Doctor Who - Documentary s13e01 Episode Script

Bob Holmes had invited Bob Banks Stewart to write the Loch Ness Monster story before I arrived, you know, as the new producer.
I remember at the very beginning, when I was asked to do Doctor Who, I said, "Look, although I'm entranced by science fiction, "I'm not awfully good at imagining "planets and, you know I mean, it's brilliantly done, "but I would feel much more at home with a really twisty, "possibly frightening story on Earth.
" HINCHCLIFFE: His strengths are details of character, a sense of humour.
And so, yes, this was the right kind of Doctor Who story to use his talents, really.
I suddenly thought, "Hey, the Loch Ness Monster," because I'm Scottish.
And because everybody is claiming that there's a sighting, they've seen it.
At this time, there was a man called Tim Dinsdale, who was I think he was an engineer or something from Reading, who decided to devote his life to tracking down the monster.
And he took this piece of film which was quite well publicised at the time, which showed something ducking up and down in the Loch.
We believe that this is the head, up at the top, here.
I was entranced by the idea that the Loch Ness monster either existed or didn't.
And that seemed to me like, if I may mix my metaphors, a sitting duck for a Doctor Who.
- Loch Ness? - Yes sir.
Don't tell me you've found the monster? As it happens, Your Grace, that's just what we do mean.
I think a lot of sci-fi stories, in particular Doctor Who stories, sort of visit well-known mysteries.
And then sometimes come up with a sort of alien answer as to what's really lying behind the mystery, like the Bermuda Triangle or something like this.
Working with Philip and Bob Holmes was a pleasure.
Bob Holmes was one of the best story editors that I ever knew.
Brimming with ideas.
HINCHCLIFFE: The two Bobs worked very well together.
These were two writers who came from short story writing and journalistic backgrounds into television.
They quickly learnt the ropes and they started writing loads of series.
So, they all knew other because one would be story editor this week on a series and the other guys would be one of the writers, and then vice versa.
I had done quite a substantial amount of writing.
For example, I did Avengers.
When I looked at it again recently, I thought, you could put Steed in for the Doctor and Emma Peel for Sarah Jane and give them the same problem, the state was in danger, the world was in danger.
It was perfect Steed and Emma Peel country.
I really enjoyed the idea of the Doctor and his sidekicks, you know, running around on the moors.
It's not as bad as "The Green Death" probably, for stereotyping, even though the first line of it manages to get in phrases like "I dinnae ken", "haggis" and "listen, Willie".
I think one of the really interesting elements of the location here is the fact that the oil boom is mentioned in it.
And that was really, really on the money.
The first oil barrels from the North Sea came ashore the week that this story was broadcast.
I mean, we have today Scotland voting to become an independent country so that they can keep the oil revenue.
But you can imagine the amazement, you know, in the mid-'70s when these oil rigs suddenly sprang up.
There are a few things in it which do chime some nice little bells at the time with topical issues.
He's been a different man since the oil companies came.
He seemed to blame everything on the oil company.
All his servants have left to go and work for them.
Well, that did happen.
Certainly the northeast of Scotland's fishing industry was badly dented by the oil industry.
And the roughnecks weren't popular with a lot of people.
Frankly, he doesn't like us, not one little bit.
There was also, even at that time, talk of hydrogen.
It's about time the people who run this planet of yours realised that to be dependent upon a mineral slime just doesn't make sense.
Now, the energising of hydrogen It was very topical, strangely enough, 35, 36 years ago.
It needed to have a certain Scottish air about it.
I mean, take the apparel of Doctor Who, with his bunnet and his tartan.
Was the scarf tartan? I'm not sure.
The Scottishness of it all was pretty good, really, because we were shooting this in Sussex, I think.
It was outside Bognor, because they couldn't afford to go to Scotland with the complete unit.
But they did their very best to create the moor, you know, the Scottish pine trees and so forth.
