As a script editor Eric Saward is to some extent
responsible for the consistent characterisation of
the regular cast. "Although it depends on the writer
- some, of course, are very familiar with the show.
At the moment, with a new Doctor they only have
one broadcast story - if they've seen it - to go on,
which is not how Colin Baker will play the rest of his
time with us anyway. In The Twin Dilemma he was
very unstable-constantly at extremes of emotional
response and temperament."
So what had been the thinking behind the choice
of The Twin Dilemma as Colin Baker's debut story?
"Because the Doctor has always been slightly seedy
after regenerating (in Castrovalva he spent the first
two episodes literally falling to pieces) and because
we wanted to make the sixth Doctor different we
decided to make the regeneration so extreme that it
would resemble madness. The swings of mood
were amazing - if he had been walking around on
the streets, he would have been a strong contender
for a psychiatric hospital! So the whole behavioural
aspect of the Doctor in The Twin Dilemma was quite
deliberate - I wanted to explore what happened
after the regeneration. With that in mind we wanted
a writer who was very experienced and who could
write the sort of dialogue to make that sort of bizarre
situation believable. The whole thing needed expert
handling - those kinds of mood are hard to handle
for writers as well as actors. Think about it - one
minute you're laughing and on top of the world, the
next minute you're plunging into the depths of
despair and wanting to kill your companion. Now
Anthony Steven is a tremendously successful and
experienced, prize-winning writer. He had worked
with John on some of the best episodes of All
Creatures Great and Small and on this basis I
approached him. He agreed, and from his basic
ideas and a lot of long discussion we got The Twin
Dilemma as we wanted it."
Since Eric Saward has been script editor there
have been two new companions for the Doctor - the
mysterious Turlough and the vivacious student Peri.
How did these characters emerge?
"With Peri, John decided we should have an
American girl to break away from the stereotype of
the English girls. We talked about her background
and what she should be like and, as with Turlough, I
wrote an audition piece. Nicola read for us, made the
part come alive and turned out to be the most
suitable. Since then we've tried to shape it around
her. Peri is quite a strong girl, she doesn't like to be
pushed around, but at the same time she's a gentler
character than Tegan."
Eric says that the process of developing initial
characters heavily involves the response of the actor
to the part. "When you get to know the actors you
tend to try to exploit, in the nicest possible way, their
own particular traits. You watch them very carefully
at rehearsals, at the producer's run and in the studio
to see what they do best and do well. You use that
because there's a tendency to choose an actor
without quite knowing where you're taking him -
this is certainly true of the Doctor. We knew we
wanted Colin to be more eccentric but it wasn't a
black and white character breakdown - it was a
progression of ideas."
After the comical swing of the later Tom Baker
seasons, Peter Davison's era witnessed a toning
down of the show's humour. With Colin Baker's
debut the humour looks like coming back. "There's
always a danger of being po-faced. Anyone or
anything that takes itself too seriously can become
pompous. We have now decided to go back to
having more fun in both the character of the Doctor
and the general situations he's in. I think there is
room for more humour - but I'll steer it clear of being
crass. We just want to relax it a bit now - in
conjunction with contrasting the styles of the Doctors.
The Sixth Doctor will be very different from the
Fifth."
The Sixth Doctor will have only one companion
for the time being. In view of recent TARDIS crews,
why the sudden reversion? "From my point of view
both as script editor and writer you can do much
more with just one companion. The Doctor and the
companion can have a much stronger...better defined
relationship and they can relate to each other
in a more positive way. When you've got more than
one companion you're farming out lines that could
be said by one person. Also, if you've got so many
people in a confined space like the TARDIS, it's
difficult to give them a lot of positive action. That
became very apparent with three companions - and
it's also a problem dealing with so many sub-plots.
Thus the return to the old idea."
For the first time ever, the twenty-second season
of the show will be broadcast as 13 45-minute
segments. I asked Eric to explain this move.
"Resurrection was in a sense a test run, although it was
written as four-parter. I think that the second half of
the show suffered slightly by going out as one slab;
there was a great deal of action in episode four and it
would have worked more effectively, I think, had it
been a separate episode. The problems that exist
with 45 minutes are basically that you cannot as
readily have a fast action show. For example,
Earthshock was repeated as a two-parter compilation
and I didn't think it worked as well that way. It's a
bit like saying a bicycle won't go as fast as an Aston
Martin - a bicycle was never designed to go that fast.
It's a different sort of product. I think that going to 45
minutes will slightly change the nature of the show
and it will certainly change the feel of each episode. I
hope the change will be for the better. That's why
we're looking more than ever for experienced writers
who can handle the length, and why new writers
will probably be fewer. For instance, Philip Martin
who's writing the second story, Vengeance on
Varos, is experienced - he worked on the series
Gangsters and his script for us is very quick and
witty. Overall I don't think the show will suffer."
I pointed out that if removed slightly the burden
on writers having to include unnatural cliffhangers
which interrupt the plot, Christopher Bailey's work
being a good example. "Dear old Chris doesn't
understand to this day the point of a cliffhanger. His
idea of a cliff is something you look out to sea from
and to him a hanger is what you hang your jacket on
at night. In spite of that I would never hear a bad word against him!"
Turning to the twenty-second season I asked Eric
how work was progressing. "We're now fully commissioned.
We've already started recording so the
great wheel is beginning to turn again. I think the
way the scripts look at the moment that the first
three stories are excellent. Attack of the Cybermen is
very much a Doctor Who traditional - with all the
goodies you'd expect and a lot of the good old-fashioned
kids-behind-the-sofa idea, It's also original,
an excellent opener - a great grab to start off the
season. The second story, Vengeance on Varos, is in
a quiet and quirky way excellent too, although very
different from Attack. It will help achieve the mix
we're always after. It's clever, enormous fun and I'm
extremely pleased with it. The Two Doctors is
absolutely smashing although very different from
The Caves of Androzani. It's very funny, as well as
having the draw of its cast. Beyond that we haven't
confirmed."
Hadn't The Two Doctors originally involved filming
in America? Now that the location had changed
to Spain had there been a rewrite? "Yes, some,
basically to re-locate it from an English-speaking
country to a Spanish-speaking country. We have to
be flexible about rewrites. If your leading man
should drop dead you have to have a rapid rewrite
which would be terrible for us but of course even
more terrible for the leading man!"
My final question to Eric Saward was how long
was he planning to stay in "the hot seat"? "I'm on
contract and it's renewable every nine months -
why, I don't know, it's a BBC quirk! My current
contract expires at the end of July and I've been
asked to stay on."
Robert Holmes explains how he came
to write The Two Doctors: "Apparently
Patrick Troughton and Fraser Hines so
enjoyed The Five Doctors they asked if
they could come back and do another
one. We were moving to the forty-five-
minute time slot and this was going to
be the season 'biggie' - and Eric Saward
wanted someone with experience of
writing what is virtually an old six-parter
and asked if I'd mind writing it. Then
they said, 'Can we have Sontarans?' I
don't really like bringing back old monsters
but I don't think the Sontarans were
really well used in their last appearances
so I was glad to redress the balance."
Whose decision it was to set The Two
Doctors in Spain; Robert Holmes' or the
Producer's? It transpired that the original
setting, New Orleans in America,
wasn't workable and it was set in Seville
at short notice "I had nevertheless written
the script to be set in New Orleans,
not Seville. That's why I created the
Androgums - I couldn't think of any
reason why aliens should visit New
Orleans and I recalled it was a jazz place
- but not even I could envisage a race of
aliens obsessed with jazz and then I
remembered it is the culinary centre of
America, with lots of restaurants so I
invented the Androgums, who are
obsessed with food - an anagram of
gourmand. So they went to New Orleans
for the food. They stayed however when
it shifted to Seville because I couldn't
think of anything else.
Previously Holmes had written for Peter Davison,
literally at the end of the
fifth Doctor's era. The Caves of Androzani
was a story based, once again, on
Phantom of the Opera: "I always tried to
look for a strand that was familiar to the
viewer. If you have straight SF with
aliens and without parallels people can
pick up on, to my mind, it doesn't work
too well. After I finished being script
editor I was up to my eyeballs in Doctor
Who and wanted a break from it, which I
had for a few years. Then they asked me
to do The Five Doctors Special which I
didn't do because they wanted too many
characters in it and I felt I couldn't do that
and get a good story as well. So I said no
thanks and Terrance Dicks did it.
"I think they asked me because of my
association with the programme, it
being an anniversary show and then
when they found out I wasn't in the
bath-chair just yet they asked me to
write a four-parter for Peter Davison.
They said, in fact, would I like to write the
death of the Doctor and I said yes, firstly
because I'd not written for Peter Davison
and secondly because everyone knows
this is the last story and so you have that
kind of in-built drama. I was teasing the
audience quite a bit really - I killed the
Doctor off, apparently, at the end of the
first episode - although you only had to
look at the Radio Times (for Davison's
name) to see he's alright! I think that was
an added 'plus' as far as I was concerned
and an inducement for writing it."
Is there a possibility of Holmes writing
a script for the 23rd season of Doctor
Who?
"Well, firstly let me say I see no reason
why I couldn't carry on writing one script
a year if I satisfy them, so hopefully I'll
carry on!
"It's not so difficult trying to think up
one story per year as it is six! I wouldn't
go back to being, a Doctor Who script
editor. I understand they want me to
write a story next year but they haven't
decided whether or not it's going to be
filmed in Singapore - I hope they decide
soon because I'm due to start work on
Bergerac afterwards and if I'm not careful
I won't have enough time! With any
luck though, I shall carry on writing for
Doctor Who until its deathbed!"
Jones is, of course, one of the people
responsible for bringing the attention
of the show's producer to actor Colin
Baker, with whom Jones has just worked
again in Vengeance On Varos: "I
cast Colin in Arc of Infinity because I
like him as an actor and as a person he
has a tremendous sense of humour.
He's a very intelligent guy and he's
bringing a lot of himself to the part,
especially in the form of this dry wit. As
a Doctor he's very interesting to watch
and lovely to direct."
Working on the show's tight schedule, I wondered if Jones had ever
actually run out of time during a studio
session: "I've never had to have a
re-mount, but like everyone I have had
the occasional over run for which we
have to have an agreed extension. A
case in point was the recent recording
of Vengeance On Varos where on one
day I decided 'yes we should finish
with an extension', while on another I
didn't stop them pulling the plugs. It
was actually quite amusing because
one of the cast had this line about
running out of breath or something - I
think it was 'I can't go on', just as the
main studio lights went up and recording had to stop."
Jones's latest work for the show was
this season's Vengeance On Varos: "I
read it and thought at once, 'This is very
exciting'. If you remember Gansters, it
was in the same way a mix of toughness and humour. Vengeance fitted
quite comfortably in the studio and I
was quite happy for it to be that way. I
thought the sets were most effective,
and they were fairly flexible. For that
one mortuary fight scene we had to
construct an entire water tank in the
corner of the studio.
"We were very lucky in our cast too.
Jason Connery is very up and coming
for instance, and Nabil Shaban was
exactly right as Sil. I wanted him to
appear as slimy as possible, and Nabil
gave a lovely performance of the right
kind of eye rolling evil. The voice was
designed to be quite sinister as well. Of
course it's very hot in all our monster
costumes and after takes Nabil had to
be kept cool with face fans. In Frontios
we had air pipes for the Tractators."
I was once warned not to work, if at
all possible, with trains, planes, cars or
boats, and of course in Doctor Who I've
worked with all of them in one way or
another. In Vengeance On Varos we
had our own vehicles to contend with.
What next I wonder?"
Since becoming a freelance director
Jones has also co-produced a film
intended for the video market called
Tangier and he has also been working
on Central TV's Murphy's Mob alongside
Doctor Who companion Janet
Fielding. As yet he doesn't know if he'll
be doing another story for the programme,
but says that he'd very much
like to.
It is some four years since
Producer John
Nathan-Turner and script
editor Eric Saward met to
begin work on the first Peter
Davison season. Since then
their collaboration has
become one of the most
durable in the show's
history. Richard Marson
interviews the two men most
closely involved with the
series, and finds out some of
their attitudes and their
intentions for the future of
the programme.
