H is for... Hade

Gatherer Hade was the chief collector of taxes in Megropolis One on the planet Pluto. He reported directly to the Collector, the representative of the Company which ran the planet. Hade ensured that everyone paid what was due, taking no account of their ability to do so. He had considerable wealth of his own and enjoyed a number of luxuries - such as having a desk made of real wood, and a supply of raspberry leaves. Part of his job was to hunt down tax avoiders, and anyone else who might upset the smooth running of the Megropolis. When the Doctor attempted to use a forged credit card and was captured, Hade assumed him to be an ajack, as this group had been active in other Megropoli. He decided to let him go in order to trace his fellow conspirators. The Collector disagreed with Hade's assessment and offered a huge bounty on the Doctor's head - to be paid for by Hade out of his own funds. In order not to lose this money, Hade decided he would capture the Doctor himself using the city's CCTV system to trace him. However, the Doctor had sabotaged this to give a false image.
The Doctor triggered a revolution, which overthrew the Collector and his regime. Hade went to the roof of the Megropolis to remonstrate with some workers who were gathering there, which was against the law. They ignored his commands and threw him from the roof to his death.

Played by: Richard Leech. Appearances: The Sun Makers (1977).

• Leech had a 40 year career in film and TV, appearing in classic movies such as Ice Cold In Alex and A Night to Remember. He played the police detective in Night of the Demon, the Val Newton movie based on M R James' Casting the Runes. By the time he made The Sun Makers he was profoundly deaf, but was a very good lip reader. He continued working up until 1988, passing away at the age of 81 in 2004.

H is for... Habiba, Lois

Lois Habiba was a junior civil servant who was brought onto the 456 project through her boss, Bridget Spears. The 456 were an alien species which had visited the Earth in the 1960's, when they took a number of children away with them. On their return in 2009 they affected every child on Earth. An ambassador was sent, materialising in a special environment chamber constructed at a government building near the Thames in central London. Habiba was one of those allowed access to record the negotiations with the ambassador. The 456 had become addicted to hormones produced by human children, and this time they wanted more than the handful of orphans they were given before. The Torchwood team in Cardiff had been forced to go on the run as Jack had been involved in the 1965 incident, and the government was covering this up - assassinating anyone who had been there at the time. Habiba was approached by Gwen Cooper and asked to help. She gave them information about the facility where Captain Jack was being held so that a rescue mission could be organised. Later she agreed to spy for Torchwood, allowing them to know what was going on with the negotiations. She was given special contact lenses which would allow the team to see what she saw and by taking shorthand notes she could also let them know what was being said.
Her involvement with Torchwood was discovered, and she was imprisoned. In jail she told Spears about the contact lenses so that she could record the Prime Minister saying he was going to blame the Americans for the latest incident. Spears could then force him to resign, and she told Habiba that she would get her released.

Played by: Cush Jumbo. Appearances: TW  Series 3: Children of Earth (2009).

• The character of Lois Habiba was created by Russell T Davies when Freema Agyeman was unable to reprise the role of Martha Jones for Torchwood's third series.

Inspirations - Meglos

This is the 110th Inspirations post I have written, and for the very first time I'm going to use the word "formula". Welcome to Meglos - the story voted least favourite of the entire Fourth Doctor's seven year run, as voted by readers of DWM during the programme's 50th anniversary year. The main reason for this lowly position is that the story is formulaic. It looks like what a Doctor Who story is supposed to look like, at least by people who don't actually know the programme all that well.
Back in 1969 producer Derrick Sherwin decided to have the 7th season set entirely on contemporary Earth, with the Doctor exiled by the Time Lords, and having to join forces with UNIT, led by Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, who had already been introduced in a couple of Patrick Troughton stories. Sherwin had a dislike for the more fantastical space-bound stories, and wanted the series to move towards something more akin to the Quatermass serials of the 1950's. He believed these would look better, especially as the programme was going to move into colour production, and he also thought present-day settings would make things cheaper (this despite The Invasion going way over budget). Of course, as soon as the decision had been made and plans were well advanced, Sherwin left to take on another job, and realising the new Earth-bound version of the programme fell to new producer Barry Letts and his script editor Terrance Dicks. Dicks' friend and fellow writer Malcolm Hulke warned that the new format left only limited plot possibilities - mad scientists and alien invasions. In other words, Letts and Dicks would be stuck with a formula. Were the Pertwee seasons formulaic? No, they were not. Letts and Dicks rose to the challenge and ensured that there was still a wide variety of story forms. There are some bad scientists in the early 1970's, but very few mad ones. As for alien invasions of the Home Counties, this is one of those misconceptions which non-fans perpetuate - like wobbly sets and spaceships made of washing-up liquid bottles. There were more alien invasion stories in the first 5 years of New-Who than there were in the 5 years of Pertwee, despite the limitations imposed by the Doctor's exile.
With all of time and space available, Doctor Who had never been formulaic. Writers may have played with formula, but always given it a twist. Meglos, on the other hand, seems to have been put together by committee. With two writers and an extremely hands-on script editor, with an executive producer looking over their shoulders, it probably was. Throw in an unimaginative director, lack of location filming, and some underwhelming performances from the guest artists, it's no wonder that it is so unloved.