And Douglas Camfield, who directed it, was of course, you know, a past master at finding locations, and he did exceedingly well in this.
Dougie inspired everybody to believe it was Scotland, and I'm not kidding, we did, actually, for a while.
Clearly, the scripts needed a lot more film content than we would normally allocate.
STEWART: When we saw a wee bit of the loch, there was only one thing missing.
The mountains.
Not a single mountain in sight.
The actual shooting of the spaceship in the quarry, where you had the model very close to the camera.
STEVE BOWMAN: We put the spaceship model on a foreground table, and then we blended the table top, which would have been of timber or something, with the same ingredients, to look as if it was part of the quarry.
Which gave the effect that you had this huge spaceship.
And we were way, way, way back, away from the camera, standing on a Jeep and crouched down.
And they lined the shot up so that you couldn't see any of us.
It took hours.
We were lined up, and we all came out and jumped off the Jeep.
Dougie and I knew by then as well, you had to absolutely get those shots right.
Otherwise, they wouldn't work.
And I was really pleased with the spaceship.
I thought it worked incredibly well.
There's some very, very good visual effects work on the show.
A lot of very good model work, model filming.
I remember the spaceship was achieved not shooting in water itself, because that has a lot of inherent problems, but in a smoke-filled room or tank.
And it was, it can be convincing, you've got to get the level of smoke quite right in order to achieve this, and the right lenses and lighting, of course.
HINCHCLIFFE: I thought the interior of the spaceship was really good.
But a lot of it came from Dougie because, you know, he wanted some sort of organic truth emanating from the script to sort of make sense, in a way.
CURZON: The cloning booths, Tom Yardley Jones and myself went to Pinewood because they'd just got a new fibreglass machine in, and we thought, "Oh, this is going to be good.
"We can really make it atmospheric and what have you.
" But when we got there, they gave us an estimate and the construction manager said, "Oh, that'll be £700 each.
" We wanted three and the total budget was something like about £500 for four episodes, I mean (LAUGHS) The actual controls of the spaceship were going to be visual effects, anyway.
John Horton, the Vis Effects Designer, had run out of money again.
So, he came to me and said, "Can I have some money to do the effects?" And of course, one has to say yes because otherwise, there wouldn't be a show, would there? There was a lot of titillating laughter that went out throughout the studio every day when the Zygons were working the Zygon machine.
I have to say, in the most decent voice I can say, they were called "breast-fondling scenes".
The poor Zygons that had to do them, I mean, when you're actually doing this onscreen with all the other actors going I mean, it was a wonderful moment.
CURZON: The lighting in there, John Dixon I remember Dougie saying to him, "I really want this pulsating light.
"And it really wants to be atmospheric, "to the point where it is changing colour all the time.
" And I remember John saying, "Well, it's going to look like a disco, quite honestly, if we do that.
" But Dougie was still adamant, and in the end, John won and said, "You can have it red and green.
" (LAUGHING) And it was red and green.
Directors always want to try a few extra things, you know.
And it's not always easy to carry everyone with you under the time constraints, and perhaps people just don't see it, you know.
The lighting directors were key people on the production.
They controlled the whole look of the show, really.
And they were also responsible for the technical excellence of the picture that was being recorded.
You tried to find someone who was in sympathy with the show.
They're going to be fighting you in the sense of if you want to take the level down to a point where they say, "Look, the viewer won't be able to see this, you must believe me.
" You know, you have to listen to them when they're saying that.
CURZON: The Inn, again, was John Dixon's nightmare, because the lighting director has probably been warned, "If you see a ceiling in a set, get it omitted straight away, "because we can't light it.
" So, there was this tussle going on between myself and John over the ceiling piece in the pub.
And I said, "No, I'm not taking it down, you know.
That's it.
"You'll have to try and light it.
" And I think in some of the scenes, he was floor lighting it, you know.
So, I mean, he could do it, he just He wanted the easy way out, you know.