I asked both Nathan-Turner and Saward which story or stories they felt
were most successful out of the recently concluded season. John replied first,
"It's quite difficult to pick out which of my
favourite two (Vengeance on Varos and
the Dalek story) I liked most. I think if I had
to make a choice I'd say Varos because
the whole video nasty set-up was so
clever and consequently it was a rounder
show. But credit where it's due, that
element was actually injected by Eric."
Saward found it harder to choose any
one story, "I'm arrogant enough to say I
thought those were the best two stories of
the season, but ultimately I don't think you
can compare them - all the shows were
very different. Of the two I'd pick Varos,
but I hope for Graeme Harper's sake that
the Dalek story wins your season poll. I
thought he did a smashing job and I'll be
quite happy to live in his reflected glory!"
With the season being broadcast at
forty-five minutes for the first time ever,
did they think the experiment had worked? Both felt it had. Saward: "The American cliche
is different ball-game
altogether. I think we were more successful than I at first thought we would be,
though I don't want to sound too defensive. It was, from my point of view, an
attempt to talk to our writers about a
format that I had no experience of,
although obviously I've written fifty minute
things myself. While re-thinking the format we were very careful to keep the
essence of the show, which is a fantasy/SF adventure story. We couldn't just
cobble together two twenty-five minute
episodes because a compilation of two
fast running parts is very off putting - it
jars. We did have time to stop and think a
bit more, but we did have to keep on
hammering away with the action."
Nathan-Turner backed Saward up.
"Yes, I think it did work. Inevitably when
you change something that's been a
tradition for such a long time, there's a
kind of apprehension from the front office
that it won't work. Now we're re-thinking
again. We've got material that's been
written for forty-five minute slots that'll
have to be split up again, and those
scripts we do finish up using will have to
be re-structured. There's more to it than
just splitting it down the middle. It would
have been lovely to have done one more
season in that slot to get it exactly right,
but we were both surprised and delighted
that we achieved accuracy so quickly."
Next I brought up the vexed subject of
violence in the show, whether it was guns
and lasers, or Androgums eating rats.
Nathan-Turner: "I don't think it was
attached to the time slot. I felt, and Eric
agreed with me, that we could go a little
further with the violence." Saward joined
in, "Yes. It was a matter of saying to the
writers that we could be more realistic,
something I have always been in favour
of. It's only logical if you have a series
based on a lifestyle which involves a lot of
physical action. I do think you can indicate
the violence without being gratuitous - you don't want guts falling out all over the
place, but it's my opinion that if you've got
an impact between two people it's better
to be more realistic than pretending that
me hitting you on the nose is a joke. It isn't.
You fall on the floor and your nose is very
painful and it bleeds. We want to imply
that if you hit someone it hurts."
Nathan-Turner came in with this point,
"As old as the show is there have been
complaints. Somehow parents have this
dim and distant memory of the show,
where they remember if with fondness
and affection, and forget the fact that they
themselves were often frightened." Saward added, "They also forget that entertainment
itself has moved on over the last
ten years or so. To try and make the show
as it was in their childhood would be
lunatic - should the Doctor sit down and
have tea with a Dalek! Our first intention is
to entertain - we don't set out to offend or
upset anybody. With this last season
there was also a deliberate attempt to
inject more humour, so we were trying to
balance the horror. That said, we didn't
want to stop the show for the routine belly
laugh so it was wit not slapstick."
I argued that Attack of the Cybermen
had been somewhat lacking in the element of hope and optimism, with nearly
every major character being killed off.
Saward replied; "You're thinking mainly
about the Bates, Stratton, Griffiths characters I suppose. Well, the narrative was
that as the characters developed and
finished their contribution they were killed.
The idea behind that was to create a
separate theme. We had the Doctor locked up in most of Episode Two and this was
the second story strand - of people struggling to get out. It was the resistance bit
that the Doctor was unable to do. It was
quite a positive element - being pretentious about it, it's the energy and effort
people put in to avoid death. They don't
just sit there. They were being very determined about trying to escape from Telos
and although they died in the attempt, I
think the way they went about it lifted the
story dramatically. I would like to say here
and now that I did not write Paula Moore's
story, apart from the help I give my writer.
Paula worked hard on researching the
Cybermen for the script, and as you saw
the story related very directly to the history
of the Cybermen in the show."
I asked Nathan-Turner about the pairing of scripts with directors. Did he try and
match writers' styles with those of his
directors? "In an ideal world that's what I'd
do, yes. But you see we haven't always
decided which script will go into a certain
slot, when we have to engage the director
for that slot. Sometimes we can, sometimes not. Sarah Hellings was paired with
The Mark of the Rani. I'd seen her work on
Angels about two years before. There are
a lot of agencies that look after directors
and they write and tell you what people
are doing. If somebody particularly wants
to do a Doctor Who they'll write and then
we'll either meet and talk about it or I'll
view some of their work and go from
there."
"In the same way we don't usually write
specially for actors because it's very likely
that when you want to film they won't be
available. The time we commission
scripts is so far away from filming that you
just can't. Obviously with the second
Doctor and Jamie it was different. I asked
Patrick (Troughton) if he'd do the part at
the first big American convention in Chicago in 1983. He said yes, so we went
ahead and commissioned without getting
Fraser (Hines) under contract because
we knew he'd be keen. We never thought
of having one of the girls from that time,
simply because we were in the early
stages with Peri, and it would have looked
odd if Patrick had had two side-kicks. It
was there to re-establish, albeit temporarily, the balance between the male and
female companion, a balance which I
thought had worked very well with Peri
and Turlough. So no we don't, apart from
special cases, write direct for actors. I
think that writers do though, in their own
minds."
Saward agreed, "When I wrote the part
of Orcini I had in mind a young Christopher Lee, the figure he was playing
fifteen years ago." Characterisation had,
in fact, been one of the strongest elements of the last season. Had this been a
deliberate effort? "Partly. Again, I think it's
got a lot to do with the length," explained
Saward, "It's one of the things we've
enjoyed about forty-five minute episodes.
We had time to explore a character without being dangerously self-indulgent. We
could often spend no more than thirty
seconds more on a scene, but that thirty
seconds means the difference between
saying 'this is the character' and leaving it
at that, and stopping to say a bit more.
Take my own Orcini - he could have been
a killer and nothing else, but I was allowed
to make more of him."
I asked Eric about the initial thoughts
behind his script for Revelation of the
Daleks. "I had got bogged down with
Resurrection, with the massive Dalek
legend, and I needed that story to free
myself completely and entirely from everything that had gone before. Then I
could go on and find a story that I could
make work, with my own characters, and
yet still contain the idea of the Daleks. I
thought it worked on that level. Last time
we talked, I told you I had an interest with
men in conflict. Orcini, for instance, came
about as a sort of extension of Lytton.
When I was on holiday in Rhodes last
year, I was reading in all the guide books
about the Knights of St. John who'd held
Rhodes for three hundred years. They
were rather unpleasant and evil people,
but they were tremendous soldiers. Six
hundred of them held the town against ten
thousand Turkish soldiers. Orcini, dare I
say it now, was the top knight - the Grand
Master as they were called. I took the
name and the rank, but thought I'd take
him much more down-market and make
him a knight who'd been thrown out of his
order and who was still very doubtful
about his own existence and motivation."
"Orcini was a man who killed for all
sorts of reasons, in his own mind for
honour. He'd made his whole life a matter
of ritual killing and when he does kill he
kills with thought and consideration too.
When he kills Kara, he chooses the knife
because she has betrayed him and it has
become a ritual thing, a revenge.
Tasambeker came from Greek history as
well. Originally she was a saint who the
local women used to worship when they
were barren. If they had a daughter they
called the child after Tasambeker. I took
the name and simply anglicised it. She
was pathetic, but she wasn't silly. I didn't
feel cruel when I wrote the part. She is like
many people in that she's trying her best
to make a living, exist and become infatuated with somebody. We all do it in our
lives - we think 'isn't he or she wonderful?
I really love them' - and we don't make
any progress because they're just not
interested. Tasambeker was that sort of
woman. She latched herself onto an
absolute dead loss but she loved him and
wanted him. She is forced into killing him
because she loves him - his death is the
only way of resolving her frustration."
Saward got his first inspiration for the
story from Evelyn Waugh's book The
Loved One. "I thought the season was
shaping up rather nicely - we'd had the
video nasty aspect from Philip and the
food aspect from Bob and I thought 'what
are the big issues we have left?' and hit
upon death. I'd always liked The Loved
One and I re-read it and thought 'Yes. I
can use this sort of feel.' I paid my
compliments to it by naming the Jobel
character after a Mr Joyboy in the book.
The motivation for the story were the
characters of Grigory and Natasha. They
were fairly lightweight, but they were there
to expose the racket on Tranquil Repose."
Nathan-Turner pointed out that a lot of
their effect was down to the actors. "In
both cases it was their first television job.
Bridget Lynch-Blosse was someone
Graeme Harper had lectured at drama
school, he was very pro her and he sold
her to me. Likewise it was Stephen
Flynn's first telly and in Timelash David
Chandler was also new to the medium. I
come up with suggestions all the time. For
instance, Kate O'Mara was cast from my
office rather than from Sarah Hellings',
because I knew Kate's work very well
from The Brothers and Triangle. "
I asked Nathan-Turner how involved he
was with rehearsals. "I go up for the read
through, and then I tend to go up halfway
through rehearsals just for an hour or so. I
sit around ostensibly chatting, but actually
watching what's going on so that the
actors who don't know me don't regard
me as some sort of evil ogre who is going
to sack them at the Producer's run. If
you're familiar to them then the nerves
aren't so bad, although there is still an
aura about the Producer's run. Eric and I
don't want to see a nervous performance,
although we wouldn't necessarily condemn someone for that. My attitude is
'Why go through it? Its not necessary."
While Saward was writing his story
Nathan-Turner had to step in and fill both
roles for about six weeks. "I didn't enjoy
being a script editor as well as Producer, I
have to say. All the stuff for the future
could wait, but I had to deal with the job in
hand which was The Two Doctors. So I
had to attend to all the day-to-day script
changes from the director, and suggestions from the actors." Both Nathan-
Turner and Saward have been asked to
write for Target books, but although Eric
has written two books, John has declined.
"They've been asking me virtually since I
took over but I don't think I could do it. I'm
very good at pantomime and revue but I
know my limitations and I don't think I
could write a novel. I was much more
inspired with the idea of my book TARDIS - Inside Out, an idea which came from the
publishers. That gave me something to
bounce off and now I'm writing a sequel."
Saward continued; "I thoroughly enjoyed writing The Twin Dilemma, I had a
great time and found it very exciting. I was
totally faithful to the original story, but still
got a certain amount of mileage out of it for
myself. You say 'this is the spirit we were
intending to do it in and this is my input'. I
think that makes everybody happy. I'd be
delighted to write more - especially of my
own stories."
Going back to the series itself, I suggested to both Nathan-Turner and Saward that the
character of Peri never
seemed happy in space, and seemed to
do nothing but complain about travelling
with the Doctor. Saward took up my point,
"Let me say how I brief a writer. I say, 'If
you were in space with the Doctor and you
had time to think what sort of questions
you'd ask, those are the sort of questions
I'd like you to put in your script.' There
might be a little too much of Peri saying
`For God's sake, what are we doing
Doctor?' but that's because of the briefing. I'm very keen on saying she is the
intelligent Earth view in space. If we were
out there with him and it was all real, we'd
be so befuddled by what was going on
we'd only want to hide. If Peri seems
unhappy you can put that down to me,
because I think if we all went out there,
we'd all be unhappy in a way."
So Peri sticks with the Doctor through a
kind of extended masochism? "Yes,
that's right. If you were out there and you
could cope with the sheer drama of your
life, you'd be on cloud nine. It would be an
amazing mix of many, many experiences.
Now the fact is that you have to divorce the
cloud nine element, because dramatically
it has got to work. So it tends to come
down to this question of, 'What am I doing
here Doctor?'. It's crazy time for her, and
personally that's an element I like about
Peri." Nathan-Turner added, "If you met a
mutant or something, wouldn't you say
`That's enough of this. Let's get out of
here.' I don't think its getting over-repetitive."
