Doctor Who 8x22

Directed by Christopher Barry

Roger Delgado as The Master • Richard Franklin as Mike Yates • John Levene as Sergeant Benton • Damaris Hayman as Miss Hawthorne • Don McKillop as Bert the Landlord

With the Doctor frozen by the energy release from the barrow, Jo calls Yates and Benton for help, but when the Brigadier tries to join them he finds the village surrounded by a heat barrier.

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1. "The Master sends a terrifying creature to destroy them..."

2. This episode was first shown on 29 May 1971, and was seen by 10.4 million viewers.

3. Prepare for some music from the Orchestre Nationale de la Rediffusion Française:

4. They've obviously had a bet on the game, but the business was unscripted.

5. As scripted, an earth tremor makes the Devil's End camera topple over, and then it cuts out.

6. The announcer is voiced by Nicholas Courtney.

7. As scripted, the Doctor has been completely buried, and here they uncover his head.

8. The other coven members are cowering in terror on their knees,

9. which is why the script gives the Master a slight, ironic pause before "worthy disciples".

10. But starting tight on the Master lost the point, so Roger Delgado opted not to play the pause.

11. Barry Letts planned to write 'The Dæmons' himself, but his day-job was a significant call on his time.

12. But his wife, Muriel, happened to know Mary Sloman, whose husband Robert (1926-2005) was a part-time playwright.

13. Letts asked him to collaborate on developing his black magic idea,

14. but Sloman had a day-job too, in the circulation department of The Sunday Times,

15. so they tended to work together in the evenings at one another's homes.

16. The barrow was not the easiest location to get to.

17. who were presumably forgiven on account of their having died several thousands of years before television was invented.

18. Benton and Yates were scripted to speak simultaneously, but the two speeches were written out consecutively.

19. This "back and forth" method of playing the scene was worked out in rehearsal.

20. The next scene was written for a bar crowded with shocked and injured people, and corpses.

21. The planned first shot was a blanket being drawn over the dead face of the television cameraman.

22. Peculiar, inexplicable deaths were a standard feature of Doctor Who plotting in the 1971 series:

23. Dr Reeves is played by Eric Hillyard (1915-85).

24. He had previously worked with Christopher Barry in Paul Temple (1970), in which he played a hall porter.

25. He was later the court usher in the original BBC production of Rumpole of the Bailey (1975).

26. It was only established that the Doctor has two hearts as recently as Jon Pertwee's debut serial in 1970.

27. In other cuts, Jo was scripted to tell Yates:

28. "He can follow us down there later."

29. Benton is ordered to change into civvies and have the chopper fuelled and ready for take-off at first light.

30. Constable Groom is played by Christopher Wray.

31. He was another P.C. In the original series of Emmerdale Farm (1972-3), and was asked to sign on as a regular.

32. Jo's switching off the light establishes that it is now daybreak.

33. The original intention was that the black magic rites were being performed in the church itself.

34. During pre-production in March, the designer was planning to build a church set - and no cavern.

35. So the Master would now be standing at the high altar, the most sanctified place in an Anglican church.

36. On reflection, it was decided that this might outrage the sensibilities of Christian viewers,

37. Second thoughts then turned into even more cautious third thoughts:

38. A church crypt would still be consecrated ground, so the scenes' location was renamed the cavern.

39. Christopher Barry rationalised this in terms of a pagan site taken over by Christianity for its own purposes.

40. Robert Sloman often wrote his own enthusiasms into his scripts - in this case, flying.

41. You will have noticed that neither of the serial's scriptwriters is named as its author in the opening credits.

42. This was partly because the BBC frowned on the "insider trading" of production staff writing for their own series,

43. So Barry Leopold Letts and the father of Guy Sloman needed to find themselves a suitable pseudonym...

44. A storyline for 'The Demons', as the serial was first known, was formally commissioned on 17 December 1970.

45. It was due for delivery on 25 January 1971, but came in early: Sloman's fee was green-lit on 7 January.

46. The scripts were commissioned on 6 January, with a 1 February deadline.

47. It was less than a four-week turnaround,

48. but Sloman and his invisible writing partner still beat the deadline:

49. The first episode was delivered on 25 January and formally accepted the same day,

50. and the others arrived on 29 January, and were accepted on 15 February.

51. Sloman and Letts worked on the scripts partly in relay:

52. Sloman bashed out a first draft very quickly and handed it over to Letts;

53. Letts then revised his partner's work into a second, interim draft,

54. and finally Sloman polished it up as a third draft which went to Terrance Dicks for script editing.

55. In rehearsal, it was suggested that the next scene might start a few seconds earlier,

56. so that we hear the phone ring, and see an elegant female hand pass the receiver across to the Brigadier.

57. The idea wasn't taken up, and the fragrant Mrs Fiona Lethbridge Stewart never reached videotape.

58. Even so, Sloman and Letts were keen to show aspects of the regular characters' lives which didn't usually feature,

59. such as the problems of Sergeant Benton's work-life balance between soldiering and ballroom dancing.

60. This was also why the narrative is engineered so that Yates and Benton mostly appear in their civilian clothes.

61. They set out to fill it instead with characters who were interesting in their own right:

62. Miss Hawthorne quotes Geoffrey Chaucer's general prologue to the Canterbury Tales (c. 1387).

63. Miss Hawthorne's cloak was not supplied by the BBC Wardrobe department.

64. Damaris Hayman borrowed it from her friend, the comic actress Dame Margaret Rutherford (1892-1972).

65. It may seem odd that the lower notice on the door reads "No admittance during service",

66. but as originally planned, the door led into the church, not the cavern.