BOWMAN: There usually was quite a lot of coordination between the set designer or production designer and the visual effects designer, otherwise the whole thing would fall around our ears, really.
It was very much one of those programmes where the different departments did have to get together.
We were all in the same block in those days.
Nigel would be in the floor above us and we were on the second floor, scenery block at Television Centre.
So it was very easy to pop upstairs or he'd come downstairs, see how things were doing.
It was a wonderfully exciting time to work with, not just in isolation, but to work with writers, and to work with, you know, the set designer and the visual effects people.
Philip, the producer at the time, was the rallying force, coordinating, pulling everything together.
You had to challenge your designers and your directors, but not ask them to do the impossible.
And so, there was this balancing act between getting a script with all the writer's crazy ideas and then sort of editing that to some extent to make it manageable.
- What are you? - I am Broton, Warlord of the Zygons.
The real stars of it are the Zygon costumes, which are just fantastic.
- Where have you come from? - Centuries ago by your timescale, our craft was damaged.
We landed here to await rescue.
And that cliffhanger at the end of Part One, which is just one of the best cliffhangers ever, isn't it? And Sarah? Better keep his recovery dark for the moment.
Well, why? Do you think Harry's still in danger from something? (SCREAMS) That's everything you want from the first episode of a new season of Doctor Who when you're a child.
"What the hell was that?" You know.
We had a wonderful costume designer on the show, James Acheson.
This was an invasion-of-Earth story, yet another It's actors walking around with funny heads on, you know.
How do you do something about that? It was much better to go with the human form and add things to it rather than try and completely hide the fact that there was a man inside it.
James came up with this idea that you actually completely ignore where the head joins the body, and you do something completely different.
The Zygons were supposed to have throbbing, illuminated chests, and craniums that also pulsed, but the electrics were either too dangerous or the time and the budget was too small.
It was all trial and error to start with.
They must have had a fantastic budget.
He must have had more than Design, with latex and casting and this, that and the other materials.
But they really were splendid to see.
He also found a sort of, probably with Dougie, in conversations with Dougie, a sort of philosophical and scientific basis for what this creature would look like.
The idea that, you know, it's to do with being underwater.
So there's the suckers, the tentacles, etcetera, etcetera.
It was half embryo, half sort of octopoidal sucker textured creature.
They just look so utterly ruthless.
And I think that wonderful shot before you've actually seen one full on, where you're looking right into Broton's eyes.
Whoa! That's just great, isn't it? ACHESON: I was quite pleased with the results.
There was a wonderful sculptor called John Friedlander who we worked with a lot.
And he sculpted the actual heads.
HINCHCLIFFE: The problem is always, where does the mask fit the eyes and the mouth? And that, again, worked much better in this one, because there's quite a lot of dialogue that these monsters have to have.
I don't understand, Commander.
They were dying when I left them.
Then you left too early! The other thing that I learnt very quickly, I think probably the Vogon experience had fed into my consciousness pretty quickly, is the voice of the alien.
I remember agreeing with Dougie, there's no way we can just have one of these Shakespearean, boomy voices coming out.
So he said, "Don't worry.
I know what I'm going to do here.
I can filter it.
" So he, again, it was a brilliant idea, and a brilliant execution of this sort of under-the-water, sibilant sort of sound.
You are too clever, Doctor.
Clever and dangerous.
But it's got to work all the time, in real time, while you're in the studio.
You can't dub this afterwards.
So, that was another very clever solution to a sort of age-old Doctor Who problem.
Recall the Skarasen and take that creature away.
I think everybody that sees "Terror of the Zygons" says that the actual costumes are what make it, quite honestly.
My recall of the Loch Ness monster and the Skarasen is we had higher expectations of what we could achieve.
The key thing is can it be achieved and be made to look, you know, plausible and realistic enough? And I remember asking that question with Dougie, of the Visual Effects department.
And we got a slightly more optimistic answer back than we were expecting.
Because we thought, "Well, there's very little.
"We will have to really pare this script down.
