Doctor Who 14x21

Directed by David Maloney

John Bennett as Li H'sen Chang • Christopher Benjamin as Jago • Chris Gannon as Casey • Trevor Baxter as Professor Litefoot • Deep Roy as Mr. Sin

London, the 1890s. As magician Li H'Sen Chang captivates audiences, a spate of disappearances amongst young women goes largely unnoticed. But almost upon their arrival, the Doctor and Leela find themselves confronting the feared Tong of the Black Scorpion, and a menace from another time. And there's something fishy in the sewers, too...

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1. "The Doctor plans to take Leela to a Victorian Music Hall - but murder and a sinister marionette spoil their evening..." (Radio Times)

2. This episode was first shown on 26 February 1977, when it was seen by 11.3 million viewers.

3. On the first attempt to record this episode's opening titles, the caption slide for the serial title jammed in the machine.

4. Here we are in the Northampton Repertory Theatre, where this sequence was video-recorded on Sunday 9 January 1977.

5. This was a little out of the ordinary at a time when most location scenes were made on film.

6. In the mid-1970s, a 6-part Doctor Who serial usually required 7 days' filming and 6 days in the studio,

7. but for this one the production team traded in the first studio block for 6 days on location with a mobile television studio.

8. This gave the theatre setting a greater authenticity than would have been possible at Television Centre.

9. There's authenticity here too: Look at the way Chang's disguising his lip movements, just like a real ventriloquist.

10. The theatre was booked for the production on 26 November 1976, seven weeks before recording started.

11. In the interim, BBC painters arrived to transform the anachronistic white decor of one backstage area,

12. which was painted white again after the recording, at the BBC's expense.

13. As well as the physical facilities, the theatre also offered the services of its resident actors for some walk-on parts.

14. But it wasn't the only location used in Northampton.

15. Between shots, Chang and Buller have been propelled about two miles,

16. from the rep in the town centre to St Crispin's Hospital in the outskirts, where the dressing room scenes were recorded.

17. The production moved to the hospital in Duston after finishing at the theatre on 12 January,

18. leaving the rep free to stage its seasonal play, David Wood's The Owl and the Pussycat Went to See.

19. In the script, Buller adds, "Stiff as a plank, six feet off the ground."

20. The script also makes Chang more talkative and less inscrutable.

21. He insists that his volunteers suffer no ill effects, suggests that Mrs Buller was enquiring about lost property,

22. and finally concludes that the cabbie must be a blackmailer.

23. Buller denies it: He doesn't want money, he wants Emma.

24. The serial's film sequences were shot in London in mid-December 1976.

25. Much of the dilapidated riverside colour comes from the locations in Wapping and Southwark.

26. This was originally planned as a film scene, but was eventually recorded on the penultimate studio day.

27. Tom Baker improves on the scripted line: "You'll catch your death of cold."

28. The script describes the Doctor's topcoat as "a viciously checked ulster",

29. and the original intention was for Leela to wear a long period skirt.

30. Instead, costume designer John Bloomfield based her outfit on the "bloomer" style worn by Victorian lady cyclists.

31. Her cap and knickerbockers are made of corduroy and the jacket is cotton,

32. with braid and ribbons appliquéd to make the decoration.

33. Little Tich was the stage name of the diminutive comedian Harry Relph (1867-1928),

34. who was best known for his dance in long boots.

35. A short scene was cut here, showing Chang, lit only by an ornate incense burner,

36. sitting on the floor of his dressing room, in deep concentration.

37. You won't find "oopizootics", Jago's word for hysteria, in the Oxford English Dictionary,

38. but it is a real word, coined by the Australian poet C. J. Dennis (1876-1938).

39. London's Carey Street (also known as Queer Street) Was the address of the Bankruptcy Courts.

40. Scriptwriter Robert Holmes enjoyed colourful vocabulary and arcane dialects,

41. and he often enriched his dialogue with entertainingly idiosyncratic terms.

42. An example was this scene's cut final line

43. "It's time to crack the monica," Jago tells Casey.

44. In the Victorian music hall, the monica was a bell which the chairman rung ("cracked") For each new act.

45. This sequence was filmed at Clink Street, Southwark, late on the night of Tuesday 14 December 1976.

46. The percussionist made the "zinging" sound by agitating an extended car spring.

47. There are several singular things about the four coolies in the fight sequence coming up.

48. For one thing, they're not all Chinese.

49. In 1976, there were no Chinese stuntmen in Britain, so the ones who fight had to be European.

50. The first to attack the Doctor is the fight arranger, Stuart Fell.

51. This one's Alan Chuntz,

52. and here's Max Faulkner, whose shots were censored from the serial's 1988 BBC Video release

53. because the British Board of Film Classification then operated an absolute ban on showing nunchuks (chain-sticks).

54. The stuntmen didn't enjoy their work.

55. Their muscles stiffened in the cold December night, so hitting the ground was more painful than usual!

56. And here's another oddity: Three stuntmen on the right, two genuine Chinese on the left,

57. making five coolies, when earlier there were only four.

