WHO Shop

Back from holiday and have decided to do another of my London Doctor Who locations posts later this week. I did one of these before but it was nearly 10 years ago, and the quality of my phone's camera is an awful lot better as well.

In the meantime, a quick word about the WHO Shop which is to be found in East London - Barking Road, Upton Park, to be exact. I used to visit the old shop opposite East Ham tube station, but haven't been to this location before.

As you can see, there are some costumes amongst the merchandise in the windows, but within is a compact but fascinating museum of props and costumes from the series itself - along with some replica items such as their Weeping Angel. Unfortunately, for various reasons, no photography is allowed in this area, though you can get a picture at its TARDIS entrance, or beside a bronze Dalek just within the shop entrance.

Amongst the costume items on display we have Mark Eden's Marco Polo outfit (also used by Julian Glover's King Richard), and the chainmail coat worn by the automaton knight in third episode of The Keys of Marinus.

Items cover the classic and Nu-Who eras as well as spin-offs. We have Monarch's robes from Four to Doomsday, a Time Lord from The Deadly Assassin, C Baker and Pertwee costumes from the Ultimate Adventure stage play, Torchwood outfits, Hyperion III and Varosian guards, and loads more. 

Smaller props include guns, masks (Ood, Sea Devil), a Hand of Fear and Krynoid seed pod. There are two Daleks and the Special Weapons version, and two Cybermen - plus a quartet of their helmets from the Troughton years.

Next time I think I'll take a note pad to record what's there, because there really is so much stuff crammed in.

Highly recommended, but essential to book in advance. It's only open Thurs - Sat for limited hours, cost £5 pp cash.

As for the shop itself, it stocks everything you'd expect, and not just all the recent stuff. Lots books, magazines, figures / figurines, T-shirts etc.

Well worth a visit.

Blog Update

It's that time of the year, so off on a short holiday. Am away tomorrow (6th) until 13th August, so no new posts during that period, unless some big news breaks.

What's Wrong With... The Visitation

Just a few things...

The one everyone spots is the layout of the buried capsule. From the exterior, it is clear that most of it is under the ground, and yet the escape hatch near the nose opens out onto ground level. The floor should be tilted a lot more as well.

We also have the problem of lots of alien tech left lying around - the capsule as well as the cellar laboratory set up by the Terileptil. The Doctor later worries about a man-made Concorde beneath Heathrow, but this extra-terrestrial equipment will only have been around for a few hundred years.

And the TARDIS crew have the cheek to remark that the tiny power pack retained by Mace might cause future archaeologists a problem...

The aliens are escapees from a prison planet - so where did the android come from? We know it belongs to them as the Doctor talks about it in relation to their aesthetic sensibilities. If built from items on the escape craft, then that's one very well-equipped lifeboat.

They disguise it as the Grim Reaper - but surely it's frightening enough for the local primitives that they don't need to do this.

Despite having built-in armaments, it does a lot of simply standing about and letting people easily run round it to escape - or shake it to bits.

The Terileptil destroys the sonic screwdriver - yet locked the Doctor up with it in the first place rather than search him first. And it leaves him with a power pack.

We have a particularly bad example of the Bond villain habit of leaving the hero to perish in an overly complicated manner, rather than just shoot him.

The Doctor knows that they have arrived at the site of what will one day be Heathrow Airport, but the Doctor has to ask Mace what the nearest population centre is.

The first sizeable town that would have come to his mind would surely be Windsor, rather than London.

As the name suggests, Heathrow was heathland, not covered in forest, in the 17th Century.

Why does the Doctor use an ancient hand-drawn map of London, which isn't topographically accurate, to pin down the location of the Terileptil base?

Episode 128: The Smugglers (2)

Synopsis:

The Doctor has been abducted and taken on board the Black Albatross, where he is confronted by Captain Samuel Pike, whose left hand has been replaced by a cruel-looking steel spike...

Cherub has informed his captain that "Holy Joe" Longfoot has died without revealing his secret - but he witnessed the Doctor apparently conspiring with the churchwarden earlier. 

The Doctor learns that Pike and Cherub sailed with the notorious Captain Henry Avery, as did Longfoot. After Avery died, Pike took over his ship and they are now seeking his hidden treasure hoard. They suspect that the churchwarden passed on the secret of its whereabouts to the Doctor.

