Doctor Who - Documentary s09e12 Episode Script

MICHAEL BRIANT: The Sea Devils were something I could believe in.
I could believe in another world under the sea.
In fact, I still believe there's another world under the sea deep down there somewhere.
BARRY LETTS: I was in the Navy.
Jon Pertwee was in the Navy.
Mike Briant was a very keen amateur sailor.
He got a boat and used to sail whenever he could.
I wanted to have a Sea Devil that was truthful, that had some basis, some foundations in truth.
Real children were terrified by it and adults were amused by it.
And it was really just good fun.
Suddenly, I got the chance to appear in this programme, and I wasn't going to miss that.
All the nice girls love a sailor.
They wouldn't let me have a nuclear submarine.
I only needed one for a couple of days' filming, but they felt that they had better priorities for it, and I was saddened because I felt they weren't backing the project properly.
They don't have a great deal to do when they're on board this ship, except take the mickey out of somebody that's doubling for Katy Manning.
NARRATOR: By 1 9 7 1, Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks had overseen two successful colour seasons of Doctor Who.
With a bigger budget and Jon Pertwee's Doctor based mostly on contemporary Earth, there was greater scope for combining the weird and uncanny with recognisable locations and action scenes.
Planning the stories for their third series, Letts and Dicks looked back to Doctor Who and the Silurians, a production they'd first worked on together in 1969.
That series went pretty well, and they were good, successful ones, and we liked the design.
So, later on, when Barry and I were talking about a later season and bringing back the Silurians, how can we make them different? And one or other of us And as Barry's always saying, we never know which it is.
One of us came up with the idea Well, I think it was me, actually, but never mind.
''Suppose there were Silurians all along under the sea.
'' And Barry said, ''Yes, and we could get naval cooperation,'' you see.
And, of course, the sea brings in all kinds of exciting stuff like boats and diving and the sea coast and the Navy and all sorts of stuff.
We worked out the storyline.
Mac wrote the story of how the Silurians had secret bases under the sea which the Brigadier had not destroyed, and we rechristened them Sea Devils, because we thought ''the Sea Devils'' was a more dramatic name.
And we went ahead, or Barry went ahead, and arranged naval cooperation.
LETTS: I rang up, and Terrance and I went down, and they were very hospitable.
-The chief SOD.
-What? -Senior Officer Diving.
-That's right.
-Known in the Navy as the chief SOD.
-I had forgotten that.
I'd forgotten that.
That's right.
And He was, you remember, very nice.
DICKS: Like James Mason.
LETTS: That's right.
-Very suave and charming.
-That's right.
And they lashed us up to pink gin and were very hospitable.
And we explained what we wanted to do, and the dates and so on.
And they said, ''Oh, well, one of the difficulties is'' The diving ship, at that time, was going to be up in Scotland doing exercises.
And I said, ''Oh, dear.
'' And they said, ''Oh, don't worry.
Don't worry.
What we can do, we'll change the thing ''so we're doing exercises in the Solent, ''and you can come and be part of the exercises.
'' So I said, ''Thank you very much.
'' And I went back to the office, and I had an official letter on BBC-headed notepaper sent to the chap at the MOD, saying exactly that, you see, that they'd agreed that they would change their exercises to the Solent.
He rang me up in a great state.
He said, ''I've managed to tear your letter up before anybody saw it.
'' He said, ''If anybody saw that letter ''and knew that the Navy was altering things for the BBC, ''you'd have to pay thousands instead of getting everything free.
'' They were giving it us free, you see, because it was good public relations for the Navy.
So I said, ''Well, what do we do?'' He said, ''Write to me saying, '''We would like to film on your diving ship at these dates.
'''Is there any chance that we could do this?' ''I will investigate, and I will come back and say, '''Well, by a happy chance, '''they're doing exercises in the Solent at that time, so, yes, you can.
' ''And then it'll be free.
'' And so that's what we did.
LETTS: At the end of the first season, Terrance and I realised, like everybody else who watched the first season, that it was really rather silly of us to have made it that the Master was the villain in every story of the first Master season, so we made up our minds that after that he would pop up every so often, and so it would be a surprise.
DICKS: And he'd been captured at the end ofThe Dæmons.
