Doctor Who - Documentary s02e01 Episode Script

INTERVIEWER: Tell me how you went about thinking about casting the Doctor and what you were sort of looking for, what you wanted them to be able to take on with the Doctor.
Well, I wanted the Doctor to have two sides to his personality, or more if possible, but mainly to to be able to be authoritative, but at the same time kindly, also unpredictable and perhaps uncontrolled in certain ways.
I suppose, in a way, the Doctor was almost a grown-up child, I mean, he had those kind of qualities.
And certainly not, under any circumstances, part of the establishment.
Very much his own person.
And, um, I thought of quite a few actors.
An actor called Alan Webb, who died, and Cyril Cusack and people like that.
And I had seen William Hartnell in two crucial things.
He'd been in a long-running series called The Army Game, where he played a rather He played a sergeant major, a very, very aggressive, hectoring sergeant major.
And I saw him in a film called This Sporting Life, where he played a down-and-out talent scout and he was quite pathetic and sad.
I got on very well with Bill.
He was He was a very kind man who could be quite irascible and he really embraced the character.
I mean, that was his very, very strong suit, is he believed in the character.
And he protected the character.
What actor doesn't enjoy being recognised and loved and sought after? He just felt very good about it.
He was thrilled.
Well, Susan was written as a granddaughter.
I didn't have as strong feelings about Susan being the granddaughter as Sydney.
Sydney was very, very upset about her being the granddaughter and I can understand why, because inevitably, he saw this as going on for a long time.
Although I don't think any of us thought it was going to go on as long as it did.
And of course, it's very hard.
It was very hard to replace Susan when she left because you could never replace her, somebody who had that special relationship.
And I also think that he wanted kids to relate to Susan as their peer.
And of course, because she was his granddaughter, they couldn't quite.
But in the end, I don't think it mattered.
But those were definitely his concerns.
The relationship of the children who would be watching it with her.
With Susan, I mean, this was one of Sydney's demands, but again for a very valid reason, she had to be able to scream.
So our auditions were quite bizarre in that respect, because we did have to find out if people could do it, and Carole Ann Ford could scream very, very well, as well as acting very well.
But she did scream well.
And I know that sounds a bit non-PC, which of course it is, but she wasn't Susan wasn't stupid by any means, so I think the fact that she screamed when she saw, um, things she didn't like was perfectly admissible.
I mean, I don't like spiders and if one landed on me, I would scream.
So I think it was just a natural thing.
The budget was hardly allowed the sky to be the limit.
I mean, we had a budget of £2,000 a half hour.
And with that we had to pay the actors, we had to do all the special effects, which I know people sort of laugh about.
But the people who made those had to be so imaginative because they had to make them with very little money.
And if you think about the way the Daleks look, that whole strange sort of Russian ballet look about them, I mean the designer, Raymond Cusick, did the most fantastic job.
And the people who built them did a fantastic job 'cause they had no money whatsoever.
I think small budgets, although they are incredibly difficult to work with, do make people use their imagination and their ingenuity.
And then we had to certainly do a lot of that on Doctor Who.
But I think that the art department were very ingenious in what they did, and the special effects people were and the costume people.
Everybody had to do things for a very, very limited budget and they used to beg, borrow, steal and use things in a way that perhaps were just not the way they normally were used.
Like the sink plungers, for example.
Because it was In those days, it was a children's programme.
You know, you didn't spend that much money on children's programmes.
Nobody had attempted to do anything this ambitious.
And certainly, when I arrived, Sydney Newman said to me, "What I want you to do, Verity, is stretch the facilities to the limit.
" And our first studio was in a place called Lime Grove, which doesn't exist any more.
And it literally, it was so old-fashioned.
It didn't even have a lighting console.
It had lighting dimmers around the wall.
So I was hard-pressed to see how I was going to be able to stretch the facilities to the limit when we had cameras that would heat up.
Our studio heated up so much that the water sprinklers would come on.
(THUNDER RUMBLING) So we were in a very old-fashioned studio trying to do a very forward-looking programme.
And we did sort of stretch the elastic, because in those days, I think we were allowed to cut the tape four times in half an hour.
And we just never We simply couldn't do that, we had to cut it more and I was continually in trouble.
We had a few breaks, just so that we could get cameras in position and people could change, because it was just too impossible to do it absolutely live.
Sydney was a huge supporter, and it was his to a certain extent, it was his baby.
I did complain to him about the studio.
It was kind of laughable, really, because it was so ridiculously old-fashioned.
There were quite a few critics saying the programme was too scary.
I'm afraid I just didn't agree with them.
I mean, I think children like to be scared.
I think it's the parents' responsibility not to let their children watch television on their own and to be with them.
But goodness me! I mean children's literature is pretty scary.
And I don't think we ever did anything nasty.
