David Maloney first worked for Doctor Who as a production assistant during season 2. By the late Troughton era, he had taken the BBC's directorial course, and was entrusted with the plurality of the episodes in season 6. Because he helmed The War Games, he was one of of an elite number of directors to offer his own representation of the regenerative process. He then took a break from Doctor Who, but returned for a significant stretch of episodes during the late Pertwee and early Baker eras. Because he directed the generally-highly-regarded serials of The War Games, Genesis of the Daleks, The Deadly Assassin, and The Talons of Weng-Chiang, few directors of the 1963 version of Doctor Who would be as well-remembered as Maloney.
Contemporaneously, however, Maloney was at the center of allegations that the show had become too violent during Philip Hinchcliffe's tenure. Some of these rebukes were fairly levelled at him personally. He rewrote the opening to "Genesis of the Daleks," into a more violent version which displeased both writer Terry Nation and morals activist Mary Whitehouse. (DCOM: Genesis of the Daleks) His direction of The Deadly Assassin famously featured a drowning scene that was so criticized by Whitehouse that it had to be edited from the videotape master. (DCOM, INFO: The Deadly Assassin)
In 1977, Maloney appeared in "Whose Doctor Who," an installment of The Lively Arts news programme which addressed the criticisms leveled by Whitehouse and others about the show allegedly being too intense for younger viewers. AFter his time on Doctor Who, he became a producer, overseeing the first three seasons of another popular BBC science-fiction series, Blake's 7, during the late 1970s and early 80s. He also produced the BBC's famous 1981 adaptation of John Wyndham's novel Day of the Triffids.