Doctor Who - Documentary s12e03 Episode Script

PHILIP HINCHCLIFFE: I was sort of saying, ''I want to actually convince ''the audience that they are where they are.
''It's not just a kids' show with sets.
''This is something really special.
'' DOCTOR: The entire human race awaiting the trumpet blast.
It was a bit of a, I hate the expression, but a bit of a sea change for the programme.
It took it to a different place.
My hand was gift-wrapped in bubble wrap.
(LAUGHING) And all the time I was doing the scene, um, there it was.
It was a risky business.
NOAH: Keep back, I said! I look at it today and think, ''Golly!'' In 1 974, I was offered the job of producing Doctor Who, and having looked at the programme, I formed a view of what I'd like to do with it.
Basically that was to take stories away from Earth and explore more science fiction concepts, create more of a sense of mystery.
ROGER MURRAY-LEACH: Philip said he would like to try and make it feel harder.
More credible.
And if I say less cardboard that sounds trite but, er, a little bit more adult.
DOCTOR: Your mind is beginning to work.
It's entirely due to my influence, of course.
You mustn't take any credit.
HINCHCLIFFE: Bob Holmes had been working for some time alongside Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts to get in a season of scripts.
There were quite a few underway, there was a Cybermen story that was well underway, there was a Dalek story that was well under way from Terry Nation and there was this other story which was called ''Space Station'', I think, originally.
I think the idea probably came from Bob, or Barry, or all three of them, I don't know, and probably was given to Chris Langley, but, I'm not 1 00% sure about that, but anyway, the idea of a space station was there.
I arrived and I was very unhappy.
I mean, I was really excited to be taking the show on, but I was really rather disappointed, because I'd got what I thought were two old-style Doctor Whos that I didn't really want.
I wanted to make my mark and take the show off immediately in another direction.
And I had this other story that was in deep trouble, it had been given to another writer, John Lucarotti, who was a sort of reliable old stager, apparently, and he was getting on with it.
But that was going to be my first studio.
So when the scripts eventually came in from John Lucarotti, they were very ambitious, requiring sort of enormous production values, like a sort of jungle-type set for the spaceship and all the rest of it.
It was just too complicated and actually wasn't working.
DOCTOR: Of course, that explains everything.
So anyway, that script in the end had to be, um, really, thrown away, and I was staring, you know, catastrophe in the face, really.
So I went to the Head of Series, Bill Slater, and said, ''Look, this is a dire situation, ''this is the first studio.
We've got to do something about this.
''What I think is Bob Holmes should write the scripts.
'' And so Bob, within three or four weeks, actually wrote a brand-new script.
(DOCTOR WHO THEME) When I read the script for ''The Ark In Space'' I thought it was, well, a very interesting script, and full of challenges, and lots of challenges for me personally because I was not what I would call a very technical director.
So things like special effects were not my sort of general line.
So this was something quite different.
I had worked with Wendy Williams two or three years earlier on an episode of Z Cars and she was a very lively, or is a very lively, sparky sort of person.
WILLIAMS: I think my then husband, Hugh David, was very happy for me to be in, doing a Doctor Who, as he had done two before.
He had directed ''The Highlanders'' and ''Fury from the Deep', I think it was called.
And he had a great deal of respect and admiration for Rodney's work.
So that was good.
KENTON MOORE: Wendy I liked very much.
For one thing, she's a very attractive woman, which goes a long way.
Your comrade is a romantic.
Perhaps we both are.
I remember talking to Anna Massey and I said, ''I've been offered this part ''and I'm supposed to have an IQ of 300, how on Earth do I convey that?'' She said, ''You have straw coming out of your ears.
'' I will inject a monod block.
Oh, that'll do the trick, eh? Your colony speech has no meaning.
I mean it'll bring her around, reverse the process.
WILLIAMS: It's like some people who are really, really, really intelligent, like a lot professors, have no what you call common sense but they're brilliantly clever.
And I think we've all met people like that.
BENNETT: I thought Wendy brought a great deal of control to the part of Vira and a lot of seriousness and a lot of responsibility, a sense of responsibility to the role.