I asked Nathan-Turner how the Jim'll
Fix It sketch had come about. "They'd
been wanting to do a Doctor Who fix for
about four years and for various reasons
they all fell through. At one point we were
going to have the robot from The Visitation
doing somebody's housework. This
series they had a very bright director
called Marcus Mortimer, who I happen to
know quite well, and he wanted to encompass the wishes of hundreds of kids who
want to travel in the Doctor's TARDIS. I
insisted that any sketch would have to be
in character and out of that evolved the
story A Fix With Sontarans. I suggested
that Eric write it for obvious reasons - it
was easier and he knows the continuity. It
was originally written for the Doctor and
Peri, but then Nicola booked a holiday so
Eric re-wrote it for Janet. The name Group
Marshall Nathan, by the way, came out of
rehearsals. In the script he was called
Stern."
I then asked how much say Nathan-
Turner has in the merchandising side of
the show. "It all comes through here.
Basically what happens, is that if someone wants to do a model Dalek or something,
they approach BBC Enterprises
who then ask me for an opinion. More
often than not I say yes, providing it's
good quality. One example of saying no
was to Doctor Who darts, which I felt
might encourage youngsters to play
games with dangerous results. So long as
it's marketable and of reasonable quality,
it reflects glory on the show."
Turning to the future, Nathan-Turner
was encouragingly optimistic, "When, we
come back people won't notice we've
been away. There will be no decision on
scripts and directors for some time yet,
though we have more than enough scripts
to choose from. Some we may use, in fact
we may use them all - we haven't decided. One of the benefits of losing a
whole season is that normally Eric and I
have to get together over a hurried drink
or on the journey back from the Action
rehearsal rooms. We don't have a lot of
time because we don't only work on
Doctor Who - we work on projects for the
future too. So normally it's all going on at
the same time - Eric is trying to fit writers
in here, there and everywhere, and I have
more than enough on my plate. What's
quite nice, just for a change, is that if we
don't feel like talking on a Wednesday,
then we can talk on a Thursday. Normally
it has to be a Wednesday because Thursday and Friday we'd be in the studio. The
next year will also give us all a chance to
take some of the holiday owing to us,
which is quite a lot. The show will return
with a vengeance next year, complete
with the line up of Colin and Nicola to go
right through the season - we have no
plans to introduce any more companions
or anything."
As my final question to both Saward
and Nathan-Turner, I asked how long they
were both planning to stay with the show.
Saward answered first. "I'm here until
June. I've been asked by both John and
my head of department to stay on, which
I'll be more than delighted to do." Nathan-
Turner, "At the moment I felt very strongly
that the return season will be my last as
Producer."
Chris doesn't seem particularly surprised that the professional relationship of producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Eric Saward ended in acrimony. "I'm obviously not equipped to comment in any way, but my impression was that the whole thing fell to pieces. John had been doing it for far too long, and Eric arguably the same.
"Doctor Who is a very difficult show to work on, and although I'm amazingly grateful to have done the season I did, I'm also grateful to have got through it alive. I probably could have done a second year if I'd got the money I was asking for, but I certainly wouldn't have done a third year and a fourth.
"Eric was a jolly good writer, but by the end of it he was really up against the wall. As for John, I really don't know. If he was trapped on the series, that's sad, because he had real ambitions to go off and do variety and comedy shows with big stars. In a sense I suppose he did too good a job with Doctor Who. What's the old army adage? Never learn to type or you'll get stuck in the typing pool."
Over the last years of the series, Chris' name was attached to various unmade or potential scripts. He listened with some bemusement to a number of them. "The Master in a computer fraud? Nope, never heard of it. The Last Adventure? I didn't write that, but I have heard the name used in relation to one of my scripts."
There were two bona fide scripts which were commissioned from Chris, written and then not used for various reasons. The first of these was Pinocotheca, planned for inclusion in the original Season 23. "It's a Greek word meaning 'a gallery of pictures', and that was central to the idea of the story. Something had gone dreadfully wrong on a certain planet which was reserved as a museum of special places and times in the universe, and the Doctor was called upon to go and investigate. That's hardly a storyline to support four episodes so there must have been more to it than that, but I think maybe one day it would be nice to do these stories anew as books, so I'd like them to come fresh to an astonished world rather than leak out storylines at this stage.
"I was invited to novelise them some years back, actually. The same people who did the novelisations, WH Allen, ten years later came back to me. I said, 'Fine, how much do you want to pay?' and it turned out the deal was exactly the same, penny for penny, as it was ten years before! I said, 'This is ludicrous - at least allow for inflation.' I was a computer journalist and it meant talking six weeks off. Although it would have been a great joy to do, I had to pass that one up.
"I think what happened with Pinocotheca was that I went through the usual loop of coming up with a storyline, which was approved, doing a first draft, which was approved, and then a second draft and delivery, all approved. I deliver the script, everyone says, 'Thanks Chris, but oh my God the season's been cancelled' - no great political thing going on there. Although there were quite clearly politics going on between Eric and John, and John and the BBC, I got paid my money."
The second script, In the Hollows of Time, was commissioned for the replacement 14-episode season, but the situation which emerged was far more tangled. "String theory is a very interesting discipline of physics, all about the nature of dimensions and the universe, and I was heavily into it when I wrote Hollows of Time. It was requested as an emergency, do-us-a-favour, we need a script urgently thing. I get a phone call from Eric: 'Chris, we're in desperate trouble. We've had to blow out such-and-such a writer. Can you do us a script quickly?' I would have said to Eric, 'I know the dangers of this. I've got to write under pressure and produce something really quickly. What we'll do, if it's alright with you, is when I complete the first draft of episode one, I'll send it down to you straight away. I want you to get back to me quickly if there's any major stuff in there that's not right.' Likewise episodes two, three and four. Minor stuff at this stage was not a problem. So that's all done, and I get the go ahead to do the final draft after a bit of discussion about some obvious inconsistencies which I know about and Eric knows about. I do the final draft and am happy with it, and so I deliver it to Eric.
"I don't hear from Eric. And I don't hear from him and I don't hear from him. Quite a long time later I get a letter. It says, 'Terribly sorry, can't use this. There will be no payment.' I certainly felt personally affronted at this. I felt betrayed because we stayed very close on that one and made sure it was on track because time was so short. The letter didn't say, 'Sorry we can't use it because there's been some upheaval,' just that it was no good. So I think, 'Bastards!' and look at my contract. It says if it is not acceptable there will be no payment, but only if I am notified within a month or something of acceptance. More than a month has gone by, so I go to John and say, 'Luckily we don't have to have a big argy-bargy about this. It's there in the contract, you pay me.' I think there was an argy-bargy, but I did end up getting paid."
Thus Chris' professional association with Doctor Who came to a slightly bitter end.
Pennant was invited back the next
season for Time Lash. "I hoped it
would be better than Warriors of the
Deep and I was a bit disappointed
when I read the new script. I
remember Eric Saward was a bit
defensive about it. He said, 'It's
really quite good - Glen (McCoy) is
quite a good writer.' And I disagreed and persuaded Eric to do a
complete rewrite on it, to make it
more lucid.
"The area I think we let down
was in the number of times we had
to create the main effect of going
into the Timelash. If you've got to
do something that often, you've got
to set about a fairly simple way of
doing it. We could never get the
man-hours or the money to spend
on the exterior of the Timelash,
which was in the first studio
session. We were left with the
physical problem of the actors going
up a ramp and falling onto a
mattress inside the 'machine', making them disappear in the post
production which, for Time Lash,
was incredibly complex.
"Our original set designs kept
getting sent back and pared down
because of lack of money and that
scaling down was, in itself, time-consuming. We'd taken the time on
the first draft, so the last one -
which the viewers saw - was a bit
slapdash. I remember also feeling
that the parts were imbalanced, and
saying so to John (Nathan-Turner)
in the planning stage, both in terms
of content and duration. There was
too much happening in the first
episode and not enough in the
second, and yet the natural cliffhanger in Glen's story was the one we
used. Certainly Eric was aware of
that and we tried to pull back. Too
much of too much was the main
problem; we needed a simpler story
really."
After production completed, Pennant discovered he was overrunning
by several minutes on part
one, but underrunning on part two:
"We slid the whole of Nicola's part
of the sub-plot, about four scenes,
into part two. She was meant to be
tied up as part of the cliffhanger,
but what was actually something
like episode one, scene fifty-eight
became episode two, scene eighteen. It was as much as that.
"I trimmed other parts of episode
one, but we were still short for the
second, so we had to go into one of
Graeme Harper's studio sessions
and record an extra scene in the
TARDIS set to fill it out. This was
written by Eric as padding, a
complete deviation from the story. I
don't think Who was built for
forty-five minutes, with its emphasis on a kind of adventure short-
hand, and rapid pace."
Pennant also had problems with
the action sequences in the story.
"The only way to do fights is one
shot at a time. It's all right having
an action sequence with three
characters, but in that we had
something like ten to fourteen
protagonists. To try and block it is
very intricate, particularly if there's
nothing for people to hide behind. I
used to say to the actors, 'This
mustn't happen until that happens,' but they sped up with
adrenalin and it all went too quickly
and confusingly together. I couldn't
prise it apart and do it sequentially.
"The new names in the cast were a
way of balancing the budget. Paul
Darrow was cast in an attempt to
bring in a name. It was nice to have
him, because of the audience he
would be able to draw from Blake's
Seven. I think that Paul faced a
problem, in that he wanted to get
away from Avon and so his ideas
for the part never coincided with
what John or myself felt would be
right for the character. I spent quite
a lot of time watering Paul's input
down - he came to me and said,
'Why don't I play it with a hump?'
and I thought, 'He can't be serious,'
but at the beginning I think he was
completely serious! Elements of that
came back and encouraged the
same kind of playing from Colin,
for example."
Pennant has mainly happy
memories of his time on Doctor Who
and wouldn't mind directing
another story, "Although I would
like to see the script first this time."
For the future, he is nurturing
independent directing or producing
ambitions with ideas of his under
consideration by various companies. Either way, it won't be long
till we see Pennant's name at the
end of a television programme once
more.
One of the most
important ingredients in
creating Doctor Who is
Visual Effects. Here
Patrick Mulkern takes
an in-depth look at
those in The Trial Of A
Time Lord, and speaks
to the three designers
responsible, Mike Kelt,
Peter Wragg and Kevin
Molloy.
The Visual Effects Department of
the BBC is a rapidly expanding
outfit, which has to cope with the
ever-increasing demand for its services from programme makers. Its
commitment over the years to shows
like Doctor Who, Blake's Seven and
now Star Cops has been exhaustive,
and what may not be so evident is
that many other sorts of drama and
comedy series frequently require their
skills.
The latest season of Doctor Who
drew heavily on the effects department and the talents of three of its
visual effects designers, whose job it
was to create all the effects required
for their particular stories, including
explosions, weapons, rubber masks
and costumes, unusual props and
modelwork. Typically, it all had to be
done for the least expense, in as short
a time as possible.
The visual effects of Episodes one to four of The Trial
Of A Time Lord were created by
Mike Kelt, who had previously
worked on Enlightenment and The
Five Doctors, for which he redesigned
the TARDIS console. As you may
remember, the Twenty-Third Season
began with a spectacular model
sequence, which lasted for approximately 45 seconds and established
the huge Time Lord space station. The
picture travelled towards it, flew
around its surface, found a beam of
light and curved up with it to show the
TARDIS. The TARDIS then became the
focus of attention and the camera
followed it back down the traction
beam to the space station.
Such a sequence sounds complicated, and indeed, as Mike Kelt
explained, needed to be filmed with a
new and rather sophisticated technique. "We had to go outside the BBC
to Peerless Studios who have this new
facility called motion control. It's
simply the use of a camera which can
be controlled by computer - a
camera mounted on tracks, which is
adjustable through three hundred
and sixty degrees, ie. in absolutely
any direction.
"We moved the camera through
the model set very slowly, frame by
frame, lining up each position precisely and logging it into the computer's
memory. Once we'd done that, which
was very time-consuming, we ran thecomputer program and the camera
filmed the model at normal speed inexactly the same positions as before.
We call that, 'one pass over the model
with its basic lighting', and for Doctor
Who we did two different passes,
winding the piece of film back and
going through exactly the same
sequence but with subtler lighting. It's
accurate to about one thousandth of
an inch. You can take as many passes
as you like - for instance, for a third
exposure you could put some smoke
in the atmosphere, which would
diffuse the light."
