Mervyn Pinfield

Mervyn Pinfield (28 February 1912-20 May 1966) was associate producer for Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child to The Romans. He also directed episodes of the Doctor Who stories The Sensorites, (episodes 1, 2, 3 and 4) Planet of Giants (episodes 1 and 2) and all the episodes of The Space Museum. He was also the original choice to direct Galaxy 4 before Derek Martinus took over. His non-Doctor Who directing credits include The Monsters, and.

Before joining the BBC early in the 1950s to work on live drama at Alexandra Palace, he spent over four years in "weekly rep" as director/theatre manager at the Royalty Theatre, Morecambe. Pinfield was the inventor of an early type of teleprompter, or autocue, which he called the Piniprompter.

Out of all the people who worked on Doctor Who, his death was one of the earliest to occur over the long history of its production, less than three years after it had debuted.

Note
The production notes on the 2010 DVD release of The Space Museum give Pinfield's date of death as 20 August 1966.