Inspirations: Hide

Hide is, basically, Nu-Who's attempt at a haunted house story. All the trappings of a good ghost story are present:

• the setting is a big old rambling house,
• it's night-time,
• there's a storm in full blast, with rain, thunder and lightning,
• the house is empty but for only a couple of people,
• despite the late 20th Century setting, much of the house has no electricity so people have to wander about in the dark with candles,
• there's a weird cold spot,
• a figure is fleetingly glimpsed scuttling about in the darkened corridors,
• another is a white shape with a skull-like countenance,
• someone holds another's hand - only to discover that it was not that of their companion...

The Doctor has come specifically because he has heard of the "Caliburn Ghast" - an archaic word for an evil spirit, and presumably where we get "ghastly" from.

We get to see the Ghast, and it looks like a ghost. It is white, has what looks like a screaming, skull-like visage, and is only glimpsed in flashes of lightning.

It turns out that, unlike most ghosts, this one doesn't mind having its photograph taken, and the scientist who has purchased the house in order to investigate the haunting, has many images of it, from different parts of the house.

Apparently the works of authors Susan Hill and Shirley Jackson were major inspirations. The former is the writer behind The Woman in Black (1983) which was subsequently adapted for TV by Nigel Kneale (more of him shortly), then made into a movie by Hammer. The latter wrote The Haunting of Hill House (1959) which was filmed in 1963, retitled simply as The Haunting.

Susan Hill also wrote the ghost story The Small Hand in 2010.

The last time the Doctor and his companion went ghost hunting in a big old house was in Day of the Daleks, and this story has other links with the Pertwee era. The setting is 1974 - year of the Third Doctor's final season, and the Doctor produces a blue Metebelis crystal. How this relates to the ones we saw in The Planet of the Spiders (1974 again) isn't explained. They all seemed to get blown to bits when the Great One popped her (8) clogs.

This being Doctor Who, our hero knows that this is nothing to do with the supernatural so there has to be some sort of sci-fi explanation to events. He dons the orangey-red spacesuit he took from Sanctuary Base 6 back in The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit and travels to the site of the house through the entirety of Earth's history, taking pictures as he goes. Sure enough, the ghast is present throughout and it turns out it's all to do with a bubble universe and time travel.

The episode actually shifts from being a ghost story to a romance. Not only do we have the relationship between the scientist - Prof Alec Palmer - and his helper, Emma Grayling (whose role in events has parallels with the psychic Theodora in The Haunting) but we also have two crooked-looking aliens who have been accidentally separated.

Palmer was originally going to Professor Bernard Quatermass, created by Kneale. The Manx writer often bemoaned the fact that for years Doctor Who had "borrowed" his ideas, and the Pertwee era isn't short of material that is ever so slightly close to the Quatermass serials.

Another inspiration for Hide is clearly Kneale's The Stone Tape, in the way that the ghast is inextricably anchored to the site of Caliburn House - even before it was built, and long after it was demolished.

Links between Doctor Who and Quatermass were hinted at in Remembrance of the Daleks, with reference to the British Rocket Group and "Bernard".

The Clara story arc is continued with the TARDIS taking a dislike to her and locking her out. This will be built on in the mini-episode in which she can never find her bedroom, and encounters multiple versions of herself, lost every night - all the work of the ship.

Next time: a Jules Verne-inspired title accompanies an effort to improve on the final two episodes of The Invasion of Time...