In some cases, several passes could
be exposed on the same piece of
film, but for Doctor Who, each
pass was exposed separately and
combined optically later, by the
technicians at Peerless Studios. This
one 45-second scene took one week
to set up and shoot (working from
9am to 11 pm) and another week to
combine optically.
Peerless have handled a great
many difficult sequences, but maintain
Mike's to be the most complicated
ever attempted in Britain - if not the
world. At times during the shot, travel
through 360 degrees was required,
appearing as if within a sphere of
'space', which meant everything had
to be backed with stars, as Mike
explained.
"Stars are basically pin-pricks on a
piece of black paper, although the
paper we were using had to be
six feet tall and built in a cylinder."
The actual Time Lord space station
featured throughout the season was
produced by the workshop assistants
to Mike's design. "We constructed it
six feet in diameter from a fibreglass
base split into six sections, which were
then stuck together and had various
finely detailed plastic components
glued on top. It was also fitted with
hundreds of lights."
Mike Kelt's other main assignment
for Story One was the design and
construction of two brand new robots.
The first, the eye-catching Drathro,
had to be humanoid in shape, but Kelt
set himself a challenge from the
outset. "I always feel that in films and
the like, when they're building robots,
they avoid the obvious problem of
what happens at joints by using
rubber. I wanted fully adjusting joints
everywhere, and that's what we got in
the end, except for the waist which
was rubber for no other reason really
than an aesthetic one. It just looked
better."
Drathro's outer shell was very
thin fibreglass held together
internally by steel joints. The
costume had to be as light as possible
for the person within - originally
actor Roger Brierley was to have
operated it, but a visual effects man
stepped in at the last minute. He had a
reasonable range of vision through a
chest panel and a tube was regularly
inserted at the rear for ventilation and
cooling.
The L1 service robot, which
appeared simpler in design and more
functional, took one month to construct, and, as Mike explained, was
quite an undertaking. "If you sit back
and consider all the problems you're
making yourself, you'd never start.
The track system was perhaps the
most complicated and had to be
made up totally from scratch: it had to
look good in the studio and run
smoothly on location.
"The main body was in aluminium
and steel, with a fibreglass casing. The
front area was black, translucent
plastic, which only lets light in through
one side, so the man inside could see
very clearly ahead of him but was
invisible from outside. All its functions
were controlled on a main joystick by
one of our team, who got in through a
door in the back."
The finished prop was extremely
heavy and six people were required
to lift it onto a trolley before it could
be transported. There was no time to
test the L1 properly before it was
needed on location and Mike ran into
problems with it immediately, when its
tracks slipped carrying Colin Baker
uphill. Proving once more the dedication of BBC technicians, Mike worked
through his lunch-hour to perfect his
creation in time for the final take in
the afternoon.
One other feature which he
obviously took great pleasure in
setting up was the vat of sludge in the
food production centre. It looked
highly unsavoury but, Mike revealed,
was merely a concoction of mashed
potato, water and food colouring. "It
had to be completely non-toxic,
something which wouldn't stain costumes, and indeed had to be edible."
Whereas Story One dealt
with fibreglass robots, the
second adventure (episodes
five to eight) called for the other type
of Doctor Who monster - the 'men in
rubber suits'. The designer responsible
for all effects this time was Peter
Wragg, who had had some experience on Doctor Who with The
Visitation and Revelation Of The
Daleks. Peter has been with the
department for eleven years, his first
six as an assistant, the next five as a
fully fledged designer, and now he
has just become a senior designer.
He explained that he had to sculpt
three separate masks and costumes -
two different ones for Kiv, who
changed form halfway through, and
one for the Mentors, from which two
identical casts were made. In the case
of Sil, returning to the show after 18
months, the original body designed
by Charles Jeanes was used
"...mainly because we didn't have
the budget to buy a new one. But we
had to make a totally new head and
work out a better join for the neck.
The main part of the mask was made
from a softer material than before - a
prosthetics foam into which we'd put
a green base colour. That fitted like a
hood over Nabil Shaban's head,
leaving a circle exposed around his
face.
"We also had to provide separate
pieces of foam, which weren't
attached to the hood, but could be
applied by make-up to Nabil's face,
covering his cheeks and his chin, so
that any facial movement or change
of expression would be reflected in
the mask." In the end, all that could be
seen of the actor's own face were the
eyes, nose and mouth. Peter had to
fashion very thin slivers at the edge of
the foam face-pieces, so that they
could be blended in more naturally
during make-up.
The second major monster, Kiv,
required two totally new bodies,
similar in design to Sil's but much
larger. For the suits to fit as comfortably as possible for actor Chris Ryan,
an accurate bodycast was taken in
plaster, a process Peter explained.
"We covered Chris from the waist up
in plaster, which when removed was
like a negative of the outline of his
body. We filled the void with more
plaster, which gave us a positive cast
of his body, and onto that, I sculpted
what I eventually wanted Kiv to look
like in clay.
"We then took another plaster cast
of that, separated it, took out the clay,
and then we put the two casts
together, the positive of Chris' body
and the negative of Kiv's and filled the
gap between with foam and latex.
Once set, it resulted in a tailor-made
costume. The latex already had a
base colour, and we sprayed it up
with an airbrush."
One initial problem that had to be
dealt with was how to conceal Chris
Ryan's legs. "Depending on where he
was, we had to cut holes in tables, or
strap his legs up underneath, because
the sting end of the costume had to be
empty."
Stories Two and Three made great
use of the new paintbox facility, which
is really in the domain of Video, not
Visual, Effects and which allows
practically anything to be done to a
video image, and has been a
godsend to directors of pop promos.
"It always looks very complicated to
me," admitted Peter, "so I don't have
to use it. But it's fascinating to see it in
action. The set designer, Phil Linley, is
brilliant at it. You just take up a stylus
and move it across a screen, touching
points and punching them into the
machine. You can take a simple shot
of a set in the studio and add to it with
the stylus any extra detail or colour
from another video source. You could
have an actor by a polystyrene rock,
shoot it from a long way off so that
the camera picks up the surrounding
studio, but paint out what you don't
want with another picture of a cliff
face."
The paintbox was used at the
start of Story Two to lend an
alien touch to the location
footage of the Doctor and Peri on a
beach. The colours of the sea, the sky
and the rocks were completely
changed. Another world could even
be positioned on the horizon behind
the Doctor and Peri. "We made a
planet here, with video effects shot
against a black background and later
laid in with the paintbox. They could
also lay in a few rings and halation
around the planet."
Planets are essentially plastic
spheres, which are painted up and
given contours. Their size depends on
how extensively the planet is to be
featured. "Obviously the larger the
planet, the more convincing the detail
will be. Then it can be reduced when
fed into the set picture - Quantel can
shrink it even more."
Paintbox was used once again by
video effects expert Danny Popkin for
the final story of the season. Several
sets on board the Hyperion 3 were
given extra dimensions by the addition of model ribbing. The cameras
would record shots showing above
the top of such sets as the gymnasium
and reception, taking in the blue
cyclorama behind, over which in post
production the stylus of the paintbox
could apply a more interesting and
colourful dome.
Another impressive mix of model
and actual sets was attempted in a
tracking shot along the hull of the
Hyperion 3 spaceship. The camera
viewpoint arrived at a window on the
model, through which, on what is
called a 'wipe', a live action interior
was fed.
Kevin Molloy, who did
Time Lash last year, designed
the three-foot long model of
the Hyperion 3 and other effects
required for the final six-episode
block of the season. He revealed a
slight mishap in the creation of the
spaceship: "It was vacuum formed in
thermal plastic, but when we took the
vacuum former apart, a major portion
of it had melted into the heating
elements. It was a hopeless situation
and had to be re-built. I wanted to get
the feel of an ocean liner and
referred to lots of old photographs as
my source. It also had to tie in with the
vaguely art-deco sets designed for
the interiors."
Only a small portion of Kevin's
allotted budget was spent on the
model work, as the realisation of the
Vervoids was of paramount importance. Six suits were fashioned in all -
a collaboration of costume design
and visual effects. Kevin handled the
superb masks personally. "The script
said they had to be humanoid
vegetables, bipedal, and very vicious.
Obviously so that it was more than a
carrot with teeth, I had to give the
design a lot of thought, and I
researched into pictures of carnivorous plants at our rreference library.'
He revealed that the venus flytrap
and pitcher plants of South America
were very much in his mind.
Great effort was taken to lend
flexibility and colourful detail to the
Vervoid masks - foam latex was the
major ingredient, the fungoid cheeks
were made to be inflatable on cue,
and the creatures' probosces were in
fact the bristles from a broom!
Another important side to the
Vervoids were their incubating
husks lined up in the Hyperion
3's hydroponic centre. "Again they
were vegetable-based, but to get the
animal feel, I also referred to pictures
of insect pods. They had to be firm
enough for someone to stand inside
them, rigid enough for the Vervoids to
break out of them, and the director
also asked if they could have a
translucent quality, so they could be
seen to pulsate with light.
"We used a vacuum-forming plastic
again, and I had the idea to wrap
them with the sort of matting material
you find on coconuts. The plastic also
had to be flame-resistant, because at
one point we had to blow up the set in
an action sequence with about forty
explosions.
"The husks were rigid, but fragile
enough for a very original shot. The
director Chris Clough decided he
wanted a shot from a Vervoid'sviewpoint of it breaking out, so the
cameraman stood behind one of the
husks and gradually pushed out
through the front. He got so enthusiastic he walked right through it,
unaware he was dragging his assistant with him, who was carrying the
camera cables.'
A separate arm was built for
close-up shots of the Vervoids spearing people with their poisonous
thorns. "The hand was based on the
shape of a flowers stamen. It was a
mechanical device operated by compressed air. A long cactus-type thorn
would shoot out and strike its victim,
but obviously it might really injure the
actor, so we gave it a harmless foam
tip.
"Everything you do has to be safe,
and quite often you have to demonstrate it in front of actors to assure
them of the safety; for example, when
we had to make smoke come out of
the Vervoids' mouths, which could
have been very daunting for the
actors concerned.
'When we were on location in
Stoke, we had to set up a line of
explosions, alongside which the Master (Anthony Ainley) had to be seen
running. Tony said, "I'll do it if you do
it first," as he had to be about four feet
away from them. Colin Baker is a real
trouper. If there's an effect to be
done, he insists on doing it, sometimes
against the advice of the director. At
one point, he was walking on a
stretch of sand through which lots of
hands appeared and was dragged
into a pit of quicksand. We'd dug a
deep hole and put up a platform so
that he could be lowered into the
ground. It should really have been
done by a stuntman or one of us, but
Colin wanted to be there all the time."
That just about covers the visual
effects of The Trial Of A Time Lord,
handled by a department which since
1967 has contributed to the Doctor
Who series with constant dedication
and innovation. As for Drathro, the Ll
robot, Sil and Kiv, the Hyperion 3 and
the Time Lord space station - the
costumes and models will probably
go on display at the exhibitions, be
put into storage for a return to Doctor
Who, or even crop up in other series
in a different form.
Writer Philip Martin has
contributed both
Vengeance On Varos and
Mindwarp to Doctor Who.
Last year, Paul Cornell
talked to him about his
work and the series in
general...
Philip Martin began his career as
an actor. Attending RADA at the
beginning of the Sixties, he
appeared in many TV and stage roles,
as well as such classic films as The
Loneliness of the Long Distance
Runner.
By 1968 Martin was writing for a
variety of fringe theatre and TV
shows, including the popular Z Cars.
It was in 1974 that he made his first
notable contribution to British Television, with the classic series Gangsters.
In 1977, he won the Imperial
Tobacco prize for best original radio
play, and continued to work in TV
and radio. He had not watched
Doctor Who for some time but
became aware of the programme
again in an unusual fashion:
"My daughter, Hilary, who was
then seven, began to watch it
independently of me. One day she
said, 'Will you come and watch with
me?' so I watched a couple of weeks
of early Peter Davison episodes. I
woke up one morning with the idea
for what eventually became
Vengeance On Varos.
"I wasn't commissioned, I sent the
idea in, and they said, 'Why does
Philip Martin, who writes Play For
Today, want to write for Doctor
Who?' and I went through the whole
process, right from writing a scene
breakdown, that a novice writer
would, which gave me a very
thorough grounding in the programme.
"When I started writing for it, it was
on midweek in twenty-five-minute
segments. Then it changed to two
forty-five-minute episodes, then I was
told that Tegan and Nyssa were
leaving, then that the Doctor was
leaving.
