Creator / Michael Craze

Michael Craze (29 November 1942 – 8 December 1998) was an English actor. He is best remembered for playing Doctor Who companion Ben Jackson from 1966-67, alongside both William Hartnell's First and Patrick Troughton's Second Doctors.

Craze made his first appearance in Doctor Who in "The War Machines", the final story of Season 3. He joined the show at the same time as Anneke Wills as fellow companion Polly. Their characters were both young Londoners from 1966, designed to capture the mood of the Swinging Sixties and appeal more to contemporary audiences than previous companions had done. Their characters sometimes clashed onscreen, but Craze and Wills would form a lifelong friendship.

William Hartnell was nearing the end of his tenure as the Doctor, with growing health and memory problems making it impossible for him to continue playing the role. Two serials later, Hartnell regenerated into Patrick Troughton, with Craze as Ben and Wills as Polly therefore going down in history as the first companions to witness a regeneration on the show.

Two stories into Troughton's tenure, Frazer Hines joined the TARDIS as new companion Jamie McCrimmon. He had originally been intended to be only a guest character, but was promoted to a regular after working well with the production team. This meant there were now two young men of action in the TARDIS, and writers struggled to balance both Ben and Jamie in the stories that followed.

Producer Innes Lloyd felt that Jamie's introduction had made Ben redundant, and that Ben was the less interesting of the two characters, and therefore ordered him to be written out. Anneke Wills opted to leave at the same time as Craze; Ben and Polly therefore departed the show together one year after they had joined it together.

Craze continued his acting career through the 1970s, but by the 1980s he was acting only occasionally alongside managing a pub. He was also one of the first Doctor Who actors to become a regular on the convention circuit, and soon built up a good relationship with the show's fans.

Sadly, Michael Craze died of a heart attack in 1998, aged just 56.

Works he has appeared in with pages on TV Tropes:

• Dixon of Dock Green episodes:
  • "The Flemish Giant" (1962) — Jimmy
  • "Facing the Music" (1964) — Fleming
  • "The Late Customer" (1965) — Hyett
  • "Face at the Window" (1966) — Boy
• Doctor Who: 37 episodes / 9 stories^{show list} "The War Machines", "The Smugglers", "The Tenth Planet" , "The Power of the Daleks", "The Highlanders", "The Underwater Menace", "The Moonbase", "The Macra Terror", "The Faceless Ones" — Ben Jackson
• Z Cars episodes:
  • Strictly Cash: Part 2 (1970) — Jack
  • Rules of the Game: Part 1 (1971) — Nick
  • Scavengers (1977) — Detective Constable Johnson