Husband David Spenser

Queer Places:
Cementerio Murla Murla, Provincia de Alacant, Valenciana, Spain

Victor Francis Pemberton (10 October 1931 – 13 August 2017) was a British writer and television producer. His scriptwriting work included BBC radio plays, and television scripts for the BBC and ITV, including Doctor Who, The Slide, Timeslip, Tightrope[2][3] and The Adventures of Black Beauty.[4] His television production work included the British version of Fraggle Rock (second series onwards),[5] and several independent documentaries including the 1989 International Emmy Award-winning Gwen: A Juliet Remembered, about stage actress Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies.[6]

Pemberton grew up in Islington, London, and lived for many years in Essex. In his earlier years, Pemberton had several small screen acting roles. In addition to novelisations, he wrote many nostalgic novels set in London, prompted by the success of his autobiographical radio drama series Our Family.[7][8]

Pemberton first worked on the programme in 1967 as assistant script editor and was promoted to the role of script editor during the production of the story The Tomb of the Cybermen.[9] Pemberton wrote the 1968 Patrick Troughton story Fury from the Deep[10] (which he subsequently novelised for Target Books).[11] The story, now missing from the BBC archives, was based on an earlier stand-alone radio serial he had written called The Slide, starring future Master actor Roger Delgado.[12][13] It introduced the Doctor's trademark sonic screwdriver.[12] In 1976, Pemberton wrote the audio drama Doctor Who and the Pescatons[14] for an experiment in Doctor Who on vinyl record and an early spin-off from the programme. The production was aimed at children and is heavily based on ideas Pemberton had used for Fury from the Deep.[15] He later novelised The Pescatons,[16] which was the final Doctor Who book published with the Target logo on the spine. He had previously appeared as an actor in the series, in a non-speaking role as a scientist in the 1967 story The Moonbase.[17]

In later life he lived in Murla, a village on the Costa Blanca which is a 40-minute drive from bustling Benidorm. He and his partner of over 50 years – David Spenser – bought a villa there when they moved from their home in Islington, London, a decade before. David died in at the age of 79 in 2013 – seven years after the couple were married in a ceremony attended by 80 guests and performed by a Spanish judge. Victor recalls a touching moment when a large contingent of villagers gathered in the street to applaud them as they left the village hall in which their marriage took place. A little teary-eyed, he said: “That’s how far we’ve come from the days when David and I first met. Life was a struggle then. It was illegal to be gay and we had to live very discreet lives. Young gay people nowadays have no concept of how hard life was for homosexuals then.” After David's death, Victor imagined that he would be fine living on his own and able to see from his villa the spot where David is buried. But, despite having two delightful dogs for company – a pair of Lhasa Apsos, a breed that originated in Tibet – he decided that he could no longer deal with the solitude, and he moved to Benidorm.

The dogs – Bubble and Squeak – were Victor’s 50th-anniversary gift to David, a child radio star of the 1940s and 50s. David will be best remembered for his portrayal on air of Just William. The author Richmal Crompton cast him in the role, in a series of dramatisations of her novels about the raucous but endearing 11-year-old outlaw. This was in 1948, when David turned 14 and was already a seasoned radio actor – performing more than one play a week. He had come into acting through a ruse set up by his ambitious mother and a BBC friend. He was lured into Broadcasting House and found himself in a studio being auditioned by the Children’s Hour producer Josephine Plummer. For playing the lead in Just William he received the standard juvenile fee of four guineas. Victor wrote: “In the years before he died, David made a valiant attempt to write his autobiography. Sadly he only completed two-thirds of it. However, he did ask me to promise that I would finish the book for him, which meant that the final third of his story would be a biography. That book is now awaiting publication.”