Doctor Who 14x13

Directed by Pennant Roberts

David Garfield as Neeva • Victor Lucas as Andor • Brendan Price as Tomas • Leslie Schofield as Calib • Colin Thomas as Sole

An unnamed planet, the distant future. Arriving in a place that seems oddly familiar, the Doctor finds the savage Sevateem tribe battling to free their captive god, Xoanon, from the Evil One and his Tesh servants. But can the whole situation really be the Doctor's fault?

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1. "The Doctor meets the Tribe of Sevateem - and finds himself hunted as the Evil One." (Radio Times)

2. This episode was first shown on New Year's Day 1977, and was seen by 10.7 million viewers.

3. "The scene is barbaric and lit by guttering torches," begins the script,

4. "but here and there pieces of equipment belonging to an advanced technology are to be seen.

5. "The people are all dressed in skins and hides."

6. Andor's throne is "the battered remains of an acceleration chair".

7. Coming up is Neeva: "As befits a witch doctor, he is more ornately dressed than the rest.

8. "His most striking decoration is a spacesuit which he wears like a cloak,

9. "the arms draped over his shoulders, the helmet hanging at the back of his neck."

10. The starting-point for 'The Face of Evil' was scriptwriter Chris Boucher's interest in the origins and development of religion.

11. As an atheist, he saw this as a sociological phenomenon,

12. so this is going to be a story about how Man created God, and what the consequences were.

13. Sole is played by Colin Thomas, who had previously worked with director Pennant Roberts on Oil Strike North (1975).

14. Roberts cast him again in his next but one Doctor Who serial, 'The Pirate Planet' (1978), as a telepathic Mentiad.

15. 'The Face of Evil' took just under nine months to write.

16. The initial storyline was commissioned, under the title 'The Prime Directive', on 19 August 1975,

17. and the final script was delivered on 9 May 1976.

18. The programmes then took eighteen weeks to make: Pre-production began on 2 August 1976,

19. and work continued until the final dubbing session on 6 December, less than four weeks before the start of transmission.

20. The serial spent just over five weeks in production, from 20 September to 26 October.

21. As was standard BBC practice at the time, this began with a short period of "pre-filming",

22. but was mainly occupied with rehearsals leading up to two studio sessions at Television Centre, totalling five days in all.

23. At first, there was talk of using the six-day film allocation to shoot the jungle scenes on location in a real forest.

24. But the year before, Doctor Who had had a great success shooting an alien jungle on film at Ealing for 'Planet of Evil'.

25. This proved to Pennant Roberts that he could get a more alien jungle, with better lighting, by filming it on a sound stage.

26. The filmed scenes amount to a little over sixteen minutes, mainly across the first two episodes.

27. This bit was shot on the first day, 20 September 1976.

28. That was a Monday. Filming continued on Stage 2 at Ealing through to the Friday.

29. The last shooting day, at the start of the next week, 27 September, was devoted mainly to effects sequences.

30. The Doctor left his friend Sarah Jane Smith in London (as he thought) at the end of the serial before last, 'The Hand of Fear'.

31. It's only one Tracer in the script.

32. The production team wasn't keen on this kind of "Tom-to-camera" exposition,

33. but Tom Baker, now well established in the leading role, had professed a hankering to carry Doctor Who as its lone star.

34. He also missed his easy working relationship with his former co-star and fellow Liverpudlian, Elisabeth Sladen (Sarah Jane).

35. So Louise Jameson was walking into a delicate situation: She was an unwanted co-star replacing an absent friend.

36. By his own later admission, Tom wasn't as welcoming to her as he might have been.

37. He put much of his emotion into an intense disapproval of the character of Leela.

38. He felt an especial responsibility towards the series' younger viewers,

39. after meeting many admiring children during a run of personal appearances.

40. He had begun tailoring aspects of his characterisation and performance to the things he learned about their outlook.

41. So he reasoned that having a heroine like Leela set a bad example - in effect, Doctor Who was condoning murder.

42. You'll see his solution later: To play up the Doctor's moral outrage at her violence,

43. along with an unspoken threat of the ultimate sanction -

44. if she doesn't mend her ways, he will no longer tolerate her presence. Goodbye, Leela...