LETTS: At the end ofThe Dæmons.
That's right.
Yes.
So we were able to pick that up.
DICKS: And that gave that nice stuff of the Master in prison.
LETTS: In prison.
That's right.
And deliberately make it a Master story, so he was very much the central character, with the Doctor as his opposition, obviously.
-DICKS: Working with the Sea Devils.
-Yes, working with the Sea Devils.
I was always very pleased to have Mac write them because he was such a very good writer.
DICKS: He was incredibly reliable.
He always delivered on time.
He always gave you a good, workable script that was practical and wouldn't give you enormous budgetary problems.
Barry and I had a lot of input into stories in those days.
We would work out even the kind of story we wanted in advance before we went to the writer.
Mac works very well with that cooperative approach.
I mean, he would suggest alterations or add things and improve things, but he works very well in that kind of team situation.
NARRATOR: Another member of the team was Michael Briant.
He was no stranger to Doctor Who, and had already directed the third Doctor in a story in the previous season, butThe Sea Devils brought a new challenge.
It was a present-day story, so instead of like in Colony in Space, where I had to invent a whole space station and a concept for all that, and that you tend to feed off old-fashioned ideas for that, and to some extent I was being handed a sort of clean sheet of paper to do a modern story in modern styles with it and with modern ideas.
So that was very different for me.
LETTS: Mike Briant at this time was a pretty new director.
He'd done Colony in Space for us the year before, and he was very keen and full of ideas.
He had ideas for the transport.
He had the little buggies running around, which were, I don't know, Renault cars with the doors taken off.
I can't remember what they were, but it made the thing feel a little bit in the future, which is what we were trying to establish.
It was like everyday but not quite our everyday.
Don't trust him! I wanted to have a monster that wasn't just something conjured up out of imagination, out of people's images from previous shows.
I wanted to have a Sea Devil that was truthful, that had some basis, some foundations in truth, so we started to look for creatures that lived in the oceans that we could model our Sea Devils on.
And I don't know which of us came up with it, but one us suddenly came up with a turtle, and we looked at a turtle and went, ''Yeah, turtles.
'' They're quite vicious creatures.
They bite.
They've got big teeth.
They swim extensively underwater and on the surface.
They're capable of coming out on land, and if Sea Devils are going to evolve from anything, they're going to evolve from turtles.
By the time we'd created these heads, which were actually quite expensive and quite difficult for the guys to make, there wasn't actually very much money in the kitty, and the costume designer had a bit of a battle supplying the rest of the costume, and I had said that I was not prepared to inflict naked Sea Devils on the children of our country.
I just felt it would be immoral and wrong and give them unfortunate ideas, so I was pretty shocked when we got out on location, which was the very first time I saw a completed Sea Devil 'cause they were making the things right up to the moment of the first day of shooting.
I walked into the costume area, and there were six naked Sea Devils, and I was flabbergasted, horrified, so I said to the costume lady, ''We can't do it.
It's just not acceptable at this time of night.
'' You know, it's 5:00.
So she said, ''Worry not, Michael,'' and she produced this netting, this green netting, and she got a pair of scissors, cut a hole in a bit of green netting, threw it over and she said, ''Voilá.
'' NARRATOR: So the team was in place, and the project reached action stations with new monsters and a new uniform for the Master.
The armed forces had featured in Doctor Who before, principally the Army in the form of UNIT, but it was now the turn of the senior service.
How would the Navy react to their new shipmates? The Navy were really enormously cooperative.
They bent over backwards to give us everything we wanted, and it made a difference, I think, that I'd been in the Navy for two or three years myself, and Jon had been in the Navy for about four or five years, practically the whole of the war.
DICKS: He had a lot of stories about his time in the Navy.
I mean, he'd gone out for a drink with the lads one night in Portsmouth and woke up next morning with a tattoo.
That was a very Jon Pertwee kind of story.
He had a lot of tales like that.
So we knew the language.
We could talk to them.
And we knew what they were talking about, they knew what we were talking about, and that was an enormous help.
NARRATOR: Jon Pertwee enjoyed life aboard ship so much that he continued serving for some time after the war ended in the popular radio comedy The Navy Lark, so it was an easy route back to Portsmouth, Pompey, when filming began with the Royal Navy at Fraser Gunnery Range in October, 1 9 7 1.
