Doctor Who 14x5

Directed by Lennie Mayne

Rex Robinson as Dr. Carter • Renu Setna as Intern • David Purcell as Abbott • Roy Pattison as Zazzka • Roy Skelton as King Rokon

England, the near future. The TARDIS materialises in a quarry and Sarah is trapped under a rockfall. But what is the origin of the fossilised hand she is found gripping ? And who is the Eldrad she keeps mumbling about ?

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1. "The Doctor and Sarah Jane return to the 20th Century - and encounter a sinister menace from primeval times..." (Radio Times)

2. This episode was first shown on 2 October 1976.

3. It was seen by 10.5 million viewers.

4. According to the script, this is "a syllenic obliteration module of Kastrian design".

5. Speaking "the litany of hate" is King Rokon, "old and full of malicious satisfaction".

6. In the script, Eldrad is also "saboteur, genocide, anarch", "carrier of all evil",

7. "transgressor of the order", and "slayer of the Vox Lebra".

8. Each phrase is punctuated with a timing blip.

9. Most of 'The Hand of Fear' was recorded in story order,

10. but this opening scene was recorded out of sequence in the studio session for Part 4, along with the other Kastrian scenes.

11. This meant that the dome set was only needed on one studio day.

12. Zazzka "resembles a Russian soldier in his bulky white insulation suit with integral hood", says the script.

13. On his first job as effects designer, Colin Mapson wanted to make his mark with something different,

14. so he designed the obliteration module with a smooth surface.

15. In the mid-1970s, the BBC's effects model-makers liked their spaceships with a lot of intricate detail,

16. so the ships' hulls were usually covered with parts cannibalised from plastic Airfix model kits.

17. Mapson worked on the model with his assistant, Steve Drewett,

18. and Drewett used his previous experience as an apprentice at the Ford Motor Company in creating the model's curvature.

19. 'The Hand of Fear' was originally the title of a very different Doctor Who serial.

20. In the spring of 1975, Bob Baker and Dave Martin were slated to write the final six-part adventure for Doctor Who's 1975-6 series.

21. They delivered a story outline on 29 May,

22. and proceeded to spend the summer writing the scripts.

23. Set in 1990s Britain after a revolution, this 'Hand of Fear' dealt with an incursion by aliens from the Omega 4.6 black hole in space.

24. The Omegans have identified mankind as a "disease",

25. and two competing factions have each sent in an agent to deal with the problem, in different ways:

26. One aims to re-educate humanity, but the other plans to destroy it.

27. The scripts were delivered in the autumn, but they still needed more work than there was time to do.

28. Another serial was made ('The Seeds of Doom'), and in October the writers agreed to a full-scale rewrite for the 1976-7 series.

29. When this was recorded, Roy Pattison (Zazzka) Had difficulty manhandling his "dead" colleague across the studio floor.

30. He was supposed to drag the body into the lift, but couldn't manage it, and dropped him.

31. "It's OK," director Lennie Mayne reassured the apologetic actor, "We'll cut that bit out."

32. The script describes this as a "time montage".

33. An establishing scene inside the Tardis follows in the draft script, but was cut during rehearsals.

34. The quarry scenes were the first parts of 'The Hand of Fear' to be made.

35. As was usual in 1970s television production, all the location sequences were filmed before the studio interiors.

36. The regular cast had five days off (Wednesday to Sunday) After the previous serial's studio sessions,

37. then travelled to the location on the Monday morning.

38. Tom Baker had spent his Saturday making a personal appearance at the Blackpool carnival

39. and dropping in on an edition of the BBC variety show, Seaside Special, broadcast on 19 June.

40. The Doctor and Sarah's dialogue here was completely rewritten. In the original, the Doctor remarks, "Bit windy, I'm afraid."

41. "Earth, he says - hah!" scoffs Sarah. "Yes," insists the Doctor.

42. "This? This god-forsaken howling wilderness?" As an inhabitant of South Croydon, she can say categorically that's not where they are.

43. "Would you settle for the South coast?" Proposes the Doctor. "Bet you a stick of rock."