"In fact, I remember doing one draft
when we didn't know who the new
Doctor was going to be, we didn't
know who the companions were, and
we weren't even sure of the timeslot! I
had a track record of four scripts
before Varos was ready to record - I
felt as if I'd been writing it for a long
time..."
After his previous prestigious credits,
had Philip felt that Who was perhaps
something of a comedown?
"I don't think that way, because I've
got the confidence to know that I can
continue to write for more 'prestigious' things, though to me, they're
not more prestigious; otherwise why
would good actors like Brian Blessed
do the show? I like the contact, I like
the fact that you can write across the
generations, I like the feeling that
what you're writing is going to be
seen all over the world.
"Doctor Who has a strand in my
writing talent that I can put nowhere
else, this fantastical element, where I
can invent warlords from the Tenth
Century, or characters like Sil; have a
lot of fun with them, and hope that
the audience has as well. Where else
can I do that? If I put this idea for a
fantasy to the TV drama bosses they'd
laugh me out of the room."
Moving on to Varos itself, Philip
talked about the initial inspiration
behind the story.
"The original idea was that I wondered what the entertainment business
of the future would be. Then I got
another idea, I wondered how a
prison planet would develop, and the
two ideas collided, as they often do
when you're creating things. I began
to get the idea that the original officers
of the prison planet had become the
ruling elite, and that the original
prisoners and their descendants had
become the masses who would need
to be entertained by violence.
"A lot of developments and ideas in
that script came from a very oppressive way that a lot of people would
like to return to this country, they'd
like to reintroduce hanging and other
oppressive forms of punishment. It
came out for a different timeslot. With
the change of climate in the media
itself, it's not the show that I'd write
now.
"I don't take anything back from it,
what it was trying to do in its own way
was say, 'Look, if you watch video
nasties all the time, if you pump
violence and poison into a population, this is what you'll find, this is the
society you'll get.' So it was actually a
very moral thing. I was astounded that
some people didn't see this, that they
actually thought I was peddling
violence, when in fact I was saying it
all as a warning."
The National Viewers and listeners
Association raised objections. What
did Philip think of this?
"Their conception of entertainment,
their conception of developing drama
is extremely naive, and this is the sort
of show that catches them out. What
we're actually doing, in a way, is
arguing on their side, but are they
intelligent enough to see it? They
should be, because it's there, but then
you need a sophisticated response,
and you have to have shows like this,
so people's critical faculties can spot
what is gratuitous violence and what
is there for a purpose, almost a moral
purpose."
Is Doctor Who a children's programme?
"I think it should be. This is the
difficulty of it. My thinking has moved
on since Varos, because at that time I
wasn't involved with the show, I
didn't know who the audience was.
Ideally, it should have elements in it
that appeal to children, so they can
enjoy it on one level, and if it works,
then hopefully there's humour, and a
few issues, though it shouldn't be a
political show, to entertain adults.
That's why it's such a challenging
show, to do that requires a great deal
of craftsmanship, talent and imagination."
Moving on to Philip's most famous
creation, Sil, how had he come
about?
"In three stages, really. When I was
thinking about having an alien on
Varos, I read something of Asimov's,
which said that you never seemed to
see water-based creatures. This is
partly because they don't like water in
TV studios. You drop it on the floor
and the paint, for some reason,
immediately blisters. Designers hate
it. If he's in water, he's probably an
amphibian, he's probably a mutant.
The designer came up with that.
"Then we had a real stroke of
fortune, in that we had Nabil Shaban,
who made that character his own, not
only in terms of acting, but in
intensity and motivation. He turned it
into something wonderful. It's been a
delight in the studio watching him
work and adding so much to it. He
started those little green things which
he pops into his mouth, what are now
called Marshminnows. It's a great
delicacy that he offers people, not
always to their delight, I might add,
when they taste them...
"Sil's race on Thoros Beta, The
Mentors, are all different. Some can
walk, some can stumble along, some
have to be carried like Sil. It seems
that the more their brains develop, the
more the capability to move around is
restricted. The less a Thoros Betan
can move around, the more intelligent it is.
"Sil is in a very powerful position.
He has lots of money that he can
invest in various enterprises throughout the universe. Now, you can show
that in two ways, either show
somebody absolutely mad with power, or you can show the humour of Sil
not really understanding what he's
doing in certain cases, and being so
uncertain of it. It's like Reagan falling
down the steps of an aeroplane, and
you think, 'Well, he's only a man,'
and this is only a little alien being.
"He's horrible in a way, but
children love him because he's like
them, he's full of bluster and full of
bombast, even though underneath
he's very uncertain. He's like a child
who's pretending to be an adult,
really. When I came to write Sil the
second time, I was rather apprehensive that he might be a one-story
character, but what with Nabil's
contribution when I came back from
the studio, you could hear the whole
gallery laughing along with his performance."
Did Philip think the eighteen-month
cancellation was inevitable?
"No, I don't really understand why
they picked on us. We may never
know. Of course, Who is an expensive show - it has to be, the way in
which we try to fit into six days what it
takes Spielberg six months to do. It
can be done, but you need money
and you need time.
"With worldwide sales, Who brings
back the money that is spent. To the
BBC, it's a free show, or as free as a
series can be. It was going away from
the children; Varos contributed to
that, but it could only really be what it
was. Mindwarp had a lot of humour.
Varos was so black because it had an
over-run problem. In the cutting and
editing, a lot of humour came out. I
made quite sure that Mindwarp was
lighter, more entertaining. It had quite
a lot of humour, but it also had the
excitement and invention.
"There are different types of
humour - if you call humour sending
the show up, that's wrong, that'll kill
it quicker than anything. I mean what
you call organic humour, which
comes out of the situation."
Did Philip have a recipe for survival
for Doctor Who?
"I can only speak for myself, but I
think there should be less overt
violence in it. It should be entertaining in a dramatic way, through
invention and good stories. The last
thing it needs is for people involved to
start sending it up. There was a lot of
pressure on last season. You felt its
success or failure depended on you
really, and that wasn't fair on any of
us."
What about a Doctor Who film?
"With the British film industry, you
come up with a film script and they
say, 'Well, this is great for England,
but it won't sell abroad.' With the
spread of the programme in the
States, I'd think it'd be absolutely
ideal. Not only have you got the
market over here, but you've got a
growing, eager market in the States.
An excellent idea that'd make lots of
money for somebody."
Philip confirmed that prior to the
cancellation, he had submitted the
draft of a script.
"I was asked to do a script, again with
Sil, maybe involving the Ice Warriors.
I'd written a first draft, where I had the
Ice Warriors inside a polar ice-cap,
because it was so cold. They were
burrowing workshops in the ice-cap,
which was beginning to flood this
planet, and the people couldn't
understand why. This ice environment allowed them to move freely,
because I was always worried about
how slow they were.
"I don't think old monsters should
return all the time, but occasionally it
works to reinvigorate an old monster.
It depends on individual writers, of
course. They should be done with
some new ingredient, new excitement, not just resurrecting them, have
them come on after the cobwebs have
been blown off. No, they've got to be
developed. A lot of the technology
has got much better since these
monsters first appeared, so we could
probably do them a lot better now,
and you wouldn't be conscious that
there's a great piece of cardboard
rattling across the studio."
What did Philip feel about Ron Jones'
direction?
"He looks upon it, that by the time the
script reaches him, it's up to him to
put his mark on it, to bring in all the
various elements and special effects.
By that time, I've usually moved on to
writing something else, anyway. I'm
around if he feels the need to consult.
"On Varos, we consulted quite a
bit. With Mindwarp there wasn't the
need, we were so clear we wanted
Brian Blessed to be the lead. I never
actually write for specific actors - it
holds back the imaginative aspects of
the character.
"When you realise the problems of
getting two episodes done in three
days, then you think it's amazing that
the thing gets on in any form of
competence at all, from any
director."
Finally, a few words on the fate of
Peri?
"I like her, I like writing for her. It
would satisfy me that she's still
pottering around some corner of the
universe..."
Nick Mallett has directed two Doctor Who stories The
Mysterious Planet and Paradise Towers. Richard Marson talked to him about his work.
Nick Mallett originally trained as a
dancer, though he always intended
to work in television. In order to
pursue this ambition, he joined the
BBC as a studio manager in radio
and after a time, moved into TV as
an assistant floor manager. Working up the ladder, he became
Production Manager in drama and
then moved to the Special Features
Unit.
His next move was overseas,
where he worked for the Arts
channel W.N.E.T in New York, as
well as continuing to work with the
BBC, and gaining some directorial
experience on the drama/documentary series Oppenheimer.
After taking the BBC director's
course, he was appointed second
director on a BBC drama called Late
Starter, which became his show-piece, and led to other commissions. This interview took place at
Nick's office up at the BBC, and
though disrupted by a fire practice
(during which it was possible to
spot the faces of many Doctor Who
'names', both past and present,
impatiently waiting for the all clear
in the car park!), it was obvious that
Nick had plenty to say.
Nick Mallett is a quiet man whose
age is hard to determine, and
whose manner is both self-effacing
and conciliatory. He seemed almost
nervous of saying anything too
controversial (perhaps he thought I
was from The Sun!) and he was
anxious to stress that Doctor Who
was a happy and challenging programme on which to work.
Nick started by explaining his
route to the series: "I directed some
of a series called Black Silk and did
some video training films with a
company called Video Arts. Then
John contacted me and asked me if
I'd like to do a Doctor Who. I'd not
worked on a drama with special
effects before and I think he chose
that first one for me (The Mysterious Planet) because, effects-wise,
it was quite gentle!
"I felt that it was a very good
piece of drama; showing various
shades of light and dark and I think
John thought I could give it the
sensitivity it needed. What appealed
most was establishing the life
outside the city and comparing the
lives above and below ground.
"In parts, one had to be terribly
gentle with stuff like Peri realising
that this was Earth - her home. And
when I first read the scripts I found
the characters of Glitz, Dibber and
Katryca particularly appealing. I
liked that element of a lot of comedy
but wanted to be very careful not to
overstate it. I think John felt I would
be good at the real life human
drama and containing the heights of
the comedy present."
I asked Nick about his often
starry casting: "You have to take the
company as a whole and cast for
things in terms of a visual contrast.
Obviously with Glitz and Dibber I
was looking for a double act, but I
still thought about the others. I'd
worked with both Joan Sims and
Tony Selby before on a series called
Cockles, for which I did the
choreography.
"Joan actually came to my mind
virtually right from the start, but
then I had to be very careful with
the balance of the rest of the
casting. John had mentioned Tony
from day one and as producer, he's
very good because he allows you
complete freedom and he'll discuss
things with you - he'll encourage
you to take a slight risk if you're
thinking on the same lines. That
was the same with Paradise
Towers.
"At the start Glitz needed to be
much larger, and Tony had lost
quite a lot of weight and when he
looked at the script, he was slightly
worried, because he assumed I'd be
asking him to put on about three
stone, which he didn't particularly
want to do. As it was, he wouldn't
have had the time. With Dibber it
was more a case of meeting lots and
lots of actors, having Tony in mind
and looking for that wonderful
ability to convey expression
through the eyes. It was a case of
finding someone who could give
me a paragraph in just a look and a
gesture.
"Casting is very, very enjoyable.
That's when it begins to come
together. You're thinking about the
casting, working out how sets are
going to look, and it's a bit like
making a cake. You get all the
ingredients together and then you
put them all into the bowl. With
Doctor Who, before location work
begins, you need a read-through
and a couple of days' rehearsal for
the cast to find where they're going.
"The relationship with the cast is
very important. You must allow
them the chance to play around
with the lines and that's when it's
very difficult if you don't have
enough time before you go on
location, because every minute is so
much money and you can't afford
to take twenty minutes to chat
about the motivation of the character.
"The rehearsal periods for Doctor
Who are generous. John really has
given a very realistic rehearsal
period, so that when you go into
the studio you are particularly solid
about the performances and you
can say, 'Well, this is scene seventeen from episode two,' and they're
not thrown at all.
"With less experienced actors,
when it comes to an effect, you
really must spell it out to them and
explain what's going to happen.
You'll hear the older ones saying,
'Oh no, he's off again!' but it has to
be done that way if it's to be
realistic."
