Doctor Who 14x7

Glyn Houston as Professor Watson • Judith Paris as Eldrad

The energy of the reactor has returned the mysterious Eldrad to life. The Doctor agrees to take her back to Kastria. But what is waiting for them there?

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1. "Eldrad appears. The Doctor and Sarah face the challenge of an alien master-mind."

2. This episode was first shown on 16 October 1976.

3. It was seen by 11.1 million viewers, nearly a million more than the previous week.

4. In the draft scripts, it was envisaged that the Nunton control room would barely be needed after these opening scenes.

5. There was to be just one more short scene in the wrecked set, the Director's phone call to the authorities.

6. This meant that the visual effects team were given carte blanche to be as destructive as they liked.

7. "The power surges blow out bank after bank of controls," said the script.

8. "There can be explosions and breaking glass."

9. Then some scenes were relocated to the control room, so the new instructions read: "The systems must not be too badly damaged."

10. This exchange was developed by the actors in rehearsal.

11. When he wasn't actually working on his scenes, Tom Baker read intensively during the rehearsal period.

12. He would bring several different books to work with him,

13. not to mention The Times.' He used to do the crossword whilst queuing for lunch in the canteen.

14. The serial was made in one of the smaller studios available at Television Centre, Studio 8.

15. Five studio days were allocated, the usual number for a four-part serial.

16. On the first day of a block of recording sessions, the morning would be spent

17. erecting and lighting the sets and rigging the studio technically.

18. Camera rehearsals began after lunch, at 2 p.m.

19. When the sets were already up, however, camera rehearsals started 10.30, as soon as the cast had been dressed and made up.

20. Recording took place in the evenings.

21. The cast and crew had an hour's dinner break from 6 p.m., followed by half-an-hour's line-up.

22. Recording started at 7.30, and was scheduled to last until 10 p.m. - And overruns were expensive.

23. As well as taping the actors' performances and those effects which were to be done "live",

24. all the pre-filmed sequences had to be transferred onto videotape during that two-and-a-half hour recording period.

25. At ten-o'-clock, half an hour was allowed for the cameras and props to be cleared away.

26. The script calls for "alarming inhuman sounds" coming from inside the nuclear pile.

27. In the script, the Doctor replies, "Of course it is, and it's still hungry."

28. In the script, Watson asks for the C. In C. Defence and the Minister.

29. With time at a premium during the recording sessions, the pressure was on to get things right first time.

30. There were a total of 98 unplanned retakes during the entire thirteen hours of recording time.

31. That's not bad going when you consider that the five studio sessions completed 643 different shots.

32. Only thirteen retakes were caused by actors fluffing their lines.

33. The rest were for technical reasons,

34. like intruding shadows and wrongly framed shots.

35. This is a cut-in effects shot of a reproduction door.

36. It's made of polystyrene, and melts when sprayed from behind with the solvent acetone.

37. In the script, they leave in Watson's car, described as an "F Type".

38. This sequence worried the authorities at Oldbury, who pointed out

39. that low-flying aircraft near the power station would infringe the safety regulations.

40. Production Assistant Marion McDougall reassured them that the planes would be cut in from stock footage.

41. Some of it was shot for the BBC science series, Tomorrow's World.

42. They aren't always the same type of plane.

43. In the establishing shots they're Harriers,

44. but the bombing run footage shows Buccaneers, an older model of attack aircraft introduced in 1962.

45. The script asked for an even more up-to-date make:

46. Panavia Multi-Role Combat Aircraft, a European fighter-bomber and interceptor which first flew in 1974.

47. The Oldbury exteriors were shot on a very windy June day.

48. Elisabeth Sladen kept warm between takes in her yellow plastic mac.

49. Sarah's distinctive watch belonged to Elisabeth herself.

50. "You mean they forgot to take the pins out?" Says Sarah in the script, alluding to grenades.

51. The finished serial includes 738 feet of specially shot film

52. On the first take, there was so much billowing smoke that Eldrad just couldn't be seen.

53. The script describes Eldrad as "a humanoid of dazzling white radiance",

54. while an earlier draft asked for a "skin-tight metallic red crystalline jumpsuit".

55. The eventual costume was so skin-tight that the actress had to be sewn into it.

56. Her mobility was then severely restricted: She couldn't sit down, lie down, or answer calls of nature.

57. For convenience, she wasn't fully suited up until recording began in the evening.

58. For camera rehearsals, she wore the make-up and headpiece, but her own clothes from the neck down.

59. It was an immensely complex piece of costume manufacture, and there wasn't time to finish it

60. by 14 June, when it was required on location at the quarry.

