Doctor Who 14x23

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

As Li H'Sen Chang works to secure the time cabinet, Leela pursues and investigates his master – the mysterious and murderous Weng-Chiang.

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1. "Leela is a prisoner of the phantom. And the Doctor goes shooting in London's sewers!" (Radio Times)

2. This episode was first shown on 12 March 1977, when it was seen by 10.2 million viewers.

3. Coming up is a sequence skilfully staged and edited to suggest

4. that Leela actually throws a knife at Mr Sin.

5. In fact, the knife never leaves her hand,

6. and it's already in Sin's neck at the start of the next shot.

7. The jaunty tune the Doctor's whistling is Kenneth Alford's military march 'Colonel Bogey',

8. which was written in 1914.

9. Louise Jameson had a shock when she read in the script

10. "Leela does a forward roll up onto the dining table,

11. "two steps down its length, and dives head-first through the curtains across the window bay."

12. Louise promptly phoned the producer and said, "No, she doesn't!"

13. And that's why you're now watching Stuart Fell.

14. This jump wasn't the only danger Stuart had to face.

15. Doctor Who was a programme predominantly made and crewed by men,

16. so it wasn't always a very woman-friendly environment.

17. A few of the cameramen and electricians took a "hands-on" approach to the actresses,

18. and in Leela's costume, from behind, Stuart Fell looked just the same as Louise Jameson,

19. with consequences best left to your imagination.

20. "Do you have to put up with this all day?" Stuart asked Louise after suffering a few mistaken gropes.

21. So why didn't they use a female stunt double?

22. Because at this time there were very few female stunt performers in the business, and none were available.

23. But the next stunt was done by a woman.

24. It's Louise herself climbing onto the back of the carriage.

25. Sherlock Holmes also tails a suspect that way in A Study in Scarlet (1887).

26. In an exchange cut from the episode's opening sequence, Leela says she thinks Mr Sin is "not a robot, but not alive",

27. to which the Doctor retorts that there's a lot of them about: They're called commuters.

28. In the script, the Doctor suggests that the robbers may have been Chinese art collectors,

29. or perhaps the K'ang-hsi vase's real owners.

30. Philip Hinchcliffe placed strong emphasis on making the absurd seem believable,

31. partly through the strength of the acting performances,

32. and partly through the design, which had to convey the authenticity of the environment.

33. The serial's designer, Roger Murray-Leach, was David Maloney's choice, having worked with him on Doctor Who before,

34. but Maloney's preferred make-up designer, Sylvia James, proved to be unavailable.

35. The trapdoor area seen here is not part of the main cellar set.

36. It's a small cutaway set mounted on a rostrum to enable Chang to descend in vision.

37. For the role of Weng-Chiang, David Maloney wanted an actor with a strong, charismatic voice.

38. The part went to Michael Spice (died 1983), who had already demonstrated his aptitude

39. by voicing the disembodied villain in the previous year's Doctor Who serial 'The Brain of Morbius'.

40. Maloney also knew Spice's theatre work,

41. and the actor had extensive experience in voice and radio work,

42. including the regular role of Matt Prior in the 1970s radio soap Waggoner's Walk.

43. Spice recognised the character's source in The Phantom of the Opera,

44. and this influenced his development of the role.

45. He played Weng-Chiang partly insane, but partly pitiful in his gradual disintegration.

46. In the script, Weng-Chiang says it is his "offerings" which have enlarged the rats.

47. Spice found Weng-Chiang's costume hot and uncomfortable under the studio lights.

48. The leather mask restricted his field of vision:

49. Only able to see straight ahead, he had to move by guesswork.

50. So why does Weng-Chiang need young women in particular?

51. In the script he gives a fuller explanation.

52. "Males are chemically inferior," he says,

53. while older women who have borne children have "nothing worth extracting".

54. "Maidens at the point of puberty are the ideal material."

55. Unfortunately for him, as Chang points out, in most societies they are also closely guarded.

56. Notice how the candles have burnt down since the scenes set the night before.

57. What the Doctor points out as the Fleet is actually the Thames, and vice versa!

58. There really was a London theatre built over an old watercourse:

59. The Sadler's Wells Theatre in Finsbury, which operated as a music hall from 1879 to 1896.

60. The Fleet was progressively covered between 1737 and 1769.

61. In point of fact, Bede (AD 673-735) Never visited London- perhaps the Doctor took the salmon up to Jarrow in the Tardis!

62. Perhaps he also supplied the 1977 newspaper visible in the laundry basket.

63. The gun wasn't really made in Birmingham, or even China, but London,

64. by a team of effects assistants working under George Reed.

65. Reed made the rifle's barrel and working parts.

66. The wood and brass fittings were the work of John Brace and Andy Lazell.

67. The script describes Teresa as a "lady of the night",

68. though in reality most East End prostitutes were middle-aged and insalubrious.

69. Teresa is speaking Cockney rhyming slang: "rosie" is "rosie lee" (tea) and "plates" are "plates of meat" (feet).

70. This scene was mostly filmed on the afternoon of Thursday 16 December,

71. but the next shot is an insert recorded later in the studio,

72. because the electronic overlay creating the hypnotic white light was achievable only on videotape.