Nick explained that with the
casting of Drathro, played by Roger
Brierley, it was originally intended
for Brierley to provide both the
voice and to operate the costume
too: "It was very much an acting
part - he was the villain after all.
Though it worked very, very well
with the guy from Visual Effects in
it instead of Roger, it could have
been a different story.
"The visual effects guy was
absolutely brilliant, because he
came in for just half a day's
rehearsal - the final day - and
watched Roger walk through the
part. Roger knew about the suit he
was supposed to wear from the
beginning and I think he began to
get cold feet right from the start. In
the end, you see, he simply decided
he couldn't face it but he didn't
come clean until very late in the
day.
"He told me he felt very top-heavy in the costume and he really
didn't feel safe. He would have
been so preoccupied with just
standing up upright that it would
have spoilt the acting. Mike Kelt
(Visual Effects Designer) tried every
way of adapting the costume to
make it more comfortable, but he
just didn't want to do it.
"In the end, we fitted the guy in
the suit with an earpiece so I could
give him directions like, 'This is
where you really have to go
bananas!' and Roger kept an eye on
him, so that if I was terribly
involved elsewhere, he would say,
'This is where... etc...etc.'."
The visual side of both Nick's
stories has been quite specifically
linked with the story - in The
Mysterious Planet, there was the
clearly defined difference between
the futuristic city dwellers and the
primitives above, while in Paradise
Towers, the actual setting and
jargon in the script gave little room
for design vagueness.
Nick spoke about this visual
aspect: "It's a company of people
throwing in ideas but both scripts
were quite clear in terms of what
was required. The location for the
first story was absolutely brilliant
and corresponded with exactly
what the script described. I think
BBC Scotland had actually filmed
there about a year or so before, so
it's on record and we went down
and had a look at it.
"We did a certain amount of
refurbishing and the actual temple
area - the hut - was all scheduled to
be achieved in the studio but we
decided we couldn't go there and
not make the best of that location.
So we moved a lot out of the studio
onto Outside Broadcast, because we
could never have created that
atmosphere in the studio. It meant
we were able to develop the idea of
life going on outside the city.
"It took a while for us to get the
right look for the interiors and to
decide what was going onto O.B.
and what would go into studio. You
have to weigh up your time very
carefully, because you do most O.B.
on single camera set-ups, which is
longer than studio multi-camera
recording and you simply cannot
afford to run out of time on Doctor
Who.
"With the second studio, we had
the problem of not actually having
the Trial set ready until seven in the
evening. It wasn't that it wasn't
ready in time - in fact, what had
happened was that Movement Control, who send all the sets to the
right studios, had sent half the Trial
set somewhere else. So we had half
the set up, and it seemed to take
forever to fit the rest of it in when it
finally arrived.
"We managed to get on the set for
a rehearsal at 5.30 and then we
stopped at six and went straight
into a rehearse/record situation at
7.30. We knew that we wouldn't be
able to finish on time.
"It was very hard on the actors,
because that Trial stuff was the
most heavy drama. Very, very
heavy drama. They needed time to
get through it. They'd been so solid
at rehearsal, because we'd actually
spent a lot of time on those scenes,
because we knew we would be
fairly pushed, and when you're
doing all the scenes in one block as
well, it is quite difficult for them.
It's very convenient for us in
production, But the actors are
having to contain a whole shift in
plot and emphasis between each
scene.
"At 9.10, we started to go for
scenes without blocking and Him
upstairs seemed to have been on
our side, because we had very few
problems with cameras. I ended up
changing shots literally on air and
we did it because the cast were
absolutely solid and the cameras
were, too. When you have a
problem like that, everyone pulls
together. If you wally around in the
studio wasting time; then the crews
can turn against you. The director
has to provide adrenaline.
"The worst problem was that
we'd left one of the most complicated scenes to last - the Doctor
arriving - because that had a lot of
lighting changes and camera movement. The idea was to get into the
set and play around with it, but we
ended up dashing through it!
"The cast had to be aware of what
was going on in the rest of the plot.
It always annoys me when I go to a
rehearsal and an actor has a very
thin script because they've ripped
out all the pages that don't directly
concern them. I then make them tell
me what's been going on between
their scenes. This happened when I
worked on Crossroads, which was
far worse than working on Doctor
Who, though I enjoyed it because of
the pace."
Several scenes were cut from the
first draft of Mysterious Planet,
including a lengthy TARDIS sequence. Why had these changes come
about? "We decided on the cuts at
the editorial period - we never
rehearsed them. It's been the same
with certain parts of Paradise Towers. In both cases, you speak with
your writer and then with John and
try to decide cuts where things are
beginning to sag, or it's a bit
repetitive, and you're left asking,
'Do we really need this?' You must
have an idea of the timing - there's
no point in creating a set that you're
not going to use.
"Also with Doctor Who, you
must be giving a good story - you
don't want to end up with a kind of
montage effect that leaves you
exhausted at the end of twenty-five
minutes. It's a question of keeping it really biting all the way through
and making sure that the way you
shoot it doesn't distract you into
creative shots which take you away
from the drama."
Like all directors on Doctor Who,
Nick has experienced the usual
problems of making alien machines
and monsters look as credible as
possible: "With The Mysterious
Planet, the service robot came off its
tracks. On location we had the
whole sequence of that particular
robot carrying the Doctor off and
being chased by the Tribesmen, but
the robot just couldn't go at any
speed, so right then and there I had
to devise a different way of shooting it - very quickly.
"I had wanted to do high shots,
seeing everyone following it but we
couldn't actually achieve that. In
the studio sequence that preceded
this, we realised that we would only
have one or two goes at breaking
through the wall, so I isolated two
cameras and we thus had two takes
in one, so to speak.
"Colin and Nicola were magic
from day one, and so were the cast
of this adventure. In both cases we
were really able to improvise and
get to grips with a scene, giving a
scene two or three different
approaches until we found the one
that was most comfortable. It's a
case of if they want to show
emotions, how far they go. For
instance, we discuss how far the
Doctor would show a sensitivity to
his companion. Because they've
had the opportunity of feeling their
way through it, they can always get
to that pitch later on."
Nick says that artistically, Doctor
Who has enormous appeal for
someone with a background in the
arts: "It's not just an ordinary police
drama or something. It attracts a
great deal of talent and enthusiasm
and for a long-running series, that's
remarkable. The problems come
with the practical side of shooting
it, in that the programme's science
fiction basis gives it certain special
requirements.
"In Mysterious Planet, we had to
shoot a sequence with Balazar being
covered in gunge from a chute. On
paper, that looks very straightforward and we all thought it would be
really simple. But because of the
angle of the set and because we
didn't have enough set to shoot it in
anything but fairly extreme close-
up, it was very hard for the man up
the ladder with the bucket of gunge
to aim it right and tip the right
quantity down the opening. So, a
scene we thought would be over
and done with in one take, or at the
most two, took much longer than
anticipated. On Doctor Who, you
learn not to be surprised by instances like that."
As for a future return to Doctor
Who, Nick is non-committal:
"Perhaps. You can never pre-plan
and as you know, John thinks of
certain scripts for certain directors.
Working on Doctor Who has given
me a lot of professional satisfaction
and pleasure and I think it's got a very healthy future"
Chris Clough has had an important input into
Doctor Who over the past
two years. Richard Marson reports...
During the last two years,
Chris Clough has directed
12 episodes of Doctor Who,
covering four stories. He's been in
charge of the arrival and departure
of Mel, the introduction of Ace and
the conclusion of The Trial of a Time
Lord, as well as the controversial
Delta and the Bannermen.
When we met to talk about his
work on the series, Clough was just
putting the finishing touches to
Dragon fire, and the interview took
place on the windy roof of the BBC
Club at Television Centre.
The best word to describe Chris
Clough would probably be amiable,
but his easy talk quickly reveals that
he's also incisive and a man of
career, he laughed somewhat derisively, before admitting that his
first proper job was as an accountant: "I left school with not very
good A levels and didn't really
know what to do. I'd always been in
love with the movies but couldn't
really see a way in.
"I worked on some coal ships,
bringing coal from Newcastle to
London, did some other jobs
abroad and hitch-hiked around and
came back to the usual family
pressure - 'You've got to get some
qualifications behind you.' So I was
an accountant for about eighteen
months, which I loathed, as you can
imagine.
"Then I was lucky enough to get
an interview at Leeds University.
They wanted a few more mature
students and I got in to read English
Literature. I chose Leeds because
they had a television studio there. I
spent my three years there putting
on plays and at the end I had a
showreel which got me a job at the
Beeb and at Granada."
Clough went to Granada as a
current affairs researcher, always
intending to move to drama. He
also worked at the BBC in Manchester, filming for the Go With Noakes
series, an eye-opener in the often
tough workings of television.
The drama break came with the
launch of Brookside in 1983 and the
chance to direct the first two
episodes, with more to follow: "It
was hell but very enjoyable! I was
there for about eighteen months
and at one stage I was the only
director there, because there were
so many sackings and internal
hassles going on. Very, very tense.
We had to sit down and cast the
whole thing from the first twelve
scripts, which was all we had.
Everything came on screen late, so
there was no rehearsing.
"It was frenzied. No-one had ever
tried to shoot ten minutes a day
before; in the first three months we
couldn't, so we were shooting till
four in the morning and getting up
again four hours later. I used to
sleep in the Grants' bedroom in
between shooting and editing!
Directing in those houses was a
nightmare - they're so small, your
shots are limited. Watching now,
they still use the same shots - you
can see the tripod marks on the
carpets!"
Directing the Brookside cast in a
play at the Liverpool Everyman led
to an invitation from the same
theatre, to direct a summer musical
there as part of the Liverpool
Garden Festival. A spell out of work
was followed by the call to work on
EastEnders, a show Clough had
written to in search of a job, and for
which he was recommended by
fellow director and friend Matthew
Robinson. This soap brought a
different challenge: "It was totally
different, though it was aiming for
the same thing. On Brookside it was
five ten-hour days, with work very
dependent on the weather, whereas
on EastEnders, you rehearsed three
days, had a day on the outside lot
and two long days in the studio."
Doctor Who came next, through
contact made between Clough's
agent and the producer: "Traditionally it's a show that tries new
directors. John Nathan-Turner called me in for a chat - he'd seen my
EastEnders. It's a bit like auditioning
an actor - he was no doubt trying to
work out if I had a brain and could
handle the job, and especially the
effects, which tend to make the
studio grind to a halt.
"I was delighted with the Trial
scripts, though, and with the freedom I was given. I expected there to
be, a house style and I remember
saying to John, 'What does this
spaceship look like then?' and
'Who's designing this?' and he said
'Well - you!' I thought, 'Oh, my
God!' I'd never really been a sci-fi
buff, though I'd watched the show
occasionally, so it was really nice to
come in so fresh.
"The great thing about it was that
you could bounce ideas off each
other. At the start you say, for
example, this is a spaceship and the
year is three something or other and
you are on the planet X. And you
think, Jesus! And then you start
honing it down and thinking, 'Well,
people are people and the function
of this thing - the Hyperion 3 -
would be rather like a banana boat,
in that it was mainly carrying cargo,
and that it would have about twelve
cabins.'
"That was the theory of it and
that was actually quite practical,
because one didn't have to have
loads of extras. It was like an
Agatha Christie set on a banana
boat! We wanted to give it some
style, which is why the designer
picked up on the Agatha Christie
theme, and we also wanted the
cabins to be quite small, because the
space would be reserved for the
cargo. Like the QE2, we decided on
an airy lounge and a nice open
space for the cargo hold, with small
cabins.
"The thing I always remembered
about Doctor Who was having these
vast open sets and I couldn't stand
that."
Clough says he was very conscious of wanting the two Trial
stories to stand apart as separate
from each other: "There was trouble
with the scripts on the last two
episodes - Bob Holmes died, Eric
Saward left and withdrew his
script, and we went into shooting
the last script, I think, the week
after Pip and Jane delivered it.
"So, not a lot of time. But it was
good in that I'd worked with Pip
and Jane in preparing for the
Vervoid story, so we knew each
other, and also by then we'd chosen
the location, so they wrote the last
script to kind of fit the location.
We'd found this pottery, because in
Eric's original script there was this
long discussion about going round
in circles and we'd looked at power
stations, at cooling towers and the
pottery was the most practical. In
the event, it needn't have been
there at all.
