Doctor Who 14x24

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

The Doctor and Leela attend Li H'Sen Chang's performance, hoping to confront the magician. But his master Weng-Chiang has other plans…

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1. This episode was first shown on 19 March 1977.

2. It was watched by 11.4 million people, the highest figure for the serial.

3. Louise Jameson had an uncomfortable time of it making this serial.

4. For one thing, she wasn't feeling very well.

5. So she spent a lot of the time zoning out in her dressing room when she wasn't needed on set.

6. There were knock-on consequences.

7. in 1960s series such as Danger Man and The Prisoner, not to mention the 1970 Doctor Who serial 'Inferno'.

8. After Jago, he worked extensively on the British classical stage,

9. You may notice that Jago's accent wavers a bit from scene to scene.

10. This left him with less time than he'd have liked to develop his character in advance.

11. Instead of having discussions with the director over a long rehearsal period,

12. he found himself working out his performance on the hoof during the location scenes,

13. with the result that there are minor inconsistencies in the way Jago comes over.

14. "Never met a woman that different," adds Litefoot in the script.

15. T'ung-Chi (1856-75) Became the boy Emperor of China in 1861.

16. "When is Leela getting back into her original gear?"

17. If Leela's development had gone according to plan, the answer would have been "Never".

18. One of the influences on the character concept was Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (1912),

19. in which a language professor transforms a cockney waif into a lady.

20. The character who became Leela was, remember, originally a cockney just like Eliza Doolittle in the play.

21. Though the concept changed, it remained the plan that the Doctor would try to educate her.

22. This serial, Leela's third, marked an important stage in her development.

23. Instead of her usual limited wardrobe,

24. the Doctor had got her to wear proper clothes for the first time,

25. and Philip Hinchcliffe's intention was not to go back to her original skimpy leather outfit,

26. no matter how popular it was with 52-year-old viewers!

27. The costume made its return the following year after a change of producer,

28. That night the channel closed down with a puff for a Doctor Who documentary to be shown the following evening.

29. A montage of monster stills was shown over a track of Doctor Who music,

30. and then, for the benefit of nervous viewers who might have nightmares,

31. and indeed for the benefit of 52-year-old Radio Times correspondents,

32. there followed what the announcer called "a more soothing sight":

33. A selection of Leela stills- wearing a lot less than she does in this film sequence!

34. 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang' took just over five months to make.

35. Pre-production began on 25 October 1976, when the director joined.

36. Filming took place in London from 13 to 17 December.

37. After Christmas the cast assembled for eight days' rehearsal between 29 December and 6 January.

38. From 7 to 13 January the production recorded on location in Northampton.

39. This was followed by a further 20 days of rehearsal,

40. and two blocks of studio recording at Television Centre on 24-5 January and 8-10 February.

41. The Doctor's "Sherlock Holmes" costume was decided jointly by David Maloney and John Bloomfield.

42. The original plan was for him to wear a top hat,

43. with his usual long scarf over the checked cloak.

44. The deerstalker is part of the "mythic" image of Sherlock Holmes,

45. This is partly because it was a country hat, incongruous in a London setting.

46. The incongruity of the Doctor's clothes was also a quiet feature of Tom Baker's characterisation.

47. Here, for example, he's wearing his outdoor hat and cloak inside the theatre.

48. The jacket is made of cotton velvet,

49. and the waistcoat from a cotton-based fabric more commonly used to cover furniture.

50. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine was a long-running literary periodical.

51. You've just seen Litefoot reading the February 1892 issue.

52. The conductor is Dudley Simpson, who composed the serial's incidental music.

53. But he's not really conducting the music you can hear.

54. The musicians are extras:

55. Bernard Price on the violin, Tony Randle on the piano, and James Lloyd on the drums.

56. 25 Midlands extras Were booked to play the audience,

57. but in the end the production had to make do with 24.

58. all except one poor chap whose car broke down on the way to Pebble Mill.