Explain yourselves.
Well, there isn't very much to explain, we're just travellers in space, like yourself.
That is not adequate.
When I watched it again, I thought, ''My God, how haughty was I?'' So bloody superior to everybody.
She will either survive or die.
The action of the antiprotonic is not predictable.
Here is our Prime Unit.
Prime Unit? Er, our leader, I think you would say? BENNETT: I'd also worked with Kenton Moore.
Again, a year or so earlier, again on an episode of Z Cars.
He was pleased playing a policeman, at that point.
I remember thinking you can't go far wrong with a character like Noah.
I mean, he does everything.
He's a trained astronaut and yet, all the things which he's not trained for, and it's impossible to train anyone for, happens to him.
He loses control of his spaceship, he loses control of his body and, more tragically, he loses control of his mind.
BENNETT: I think the critical thing for Kenton was how desperate his character should be in the transformation, how awful it should be for him.
Um, and bearing in mind that the audience were principally children.
The revivification must be stopped.
Why? I don't understand.
It is an order.
I am the Commander.
It's an horrific situation.
You can't disguise it, you can't tone it down.
You can't pretend it's other than what it is.
Here is a man who's going berserk, and he has no control over it.
No! No, the plan has changed.
I was always keen that he should take it as honestly and as seriously as possible.
And then we would see if anybody in authority in the production would complain.
I thought that Tom Baker was inspired casting.
I think for generations after he played the part, he was Doctor Who.
I don't think there's any doubt about that.
HINCHCLIFFE: I remember saying things to him like, ''You're not really human, ''you know, you're fond of Earth, and fond of human beings ''but you're not a human being.
''And there's a certain kind of perspective ''that you have on the universe that is unique to you and your character, ''and I'd like to bring this out.
'' You haven't touched anything, have you, Harry? Me? Well, there are only two of us here and your name is Harry.
I remember in rehearsal he had a child's exercise book that he used to write his moves down in with a stubby old pencil and I thought that was so right, that Doctor Who would have a child's exercise book and a scrubby old pencil, and that's the way he would do it.
Not much oxygen.
Still, nothing to worry about.
Suffocation is nothing to worry about? I remember suggesting to him that he might like to have a personal prop, uh, a yo-yo.
We can survive for quite a time yet.
While you play with that yo-yo? Because I always felt that in moments of stress, great stress, and when the Doctor's really up against it, it would be a very nice thing if he could produce his yo-yo and play with it while thinking out the solution to the problem facing him.
Which he used to from time to time.
Just a simple gravity reading, Sarah.
Yes, almost certainly we're in some kind of artificial satellite.
-Now, isn't that interesting? -Not very.
I think it is.
But he never got quite as good as I hoped he would.
As far as the set design is concerned of ''The Ark In Space'', I would have had some very radical conversations with Roger Murray-Leach, the designer, well ahead of the show.
I saw it as a chance to come away from some of the, uh, more fantastical sets that had been around to try and get away from some of the wobbles.
I was sort of saying, ''Your input into this is absolutely vital, ''it's completely centre stage, ''I want to actually convince the audience ''that they are where they are.
'' The budget was the most daunting thing, but it always was on Doctor Who.
This isn't a mortuary, Harry, quite the reverse.
Reverse? I'd hardly call it a nursery.
-Cryogenic chamber.
-What? Old principle but I've never seen it applied on this scale.
I think in the script the people who were asleep, as it were, were sort of cryogenically frozen, were all sort of in a line, but there had to be a lot of them.
We had to have the sense that this was the remnants of the human race.
It couldn't be just four guys in a corner, you know, lying down.
Instead, we turned it on its head and we made it a cylinder with the pods going up and up and up.
HINCHCLIFFE: I remember vaguely that Roger said he'd had to have a word to get a special dispensation to get a set like this built so high under the lighting gantry.
The bottom layer was made out of There were steel frames with flattage on them and then angled, which would allow the actor to lie back with a foot rest.