67. The back-pedalling on the scripts' already cautious representation of Satanism may not be unconnected

68. with the fact that script editing and pre-production coincided with a press and parliamentary controversy

69. From the production team's point of view, it wasn't perfect timing:

70. Terrance Dicks was not only finalizing 'The Dæmons' but also planning a ghost story to kick off the 1972 series!

71. In traditional witchcraft practice, black candles are in fact used for positive magic.

72. The Fraudulent Mediums Act 1951 did indeed repeal the Witchcraft Act 1735,

73. That shotgun's an expensive prop - and it's doomed.

74. John Levene gamely agreed to be thrown head over heels onto his back in the course of this fight.

75. The only casualty of the stunt is the shotgun, which breaks in two.

76. "Hold the two pieces together," hissed Levene, but Garvin leaves the wooden handle on the ground.

77. So if you think Garvin's holding the gun in a funny way, you know why...

78. 'The Dæmons' is the only five-part serial in the entire 1963-89 run of Doctor Who.

79. Its unusual length is a function of arithmetic and series duration.

80. The 1970 and '71 series of Doctor Who both ran for 25 weeks, after which the BBC upped it to 26.

81. In 1970, most of the serials had run for seven episodes, but Barry Letts wanted them shorter in 1971.

82. Early in March 1970, he revised plans for the 1971 series, scrapping previous budgets based on seven-parters.

83. Most of the serials were to run for four or six weeks, leaving five weeks over for the series finale.

84. Garvin is about to suffer death by film edit:

85. The next shot is a "dæmon's eye view" which was scripted to begin at the church doors:

86. Look carefully at the van.

87. He's driving along with both doors wide open!

88. It's almost as if he was anticipating the need for a quick exit...

89. This sequence was shot at Ramsbury Airfield on 26 April 1971: The "road" is really an airstrip.

90. Jon Pertwee softens the scripted "Don't fuss, girl."

91. At that point, Barry Letts introduced two new standard budgets for first and subsequent episodes.

92. No serial would ever be done "on the cheap" to fund more lavish expenditure elsewhere.

93. Damaris Hayman was only twelve years older than John Levene.

94. She tended to be cast as tweedy ladies of a certain age who might be easily shocked.

95. She preferred to work in comedy, saying it had "more depth", and she appeared with, among other comic legends,

96. Les Dawson (1972), Morecambe and Wise (1973), Harry Worth (1973), Tommy Cooper (1974), and Basil Brush (1976-7).

97. Shortly before 'The Dæmons', she was seen as a charity collector in Doctor at Large,

98. and during the run she was a secretary in The Mind of Mr J. G. Reeder.

99. The phrase was another element dropped from the script in order to avoid offending Christian sensibilities.

100. Damaris Hayman pointed this out to Barry Letts as an error,

101. The prescient van driver is played by Gerald Taylor, making a rare Doctor Who appearance in person.

102. He was more often out of vision as a Dalek (1963-7, including on film and stage),

103. a Zarbi (1965), a War Machine (1966), and an alien Faun from the planet Vega Nexos (1974).

104. The heat barrier was scripted to be fifteen feet wide, but this looks more like three.

105. The stick is fitted with a battery-powered pyrotechnic charge operated by a concealed trigger.

106. Soon we'll see objects such as small rocks and branches being thrown into the barrier.

107. This was a more complex effect to stage, partly because the trick props had to be small enough to throw,

108. and partly because they had to explode in the air on cue.

109. Obviously they had a charge built into The problem was how to detonate it remotely.

110. There was too little room inside To do it by any kind of radio control.

111. The secret was two drawing pins, a non-conductive plastic peg, and a thin nylon line.

112. The pins were wired up to the battery, also inside the prop, but the peg kept them apart.

113. The peg was connected to the nylon line, which secured the prop to the actor throwing it.

114. See any nylon here?

115. The prop is tossed, the nylon pulls out the peg, the two pins come together to complete the circuit, and BANG!

116. Originally, 'The Dæmons' was to have been made following the usual Doctor Who production pattern:

117. A week of location filming, followed by rehearsals and five recording days in the studio.

118. On 16 November 1970, however, Barry Letts arranged to swap the first two studio days

119. For an extra week on location , leaving only three days' worth of studio scenes.

120. The improving text is from the hymn 'Rock of Ages' (1763).

121. The noise that follows is the beating of heavy wings from outside, as something flies off to do the Master's bidding.

122. The "Crystamatic" made it possible to synchronise the operation of film cameras and their sound units.

123. Barry Letts saw a possible application which might make location filming almost as efficient as studio recording.

124. Traditionally, film was made with a single camera working on a shot by shot basis,

125. But now two or more film cameras could be synched up to shoot a scene simultaneously...

126. In the script, all we see until the end of the episode are glimpses of a thing with a scaly back.

127. At this time, filming usually achieved 3½ minutes of footage per day's work.

128. Barry Letts planned to shoot 'The Dæmons' using three film cameras synched up with a Crystamatic unit.

129. This would reduce the time spent setting up shots, and so nearly treble each day's output to 10 minutes.

130. If the experiment was a success, the style of Doctor Who would become a lot more filmic in the coming years...

131. The archaeological dig in Quatermass and the Pit also ends up uncovering a spaceship.

132. Katy Manning found Bok rather comical.

133. So did Jon Pertwee...

134. Also seen in this episode were:

135. Leslie Bates, Anthony Case, Stephen Ismay, Ron Tingley

136. Robin Squire

137. Uncredited production contributors included:

138. Peter Grimwade

139. John Norton, Alex Young

140. Alf Trustrum

141. Ricky Grosser, Tony Harding, Len Hutton

142. Sybil Cave

143. Chrissie Lightfoot

144. Sarah Newman

145. Sue Upton