Michael Pickwoad
Production designer on Doctor Who and Withnail and I
MICHAEL PICKWOAD, who has died aged 73, was a Bafta-nominated production designer widely respected for his instinctive gift for how a set should look, his attention to detail and his unfettered imagination.
He was best known in later years for his work on Doctor Who, which he joined in 2010 at the end of Matt Smith’s first series in the lead role.
His first episode was the Dickens-inspired A Christmas Carol, featuring Michael Gambon and Katherine Jenkins. He revamped the interior of the Tardis which made its debut on the show’s Christmas Special in 2012, its multiple levels allowing Matt Smith’s successor Peter Capaldi to develop his hyperactive style. He created settings ranging from the flight deck of a Silurian dinosaur ark to a Viking village before retiring after series Ten’s Twice Upon A Time.
Its executive producer Steven Moffat has observed that Doctor Who “never had the movie-scale budget it needed, and our secret weapon for hiding that was Michael Pickwoad”.
Pickwoad’s other television work included The Deal (C4, 2003), The Queen’s Sister (C4, 2005), Sweeney Todd (BBC Two, 2006), and series such as Marple, Murder Most Horrid and Kavanagh QC.
For Sweeney Todd, he oversaw the recreation of 18th-century London in a Bucharest studio. For The Queen’s Sister, he recreated Kensington Palace in a former hospital and delighted in installing the visual oddities that arose when Princess Margaret’s husband, Lord Snowdon, planted his 1960s modernist paraphernalia amid the stuffy royal decor.
He had fun, too, creating the sets for The Deal, Stephen Frears’s drama about the birth of New Labour, recreating the House of Commons in St Pancras station. Tony Blair’s north London home, for which Pickwoad studied a party political broadcast filmed in the Blairs’ kitchen, was described by one reviewer as “an airlock of blandness” with walls painted in magnolia and hung with bland prints.
Gordon Brown’s house in Scotland was, Pickwoad explained, “more earthy and basic”, with “a heavier feel, which rather defines the character.” Pickwoad’s film credits included Bruce Robinson’s cult classic Withnail and I (1987), starring Richard E Grant and Paul Mcgann as a couple of hard-living, hard-up young London actors who decide that what they need is to “get into the countryside and rejuvenate”.
For the boys’ squalid London flat Pickwoad took over a near-derelict Bayswater house, lined the kitchen sill with old milk bottles containing soured milk and filled the sink with dozens of chipped plates smeared with the remains of Chinese takeaways.
Filming was delayed a couple of days and by the time it began the sink had begun to bubble. With the camera crew retching and threatening to walk out, filming had to be wrapped up hastily.
Michael Mervyn Pickwoad was born on July 11 1945 to William Mervyn Pickwoad, an actor who, as William Mervyn, appeared in Doctor Who as a guest star in the 1960s, and Anne, née Payne Cook. He was educated at Charterhouse and at the University of Southampton, where he read Civil and Environmental Engineering.
He began his career as an art director in the 1970s, working with museums and galleries, before taking on the role of film production designer. His other film projects included The Krays (1990) and Let Him Have It (1991) starring Christopher Eccleston. He created the Egyptian backdrop of Agatha Christie’s Poirot: Death on the Nile (ITV, 2004) and the Village of the remake of the cult series The Prisoner (ITV, 2009), filmed in Swakopmund, a German colonial settlement on the coast of Namibia.
In 1973 Michael Pickwoad married Vanessa Orriss, with whom he had three daughters.
Michael Pickwoad, born July 11 1945, died August 27 2018