Pilot Officer Randolph Wright was the paternal uncle of Polly Wright, a companion of the Doctor during his first and second incarnations. Shot down over southern Vichy France, about a hundred miles from the Spanish border, he died in a Nazi prisoner of war camp in Germany during World War II. He was survived by two older brothers, Charles and Polly's father Edward, and his mother. Edward honoured his younger brother's memory by telling Polly tales of her uncle after the war. Having been born in 1942, Polly was too young to remember her uncle.
In February 1944, Polly met a man whom she thought was her uncle but he turned out to be a Nazi agent who had tried to impersonate Randolph to infiltrate the French Resistance. (AUDIO: Resistance)
Polly once went to a séance where she made contact with Randolph's spirit. (PROSE: Invasion of the Cat-People)
Behind the scenes
- That Randolph's surname is mentioned in Resistance is significant. Polly's surname, by contrast, was never mentioned in performed Doctor Who up to this point. "Wright" had instead derived from the Gary Russell book, Invasion of the Cat-People. The explicit mention of his last name in a piece of performed Doctor Who thus gives the name "Polly Wright" a measure of wider acceptance and therefore greater authority.
- Though John Sackville mostly portrays the false Randolph Wright, he does appear to portray the genuine Randolph as he gets shot down at the start of the play.