61. That's why, later in the episode, you only see Eldrad in long shot as she walks across the quarry to the Tardis.

62. In the script, she retorts, "What, change the habit of a lifetime?"

63. The expressions of mutual concern topping and tailing this dialogue were the actors' unscripted contributions.

64. In the script, he quotes the "I'm from Earth" line at her before she can say it herself,

65. and she in turn pre-empts his injunction to be careful.

66. This is the power station's turbine hall, where the actual electricity is generated.

67. Eldrad's costume crackled as the actress moved in it.

68. It also kept shedding crystals onto the floor.

69. Between shots, her dresser would rush onto the set and stick them back on.

70. Her facial crystals were glued directly, and uncomfortably, onto her cheeks.

71. She also wears a pair of contact lenses, specially made for the serial by the firm Keeler of Marylebone Lane.

72. In the first draft, Eldrad speaks with the voice of Dr Carter.

73. Her voice was treated with a vocoder in post-production to make it deeper and more masculine.

74. Body notwithstanding, the writers envisaged Eldrad as a male character throughout.

75. The Doctor has two hearts, and crosses them both - Tom Baker's unscripted contribution.

76. The glowing eyes were achieved with Front Axial Projection, a technique which uses a reflected beam of light.

77. The reflective material was stuck over the actress's eyes, and catch the blue light as she raises her head into the beam.

78. The effect proved difficult to achieve in the studio, and had to be remounted on a later recording day.

79. The female form of Eldrad was the serial's final star part, alongside Professor Watson and the regulars.

80. It was also by far the hardest part to cast.

81. Lennie Mayne considered eleven names, and, despite the scripted emphasis on Eldrad's masculinity,

82. he looked mainly at the glamorous end of the profession.

83. He concentrated on actresses of around Elisabeth Sladen's age,

84. though a few were slightly younger, and one nine years older, born in 1939.

85. Several of the actresses on his list had played female leads in ITC adventure series of the 1960s.

86. A number of them proved to be unavailable: One was working in Melbourne, and another was pregnant.

87. The casting process took place over several weeks in late May and early June.

88. The first actors to be cast were contracted on Friday 28 May.

89. They were John Cannon, Frances Pidgeon, and Roy Skelton.

90. Two of the major roles followed on 1 June: Glyn Houston And Rex Robinson,

91. and Roy Pattison and Renu Setna Got their contracts on the same day.

92. But all that time, Lennie Mayne was still urgently seeking his principal Eldrad.

93. Red-haired Judith Paris, who finally got the part, had been seen most recently

94. as one of the mischievous nude sunbathers in The Girls of Slender Means (1975).

95. In her overall career profile, it is her work with Ken Russell that stands out.

96. Russell cast her in, among others, Dante's Inferno (1967), The Devils (1971), The Rainbow (1989), and Lady Chatterley (1993).

97. He also directed her on stage as the singer Lotte Lenya in her own script, Weill and Lenya (2000).

98. She continued her play-writing with La Goulue of the Moulin Rouge (2001) And When Florence Met Isadora (2005).

99. In the theatre, her powerful voice (never, of course, heard untreated in 'The Hand of Fear')

100. Has featured in several high-profile West End musicals,

101. including The Secret Garden (2000), The Phantom of the Opera (2004), and My Fair Lady (2006).

102. Note the effects of theatrical voice production here.

103. Her contract was issued on 7 June, just a week before filming began,

104. and on the same day she had her first meeting with Barbara Lane, the costume designer.

105. That was why the costume wasn't ready in time for the filming:

106. It had to be made specifically to fit whichever actress was cast.

107. An armourer was present in the studio when this sequence was recorded on 7 July.

108. Watson's gun was loaded with blanks, but its use still had to be supervised.

109. The script describes the Kastrians' body surface as "marble-textured".

110. Eldrad calls herself "the master architect of Kastria" in a scripted line dropped from the finished programme.

111. "Without me, there would be no Kastria," she says.

112. In the draft script, the Director uses a machine gun, ineffectually:

113. "Eldrad walks straight forward into a hail of bullets."

114. Another source drawn on by 'The Hand of Fear' is the 1961 BBC serial, A for Andromeda,

115. in which a disembodied alien being constructs a body for itself

116. using the pattern of another character in the serial, again a young woman.

117. In the script, the Doctor adds, "What's the life of one misguided primitive worth?"

118. In the script, he also says, "I have a duty to this man."

119. But Eldrad thinks his higher duty is to her: "I hold you to your promise. Let us be gone - away from here."

120. Note the concealed fastenings down the back of Eldrad's costume.

121. and Eldrad is taller still, thanks to the heel lifts built into the costume.

122. The first studio recording block was bedevilled with technical problems.

123. The print of the film sequences turned out to be of poor quality,

124. so the job of transferring them to videotape had to be postponed until the second block.

