John Leeson, the actor who gave Doctor Who’s robot dog K9 his clipped, faintly pompous and thoroughly lovable voice, has died at the age of 83. His son, the film editor Guy Ducker, announced on Facebook that his father had died on the afternoon of Sunday 1 November, after a summer of illness, and that the end was peaceful. Guy signed off with Horatio’s farewell from Hamlet, “Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest”, and in a separate post to a Doctor Who fan group he thanked the Whovian community for the love it had shown his father over the decades. Leeson is survived by Guy and by his wife, Judy Griffiths, a former BBC assistant he married in 1969.
For a generation of children who watched Tom Baker’s Doctor through the gaps between their fingers, Leeson was the most dependable voice in the TARDIS. K9 trundled on in The Invisible Enemy in 1977, the computerised hound of Professor Marius, and was kept on after that first story because the audience took to him at once. In the same serial Leeson also voiced the Nucleus, the very virus everyone was trying to stop, so he spent his debut playing both sides of the plot. “Affirmative, master” soon joined “Exterminate” in the playground vocabulary, and was a good deal more polite about it.
Tom Baker famously could not stand the character. He did like Leeson, though, and when Baker was handed the big red book on This Is Your Life in 2000, Leeson made his entrance on all fours. The pair were still working together this year, reuniting for the audio drama Sir Sherlock: The Red Letter Day, with Baker as Holmes and Leeson as Watson. The loyal companion to the very end, then.
Leeson walked away from the role in 1979, worried that a career as an off-screen voice would make casting directors forget his face. He did at least get on screen as Dugeen in The Power of Kroll, a story K9 sat out because a metal dog on wheels was never going to survive its marshland location. David Brierley stepped in for season 17, with the change of voice explained away as K9 having laryngitis, surely the most British continuity fix in the programme’s history. When John Nathan-Turner took over as producer, Leeson came back for season 18 on the understanding that the dog was being written out, which he duly was in Warriors’ Gate.
Nobody could keep K9 in his box for long, mind. There was the 1981 pilot K-9 and Company with Elisabeth Sladen, which never became a series but left behind a theme tune that still haunts anyone who saw it, then The Five Doctors in 1983 and, a quarter of a century on, the return Russell T Davies engineered in School Reunion. In his tribute, Davies said that when they brought K9 back in 2006 it was “impossible to imagine anyone else” providing the voice, and called Leeson a fine actor and a true gent. Leeson went on to Journey’s End, The Sarah Jane Adventures, the British-Australian K9 series (which he later admitted he found strange, since the dog worked best as a sidekick), a great deal of Big Finish audio including the Gallifrey series, and even a turn as a Dalek in Remembrance of the Daleks.
It would be a mistake to remember him only as a tin dog, though. Born John Ducker in Leicester in 1943, he worked in a bookshop and as a hospital porter before RADA, where his contemporaries included Terry Hands and Susan Fleetwood, and he borrowed his stage name from his godmother’s surname. Before K9 he was the original Bungle in ITV’s Rainbow, inside the bear suit for 50 episodes from 1972, which meant putting up with Zippy long before the rest of us had to. He turned up in Dad’s Army, twice in Blake’s 7, and in Sorry!, Minder and The Bill, and spent several years as a resident stunt performer on Game for a Laugh. Viewers who never knew his face still knew his voice from his years as a continuity announcer on Channel 4.
Off screen he led a life of almost comic respectability. As John Ducker he sat as a magistrate for more than 25 years, six of them as Deputy Chairman of the Ealing Bench, and became an accredited wine educator who lectured on land and at sea. He wrote two autobiographies, The Flight of the Budgerigar and its expanded successor Tweaking the Tail, plus a cookbook cheerfully titled Dog’s Dinners, narrated The Space Gypsy Adventures for children’s hospital radio, and recorded audiobooks for the Calibre Audio Library. K9 would have filed all of it under commendable.
Here at SFcrowsnest we have reviewed a good many of his outings over the years, from The Sun Makers to The Pirate Planet, and the voice never lost its prim precision, a schoolmaster’s diction filtered through a biscuit tin. That was the trick of it. K9 was a computer, a weapon and an insufferable know-all, and Leeson made him the most loyal friend in the universe. It is a sad irony that K9 turns 50 next year, and fans had hoped to see the man who gave him his voice there for the party. Rest well, John.
Join the conversation (0)