45. The script calls for "a bolt between the shoulder blades", but this was adjusted to suit the costume.

46. In the 1970s, it was standard television practice for filmed scenes to be performed with little or no rehearsal.

47. That was partly because, in the early days of the medium, they tended to be exterior establishing shots, often without dialogue.

48. Scenes like this which required nuanced acting, and therefore rehearsal, would be recorded in the studio.

49. So filming customarily took place before rehearsals. And so it was for 'The Face of Evil'.

50. After the last filming day, there was a two-day break before the cast assembled on 30 September for a full script read-through.

51. And that's why Leela mispronounces Calib's name here

52. because, on 22 September, Louise had never heard it spoken aloud before, and had to guess at it - wrongly, as it turned out.

53. Tom Baker's Doctor often whistled 'Colonel Bogey', the 1914 military march (and rude anti-Nazi song).

54. In the 1970s, the tune was often used to mock or undermine figures of authority,

55. so it helps to give the Doctor an effortlessly cheeky anti-establishment air.

56. Many of the creepers are built around lengths of corrugated plastic tubing.

57. They are moved by a complex network of wiring festooned through the jungle set.

58. Louise Jameson found the next few shots especially alarming to make.

59. She had to take a very precise route, or risk garrotting on one of the wires.

60. This sequence was shown on John Craven's Newsround on 26 October 1976, as part of a report on Leela's upcoming debut.

61. The publicity's timing was accidental but serendipitous, ensuring a smooth hand-over from one series regular to her successor:

62. The story broke during the week after Sarah Jane left the Doctor at the end of 'The Hand of Fear'.

63. In the script, Leela makes the Sevateem ritual gesture again when she hears about the Doctor's dreadful diet.

64. Leela gets her nice name from a terrorist:

65. Leila Khaled (born 1944), a Palestinian who became a revolutionary icon after taking part in two aircraft hijackings in 1969-70.

66. The earliest idea for Leela came about after producer Philip Hinchcliffe talked to a young next-door neighbour.

67. It emerged that the little girl, a regular Doctor Who viewer, identified with the Doctor rather than Sarah Jane,

68. so Hinchcliffe began to think of introducing a more overtly positive female role model as a regular character.

69. To begin with, this had nothing to do with 'The Face of Evil', which was a Sarah Jane adventure in its earliest versions.

70. Elisabeth Sladen's departure moved the creation of a new regular to the top of the production office agenda.

71. The plan was to introduce a cheeky Victorian cockney in 'The Foe from the Future', the intended finale of the 1976-7 series.

72. In the meantime, there would be a succession of one-off stop-gap characters fulfilling the "Doctor's assistant" function,

73. including a cave-girl whom Chris Boucher had been developing in successive drafts of this serial.

74. The character emerged in collaborative discussion between Boucher and script editor Robert Holmes:

75. Holmes claimed credit for the jungle girl image, while Boucher was thinking in terms of Emma Peel from The Avengers (1965-7).

76. Then 'The Foe from the Future' fell through, taking its "Eliza Doolittle" street girl with it, and Leela took her place.

77. The footprint is a cantilevered cut-out which drops when triggered by remote control.

78. The shot was slowed down on a videodisc machine to give it more weight.

79. During production it was Louise who tripped over one of the wires which animated the trees.

80. The "egg-timer" is hollow, and made of very thin vacuum-formed plastic.

81. A nylon line inside the clock fixes its top to a stage weight inside the rock.

82. The weight is made to drop by remote control, and the flimsy clock collapses in on itself.

83. Chris Boucher first made contact with Doctor Who in the form of 'The Silent Scream',

84. an unsolicited storyline he submitted early in 1975.

85. It was too short, and the material was unsuitable for Doctor Who, but Holmes was impressed by his ideas and imagination.

86. After a meeting, Boucher offered, among other ideas, 'The Dreamers of Phaidos'.

87. This drew heavily on Harry Harrison's novel Captive Universe (1969), which features two segregated Aztec communities

88. who are living not, as they think, in an isolated valley but in an artificial environment aboard a vast colony spaceship.

89. Robert Holmes proposed developing the ship's computer, a minor element of the novel, into the source of the trouble:

90. After two years as a BBC script editor, he was starting to think about impersonal systemic limitations on human liberty

91. (which eventually grew into 'The Sun Makers' in the 1977-8 series of Doctor Who),

92. so he suggested a story showing the collapse of a computer-controlled society when the machine malfunctions.

