Doctor Who 14x8

1. "Deep in the dead planet of Kastria, a trap laid long ago waits to be sprung..."

2. This episode was first shown on 23 October 1976.

3. Helped by newspaper publicity for the ending, it achieved the serial's highest audience figure, 12 million.

4. The technical planning meeting for this serial got a burst of song from Marion McDougall, apropos of the Kastrian dart:

5. "The greatest killer of them all! Guaranteed to shatter any girl!"

6. The first take was technically unusable, but was also the one in which the fluid bubbled the best.

7. The dart had to be refilled between takes.

8. At one point it leaked onto the studio floor.

9. In the draft script, Eldrad's progressive disintegration is more alarming than in the final version.

10. Her skin cracks "like windscreen glass",

11. but the acid in the tube was old and has "lost some of its bite", explains the Doctor,

12. so it isn't until later that we see the side of Eldrad's face shatter.

13. The script calls for the voice to be "scratchy and tired, like that of an Edison phonograph".

14. The lift cage is stationary on the studio floor. The moving background is inserted electronically using green-screen.

15. In storylining the Kastrian sequence, Robert Holmes drew on several previous Doctor Who scripts.

16. The tunnel scenes owe something to 'Death to the Daleks' (1974), the first serial he worked on as script editor,

17. in which the Doctor encounters a series of booby-traps as he enters a dead alien city,

18. while his progress is remotely monitored by a sinister figure

19. The script calls for "a column of smoke".

20. At a very early stage, the production team considered killing off Sarah Jane in her final serial.

21. An alternative script proposed for the slot, written by Douglas Camfield,

22. ended with her being buried, with full military honours, by the French Foreign Legion.

23. "Great!" she says in the script. "That's real sympathy. It's nothing to smirk about. I thought I was dying."

24. When producer Philip Hinchcliffe asked her how she wanted Sarah to go,

25. Elisabeth Sladen asked him not to kill her, in case it might traumatise younger viewers.

26. "We almost had several miles of Kastria on top of us," says the Doctor in the script.

27. In the script, the Doctor's a bit worried that there may be some Kastrians left.

28. "We might not be popular for bringing her back?" Realises Sarah.

29. "Hard to say in such a dry atmosphere," answers the Doctor in the script.

30. "It's all just one immense mausoleum."

31. In her discussion with Philip Hinchcliffe, Elisabeth Sladen made two other requests as to the manner of her going.

32. She didn't want Sarah to be married off, like her predecessor, Jo Grant.

33. And she didn't want it to be the mainspring of the story.

34. Reasoning that Sarah was not the series' central character, she asked for a conventional Doctor Who serial,

35. with her departure added as an unconnected final scene.

36. "A bit rough, but I think we can make it," he says in the script.

37. The actors are continually moving through the same area of set.

38. The rocks were moved about between shots to create the illusion that they are in different areas of cave.

39. It is unusual for television sets to have ceilings, because they are usually lit from an overhead gantry.

40. For the caves, Christine Ruscoe incorporated intermittent sections of roof suspended on thin wires.

41. Elisabeth Sladen had been in Doctor Who since 1973.

42. She had been thinking of moving on for some time,

43. but stayed partly because there was talk of making a Doctor Who feature film.

44. Tom Baker and lan Marter wrote a script together,

45. and Elisabeth also contributed some ideas as they worked on it during rehearsals in 1975.

46. Tom didn't want to see anyone else playing Sarah, but film companies began talking about Twiggy.

47. The film stayed in development hell until 1980, and died when Tom left Doctor Who.

48. In the draft script, there's no ready-made bridge across the chasm: The Doctor has to build one using metal sections of the tunnel wall.

49. In the script, Sarah flatly refuses to use the bridge ,

50. so the Doctor leaves her behind on her own.

51. He then pretends to be in danger, calls out,

52. and Sarah blindly rushes across to help him.

