Doctor Who - Documentary s09e16 Episode Script

BARRY LETTS: It was an open secret that all the stories which are credited to Robert Sloman were, in fact, an equal collaboration with me.
I was as much the writer of them as he was.
It was an absolute shared thing.
It wasn't that I used his name to get my stories on the screen or that I was merely a technical bloke who went through his stories and made sure they'd work.
It was an absolute collaboration.
TOMTIT, that's what it's all about.
A demonstration of TOMTIT.
We decided that we wanted to do a story about time.
The way the Doctor Who series deals with time is actually not too far from the understanding we have in modern physics.
The idea that time is absolute, that you can't mess with it and you can't move through it, we now know is wrong.
Einstein has explained that time is something that we can stretch and squeeze and maybe even travel through, so it's not so crazy.
Bob said, "I want to do a story about fliers in the First World War," and he'd got an opening scene where an amateur pilot was flying along and suddenly was attacked by a First World War plane.
That's as far as he'd got.
It was his inspiration.
Now, just about at that time, I was fascinated by the whole idea of Atlantis because of a book that had been published which suggested that Atlantis was based on the island of Santorini, which is, I think, north of Crete.
Thera Tsk-tsk.
Doesn't mean a thing to me.
Well, it says "Santorini" in brackets.
Well, that must be another name for it.
LETTS: And it was part of the Cretan civilisation at the time of the Greek legends, and it had volcanic eruptions which had destroyed most of it but had left under the water undoubtedly a harbour which fitted all the descriptions of Atlantis.
But you said Atlantis.
Why Atlantis? Well, that's what it says in the paper.
I said, "To be honest, I don't think "we've got the resources to do the First World War.
"We might do trenches and mud, "but I don't think we could do a lot of planes.
" So he reluctantly dropped that idea, but we picked up the idea of travelling backwards and forwards in time, in particular, to Atlantis.
It's nice, I think, to ground things in past theories or past ideas so that the present and the projected future ideas, I think, have more credibility because they have a background.
That's a fearsome looking load of electronic nonsense you've got together, Dr Ingram.
How does it all work? In words of one syllable? I'll do my best.
Well, gentlemen, to begin with, time isn't smooth.
I'm sure the writers of Doctor Who were in touch with actual scientific advance.
And using imagination, you can project ideas which actually, as we have seen, to a large extent, you know, come to pass.
We always tried in Doctor Who, not just Bob Sloman and I, but everybody, eventually, when I'd sort of got my hands on it, to make the science, any real science that was mentioned, be genuine.
If we had a bit of scientific gobbledygook, it would be about something which was beyond our present knowledge.
- Cut the power! - RUTH: I can't! It won't budge! - Then reverse the polarity! - What? Reverse the temporal polarity.
Provided you don't actually go against real scientific principles, it's only right and proper that you should be able to produce fantastic ideas, as long as they're plausible, plausible within that story, so that people can accept them and will accept them.
I think that all the terminology was very, very important.
And that's why it was jolly useful to have Ta-da! Miss Jo Grant there to actually translate some of the things that, say, the younger viewers or, let's face it, even those like myself, who understand certain things but need it explained to them.
And I think Doctor Who was taken That was taken very, very seriously.
I've asked you at least a million times, what is it? Extraordinary, I could have sworn I'd told you.
I think, as with all good science fiction, Doctor Who sort of treats science very speculatively and mixes it with what we would regard as impossible, almost ridiculous, according to our current understanding of science.
But it is quite true that if we were to present an ancient civilisation with a TV set or a mobile phone, that would be indistinguishable from magic.
So we've certainly, as scientists now in the 20th-21 st century, we should not be too arrogant as to imagine that there wouldn't be something we would regard as crazy today, whereas maybe a hundred, a thousand years from now it would be commonplace.
Who knows? When you think of the sciences, they all started off semi-mystical.