"And can we really have a monster coming up the Thames, "and will it really work?" It was designed by John Horton.
It was an effect sort of based around a skull of a dog.
And we were going to do some stop-frame motions.
Stop-frame animation, a technique which was that sort of Harryhausen technique, can work quite well.
But you need time, really, to do all this.
I do remember we started sort of early evening, about 6:00 or 7:00, and we went on to about 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning shooting a frame, moving it again a small amount.
You know, this does take a period of time.
In itself, you know, it was fine, but when you put all the bits together, it didn't really add up.
It's a bit of a giggle, quite honestly.
I mean, when you do see it, you know, you don't think, "My God, this is Ray Harryhausen on a good day.
" You think, "They've run out of money.
" We junked a lot of the filming of the Skarasen, I think, and just used the bare minimum of it in the show in the end.
I shall recreate my own planet here on Earth.
- Using forced labour? - That is my intention.
John Woodnutt, one of Dougie Camfield's regular kind of rep there.
It always started the same way, a great peal of laughter at the other end.
"You're not going to believe what I'm asking you to do this time," he'd say.
"But how do you fancy being" And then stopped.
He was laughing so much.
And he said, "No, I'll start again.
"How would you like to be "a Scottish Duke and a monster at one and the same time?" He said, "You know, two for the price of one.
" He said, "In fact, you're going to be playing three characters.
" Because you're going to play Broton, Broton pretending to be the Duke and the Duke being the Duke.
And I want to see the difference between the two.
The task is challenging but not impossible.
John Woodnutt, I suppose the word is "consummate", he'd done just about everything.
The canvas of his acting work was pretty broad.
Generally speaking, villains see themselves as hero figures, and the more of the hero figure you portray, the more credible the whole thing becomes, and the more horrific.
Tomorrow, I demonstrate my ultimate power.
He's great here, actually, great, controlled kind of humourless thing, and I loved that line where he says about aliens You're all utterly unhinged.
Must be.
Aliens? He brought a touch of class to Doctor Who.
"But that seems not to count these days.
" (SARAH CHUCKLING) Another person who's really good is Lillias Walker, Peter Vaughan's wife.
Lillias Walker, who plays the nurse.
Dr Sullivan, how are you feeling? You never actually suspect she's an alien.
Harry, it's me, Sarah.
I think you should let him rest.
He is under sedation, you know.
Yes.
Yes, of course.
She's just like one of those really cold-hearted nurses with no bedside manner.
What are you doing? Well, the English soldier reckoned they were being bugged and sure enough, I think I've found it, though how on Earth anybody could have fixed this here As for Angus, the proprietor of the inn, that was a wee Scottish actor called Angus Lennie.
Well, I am the seventh son of a seventh son (CHUCKLES) Angus Lennie was a joy to work with and when I had that lovely scene where I had to say, "We're looking for bugs.
" Oh, bugs, is it? Well, you can tell your Brigadier from me that this is a clean house.
Yes, well, it's not that sort of bug we were looking for.
He had this wonderful delicacy about him.
Here in Tulloch we don't need any clever contraptions to tell us what people are up to.
Everybody knows everybody else's business.
It's a matter of principle.
He was a very charming, and I think quite special Scottish actor.
But I think the acting honours in "Terror of the Zygons" have got to go to Ian Marter.
There's quite a few crush injuries.
The rig collapsed.
I think I'd better take a look at these, sir.
You just believe in him.
He's serious and a real professional.
Also, he's got a fantastic heroic look about him.
You just look at him and think here's a man that you would trust, you know.
This is roast beef of old England here, you know.
But when he gets to play the evil doppelganger, he's terrifying.
It was sad, in a way, that we had to phase him out because he didn't deserve it in terms of his performances or anything like that.
Coming? I think I'll stick to Intercity this time, Doctor.
We had Ian Marter, whose character was never going to last forever.
I think it was just a little bit, there were too many of us in it at that point.
