Doctor Who 18x17

Matthew Waterhouse as Adric • Clifford Rose as Rorvik • Kenneth Cope as Packard

The TARDIS is drawn into an empty white void, somewhere between universes. But they are not the only ones trapped there.

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1. "Who is the Time-Sensitive Fugitive?

2. "What awaits the TARDIS at the Zero Point?

3. "What secret peril lurks in the banqueting hall?" (Radio Times)

4. This episode was first shown on 3 January, 1981.

5. It was seen by 7.1 million viewers.

6. The opening shot draws on imagery of 18th-century slave ships familiar from the 1977 American mini-series, Roots.

7. Director Paul Joyce had asked for special lighting to suggest the Tharils glowing with power even when dormant.

8. This proved technically unachievable. The effect you're seeing now was added electronically in post-production.

9. Joyce hoped to make the serial in a distinctively filmic style.

10. This tracking shot was inspired by the cinematography of Orson Welles in Touch Of Evil (1958).

11. The first take ended here when the camera failed to clear the doorway.

12. Early in August, 1980, Joyce had pre-production screenings of several films he wanted to emulate,

13. including the film noir classic, iss Me Deadly (1955), and the nihilistic space comedy, Dark Star (1974).

14. The script mentions the graffiti, but not the precise wording.

15. The "Kilroy" graffito was first scrawled by Americans in the 1940s (though we'll later find out there really is a Kilroy here).

16. Seen above is the actual lighting rig for Studio 6 at Television Centre.

17. This was deemed to be "shooting off the set", which was against BBC custom and practice and led to a two-hour stoppage.

18. Joyce's unusual working methods weren't popular with some members of the management and crew,

19. so 'Warriors' Gate' was a fraught production with more than its fair share of tension and conflict behind the scenes.

20. As originally written, the serial began more busily, with a space battle between the privateer and an anti-slavery blockade craft.

21. Steve Gallagher wrote it economically as a tight shot of the "Antonine killer" pilot sitting in his cockpit,

22. with the battle shown as flares and graphical readouts reflected in the visor of his helmet.

23. The Antonine scores a direct hit on the privateer's engines.

24. The privateer tries to escape by jumping to warp drive and arrives... nowhere.

25. But Gallagher's screenplay was overlong, and the Antonine killer was one of many elements revised out during pre-production.

26. In the script, Rorvik presses his hand down on Packard's, forcing it painfully onto the button.

27. The time-sensitive Tharils can see and select from a range of possible futures.

28. As a navigator, the Tharil feeds in the co-ordinates of the ship's possible future location, and so makes it a reality.

29. But his options have to be limited to the ship itself, "in phase" with the present moment. That's why Biroc's in chains.

30. In this sequence, Paul Joyce aimed to create a sense of time slowing down and coming to a dead stop.

31. The Quantel image-processing device was used to slow down the coin and freeze it at its apogee.

32. This degraded the picture so much that Joyce's BBC critics suggested it was untransmittable. (But here it is anyway.)

33. The coin here is a large replica of the one Aldo tossed, six centimetres across.

34. In the script, the TARDIS is "tumbling top-over-tail in E-Space, like the coin".

35. The image coming into Biroc's eye was added in post-production.

36. It's actually a wire model: A computer graphic would have cost too much.

37. In the script, only Romana is at the control console. The others are braced against the walls, "Adric looking particularly queasy".

38. This episode was originally scheduled for transmission on 20 December, 1980, following straight on from the previous serial.

39. Then the Controller of BBC One, who compiled the schedules, decided to give Doctor Who a two-week break over Christmas.

40. Just in case anyone had forgotten the ongoing E-Space situation while the series was off the air,

41. a New Year's Eve retrospective of the year's tv highlights, Pick of 80, showed an appropriate extract from 'Full Circle'.

42. The bridge was scripted as "a geodesic structure", with operational zones on three levels to make the most of the space.

43. But it's rundown: "Once gleaming and efficient, the paint is now streaked and aged, the theme colour being that of rust.

44. "Fixtures are held in place by tape, glass covers to screens are split and cracked."

45. Lane's damaged area is like an aircraft cargo hold, normally sealed off from the inside of the ship.

46. The camerawork here, looking through foreground objects, was inspired by similar shots in iss Me Deadly.

47. The scenario draws on Gallagher's radio serial, The Babylon Run (1979),

48. in which a spaceship malfunctions during a black hole jump and ends up in a deserted sector of space.

