I'm all for a painless history lesson and find the 'Three Journeys of Marco Polo' fascinating.' The Doctor Who one was a totally new script of course, but the radio version certainly had an influence on it. 'I had done Marco Polo as a fifteen-part radio series in Canada for CBC, about five years earlier.John Lucarotti ( The Doctor Who File, Peter Haining W H Allen, 1986).In the original radio version I had written him as 'the mighty Khan' but the director had the actor play the role completely against the lines…' There was a superb character actor named Martin Miller who played Kublai Khan, but the characterization was not my invention. '… I remembered that I had written a fifteen-part, half-hour radio serial in Canada during 1956 about the three journeys of Marco Polo and, seven years on, I still had my notes and a copy of his diary'.

But there was always some confusion - even by John himself! - as to how many episodes there were as well as the year in which it debuted: In the few interviews that Lucarotti had given about his work on Doctor Who, he often mentioned the radio serial that inspired his TV scripts. It is quite well-documented that Lucarotti had to some degree based his seven TV scripts on an adaptation he had written several years earlier for Canadian radio. 'In Marco Polo Bill (Hartnell) found his direction and crystallised his performance with the authority and stature he brought to it for the next three years.' - John Lucarotti, quoted in The Doctor Who File by Peter Haining (W.H.He remembers the Marco Polo serial as a defining point for the young series: The author of the Marco Polo serial for Doctor Who was John Lucarotti. Unfortunately, the entire serial is missing but complete off-air audio recordings exist. Among the early episodes of Doctor Who, perhaps one of the most missed is the fourth serial, the seven part Marco Polo that was first aired in the spring of 1964.

Doctor Who by John Lucarotti