125. At a very early stage, it was mooted to combine the characters of Driscoll and the Director's Assistant into a single person.

126. The idea was dropped because it would have left Watson with no-one to talk to in this sequence.

127. The recording of this episode was split across two studio blocks.

128. The power station sequences were recorded on 7 July.

129. The Tardis and Kastrian scenes followed on the first day of the second block, 19 July.

130. The final day, Tuesday 20 July, covered the Kastrian catacombs in Part 4

131. and also picked up all the material postponed from the first block.

132. With so much to do, it was quite an achievement that recording finished only 30 minutes later than scheduled, at 10.30 p.m.

133. In the script, he adds that the inevitable enquiry will "probably take twenty years.

134. "This plant cost £400 million to build, and look at it.

135. "There'll probably be 400 million questions!

136. "That'll be the first of them," he says as the red hotline rings.

137. "They'll put me in a padded cell when I try to explain."

138. In the script, Eldrad assesses the Tardis as a potential weapon: "Such a device could be useful - against traitors."

139. "You do go on," says Sarah. "It's not good being obsessed with revenge. Paranoid."

140. "It's not surprising after all that time," observes the Doctor.

141. In the draft script, Eldrad prompts this discussion by trying to fire her ring at the Doctor.

142. He has allowed her to set the co-ordinates for Kastria herself,

143. as a test to see if she will contravene his conditions by trying to go back in time.

144. But then lights flash and "the Tardis machinery starts to hiccup and jerk".

145. "Oh no... Off course again," says Sarah.

146. The Doctor goes to check Eldrad's co-ordinates, but she takes offence and raises her ring menacingly.

147. The authors were unsure about the ensuing temporal grace dialogue, and marked it as a possible cut.

148. Kastria's scripted co-ordinates were: "370 DK 422 K2326212211222111 etc etc".

149. Tom Baker ad libbed an alternative set of co-ordinates based on telephone numbers,

150. including those for the BBC Television Centre, Scotland Yard (WHI 1212), the Doctor Who production office,

151. and even his own former home phone number, which he'd recently had changed.

152. "I nearly ran out of telephone numbers!" Exclaimed Tom after the scene was shot.

153. Don't bother trying to ring the numbers: They've all changed since 1976!

154. This is the second consecutive serial in which Sarah Jane is shown eating fruit.

155. Perhaps, somewhere at the back of somebody's mind, was a letter to the Radio Times the previous year,

156. in which a lady from Winchester suggested that the characters in Doctor Who were all androids.

157. If not, she asked, why were they never seen to eat?

158. Why don't they sleep, wash or comb their hair, or perform other everyday functions?

159. Showing more of their private lives, she said, would be a lot less boring than all the chases, sliding doors, and flashing lights!

160. The model dome and landscape were built by Colin Mapson and Steve Drewett, with the help of Charlie Lumm.

161. The earliest cast member to arrive at the studio each morning was Judith Paris,

162. because Eldrad's costume and make-up took two-and-a-half hours longer than anyone else's.

163. There is "a curious look of triumph" on Eldrad's face, says the script.

164. "Once it was a pleasant land," says Eldrad in the script. "Now the solar winds have claimed it for their own."

165. The "snow" is cabosil, a fine powder of silicon dioxide which is commonly used as a thickening agent.

166. In the script, Eldrad dismisses the Doctor: "Your duty is discharged."

167. "I'll just see you to the door," says Sarah with polite dislike.

168. "Just a minute," insists the Doctor. "Don't tell me my duty."

169. If it is his duty as a Time Lord to prevent alien aggression, he reasons,

170. then he must accompany Eldrad, who is indigenous to Kastria, "until I am sure the aliens no longer threaten you.

171. "Besides which, I'm curious."

172. Tom Baker liked to suggest that the Doctor doesn't feel the cold,

173. which is why he has lent his coat to the shivering Sarah.

174. Mid-1970s Doctor Who serials often had the problems of energy supply at their margins.

175. This was topical stuff in the wake of the oil crisis of 1973,

176. when the producers and exporters of fossil fuels began to recognize their economic and political strength.

177. The Kastrian dart was made by effects assistant Charlie Lumm.

178. Also seen in this episode were:

179. Tim Hooper, Roy Wadsworth Bob Peters

180. Uncredited production contributors to this serial included:

181. Martin Ridout, Andy Stacey

182. John Pritchard Dennis Johnson

183. Laurie Bush Jennie Betts

184. Mervin Bezar, Gail Clarkson

185. Fred Wright Ken Ayres

186. Judith Lang

187. Joy Sinclair My gift to Kastria.

188. I have come to claim my kingdom.

189. Come, we will descend to the thermal chambers.