Doctor Who - Documentary s09e09 Episode Script

DONALD GEE: Mars, the bringer of war.
The fourth planet from the star Sol, many hundreds of years ago, the home to a race known as the Ice Warriors, a war-like reptilian people, whom evolution had well accustomed to existing on such a cold and inhospitable body.
Their technology eventually grew to the point, where the creatures were able to venture out into the stars, to Mars' nearest neighbour, Earth.
Viewers first encountered the Martians in the Ice Warriors, a 1967 serial starring Patrick Troughton.
In the distant future, as glaciers advanced over Britain in a third Ice Age, scientists discovered the warrior leader, Varga, buried for thousands of years in the ice.
Varga revives, determined to free his entombed ship and crew.
As the glacier draws ever nearer, threatening to consume all of Europe, the Doctor is faced with a desperate situation.
(SCREAMING) The creatures themselves were the brain child of Brian Hayles.
Inspired by the discovery in Siberia, of an animal perfectly preserved in a block of ice, the monsters were described as cyborgs in Hayles' script.
However, the designer of the serial, Martin Baugh, took a different approach, worked with make-up designer Sylvia James to realise the towering Martians.
BERNARD BRESSLAW: I remember first being asked to go for my costume fitting by the BBC and expecting to be told to go either to Nathan's or to Berman's, the usual costumiers.
When I went for the measurement for the Ice Warrior costume, they measured me up and all that sort of thing.
But I never knew what it entailed, until the day I went to try it on.
BRESSLAW: To my surprise, I was directed to go to a company that moulded the hulls for yachts, in order to create the incredible, fantastic costume, of fibreglass, foam rubber, clear plastic.
The stomach and the chest was all the way out here and you're all the way in the back here.
It was bolted between your legs and bolted at the top.
So once you were in there, you're not coming out of there, unless somebody take you out.
Just really feel sorry for them every time we had to really put these masks back on, you know.
And you had these rubber legs you put on.
Within three or four hours, up to your ankles filled up with water, because that's your sweat.
There were times when they just came in to the make-up room pleading with us to be able to take it off, just for a short period of time.
There was no air getting into the head piece.
'Cause you were all fitted with this mask and all is enclosed.
So, the eye pieces, it was misting up.
You couldn't actually see.
She has betrayed us.
She must be destroyed.
CALDINEZ: The director, Derek Martinus, was very good in what he did.
We never walked very far because the set wasn't all that big.
The actual masks themselves were quite thick.
But we had to make sure that we could attach them in such a way, so that they looked and moved with the face.
CALDINEZ: So what we did was we mumbled, we formed the words, that have already been pre-recorded.
And did they have them? We shall take them.
We used to hiss.
(HISSING) 'Cause we're supposed to represent a form of lizard people from outer space.
(RUMBLING) (ALL HISSING) BRESSLAW: Being asked to create an alien creature is a great challenge to any actor.
It draws upon your resources in a very taxing way.
You couldn't do the part as a human being.
You have to play the part of what you were, of a Martian, the way you think you should play it.
BRESSLAW: You have to give thought to how to match the appearance that the designer has drawn of the creatures, how to give that some kind of personality and some kind of impact.
And we had a way where we used to pull your head down like this.
No hope for our engines then.
Or for us.
CALDINEZ: Bernie is the only man I know that make me feel like a midget.
He towered over everyone.
He was massive.
He was a sort of gentle giant, I think, as a personality.
CALDINEZ: Patrick Troughton, he was about 5'8".
Frazer Hines, he was 5 foot something.
Deborah Watling, she was about what, 4'11".
So in other words, we were like giants among midgets.
And when I saw the final thing, I thought, "This is extraordinary.
"This is a big lizard that really is very frightening," 'cause they were very, very tall.
CALDINEZ: There were other monsters in the Doctor Who series, but none of them were frightening as the Ice Warriors.
You looked at them and you told to yourself, "Jesus, they are grotesque.
" They were one of the most impressive actually and, in many ways, one of the most actually frightening.
BRESSLAW: The Ice Warriors subsequently became one of the most successful of all the opponents of Doctor Who.
GEE: Less than two years later, the Ice Warriors returned to BBC screens in The Seeds of Death.
In the later stages of the 21st century, the Ice Warriors have hatched a cunning plan.
Using deadly pods which emit a toxic vapour, the creatures intend to destroy all life on Earth and take the planet for themselves.
The Seeds of Death was directed by Michael Ferguson, who used some well-tried and tested formulae to get the most out of the Ice Warriors.
FERGUSON: Keep them hidden as long as possible, in a way.
You need to imply them for as long as possible.
And the script either does or doesn't do that for you and this one did.
You only show a little bit at a time.
You suggest it, then you see a little bit more.
And then finally, and very often on the cliff-hanger, you show the whole thing, smack on, face to face.
There is the monster.
One of the important things to need always to do with monsters is to shoot them from low down so that they overwhelm the camera.
As a director, you very quickly learn.
Yes, you can draw pictures and do storyboards and do all that sort of thing.
You get out on location, and very often, things that never occurred to you, which are there, saying, "Use me, use me.
" There was a kind of hill there, and so I thought, "Well, yes, let's get one of the guys up there.
"And on cue, get him to come marching down towards the camera.
" We were filming on Hampstead Heath.
And during a break, one of the actors, I think his name is Steve Peters, very, very tall, handsome, elegant, young man, went off and lent against a tree by the side of which there was a road.
He took his helmet off and got out his cigarettes and had a cigarette holder.
And he was leaning against the tree, in full Ice Warrior kit, except from his beautiful Scandinavian head above.