53. Robert Holmes often had the Doctor trick Sarah into making an effort in spite of herself,

54. notably in his 1975 script 'The Ark in Space'.

55. In the script, the door is marked with Kastrian hieroglyphics.

56. The draft script describes Eldrad's ring as "the Kastrian master-key".

57. The shoulder strap of Elisabeth Sladen's dungarees has come adrift here.

58. She reset it between shots.

59. As the script puts it: "Bam splat powee!"

60. The underside of the regenerator press was coated with reflective material.

61. The plan was to use Front Axial Projection to make it glow.

62. This was abandoned after the difficulties with Eldrad's glowing eyes.

63. In the draft script, Eldrad's body crumbles to dust as she lies on the slab,

64. leaving only the ring hand intact.

65. "She's all cracking up," says Sarah in the script.

66. "The storage cells are very low," says the Doctor. "Just have to take a chance, put them all through one."

67. A shot of Eldrad's head shattering was planned, but omitted.

68. A long sequence followed, in which the upper slab descends slowly onto Eldrad while the Doctor tries in vain to stop it.

69. The press was designed with a cut-out system to stop it coming down too far

70. but in the studio the cut-out failed, and Judith Paris escaped with a bruised face.

71. As that sequence was originally structured, we firstsee the slab start to descend,

72. then hear there is too little power,

73. and then see Eldrad crunched to smithereens anyway.

74. After the final recording session, Kastria was dismantled:

75. Christine Ruscoe's sets were taken down overnight and the studio thoroughly cleaned, ready for the next day's work.

76. Another day, another programme... in the case of Studio 8, this was Top of the Pops.

77. "A new, enlarged, economy-sized Eldrad emerges," says the script.

78. He's played by Stephen Thorne, who had worked with Elisabeth Sladen before.

79. He played a snake-tongued alien at the 1973 audition which won her the role of Sarah.

80. The costume was built around a pair of deep rubber trousers, rather like a fisherman's waders, which came up to Thorne's armpits.

81. He found the costume very hot indeed under the studio lights.

82. After the recording, pints of perspiration were poured out of the boots.

83. Post-production on 'The Hand of Fear' began with an experimental sound session on 22 July.

84. On 5 August, Lennie Mayne met with composer Dudley Simpson and sound effects supremo Dick Mills

85. for a nine-hour session to review the four episodes and discuss their contributions.

86. The final dubbing sessions took place on four days between 15 September and 6 October.

87. Each episode was completed and ready for transmission with about a fortnight to spare... at the time, a comfortable margin.

88. The script calls Rokon the overlord of Kastria: "Old, cunning, ascetic, metallic".

89. "Now I shall have my final revenge," adds Eldrad in the script.

90. 'The Hand of Fear' was one of Lennie Mayne's last productions.

91. On 20 May 1977, he was lost at sea

92. when a freak wave overturned his dinghy in the English Channel.

93. This is another staple theme of mid-1970s Doctor Who: The war criminal returned from the grave.

94. This was a science fiction take on the popular "Hitler survived World War Il" scenario,

95. and featured, differently inflected, in four other 1975-7 Doctor Who serials:

96. 'Pyramids of Mars', 'The Brain of Morbius', 'The Deadly Assassin', and 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang'.

97. The draft script proposed that Kastrian architecture should be based around triangular shapes,

98. reflecting the crystallography of the silicon out of which their bodies are composed.

99. "The barely balanced crystalline column of particles that was once a king dissolves into a heap of powder," says the script.

100. At this point one of the studio microphones packed up, forcing a retake.

101. Rokon's recorded message from the distant past is drawn from 'The Ark in Space',

102. in which humanity survives a solar disaster by putting a selection of pioneers into suspended animation:

103. A race bank for reanimation in the distant future, like the one Eldrad speaks of here.

104. Look at the back wall behind Sarah, and see if you can spot the moving shadow of the boom mike.

105. The script, frugally economising on the set, described the race bank chamber as a "shallow alcove",

106. but Lennie Mayne decided to make it rather more spectacular.