Ben and Polly are locked in the village gaol, suspected of killing Longfoot. When Polly screams after seeing a rat, Tom - the young man from the inn - comes to see what the trouble is. Realising that people in this age were very superstitious, they decide to use this to engineer their escape. Polly starts collecting up straw...

Innkeeper Jacob Kewper takes to a boat and rows out to the Black Albatross.

Realising that Pike sees himself as a gentleman, the Doctor decides to exploit this by humouring his sense of self-importance. He soon finds himself being entertained by the captain and offering to enter into a partnership with him for the treasure.

A pirate named Jamaica alerts Pike that a boat is approaching. The Doctor is locked away out of sight.

At the gaol, Polly has fashioned the straw into a doll and they call Tom back. They explain that they are really witches, and have captured his soul in the doll. If he does not let them go, they will use it to harm him. Once free, they make for the church in the hope of finding the Doctor there.

Kewper meets with Pike and Cherub and explains that he has come to do business with him. He is a member of the local smuggling ring, and is unaware that they are pirates. When the landlord mentions that the squire is part of his group, Pike accepts his proposal - but Kewper now knows who he is dealing with. Pike insists on meeting with Squire Edwards to discuss their proposal and seal the deal.

Ben and Polly have found the church to be empty and have gone down to search the crypt. They hear a rumbling sound and see a gravestone move. A man emerges from a secret passage and, thinking it to be the murderer of Longfoot, Ben knocks him to the ground. Ben will stay and guard him whilst Polly goes to find the squire and tell him they have found the real killer.

Pike and Cherub set off for their meeting leaving the Doctor and Kewper on the ship, guarded by Jamaica.

Ben learns that the man in the crypt - Josiah Blake - is actually one of the King's Revenue men, come to track down the smugglers.

Pike and Squire Edwards hit it off - the pirate happy to be associating with the local gentry. He claims that he and Cherub are merchants, looking to do some business with the smugglers.

Polly arrives - but recognises Cherub as the man who kidnapped the Doctor.

On the Black Albatross, the Doctor learns more about the background to events from the innkeeper. He realises that the village will be razed to the ground by the ruthless Pike in his search for the pirate treasure.

Already suspected of murder, Polly is not believed and the squire has come to trust his new merchant friends anyway. However, he does agree to come to the church to see the man she claims they have captured. Pike and Cherub elect to accompany him, claiming that Polly might be luring him into a trap.

Ben learns from Blake that the tunnel he has just used leads all the way to the cave where the TARDIS is located.

The squire appears at the top of the crypt steps with his new allies, a bound and gagged Polly in tow. He focusses on Ben, pistol in hand, stating that he will not escape a second time...

Data:

Written by: Brian Hayles

Recorded: Friday 15th July 1966 - Riverside Studio 1

First broadcast: 5:50pm, Saturday 17th September 1966

Ratings: 4.9 million / AI 45

Designer: Richard Hunt

Director: Julia Smith

Additional cast: John Ringham (Blake), Elroy Josephs (Jamaica)

Critique:

In the original draft, the character of Jamaica was to be named Crow. A lengthy sequence between Pike and Cherub, which began on the Black Albatross and ended on the cliff top, was rewritten to take place entirely on the ship. The secret passage used by Blake was going to be called the "Devil's Stairwell".

As far as the script for The Smugglers is concerned, we are never given a specific date for these  events. It can be pinned down to within 5 years or so, however.

In the first episode it is stated by the Doctor that the TARDIS crew have encountered someone from the 17th Century when meeting "Holy Joe", and from the gravestones they have already gathered that it is after the 16th Century.

Later, we will learn that there is a King on the throne, as the exciseman Blake will claim to be acting on the King's orders. There were five male monarchs in the 17th century - James I, Charles I, Charles II, James II and William III. From the costumes we're clearly not in the Jacobean or first Carolingian era, so it has to be sometime after the Restoration (1660).

The story revolves around the treasure of the pirate Henry Avery (or Every), who is already said to be deceased. We don't know his date of death, but he was last seen in the summer of 1696. 