Like chemistry developed from alchemy, you know? It wasn't until Linnaeus started his taxonomy of the natural world that natural history became a science.
Science did begin, I guess, as philosophy.
Well, it was sort of a mixture of philosophy and magic and superstition.
Going back, the ancient Egyptians practised medicine.
The Babylonians were very good at astronomy, but of course, astronomy was mixed with astrology, which we now don't regard as science.
Likewise, as Barry mentions, chemistry originated from alchemy, and so it had its origins in superstition and magic and mixed in with religion.
Modern science really grew very, very gradually, starting with the ancient Greeks throughout the Islamic empire in medieval times and all the way through to people like Galileo and Newton.
So, science didn't begin at any one point.
It's a gradual process over thousands of years.
This applies very definitely to time.
Lots of people have had ideas about what time is.
What's happening, Doctor? Are we too late? On the contrary, Jo, I think we're just in time.
Since the theory of the Big Bang came up, it's been suggested that time and space started at the moment of the Big Bang.
Now, this is an issue that people have been wondering about for thousands of years, going back to the time of the ancient Greeks.
We now believe there was no before the big bang, because there was no time to embed the word "before" in.
The best example is to say, "What if you were to travel south? "When you get to the South Pole, keep going south.
" Well, you can't.
Once you're at the South Pole, that's the furthest south you can go.
Any direction you move from the South Pole is taking you back north again.
In the same way, if we take time back to the moment of creation of the universe, that's the origin of time.
We cannot go any earlier than that.
How long's it going to take us to get there? Well, that's the curious thing, no time at all.
We're outside time.
Of course, it always seems to take a long time but that depends upon the mood, I suppose.
- What, your mood? - No, no, no, hers.
No, the Tardis's.
We've got a line somewhere in The Time Monster, it says something about being but not becoming.
That's a philosophical idea, that you could ontologically be and exist without changing at all, and so you wouldn't be becoming something else, i.
e.
you would be outside time.
Now, we had for some time, just as a purely practical thing, of saying that when the Tardis was travelling, it was in the time vortex.
And what was in our mind was a place which was outside time.
Okay.
What about the time vortex? You know, we see the Tardis floating through this something.
We don't know if it's space or time, but it's travelling through time.
Well, one thing is for sure.
If we were ever able to build a time machine like the Tardis, it would not be able to move from one time to another without moving from one place to another, because our current view of space and time is that they're linked together.
We talk about four-dimensional space-time.
So you can't move through time without moving through space, in the same way that you can't get from one place to another without it taking a certain duration of time.
It may be possible, and again, this is just theory at the moment, that we could move from one time to another, even if that time were in our future.
We'd have to move in space as well, and provided we did the sums and the space and time balanced, we could move back in time.
The problem is that this leads to all sorts of paradoxes.
Why on Earth I never realised that Oh, no, what are you doing here? Yes, well, it's a bit difficult to explain, really.
But in theory, if we do the maths, we can't rule it out.
Interstitial activity, nil.
Molecular structure, stable.
Increasing power.
LETTS: So that made a sort of theoretical background for the whole of our story.
And the big difference between The Time Monster and time travelling was that they were hoping to transfer actual objects from one part of time to another part of time.
TOMTIT, the Transmission Of Matter Through Interstitial Time, interstitial time being the moment between now and now.
We shoved that vase through and brought it back in there.
But shoved it through where, for goodness' sake? Sort of through the crack between now and now, sir.
- Right, you've got it.
- Well, I give up.
It's beyond me.
That bit, actually, was a very interesting bit of speculation.
It's an interesting bit of theory.
I love that, between now and now.
At one time, the physical world was supposed to be smooth and indivisible.
You couldn't divide it.
But then I think it was Democritus who said, "Well, what would happen if you got a piece of matter, whatever it might be, "and cut it in two, and then cut it in two again, "and cut it in two, until you got down to something "which you couldn't cut any longer? "That would be an atom.