And they could be wheeled in and out, and the rest was just a series of flats which were hauled into place, with chains and then knocked together in position.
We did want to be able to see from room to room, as if there was another tube.
So in this case, we did put a corridor with a mirror at the end on a slight angle, so it appeared as if there was another pod in view.
I think we'll try this way first.
MURRAY-LEACH: As for the corridors, one wanted to make it feel endless.
So I built The corridor itself was very long and you just couldn't see the other end, from one end to the other.
It literally stopped the minute it was out of vision.
All the studio floors were always painted and I thought it used to kill the sets dead, so for that corridor we lifted everything up, so we built the floor out of rostrum.
And the windows, then you could actually look down out of rather than, again, seeing the studio floor.
The stars outside the windows on the corridor, I just hung black velvet drapes outside the windows, and then strung fairy lights all over them.
So, that was hours for my assistant and I, up on ladders pinning hundreds and hundreds of strings of fairy lights.
BENNETT: Going into the studio and seeing the set for the first time was terrific.
We'd talked about it so much, I'd looked at models, I'd looked at the plan, all the rest of it, and there it was at last.
I say, what a place for a mortuary! MOORE: It felt, in essence, cathedral-like.
It felt vast, it felt spacious.
And there was sheer white walls and the cryogenic chambers themselves, the plastic covers, I thought were very, very convincing.
And a bit chilling, too.
It did convey a huge, uh space, without it actually being as huge as it looks, or as high as it looks.
It's an amazing sight, isn't it? The cryogenic chamber and that sort of solution for the spaceship were design of the highest order, really, I mean, feature film design work, really, on a shoestring.
I think the downside of the set was that being made principally of plastic, it was very creaky, because of all the heat coming from the lights.
You have to imagine, just above where you can see, whole banks of lights.
And there was another thing which also creaked, or made a terrible noise.
There's a trolley that Vira moves across the floor to go to administer to people to wake them up.
And the wheels on this plastic trolley made a terrible din, so at the dub afterwards, one had to take all that out, just remove it.
So I had to tell Wendy Williams not to speak while she was moving this trolley, because otherwise it would be disastrous.
The drama tradition at the time was, and even more so now, was that drama was usually shot in very moody light, and Doctor Who was exactly the same, very moody lights.
Er, a lot of shadow and all the rest of it.
But I felt that in this sterile environment, we should actually go completely the reverse and have very bright lights.
Which is very testing indeed, particularly testing for the lighting director and the sound people, who have to get in big booms without casting shadows everywhere.
It was a risky business.
Um, and, I look at it today and think, ''Golly!'' It was brilliant, really.
I mean, in a sense, it looks easy but it was every bit as hard as lighting a set full of lots of shadow.
-What is it? -I saw something moving.
-Nonsense, Harry.
-I'm positive, I saw something move.
-Trick of the light.
-It wasn't a trick of the light.
I saw something moving! When I first read the scripts, the idea of the Wirrn I thought was a rather nasty idea, being parasites, or being parasitical, laying their eggs in other bodies.
So the first stage of the Wirrn is its grub form.
The Wirrn grub was largely made out of bubble wrap sprayed green.
And the problem was the blooming popping of the bubbles and this poor little Wirrn, as he was, Stuart Fell, or whoever it was, who was in it sort of swimming along the floor going pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.
HINCHCLIFFE: People nowadays say, ''Oh, look, it's just bubble wrap.
'' But actually, my memory is that bubble wrap was quite a new material, actually.
And I think it was, you know, people in the know said, ''Oh, look they've used bubble wrap.
'' By that I mean people in television production and design and visual effects, they knew that it was bubble wrap, but I don't think the general public actually knew much about bubble wrap.
So in that sense it was a cheap, clever solution, I think, to how to create this grub.
Looking at it now, I wish the body of the grub could have had more slime about it.
But it's very difficult to achieve that in a studio where you weren't allowed to have any water.
It really did have to be a solid skin, but I would have liked it to have had a bit more slime.
HINCHCLIFFE: The stages of how does Noah turn into, you know, the Wirrn were handled, I think, as best as we could under the constraints of the studio shooting time available.