The Smugglers therefore has to be set between 1696 - 1702, when Queen Anne ascended the throne.

Filming at sea took place on Thursday 23rd June, when a fishing boat named the Bonny Mary, anchored in Newlyn Harbour, was press-ganged into appearing as the Black Albatross. A relatively small section of decking and stern-castle in 17th Century style was constructed by Richard Hunt and set up on the vessel on the previous evening. The image above shows how little space there was available. Michael Godfrey can be seen in the grey coat, left of centre.

Despite the season, the weather saw choppy seas and a number of the cast and crew fell victim to mal de mer - including the director, who had to carry on regardless.

All of the shipboard exteriors were filmed on this day - the last of the lengthy location shoot.

A scene scheduled for the cliff top the previous day had been deferred, and was mounted on the boat instead.

Smith had acquired library footage of a galleon from Rank Films to use as establishing shots of the Black Albatross. However, the print quality was very poor and she decided not to use the material.

Joining the cast for rehearsals on Monday 11th July was actor John Ringham, who would be portraying Josiah Blake, King's exciseman. He had worked with Hartnell before on the series, when he played Tlotoxl in The Aztecs. 

In this story they would not share anything like the same amount of screen time.

The episode went into studio at the later time of 9pm that Friday evening. Michael Godfrey repeated his dialogue from the end of the first instalment by way of the reprise, stabbing his spike into the table. 

Scenes in the gaol had their sound artificially echoed.

Recording breaks were used around Ben and Polly's escape from their cell and subsequent move to the church crypt.

The end credits rolled over a close up of the squire and his pistol before fading to black.

Trivia:

• The ratings see a slight rise, up half a million, whilst the appreciation figure falls only slightly. This story will see fairly stable scores throughout.
• Elroy Josephs was first and foremost a dancer, performing initially with the Les Ballet Negres. He later fused traditional European dance with Afro-Caribbean styles. Other acting roles include the Hammer film version of Quatermass and the Pit, where he can be seen as one of the workers who first find the skull in the Underground. He later taught dance in Liverpool, and has a memorial bench at the city's John Moores University.
• Michael Godfrey had a Hammer Quatermass connection as well. He had been one of the firemen seen in the opening section of The Quatermass Xperiment in 1955.
• Irish actor David Blake Kelly (Kewper) went under his real name of Diarmuid Kelly for the first decade of his career, adopting the anglified David in 1957.
• Combining his review for both the first and second instalments of The Smugglers, the critic of The Listener thought the serial to be "properly absurd" and "a sub-Treasure Island narrative". By its close, however, he would be praising it overall.
• This was the only one of the four episodes which did not require cuts from the Australian censor.

Doctor Who y la Guerra Espacial...

Somewhere in Spain in the late 1970's, some unknown artist was clearly inspired by Chris Achilleos' cover art for Malcolm Hulke's Doctor Who and the Space War. Commissioned to provide exciting artwork for a series of pulp sci-fi novels, they raided the Target book for three separate covers.

We have a Draconian, an Ogron and the Master's stolen police spaceship gracing Permiso Para Invadir La Tierra (Permission to Invade the Earth), Contrabandistas del Cosmos (Space Smugglers) and Cita en Ganimedes (Appointment on Ganymede).

The books number in their hundreds, and hail from a publisher known as Bruguera. I came across them on an internet archive site. There is another cover which features a well-known pepper-pot shaped robotic figure...

As well as the ciencia ficcion novels, there are hundreds of supernatural / horror titles as well from the same source. Other artwork steals come from the original Star Wars, Creature from the Black Lagoon, This Island Earth, It! The Terror from Beyond Space, Flash Gordon and many, many others. It's great fun identifying all the movies which the artists have raided for their imagery.

Inspirations: A Town Called Mercy

Doctor Who had tackled the Western genre once before - and it had been widely regarded as a failure. That was The Gunfighters, back in 1966, which was based on the historical events at Tombstone's OK Corral. Other stories had borrowed heavily from the genre, but adapted plots for a futuristic sci-fi setting. 

The Space Pirates is basically the story of Gold Rush miners and claim jumpers. Colony in Space is the story of the big company - the railway, say - using dirty tricks to force farmers off their land, with the Primitives standing in for North America's indigenous peoples. It's actually their land the other two groups are fighting over.