Meglos is the only story written by actors Andrew McCulloch and John Flanagan (neither of whom ever appeared in the show). The new script editor Christopher H Bidmead had seen a play by the pair and so approached them about writing for the series. The play was a political satire about Thatcherism, set in a funeral parlour, but Bidmead saw some potential.
It was Flanagan who came up with the idea - an old chestnut - of a society wherein two factions are at loggerheads - one scientific / rational and one religious / mystic.
Science and Religion have been incompatible in certain respects for centuries. Even today we have Creationists, who tend to accept the Biblical story of the creation of the Earth, animals and human beings literally - the Earth created in 7 days, Adam and Eve etc. Victorian prelates worked out the age of the Earth from the Bible, counting all the various generations mentioned. Science, on the other hand, shows that the planet was already billions of years old when the human race came along. Those Victorian prelates claimed that the fossils of sea creatures found at the tops of mountains were proof of the Biblical flood, whereas geologists could show that this demonstrated the way land formations changed over millions of years, with tectonic forces raising up ancient sea beds.
Another great conflict between Science and Religion was in the area of cosmology. If God had created everything in the universe for the benefit of Mankind, then the Earth must therefore lie at the centre of that universe, with everything else in orbit around it. Astronomers, however, found that this was not the case. The Earth rotated around the Sun, which was just one of billions of stars. This conflict is epitomised by the treatment of Galileo Galilei by the Catholic Church. He was an advocate of the Heliocentric view of the universe - wherein the Earth orbited the Sun. When he came to write about this he phrased it within the context of a philosophical discussion, rather than put forward a straightforward thesis. This still wasn't acceptable to the Vatican, which put him on trial and forced him to recant his views.
In Meglos, we have a society which is split between the mystical Deons, who believe that their power source - the Dodecahedron - was given to them by their god, Ti, and so is deserving of worship. The other section of society is the Savants, who accept it as simply an object of obscure origin which provides energy to power their underground city. 'Deon' derives from deus (Latin) and dios (Greek), which mean 'god'. Savant comes from the Latin sapere, meaning 'knowledge' or 'learning'.

The Dodecahedron (a 12 sided geometrical figure) is really the power source for a weapon built by the alien Zolfa-Thurans, who wiped themselves out in some sort of war. Only one of their race survives - Meglos - and he wants it back. Meglos' name derives from megalomaniac - because that's what he is. It's like calling your baddie Villainus. The inspiration for the form of the alien came from a cactus in McCulloch's kitchen.
Considering that Bidmead, and Barry Letts, wanted to have more real science in the programme, we have a quite idiotic time-loop on display, which keeps the Doctor and Romana out of the plot for the whole of the first episode. First of all, the people trapped in the time-loop are aware that they are in a  time-loop. Then we have them breaking out of it by simply going through the repeated motions themselves but out of phase with it - so breaking it by seemingly confusing it. Bidmead called this time-loop a Chronic Hysteresis. Chronic obviously refers to time, whilst a quick check on-line reveals that Hysteresis is "the phenomenon in which the value of a physical property lags behind changes in the effect causing it, as for instance when magnetic induction lags behind the magnetizing force". Put simply, it's like when a rubber band returns to its usual shape, but not immediately. This seems to imply that the Doctor and Romana would have gotten out of the time-loop eventually, which at least fits with Meglos' plan to delay them rather than just trap them forever. Quite why he doesn't just do the latter is never explained. Like the megalomaniacs who populate James Bond movies, he just has to leave the door open enough to let his enemy eventually defeat him.

Meglos devises a typically complicated and convoluted plan to steal the Dodecahedron back. He employs some comedy pirates, led by a couple of pensioners, to abduct a human being from Earth to provide him with a physical template which forms the basis of his impersonation of the Doctor. He somehow knows that the Doctor has been to Tigella before and is known to the leader of the planet, who has invited him to come and help them. Impersonating the Doctor will allow him access to the power source. He could have simply had the Gaztaks abduct a Deon Tigellan to achieve the same aim a lot quicker and easier, without bringing the Doctor into the picture. The Gaztaks are going to raid the city anyway, so they could also have just let him have access using one of their forms as his template. Meglos' ultimate aim: to sit in his bunker and blow up planets. If he has any other goal, it is never mentioned.
The director chosen to helm this story was Terrence Dudley, who had worked with John Nathan-Turner before. He had previously produced Doomwatch, driving it into the ground and forcing creators Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis to quit. He later produced Survivors, prompting Terry Nation to also walk away from his own show and contributing to its premature demise. He would later write some fairly dull Doctor Who stories.
K9 at least contributes something to this story, but in keeping with JNT's desire to incapacitate it wherever possible it has a problem with its batteries and keeps running out of power. Bill Fraser, who plays the Gaztak leader General Grugger, claimed he would only take the part if he got to kick K9, and so become the most hated man on TV. he did kick K9 in one scene, but did not become the most hated man on TV - mainly because very few people were actually watching Doctor Who at this time.
Season 18 saw a huge fall in viewing figures for the first few stories, due in most part to the arrival on ITV of glossy new US import Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.

