Doctor Who 14x2

Directed by Rodney Bennett

Jon Laurimore as Count Federico • Antony Carrick as Captain Rossini • Gareth Armstrong as Giuliano • Tim Pigott-Smith as Marco • Norman Jones as Hieronymous

The Mandragora energy joins forces with the secret Brotherhood of Demnos. Count Federico plots to steal the Dukedom of San Martino from his nephew, Giuliano.

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1. "Fear reigns in San Martino as the Hooded Terror seeks further victims." (Radio Times)

2. This episode was first shown on 11 September, 1976.

3. It was seen by 9.8 million people.

4. The Doctor's upcoming escape from the headsman was originally going to be a lot simpler.

5. As written, he just lunges at the guards, pushes them off the scaffold, and makes an equine exit.

6. But Tom Baker was always keen to find inventive uses for the Doctor's scarf.

7. The scarf first became important in the pre-shooting revision, when the execution was still being done with an axe and block.

8. The cliffhanger was planned as a close-up of the Doctor's head on the block.

9. The axe thuds down - and chops the scarf in two. The Doctor has moved his neck out of harm's way!

10. The changed staging meant the scarf was reprieved - so it could be made useful in other ways.

11. The Doctor spends longer on horseback in the script.

12. Before dismounting, he gallops past the guards we're about to see.

13. "That fellow thinks he's at the races," the guard was scripted to say.

14. During filming, coloured felt was used to mask off Portmeirion's modern windows - or most of them, at least.

15. This market sequence was a late addition, written in to suit the location after the pre-production recce.

16. Originally, the Doctor was to steal bread rather than an orange.

17. Parts of the chase were filmed with a handheld camera.

18. As well as adding new scenes, the pre-production revisions also entailed some restructuring and reordering of the action.

19. For example, this sequence switched episodes.

20. Originally it formed part of a multiple cliffhanger at the end of Part One.

21. The Brethren found their masks uncomfortably heavy to wear.

22. "Ades'is Latin for "be present", and is customarily said in ceremonies summoning up the Devil.

23. Peter Walshe (on the right) did another Doctor Who for Rodney Bennett in 1975: 'The Sontaran Experiment'.

24. Car noise ruined an earlier take of this shot.

25. In the script, the cautious pikeman is, more conventionally, the older one.

26. A cut line says that the catacombs have a "stench of evil".

27. A stench of polystyrene would be more accurate: That's what the scenery was mostly made of.

28. The upcoming rescue worried Tom Baker: How could he possibly do as scripted, and sneak up on the altar undetected?

29. Rodney Bennett kept his camera angles tight, and hoped viewers wouldn't think too hard about what was going on out of shot.

30. 'Doom of Destiny' went though several changes of title before it became 'The Masque of Mandragora'.

31. Late in pre-production, they decided to focus on the underground setting,

32. so in mid-April, 1976, the serial was renamed 'Catacombs of Death'.

33. On location in May, the cast and crew thought they were working on 'The Secret of the Labyrinth'.

34. But that still wasn't right, and the final title was decided during the rehearsal period later that month.

35. They were thinking of The Masque of the Red Death,

36. the 1964 Roger Corman film version of Edgar Allan Poe's 1845 short story.

37. Hinchcliffe was watching a late-night BBC showing of the film on 12 January, 1976.

38. It helped to define part of what he hoped to achieve with the serial he was already discussing with Louis Marks.

39. A pre-production decision to drug Sarah for the sacrifice resolved a problem with this scene.

40. In the script, she's awake and terrified.

41. But does she try to escape?

42. At first, it was planned to have the cult leader dressed in black like the others.

43. But black robes would absorb the light, and they wanted him to stand out.

44. Ten boxes of petal confetti were supplied for the Brethren to scatter.

45. As first written, the temple was to be restored above ground as well as below. Model footage was proposed.

46. In the end, they made the temple entirely subterranean and used a much older theatrical trick:

47. "Pepper's Ghost", devised in the 1860s by John Pepper.