107. Except for the doorway, this is a painting on a sheet of glass.

108. The camera is lined up to shoot the door through the unpainted middle part of the glass, creating the impression of a vast room.

109. The action was tightly choreographed

110. to keep Eldrad in the unmasked area of the glass.

111. Rokon is played by Roy Skelton,

112. who worked on no fewer than 16 Doctor Who serials between 1966 and 1988.

113. In 1975, he turned down the iconic role of Davros in 'Genesis of the Daleks'.

114. Other rubber-suit work included the Mock Turtle in Barry Letts's production of Alice in Wonderland (1986),

115. which also featured Elisabeth Sladen as the Dormouse.

116. But he is mainly known for his voice work, including many a Dalek, a robot in Out of the Unknown (1967),

117. and a 20-year stint as Zippy and George the Hippo in the pre-school series, Rainbow (1973-92).

118. After 'The Hand of Fear', the next project for Bob Baker and Dave Martin was the ITV children's serial, King of the Castle (1977),

119. a horror story set in a squalid modern tower block.

120. In the script, Rokon gives "one last smile" before he vanishes.

121. "Eldrad shakes with cold, frustrated fury."

122. Camera 1 is visible in the doorway to the left of Sarah, ready to take the next shot.

123. In the draft script, Eldrad kicks at the dust of Rokon's remains.

124. Dudley Simpson was commissioned to compose the incidental music on 21 April, nearly two months before shooting began.

125. He wrote, in all, 46 minutes and 23 seconds of incidental music, in 62 different cues.

126. This is Cue 60, one of the longer ones,

127. which means there are only two more to come. It was agreed not to use any background music for Sarah's departure.

128. Instead the actors' performances were allowed to carry the full emotional weight of the scene.

129. Dudley Simpson assembled a six-man orchestra, who recorded the music in two three-hour sessions

130. on the morning of 6 September and the evening of 22 September.

131. Among the instruments used are two cymbals, a bass drum, a tom-tom, a side drum, four pedal tympani, a vibraflap, a vibraphone,

132. a xylophone, a Yamaha electric organ, a saxophone, and a bass clarinet.

133. A longer chase sequence was recorded, but cut for timing reasons.

134. One of the shots had to be retaken because Eldrad was running in the wrong direction, left to right.

135. Eldrad is mixed into the black background of the abyss using Colour Separation Overlay.

136. Initial plans to suspend him on a harness were abandoned as unduly time-consuming to set up.

137. In the script, Sarah asks to keep the ring as a souvenir, but the Doctor tells her it belongs to Eldrad.

138. To get Sarah back across the bridge, he uses the same trick as before:

139. Pretends to stumble on the far side so that she'll rush over to his aid without thinking.

140. We then see the systems monitoring the lift's ascent, and the power finally fading out.

141. On the first take, the console was wrongly aligned,

142. so that when the Doctor opened the panel, the functional buttons weren't there, just a tatty cardboard mock-up.

143. The heavy prop had to be physically turned around before recording could continue.

144. While the scene-shifters laboured, Tom Baker passed the time by tap-dancing.

145. In the draft script, the Doctor says the coldest place in the galaxy is the planet Berberus.

146. They run so many electric fires that the entire surface is covered in power stations.

147. But the cold has an advantage: Superconductivity. "Cheapest power in the Milky Way."

148. "Look, I want some attention," she tells him in the script.

149. Bob Baker and Dave Martin were briefed to leave Sarah's departure to be written in-house.

150. They wrote a comical scene anyway, in which the Doctor gives Sarah "a large white furry object": A lucky squirk's foot.

151. "You can use it as a paperweight, he says, and she retorts, "That's what people always say about totally useless objects."