The most notable thing about the production is the return of Jacqueline Hill to the programme after a 16 year absence. She had, of course, played original companion Barbara Wright. Hill had quit acting to raise a family and was looking to get back into the business. She plays the fanatical Deon leader Lexa. Later, JNT would prohibit people who had been regulars on the show from reappearing as other characters. Director Graeme Harper had wanted to cast Michael Craze (companion actor Ben Jackson) as Krelper in The Caves of Androzani, but JNT vetoed this.
Another thing of note was the arrival of a new VFX technique. Doctor Who had been employing CSO - Colour Separation Overlay - since it moved to colour in 1970, championed in no small part by Barry Letts. As well as the problem of fringing around people or objects placed against a CSO background, and reflective surfaces like the legs of giant robots vanishing altogether, it could only be used for static shots. As the image to be broadcast was composed of two different camera images - one looking at actors and another looking at a model elsewhere in the studio - the model shot had to be perfectly still. If one camera were to move it would have a disproportionate affect on the other - making one part of the image swing drastically out of alignment. A new process called Scene Sync was devised to get round this. The two cameras would be locked together via computer, so that if one moved then the other would adjust at the correct scale in relation to it. Figures could now move more freely through CSO backgrounds, allowing panning shots which had been impossible beforehand. Meglos was the first story to use this new technique, seen best in the sequences involving the planet Zolfa-Thura and its massive screens. Sadly, it did nothing to address the fringing problem.
Next time: if Creationist viewers were unhappy about being represented as deluded fanatics this week, then we get a story which owes a lot to the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin. The show gets a teenage new writer, and a teenage new companion...

Back On Target

Thursday 8th August sees the release of the latest Doctor Who Magazine Special Edition - and this one's dedicated to the Target book range.
I have bought every issue of Doctor Who Magazine right from the first issue of its earliest incarnation - Doctor Who Weekly - in 1979, and I generally buy all the Special Editions as well. That was until recently. I didn't bother buying the Yearbook for 2017, as there wasn't any broadcast Doctor Who in the year it covered (2016) apart from a Christmas Special - and I certainly won't be buying the 2020 one either. I've also decided to give the recent Twelfth Doctor Volume One a miss, as it is just a rehash of the partwork with some extra photographs.
I was in two minds about buying this week's Special Edition as well, because I already own a well-thumbed copy of The Target Book, written by David J Howe, and published by Telos Publishing over a decade ago.

This gave the complete history of the Target range, focusing mainly on the Doctor Who books but also featuring sidebars covering other works, which ranged from a series about Canadian Mounties to a series about Skinheads of all things. Every author was profiled, along with every cover artist, and there were images of every single book cover, including all the various reprints and even some abandoned covers and design sketches. It's a big, glossy paperback and it's gorgeous.
Since it was published in 2007 we have had some new Target releases, however, so naturally it isn't up to date. We've had reissues of some of the classic range, plus some more recent stories have now been novelised - Rose, The Day of the Doctor, Twice Upon a Time.
Another slight drawback with The Target Book is that the largest images are around one sixth of a page size, when it would have been nice to get some big full page images of the artwork. I'm hoping that the DWM Special Edition will have some of these. A couple of years ago another SE was devoted to The Art of Doctor Who, and this had a section on the book covers which included some lovely big versions of the paintings. Another thing The Target Book never really covered were the internal illustrations which featured in the early days. If the books themselves were the only way of reliving never-to-be-repeated stories (as we thought then, in the pre-VHS, DVD and Blu-ray days), then these images were our only visual reference beyond what we could vaguely remember from watching the episodes on their original broadcast (in pre-DWW days).
The Target book range is all but deleted now, although you can pick copies up second hand all over the place, so for younger readers a quick recap as to why they remain so important to older fans.
Back in the mid-1960's we had 'Dalekmania', when the programme generated a lot of merchandising primarily based around the Daleks rather than the Doctor himself. It was only natural that the first Dalek story would be novelised, and this was undertaken by the programme's script editor David Whitaker as Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure With The Daleks. Yes - that was the book's title. It was published by Frederick Muller Ltd roughly one year after the story had been seen on screen. It proved very popular, spawning some paperback reprints, and the production team were asked if some other stories could be novelised. Only two other titles were released - Doctor Who and the Crusaders, again by Whitaker, and Doctor Who and the Zarbi, by Bill Strutton. The latter was, of course, his novelisation of The Web Planet. All three had half a dozen or so internal illustrations.
In the early 1970's the programme's popularity was on the increase thanks to the move to colour and Jon Pertwee's arrival. The new publishing outfit Target, which was aiming for the children / teen market, bought the rights to the three 1960's books and republished them in paperback, with striking Chris Achilleos artwork on the covers. The first book's title was simplified to Doctor Who and the Daleks. Again the books sold very well, so it was only natural that Target would approach the current production team - Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks - about adapting some more. They were happy to oblige - so long as it was their stories which were prioritised. Dicks saw this as an opportunity to get some extra income and so agreed to write some himself, whilst also approaching the writers of the TV stories to novelise their work. Even Letts himself got involved, writing Doctor Who and the Daemons. On TV this had been broadcast under a writer's pseudonym. Malcolm Hulke contributed Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters (The Silurians), and Brian Hayles contributed Doctor Who and the Curse of Peladon. Robert Holmes wasn't interested in adapting his work, so Dicks wrote Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion (Spearhead from Space).
You'll notice that a number of stories had their titles changed to make them a little more descriptive of the plots. The rather dull sounding Colony in Space became Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon, for instance, whilst The Moonbase became simply Doctor Who and the Cybermen.