Seemed a rather curious thing to have two service characters backing Doctor Who and Sarah Jane up.
When you've got UNIT in the show, there's much less of the Doctor, actually, on screen.
You know, you've got Sarah Jane, Harry, and then you've got the Brigadier.
And so there's not nearly as much of the Doctor in this story as there were in my stories, you know, in later episodes.
Why have you called me back? I hope you've got a very good reason.
I was so used to the Jon Pertwee era.
We were so content with the way we had all developed as characters, that when Tom took over, we had to kind of change a little.
Both Tom and I came into a very successful show that had a very strong sort of formula, if you like.
Script editor, producer, a star with Jon Pertwee, UNIT, you know, Nick Courtney.
This was a formula and it was working and it had been going for several years and suddenly, it was all changing.
Now, I'm not saying that's a good or a bad thing.
In all fairness, every story has to change.
And so, probably the old guard might have known the writing was on the wall.
LEVENE: I hadn't heard anything but I had a quiet dread in my tummy.
Having enjoyed the Jon Pertwee years with such relish, and gotten through the Tom Baker years with a professional attitude, I realised that we were on our way out.
FARQUHAR: I remember Nick Courtney saying that when they worked together on "Robot" they got on really great and Tom was a good drinking companion.
But when he came back for "Terror of the Zygons", Tom was kind of quite distant.
When Tom took over the Doctor, his approach was so utterly different, it did momentarily throw us.
You still on duty, Mr Benton? - Well, yes, I am.
- Then get outside and scout around.
When an ego is that big, there is no way little men like me It's like an ant on an elephant's leg.
And he was a force to be reckoned with.
There's no question.
And I just always wondered if he just seems a little bit sulky, having to share with the sort of, you know, the old guard for the first couple of episodes.
He comes into his stride later on really well.
And his scenes with Broton are great.
Social call? What struck me about Tom's performance in "Zygons" was how on the nose he was so quickly.
I'll say one thing for you, Broton.
You think big.
He was in great form.
Being able to be cheeky, and to send up, you know, the limitations of a story.
And what are you going to do with it when you've got it? Isn't it a bit large for just about six of you? And yet, when it was needed, he could be absolutely serious.
The radio picked up some strange sound but as far as we know, the sea was calm and empty.
It may be calm, but it's never empty.
Occasionally I would sit in the viewing room next to the gallery and overlooking the studio.
And I do remember that there were problems of running over time.
All the shows were very, very tight.
Dougie was scrupulous and punctilious about not wanting to be a director who's overrun.
And so I think he sort of flagged that up.
CURZON: The underground set was quite a big set in the studio, but it was made of rocks and fibreglass, and every time the scene crew set it, it was off its marks.
HINCHCLIFFE: Everybody works off the plan.
Cameras were on big pedestals in those days and pushed around.
And so if you had anything that was off by a foot or everything else was slightly out of kilter.
Which would mean that when you were blocking in your camera rehearsal, Dougie would be expecting the shot to come up all nice and clean and somehow it wasn't.
Trying to deal with it, you're eating into rehearsal times in the morning.
If you do start to move it, John Dixon would say, "You've moved it all.
"My lighting plan has gone askew.
You can't do it.
" So, Dougie was really enraged about it, I don't blame him, quite honestly.
It was technically quite a complicated show, so there was huge pressure on the director.
Something about it was confrontational all the time, you know.
If it wasn't the Costume department, it was Design.
If it wasn't Design, it was Sound.
Douglas Camfield was mainly a film director.
And I'm sure there were times where he felt quite frustrated about video and the problems of shooting in video, although he did it very well.
CURZON: The set I designed for the underground labyrinth, it was a bit of a problem.
The costumes, when they were actually fitted, didn't actually go through the doorways that we'd designed for them to go through.
Now, either the door's got to get bigger or my monster's got to get smaller.
And I remember that happening in the "Zygons", and luckily we didn't have to cut the Zygons down.