58. That's because the extra playing the fifth coolie arrived late.

59. Robert Holmes had long wanted to have a Doctor Who serial set in the "mythical" Victorian era of gas lamps and hansom cabs,

60. but the immediate trigger was the need to develop the series' new female co-star, introduced two serials earlier.

61. The production team was keen to move away from the stereotype of the screaming female companion,

62. and had initially planned an uncouth cockney girl from Victorian times.

63. She would be an independent, positive female character with whom girl viewers might identify.

64. Leela turned out somewhat differently, of course, but the period setting reached fruition here.

65. The levitating lady came with the theatre: She's Sally Sinclair of the Northampton Repertory Company.

66. The audience's vocal reaction and applause were dubbed on afterwards.

67. The levitation trick was originally to have been more elaborate.

68. In the script, the girl's lying across three chairs, and Lee takes out the middle one.

69. This was changed to avoid slowing up the action later with two more chairs to remove.

70. At a very early stage, it was planned to show the levitation using the "blue-screen" Colour Separation Overlay process.

71. The necessary equipment was provisionally booked for the location shoot,

72. but in the event it was all done by practical stage magic.

73. No metal bar, no wires,

74. but if you look closely you can see that she's actually lying on a black pedestal.

75. The illusions were all devised by the production's two magic advisers, Larry Barnes and Ali Bongo.

76. Bongo (1929-2009) Had also been magic adviser to the ITV adventure series Ace of Wands (1970-2),

77. but he was best known as the compere of a children's cartoon compilation for the BBC,

78. Ali Bongo's Cartoon Carnival (1971).

79. It was Larry Barnes, however, who was on hand in the theatre when the magic sequences were recorded.

80. The secret of levitation? There are two men dressed entirely in black lifting her up.

81. After recording, Mr Jago's unsmoked cigars found their way home with actor Christopher Benjamin, who plays the part.

82. Leela is played by Louise Jameson (born 1951), who had been acting professionally since 1971.

83. She had worked mainly in the theatre, including an extended period with the Royal Shakespeare Company (1973-5).

84. Her film experience was limited to a single movie, the period horror flick Disciple of Death (1972).

85. In 1975, her agent decided that she needed more exposure, and put her up for a number of television series.

86. These included the nursing drama Angels and the role of Purdey in The New Avengers (which went to Joanna Lumley).

87. She did get a number of one-off television parts, including John Hurt's one-night-stand in a 1976 Play for Today,

88. and she won good reviews as a football heiress in the Yorkshire comedy The Game (1977).

89. The role of Leela was her first big break into series television.

90. She later had notable appearances in Tenko (1981-2), Bergerac (1985-90), and EastEnders (1998-2000).

91. Believe it or not, Louise has blue eyes.

92. She's wearing tinted contact lenses to make them appear brown.

93. It wasn't at all comfortable, because the red lenses filtered out all other colours.

94. This was a make-up decision: Blue eyes looked odd with Leela's tanned skin.

95. Later it was discovered that "Leela" means "dark-eyed beauty" in the Indian language Urdu.

96. The Doctor's speaking Chinese was unscripted business worked out in rehearsal.

97. He starts by saying,

98. "How are you?"

99. But this bit isn't Chinese at all!

100. If it hadn't been dubbed, the police whistle would actually have come from Wapping Old Steps, where the next scene was filmed.

101. The ghoul is played by Patsy Smart (1918-96),

102. who was best known for her role as the sour lady's maid Miss Roberts in Upstairs, Downstairs (1971-3).

103. The corpse was supplied by the BBC's Visual Effects Department.

104. After the scene was shot, the prop was borrowed by two policemen helping with crowd control at the location.

105. They deposited the "body" up a dark alley a few hundred yards from the filming area,

106. then radioed the station and summoned a junior colleague to investigate reports of a dead body found on the manor!

107. In developing the Victorian setting, Robert Holmes drew more on literary sources than accurate history.

108. The recovery of a corpse from the Thames also features in Charles Dickens's novel Our Mutual Friend (1864-5),

109. which had been atmospherically dramatised by the BBC in 1976, a few months before the serial was written.

110. Another suspected body in the river features in the Sherlock Holmes story 'The Man with the Twisted Lip' (1891),

111. which also contains a few other elements in parallel with this serial,

112. notably an expedition to an opium den.

113. The scripted line was: "When was I last in China? With Marco Polo?

114. "No, it must have been before that, but at some more recent time."

115. Robert Holmes knew his stuff: The Doctor had indeed been in China with Marco Polo in a serial made in 1964.

116. The "venom capsule" is really a plastic "jewel" from a child's bracelet.

117. Tongs are Chinese secret societies, often founded for benevolent purposes

118. but also often involved in organised crime, like an oriental version of the Mafia.

119. Unless the secret has been very well kept, the Tong of the Black Scorpion is fictitious.

120. Robert Holmes got the name from an episode of the BBC's wartime sitcom It Ain't Half Hot Mum,

121. 'Pale Hands I Love', shown on 30 January 1976.