"There were other differences,
too. The original character of Mr
Popplewick was meant to be thin
and weasly, rather like Scrooge and
typically Dickensian, and we went
through zillions of characters in our
minds and everything was a bit
boring. So I thought, 'Well obviously that avenue is a dud, otherwise you'd have solved it by now, so start from the totally opposite end of the thing and go for a large fat man.'
"In the new script, in which Michael Jayston turned out to be Popplewick all along, that wasn't the first intention at all."
What were his thoughts on the criticism of Doctor Who's often over-bright studio lighting? "That's always been a problem in television. Don Babbage, who lit both stories I did, worked with me on EastEnders, so we sorted our way through that. He calls me the Prince of Darkness, because I'm always after shadows everywhere and forever shouting, 'Turn the bloody lights down!'
"You try to build up the atmosphere. For instance, the monsters were described basically as man-eating plants, so we did some research and if you look through nature books, there are some peculiar shapes to choose from. Fly-eating plants in close-up are pretty fearsome!"
What about the difficulties of playing a monster such as the Vervoids? "We did a lot of rehearsal with them in costume because it's unfair on the actors to dump them in a costume at the last minute. The worst thing for them is the discomfort, because they sweat buckets."
Wasn't the Mogarian, played by actor Tony Scoggi, Matty from Brookside, stretching credibility a little far? "Well the problem with that was that script-wise, you had to set up the guy's face, because he didn't have any dialogue. He just wandered in and you needed someone very recognisable. A few people did say, 'What's a scouser doing in space?' but again I don't see why not. He was Earthbound as such.
"People also drew attention to Yolande Palfrey - she of the wiggling bottom or the token woman. She was the maid, as it were, a la Agatha Christie, and what we were trying to do with her was to point the finger of suspicion at her by making her seem too sweet."
Did Chris ever find the artificiality of video effects a problem, in particular the opening and subsequent shots of the Hyperion III in Terror of the Vervoids? "There was a problem with this great long tracking shot at the start. The original idea was that the shot should start with a planet and then we'd go right up and there'd be ships passing and we'd finally home in on the Hyperion.
"We shot it but the trouble was because on video there's a lower contrast ratio, it won't accept so much light and shade, the models tended to look very plasticky. So we cut it down, as we were over-running anyway.
"In editing, you always have to trim the arty bits, which is very distressing. The thirty-minute episode of Trial of a Time Lord was a mistake, but it was so complicated we couldn't think of a way of cutting it down. We looked and looked and looked and we just could not think of a way of getting five minutes out of it. John had to go to Jonathan Powell, who liked the show and said, 'Okay'."
Clough was quick to deny that
morale had suffered on the show,
which has endured a cut season, a
sacked Doctor and a walk-out from
the script editor. He felt a lot of the
reported atmosphere and tension
was created by the press: "You
cannot worry about what the press
say, because it's out of your hands.
You just take the script and do it to
the best of your ability."
What was the most boring or
frustrating part of the job? "It's
frustrating in editing where you
often find yourself saying, `Why the
bloody hell didn't I shoot it from
that angle, or go for a close-up
there?'
"Doing the camera script is a very
boring job. My attitude is half and
half - you have to have done your
homework before you go into the
rehearsal stage. You've gut to know
what you think the actors should be
doing at any particular time in the
story and where they should be in
the set. Otherwise, all you can say
is, 'Let's just kick it around for a
while.'
"I start off with little designs of A
starts there and moves to this, and
the entrances are here etc., and I try
and do my camera script after I've
rehearsed everything at least once.
If you do your camera script too
early, things don't work when you
come to rehearsals and it restricts
the actors.
"I like to keep the camera moving -
there's an awful lot of boring
television around and you try TV to
avoid the 'wallpaper' effect.
"When you've shot it and go into
editing, you have to let the editor
have his input, just like you let the
actors have their input. One plays
and discusses with the editor - 'I
have shot it with this in mind,' and
he'll say, 'Well, that's a load of crap,
wouldn't it be better if.. ?' and so
on and so forth.
"Boom shadows are very embarrassing but if there was a choice
between a shot where the performance was better with the shadow
and worse without it, I'd go for the
better performance and try to edit
round the shadow.
"After the editing, there's the
sound dub and we have two days
for the location stuff and a day for
the studio stuff, which should be
fairly simple. Dick Mills adds his
splits and splats and then there's
the music. "
All the same, Broadcast magazine
recently nominated Doctor Who's
incidental music to be the worst on
television. Chris Clough snorted
with disdain when this was brought
up - he'd obviously seen the piece
too: "The trouble is that the show
suffers because all journalists look
at their clippings before they actually go and do the story; they end up
repeating the same story.
"I think some of the music is not
very good, but I've always been
pleased with mine. Nothing sounds
as awful as library tapes - that's
dreadful, instant turn-off."
As to whether he will be returning to the programme, Chris
adopted a more serious tone: "I
don't know. We'll have to wait and
see - it's very difficult to plan these
things. I think it's quite easy to get
typecast as a director. I'll try to
avoid soaps..."
Richard Marson interviews the writers who brought The Rani, the Vervoids, Mel and the Tetraps to Doctor Who, and introduced us all to the Seventh Doctor...
Over the last three years, Pip and Jane Baker have been at the forefront of many significant changes in Doctor Who. They created the Rani and introduced both Mel and the Seventh Doctor, as well as concluding the epic adventure The Trial of a Time Lord. They have both been in the business for quite a while, their credits spanning many television and film productions (except soap operas, which don't interest them). They have chaired the television side of the Writer's Guild and are fiercely proud of their professionalism.
Meeting them is quite an experience. The Bakers are extremely hospitable and seem very receptive to all that you have to say. But they have strong minds and anything they disapprove of or disagree with is ruthlessly pounced upon, critically dismembered and dismissed. For my part I didn't go along with all that they said; however, I have nothing but admiration for their unwavering adherence to their principles.
We started by talking about the script that both the Bakers felt had been their most effective contribution to the programme, episode 14 of Trial of a Time Lord. "It all began with the Vervoids," explained Pip. "We'd been to Spain and on our return we met John Nathan-Turner in a lift at the BBC and he said, 'Where on Earth have you been? We need a story.' So we wrote the Vervoid story and then we were finished as far as we were concerned. We were never part of the decision to make the Trial a format for the season - there was some discussion I believe, but we weren't there. We were told only that the Doctor was on trial in the previous two adventures, and our brief was that we had to provide the Doctor's defence in a story set all within the studio."
"We had a meeting in John's office and both Eric Saward and John wanted a who-dunnit in space," interjected Jane, before Pip continued to explain how they coped with the urgency with which the scripts were needed. "We came to an arrangement where we would write an episode a week and run it down to Television Centre on the Sunday. They would read it on the Monday and phone us back to say proceed.
"After we'd done two we then went in to spend a day with Eric going through and discussing how it fitted in with the rest of the concept. We still didn't know what the outcome of the trial would be - we were never told. The last two episodes were being kept very much a secret.
"We were being asked to put things in
for which we were given sort of half
explanations - the suggestion that the
Matrix had been tampered with for
instance. We never really understood
why. Anyway, we delivered the scripts
and there was this great silence, so we
phoned the office and the next thing we
heard was that Eric had left the BBC.
"Bob Holmes had died - we didn't
know him, but Eric was very upset and
emotional about it - Bob had written
only about twelve minutes of the last episode before his death." Jane: "Eric phoned us from home and he didn't give us all the details of why he'd left. He'd called us earlier to say that Bob Holmes was having terrible difficulties with episode 14 and that he felt he just couldn't write it."
Pip: "Then Jane had a rather strange conversation with John just after Eric had left. He said, `There's a taxi on its way to you with a script in it. Read it
tonight, and come in in the morning:' And
he wouldn't say any more. So the taxi
came and we discovered it was script
13.
"We went in the following morning and
the first ten minutes was just the usual
coffee and gossip. But there was
another person there as a witness to
ensure that John didn't tell us anything
that was in script 14 because of copyright difficulties.
"Obviously he wanted us to provide a
replacement, but he couldn't tell us how
the series was supposed to end! There were thirteen episodes leading up to a
conclusion that wasn't there. We said
we'd think about it and then John said he
wanted it within the week [laughter].
"Chris Clough was already working
on Terror of the Vervoids. We went over
to Eric's empty office and talked it
through - whether we could do it justice
-- not just because of the time period, as
we had experience of that kind of speed
on American series - but because we
were being asked to wrap up thirteen
episodes. If people have watched it that
long there's an expectation that has to
be satisfied - this has got to be it.
"We were told that we could have the trial room sets in the studio, which everyone had got bored to tears with, and shoot at locations they'd already
found. There wasn't time for us to see
them - all they could do was to bring us
some photographs and drawings and say, 'This is where it is to be shot.'
We were also worried about what we
might do to ourselves professionally!
We couldn't put up a little caption at the
end explaining we only had X days and
didn't know what was supposed to
happen. We had some ideas and John
leapt upon them and said he loved them.
We had three days in the end - two to
write and one to type up from our
longhand, which we always write in, and
collate everything. "
Jane: "It was challenging rather than
exciting. We delivered the script on a
Tuesday; John and Chris read it and then
we had a meeting in an observation
room for half an hour. I think the script
ran to about thirty-eight minutes. We
then took some out and Chris said, `Let
me go into rehearsal and see what we
can cut there.' You see they were
shooting 13 and 14 before the Vervoids.
At rehearsal it was still too long.
"After the producer's run we told
John to leave us alone to sit down and cut
it, and we knew there was going to be
heartbreak; because we had to cut four
minutes and that meant losing lovely
comedy scenes. Some of the actors
pretended not to speak to us in
rehearsal - they were genuinely a bit
hurt.
"Anthony Ainley and Tony Selby
suffered the most, because the Master
and Glitz were really a sub-plot. They
accepted the situation however, although Tony would stand beside us in
the studio and give us the line that we'd
cut to let us know the gems we'd cast
out [laughs].
"We found episode 14 one of our
favourites. For the satisfaction of your
readers, we've re-introduced all that
was cut into our novelisation and given
an explanation for the seemingly easy
access in and out of the Matrix - no
doubt some will nit pick with it, but
nobody gave us an alternative explanation.
"When we were writing the novel, I
rang Terrance Dicks - whom we don't
know - as he was writing the first book.
He said he just followed the script,
which gave us no clues! Episode 14
worked, we felt, very well. It brought
out the best in the actors, or at least the
actors gave their best to it and we
enjoyed it."
In an interview, Colin Baker is
reported to have said he found some of
the chopping and changing most confusing in earlier scripts. There
was one instant in Mindwarp when he didn't know whether the Matrix was lying or whether he was really supposed to have turned evil. Neither director nor script editor could supply an explanation, either.
The Bakers categorically refused to
comment on other writers' work, but
said, "In our story, we made clear for
Colin how we saw his motivation; and he
quickly grasped that. We don't think it
was ambiguous at all. For instance, he
was meant to destroy the communications unit and he was left in no doubt of
that in our script as that's what we were
asked to put in though we hadn't been
told why.
"In a way, that's fair enough, because obviously John doesn't want things to
get out. Like us, he can't understand
why these people want to know the plot.
If I went to the cinema or theatre to see
a who-dunnit, I'd wring the neck of
somebody who told me what was going
to happen."
Moving on to a certain success, I
asked the Bakers if they had any notion
of how popular the character of the Rani
was to become? Jane replied first. "We
hoped it would be a success because we
enjoyed writing her. Certainly from the
amount of fan correspondence we get,
she's popular. "
Pip: "I don't think you think in those
terms, though. We may like her but you
can never tell how the audience are
going to take it. "
Some critics have wondered why the
Bakers are so fond of flamboyant
dialogue. The harshest critics believe
this renders the show incomprehensible; or holds it up to ridicule in terms of
believable conversation dialogue. The
Bakers were vehement on this point.
Pip: "One of the inhibitions, mainly
about television, is it tends go tabloid -
monosyllabic - and it's become a cult,
almost an inverted snobbery.
"If anyone is polysyllabic, they're
accused of being pretentious, which is a
shame because if you go back to the end
of the last century and read Dickens,
you can't accuse him of being monosyllabic, and he was writing for a mass
audience. It's a shame that something's
happened to the working vocabulary
nowadays, so that it's gradually being
gleaned down to a much smaller range.