93. And that was the idea commissioned as 'The Prime Directive' in May 1975 and delivered as 'The Mentor Conspiracy' on 30 October.

94. In the script, Neeva starts the scene already kneeling before an altar laid out with "relics of Xoanon" - technological bric-a-brac.

95. The relics include what looks suspiciously like a white plastic tape spool.

96. They don't appear to include the "heavy-duty disrupter gun" specified in the script.

97. 'The Mentor Conspiracy' still needed work before it could be turned into a viable set of scripts.

98. Boucher and Holmes spent the next three months finessing it into an very full outline, now entitled 'The Tower of Imelo'.

99. At this stage, Philip Hinchcliffe contributed several ideas to the story's development.

100. He wanted it set on an alien world, which meant that, in effect, the colony ship had already made planetfall.

101. He also proposed that the Doctor should have visited the planet before and unwittingly influenced its civilisation.

102. Finally the concept was cooked, and on 27 January 1976, Boucher was formally commissioned to write the scripts.

103. The start of the next sequence was cut. Andor bursts into the Inner Sanctum and confronts Neeva.

104. He complains that the people are hungry, and summons the shaman to appear before the Council Chair.

105. Andor then strides out through the sackcloth curtain which connects the Sanctum to the council chamber.

106. "He stalks up and down impatiently for a moment or two," then takes his place on the throne.

107. There follows a confrontation between secular and sacred authority:

108. Neeva stands on "the grace of Xoanon, whose servant I am", but Andor points out that he is also mortal.

109. And the scene as broadcast picks up from there...

110. By the time the scripts were commissioned, the title had changed again:

111. It was a story about how the faulty computer, believing itself to be God, manifests its personality on the planet,

112. so it was called 'The Day God Went Mad'.

113. Tomas's scripted speech also includes the line, "As long as any can remember, it's been the same."

114. There was a significant trim to the start of Andor's next line, which begins,

115. "Tomas, my son."

116. Those words were recorded, but they were removed in editing.

117. That wasn't because anyone had second thoughts about Tomas's paternity (even if Andor may do here).

118. It was because the episode's first edit was significantly over length.

119. In its first two decades, Doctor Who's programme length was dictated by its 25-minute slot in the BBC-1 schedule.

120. Some episodes had to be cut very tightly in post-production, losing shots and lines, to reach the required duration.

121. This episode's final edit managed it with just two seconds to spare.

122. Notice how Leela cocks her head to listen to a distant sound.

123. It's a mannerism Louise Jameson developed by observing her basenji dog, named Bosie.

124. Bosie was a medium-sized hound with amazing pointed ears which he moved like radar antennae.

125. He was also very supple: For example, he would greet Louise by stretching up and putting his front paws on her shoulders.

126. When he sensed danger, he would stretch himself up to his full height.

127. You may have noticed Leela doing that, too, extending her neck upwards when she gets a hint of trouble.

128. Lugo is played by Lloyd McGuire, and (as you can hear) He's from Birmingham.

129. He had previously worked with Pennant Roberts on Oil Strike North (1975) And Survivors (1976).

130. His later television roles included Prince Albert in The Mayor of Casterbridge (1978) And Edward Heath in The Queen (2009).

131. He played regular characters in Juliet Bravo (1981-3), Teachers (2001-4), and Doctors (2004-6).

132. The ritual gesture is based on the Christian practice of "crossing yourself".

133. Philip Hinchcliffe was unable to be present on 24 September, the day this was filmed,

134. so Tom Baker took the opportunity to slip in a few more of his ideas than usual.

135. The Doctor was scripted to threaten the warrior with his own knife.

136. Tom substituted a different threat, reasoning that the Sevateem wouldn't know that a jelly baby wasn't deadly.

137. Hinchcliffe objected when he saw the rushes, but by then the deadly jelly baby was a fait accompli.

138. The script only calls for a blindfold; it was a rehearsal idea to use the scarf.

139. The cloth is pre-cut, but at this stage Leela's knife still has a sharp blade.

140. The script calls for "a small but complex arrangement of perspex tubes".

141. David Garfield, who plays Neeva, was best known for his Welsh character roles.

142. Younger viewers had seen another of his intense performances as a religious maniac in the fantasy serial The Changes (1975).