" So, for a long time, everybody thought everything was just made of little lumps of matter called atoms.
Well, gentlemen, to begin with, time isn't smooth.
It's made up of little bits.
Then they discovered, of course, that the atoms were made up of particles.
And to their horror, they weren't even particles of matter, they were particles of energy.
And it would seem logical that time is built in the same way, built in little lumps.
Like light is made up of photons, little lumps of light, so they're little lumps of energy, that time is made up of little lumps of becoming.
A series of minute present moments.
Mmm, that's it.
Temporal atoms, so to speak.
Having watched the series, I guess I do have a slight problem with this notion of interstitial time, somehow a gap in time between now and now.
According to our best understanding of the nature of time, Einstein's theory of relativity, time can be controlled in some sense.
It might even be possible to move from one time to another.
But to somehow slot in between gaps in time, I have difficulty with.
Time is still, as far as we know, a constant stream.
That the very name of your project is arrogant nonsense? TOMTIT! What, pray, is interstitial time? This, in fact, is a Buddhist idea which goes way, way back.
They say, they believed and still believe, that matter is being created and destroyed and created and destroyed perpetually.
Not so that it goes duddely, duddely, duddely, because it's going billions of time every second, so it's quite impossible for us to see it or measure it, but as a philosophical theory, it does make sense.
But that means that there must be these little gaps between each lump of time, between the now and the now.
You are already familiar with the idea of stepping outside of space-time.
I've lived with the concept for months.
And I've lived with it for many long years.
- I've been there.
- You have? Yes, I have.
Strange place it is, too.
I think the fact that Barry has interest in Buddhism I think, in a subliminal way, shows right through his work on Doctor Who, actually, because it is not superficial.
There is a gentleness and a poetry in the Doctor's reflections of his past, which I think comes from Barry's interest in Buddhism.
Well, when I was a little boy, we used to live in a house that was perched halfway up the top of a mountain.
And behind our house, there sat under a tree an old man.
A hermit, a monk.
He'd lived under this tree for half his lifetime, so they said, and had learnt the secret of life.
It did strike me that the Doctor was an ideal candidate to be somebody who thought in that way.
And so it wasn't that I was trying to proselytize, because Buddhism isn't that sort of religion.
I don't think of it as a religion at all.
It's a way of living.
It just seemed to fit the Doctor and give him a background, a back story, a hinterland, so to speak.
I think it's terribly important to get that sinking side.
Buddhism is a wonderful place to come from when you're doing science fiction.
Barry and I had a great deal in common there.
We both have that leaning.
The old man himself was He was as brittle and dry as a leaf in the autumn.
But what did he say? Nothing.
Not a word.
The story is a direct pinch from a Buddhist legend, which was supposed to be the start of Zen within Buddhism, so a transmission without words, without scriptures, but direct.
And the Doctor had experienced it and tried to explain to Jo.
Creatures beyond your wildest imagination.
Chronovores, time eaters, who will swallow a life as quickly as a boa constrictor can swallow a rabbit.
Are you saying that Kronos is one of these creatures? I am.
The most fearsome of the lot.
According to the ancient Greeks, certainly great philosophers like Aristotle, there were two kinds of time.
There was kronos time, which is our everyday time that we measure with clocks, the real ticking of time.
Then there's kairos time, which is sort of the subjective view we have of time that flows gently by.
So it's really two different ways of measuring or understanding the way time flows.
Kronos, be at peace, I am your friend! LETTS: One of these things that I think that Paul Bernard, the director of The Time Monster, got slightly wrong was the monster side of Kronos.
He had this chap dangling on a Kirby wire, flapping his wings, and he'd got him peak white.
The whole idea being that you could flare the camera so that you wouldn't really see him quite, but every so often you'd catch a glimpse of what was obviously a man in a rubber suit, so to speak, which spoiled things.
And I suggested to him that instead of having peak white, he would have saturated blue and put flames in it so that it was a monster of fire.