Looking for big cinematic adventures for the first half of the series which would lead up to the 50th Anniversary, Steven Moffat decided on a new Western story, and this time it would be more along the lines of the pseudo-historical - 19th Century US setting, with aliens.

Many of cinema's most iconic Westerns were filmed not in Monument Valley or similar, but in Southern Europe - the so-called "Spaghetti-Western" which gave us Clint Eastwood's 'Man With No Name' and the soundtracks of Ennio Morricone.

Some of the locations for these movies still existed, one of which was located at Fort Bravo in Spain. "Mini Hollywood" - the Oasys Theme Park at Tabernas - and the desert environs of Almeria were also to be used.

The European location meant that it would cost a lot less than to revisit the USA, as the series had done the previous year. Another production for Series 7 was scheduled to visit New York anyway.

The writer chosen to handle this project was Toby Whithouse, who had been contributing annually to the series since Moffat took over. 

He naturally looked at various genre stereotypes from old movies, such as the enigmatic lone gunslinger and the town lynch mob. The Gunfighters had also featured a scene in which a lynch mob wanted the lawman to hand over someone who was locked in the jailhouse. Then, it was the Doctor they were after. Here, he's the lawman.

Knowing the earlier story's poor reputation, Whithouse opted not to view a copy of the Hartnell adventure in preparing his story.

The story sees a midday deadline, as in High Noon (1952). This classic Western had been the basis of another sci-fi adaptation - Sean Connery's Outland, in 1981. 

1955's Bad Day At Black Rock (a film-noir Western) is also an inspiration. In this a stranger arrives in a small town that harbours secrets.

The Doctor's attempts to trick the Gunslinger at the climax are reminiscent of Eastwood's High Plains Drifter (1973).

Whithouse claimed that he had been impressed with the HBO series Deadwood (2004 - 6) which presented a realistic view of the West, so presumably some of the feel and look of that series fed into this.

The cyborg Gunslinger itself was inspired by the Frankenstein Monster, in that it was supposed to inspire sympathy as much as horror. It was originally going to be purely robotic.

The Terminator is another obvious antecedent, with its unstoppable killing machine determined to hunt someone down.

The background to Jex and the Gunslinger take us into war crimes territory, and the concept of the military developing a super-army can be seen in many sci-fi movies such as the Universal Soldier franchise. Alien super-soldiers had been a feature of The X-Files as well, in its latter seasons.

Next time: Cubular hells...

N is for... Noble, Donna

The Doctor first encountered Donna Noble when she materialised in the TARDIS on her wedding day. She had been half way down the aisle when transported. The Doctor attempted to get her to the church in time for the ceremony but she was abducted by Roboforms.

The Doctor later discovered that she had been dosed with Huon particles - an ancient energy form which was present in TARDISes though virtually extinct elsewhere in the universe. The TARDIS had drawn her to it like a magnet. Her husband-to-be, Lance, was working with the alien Racnoss Queen to resurrect her sleeping children - dormant at the centre of the Earth. He had been secretly feeding her the particles in her coffee each day at work - locksmiths HC Clements. The particles would reanimate the Racnoss brood.

Donna witnessed the Doctor destroying the Racnoss children before they could reach the surface, and warned him against himself. He needed someone to temper his emotions.

Despite a fiery start to their relationship - she believing he had kidnapped her - they warmed to each other, and the Doctor even invited her to join him in is travels. 

A temp secretary, Donna had never dreamed of any life beyond her everyday suburban existence, but the Doctor had opened her eyes to the wider world. Lance had previously mocked her intellect and lack of imagination.

She came to regret not having taken up the Doctor's invite, and so began investigating strange events and phenomena which the Doctor might be interested in - in the hope of meeting him again.

She even had her belongings already packed for just such an eventuality.

Her father Geoff died, and she and her mother Sylvia shared their Chiswick home with Donna's grandfather, Wilf Mott. Her relationship with Sylvia could be strained, with her mother often belittling her over her unmarried and unemployed status.