One of the joys of working with the Royal Navy, of course, is that they have even more staff than the BBC does.
I was the first lieutenant of Fraser Gunnery Range, and I was informed that it was my job, and I was to basically take care of them all and do everything that we could to help them.
(SIREN WAILING) BRIANT: And they all wanted to be in the movie, and the officers wanted to be in the movie.
There was actually a queue of volunteers from the whole of Fraser Gunnery Range, because everyone wanted to get on television and become famous, et cetera.
Now, in the Navy, you never, never volunteer for anything, but suddenly a buzz went round that the BBC were involved, so suddenly 20 volunteers just turned up out of nowhere.
BRIANT: Almost all the naval personnel that you see, like, rushing up to Jon when he's at the boat with his magnifying glass, those are all real naval personnel.
I mean, the petty officer is a real petty officer, acting for the first time in his life on television.
The guys saluting the Master are all naval personnel.
Suddenly this guy you've been watching on TV, you're suddenly there face-to-face with him, and although he was a scary person in some respects, he turned out to be a real nice guy.
Roger Delgado, we used to take the mickey out of him by saluting him every time we saw him and calling him, ''Yes, sir.
No, sir.
Three bags full, sir.
'' From having a very restricted budget where I only have six Sea Devils and two extras, I've suddenly got 30 or 40 or 50 naval guys running around and saluting to my command.
They were wonderful.
I mean, they were so excited to have this whole team of demented actors, doing all these crazy things, and they were so helpful and so supportive.
They had more than enough time to talk to you.
They weren't like some that finish their film, and then they rush off back to the hotel.
They'd sit down, have a drink with you, have a chat with you.
We had a photograph taken for the local paper.
It was an actual conversation that we were having which went on for quite a while, Jon Pertwee and myself, a colleague of mine,Jerry, and Dave King who'd just took some film.
And to actually, as I say, meet him on set was a real, real buzz for me, and the fact that Jon Pertwee had had some involvement with the Royal Navy and the fact that he was a sailor or matelot at one time and so he had a great interest in what we were actually doing.
It was about 36 years ago since I was last down here, but as far as I can remember, this is where the gun was, where we actually did the Cine filming with Jon Pertwee.
We got on very well together.
We did a slight interview with him.
One of the BBC cameramen said, ''Well, if you'd like to ask him some questions and have a talk with him, ''then I'll do the videoing for you.
'' We even managed to get some autographs from him.
There's Jon Pertwee.
Edwin Richfield tried three times, and the pen ran out three times, but we finally got his autograph at the end.
Katy Manning and Roger Delgado, the Master, and Clive Morton.
Then, at lunch time, Jon Pertwee and Katy Manning came into the ward room, which is the officers' mess, and, as is tradition in the Navy, we had a few drinks before lunch.
All right.
What about the theft of your electronic spares? -Surely you'll agree that happened.
-Since I was here at the time, yes.
The Master stole those parts to make his calling device.
His what? NARRATOR: Edwin Richfield played the role of the irascible senior naval officer, Captain Hart, and he found there were distinct advantages to wearing the uniform.
But there happens to be a stray civilian chugging into the base! I wanted Edwin Richfield playing the captain of our gunnery range in the story, to be firing one of the major guns, and the Navy personnel said, ''Absolutely no way! ''I mean, I'm sorry.
Guns are dangerous things you're firing.
''Okay, they're blank rounds, but a lot of action going on there.
'' And so Edwin walked across to the gun and said to the CPO in charge, ''Oh, right, I'll take over here.
'' And he sat himself down in the gun, and he says, ''Now, what do I press to make this fire, old chap?'' And the CPO said, ''Yes, sir.
That one, sir,'' and there we had it.
Sea Devils came from that area down there because of a simple reason, the buildings were too close for us to actually fire towards them.
Edwin Richfield was on the Bofus gun, which was just about here.
I was on the back of the gun, actually loading the ammunition into the gun for him, and all he had to do, basically, was just pull the trigger.
Rank and authority is a wonderful thing, particularly if you're an actor.
KING: At the end of the day, Edwin Richfield was an officer and a gentleman.