49. The Doctor and Romana are debating the workings of chance in human (and Gallifreyan) destiny.

50. The Doctor holds that even a deliberately random action, and its consequences, may, in a sense, be "chosen",

51. on the "holistic" argument that anything in the universe is influenced by everything else.

52. Romana refers to the psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961),

53. The I Ching (literally, the Book of Changes) was probably first compiled in the 9th century BC.

54. Packard is played by Kenneth Cope (born 1934).

55. He played a Scouse wide-boy in early episodes of Coronation Street, but left to write and act in That Was The Week That Was (1962-3).

56. He is best remembered as the ghost detective Marty Hopkirk in Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) (1969-70).

57. Aldo and his colleague (who wasn't originally called Royce) were written as a pair of incredibly old handymen,

58. a comic couple dressed in heavily patched spacesuits that were far too big for them.

59. They have been almost part of the ship's fixtures and fittings since long before Rorvik took it over,

60. and they know all its nooks and crannies, the places to hide themselves away whenever there is work to be done.

61. They were also supposed to be impossible to tell apart from one another hence their almost identical names, Aldo and Waldo.

62. The script describes Packard as "tall and gloomy, as if resigned to a lifetime of apologising".

63. In earlier versions, the time-sensitives were called Tharks, not Tharils.

64. The name wasn't liked.

65. In early pre-production, Paul Joyce considered renaming them Calibans,

66. after the monstrous slave who once ruled Prospero's island in Shakespeare's The Tempest (1611).

67. That came to nothing, and the Tharks became the Thars,

68. and then the Tharls.

69. Then it was pointed out that three previous Doctor Who serials

70. had featured an alien race called the Thals (pronounced "Tharls"). And so the Tharils had their final change of name.

71. This business was developed in rehearsal. In the script, Biroc just pushes Lane aside and rushes out.

72. The script directs the two actors to play this exchange "with something less than complete amiability".

73. That wasn't difficult for Tom Baker and Lalla Ward. They were in a relationship at the time,

74. but it was a sparky, abrasive relationship which ran hot and cold.

75. During the making of 'Warriors' Gate' it was more acrimonious than usual:

76. Paul Joyce believed they were in the process of breaking up with one another.

77. What they were actually doing was coming to terms with the end of their time on Doctor Who.

78. Lalla had known from the start of the 1980-1 series that she would be leaving.

79. And now, during the making of 'Warriors' Gate', Tom let it be known that he too wanted to bow out at the end of the year.

80. This was originally the last line of the scene,

81. and this material was a late addition.

82. Adric's doing it wrong: You toss three coins to consult the I Ching.

83. But K9 accurately quotes the I Ching's words on how the weak restrain the powerful.

84. The "surfboard" effect Paul Joyce had wanted here was only achievable on film,

85. so in pre-production they considered doing something with lighting, smoke, and a laser.

86. The final effect, with Biroc trailing ghostly alter-egos behind him,

87. was discovered unexpectedly when experimenting with the electronic "Framestore" image-processing device.

88. The smoke pours out of K9 "like desert sand", says the script.

89. The orange privateer uniforms were genuine NASA engineers' overalls,

90. but Rorvik's costume, denoting his seniority, was made from scratch.

91. The main design influence was the costumes of Dark Star.

92. Paul Joyce wanted utilitarian working clothes rather than flashy spacesuits.

93. The intended effect was for the buttons to move in response to Biroc's touch moments after his paw has moved on.

94. As Gallagher conceived them, Tharils go "out of phase" as they flit between possible futures, testing out the options.

95. Gallagher had wanted to make the privateer and its crew more of a focus for comedy,

96. some of it arising from the ship's poor state of repair:

97. Characters would break off what they were saying to thump the systems back into temporary working order.

98. But, in 1980, Doctor Who had just finished a period when it was being played more for laughs than usual.

99. Executive producer Barry Letts saw a risk of regressing to "the very facetiousness we so disliked in the past".

100. He advised that 'Warriors' Gate' needed to be played "absolutely for real (letting the comedy be real too)".

101. In particular, he ruled that the serial couldn't have a handyman double-act named Aldo and Waldo.

102. "Immediately the story becomes a silly pantomime instead of 'real' science fiction," he wrote.

103. It may not be entirely a coincidence that Waldo's new name rhymes with the director's,

104. especially since there was a second Joyce working on the production His assistant Joyce Stansfeld.

105. The script specifies that the time column has stopped rising and falling.

106. Biroc is played by David Weston (born 1938).

107. In 1956, he was a founder member of the National Youth Theatre.

108. He played the title role in The Legend of Young Dick Turpin (1965),

109. and he had a future as another icon in his one-man show, Falstaff (1997).

