Gerry Davis became a BBC story editor in 1965 at the invitation of Head of Serials Donald Wilson, who had been impressed by a course he had written on TV scriptwriting. He had previously been a newspaper reporter, a merchant seaman and a writer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and had studied opera and worked as a cinema translator in Italy. His first BBC assignments were on 199 Park Lane and United! and he was then given the chance to take over from Donald Tosh on Doctor Who. Although he never saw entirely eye to eye with producer Innes Lloyd, he remained in this post for over a year before moving on to edit another show, First Lady. He later returned to freelance writing, his greatest success coming in the early Seventies with the BBC's ecological drama Doomwatch, which he co-created with Kit Pedler. From the mid-Seventies he spent most of his time in Hollywood, writing for American films and TV series and teaching screen-writing courses at the UCLA Film School. He died on 31 August 1991, aged sixty-four.