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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

13. For example, this sequence switched episodes.

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

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

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

17. Peter Walshe did another Doctor Who for Rodney Bennett in 1975: 'The Sontaran Experiment'.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

32. But does she try to escape?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

43. He was also an expert on Renaissance Italy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

50. The scripted stage direction here reads, wryly:

51. "Resistance is useless."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

61. "He is called the Doctor."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

75. Gareth Armstrong, who plays Giuliano, is now best known as a Shakespearian actor.

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

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

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

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

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

81. David Swift was offered the role on 19 March, but he was heavily in demand that year.

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

83. The first name on the list is King Ferdinand I of Naples

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

85. The Signora of Florence was Philippina de' Medici until 1492,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

102. Hieronymous is played by Norman Jones.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

116. The temple ruins are made of lightweight polystyrene.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

131. This replaced an earlier cliffhanger,

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

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

134. Also seen in this episode were:

135. David Glynn Rogers

136. George Ballantine

137. Uncredited production contributors

138. Lan Brindle

139. Ken Bomphrey Dave Chapman

140. Henry Barber Graham Giles

141. Terry Elms

142. Carolyn Buisuinne, Hadsera Coovadia

143. Les McCallum, John Neild

144. Jennie Betts