48. The pristine temple is painted on gauze, and is only visible when lit from the front.

49. Previously, the gauze was backlit, so we could only see the black drapes behind it.

50. In the script, the guard implies that Giuliano should know the cause of death because of his "interest in the new learning".

51. "The new learning does not always have answers," replies the young Duke.

52. "It means only that we must throw away old beliefs, like witchcraft and sorcery and demons, and trust to our own intelligence."

53. Giuliano and Marco were known on set as "Gert and Daisy",

54. alluding to a 1940s comedy double act played by Elsie and Doris Waters.

55. Once Hinchcliffe had settled on a Renaissance period setting, Louis Marks (born 1928) Was the obvious choice of scriptwriter.

56. He had more than 15 years' experience in television, working as a script editor and producer as well as a writer.

57. He was also an expert on Renaissance Italy.

58. In 1954, as a historian at Oxford, he had submitted a doctoral thesis with a typically catchy academic title:

59. 'The Development of the Institutions of Public Finance in Florence During the Last Sixty Years of the Republic, c. 1470-1530'.

60. The script draws heavily on his specialist knowledge of the period, on many different levels.

61. The name Mandragora derives from the English form of the Italian word mandragola.

62. It refers to a mandrake root, which was used during the Renaissance as a sleep-inducing drug.

63. Its narcotic properties are central to the plot of the Florentine comedy, La Mandragola (1518).

64. Louis Marks used the name as a coded allusion to the play's author: Machiavelli.

65. The scripted stage direction here reads, wryly:

66. "Resistance is useless."

67. The cult's leader "seems held in an ecstasy of paralysis," says the script.

68. The light column effect combines the output of two cameras.

69. Camera 3 shoots the altar, while Camera 4 is on the other side of the studio,

70. taking a defocussed shot of an Astra lamp (or, as it is better known, a lava lamp).

71. The pre-recorded voice of the Titan is supplied by Peter Tuddenham (1918-2007).

72. He worked extensively in radio from the 1950s, notably on the soap operas Mrs Dale's Diary and Waggoner's Walk.

73. He'd been another disembodied voice in the 1975 Doctor Who serial, 'The Ark in Space', also directed by Rodney Bennett.

74. When cast to be seen as well as heard, he often played doctors:

75. He took a medical role in Rodney Bennett's classic serial, North and South (1975),

76. and another in the same director's 1978 J. M. Barrie biography, The Lost Boys, produced by Louis Marks.

77. More doctoring came his way in the spy drama Quiller (1975) And the gentler Nanny (1981-2),

78. but he was best known as the voices of the various resident computers in Blake's 7 (1978-81): Zen, Orac and Slave.

79. In the script, the voice also orders the elimination of the only other being on Earth who knows of their purposes.

80. "He is called the Doctor."

81. The Titans of Mandragora aren't the only ones after the Doctor.

82. After this sequence followed a cut scene in which the Captain reports to Count Federico on the progress of the search.

83. The Doctor has evidently been seen since he emerged from the catacombs, but he won't evade capture for long,

84. because now he is even more distinctive, with an accomplice at his side "dressed in strange, foreign garb".

85. Federico orders that they are to be executed as soon as they are caught:

86. "At any hour of the day or night, they are to be taken straight to the block!"

87. "Whatever happened to that old-time Italian courtesy?" Asks Sarah in the script.

88. There wasn't really a Duchy of San Martino. (The similarly named San Marino, in the Apennines, was and is a democratic republic.)

89. However, some of the characters are named after people and places of Renaissance Italy.

90. These include Giuliano de' Medici (1479-1516) And the Convent of San Marco.

91. Then there's Federico da Montefeltro (1422-82), a somewhat more enlightened ruler than his namesake in this serial.

92. There is an English prototype for San Martino's indecisive scholar prince and his wicked uncle:

93. Hamlet and Claudius in Shakespeare's play of 1600.

94. When making the serial, the cast were not conscious of the script's Hamlet associations,

95. but, in later publicity interviews, Philip Hinchcliffe emphasised the "positively Shakespearian" ambience.