143. In The Onedin Line (1973), he played Samuel Plimsoll, deviser of the Plimsoll line,

144. and he'd recently been a King's Messenger in the BBC's 1976 adaptation of Lorna Doone.

145. He was later the regular gangster in the last series of Citizen Smith (1980).

146. Leela's bracelet was designed with half an eye on merchandising.

147. Plans to market "Leela jewellery" never came to anything,

148. but Louise Jameson gave away a prototype when she appeared on The Multi-Coloured Swap-Shop on 12 February 1977.

149. There's another example of this episode's tight editing coming up now.

150. This film sequence was cut from 28 seconds to just 7, losing the wider establishing view of the gong.

151. Andor is played by the red-haired, rubicund actor Victor Lucas (1919-2001).

152. He had once worked for Alfred Hitchcock, playing a clergyman in Under Capricorn (1949).

153. He was also a minor dramatist, with twelve plays to his name in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

154. On television he was best known as one of the eponymous policeman's deputies in the BBC's Maigret (1960-3).

155. He later played the speaker of the House of Commons in the cruel Thatcher-era satire, The New Statesman (1989).

156. Despite the failed jewellery project, Leela span off into merchandising very quickly indeed.

157. £3.40p would buy you Leela herself, with enhanced frontal projections.

158. She was part of a range of posable "Action Man" figures (that's "GI Joe" if you're reading in America),

159. which also included the Doctor, a Dalek, a Cyberman, the Giant Robot, and a not very posable Tardis.

160. The Leela doll was trademarked in 1976, even before the character had appeared on screen, and hit the toyshops early in 1977.

161. In Louise Jameson's household, it suffered the same fate as the Sarah Jane action figure did in Elisabeth Sladen's decades later:

162. It stood in for the fairy on top of the Christmas tree.

163. The Litany begins with almost the same phrase as the biblical Lord's Prayer (Matthew 6.9).

164. The tribe's responses were pre-recorded by ten actors speaking in unison.

165. At first, Leela's poisonous thorn was going to be called something ever so slightly different, but in rehearsal they decided

166. that Janice Thorn sounded too much like the name of an out-of-work actress.

167. Chris Boucher was given a staggered schedule of deadlines for his four scripts.

168. He had a month before the first episode was due, and then a fortnight each for the remaining three.

169. He almost managed it. The first episode was delivered the day before deadline on 26 February.

170. Episode 2 was bang on the nose on 12 March, and Episode 3 was two days early on 24 March.

171. But Episode 4, due on 9 April, came in exactly a month late on 9 May - still leaving three months to go before pre-production.

172. The guard bumps into the scenery as he enters.

173. The "dead" Lugo reaches out to catch himself as he falls.

174. At a very late stage, Robert Holmes decided the serial needed a different title.

175. Nobody was especially concerned that 'The Day God Went Mad' might upset religious people,

176. but it just wasn't deemed a very good title: Chris Boucher later acknowledged that it was "pretentious" and "a bit precious".

177. A replacement still hadn't been chosen on 30 September, the day of the initial read-through.

178. Nobody knew what to tell the Graphics Department to put on the title caption: The decision was made two days later.

179. And so the story reached its sixth title, and finally became 'The Face of Evil'.

180. In an early discussion about Leela, Robert Holmes suggested that her grandmother might have been a witch-priestess,

181. and that Leela had inherited some vestigial supernatural powers from her. Boucher the atheist demurred.

182. This scene, in the forest with dry ice, was the very first part of the serial to be shot, on 20 September 1976.

183. The image of a "Rushmore" mountainside with the Doctor's face was one of Philip Hinchcliffe's contributions.

184. The tabletop model landscape was built by effects assistant Steve Drewett,

185. using a moulded plaster cast of Tom Baker's face.

186. Also seen in this episode were:

187. David Nichol, Harry Fielder (Assassins)

188. Andy Dempsey, lan Munro, John Sarbutt (Lugo's Warriors)

189. Alan Charles Thomas (Crowd Voice)

190. John Bryant (Guard)

191. Alan Harris, Michael Reynal (Council Members)

192. Uncredited production contributors

193. Dave Chapman (Inlay Operator)

194. Karen Bryan, Sue Frear, Jennifer Hughes, Carol Wilson (Make-Up Assistants)

195. Brenda Barker, Val Woodford (Props Buyers)

196. Ann Rickard (Production Secretary)

197. Nansi Davies (Artists Booker)