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| - Waris Hussein was born in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India. He moved to London with his parents when he was nine. He attended Cambridge and worked as a trainee at the BBC, where his mother, Attia Hussein, was a newsreader and dramatic star. When he became a director, he was the first Asian BBC Drama director. According to Waris, he had to put up with a lot of "innuendo" and gossip about how he got to do what he was doing. He could feel himself being stared at and it made him determined not to fail.
- Since he was the first Asian director at the BBC, and one of the youngest ever, most people were too busy being racist or teasing him about his mom working in the building (she was a broadcaster for BBC World Service) to even notice that he was gay, much less discriminate against him for it, despite him hanging out in a circle of theater boys like Ian McKellen and the ultimate fag-hag, James Bond's wife, Diane Cilento.
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| abstract
| - Waris Hussein was born in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India. He moved to London with his parents when he was nine. He attended Cambridge and worked as a trainee at the BBC, where his mother, Attia Hussein, was a newsreader and dramatic star. When he became a director, he was the first Asian BBC Drama director. According to Waris, he had to put up with a lot of "innuendo" and gossip about how he got to do what he was doing. He could feel himself being stared at and it made him determined not to fail. He was crucial to the casting of William Hartnell as the Doctor. He felt Hartnell had the eccentric and powerful quality required for the part. Waris was one of the group that went for lunch with him to try to convince him to accept the role. When he first met Hartnell, he felt terrible because he thought Hartnell was "a very opinionated man — that is, prejudiced", and he felt he was looked down upon because he was an Asian "kid", although none of this was spoken between them. First impressions notwithstanding, Waris eventually got on very well with Hartnell. Waris was a very close friend of Diane Cilento (former wife of Sean Connery) and met Sean just after Dr. No had been released. He was the director of the pilot episode, which was very different from the final version. After Sydney Newman saw the pilot, he took Waris and producer Verity Lambert to dinner, told them he thought it was terrible and gave them another chance at the episode. They made An Unearthly Child together. Waris tried to forget the pilot, as he thought it was so terrible that people would fall asleep while watching it. His next Doctor Who association was with the story Marco Polo, for which he directed six of the seven episodes. He claimed he had a strange imagination and, in one of the scenes, wanted to have a dwarf on an actor's shoulder. In the end, a spider-monkey was used. In An Adventure in Space and Time, Waris was played by Sacha Dhawan. In this documentary, it was said that he left to direct A Passage to India, when in fact he directed The Indian Tales of Rudyard Kipling.
- Since he was the first Asian director at the BBC, and one of the youngest ever, most people were too busy being racist or teasing him about his mom working in the building (she was a broadcaster for BBC World Service) to even notice that he was gay, much less discriminate against him for it, despite him hanging out in a circle of theater boys like Ian McKellen and the ultimate fag-hag, James Bond's wife, Diane Cilento. Hussein directed the Doctor Who pilot, plus An Unearthly Child and most of Marco Polo. He convinced Verity Lambert that she was right to go after William Hartnell, and convinced Hartnell to take the role. And he trained Douglas Camfield (who directed a crapload of serials for the first four Doctors and almost became Derrick Sherwin's successor). Beyond that, he wasn't quite as involved in Doctor Who as Adventures in Space and Time would make you think, but seriously, that's more than enough, isn't it?
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