But he didn't like that idea.
He latched on to the idea of the fluttering bird and the fluttering feathers to the extent that we took some time at Ealing Studios taking shots of poor white hens being made to flutter very close to the camera so that they were out of focus, which he used every so often as a punctuation to the monster.
- Doctor? - Yeah? It's working again.
That extraordinary machine that Jon had to play with, with the little sort of whirly thing on the top like children have at the seaside, where you hold the stick up and the wind blows the little whirly thing round, was extremely unconvincing, I thought.
(LAUGHING) You just keep your eye on those dials.
It's working! Well, of course it's working! What about this device, the time sensor? Now, the Doctor refers to it as something that can detect disturbances in the time field.
It's exactly what you need if you happen to be looking for a Tardis.
Now, far be it from me to criticise the Doctor in terms of the language he uses, but I wouldn't regard time as a field.
Time is like an axis, a direction, in the same way that space has directions.
Now, if we had a device that could somehow measure ripples in time or whether time speeds up or slows down, of course, that would affect the detector itself and affect the people looking at the detector, so they wouldn't see anything different.
If time were to slow down, the detector dial measuring time, a clock, for instance, would also slow down, and the time of the Doctor and Jo looking at it would also slow down, so they wouldn't see any difference.
So I don't believe that this time sensor could actually work, even in principle.
Sorry.
It's a doomy old day.
I mean, just look at that sky.
Just look at it.
MANNING: There we were, Jon and I, we're left alone with a camera strapped to the car.
And we were driving along.
We'd been driving for ages, waiting.
Time just went on.
We're still waiting for the sort of, you know, action.
Nothing.
So we're babbling.
Jon and I never ever run out of conversation, you know.
Do stop whiffling, Jo.
There's a good girl.
We're not out on a pleasure jaunt, you know.
Suddenly, we heard "Action!" and I just went straight into it because I hadn't made the jump from, you know, that moment between now and now hadn't hit me.
(LAUGHING) And I went straight into, like, "Gloomy old day, Doctor," into this voice that was really Katy, 'cause I used to lift my voice ever so slightly for Jo.
And Jon said He said, "We can't use that, the lorry driver suddenly came out.
" Sorry, Doctor.
So we had to redo it again with a lightness of touch from Jo's vocal quality, which, you know, when I was around and just hanging I mean, I had quite a deep, husky voice.
- What time's the demonstration? - 2:00.
Well, we've got to stop it.
Hang on tight, Jo.
(ENGINE REVVING) I do like the idea of the super drive in Doctor Who's car, the idea that it can speed up and slow down very, very suddenly.
Now, the Doctor talks about this or gives the impression that it has something to do with manipulating time.
I like to think that it might be due to manipulating space and time through a gravitational field.
The theory of relativity says that gravity and acceleration, speeding up and slowing down, are somehow equivalent.
We talk about G forces, meaning gravitational forces, when we speed up and slow down.
So maybe that in Doctor Who's car, in Bessie, is a device that generates a gravitational field that switches on and off, cancelling out the acceleration and deceleration of the car.
Now, I have no idea how this would be built, how it would be fitted into the engine of the car, but at least theoretically, I can see how it might be possible in the distant future.
But why didn't I go through the windscreen? Well, the brakes work by the absorption of inertia, including yours.
(BUZZING) It's working again.
Right, come on, Bessie, old girl.
It's up to you now.
MANNING: Because one can only project into certain areas, and you know, you can base an awful lot on scientific fact, but you've also got to bear in mind we're talking about entertainment, apart from anything else.
And the great thing, hence science fiction, that you can take the basis of science, but you can do that wonderful creation of magic and we get into the fiction, creative truth, whichever way you care to look at it.
That is not wrong.
That's giving children and filling them with the wonders and the fantasy and the possibilities of what could happen if And that's what it's all about, so you put all of that together and you get this extraordinary programme.