"We don't set out to write erudite
dialogue. What happens is that first of all
you create a character and then you
work out how they would talk. Take the
Rani - now if you're creating somebody
who's supposed to be a superior being,
somebody at the apex of all evolution,
she cannot start talking, I don't think, in
an ordinary way.
"The Valeyard was a Time Lord
villain. He had this tremendous intellectual capacity. You've got to give him
something that matches that. You're
trying to say, `This is a character
different from the rest, he can't just
mouth mundane chit chat.'
"As we understand it - Eric told us
this - the Time Lords have no magic
power, all they've got is the ability to
think more and use their minds in a way
most of us haven't yet evolved to.
You've got to demonstrate that."
Jane: "In any case we don't believe in writing down. It's an insult to the
viewer. We'd have thought that Doctor
Who followers would appreciate that."
Research is a crucial part of their
working pattern. Pip: "We quite enjoy
that actually - though any scientific data
can be faulted. We start with a science
fact. The Mark of the Rani came out of
the fact that scientists are trying to
synthesise the substance released by
the brain that causes sleep. If it works, it
will be non-addictive and will have no
side effects.
"The discovery that animal and plant
life share a hormone as a common
feature spawned the Vervoids."
Not knowing what actor was playing
the Doctor for Time and the Rani was a different matter. "We
were well into the story when we were
shown a video of Sylvester - we had to
find a way of a) regenerating the Doctor
and b) a character for him. John asked
for a pre-credit teaser. All of us felt we
couldn't go straight into the story. If we
had to regenerate in this way we needed
to start with it, then have a full stop and
then start the story. You couldn't open
with Sylvester's titles otherwise, it
would have looked silly. "
Writing Mel was another special
requirement. "We were asked to create
it for Bonnie and we tried to give her
something to do other than being just a
feed. It's very difficult to write for a
Companion. The screams weren't
necessarily in the script [laughs]!
"We don't believe that you enhance a
character by giving them nonentities
around them. If you want to establish a
principal and make him or her a principal
of substance, the Doctor has to have
someone of substance to play against.
It's a mistake if an actor wants all the
good lines - to have a victory over a
nonentity is no victory at all. "
For the future Pip and Jane are
involved in setting up a hush-hush TV
show which they hope will involve Colin
Baker, but further than that they're not
at liberty to comment. Whether you like
their work or not, at least it creates a
reaction, which is more than much of the
material to be seen on television today.
Philip Martin was born in Liverpool
in 1938. He was a professional
actor, trained at RADA, but after
several television and theatrical leading
roles became dissatisfied with his
career. After working for two years as
an engineer he took over as the
Manager of a ballroom/cinema in Preston. It was here that he saw the Steve
McQueen thriller; The Thomas Crown Affair, which stimulated him to take up
writing.
From the late 1960s he wrote for
fringe theatre, Radio 3, and television
series such as Z-Cars. He was resident
dramatist at the Liverpool Playhouse in
1975; his plays include Dead Soldiers
(about alcoholism), A Tide in the Affairs
of Women (about middle class women
involved in terrorism) and Sambo (about
racism).
He also wrote a number of science
fiction scripts for television including The
Unborn (where a safety officer in a
nuclear power plant discovers that his
soon to be born son will destroy all life
on the planet), The Remainder Man (set
the day after the nuclear holocaust) and
two episodes of the series Star Cops. He
also wrote the classic thirteen part
action-adventure series Gangsters, and
episodes of Shoestring and Tandoori
Nights. He is presently Senior Radio
Drama Producer at BBC Pebble Mill.
Philip has written three Doctor Who
stories: Vengeance on Varos, Mission to
Magnus and Mindwarp. I met up with
him at Pebble Mill to discuss his feelings
about Mindwarp, which he had recently
novelised for Target Books.
Doctor Who Magazine: How did
Mindwarp come about?
Philip: As you know the show was
taken off, and we didn't know which way
to go. We went towards comedy.
There was a script meeting with John
Nathan-Turner, Eric Saward, myself,
Robert Holmes, David Halliwell and Jack
Trevor Story. It was basically A
Christmas Carol - past, present and
future, all done in terms of a trial. Bob
Holmes' was the past, mine was the
present.
DWM: Were you pleased with the
umbrella theme of the season?
Philip: It suffered from being simultaneously commissioned. Bob Holmes
died after his second draft, and there
were problems with the final story -
there were 6 to 7 writers - and we
never knew where we were going. Then
the script-editor left and when we
reached the final episode it was all so
confusing I couldn't follow it. And I had
been there at the beginning! The final
story seemed to have little left of our
original idea.
The part of the Valeyard, as I
understood it, was in fact the manifestation of the Doctor's final persona.
Because Time Lords can only regenerate twelve or thirteen times and the
Valeyard was the twelfth manifestation,
he couldn't regenerate anymore. He
planned to go back and manipulate time
and the matrix so he could take the
Doctors' lives. I thought this was very
interesting and a strong motivation for it
all. But then it hit problems with the final
story.
DWM: What was your original idea
for the story?
Philip: There was someone playing
around on a planet, actually using
another race to do all their slave labour
for them. There was the elite, which
was the Mentors, Sil's race. Although
the planet did not have a lot of resources
they could manipulate the universal
stock market to profit and that's how
they lived, by investing.
But they were also meddling, and
selling arms to anybody. They'd invest
in various underdeveloped countries,
and underdeveloped worlds - sell to
both sides, see who was going to win
and make a contract with the winners. It
was a form of colonisation. They were
also manipulating their biology to provide a means of extending life. Crozier
was a genetic genius.
It was really my personal concern
about research on genetic engineering
which bothered me; we could create any
particular form of life we wanted. A
soldier class, an intellectual class;
change the livestock. There were a lot
of serious things in Mindwarp which
tended to get lost.
DWM: What were your feelings
about the production?
Philip: After the hoo-ha over Vengeance
on Varos, perhaps after all the comedy
bits were cut out, I think I compensated
by saying to myself that I'd put in plenty
of comedy. I thought, even if they cut it
there'll be some left. In fact Eric Saward
edited it more heavily than I ever
imagined, diluting my whole conception.
New characters appeared which weren't
mine.
There were moments which I found -
and still find - particularly chilling. For
example, when Kiv is put in the body of
Peri, and she sits up, with hate, and that
deep voice - I think the series should do
more of this.
Patrick Ryecart and Brian Blessed
were good - but it suffered from
problems in rehearsal. Because there
was a certain high level of comedy it was
almost stylised, which you could see in
the way Crozier, Yrcanos and Sil
operated. Central to all this should have
been a cohesive force which was the
Doctor, but in rehearsal, Colin Baker
saw how the other actors were playing
it, and he started to do it as well. This
affected the whole story, the whole
balance was wrong, and it just appeared
to be a bit of a send-up.
DWM: The Doctor presents as a
villain. Was that your intention?
Philip: The Doctor can't really remember what happened because of the way
the Time Lords took him out of time,
and also because they tried to interrogate him with the brain scan. You don't
know why the Doctor is suddenly the
villain. The television audience shouldn't
know. Does he know what he is doing,
or is it a ploy to enable him to gain an
advantage?
At certain times the characters think
they know what he is doing, but then he
isn't. It's a series of dramatic devices but
it gives the Doctor and actor interesting
things to play. I wish it had come over in
a stronger, clearer way.
DWM: Are you currently working
on the novelisation of Mission To
Magnus?
Philip: I don't really remember the
story. I'll have to dig out the script. But
it's set in a world run by women, where
men are kept undergound. It's also got
Sil, the Ice Warriors and someone from
the Doctor's childhood, who used to
bully him at school.
Last month Off The Shelf took a rather overdue look at The Nightmare
Fair, the first of Target's 'Missing Episodes' series of novels based on
untelevised scripts from the original Season 23. This first one was
penned by ex-Doctor Who producer Graham Williams, who worked on the
latter end of the Tom Baker era.
Graham has now left the world of
television and runs his own hotel with his
family in the depths of Devon. He still
retains links with the series, most
obviously by his writing of the script of
The Nightmare Fair, originally destined
to open Season 23, but dropped when
Michael Grade, then Controller, BBC1,
decided to "rest" the programme.
My first question to Graham was how
did he find himself writing for the
programme some six years after
finishing his stint as producer?
"It was a phone call out of the blue
from John Nathan-Turner, or more
accurately his script editor, Eric
Saward. They asked if I fancied writing
a story and whilst I was thinking up
storylines, would I please think along the
lines that Douglas Adams and I had
thought along when we wrote City of
Death, ie tying it into a particular
location. In that case it was Paris, here
Blackpool. John had a contact at the
Blackpool Pleasure Beach and they had
offered virtually unlimited help and
resources.
"It also tied in with the fact that in
these days there was an exhibition of
Doctor Who up there - it was all
distinctly commercial - absolutely no
altruism at all! I was told that if I didn't
find all that too inhibiting, could I go to
Blackpool with Eric and look around.
"They then, rather nervously, added
a further restriction - would it be
impossible to work into the script The
Celestial Toymaker? Fans were keen for
a rematch and the BBC had negotiated
the rights to the character. My response
to that was 'Yes'. I remember seeing the
original transmission back in 1966 but
never since, so I hadn't the faintest idea
what was what.
"They got the scripts out of the BBC
Library for me and I recall there was one
episode still on tape and I watched with
absolute amazement. It seemed that
almost the entire half-hour episode was
taken up by a game of hopscotch and I
kept thinking that if we devoted as much
time to one small section of story,
viewers would be rampaging up to
Shepherds Bush!
"It's extraordinary watching the different pace of the programme 20 years
ago. When I was producing it, I tried to
keep well away from the wham-bam Star
Wars splatter. I tried to concentrate on
character and quirkiness, which the fans
hated me for! And here I was now
accusing someone else of doing the
same. I suppose it's all just fashions in,
television.
"I hadn't seen much Colin Baker when
I started on the scripts, I suppose four
- no, make that five minutes! I've known
Colin, though, from previous work he'd
done and think he's a damned good
actor. He had a commitment to Doctor
Who that was absolute. I did like what
he was doing. It's quite an acid test
recasting a Doctor - I recast Tom Baker
every fifteen minutes! It was a love/hate
relationship par excellence - I have
enormous respect for the man, but he
could be just a little bit irritating! But so
could I, I'm sure.
"The thing you must think about when
recasting the Doctor is firstly, does the
actor have the stamina for the part
because the schedule is so punishing,
and secondly you look at him and think
of all the things in a Doctor Who story
and then the bottom line must be, `Do
you believe this guy could save the
Universe?' Colin, I believe, could.
"At some point I remember John
Nathan-Turner wanted the script as two
fifty-minute episodes but I know I
structured the story in my head as a four
parter which was what I was used to.
Anyway, it certainly ended up as a four
parter again, which I prefer. Mind you,
it had to be said that 'four armed' is not
always forewarned! Each story has what
Bob Holmes used to describe as dog
legs - episode three is always a bitch.
You've got to have everything set up and
the interest going during episodes one
and two but you cannot blow the gaff
until the last episode so part three is
often a thinly disguised holding section,
with lots of running around.
"It was a few months after I'd finished
the work that I learnt that it wouldn't be
made after all, but as I was onto other
things by then, it didn't seem too bad,
just disappointing. The chance to write
the novel again just came out of the blue.
I'd been asked by W H Allen, when I was
producer, to adapt other people's scripts
into novels but I'd refused, partly
because I'm not a prose writer, either
by training or talent, and partly because
the money was appalling. No; mostly
because the money was appalling!!
"Then they asked me if I'd like to turn
The Nightmare Fair into a book. It was
an intriguing and challenging idea, and I
said yes. It was also the only way these
poor old scripts would ever see the light
of day! I made no changes from the
script though, it's all as I wrote it. The
only real difficulty I had was that when
we had scripts when I was producing the
show, you passed them on to directors,
designers and everyone else and their
input helped shape your vision into a
programme.
"As it had not appeared on television,
none of that visual material was provided
and I found myself putting in all the stage
directions and descriptions. This meant
that my first draft was half as long again
as the final version so it had to be slightly
trimmed. In other words, I elbowed
ninety-eight percent of that descriptive,
flowery, undying, deathly prose to
immense advantage!
"Yes, I enjoyed writing the novel, far
more than I thought I would, but
whether I'd do any more, we-e-ll. . ."