110. He is also the author and narrator of the 1998 audiobook, Shakespeare. ; His Life and Work.

111. Scriptwriters for the 1980-1 series were briefed to treat K9 as a mobile computer, not a dog.

112. Tom Baker, however, liked to make visual puns

113. along the boundary between organic and mechanical, like giving K9 the kiss of life in 'Destiny of the Daleks' (1979).

114. He's doing it again here: Is that a massage or some arcane technological procedure?

115. Executive producer Barry Letts had a ponder himself when he read the script.

116. The production team explained to him that there's more to zero coordinates than Romana says here:

117. They define a domain with no spatial existence and no "present" as we know it, but rather a mix of past, present, and future.

118. Biroc is now moving under his own power, no longer aided by the Time Winds.

119. The void outside the TARDIS was created using the green-screen Colour Separation Overlay process.

120. The studio was dominated by two green cycloramas made of flameproof felt measuring 50 feet by 21. The floor was painted, too.

121. The green was electronically keyed out of the picture, and replaced with the output of Camera 5, which was trained on

122. a backlit white sphere.

123. Gallagher conceived the void as the mathematically theoretical medium through which a warp ship passes when travelling.

124. Paul Joyce envisaged it as an endless fog, with no apparent light source and no point of reference to give you bearings.

125. Adric's line was originally written for Romana.

126. The horizontal black line to the left of the screen is the shadow cast by the edge of a cyclorama.

127. You can still see traces of the keyed-out green as a fringe around the edge of Packard.

128. Romana is wearing a Chinese tunic modelled on one owned by Paul Joyce's ex-wife.

129. That wasn't the original plan.

130. As played by Lalla Ward, the character often wore a feminine variation on period men's clothes.

131. The original design for her 'Warriors' Gate' costume was in the eighteenth-century Rococo style.

132. The design included a gold-braided dress coat, a white ruffled shirt and high, knotted neckcloth,

133. dark green velvet breeches, pale green silk stockings, grey shoes,

134. and a waistcoat embroidered with yellow-green leaves and fastened with frog-motif buttons.

135. The problem with that design concept was the predominant use of the colour green.

136. As soon as Romana stepped in front of the CSO cycloramas, most of her clothes would have disappeared!

137. The first idea for the gateway

138. was a "glass shot": A painted image rather than a full-sized piece of scenery.

139. Steve Gallagher drew inspiration from the films of Jean Cocteau, which he had studied at university.

140. In Cocteau's Orphée (1950), mirrors are the gateway through which the characters travel to the other world beyond death.

141. The Tharil Palace owes more to the enchanted castle in La Belle et la Béte (1946),

142. but the budget wouldn't stretch to a corridor of torches held by human arms, like those which lead to the Beast's great hall.

143. The Tharils' leonine appearance was inspired by the look of the Beast in the same film.

144. This shot is a close visual echo of the moment when Death first goes through the mirror in Orphée.

145. Orphée and its 1960 sequel, Testament d'Orphée, were two more films which Joyce viewed during pre-production.

146. Through a misunderstanding, the crew's pistols were cast in solid aluminium.

147. The wooden TARDIS prop was rather less solid, and cracked when Packard hit it.

148. It was decided early on that Rorvik and his crew would not wear spacesuits for their scenes in the void,

149. but some kind of protective clothing was mooted, such as anoraks and walking boots.

150. In the first draft, this is a castle outside of time, lit by candles which never burn down.

151. In the script, there are dormant, armoured Gundans stationed by each doorway and each mirror.

152. Remember this business with the goblet. When you watch Part Three, it'll become more significant than it now seems.

153. In the script, the Doctor crosses directly to the mirror, following Biroc's footprints in the dust.

154. This business was developed in rehearsal to explain why the Gundan should now come back to life.

155. Steve Gallagher's first draft had a different cliffhanger.

156. As the Doctor explores the strange castle, a Tharil suddenly appears out of nowhere and advances on him menacingly.

157. Also seen in this episode were:

158. Mike Mungarvan (Kilroy)

159. Derek Schafer (Gundan)

160. Carl Bohun, Michael Gordon-Browne (Tharils)

161. Andy Hart, James Muir, Joe Santo (Tharils)

162. Uncredited production contributors

163. Dave Murphy (Studio Engineer)

164. Gerry Borrows (Grams Operator)

165. Sarah Leigh (Costume Assistant)

166. Nansi Davies (Booker)

167. Roger Harris (Design Assistant)

168. Chick Hetherington (Show Working Supervisor)

169. Jane Judge (Production Secretary)