Doctor Who - Documentary s06e06 Episode Script

This is the recorder that I used to record every week the Doctor Who episodes from Marco Polo right through to The Three Doctors.
I was 11 when I started with the compilation of The Sea Devils at Christmas.
The first Doctor Who I ever recorded myself was The Horns of Nimon, which, just, you know, as the quality went down, I started recording.
Yeah, I did record Doctor Who off air when I was a teenager.
I built a little box to take the direct output from the back of the speaker coils The volume control.
I started recording Doctor Who on cassette in 1978.
Part one of The Armageddon Factor.
What I used to do is play that week's episode back on my portable recorder, and I would get out my Denys Fisher action figures and have them re-enact the action of the audio.
I didn't have a Mary Tamm figure, so Scotty from Star Trek filled in for her.
I was amenable to inviting school friends to come and listen to them with me.
It didn't have to be a darkened room.
At, sort of, 1:00 in the morning, hoping that everyone thinks I've gone to sleep, and I'm sitting there with this tiny little tape recorder next to my bed.
(EXCLAIMS) ''Listen to Doctor Who! Listen to Doctor Who!'' I was 17.
Oh, my God, I should have been doing this when I was 10.
But I was doing it when I was 17.
The technology in those days was as basic as you could get.
It was a little cassette recorder.
I had a little Philips recorder.
Didn't have a mains supply, had to run it on batteries.
The tape recording was done upstairs.
I had a little black-and-white portable.
So I'd run upstairs, play and record on this square box with a big red button on the front.
Play and record on that, then run downstairs and watch it on colour TV with my mum.
You basically stuck a microphone up in front of the television and you told your family to shut up.
HOLMAN: It would be just a Saturday evening, just before we had dinner.
Grandstand would have finished, and I would have sat down and set the recorder to record it.
There's a few recordings I've got where I can hear my dad in the background saying something like, ''Right, everybody, settle down.
'' 'Cause he was quite sympathetic to the cause, if you like.
Everybody had to keep quiet.
Throughout the tape you hardly hear any noise, so it must have worked.
The mantelpiece clock wasn't very cooperative.
So very often you'll hear it striking, you know, 6:30.
Why do people ring the telephone when you're watching Doctor Who? -And the door would open.
''Tea's ready!'' -People coughing.
-My father coughing.
-But that was a risk we had to take.
You know, Graham Crowden going, ''Lord Nimon!'' And there's this little Trimphone, '70s Trimphone, going off.
The family was very cooperative, except for my brother, who used to wind me up rotten, right as the end credits are rolling, he'd go (HUMMING) And then he'll sneeze right at the end and, of course, you hear me going, ''Dave!'' I did once have a terrible experience where I had to record Doctor Who at school.
I'd got a briefcase and I put the recorder in there and set it running, and put the microphone, sort of, with the lead coming out of the briefcase, and left it near the telly in the hope that no one would see it or ask what it was.
Just because I didn't want to get into technical explanations at that point, you understand.
You can just about hear what's going on.
Listening to it now, it's more instructive as a social document, I think, because it gives you first-hand experience of how a group of fifty 13 to 18-year old boys reacted to Episode 4 of The Brain of Morbius.
STEVENS: It wasn't without its difficulties.
You would very often end up with Destiny of the Daleks Part One wrapped around a pencil, because it had snapped.
If the batteries were low, it would record slower.
Which meant, when you played it back, it actually all sounded very fast, because it was playing back at a high speed.
So, suddenly the Doctor was played not by Jon Pertwee, but by Mickey Mouse.
STEVENS: C90 was the cassette of choice.
The ideal was to get one episode on a C60.
The thing about C90 recording is that if you had two episodes of Doctor Who at 25 minutes, you could just about squeeze them onto one side of a C90.
I didn't subscribe to that myself.
I reckoned that you were pushing it.
And anyway, of course, you wanted the theme music, as a completist would.
The problem you have there is you're wasting money if you just put one episode each side.
So the secret was to find a point where there was just some boring music going on and you weren't missing anything, whip the tape out, turn it over, put it back in.
The sound archiving of Doctor Who was a very serious business.
I had Dymo tape labels.
I'd type up little insert sleeves, if you like, for the cassettes.
Justin used Dymo labels, you know? That's tragic.
I used Letraset, he used Dymo.
I had a great big Imperial typewriter.
So onto those I would clunk out the episode title, and then I would stick that onto the box.
I was not very good at labelling cassettes.
I was a bit rubbish there.
And consequently, a lot of them got lost or taped over.
Photocopying in those days wasn't really an option.
Photocopies were more like coffee grinders in those days, and the images they gave, it was sort of thermal toilet paper.
So they weren't terribly good.
But if you had a spare Weetabix figure from one of the sets, you could use that.
Stick it on the front with Sellotape, which we now know, sadly, does go yellow and drop off and discolour.
We used to get these little Doctor Who cardboard covers.
And I could throw away all my old, sort of, photocopied bits of Nimons.
And I had red for William Hartnell stories, and green for Pat Troughton, and blue for Jon Pertwee, because it was colour-coordinated with the Radio Times special.
And, God, that's the worst thing.
Right.
In those days I had a little portable typewriter, which I used to do my fanzines on.
And I used to have You used to be able to get coloured ribbons.
And so my Hartnells were typed in red, and my Troughtons were typed in sort of turquoisey-green, and the Pertwees were typed in this kind of electric blue.
So everything was colour-coordinated.
I am such a Virgo.
Listening to off-air audios in the '80s was a little bit like having a conversation with somebody on the other side of the world, down a telephone just made up of two tin cans and a string.
They were completely unlistenable.
And the absolute nadir of it was definitely Marco Polo and Reign of Terror, which nobody could understand.
I mean, they really (MUFFLED SOUND) was all you got.
