Mark Smith

Peter Davison died in July last year. The star of Doctor Who and All Creatures Great and Small didn’t realise he was dead until his son emailed him. He went online and sure enough, there it was. Dead. A Facebook tribute page. The lot. It was a celebrity death hoax naturally, but it was rather pleasant, says Davison, 65, like having a wake before you die. “What’s the point of people saying all those nice things about you if you’re not around to hear them?”

People do say nice things about Peter Davison, partly because he almost always plays nice people. In the 1970s and 80s, he was Tristan Farnon, the younger vet in All Creatures Great and Small. Then, in 1981, he took over as the fifth Doctor Who and suddenly a character that was forbidding and middle-aged was friendly, dashing and young. Then there was the dad in At Home with the Braithwaites, the series about an ordinary family who win the lottery, and “Dangerous Davies” in the police drama The Last Detective. All very good, all very likeable.

But for Davison himself, it has been a bit different – darker even. He sometimes looks at the old clips of himself as Tristan and can barely believe it’s him. He says Robert Hardy, his co-star on All Creatures, once told him that, to overcome his shyness, he should pretend to be Tristan. So that’s what he did, only for it to become, slowly and without realising it, a serious problem.

The problem was this: Peter Davison was an ordinary, shy, comprehensive school boy from a mixed-race background (his father Claude was from the West Indies, his mother Sheila from England), but on television and increasingly in parts of his real life, he was acting like Tristan: a posh, confident, pale-faced, public school boy.

By the time he noticed he was actually living as his alter ego he was in massive debt, his career was heading in the wrong way and his marriage, to the actress Sandra Dickinson, was going wrong. We all pretend to be someone we’re not sometimes, but for Davison it became a suffocating trap.

Several years on, Davison is happy to talk about it all because he’s in much improved circumstances. His career is bouncing along fine, he’s happily married, he has two young sons, and he’s in the curious situation of being the father-in-law to another Doctor Who – his daughter Georgia Moffett is married to David Tennant.

He recalls when he was offered the lead in Doctor Who. “It felt like a mad idea to me,” he says. “I grew up with William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton and they were older Doctors, avuncular figures.” He says it took him a long time to feel comfortable. “I’m sure there were many people saying, ‘Oh, he’s nowhere near as good as Tom Baker,’”

Davison says he might never have ended up becoming an actor. As a teenager growing up in the 1960s, his great passion and escape was songwriting. There was even a point when EMI offered him a contract, but in the end he preferred the idea of acting.

Davison persisted with his ambition though and worked solidly after he left drama school, much of the time at the Young Lyceum in Edinburgh. It was there he met the woman who would become his second wife, Sandra Dickinson. He was already married, to Diane, but began an affair with Dickinson, who was also married. He says regret would be the wrong word for that time in his life, because that would mean regretting Georgia, the daughter he had with Dickinson, but he feels the way he treated Diane was unforgivable. It’s a difficult period to think about for him, because it was the start of a major relationship that went horribly wrong.

For years, he and Dickinson bought bigger and bigger houses, but by 1991 TV series were drying up and there was a stupidly high mortgage and threatening letters from the Inland Revenue asking for £90,000. The couple had been living at the edge of their means and suddenly were tipped over it, which only added to the pressure on the disintegrating relationship.

The couple split and Davison struggled with debt, which came exactly at the time his TV career took a dip and he went into theatre and met Elizabeth and and started a new family. I ask him how weird it was when David Tennant started going out with his daughter and suddenly there were two Doctors in the family and he laughs and says, in fact, it was him who pushed them together when Georgia failed to pick up the hints that David was interested. “David’s a charming man,” he says, “so I suppose in a way I’m a bit more intimidated by him.”

That might sound like Davison just trying to be nice, but in his case, it’s likely to be true. For three years, he played television’s greatest hero but he’s not like some of the other Doctors – he doesn’t have an ego the size of a planet; he’s self-conscious and self-deprecating, the shy boy who pretended to be someone else before finding his true self.

Is There Life Outside the Box? An Actor Despairs is published by John Blake Publishing priced £20.