It has recently been consigned to the TV soap opera retirement home, but the long-running daytime series Doctors had a secret – its characters’ names were often inspired by Bristol City players.
The culprit was actor, scriptwriter and Bristol City fan Dave Lloyd, who has been talking about his life as a scriptwriter for both Doctors and EastEnders, as the primetime soap celebrated its 40th birthday this week.
Mr Lloyd, who was the announcer at Ashton Gate for eight years, began writing for Doctors in around the year 2001 and became one of the daytime show’s most prolific writers, having written more than 70 episodes.
And that gave him something of a free hand when it came to introducing new characters, and coming up with their names, even if they were only going to be on for one or two shows.
So Mr Lloyd had to wrack his brains to come up with new names – and what better inspiration to draw on than the Bristol City teamsheets in the 90s and 2000s. He has now admitted to sneaking in as many as 30 or more footballers names into the episodes, and said he did it ‘as a bit of fun’.
Mr Lloyd, from Backwell, near Bristol, also wrote for EastEnders for a couple of years – and wrote the famous episode where Sharon Watts discovered she had a half-brother called Dennis Rickman.
Evidence of Mr Lloyd’s handiwork went unnoticed at the time, despite one law firm called Coles, Carey and Hill, making an appearance – named after three stalwart defenders, Danny Coles, Louis Carey and Matt Hill, who played a combined total more than 1,000 games for Bristol City in the first few years of the 2000s.
“”I just slipped it under the radar, I used to do it all the time,” he told BBC Radio Bristol. “It was an entirely juvenile thing but they’re just little inside jokes,” he added.
Mr Lloyd went from writing for Doctors to writing for EastEnders – a show he appeared in as an actor not once but twice. He first appeared as a paramedic called to treat ‘someone who Grant Mitchell had beaten up’, but more notably appeared as the leader of a strange cult that Ian Beale came across on Dartmoor as part of a special episode to mark the total solar eclipse in the West Country in August 1999. “It was utterly bizarre,” he said. “I had a long, white flowing robe on.”