And you thought, ''I'm listening to Marco Polo! ''I can't understand a word of it, but I'm listening to it! How fantastic is this!'' (MUFFLED DIALOGUE) I think with audio, stories take on a life of their own, and they build pictures in your head that are either completely ruined or made better once you've seen the visual.
RUSSELL: I think everyone was disappointed when Tomb of the Cybermen turned up, really.
And yes, it is very, very good on audio.
It's very moody and everything, and it is utterly let down by the visuals.
Other people's recordings, particularly of things I haven't seen, it was sometimes difficult to know what was part of the programme and what wasn't.
I remember I got a copy of the first Daleks story.
In the first episode, I was convinced there was a kid on a bike outside, honking his horn and beeping his beeper and whatever you do on bikes.
(BEEPING) And now I know it's the food machine in the Tardis.
HOLMAN: I stopped atThe Three Doctors.
I found it a bit tedious.
I grew out of Doctor Who.
I kept recordings in storage until about 15 years ago, then I gave them to the BBC.
STEVENS: Mark Ayres works wonders with the audio.
Very often he'll use three or four sources in order to get the best finished episode.
You have to remember that these recordings were made in different ways.
Some are microphone recordings, say a microphone stuck to the television speaker.
Others are line recordings.
They all have different problems, hums and whines and hisses and pops and crackles and family members talking and coming into rooms and going out of rooms.
If it's a direct connection to the television, it will be a nice, clean recording, generally, without all the extraneous noise, but it might still have hum and other stuff on it.
It still won't synchronise with the pictures, because no domestic tape recorder ever ran at the same speed.
The remastering of the soundtracks for the animated episodes of The Invasion has taken a number of different stages.
I initially remastered these episodes for the audio book a couple of years ago, and I had a number of different off-air soundtracks to choose from.
Jamie! AYRES: This recording was made by a gentleman called Richard Landon.
We'd better just check it though.
Are we actually on our way, Doctor, or are we stuck somewhere? And it's a microphone recording, so you can hear that it's quite open, quite roomy.
Here's a recording made by David Butler.
Doctor! It's all right, it worked! Jamie! You're right! We'd better just check it though.
I can hear some movement in the room there.
We'd better just check it though.
Here's a third recording.
Are we actually on our way, Doctor, or are we stuck somewhere? Well, let's see, shall we? AYRES: That is from a chap called David Holman.
It's a lot cleaner, there's not so much hiss, not so much room noise.
It's a lot closer, but there's not a lot of high frequencies on it.
Here's a recording which came from Australia.
on our way, Doctor, or are we stuck somewhere? Well, let's see, shall we? This is not the original recording.
It's actually a copy.
It's a cassette copy of a cassette of the original reel-to-reel, but, basically, I felt it was the best recording so Well, haven't you got any spares? No.
We shall have to see using that as a basis and adding a lot of filters and doing a lot of manual cleanup, we end up with this.
Let's have a further look, shall we? That's the original.
(TAPE HUMMING) There's the remastered version.
Oh, yes, it could be 20th century.
And that's the master which was used initially to do the animation, but I've since revisited it.
AYRES: So this is the final master that's being used as a basis for what you will hear on the DVD.
The Australian recording for this whole sequence where the Doctor and his friends escape, on the Australian recording, is afflicted by very deep wow and flutter, so I've had to resort to using the David Holman recording here.
But the way I've done it is to very carefully cross-fade between the two, to try and keep some of the brightness of the Australian recording with the sort of firm underpinning of the UK recording.
And to help that, down here, this is the original music cue.
Hey, you! I want to see your pass! As recorded by Don Harper, which you can hear at low level on its own there.
But I've just added that in again underneath, just to help to try and pull the whole thing together.
The other thing here is that the animator has added a spaceship.
(SPACESHIP ENGINES ROARING) The spaceship that fired on the Tardis wasn't seen in the original.
But it is now.
And the animator, when he did it, added in that rather Sputnik-y sound.
So for the final DVD, I've gone back to the original sound effects and replaced that with the original sound effect from the Radiophonic Workshop (SPACESHIP ENGINES ROARING) of the Cyber-spaceships.
This is an episode of The Abominable Snowmen, Episode 2, and just here there's a big hole in the soundtrack.
This is what survives.
(CHANTING ON TAPE) (AUDIO STOPS) AYRES: There's a pop, and absolutely nothing for a few seconds.
And here's the Doctor looking at the Yeti.
Victoria.
And then suddenly it comes back in.
I've checked the off-air recording, and this hole is in the off-air recording as well.
So it is obviously a fault in the original videotape, before even the film recording was made.
I searched a number of Doctor Who episodes, and eventually came up with all the different syllables, which I could use to reconstruct it.
And here they are.
(CHANTING) (CHOPPY AUDIO) You're right about one thing, Victoria.
So that's all the individual syllables.
And then it was a question of cutting it all together, with a bit of a chant to finish the previous scene.
(CHANTING) You're right about one thing, Victoria.
This creature Now, I'm not pretending it's perfect.
There was a lot of filtering, a lot of editing, some pitch changing at various speeds to try and put it all together, but it was either do that or cut the scene.
It's like you've come full circle.
That hobby that I used to have, when I was eight or nine years old, of recording Doctor Who off the telly, we now use people's similar recordings and polish them up and put them onto CDs.
It feels really great to know that, you know, that it wasn't a complete waste of time, recording them week after week.
And they have gone to use and people have been able to listen to them again.
Because if people like myself hadn't, then there'd be nothing.
There'd be no record at all.
Inside we still have the original Boots sleeve, as it would have come.
Look, look, with these two people, with their very own Doctor Who collection.
I'm sure that's what they'd be recording, extended dynamic range.
I don't think that's talking about them particularly.