It wasn't just the titles that were changed, however. Some writers took the opportunity to add to their plots, giving background detail to characters or even changing plot elements entirely. As such, the novels don't always match exactly with the televised programmes. This started right at the beginning when Whitaker decided to have a whole new introduction for the characters of Ian, Susan and Barbara, making his Dalek story their first meeting with the Doctor on Barnes Common rather than in a junkyard in Totters Lane. The real origins story - An Unearthly Child - wouldn't see print until October 1981, when JNT suggested it be released to tie in with the package of repeats he had organised - "The Five Faces of Doctor Who". Whitaker's Dalek novel also featured a glass Dalek which leads the race - something which we wouldn't see on screen until 1985. As Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon was the first novel to be issued featuring Jo Grant, it also has its opening changed to make this her first story.
Eventually every story (bar a couple) was novelised by Target - the missing ones being TV works by Douglas Adams and Eric Saward. These gaps have recently been filled, or are about to be.
Terrance Dicks ended up writing the majority of the novelisations, though many of the 1960's writers were happy to return to their TV works after many years. This has led to a number of older fans claiming that Terrance Dicks taught them how to read. I wouldn't go quite that far myself (Dick and Dora and Spot the Dog might have something to say about it), but Dicks certainly helped a great many people improve their reading.
So, for fans of a certain age, the Target novels have a real nostalgia factor - which is why I certainly will be buying this week's DWM Special Edition. I grew up with the books, and I love the artwork. You'll recall that back in 2016 I went to see the small exhibition of Target book cover art at London's Cartoon Museum - see my post elsewhere on the blog.