The door was made bigger.
We had to, overnight, cut them so that they did manage to get in.
But they sort of wiggled as they went in.
It's the first time I'd worked with Dougie Camfield, the director, and he was very demanding.
And also his PA, Edwina.
HINCHCLIFFE: Edwina Craze, yes.
She was lovely.
I mean, the BBC, when I joined, was full of these unbelievably talented and clever production managers, or you'd call them First Assistants in filming.
Edwina Craze was a delight to work with.
She was really professional in her job.
It was like driving a Rolls-Royce when you had an Edwina Craze, you know, in charge of the production.
Very authoritative, but also nice sense of humour.
And she was very, very popular, but incredibly strict.
I mean, off the set, she was an absolute pussycat, adorable.
But she could keep a whole studio full of hairy men in check with a look.
I often worked with Edwina because we got on so well, and she did number of big shows for me including, I think, Nancy Astor.
And I remember my daughter, who was quite young then, probably her first time on set ever, and she said, "Daddy, who's the scary lady who shouts a lot?" But it was Edwina.
Well, of course she doesn't, but she does in a firm voice.
But you need these people to run a film set, you know.
And no, she was delightful, and unfortunately, died very prematurely.
It was a terribly sad thing.
She was great.
If my memory serves me correctly, this was going to be a six-part story.
And I think what happened is that as we came to the scripting process, there was a decision made about how long the season would be.
Well, "Terror of the Zygons" was actually planned to be the last story of Tom Baker's first season and it ended up getting moved back a bit.
The ratings were always going to be better if you start a show in the autumn.
Certainly in the early '70s, when it ran from January to June, the ratings noticeably dropped around kind of May, June time.
I've got a feeling that we actually worked out our schedule, and realised we couldn't finish the season in time.
No one knows for sure what the reason was for putting the next Doctor Who season forward, but what's developed as a kind of conspiracy theory is that it was to scupper Space: 1999, which was ITV's big, new science fiction series, which was launching that September.
HINCHCLIFFE: I mean, there was talk that there was this Space: 1999 coming along, but I can't remember whether that would be the reason for the change in the scheduling of the show, going into the second series.
Probably an amalgam of all these things happened.
The first episode of "Terror of the Zygons" went out at the end of August.
The following week, the first episode of Space: 1999 went out.
I think we took a dip in the ratings that week, and there was great sort of hype and expectation around it.
But within a few weeks, they were back to normal, and Space: 1999 sort of really never made the impact that it was intended to.
We did sort of bounce back pretty quickly.
All of those shows that Lew Grade did, which were designed to appeal to Britain and America, most of them, as someone said, landed in the middle of the Atlantic with a dull splash.
It didn't have the heart, it didn't have the soul of Doctor Who.
Martin Landau wasn't really any competition for Tom Baker.
And Barbara Bain was certainly no competition for Lis Sladen, so I don't really think it had a hope.
STEWART: Looking at it again recently, I was really very impressed, not by me, but by the programme, and the standard of the acting and the direction.
The Scottish colouring and the Loch Ness legend gives it a sort of otherness and a mystery, even though it's really a sort of invasion-of-Earth story.
Dougie Camfield knew what he was doing with Doctor Who, he'd never treat it like a children's show.
He quite likes being quite brutal at times.
The aim then was to really excite and even frighten children.
Frighten them in the best way.
FARQUHAR: There's lots of jeopardy and there's lots of suspense.
It's got some great monsters.
One not so great one as well.
There's a nice sort of colour and humour in there and some very good design elements, which just lifted it a bit above the run of the mill, I think.
It's got a heck of a lot going for it, and it's also just at that point when Tom Baker is really, really coming into his stride completely, and he's about to be given, you know, complete free reign.
This is severing the last ties with the Pertwee era, with UNIT, and giving him the chance to really sort of go off and just be completely alien and do with the part what he wants.
It's an overture to the best period of Doctor Who that there ever was.