Even when you were doing a very serious moment with him, there was just always this tiny twinkle in his eye, and it always used to make me giggle.
Now, are you going to carry out my order, or must I replace you with someone who will? I found it very hard to actually look at Edwin and not giggle.
It wasn't his fault.
He didn't do anything wrong.
It was just my reaction.
He had that little, naughty glint in his eye.
So when you get two good actors in a part, they can be laughing and drinking and best of mates up in the canteen and yet can develop this apparent conflict between the two of them.
And I thought those two actors I thought Jon and Edwin played very, very well off each other, very well off each other indeed, and I think some of Jon's jokes came out of the skill of Edwin delivering his lines.
History books? Captain Hart, Horatio Nelson was a personal friend of mine.
Come on, Jo.
Good grief.
Poor chap's as mad as a hatter.
NARRATOR: So armed with a mischievous twinkle and the right uniform, you can get to play with some real naval hardware.
Over in the hovercraft, Katy Manning found herself amongst a group of real sailors and at the whim of the weather.
And for some reason, I'm in there with all these sailors, who were actually doing all the work, and we're just at back It was packed 'cause there were about a dozen or so of us.
We all had to stand up.
Katy was standing up in the front, and I think when the hovercraft came into the beach, they hit a slight bit of turbulence.
The whole thing went slightly to one side, and I was, like I was sort of inside this hovercraft in what could only be described as a nautical rugby scrum.
It jerked, and, of course, everybody was standing up, and they all fell against her.
It was quite an exciting moment, actually.
I had something like 24 sailors on top of me.
There's a memory! Well, they were sailors at the end of the day.
You gotta give them a little bit of leeway.
I said to them afterwards, ''I'm gonna have to marry all of you.
''We've just been too close.
'' And Jon was actually deeply concerned.
He was not happy about that moment.
(MANNING LAUGHING) The whole episode basically provided a bit of light relief, not only for myself, but for everyone else that was working at Fraser at the time.
And we thoroughly enjoyed having them.
And when we talk about our 15 minutes of fame, that was my 15 minutes of fame.
Everybody enjoyed the day out, so to speak, the ratings and everybody.
NARRATOR: All these high-octane antics and the appearance of some stranger-than-usual creatures at the seaside attracted the attention of the local press, who visited the location.
The Sea Devils required a substantial amount of location filming, and although the Navy's involvement was crucial, they did not perform any of the stunts.
This was left to HA VOC, the show's regular stunt team.
HA VOC members played both Sea Devils and Navy personnel, and although this was to be their last appearance as a team, it did mark the debut for one keen young stunt performer.
Stuart Fell, who's a stuntman I worked with during my entire career as a director.
Stuart was the smallest Sea Devil of them all, and he was just come out of the parachute regiment and had just become a stuntman and had just joined HAVOC, so when they were all There's a shot where all six Sea Devils are lined up, and Edwin Richfield or somebody is shooting them with a machine gun, and they all fall down dead, and the littlest one does a flip.
I was extremely keen that I should show the lads what I could do.
Now, I'd been a gymnast, and I could do back flips and stand on my hands and that sort of thing, and I once saw an opportunity on one of the banks for me to die as a Sea Devil, doing a flip.
It was easy to do for me because it was on a slope, and Michael Briant was a young director then, and he, too, was keen that he got the most value he could possibly get from any of his stuntmen.
And I said to him, ''Look, why don't I do it like this, Michael?'' And he said, ''Yeah, it looks pretty good to me.
'' But Derek would say, ''Well, look, Stuart, I don't think so.
''It's just a little bit over the top, really, you know, for a Sea Devil.
''I think we'll just die in the normal way.
'' I don't know whether he thought he'd have to pay me extra money for doing a back flip, but it wouldn't have cost them any extra money, I just wanted to show them my mettle.
NARRATOR: The Navy left Fraser Gunnery Range in the mid 1980s, and the site may now be redeveloped for luxury housing.
If the Sea Devils invaded today, the biggest opposition would come from the nudists.
Filming now moved across the Solent to the Isle of Wight, and at one point, the HAVOC lads found themselves in full costume sinking into the sea and up against the clock, filming what was probably the trickiest sequence.