What's Wrong With... The Keys of Marinus

Were you to have asked designer Ray Cusick what went wrong with The Keys of Marinus then he would have pointed the finger squarely at the writer, Terry Nation, and the director, John Gorrie.
He claimed that the latter did not show any interest in the design aspects of the show, whilst the former presented him with the challenge of devising different sets and props almost every week of the six episode run. Cusick was on record as saying this was his least favourite Doctor Who story he worked on.
The problem was that Nation had been so impressed with the way that his Dalek story had turned out that he thought the BBC designers could do anything. However, that story had relied on a number of sets which would be seen over a number of weeks - their costs spread accordingly. With his new story, written in a hurry after other scripts had hit problems, Nation came up with a quest adventure, which would switch locations every week as the TARDIS crew went to different places in search of the titular keys.
There wasn't any more money available in the budget for this show than any other in the season (save for the start up costs for the very first episode and its remount). Episodes 2, 3 and 4 all have sets and props which don't feature in any other episode. It's a wonder Cusick managed to deliver so many different sets in the end, although you can see where corners had to be cut. For instance, the central area of Arbitan's pyramid where the Conscience machine is located features a wonderful transparent dodecahedron prop, but for the background Cusick had to resort to plain black drapes. The ice tunnels in the fourth episode are clearly made from ordinary rock walls covered in cling-film to simulate ice.
The plumbing in the same episode, which keeps the key locked in a block of ice, looks pretty low tech, like the sort of thing which homes of 1964 would have had. Cusick was actually reprimanded by his boss for using expensive materials for the city of Morphoton, which had to appear both in a dilapidated state and in a luxurious form as seen by the hypnotised travelers. The other sets in this episode appear very basic as a result, with black drapes once again used for the background to the chamber where the Morpho brain creatures reside. The rotating statue in the jungle episode clearly has the arms of a studio-hand sticking out of it.
Later, when we get to the city of Millenius, the courtroom seems to have used up the budget, as all the other parts of the city we see are very spartan. The cupboard where valuable exhibits are held appears to be an ordinary wooden cabinet, locked by a small key, rather than anything which hints at high security.
As mentioned above, this story was a rush job as Nation was supposed to be working on a historical story set in India during the Mutiny - often referred to as 'The Red Fort'. A story by Malcolm Hulke about an alternative Earth on the far side of the sun - possibly to have been called 'Beyond the Sun' - was continually being pushed back as script editor David Whitaker had problems with it.
Nation was called in to write a replacement as he was know to be a quick and dependable writer. He had written his Dalek story an episode a week. Rather than devise a single story that would hold up by itself for 6 weeks, he opted for the quest structure, as this allowed him to write a number of smaller adventures which wouldn't stretch to full stories on their own.
His rush leads to a number of plot problems - starting with the entire premise of the story.
The Doctor and his companions decide that they are not going to help Arbitan fetch the keys, so he puts a forcefield around the TARDIS to coerce them into doing what he wants. His machine - the Conscience - affects peoples' minds, making them refrain from crime. The Doctor disagrees with the method to achieve this, as he states at the conclusion. However, rather than stay and fight against Arbitan and regain the TARDIS, the Doctor gives in - even though it means he is helping a man who is going to manipulate the minds of an entire planet.
Arbitan talks as if he created the machine, even though it is 2000 years old. All the inhabitants of this planet must be extremely long-lived, as Yartek is supposed to have overcome the Conscience's influence 700 years ago. Arbitan hid the keys around Marinus so that they wouldn't fall into the wrong hands - which is exactly what has happened to them.
How did Yartek overcome the Conscience, when it should have stopped him even wanting to do such a thing? Why has it taken Yartek 700 years to launch a proper assault on Arbitan's island? It's also a bit of a coincidence that he turns up just when someone has arrived who might actually succeed in retrieving the keys, when previous attempts have all failed. What would he have done if the Doctor's party hadn't been sent off to collect them, bearing in mind that he has just had murdered the only person who knows how to make new keys?
What is it with the travel dials? They do whatever the plot wants of them, rather than work in any logical fashion. Barbara goes on ahead of the others by only a few seconds, but when we next see her she has had time to get settled in the city of Morphoton, learn all about it, and had a dress run up.
Later, the dial takes Ian to the very room where the fifth key is located, yet all the other times the dials have left people miles away from the keys. And why does only Ian arrive in the museum vault? Where do the others arrive?
Taking of the museum vault, why has Eprin not collected the key sooner? The citizens of Millenius say that they are quite prepared to hand it over to Arbitan or one of his agents - so why didn't Eprin just ask for it on his arrival?
It's the same with mad old Darrius in the jungle. Why invent deathtraps when he is expecting Arbitan to send someone for the key?
In the fourth episode, why doesn't Vasor just kill Ian while he's unconscious? Instead, he has to be over elaborate and send him off with a bag of meat in the off chance that the wolves will get him. What makes he think the travel dials and keys are valuable? As a fur trapper living alone in the mountains wouldn't their clothes be of more use to him?
Likewise Eyesen and Kala and their plan to steal the key from the museum. Who did they hope to sell it to? Eyesen puts on a black mask when he breaks into the room to steal the club which has the key hidden inside it. A smart move you might think, but he's still wearing his distinctive uniform.
It's never explained how long the Conscience has been deactivated. It must be not working, for Vasor to be a murdering rapist and for Kala, Aydan and Eysen to be killer-thieves. Millenius has also had time to set up an advanced criminal justice system.
Who are the Ice Soldiers who guard the fourth key? Did Arbitan employ them to be frozen for centuries? When Terrance Dicks wrote a book in the late 1970's called The Adventures of K9 And Other Mechanical Creatures, he claimed that the Ice Soldiers were robots. We can clearly see that they are just men, and one of them screams when he falls down a crevasse - so not robots.
Something else which went wrong with The Keys of Marinus was that the new aliens - who are inconsistently called Voords and Voord as a plural - failed to become the new Daleks, despite a lot of press coverage. This might be because they only appear in the first episode, and then again in the last quarter of the sixth episode. This won't be the last time that Nation fails to come up with a new marketable monster. The Voord never returned to the programme though they did appear in other media such as the Dr Who Annual and a series of collectable cards.
Perhaps the fact that one of them trips over his own flippers in the sixth episode showed the limitations of the Voord as on-going foes for the Doctor.
Last but not least, we have a couple of great Hartnell fluffs. There might have been more, but he went on holiday and so was written out of episodes 3 & 4.
In the first episode the Doctor is arguing against the sea being frozen:
"No, impossible in this temperature. Besides, it's too warm...".
A short time later he berates Ian for not giving Susan his boots: "If you'd been wearing your shoes you could have lent her hers".
Returning from his holiday he has another fluff as, in the fifth episode, he gives us: "I can't improve at this very moment... I can't prove at this very moment...".

Inspirations - The Leisure Hive

David Fisher had written a number of well-received stories for Graham Williams, but his last one had ended up being totally rewritten by Douglas Adams when he experienced some domestic problems. With these issues behind him, he contributed another idea which had partly come from the same background as his abortive 'A Gamble With Tim' - namely the idea of gangsters muscling in on some lucrative business. In keeping with the tone of Season 17, his new story had a lot of humour and pastiche of the gangster movie genre. His villains would be reptilian, but would wear snazzy suits and carry their weapons in violin cases.
However, there were big changes going on at the Doctor Who production office. Douglas Adams had decided to resign after just the one season as script editor as his Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy had really taken off. As well as coming up with a second series, he was working on the novelisation, an vinyl album adaptation, and a TV series. After a year of stress, Graham Williams had also decided that he had had enough. Even before his last story - Shada - had been cancelled due to industrial action, he had decided to quit the show. This was mainly due to the budget-busting inflation he had to contend with, headaches from some sections of organised fandom, and the behaviour of his leading man, which was spiraling out of hand. The fractious relationship with Tom Baker had led to the star threatening to resign, and Williams threatening to sack him.
On finally managing to take a holiday, Williams had broken his leg, and his Production Unit Manager John Nathan-Turner had deputised for him. The role of the PUM was primarily a financial one, looking after budgets (which is why it was JNT who had realised that filming in Paris was realistic for City of Death). Williams had tried to get JNT promoted to the post of Associate Producer on a couple of occasions, but the BBC had turned the request down. On resigning, Williams suggested JNT as his replacement.

