sams in the 1997 telemovie Beyond Fear, shown on the first night of broadcast of Channel Five. He has also returned to play the Seventh Doctor in a series of audio plays by Big Finish Productions. In the early 90s he also appeared in several independent, Doctor Who-inspired productions by BBV Productions, including The Airzone Solution (a science fiction film with no direct Who connection but which starred most of the surviving Doctor actors), and the spoof Do You Have a License to Save this Planet? in which he played a Doctor parody called The Foot Doctor.

He has also acted extensively in theatre in productions as diverse as pantomime and Molière. He played the role of Snuff in the macabre BBC Radio 4 comedy series The Cabaret of Dr Caligari, and The Fool in a Stratford production of King Lear by the Royal Shakespeare Company, opposite Sir Ian McKellan.