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. "The Doctor takes on the Tong of the Black Scorpion - and the giant rat claims another victim." (Radio Times)

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

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

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

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

6. During the first block of studio recording (24-5 January 1977) She was coming down with a nasty case of glandular fever

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

8. There were knock-on consequences.

9. She was too poorly to fulfil all her commitments during the rehearsal period for the second studio block,

10. and she had to cancel an appearance on the Saturday morning children's series The Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, scheduled for 29 January.

11. Adding to Louise's woes, the sewer water made her Victorian underwear somewhat more revealing than expected.

12. To ease her embarrassment, assistant floor manager Linda Graeme promised that the sequence would be sensitively edited,

13. but when she first saw the serial six years later, Louise was dismayed that it wasn't sensitive enough for her liking!

14. Mr Jago is played by Christopher Benjamin (born 1934), who often appeared as genial, nervous civil servants

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

16. He also played the Belgian socialite Prosper Profond in The Forsyte Saga (1967), when he first met David Maloney.

17. His Jago characterisation had been seen before in the BBC's dramatised documentary Jack the Ripper (1973),

18. in which he played an Edwardian clubman giving his account of the Ripper's true identity.

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

20. notably as the theatre impresario Vincent Crummles in the Royal Shakespeare Company adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby (1980).

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

22. That's because Christopher Benjamin received the script rather late, and joined the production when it was already well under way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

29. He came to power in his own right in 1873, the year Litefoot and his mother left China.

30. Shortly after this serial began transmission, a 52-year-old gentleman wrote in to Radio Times to ask,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

38. Instead of her usual limited wardrobe,

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

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

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

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

43. and rather sooner for those who were watching BBC-2 on 2 April 1977, the day the final episode of this serial was shown.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

57. Post-production ended on 30 March, with each episode's final sound dub taking place just three days before transmission.

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

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

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

61. Late in pre-production, it was decided to abandon the scarf and replace the topper with a deerstalker.

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

63. seen in a famous Sidney Paget illustration to the short story 'Silver Blaze' (1892).

64. Ironically that was one of the few occasions Holmes wore the hat in the original Conan Doyle stories.

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

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

67. They don't seem to change with the environment, because he never seems to feel the heat or cold.

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

69. The cloak is made of a lightweight tweed, with braids and ribbons appliquéd to make the check pattern.

70. The jacket is made of cotton velvet,

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

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

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

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

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

76. The musicians are extras:

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

78. They, and the singer, are miming to music that was pre-recorded the month before, on Wednesday 8 December 1976.

79. The tape was played back when this scene was recorded, to give the audience something to respond to.

80. 25 Midlands extras (13 men and 12 women) Were booked to play the audience,

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

82. They assembled in Birmingham at the BBC's Pebble Mill studios on Sunday 9 January, and were bussed to Northampton,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

92. that won't scatter when thrown.

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

94. It opened in 1891, and still stands where Shaftesbury Avenue bisects Charing Cross.

95. Little Tich (whom the Doctor hoped to see) Was once on the bill there - but not until 1912.

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

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

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

99. Holmes may also have remembered the "Chinese" stage magician Chung Ling Soo (1861-1918; real name William Robinson).

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

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

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

103. Somebody's about to get a Chinese axe in the back, but it won't be this extra (Huntley Young),

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

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

106. Max Faulkner stands in for the policeman.

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

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

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

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

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

112. In the script, he actually sticks the sword into the stage boards to show the audience it's a genuine weapon.

113. You can hear Lee inside the cabinet panicking,

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

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

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

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

118. The script calls for Chang to wipe imaginary blood off the sword blades as he pulls them out.

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

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

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

122. In practice, however, there had to be one six-part serial every year to make up the series' 26 weeks' running time,

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

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

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

126. This scheme had been successfully piloted in the final serial of the1975-6 series, 'The Seeds of Doom',

127. and with 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang' the following year, there were other pressing reasons for using the same structure.

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

129. He'd worked on the programme, almost without a break, since the final series starring Jon Pertwee in 1974.

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

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

132. and there was a real risk that the demoralised Holmes would simply be unable to complete the job.

133. Hinchcliffe and Maloney agreed that the writing should be split into manageable units, using the "four plus two" story structure.

134. The production and budget requirements for the unwritten scripts would have to be assessed on the basis of the storyline.

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

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

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

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

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

140. The last two episodes had to be studio-bound and, moreover, they couldn't introduce any new principal characters.

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

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

143. while the remaining two episodes are more concerned with developing the character of Weng-Chiang.

144. This is the point where the story breaks:

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

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

147. Doctor Who fans struggling to keep their metabolisms in balance may have been tempted to try a nutritious breakfast.

148. In March 1977, when this serial was first shown, there was another kind of Doctor Who cereal available.

149. Over on commercial television, a wobbly red Dalek (John Scott Martin) Urged viewers to seek out and devour the promotional packs.

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

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

152. "We must copy these special packs of Weetabix and exterminate, exterminate, exterminate," chanted the Dalek.

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

154. and the advert ended, echoing a David Maloney trademark not seen here, with a freeze-frame cliffhanger.

155. The theatre audience was played by

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

157. Mary Brownbill, Barbara Carey, George Carr,

158. Barbara Chambers, Brian Fellows, Verdi Gilbert,

159. Clarice Good, Valerie Hastings, Carl Haugland,

160. Yvonne Lambe, Gillian Lee, Dennis Lycett,

161. John Milner, Sylvia Milner, Leslie Price,

162. Michaela Rea, John Thomas, Stanley Welch,

163. Ricky Williams, Dorothy Wood, Roger Wood. ! You aren't going, are you?

164. I must - things to do!

165. (QUIETLY) We've got to get back to that time cabinet. Come on.

166. (MAN) Come on!