I mean, there wasn't any blood or anything in Doctor Who.
It was always just sort of hands out from underneath canopies and things like that.
And that's sort of straightforward stuff, isn't it? It's like pantomime, where, you know It has a tradition.
You had to take it seriously in the sense that, you know, if somebody writes in and complains.
But I felt that people were rather overprotective.
When I was thinking about the titles and the music, I wanted something that looked different and sounded different.
And initially, I There was a group that I'd seen actually on Monitor who played music on glass tubes.
It was very kind of ethereal and strange.
And I approached those people, but in the end they couldn't do it, so I thought, "Well, what I want "is a theme, a melody, "a melodic theme, but not played on conventional musical instruments.
" And so I went to a composer called Ron Grainer, who was very, very successful at the time.
He had done the signature tune for Steptoe and was very good at catchy tunes.
And I asked him if he would be interested in writing a melodic theme and using electronic music, and he thought that was a fantastic challenge.
The BBC had this department called the Radiophonic Workshop.
Ron and I went to them and put this possibility to them.
And they were absolutely thrilled by it.
There was a wonderful woman there called Delia Derbyshire who did most of the music.
And a guy there called Brian Hodgson who did a lot of the effects.
And they just jumped at it because, of course, I'm sure they had been doing interesting stuff but they had never been let loose on anything where they could have so much input.
The visuals, I had an associate producer called Mervyn Pinfield and he had worked with an area of the BBC where they had been trying, experimenting with different ways of looking at things, and during one of these experiments, they had had a camera shooting down its own monitor.
And it had made these extraordinary shapes.
And I said, "Oh, this looks wonderful.
" So we spent actually a couple of days in a television studio just shooting.
We had a camera shooting down its own monitor, until eventually, we got that "Doctor Who" coming out, and the way it all kind of split up and made itself.
And then I think we had to use some of the original stuff, which was the stuff coming towards you.
Because we could never We could never replicate that particular situation, and that's what I wanted.
I wanted those things coming So that's how it all came about, really.
Sydney was a huge supporter.
Well, it was quite interesting in that when I showed him the opening titles and the music, he absolutely hated He hated the titles.
And wasn't really very keen on either of them, really.
And eventually But he then said to me afterwards, of course, that he felt that he had been wrong.
I mean, I was so I was terribly pleased with the titles and the music.
I thought they were very much something different and of their time.
No, I don't think I ever thought it would become a TV legend.
I mean, you just don't.
It was my first job as a producer.
All I was grateful for was that I could actually get it on and that people wanted to watch it.
I mean, that was my aim, really.
And that people wouldn't say, "God, this is a terrible piece of rubbish "and I hate it.
" It is very hard to say why it's so successful but it is, isn't it? I mean, Doctor Who is a phenomenon in that I couldn't possibly have told you all those years ago that it was going to run for the length of the time that it did.
And that people would still be talking about it 40 years later and the BBC would be considering bringing it back.
Although I would say that one of the reasons that it was so successful is it was there every week and people knew where to find it.
And once people had started, once the BBC started cutting back and moving it, it became much more vulnerable.
When I left the series, I wasn't a regular viewer, but I used to dip in from time to time.
And of course, you have a very proprietal view of the person you cast, which was William Hartnell for me.
So everything is sort of is taken in relationship to that.
But I thought there were some very good Doctors.
Patrick Troughton had all the kind of eccentricity, but didn't, in my opinion, he wasn't as dangerous.
He was much more gentle.
Jon Pertwee was definitely a much more establishment figure, and for me just didn't have the sort of quirkiness.
I think the nearest for me was Tom Baker, who was very, very eccentric.
And initially I thought perhaps he was a bit young but he sort of overcame that.
And then I think there was Peter Davison, who was very urbane.
And Colin Baker.
I began to think that perhaps they were a bit young, although I think they are both wonderful actors.
And then the last one I think was Sylvester McCoy.
Well, I have a sort of view about the way Doctor Who went, which is that I thought that one of the reasons why it sort of began to lose its popularity is it became It became very camp.
I would watch it and think nobody is really believing what they're doing here, they just think it's all rather funny and they're rather smart and clever and I just didn't It didn't work for me, I'm afraid.
Well, I'm thrilled that the series is coming back, and I'm absolutely delighted that Russell T Davies is going to write it, because I think he's a wonderful writer.
And I saw him on a programme and I know he absolutely loves Doctor Who.
And he really liked Tom Baker, which makes me feel quite happy.
I think the whole beauty of it is that people believe in it and play it for real.
And I do, do hope that they keep the signature tune and some form of the titles because it's particularly the signature tune I think that says everything about Doctor Who.
INTERVIEWER: That's a lovely note to finish on.
Okay.
-I think we're there! That's brilliant.
-Okay.