There was this, I thought a wonderful scene, where Noah is aware that he is physically changing.
His hand has actually taken on the hand of another being and it's a horrendous being, it's a Wirrn.
And so in rehearsal, we'd always played it that my hand would be within a Wirrn's hand, so that I could move my fingers within the Wirrn's hand, as a Wirrn's claw would move, and I wouldn't, I would have no control over it.
So I would try to control it and it would be impossible.
But when we came to record it, that's when the problems for me as an actor started.
I was sent off to have the Wirrn's hand put on in makeup.
I went off to my dressing room and these two makeup ladies turned up, one had a roll of bubble wrap, one had a roll of Sellotape and the other one had a bottle, a plastic bottle of green liquid, which looked like, indeed I think it was, Fairy washing-up liquid and my heart sank.
Because my visualisation of the horror of this hand went right out of the window, because they started to wrap this bubble wrap round my hand, Sellotaping it, and so my hand was encased inside it, I couldn't move it, but to make it even worse, I (GROANS) it didn't look convincing to me that it was an object which would fill you with horror.
But of course there was nothing I could do about it.
When it was all bound up and there it was, we went down onto the set, the cameras had all been lined up, the props were all there, everything was ready to go and we went.
Ah! VIRA: Noah! Moving on to where I had half a Wirrn on me.
NOAH: Fools, human fools! That was fine, because I couldn't actually see myself.
In the previous scene with the hand, I was reacting and acting off that object, my hand, whereas now, I couldn't see what I looked like, so, I could act emotions of someone who is losing his mind and at the same time losing his physical body.
The design of the adult Wirrn had to take note of two things, one was the insect on which it was based.
It had to be an insect-like creature.
It also had to take into account how it was going to be operated, because it was not to be a puppet.
It was to be operated by a stuntman inside it.
Therefore, the design of it had to take into account that the stuntman had to be able to move his feet.
The cameraman obviously just had to keep the camera off the floor at the point where the stuntman's feet might have been seen, er, to, you know, which would've given the game away completely.
How much anatomy do you remember, Harry? Quite a lot, I think.
But you need a blooming entomologist for this thing.
The Wirrn was a good design.
It was functional, it looked like what it was meant to be, a sort of giant waspy thing.
So, in that sense, it was great.
The fact that it was lit quite highly, um, I think, you know, took away some of the mystery and Compare it, say with Alien, which is a similar sort of story, the movie Alien, you know, it was dark, it was lubricated.
It was, you know, glistening.
You had the sense of something truly organic.
But it costs a lot of time and money to create that.
(GASPS) Keep back! And don't touch me! As we originally recorded the show, I think it's Episode 3, uh, there is a scene out in the corridor where Noah pleads with Vira to kill him.
And he says that he's in agony.
And I thought it was really good scene.
I thought it went well and it really felt right.
When we were recording it, I suddenly I was in the gallery and I suddenly got this feeling, ''My God! I don't know that we can use that.
'' Because it was so sort of spine-chilling, really.
To me, as an adult viewer, let alone a kid, that this man was in such pain and torment that he was asking his sort of best, you know, his colleague to actually dispatch him.
We shot the scene and it was edited.
And it was in the show.
I knew that we couldn't We couldn't use that.
So I went to the Head of Series.
This was the way the BBC worked.
If you were concerned about something in your programme, you referred it upwards to your head of department.
And so he looked at the whole thing with me and I said, ''Look, I'm a bit concerned about this moment here.
'' And he said, ''Yes, I agree with you.
'' So we did a, did an edit on it.
I remember being disappointed and tried to argue that it, you know, that was the context.
There'd been proper build-up to it and so on and so forth.
But no, it was judged to be too strong.
Keep back, I said! Noah, tell us one thing.
-How much time do we have? -Time? So there is a rather abrupt edit in that scene where the Doctor and Vira are talking one moment to Noah on the other side of a door.
And then the next thing you see is that the door has dropped.
I think his gun lands on the floor at her feet.