One darkish evening in Bembridge as the light was going down, six stuntmen were dressed in their uniforms and instructed to march backwards until I said, ''Stop,'' deeper and deeper into the ocean.
We had a lot of difficulty with those things.
The feet would come off.
I sat there like King Canute until they vanished under the waves.
The boots would get filled with water, so they weighed a ton.
I cried, ''Action!'' which none of them heard, but by that time they had run out of breath, so they all started to bob up and walk forward.
We didn't have, to my knowledge, any fitting for these things.
They were just costumes that were all made the same, and it was like, ''Get one of these on.
'' The heads, they were latex heads that you could buy in a joke shop and they were quite tight-fitting.
Their eyes used to fill up with water, and as you put your head underneath the water and counted to 1 0, and we all come up together, these heads were full of water, so, I mean, it was difficult enough holding your breath under the water as it is, and then you've got to come out of the water, and then let all this water drain from around your nose and your mouth and take a deep breath.
They weren't really things that had been foreseen, so we didn't do a lot of rehearsing coming out of the water.
They actually shot it for the first time and hoped to get away with it.
That is the only shot that exists of six Sea Devils taking over the world.
The original intention of the Sea Devils was to be filming on an oilrig, and it was absolutely impossible.
I just knew from experience.
Oilrigs are very, very expensive working platforms, and they don't want a film crew on them who's playing around with Doctor Who.
But I did know about the forts in the Solent, close to Portsmouth, and close to where our other Royal Navy locations were going to be, so it seemed logical to use one of these forts.
NARRATOR: No Man's Land Sea Fort was one of four 19th century defences built in the Solent to counter the fear of a French invasion.
The production team hired it for a day from the MOD, who then owned it, for £10.
That's around £100 in new money.
Filming at the location gave new recruit Stuart Fell the opportunity to get in touch with his feminine side.
We were in middle of the Solent, and we were climbing up ladders, and the tide was out, and this ladder that wasn't all that high, all of a sudden it's very, very high, covered in seaweed and quite a hazard for Katy Manning.
Boy, he put on a wiggle that even I couldn't ever, ever produce.
(MANNING LAUGHING) FELL: They said to me, ''Look, Stuart, could you help us out? ''You're the littlest.
'' And they put me into this costume.
I remember they had to cut it at the back and sew it up a bit.
We must have gone there on a naval ship, which was fully manned by these matelots, and I was in this costume for a couple of hours before we got to the shot, so they thought that was highly amusing, that a bloke should put on a wig and double a girl and feel perfectly happy about it, which I did, but they thought that was completely unusual.
NARRATOR: Scenes were also scheduled which gave the action Doctor,Jon Pertwee, the chance to show off some of his other talents, but the team had not allowed for a familiar British problem.
Originally in the Isle of Wight sequence that we were going to shoot, Jon was going to water-ski for us because that was something which he was adept at, and I think it was put into the script.
I think we put it into the script especially to show Jon's abilities water-skiing or the Doctor water-skiing.
You see him in the cloak and the costume.
There were also other sequences that we were going to do, but we'd lost a whole day's filming out of fog.
I mean, it was unbelievable.
We got up the morning that we were going to do the abseiling down the cliff sequence, which would have led into water-skiing, which would have led into something else, and there was just thick fog, so that abseiling sequence, which was actually going to be quite a long sequence, turned out into two shots because of the fog.
We had to run through this minefield, and so Jon always held my hand and helped me through everything 'cause, you know, me, I probably would have been running in the opposite direction and not have known, you know.
And we're running through that minefield, and suddenly Jon tumbled, and he fell right onto his sonic screwdriver.
No, it's not funny.
Anyway, but he actually did damage his ribs, poor darling, so that he was in a lot of pain.
NARRATOR: Undeterred by his bruised ribs, Jon Pertwee displayed no fear and relished any action sequence, especially those involving the sea.
For his foe, however, fellow actor Roger Delgado, filming anywhere near water was a nightmare.
Roger couldn't swim, so can you imagine being asked to jump in the ocean in one of those suits around the hovercraft, floating around out of control when you're terrified of the water, and doing retakes and everything else? I mean, that man was so brave.
He then did the speedboat chase.
He then had to drive those little speedboat things as well.
Okay, he had a lifejacket on underneath his cloak, but, I mean, he didn't know that it was a BBC lifejacket and probably had a hole in it.