The BBC asked around, and found that no-one else wanted to produce Doctor Who. People knew of Tom Baker's reputation as a difficult actor to work with, and they knew the show was under-budgeted yet highly complex to make. JNT was the only person keen to take the programme on, seeing it as a stepping stone to producing other shows - especially in the soap or light entertainment fields which were his passion. The BBC agreed to promote him, but insisted that, as an untried producer, he have someone more experienced to watch over him. This task was given to someone who knew the series well - 1970's producer Barry Letts. Letts had been unhappy with the way the programme had been developed since he left, disliking the overt horror aspects of his successor's period, and the silliness of the most recent series. The first task JNT had to face was the recruitment of a new script editor, and the man he and Letts brought in was Christopher Hamilton Bidmead. He had been an actor before turning to writing, and was interested in proper hard science - with a particular interest in computing. He wrote for computer magazines, using a word processor rather than a type-writer. At his interview his views on the current state of the programme chimed with those of JNT and Letts. The programme wasn't taking itself seriously, and there was too much magic and fantasy and not enough hard Science Fiction.

On taking up his new post, Bidmead was dismayed to discover that Adams had failed in his attempts to lure new writers to the programme, and the script cupboard was virtually bare. David Fisher's script about alien gangsters was just about the only one in any condition to be taken forward into production, along with an old script from Terrance Dicks which had been about to be produced when the BBC pulled it from Season 15 - more of which later. JNT also attempted to resurrect Shada.
As new producer, JNT wanted a totally fresh approach to the programme - beginning with the look and sound of the show. Regular composer Dudley Simpson was invited out to lunch and told that his services would no longer be required, as JNT wanted a more contemporary sound to the incidental music. From now on it would all be provided by the Radiophonic Workshop. This change extended to the title music. The titles themselves were now nearly 7 years old, and Tom Baker no longer looked the way he had back in 1975, so Sid Sutton was tasked with devising a new set. Out went the tunnel effect, inspired by the stargate sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and in came a new star field background. The now iconic diamond logo was replaced with a fluorescent tube design, which was all the rage at the time. New VFX techniques would be used, which would enhance or replace CSO. JNT also decided that he would not use writers who had worked on the series before, and directors would, for the most part, be ones who were also new to the show. He would allow back those whom he knew from other shows he had worked on, however.
Something else JNT embarked on was the reigning in of his star. Out was to go the humour of the last couple of years, which he, Letts and Bidmead thought "under-graduate". He also insisted on a whole new wardrobe, preferring a uniform look over the mix and match costumes Baker had recently been wearing. He introduced the question mark motif on the Doctor's shirt collar, which he persevered with in one way or another for the whole of his time on the series, despite everyone but he thinking it a stupid idea. The programme wasn't called Doctor Who?.

The director selected to helm the first story of the new season - Fisher's set of scripts which were initially known as Avalon - was Lovett Bickford. He wanted to use techniques which hadn't been seen on the programme before - such as single and hand-held camera set-ups. Doctor Who had always been recorded in studio using the multi-camera set-up, where the director selected his shots from several cameras in the gallery. This was a relatively quick way of doing things, as the scene could be lit just the once overall. For the single camera way of working, each shot had to lit separately, which was time-consuming. This would lead to Bickford rapidly falling behind schedule, and going over budget.
The new visual aesthetic is there from the opening shot. It is a long tracking shot across Brighton beach, taking in a number of brightly striped beach tents. We hear the popular tune Oh! I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside (written 1907), and the sound of someone snoring. Eventually, after what seems an age, the camera goes beyond the tents to reach the similarly shaped TARDIS, with the Doctor sleeping in a deckchair beside it. Tom Baker had just returned from a promotional tour of Australia, so scenes where he is huddled up with face obscured by hat and scarf are actually an extra. Baker arrived later in the morning, jet-lagged, to record his scenes with Lalla Ward.
Another of things which JNT, Bidmead and Letts had agreed upon was the exiting of K9 from the series, as they disliked anything which made it easy for the Doctor. he should use his wits, rather than any magic wand or mobile weapon. You'll recall that David Brierley had quit as the voice of K9 when JNT wouldn't guarantee him an on screen performance in Season 18. JNT talked John Leeson into returning, on the condition that the character would be written out before the end of the season. It was decided that it would be incapacitated in some way in all its remaining stories - despite a lot of money being spent on upgrading the prop. As it was, Brighton's shingle beach proved too great a challenge for the prop, and you can clearly see that it is being pulled along on fishing line in the scene where it trundles along the beach with Romana.