And that's all there is.
MOORE: I was really devastated when it was cut.
'Cause I thought it was essential for the story as a whole.
This was part of of the evolving of, um, of Noah, from a perfectly normal, competent spaceship commander into an horrendous creature from another world.
And this seemed to me so right.
And it was I was really upset when it was cut.
And I think this I think the episode would've been the better for keeping it in, to be quite frank.
What that taught me was if we really wrote characters well, really good, juicy characterisation, and plausibly, psychologically plausibly, and put them in good relationships, the narrative could be carried by this.
The frighteningness of it, the monstrousness, the monstrous elements in the programme didn't have to entirely depend upon how monstrous your monster was.
It was the human element.
And when I then discovered that Bob Holmes had a sort of predilection for what I would call possession stories, where human beings become possessed, how those things work incredibly well within this format.
And so that was a real sort of insight for me which I got from that scene which went too far, actually.
(DOCTOR WHO THEME) NICK BRIGGS: I was 1 3 years old when ''The Ark in Space'' was first broadcast and it had a huge impact on me.
I'd already bought into the new Doctor completely in ''Robot''.
From the moment he opened his mouth, that amazing voice.
I'll have to link in my own cerebral cortex.
But this was a real gear change.
And it was gear change to something that at the time I thoroughly approved of.
The power could burn out a living brain! I agree, an ordinary brain.
But mine is exceptional.
When the show went out, I think the ideas that we'd had, what we wanted to do, it was proven at that point that they'd borne fruit, that actually, they worked.
HINCHCLIFFE: The second episode got a huge rating for that time.
It was 1 3 and a half million, I think.
And, er, it took me aback, I mean, it was extraordinary, it was in the top 1 0.
Which seemed to be a certain vindication of everything we had been trying to do.
This show looked so different.
It felt so different, with the science fiction sort of content, really, in the look.
MURRAY-LEACH: Everybody wanted to see the new Doctor.
And Tom fulfilled on every level.
As did Lis, as did Ian.
Homo sapiens.
What an inventive, invincible species.
After ''Ark in Space'' went out, when I went back to school, everyone was talking about Tom Baker.
They'd been talking about him since the beginning of ''Robot'' but I think this really cemented him.
And I think the reason they were talking about him is that he In a way they'd never spoken about Jon Pertwee, is that he was constantly surprising.
Here they are, out among the stars, waiting to begin a new life.
Ready to outsit eternity.
BENNETT: To be absolutely honest, my feeling was that it was still early days for Tom.
But I hoped that the children and the public generally were taking him to heart and I think they did.
Life is returning to the Ark.
And soon to the world.
-Have a jelly baby, Vira.
-Ah, thank you.
WILLIAMS: Forty years on, it's quite amazing that I'm still hearing from people who've bought the DVD and that they're enjoying it.
It's quite incredible and I feel very proud that I was lucky enough to be chosen to be in it.
It was a wonderful experience.
A wonderful group of people to be with.
BENNETT: It's absolutely great that people still enjoy it and don't mind it creaking in places.
(LAUGHS) He must have known that that would happen.
For a designer, the minute you stop seeing the mistakes and what's wrong, you should give up and go home, really.
It was built on a shoestring.
To me, it looks like as if it was built on a shoestring.
However, bearing in mind how little we had to spend, I think it's not bad.
More than a vestige of human spirit.
But it was fun.
We had such fun.
My daughter, my elder daughter and her family, all live in southern Spain.
And a couple of years ago, my daughter said to me, ''Oh, we've got a treat for you, Dad.
''We've got a copy of 'The Ark in Space'.
'' And I thought, ''Oh!'' And she said, ''And Jake and Max, '' my grandsons, ''they've invited all their mates up from school in the village.
'' I thought, ''Oh, God! It's going to be even worse! ''They're all going to turn up.
'' And as it started and started to progress, one by one, all the children watching the screen started to turn round and look at me.
And they were going, ''Oh, cool! Cool, man! Cool!'' (CHUCKLES) That was it.
The magic of Doctor Who.