And some lady driver was coming along on the road and was so fascinated and astonished by what was going on, she drove straight into the back of a car in front.
GEE: In this serial, we also meet a new Ice Warrior class, sleeker and smaller than his minions, the sadistic Slaar.
We, I think, could come up with this rather good thing of having two kinds of Ice Warrior.
So you could actually get more character into your senior Ice Warrior, as it were.
The message I got was, "It's going to be rather painful.
" (LAUGHING) "But if Alan was prepared to take that risk" Alan Bennion and I have worked together in children's theatre, some, probably some 10 years before that.
He's actually a rather suave George Sanders type villain, you know, and some of those kind of lines.
You will adjust the T-Mat controls and suspend him in space, between the Moon and Earth.
LETTS: Alan Bennion once said to me, "The trouble with my playing in Doctor Who, "is that nobody ever sees my face.
" So he said, "I don't get any other parts from it.
" BENNION: This place where the costume was being made, they put me into a leotard and tights.
And then this had to be covered with all this kind of solid latex.
It wasn't very pliable actually.
There are patterns all over the stuff.
You know, it's not just sprayed on and then that's it.
It was quite artistic.
I had what I always describe as fibreglass accessories, a kind of halter, split down the back.
Which if I'd fallen onto it, would just have garotted me.
You know, it would have I think I'd die rather gently.
(FIRING) GEE: With a very different form to the standard breed, this new class of Martian has been dubbed an Ice Lord.
Also appearing in two subsequent serials, these roles required a special prosthesis for Alan Bennion to wear.
Just the bottom half of my face, from about there down, was visible under the helmet.
JAMES: We added a sort of pebble effect.
So it gave it a much more powerful, strong, heavy, almost stone-like quality really.
She painted on Copydex.
And then stuck these little rubbery, pebble things all over.
JAMES: With the mask, you've got this lovely sort of folds in the neck.
So that it had a very almost lizard-like look.
BENNION: And then Michael Ferguson came in to kind of review the makeup and said, "I think we'd better have the teeth blacked out as well.
" I thought, "There I go.
There's the last of me gone.
" We would have used black tooth enamel to have got the shape, little, sharp, pointed teeth, which show up really quite well.
The helmet, of course, was fibreglass as well.
The eyehole had a sort of yellow screen, orange screen thing.
You have betrayed us.
Every word has been heard on Earth.
Kill him! The Ice Warrior gun has two components.
One is the charging up of the energy.
(EXCLAIMING) It's fairly high-pitch modulation of white noise, filtered white noise, and oscillators.
The distortion was sort of square waved.
It was slightly modulated.
And it went through a device that literally switched between sounds.
(BULLET RICOCHETING) (FIRING) GEE: An ingenious method was devised to match the visuals to this sound effect.
I inherited, I didn't invent, I wish I had, a wonderful way of doing it, which is used in this series, which involved a huge sheet of something called Miralon.
It's a plastic but it's really mirrored that's why it's called Miralon.
Mirror surface plastic.
FERGUSON: The actor would stand in front of the Miralon and the camera would look into it.
And a scene hand would be behind it with a monitor.
The actor would go, "Oh, no!" And he will poke his finger in and out of the Miralon.
GEE: In 1972, the Ice Warriors returned to face the Doctor's third incarnation.
The Galactic Federation is debating whether to accept an application by the backwards and primitive planet, Peladon.
Delegates have been dispatched to adjudicate the matter.
But someone is trying to sabotage proceedings.
And as the death toll mounts, unease and distrust grows.
What are you suggesting? (HISSING) -I reject the accusation.
-Yes, of course, you would.
I don't think the Ice Warriors were ever as it were, number one, you know, in the monster charts but they were pretty high up there, you know, they were three or four.
LETTS: The Ice Warriors, which had been Brian's invention in the first place, were brought back by him.
I don't think that we asked for them.
He made a nice twist that they turned out not to be villains, as they always had been before.
But the Doctor did say you are a race of warriors.
We were, once.
But now, we reject violence.
CALDINEZ: We weren't baddies.
Which I didn't like very much, because I loved being a baddie.
I love trying to kill people and frightening people, that sort of thing, you know.
It's a fairly obvious twist, in a sense, you know, because when the Ice Warriors come on, you think villains, bad guys, evil.
-Your Majesty -You've got to believe him.
His ignorance of the law at least deserves consideration.
HEPESH: No, his crime is too great.
A royal pardon would count highly with the Federation.
Izlyr is coldly logical and rational and, you know, not sort of terribly sympathetic.
The Doctor saved my life.
Now I intend to save his.
And then a nice twist in the second one, that they turned out to be villains again.
GEE: Two years later, for BBC television viewers, but 50 years later for Peladon.
This time, the Doctor finds himself in a battle over trisilicate, a vital mineral for the war with Galaxy Five.
A group of Ice Warriors arrive to take charge of the situation, led by commander Azaxyr.
But they are not quite what they seem.
If we cannot have the trisilicate, then our space fleet will blast your hostile planet to dust.
But the fairly obvious thing is to apparently start off playing them straight and then have it turn out that they really are the villains you thought they were after all.
Though, in fact, it's made clear that they are not representatives of the Ice Warrior race.
Tell your men to lay down their arms or the Queen will die.
GEE: The Ice Warriors were originally intended to appear during the 23rd season of Doctor Who, in a serial entitled Mission to Magnus.
Unfortunately, the hiatus of 1985, put paid to this opportunity.
But who knows what the future holds.
Perhaps, one day soon, the Doctor will again encounter the giant lizards of Mars.
But the question remains.
Will the creatures continue their dedication to peace? Or will humanity once again be forced to fight the Ice Warriors?