96. Gareth Armstrong (born 1948), who plays Giuliano, is now best known as a Shakespearian actor.

97. 'The Masque of Mandragora' was his next job after a season with the Royal Shakespeare Company,

98. including parts in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Richard III, and Hamlet (but playing Rosencrantz, not the Prince).

99. In 1978, he was one of the voice artists who dubbed Monkey, the Japanese comic fantasy, for British consumption.

100. He later worked as a director, and founded the Made in Wales Stage Company to promote new Welsh writing.

101. He is also the author of Shylock (1998), a one-man show he conceived after playing the role in The Merchant of Venice.

102. At a Renaissance court, very senior noblemen were also the ruler's personal servants.

103. It was deemed a great honour to be the one who served the Duke his wine, not menial work at all.

104. The original choice to play Count Federico was a slightly older-looking actor.

105. David Swift (born 1931) was offered the role on 19 March, but he was heavily in demand that year.

106. With parts in Within These Walls, The New Avengers, and Victorian Scandals, he just couldn't fit in Doctor Who.

107. So the Count is played instead by Jon Laurimore, who often gave his roles a streak of heavyweight cynicism.

108. His other notable appearances included a PR man in The Organization (1972) And a technician in Space. ; 1999 (1975).

109. Soon afterwards, he played a senator forced to commit suicide in I, Claudius (1976).

110. The first name on the list is King Ferdinand I of Naples (reigned 1458-94).

111. There wasn't a Duke of Padua: The city had been ruled by the republic of Venice since 1405.

112. The Signora of Florence (in effect, the First Lady) was Philippina de' Medici until 1492,

113. then Alfonsina de' Medici until the fall of the Medici dynasty in 1494.

114. We'll come back to the other names on the list in the next episode. For now, let's stick with Florentine history.

115. Hieronymous is the English form of the Italian name Girolamo.

116. Louis Marks intended a coded allusion to the fanatical theocrat, Girolamo Savonarola (1452-98).

117. Savonarola was a Dominican friar who emerged as the effective ruler of Florence after the Medicis were expelled.

118. Like Hieronymous, he found his apocalyptic statements, or "prophecies", starting to come true.

119. He regarded himself as God's messenger preaching to a corrupt land, and spearheaded a religious revival.

120. His preaching whipped up the people into a frenzy of superstitious, fundamentalist penitence.

121. This culminated in the Bonfire of the Vanities in 1497, in which the artefacts of moral laxity were burned.

122. These included important works of art, literature and scholarship.

123. His objective was to establish Florence as a centre of "purity" from which he could conquer the rest of Italy in God's name.

124. In the 1950s, when he was still a postgraduate student, Louis Marks published a learned essay on Girolamo Savonarola:

125. 'Savonarola, the Unarmed Prophet', in the August, 1952 issue of the journal History Today.

126. For Marks, the story's background boiled down to a fundamental conflict.

127. He articulated it in human terms as Savonarola versus Machiavelli.

128. Marks interpreted the Renaissance as a period of transition between the two philosophies they represented:

129. Savonarola's obscurantism was superseded by Machiavelli's rational pragmatism.

130. To understand this clearly, you need to get rid of a lot of the baggage that has been loaded onto the name of Machiavelli.

131. For centuries afterwards, he was reviled as an amoral schemer by people who disapproved of his political philosophy,

132. and also by people who practised what he preached, but didn't want it generally known!

133. Marks, however, admired Machiavelli for his lucidity of thought, and, in particular, his analysis of Girolamo Savonarola.

134. But the ascendancy of "Machiavelli" over "Savonarola", human intellectual freedom over superstition, wasn't inevitable.

135. Marks saw the late fifteenth century as a crucial moment, when history could have gone either way.

136. And that's why the Titans have brought the TARDIS to this particular time: There's a chance for them to change the future.

137. Notice that Hieronymous's beard isn't forked in this scene,

138. because he's had it tucked up underneath the mask, with no chance for the make-up girl to comb it out again.