59. Mr Jago's stage persona owes more to 1970s popular culture than the real Victorian music hall.

60. Music hall was the basis for the BBC's long-running variety series The Good Old Days (1953-83),

61. with the audience in period costume and the actor Leonard Sachs presiding as chairman.

62. Sachs's role was to announce the acts, but he needed a way of making it interesting,

63. so he invented introductions which astounded the audience with their panoply of polysyllabic pyrotechnics,

64. and that's where Jago gets his fondness for long words!

65. First tlick extremely simple: It's a magnesium flash.

66. In the next shot the pack of loose cards is replaced with a solid pack

67. that won't scatter when thrown.

68. There really was a Victorian music hall called the Palace Theatre of Varieties.

69. As part of his background research for the serial, Robert Holmes read up on Victorian theatrical magic.

70. This is based on a real stage illusionist's trick, called the card stab:

71. The conjurer would run his sword through the selected card, missing the rest of the pack.

72. His stage act also involved pistol shooting, but with him as the target:

73. He caught the bullets in a golden basin, but was finally killed on stage when the trick went wrong.

74. The piano music quotes the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Mikado (1885).

75. Somebody's about to get a Chinese axe in the back, but it won't be this extra ,

76. and it'll be a somewhat more occidental coolie throwing it.

77. Welcome back, stunt co-ordinator Stuart Fell.

78. Max Faulkner stands in for the policeman.

79. These shots of the stage are lit from an unusually low angle

80. to suggest the illumination coming from the footlights in the foreground.

81. In the script, Lee holds the door open for the Doctor to enter,

82. but the Doctor gives him a nudge and Lee unexpectedly finds himself in the cabinet instead.

83. Chang strikes the stage as the signal to Casey to operate the trap under the cabinet.

84. You can hear Lee inside the cabinet panicking,

85. which is why Chang gives the stage another hefty tap with the second sword.

86. The death of a thousand cuts was actually a form of execution in Arabic countries,

87. and the pictograms on the cabinet aren't Chinese either- neither Mandarin nor Cantonese.

88. In other words, it's all just enthralling stage patter.

89. Watch the lighting change to suggest the curtain going down.

90. In mid-1970s Doctor Who, there was a production policy to avoid longer serials.

91. Six-part serials were considered more difficult to sustain than four-parters.

92. so Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes devised a technique of breaking those serials in two.

93. The story would take a new direction part of the way through,

94. making it easier to carry the action across the six episodes.

95. Robert Holmes had been Doctor Who's script editor for more than three years:

96. He was exhausted-and, remember, he hadn't been expecting to have to write this serial himself.

97. No scripts had been completed by the time the director joined the production,

98. That did the trick: Holmes delivered the first three episodes on 8 November and the fourth ten days later.

99. Then, while Maloney was busy organising his film schedule,

100. Holmes wrote the last two scripts, delivering them on 9 December.

101. The arrangement put some practical constraints on the story-telling.

102. Virtually all the location material had to come in the first four episodes.

103. The effect was to impose a shift of focus:

104. It's why the first four episodes concentrate on events in and around the theatre,

105. This is the point where the story breaks:

106. Weng-Chiang's removal of the equipment means the theatre is left behind,

107. and our attention now focuses more on who he is and why he needs the girls.

108. Each box had a Doctor Who board game on the side,

109. and inside were stand-up figures of the Doctor's deadliest enemies.

110. We then cut to a child, evidently terrified by the interruption to his high-fibre breakfast,

111. The theatre audience was played by

112. Elizabeth Jane Bennett, John Bill, Susan Bronte,

113. Mary Brownbill, Barbara Carey, George Carr,

114. Barbara Chambers, Brian Fellows, Verdi Gilbert,

115. Clarice Good, Valerie Hastings, Carl Haugland,

116. Yvonne Lambe, Gillian Lee, Dennis Lycett,

117. John Milner, Sylvia Milner, Leslie Price,

118. Michaela Rea, John Thomas, Stanley Welch,

119. I must - things to do!

120. We've got to get back to that time cabinet. Come on.

121. (MAN) Come on!