122. In the script, the Doctor addresses Li H'sen as "Chairman Chang",

123. referring to Chairman Mao, the Chinese dictator who died in September 1976 when the serial was being written.

124. The closing lines of the scene were cut.

125. After Chang leaves, Leela remarks that the smell of death has gone,

126. "It clings to the yellow one like mist over a swamp."

127. The Doctor wasn't aware of it: "All I noticed was a disagreeable odour of old joss sticks."

128. Another disagreeable odour in the studio was the "fog".

129. It was made by an oil burning device.

130. For foggy studio scenes, the ventilators were turned off to keep the miasma in shot.

131. That's why there's usually more of it on location than in the studio,

132. the fresh air made the stench a little more bearable!

133. Another influence on the plot was the Victorian serial killer Jack the Ripper,

134. who murdered five London prostitutes over a ten-week period in the autumn of 1888.

135. No girls went missing: He left behind his victims' mutilated remains in the streets of Whitechapel.

136. The killer was never caught and his identity remains a mystery,

137. but the case later produced a flood of imaginative fictional solutions in films and pulp fiction.

138. Two versions were made of Mr Sin, Chang's ventriloquist's doll.

139. One was a dummy,

140. the other an actor's costume.

141. The rest of the cast found the mannequin sinister because they couldn't tell the dummy from the costume,

142. and they would sometimes get a shock when the actor inside moved unexpectedly!

143. The main difference is the mask: The dummy's is solid, but the actor's was made in three pieces,

144. allowing his jaw to move freely when Mr Sin has to speak or laugh.

145. The actor in question is Deep Roy (born 1957),

146. who specialised in diminutive adult roles and was then best known for a recent appearance in The New Avengers (1976).

147. He later worked extensively as a stunt performer in 1980s and '90s Hollywood.

148. In fact there is no ancient Chinese god called Weng-Chiang,

149. only Wen Ch'ang, the benevolent god of literature.

150. The actors made a significant change to the script by reassigning one line: It was originally Leela who said "Superstitious rubbish".

151. In reality there was no public mortuary in the East End of London.

152. Post mortem examinations had to be conducted in makeshift sheds.

153. That's not the only anachronism connected with the mortuary.

154. In the next scene, see if you can spot the modern electrical socket on the wall, covered over with masking tape.

155. "The Doctor's attention is riveted by something mercifully out of camera vision," says the script.

156. A short exchange between the Doctor and Leela was cut here,

157. in which he comments that she was right about the different sounds of death.

158. The Doctor's line was originally: "I always know what I'm saying. Other people are sometimes slow to understand."

159. The mortuary exteriors were filmed at Wapping Pier Head Square.

160. The hatchet was made by effects assistant George Reed, who specialised in weapons.

161. It was designed to be fired from a compressed air gun

162. but this didn't give an accurate enough aim,

163. so in the end the axe was thrown manually at Tom Baker by Reed himself.

164. Luckily Tom was good-humoured about the situation!

165. Reed also supplied the blow-pipe, which had previously been used in another programme,

166. but had to be shortened to fit down Leela's bloomers.

167. The name of Leela's poisonous thorn was originally to have been pronounced differently,

168. until the cast decided that "Janice Thorn" sounded more like an out-of-work actress than a deadly weapon.

169. In the background you can hear the sound of a cylinder piano.

170. It's a track from Roy Mickleburgh's record, Music of the Streets (1968).

171. These particular streets are dressed with straw and horse dung to hide the modern road markings.

172. In reality anyone wanting to access a London sewer would have needed a key.

173. A line was cut from the sewer sequence in which the Doctor makes it plain that they are looking for a large rat:

174. "I hope they keep it on a chain," he tells Leela.

175. The squeaking isn't really made by rats: It's a radiophonic simulation.

176. The rats themselves were borrowed from a pet shop in Shepherd's Bush market.

177. Unfortunately the rodents wouldn't co-operate with the recording.

178. As well as running out of shot, they kept biting the rat wrangler.

179. This is a model shot. (The rat, of course, is real.)

180. The miniature sewer was made by effects assistant Andy Lazell, with the assistance of George Reed.

181. The main difference from the full-size set is that the model has no water in it.

182. The model shots were recorded in a presentation studio at the BBC Television Centre.

183. But the rat sequence wasn't all the work of the Visual Effects Department,

184. see if you notice anything suspicious about the rat in the next shot.

185. Also seen in this episode were

186. Charles Adey Gray (Theatre Doorkeeper)

187. Arnold Lee, Kevin Sullivan (Chimney Sweeps)

188. James Haswell, Richard Sheekey (Beat Policemen)

189. Jim Delaney, Colin Thomas (Station Policemen)

190. Marie Anthony, Lisa Bergmayr (Riverside Ghouls)

191. Uncredited production contributors included

192. John Sterling (Engineering Manager)

193. Pat Mordecai (Vision Mixer)

194. Stan Swetman (Grips)

195. Brian Hall (Assistant Film Cameraman)

196. Steve Diamond (Assistant Film Recordist)

197. Bill Eldridge (Props Buyer)