44. Sarah won't have it: "If it is Earth, it's the middle of the Gobi desert."

45. The suggestion about "the season" arises from the Doctor's insistence that they're at the seaside.

46. He picks up a piece of rock. "Not peppermint," he observes. "Jurassic limestone, I would say."

47. And so he deduces they're in a quarry. "If we're lucky we might find some interesting fossils."

48. This bit was changed to show that Sarah is more on the ball than the Doctor.

49. In the original, he tells her to run, rather than vice versa.

50. This shot was taken by a remote controlled camera.

51. Its protective box was completely buried by the blast.

52. Though filmed for Doctor Who, the shot of the explosion was first seen on television

53. in the police series, Softly Softly Task Force, on 8 September 1976 - nearly a month before 'The Hand of Fear'.

54. The quarry scheduled a "weekly blast" on Tuesdays at 1 p.m.

55. It was decided to film on a "blasting day" for both artistic and economic reasons:

56. It would save the visual effects department having to fake the explosion - and also look better!

57. In the script, he pushed Sarah under an overhang when the rock face blew, so he doesn't automatically assume she's been crushed.

58. Keeping track of the Doctor's costume was always a continuity nightmare during filming.

59. The film script would usually end up covered in little sketches showing exactly how he was wearing his scarf in each shot.

60. The upcoming shot of the ambulance was a piece of stock footage.

61. This is Windsor,

62. a long way from the west country quarry where the accident happened!

63. The disembodied hand was one of the starting-points for the original 'Hand of Fear' serial.

64. The authors were chatting with script editor Robert Holmes about 1930s movies.

65. Holmes mentioned The Hands of Orlac (1935) In which a pianist loses his hands, has a transplant to replace them,

66. and finds that his new hands have a life of their own - and belonged to a murderer.

67. This developed into the concept of being mentally dominated by the hand of a dead criminal.

68. At this time, Doctor Who co-opted much of its leading imagery from horror films, with mummies and Frankenstein-like monsters,

69. and Holmes briefed the authors to include a severed hand that would crawl around like a spider and strangle people.

70. The horror film he had in mind was The Beast with Five Fingers (1946),

71. which had scared Bob Baker (born 1939) When he was a child.

72. In the script, this is the first time we see what Sarah has found.

73. "She didn't have to go to those lengths," says the Doctor. "Eh?" asks Abbott.

74. "To find interesting fossils," the Doctor half-explains.

75. "I shall want to talk to you an' all, mate," retorts Abbott in the script. "Coming in here..."

76. As this scene was originally written, it was the Doctor who extolled pain.

77. The lines were transferred to the intern during rehearsals.

78. Note the way the Doctor's holding his scarf.

79. Tom Baker was trying to suggest that the scarf might be the Doctor's worry blanket.

80. Renu Setna, who plays the intern, was born in the part of British India which later became Pakistan.

81. Though frustrated by the caricatured sitcom roles he was continually offered,

82. he also played a scientist in the Look and Read BBC Schools serial, 'The Boy from Space' (1971),

83. and made notable appearances in I, Claudius (1976), Moonlighting (1982), and Bridget Jones's Diary (2001).

84. He also wrote his own one-man stage show, The Prophet (1988).

85. Getting Sarah Jane into bed was a time-consuming operation in the unreconstructed male atmosphere of a mid-1970s TV studio,

86. because some of the crew seemed more interested in looking at Elisabeth Sladen in her hospital gown than in getting on with the job!

87. Lennie Mayne chose to shoot much of this scene in close-up

88. in order to disguise the fact that the set was even tinier than it looks on screen.

89. Histology is the study of tissues, especially under the microscope.

90. In the script, Dr Carter says he doesn't have the right kind of equipment to deal with the hand.

91. In reality, the adjective "geodetic" refers to the technique of determining the area of a planetary surface, in whole or part.

92. The Omegans in the original 'Hand of Fear' treatment were also a silicon-based life-form.

93. The crawling hand belonged to the agent of the destructive, hawkish faction.

94. He and his ship both disintegrated upon crashlanding,

95. leaving his hand as the only viable fragment left.

96. "Sarah comes calmly to the surface of consciousness," says the script.

