Derek Martinus, who has died aged 82, was an extraordinarily versatile theatre and television director and occasional actor who enjoyed the kind of varied artistic career hard to imagine today. As a contracted BBC TV director, he was responsible for many early episodes of Doctor Who, in which he worked with William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee. As a theatre director, he ran the pioneering in-the-round Pembroke theatre in Croydon (1959-62), helping, along with Stephen Joseph in Scarborough, to put a new configuration on the map.
In what was a golden age for TV drama, when directors were expected to turn a hand to everything, Derek worked on long-running popular series such as Z Cars and Angels, and directed classic serials such as Dumas's The Black Tulip (1970) starring Simon Ward, and Sybille Bedford's A Legacy (1975), with Claire Bloom and Jeremy Brett. And there were straight plays including Strindberg's The Stronger and Maggie Wadey's In the Labyrinth, starring a young Michael Gambon. Derek later moved to ITV, where he twice won the Pye award for best children's drama, first with The Paper Lads, then with Dodger, Bonzo and the Rest.