139. Hieronymous is played by Norman Jones (born 1935).

140. He made his West End debut in 1960 as a musical comedy actor,

141. but he later developed a knack for playing manic, obsessive, and corrupt characters who are not quite yet at the edge of madness.

142. He gave notable performances in this line in Doctor Who (1970), The Sweeney (1976), and The XYYMan (1977).

143. Like several other members of the 'Mandragora' cast, he had recently worked on North and South,

144. in which Rodney Bennett cast him as an industrial labourer.

145. He later gave an uncharacteristically mild-mannered performance in The Borgias (1981)

146. As that rarity of the Italian Renaissance, a genuinely Christian Pope (and therefore a doomed one).

147. Barry Newbery's set designs drew heavily on Italian Renaissance painting.

148. In particular, he looked for inspiration to the work of the Venetian artist Vittore Carpaccio (c.1460-1526).

149. The double-arched window in this set is an exact copy from Carpaccio's The Dream of St Ursula (c.1495).

150. So historian and television professional Louis Marks was undoubtedly the Renaissance man for the writer's job,

151. but this meant Philip Hinchcliffe had some BBC bureaucracy to negotiate.

152. Marks was also a staff producer in the Plays Department, so he needed permission to write for Doctor Who as well.

153. Story discussions were already well under way on 6 January, 1976, when Hinchcliffe did the paperwork.

154. This was typical of the BBC in the 1970s: Producers made the artistic decisions and getting them authorised was a formality.

155. Marks eventually signed his contract to write the scripts on 6 February,

156. but he only got formal permission to do so on 10 February, four days later.

157. That was at least five months after a Renaissance serial had first been mooted:

158. It had been eagerly anticipated by many of those involved, including the designer and lead actress, since October, 1975.

159. This is Take 2 of this shot. Problems with Giuliano's cloak made Take 1 unusable.

160. The temple ruins are made of lightweight polystyrene.

161. This is a retake, too: Elisabeth Sladen lost her footing on the first attempt.

162. The owner of Portmeirion, architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis, was present when this scene was filmed on 5 May.

163. He'd been to the execution the day before and enjoyed himself so much, that he came back to see the temple ruins.

164. Barry Newbery's classical columns caught his architect's eye.

165. He was always on the lookout for new additions to his quirky town, like the Buddha in the portico,

166. so he asked the crew to leave them in place after the filming.

167. No could do: One good puff of Welsh wind and they'd have blown away!

168. You've seen this set before, but differently dressed.

169. In the last episode, it was the bedroom where Giuliano's father died.

170. The original plan was to represent the forces being disturbed by the Doctor using sound alone.

171. At first we hear only his two hearts beating loudly. Then other, alien sounds break in.

172. A tuning fork in his pocket starts to vibrate. He tries to throw it away, but it sticks to his hand.

173. Something similar had happened to him the year before, in 'Terror of the Zygons'.

174. In fact, Eratostenes proved experimentally that the world was round, not flat, as early as 220 BC.

175. Empirical proof took a little longer to come in, with Ferdinand Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe in 1519-22.

176. During pre-production, the episode was planned to end here.

177. This replaced an earlier cliffhanger,

178. which picked up on the Titan's command that nobody else must stand in Hieronymous's place at the altar.

179. When Sarah does so, she finds herself trapped inside the column of light.

180. Also seen in this episode were:

181. David Glynn Rogers (Giuliano's Servant)

182. George Ballantine (Federico's servant)

183. Uncredited production contributors

184. Lan Brindle (Film Ops Manager)

185. Ken Bomphrey (Effects Assistant) Dave Chapman (Inlay Operator)

186. Henry Barber (Technical Manager) Graham Giles (Vision Mixer)

187. Terry Elms (Film Sound Assistant)

188. Carolyn Buisuinne, Hadsera Coovadia (Make-Up Assistants)

189. Les McCallum, John Neild (Design Assistants)

190. Jennie Betts (Facilities Bookings)