Roger Noel Cook

I'm saddened to learn that Roger Noel Cook, the regular writer on the Doctor Who comic strip in TV Comic from 1966 to 1970, has died. 

I encountered Roger when I was researching my book, The Comic Strip Companion 1964-1979, a guide to the Doctor Who stories from TV Comic.

We made contact through Barracudas guitarist and songwriter Robin Wills, who had interviewed Roger on his blog in February 2009. Roger was talking about his music career but made a passing reference to having written Doctor Who, so this had to be the same man whose name frequently appeared in recently obtained BBC correspondence files concerning the comic strip. Having been alerted in February 2010 to the existence of the interview by fellow researcher Richard Bignell, I contacted Wills, who kindly forwarded my request on to Cook. Roger got in touch, and we struck up a regular correspondence via email.

Looking back through the emails from February and March 2010 when we were writing back and forth nearly every day, I’m most struck by how enthusiastically “Roger the Dodger” or “The Madman from Marbella”, but usually just “Rog”, responded to my many questions about his work. His memories were hazy, which was understandable given that four decades had passed since he’d stopped writing for TV Comic in 1970. He told me that, “My recollections are hopelessly scattered”, but he was keen to provide whatever details he could recall. He hadn’t kept copies of his work, so I sent him scans of the comic strips from TV Comic. He enjoyed seeing these, revisiting them for the first time since their original publication. He was astonished too when I reunited him with copies of his letters and synopses from the correspondence files held by the BBC.

One of Roger Noel Cook's letters to Roy Williams at BBC Enterprises, dated 10 December 1969. He was delighted to see this again, observing, "Not many writers would refer to themselves as 'The Idiot'! ... That's my signature, like a spider on drugs."

One of the most interesting things I learned from Rog was that he was just 19 years old when he was hired by TV Publications (later Polystyle), who had offered him “a very attractive deal”. This meant that when we were corresponding, he was only in his mid-60s. He was fulsome in his praise for artist John Canning (who started illustrating the strip around the same time Rog began writing it). He shared with me his impressions of what it was like to work for TV Comic. He described the staff as “church going Christians” and as such didn’t feel as if he fitted in – “I must’ve slipped through the net” - but nevertheless considered them “lovely people to work with”, pointing out the stark contrast with his later lucrative career as a publisher of porn videos and magazines.

As Rog pointed out, Doctor Who was just one of many regular weekly strips he worked on in the latter half of the 1960s. TV Comic did not include creator credits, so it was a revelation to discover that Rog had been the regular writer on Tom & Jerry, Popeye, Beetle Bailey, Orlando and Ken Dodd’s Diddymen, amongst others. He was phenomenally prolific, estimating that he wrote on average about 20 scripts a week, half for TV Comic and half written freelance for IPC. “All my scripts were written at enormous speed,” Roger told me. “I would be embarrassed to write anything at that speed now. I would just write what was in my head at the time. I didn't plot and I didn't re-write. I just wrote ‘em as they came to me.”

One of Roger Noel Cook's many Doctor Who strips (TV Comic issue 864 cover dated 6 July 1968).

He was proud of the fact that he earned so much from his work that he was able to purchase an E-type Jag, inspired by John Canning who owned a brand-new Mark 10 Jag. Rog had a life-long passion for cars, and told me all about his impressive collection of Bentleys. He was excited to be working with his son, an award-winning animator, on launching an online Formula 1 car racing game with David Coulthard as a backer.

His emails conveyed so much energy and enthusiasm. They were unfiltered streams of consciousness. He’d answer my questions about the Doctor Who strip as best he could, but would often go off on tangents taking in what he’d been up to that week (“Played tennis in the rain yesterday… lost to 16 year olds”); observations about his life in Marbella (his neighbours, he informed me, included “premier league soccer stars who can barely communicate, Saudi Princes, Russian oil magnates, gangsters and stockbrokers who wrecked the globe's financial system...”), and observations about his time in the music and porn industry (“I wasn't offensive until I started to edit Men Only and Club International. Then I learned how to upset people - the establishment and just about everyone everywhere except a few million readers every month.”)

Roger Noel Cook with one of his prized Bentleys, at his villa in Marbella.

Our lively, informal correspondence was a welcome distraction for me as at the time my mother was hospitalized with terminal cancer. I didn’t share this with Rog until after she’d passed away in April 2010, and then only to explain why I’d been late in replying to his last email. I was touched by his sympathetic message of condolence, sharing that he’d lost his own mother just a year earlier.

I reconnected with Rog in late 2012 to let him know that The Comic Strip Companion had been published. He read my book and thought it was “an amazing piece of work of entertainment history”, which is a wonderful endorsement from the man responsible for creating so many of the stories I’d written about in that volume.

Rog was excited to share with me that he was planning to make a movie adaptation of his graphic novel called The Devil’s Detail, with Richard Senior attached as director (Senior had recently directed the Doctor Who story Let’s Kill Hitler) and the then-current Doctor Matt Smith approached to star in it. I don’t think this got anywhere, but his passion for the project was plainly evident.

The last time we exchanged emails was in April 2018. Rog’s name had come up in something I was researching, and I wanted to check a minor detail with him. Typically, his enthusiastic reply was peppered with fascinating observations and anecdotes about his career.

Read John Freeman's tribute to Roger Noel Cook on Down the Tubes.