152. This line was Elisabeth Sladen's unscripted input.

153. The draft scene, in which Sarah refuses the squirk's foot because the Doctor will need more luck than her,

154. was not liked by the two actors.

155. Robert Holmes wrote a new version, which Tom and Elisabeth then tweaked to suit themselves.

156. "Don't you think it would be funnier if she stepped over me?" suggested Tom Baker during camera rehearsals... so she did.

157. Once the production team knew Sarah would be leaving

158. they needed to find a better reason for her to go than a fit of pique.

159. They also needed to decide what to do next with Doctor Who.

160. One radical idea was to attempt a serial featuring the Doctor alone, without a secondary lead character.

161. Producer Philip Hinchcliffe also wanted to feature the Doctor's home planet of Gallifrey.

162. So the next serial, 'The Deadly Assassin', saw an interlude between Sarah and her successor, the primitive Leela.

163. And once that was settled, Gallifrey became the solution to the problem of writing out Sarah.

164. The address was originally "Thornton Heath, Norwood, Croydon".

165. "Ah, Sarah," he says in the script. "Forget about the zues plug." The eventual line was Tom Baker's contribution.

166. Tom was upset to be losing Elisabeth Sladen, with whom he had formed a close working relationship.

167. There was also a worry about her replacement: Would he be stuck having to say a posh, polysyllabic name like Jonquil or Jessamine?

168. This was one of the few sequences in 'The Hand of Fear' shot out of story order.

169. It was recorded on the penultimate studio day, 19 July.

170. The final day was devoted to the underground scenes on Kastria.

171. The principal reason was to group the Tardis scenes together, so that it would not be necessary to use the set on a second day.

172. But the effect was also to help the actors concentrate on their performances,

173. so that they could make a powerful show of Sarah's farewell without the emotional distraction of its also being Elisabeth's.

174. The exteriors were shot on Friday 18 June, the last day of location filming.

175. Many retakes were necessary because of intruding aircraft noise,

176. not to mention local residents who chose exactly the wrong moment to leave their homes!

177. On the recording day, Elisabeth Sladen kept quietly running through this scene whenever she was free.

178. After making 'The Hand of Fear', she returned to the theatre,

179. appearing that autumn in Saturday, Sunday, Monday and The Lion in Winter at the Liverpool Playhouse.

180. Because of the nature of theatre work, she was unable to see 'The Hand of Fear' when it was broadcast.

181. Her next television appearances were as the presenter of two editions of the BBC Schools programme, Merry-Go-Round (1977).

182. In the last episode, the Doctor told her that travel broadens the mind, but she wasn't convinced.

183. In the script, the Doctor replies, "A stitch in time saves nine" and "Look before you leap," which were her lines in Part 3.

184. "Bring on 35 violins!" Called Lennie Mayne when the scene was finished.

185. Elisabeth Sladen took the cuddly owl home with her, and years later gave it to her baby daughter

186. No, it's Stokefield Close in Thornbury, Gloucestershire.

187. Speaking to the dog was Elisabeth Sladen's unscripted input.

188. The dog, named Fifi, belonged to Frances Pidgeon, who played Miss Jackson.

189. The tune is the music-hall favourite, 'Daddy wouldn't buy me a bow-wow' (1892).

190. The concluding freeze-frame was Elisabeth Sladen's idea.

191. Uncredited production contributors to this serial included:

192. Nansi Davies, Phyllis Page

193. Ronnie Peverall Johnny Norris

194. Nick Lake Dave Chapman

195. Lan Brindle Stan Sweatman

196. Jim Hering, John Phillips, Jim Short, Alan Thompson

197. John Dymock, James Guest, James Hughes, Mary Weston

198. Janet Gilpin, Jennifer Hughes, Caroline O'Neill

199. Alan Muhley, George Best, Dave Child, Dave Gurney

200. Roger Williams

201. Production text commentary by Martin Wiggins

202. Hey.

203. You.

204. He blew it.