73. Filming added value to scenes like this, but it was also a costly and wasteful process.

74. For this serial, the amount of 16mm film shot totalled 9,425 feet.

75. The amount of film used in the finished programmes is just 614 feet.

76. The total cost of the film footage was £1,178,

77. but this was a bill which incoming production unit manager John Nathan-Turner somehow managed to avoid having to pay!

78. Cackling theatre cleaners also feature in the 1962 Hammer Films version of The Phantom of the Opera.

79. It was established earlier that Leela feels awkward and uncomfortable in her period clothes.

80. The point is subtly reinforced in the way she wears her tie crooked, because she doesn't know (or even know how) to straighten it.

81. The noise Leela hears is made by the doves from Chang's act,

82. but not by the doves in the background: The sound was dubbed on later.

83. This scene was shot on a dreary, drizzly Friday morning at the end of the filming week.

84. The location is St Katherine's Dock, to the east of the Tower of London.

85. It's well downstream of the River Fleet, which is at the west end of central London near the street which bears its name.

86. In the script, the Doctor won't hear of abandoning the enterprise, as Litefoot suggests.

87. He calls the Professor some rude names, "noodlepate" and "jabbernowl",

88. whereas he's ludicrously reverent about Birmingham, which he calls

89. "the city of craftsmen".

90. To be fair, it is a good gun.

91. It's so responsive to the Doctor's reflexes that, according to the script, it nearly goes off early at the end of the episode.

92. In the script, Weng-Chiang's first command is: "Take those clothes off!"

93. Michael Spice's ungainly physical performance suggests the extent of Weng-Chiang's bodily deformity.

94. The sewer set, which appears in the next scene, caused some headaches in the studio.

95. The problem was that the set wasn't sufficiently waterproof:

96. The "sewer" water escaped and seeped down to the floor below.

97. Unfortunately Studio 1 at Television Centre was immediately above the main telephone switchboard,

98. so the BBC was brought to a standstill that day (24 January 1977).

99. Two sections of sewer were built in the studio, one with a bend at one end, the other straight.

100. There was a long concealed aperture in the roof to facilitate lighting the set.

101. Robert Holmes originally imagined the distillation machine differently.

102. The script describes it as a "patent liquidiser".

103. It encloses the victim's body, leaving just a "head in a box" visible;

104. a shining ball hangs down on a rod on each side,

105. and when the machine operates, lightning arcs through the victim's head.

106. The process leaves no residue:

107. The cleaner has completely disappeared when Leela switches off.

108. She has literally been liquidated,

109. and Weng-Chiang is later seen to ingest her life essence intravenously.

110. Originally he was to escape Leela by feigning death.

111. The script refers to Weng-Chiang's gun as a "light-bolt magnum".

112. The next shot required some work by the scene-shifters:

113. Three sections of the sewer wall were removed to get this camera angle.

114. This serial required an exceptionally large number of walk-on performers and extras, many of them oriental.

115. The cost of these non-speaking artists in fees and expenses came to a total of £1,909.20.

116. For the location sequences, they were mainly supplied by the Alander Agency in London

117. but for the studio recordings the production team went to the specialist Oriental Casting Agency,

118. only to end up with the same performers as before!

119. The chimes you can hear are a recording of the original bells of St Clement's,

120. from London's church of St Clement Dane in the Strand.

121. Robert Holmes often wrote scenes in which characters make large, false assumptions about what is going on.

122. This enables them to make sense of the anachronistic anomaly of the Doctor in their own terms,

123. and so believe they're taking part in a completely different story.

124. Here Jago reinvents the Doctor as Sherlock Holmes in all but name,

125. and supposes himself to be a collaborator in a large-scale police operation,

126. whereas in fact the police have less and less to do with events as the serial goes on!

127. It was originally intended to use model shots to show the giant rat, but that just wasn't viable:

128. The rat had to perform specified actions,

129. and it needed to be in shot with Leela at the end of this episode.

130. They just had to make a full-size giant rat.

131. The task fell to the costume designer, John Bloomfield.

132. Bloomfield began his career as a set designer in the theatre, and joined the BBC in 1969.

133. One of his first jobs there was The Six Wives of Henry VIII.

134. The prestigious period drama was still well remembered in 1977, and was mentioned in pre-publicity for this serial.

135. Bloomfield began work immediately after completing another Doctor Who serial,

136. 'The Face of Evil' (1977), for which he had designed Leela's original leather costume.

137. He built the rat by laying the fur over a wooden framework.

138. The creature's dimensions were calculated from scale drawings of real rats.

139. Effects assistant Andy Lazell animated the rat's rubber nose

140. using a bellows to make it twitch its rubber whiskers.

141. The camera script calls the full-sized version "Rat Fell"- because inside the costume is the long-suffering Stuart Fell.

142. Later, in a routine review meeting with the production team,

143. the BBC's Head of Serials, Graeme McDonald, singled out the giant rat as the serial's only flaw.

144. Real sewer rats are slimy, he pointed out, but the fur on the costume hadn't been greased.

145. It was just too cuddly.

146. To finish, here's a choice stage direction from the script:

147. "The crazed blood-cries of a relentless carnivore bearing down upon its prey echo and re-echo through the tunnel."

148. Also seen in this episode were

149. Mary Maxted, Rita Tobin (Theatre Cleaners)

150. Frederick Cresswell (Waterman)

151. No rats were harmed in the making of this serial.