If we're talking a lot about what was going on behind the scenes with this story, then it's because there was an awful lot going on behind the scenes with this story. The actual plot, as mentioned, was quite straight forward. Fisher named his alien gangsters Foamasi - an anagram of Mafiosi. The humanoid race were named Argolins, and were described as plant based beings. This is why they have green-ish faces and small seed pods on the top of their heads, which drop off when they are approaching the end of their lives. This element of their nature isn't all that clear on screen. The Foamasi infiltrate the Leisure Hive complex on Argolis by pretending to be a couple of businessmen from Earth, hiding in rubber suits. There is no explanation as to how they can fit inside these suits, as we see the Foamasi are quite bulky in their natural form. Russell T Davies was probably thinking of this problem when he devised the Slitheen in 2005. They are one of the few alien races whose language the TARDIS cannot translate. There's a sub-plot of the Doctor being put on trial for murder, as his scarf is found on a strangled man. It's never explained how the Doctor came to be parted from his scarf, and it's true that just because his scarf was round the dead man's neck, it doesn't mean he was the murderer. It would be an extremely foolish killer who leaves such an obvious clue as to his guilt behind at the scene of the crime, yet no-one picks up on this.

Argolin technology is based on Tachyonics - a scientific element introduced by Bidmead. A tachyon is a hypothetical particle which always travels faster than light, despite conventional science stating that nothing can go faster than light. They were first proposed by physicist Arnold Sommerfeld but named by Gerald Feinberg, from the Greek tachus which means 'speedy'.
Despite Bidmead's insistence on real science being incorporated, the Argolins use Tachyonics for everything but going faster than light - from regenerating themselves to anti-gravity squash and parlour tricks like making parts of their bodies split off.
Next time: as promised, a look at what was voted worst story of the Tom Baker era in DWM's 50th anniversary poll. Maybe it's because it is a bit of a throwback to Season 17, with comedy pirates and a talking cactus for a villain...

Story 208 - The Vampires of Venice

In which the Doctor attempts to bring Amy and Rory closer together with a romantic trip to the city of Venice. Earlier, he had turned up at Rory's stag do, emerging from a cake instead of the planned stripper, and mentioning how his fiancee had kissed him. Neither Rory nor Amy are happy to be going on the trip. Rory distrusts his fiancee's relationship with the Doctor, whilst she is unhappy that she is no longer alone with the Doctor. The Doctor is unhappy that Rory is not as impressed with the TARDIS as he expected him to be. The ship materialises in Venice in the year 1580, and the Doctor meets an official who tells him that the city is closed to visitors because of the plague, on the orders of Signora Rosanna Calvierri. The Doctor uses his psychic paper to give them a clean bill of health. He knows that the region should be safe from plague at this time, so becomes suspicious of Calvierri. He goes to see her famous academy for girls and sees a man attempting to speak to one of the girls, only to be chased off. Amy and Rory, meanwhile, witness an attack on a woman in the street - the assailant being a smartly dressed young man - with razor sharp fangs. The Doctor had seen the school ladies bare similar fangs when the man had tried to approach them.

The Doctor tracks down the man - a boatmaker named Guido - who tells him that he had enrolled his daughter Isabella at the academy, only for hi to be told he would never be allowed to see her ever again. He now fears for her safety.
The Doctor decides that they must find out what is going on at the school and to free Isabella, so Amy volunteers to enroll. Rory borrows clothes from Guido and together they go to the school to meet Rosanna and her son Francesco - who is the young man they had earlier seen attack the woman in the street. Rory pretends to be Amy's brother to get her accepted. That night, Amy goes exploring as Guido has told her of a way into the school grounds. The Doctor and Rory will break in through this route, whilst Guido waits with a gondola to take them to safety. The Doctor discovers a corpse which has been drained of its bodily fluids. Amy is captured and taken to a room where she will be given a blood transfusion. She kicks out at Rosanna, and the woman momentarily appears as a fish-like alien - her true form. She had damaged a perception filter which makes her appear human. The Doctor meets the academy girls and finds that they appear to be vampires - which he deduces to be caused by the limitations of their perception filters. The eye can translate everything but their fangs.
The attempt to rescue Isabella fails and she is recaptured when she is unable to go into direct sunlight, but Amy manages to escape. The next morning, Isabella is executed by being thrown into the canal, which is full of tiny flesh-eating creatures.

At Guido's home, the Doctor tells everyone that he believes they are dealing with an alien race known as Saturnyns. They come from a nocturnal ocean planet. Guido reveals that he has been stealing and stockpiling gunpowder from the city arsenal, intending to blow up the academy. They hear a noise from upstairs - even though there is no upstairs. The girls from the academy suddenly appear at the window, floating above the street. Ultra-violet light reveals that they have been transformed into Saturnyns. Guido gets everyone outside before sacrificing himself to ignite the gunpowder - killing himself and the vampire women. The Doctor goes alone to the academy and confronts Rosanna. She reveals that her planet has been destroyed when silence fell and she and her son have come to Venice to create a new race of Saturnyns. The girls in the academy had been fed alien blood to turn them into her kind, whilst thousands of males wait in the canals to mate with them - the flesh-eating creatures which had killed Isabella. Amy and Rory, meanwhile, are attacked by Francesco. In the struggle, a mirror is used to force him into the sunlight where he is destroyed.
Rosanna's scheme is to sink the city using a device hidden in the school's tower which will trigger flooding and an earthquake. The Doctor is able to scale the tower and disable the device before it can destroy the city. Her plans ruined, Rosanna elects to kill herself by jumping into the canal with her perception filter still activated - meaning the male creatures won't differentiate her from a human.
Before leaving in the TARDIS the Doctor notices a break in the clouds which looks like a crooked smile, and silence momentarily falls over the city...