He covered it up completely because he's a professional and a trouper, and he didn't show it, and he was a very good actor, but it was such a contrast to Jon.
NARRATOR: Safely back on dry land, filming moved to Norris Castle, a private residence on the Isle of Wight and the location for the Master's prison.
The filming was going well until something in the kitchen caught the eye of the leading man.
He spotted the cookery books in the cupboard here, and he has a great interest in cookery books, and he started reading them, and we couldn't get him back out to go on with the film, which was a bit embarrassing, so eventually we lured him out with a glass of brandy, and then everything was able to resume.
This is the courtyard of Norris Castle and this is the window that Katy Manning came in through.
And we had a bit of a giggle 'cause she climbed in from the outside and got stuck, so we had to haul her back out again, bring her around, stuff her in from this side.
Then she was able to come out, and then she went across the courtyard here, and that is one of the signs that they brought with them as part of the film set, and fortunately they left it, and we've been using it ever since.
The filming took two days, and when they went away, they left overnight some of their stuff, including one of the Sea Devils, who was in this corner, slumped down, looking very realistic, one foot stuck up in the air a bit in the corner there, and when the poor old postman came in the morning, he nearly had a fit 'cause this thing looked so real.
NARRATOR: So the monsters may have scared the postman on the Isle of Wight, but for the actors in the studio, it was a different matter.
Donald Sumpter, who had appeared previously in Doctor Who, developed a technique for dealing with this.
The difficulty with Doctor Who was, faced with the monsters, the shock horror that you've got to kind of (EXCLAIMING) Which I didn't really kind of fancy, so I think Ridgeway I think he had to be very stiff, not show anything at all.
It was a very good way of avoiding that acting problem.
And I think the one concession I made was that whenever the men in the plastic suits, who could hardly walk, appeared, I think I had a little twitch and I think that's about as far as I went.
NARRATOR: Water-skiing,jet skis, cookery books, what more could satisfy the third Doctor's craving for adventure? One particular studio sequence offered him a chance to swash his buckle in the style of Errol Flynn, but the action scenes were not always so easy.
Jon Pertwee suffered from a bad back.
Luckily, however, there was someone on hand who knew the right treatment.
Roger Delgado, actually, was one of the few people who knew how to put Jon's back back, and I remember going in the studio and seeing Jon lying face down and Roger kneeling on top of him with a knee in the middle of his back, yanking his arm or something.
You know, there was a particular trick to it.
Roger himself was a very good swordsman.
I knew that because I'd often fought him myself when I was an actor, you know.
-Didn't you say you he ran you through? -That's right.
BRIANT: Derek Ware, I think, was the fight arranger for that, and Derek came in the rehearsal room and we went through the moves, and we worked it and worked it and worked it.
And considering that we shot it in a TV studio in probably half an hour, and in a feature film they would have spent a day or two days or three days shooting it, I think it came out pretty well.
I wouldn't do that if I were you.
That's government property.
BRIANT: To try to improve it, I lifted it off, put it on a disk, which is what we used to use in the old days for speeding film up, speeded the whole thing up and then put it back on tape, but the difference in quality, of course, of the shape of the picture, of the texture of the picture, slightly brings that shot to attention, which is a shame.
You're good, Doctor, but you're not good enough.
But you haven't seen the quality of my footwork yet.
There's one shot where I absolutely know it's Derek Ware and not the Master, but you just get away with it.
I think you probably are not absolutely certain if it's Roger Delgado or Derek Ware.
Violent exercise makes me hungry.
Don't you agree? Then you'd better enjoy your meal, Doctor, because it might be your last.
NARRATOR: But the surprises didn't end with the filming.
After the story was broadcast, Michael Briant received an unexpected visit.
The next morning, security called to say MI5 were entering the building, and would I attend an interview with Naval Intelligence at once? And I said, ''Yes, yes.
'' And these two actually rather ordinary looking blokes from Naval Intelligence, looking nothing like Sean Connery at all, came in the office and said, ''Uh, Mr Briant, this nuclear submarine, ''where did you get the plans for it from?'' And I said, ''Well, you'd better call the visual effects designer, ''but Woolworths, basically.