97. We're on Camera 3 here.

98. Elsewhere in the studio, Camera 5 is pointing at a blue lamp.

99. Mix the two cameras' output, and hey presto, the ring glows!

100. It was Elisabeth Sladen's idea to throw the bedclothes over the camera.

101. An intruding shadow ruined an earlier take of this shot.

102. The prop is an accurate reproduction of a scanning electron microscope,

103. which reveals an object's structural make-up by scanning it with an electron beam.

104. Tom Baker reblocked this sequence during camera rehearsals,

105. so that the Doctor's movement across the set would underline the important words.

106. Dolomite is a hard sedimentary rock - so the hand probably fell into a primeval river.

107. 150 million years is a conservative estimate: The Jurassic period began roughly 206 million years ago, and lasted for 70 million.

108. Any human beings around then would, of course, have been gobbled up by dinosaurs.

109. A recording break followed this scene, to allow time to dress Sarah.

110. The next shot had to be retaken because the camera position was off.

111. "Tell the boys it wasn't their fault," Lennie Mayne asked the floor manager.

112. The script calls for the Doctor to hum 'Your tiny hand is frozen' from Puccini's La Boheme (1896).

113. Tom Baker asked for the notice to be hung crooked, so that the Doctor could straighten it.

114. "Yes, we all know how tidy you are," commented a studio wag.

115. The door at the back of the corridor is just a painting on the set wall.

116. A sample to be examined by an electron microscope is first coated with a conductive substance, such as gold,

117. then placed inside the airtight central column of the microscope scanner.

118. The air must be pumped out before the electron beam goes to work.

119. Studio 8 at the BBC Television Centre had some unwelcome visitors during the recording.

120. There were several flies buzzing around.

121. Elisabeth Sladen got one of them in her mouth when saying this line.

122. The studio sessions took place over five July days in the long, hot summer of 1976.

123. The recording was split into two blocks, on 5-7 and 19-20 July.

124. In the script, the hand is kept in a tray of formalin (a disinfectant and preservative), not a lunchbox.

125. This is Cromhall Quarry in Avon, which was owned by the Amey Roadstone Corporation.

126. Filming there took place on the unit's first two days in location, 14-15 June.

127. The scriptwriters had originally envisaged using Tytherington Quarry in Gloucestershire,

128. which they proposed for a building site sequence in the first version of 'The Hand of Fear'.

129. In the script, he adds:

130. "Civilisations rise and fall, pass each other like ships in the universal night."

131. If there had been a crash, he says, "There should be some sign, some wreckage, some fragment of anatomy.

132. "But there's nothing. So it must be a fossil."

133. When he first appeared in the revised 'Hand of Fear' storyline, Dr Carter was named Dr Muller.

134. Bob Baker and Dave Martin changed his name when writing the draft script.

135. The original intention was for Sarah to wear a trouser suit rather than overalls.

136. Andy Pandywas a pre-school puppet series made in 1950, and regularly reshown for the next twenty years.

137. Because Andy's adventures were made in black-and-white, not all early viewers knew that his overalls were in fact blue.

138. The Andy Pandy reference was added in rehearsal.

139. The unmade 'Hand of Fear' featured an ageing Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart,

140. who has been moved from UNIT to the Extraterrestrial Xenological Intelligence Taskforce (EXIT), which investigates UFO activity.

141. Ultimately he is killed after he realises that the only way to intercept an Omegan kamikaze crash-landing

142. is to steer his own rocket ship into a collision course.

143. This was not the mid-1970s production team's first attempt to dispose of the Brigadier in a "blaze of glory".

144. In any event, Nicholas Courtney would not have been available to play the role:

145. On the original production dates for 'The Hand of Fear', he was touring Britain and Canada in The Dame of Sark.

146. In the script, Carter went further and called the police.

147. Doctor Who's use of classic horror films during the mid-1970s wasn't always obvious, or perhaps even conscious.

148. The start of 'The Hand of Fear' is strikingly similar to that of Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954),

149. in which a fossil hand is discovered in an outcrop of ancient limestone from the Devonian period.

150. It too has a damaged finger - as it happens, the very same finger.

151. The authors were asked to revise their original 'Hand of Fear' scripts.

152. The production team wanted them to use Doctor Who's notional "present day" setting (then deemed to be the early 1980s),

153. and they hoped to include the semi-regular character of Harry Sullivan.