The Vampires of Venice was written by Toby Whithouse, and was first broadcast on 8th May, 2010.
Whithouse had previously written the episode School Reunion for the second series, after which he had created and written for the BBC 3 supernatural comedy-drama Being Human.
Despite being hugely popular supernatural creatures, Doctor Who had only rarely featured vampires up to this point. Count Dracula had appeared in The Chase, but this had proven to be merely a robot version in a House of Horrors funfair exhibit. The Doctor likened Magnus Greel to a vampire in that he drained his victims to feed himself. The first time vampires as we know them appeared in the series was in Season 18's State of Decay, a story which had been postponed from 3 years previously when the BBC decided that it might be construed as taking the mickey out of their proposed production of Dracula and had it cut. In this story vampires were real creatures, known on many planets, whose origins lay with a race which the Time Lords had fought against millennia ago.
In the final season before cancellation, the Seventh Doctor and Ace had encountered the Haemovores, which were blood-sucking devolved humans from the far future. The Curse of Fenric recounts how one of them had been brought back through time to the Dark Ages and its travels through Eastern Europe had given rise to vampire myths there.
Another blood-drinking alien had appeared in Season 3, with the Plasmavore which appeared in Smith and Jones.

It had been decided to film the scenes set in Venice on location in Croatia. The city of Trogir offered building similar to those found in Venice, with water features that could double for canals. To make the trip more cost effective, shooting would also take place for a story to be broadcast later in the series - Vincent and the Doctor - where the Croatian countryside would double for southern France.
The main guest star, playing Rosanna Calvierri, is Helen McCrory, who had just found international fame in the sixth of the Harry Potter films - The Half-Blood Prince - in which she played Narcissa Malfoy. She would go o to feature in the final two movies of the series, and is best known at the moment for her regular role of Aunt Polly in Peaky Blinders, which is about to begin its fifth series.
Playing her son Francesco is Alex price, who had featured in Being Human as The Smith's-loving ghost Gilbert. He went on to a regular role in the BBC's adaptation of the Father Brown detective stories.
Guido is Lucian Msamati, who has appeared in Game of Thrones, whilst Isabella is Alisha Bailey.

The story follows directly on from the coda to Flesh and Stone as the Doctor reacts to Amy's attempts to seduce him by getting her to spend time with her husband-to-be. However, there is another of the short Meanwhile in the TARDIS sequences which comes in between. In this, Amy wants to know about other people who have traveled with the Doctor over the years and tricks him into getting the ship to show images of them from its data banks - namely the female ones. This scene was only available on the DVD complete series box-set, and subsequent Blu-ray release.
As far as the story arc is concerned, Rosanna claims that her people fled from "the Silence" and escaped to Earth through a crack in the sky. The city goes silent at the end as the Doctor and Rory look up at the crooked smile break in the clouds. The camera then tracks into the TARDIS key-hole, which we see also looks a bit like the crack.
Significantly, Rory Williams is now travelling in the ship, so becomes a proper companion from this point on.

Overall, a very good story (everyone loves vampires) despite having some loose ends which don't seem to be addressed - such as the canals full of flesh-eating Saturnyns.
Things you might like to know:

• The city official who tries to stop the Doctor and friends from entering Venice was played by Michael Percival. He was the partner of Janet Fielding for many years, who played long-running companion Tegan Jovanka.
• The Doctor flashes his library card at one point, and it bears an image of the First Doctor, as played by William Hartnell. The image is a publicity shot from The Celestial Toymaker. The card gives his name as Dr J Smith, and his address as 76 Totters Lane, Shoreditch, London. This means that the Doctor was using the "John Smith" alias long before Jamie gave it to him in The Wheel in Space.
• The body of water into which Alisha Bailey was to be thrown, and into which Helen McCrory was to jump, was extremely cold. Not wanting the cast members to do anything she wouldn't do herself, Exec-Producer Beth Willis insisted on doing the jump herself first. They all wore wet-suits under their costumes.
• The Doctor mentions not wishing to bump into Casanova on arriving in Venice, glad they have arrived before his time. This might well be a reference to David Tennant having played Casanova in a production written by Russell T Davies just before he was offered the role of Matt Smith's predecessor.
• In designing the look for the female vampires, Steven Moffat wanted the classic Hammer Horror look. The film which illustrates this image best is 1960's The Brides of Dracula, which is set around a girls' school, and the vampire brides wear long white robes.
• Whilst the planet Saturnyne is mentioned a couple of times, Rosanna's race are never named on screen.
• It was noted at the time that both of Toby Whithouse's stories to date were centred around a school. There are other similarities in that both stories feature the boyfriend of the female companion joining the TARDIS crew - and being only grudgingly welcomed by her - and the aliens can disguise themselves as humans. School Reunion also shares themes of the impact which the Doctor has on his companions and their relationships.