'' And they said, ''Sorry?'' I said, ''Well, Woolworths.
''We went down to Woolworths and we got this plastic nuclear submarine ''and built it from the kit and painted it black and that's it.
'' And they said, ''Really? I see.
And what was the make?'' So they spoke to the visual effects guy and found out where it was, and then they came back a few days later, Naval Intelligence, and said, ''All right, ''but why did you change the propeller from the model?'' And I said, ''Because it didn't look like a proper propeller.
''Do you think it looked like a proper propeller? ''I mean, would you send a nuclear submarine to sea ''with a propeller like that? I mean, would you?'' And the guy said, ''Well, possibly not, but where did you get it from?'' I said, ''No idea.
Ask the visual effects designer,'' and so they went off and they spoke to Peter Day, and Peter Day actually got it out of a Hoover or something.
I mean, it was just a sort of thing he stuck on the back.
By chance, nuclear submarines identity is controlled by the number of blades on the propeller.
So on our propeller, there's 23 blades or something, and it just so happens that British naval nuclear submarines have 23 blades on their propeller, and by sheer chance, we'd actually told the world the sonar signal of British nuclear submarines.
NARRATOR: So a saga of sailors, submarines and sea monsters drew to a close, and looking back 35 years later, it's the series' leading man that stands out.
DICKS: The thing about Jon Pertwee was that under this suave, man-of-the-world, leading-actor confidence, he was a terrible worrier.
I remember going down to visit the location towards the end of the filming, and they were doing quite a complicated sequence in which the Master has been captured, and Jon came rushing up to me in a great panic, saying, ''Terrance, we're in trouble.
We're in terrible trouble.
'' And I said, ''Well, what's up, Jon?'' And he said, ''Well, the sequence, the one we're about to do, it won't work.
'' And I said, ''Why not? It's a very good end sequence.
'' He said, ''Well, there isn't time, you see, ''for the Master to do all he'd have to do, to put the mask on ''and change clothes and steal the hovercraft.
''He can't do it.
There isn't time for him to do it.
'' He said, ''You've got to rewrite it.
'' And this is at the moment when the whole gang of people are just about to start filming this, you know, against limited time.
So, I said, ''Jon, it's all right.
'' I said, ''Trust me.
'' I said, ''No one will ever notice.
'' And he ''I don't know,'' you know.
But I eventually calmed him down, and he went off to do it.
And, of course, nobody ever did notice, you know, but that was very typical of Jon, to have a desperate last-minute worry about something.
Jon had written the lines on the inside of this tin, and I'm acting away, doing my thing, you know.
''But, Doctor, blah, blah, blah.
'' And he had to say, ''But listen, Jo!'' Anyway, he was just about to launch into this terribly complex spiel, and I, in the middle of my great passionate moment, went bang, closed the lid, and Jon went, ''But, Jo, I I I (WHISPERING) ''Open it! Open it! ''I'' And we used to write things on the floor of the studio, but, of course, what we never remembered at the time when he was writing mathematical equations on the floor in the studio is that you can guarantee a large percentage of Doctor Who was done with dry ice.
Awful lot of smoke everywhere.
And so the moment he'd go and he'd say, ''Right, Jo, what is'' And the smoke would start pumping across that floor, Jon would be going, ''What is I I I'' BRIANT: Jon, somehow, to me, was everything that Doctor Who should be.
He was brave.
He was elegant.
He was courageous.
He was lovely.
And Jon was very much that as a man.
He was a real pleasure to be with.
He was a raconteur.
He was an adventurer.
He was a consummate professional.
He wanted to look good, and it was always a pleasure to try and make him look good.
I guess he was the sort of Sean Connery of Doctor Who.
It was just such fun, and it was a joy, and it still is.
It actually gives just this idea of actually something magical and innocent in a world that's actually pretty mean, and the world where magic can happen is still there, and that's wonderful.
You make a show, and you don't believe it's really going to have longevity.
You think it's going to go out on a Saturday night and maybe get a repeat at Christmas, which is wonderful, and then be forgotten, and it's incredibly pleasing to know that people are still looking at The Sea Devils, are still going out and buying a DVD of The Sea Devils and getting pleasure and enjoyment out of doing it.
It's incredibly flattering.