154. The authors also wrote in the Doctor's laboratory at UNIT, but were asked to remove it to save on sets.

155. This unmade 'Hand of Fear' laid the foundations for the hand's taste for radioactivity in the broadcast version.

156. The Omegans are "radiobionic" beings made of "the unstable teryllium molecule":

157. They can use radiation to restructure their bodies

158. and rebuild lost tissue by converting energy to matter.

159. So the crashed Omegan agent's crawling hand needs to find a nuclear power station.

160. Here's one: It's Oldbury-on-Severn Nuclear Power Station in Gloucestershire, built in 1961-7.

161. At the time, the authors were based just down the road in Thornbury,

162. and they hit on the idea of writing a script which could be filmed at the station.

163. In the script, the sign reads: "Nuton Complex. Nuclear Research and Development."

164. The Nuton Complex was the power station in the same authors' 1971 Doctor Who serial, 'The Claws of Axos'.

165. That too had been filmed at a nuclear facility, Dungeness in Kent.

166. Early in 1975, they approached the Oldbury authorities to investigate the feasibility of doing it again locally.

167. To their surprise, the power station chiefs proved amenable to the idea, and so they set to work.

168. Their initial research centred on the procedure in the event of a nuclear accident.

169. What they offered Robert Holmes at the initial ideas meeting was a high-tech thriller about a terrorist attack on a power station.

170. Holmes demurred, and diverted them onto crawling hands.

171. In the resultant scripts, the power station changed

172. into a large-scale military research and development centre, like the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston.

173. It has its own reactor, naturally, and other advanced technology such as the experimental rocket used against the Omegans.

174. Permission to film at Oldbury was sought from the Central Electricity Generating Board,

175. and was granted on 1 July 1975.

176. When the authors began work on the new improved 'Hand of Fear' in the spring of 1976, they reverted to their power station idea.

177. The decision to rename it the Nunton Complex was made only a few days before location filming began.

178. The power station scenes were filmed on 16 and 17 June, immediately after the unit finished work at the quarry.

179. The station manager, Victor Brown, couldn't have been more helpful.

180. The cast and crew were given a guided tour of the station,

181. including the secret areas (or so they were told).

182. In turn, Victor Brown and his assistant were invited to the studio recording,

183. where they were just as bemused by the unfamiliar environment of the BBC.

184. After a visit on 13 May, the Production Assistant told Victor Brown that Oldbury was

185. "a most splendidly visual location".

186. Some of the cast were nervous about filming at a nuclear facility.

187. The unit was subject to stringent safety procedures.

188. All the equipment and props (more than 160 individual items) Had to be monitored for contamination.

189. This was done by six members of the station's Health Physics team.

190. A Radiological Clearance Certificate had to be issued before any object was allowed to leave the premises.

191. All the kit was clean, so the BBC got it back!

192. In the script, Sarah meets a man coming down a ladder, who gesticulates angrily, but cannot be heard inside his radiation suit.

193. He grabs her, spins her round to face him,

194. and gets "zizzed" (as the script puts it).

195. This shot required so many retakes that, by the end, Elisabeth Sladen found her legs getting sore from all the climbing.

196. Negotiating the ladder whilst carrying the box proved a little tricky, too.

197. If, like a typical Doctor Who assistant, you think that all these corridors look the same, you're right.

198. They are all one set: Only the location signs change.

199. The episode was originally planned to end with Sarah entering the lethally "hot" nuclear pile.

200. In the final shot she closes the door, shutting herself in and the camera out.

201. At an early stage it was mooted to shoot this scene on location at Oldbury,

202. but, when he was shown the draft scripts, Victor Brown pointed out that there was no such thing as an accessible "fission room".

203. This was, he said, the point at which fantasy had to take over.

204. Also seen in this episode were:

205. Peter Toy (Technik Obarl)

206. Bruce Hubble, Simon Jones, Ken Taylor (Quarry Workers)

207. Colin Jaggard (Explosives Man) Libby Ritchie (Nurse)

208. Carl Edwards, Michael Wadsworth (Ambulance Men)

209. John Deleiu, Derek Southern (Pathology Technicians)

210. Brian Gear, David Hyde, John Telfer (Nunton Guards)

211. Alan Evans (Zizzed Nunton Worker)