She and the Doctor were reunited when both investigated a slimming company - Adipose Industries. The Adipose were actually fat-based alien creatures, tended by a humanoid matron who called herself Miss Foster.

The Doctor was surprised that he had met her once again, the odds being astronomical. Looking for someone to share his travels, this time she accepted. The pair got on well - causing various people to assume they were a couple - which they strenuously had to deny.

Donna's first journey was back in time to Pompeii, on the eve of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Unwilling to interfere in historical events, the Doctor at first declined to save the lives of the Roman family whom they had befriended, but she talked him into doing so - once again warning him against himself.

Donna almost brought her travels to an early end after witnessing the enslavement of the Ood on their home planet.

A visit back home followed, where the Doctor met Wilf - and was shocked to discover that he had met him before. Wilf had been selling newspapers at Christmas when the Earth had been threatened by the crashing Titanic spaceship replica.

On this occasion Donna met his previous companion Martha Jones, now a member of UNIT. At one point she was trapped alone in the TARDIS when it was transported to a Sontaran spaceship, and had to defend herself against the aliens with a well-timed strike from a mallet.

Martha accidentally rejoined the Doctor on his travels when the ship flew off to an alien world in the far future. Here the Doctor gained a daughter through a cloning process. As a soldier, he refused to acknowledge her and it was Donna who eventually made him accept her.

After Martha had been returned home, Donna had a meeting with crime writer Agatha Christie, where she used her knowledge of her books to help the Doctor investigate a murder in a country house, which proved to be the work of an extra-terrestrial. At one point she revealed that she thought that nursery character Noddy might actually be real.

On visiting a library the size of an entire planet, the Doctor decided to send Donna to safety in the TARDIS using the transmat system. However, the library's computer core intercepted her and she found herself in an artificial environment which she thought to be real. In this she did not travel with the Doctor, and at a hospital met a man named Lee whom she married. They lived in a suburban house and had two children. One day she met a woman who revealed to her that this was not the real world at all. As the computer began to break down, this reality began to crumble. Lee and the children vanished.

In the library, the Doctor had seen Donna's face used to front an information node, and feared that she had died.

Once rescued after the computer core had been saved, Donna suspected that Lee had simply been a product of the artificial environment - unaware that he had also been transferred there by the computer. He left the library before he could be united with her in real life.

Throughout her travels, Donna had been hearing cryptic messages from people she met. These included her having something on her back.

On the planet Shan Shen she agreed to having her fortune told. This was a trap set by the Trickster. His agent had a huge black Time Beetle attach itself invisibly on her back - glimpsed only briefly by certain sensitive individuals.

The creature interfered with Donna's timeline, so that she had never gone to work at HC Clements. This meant she never met the Doctor and failed to save his life when he confronted the Racnoss Queen. She lived a parallel life in which all of the alien interventions stopped by the Doctor came to pass. London was destroyed by the Titanic spaceship, and the family were sent to Yorkshire as refugees. Throughout, Donna kept meeting a mysterious blonde-haired young woman. She did not know it, but it was Rose Tyler, travelling back and forth from a parallel dimension. There she worked with UNIT to correct the Trickster's meddling to save the Doctor so that he could help with a threat to the entire universe.

Donna was sent back to stop the original intervention. However, this could only be done by her sacrificing her life - throwing herself in front of a lorry to cause a traffic jam, which meant that she went to the HC Clements job interview after all.

Donna recalled some of this alternative life and was able to give the Doctor a message from Rose.

Returning to Earth, they witnessed the planet being transported across space to the Medusa Cascade. This was the work of Davros and the Daleks, who were using the planet and others to help power a dreadful weapon.

Donna became trapped on the TARDIS when the Daleks attempted to destroy it, and there she brought about the creation of a half-human Doctor grown from his severed hand (the result of an encounter with the Sycorax several years before). This process was known as a meta-crisis. Whilst the alternate Doctor was half-human, Donna became half Time Lord. An electric blast from Davros completed the process, and she was able to use her new knowledge, combined with her old secretarial skills, to disable the Dalek weapon and send other captured planets back to their proper place and time.

The Doctor realised that he had always been destined to meet Donna, who would save the universe.

However, he knew that the meta-crisis would prove fatal to Donna, and was forced to wipe her mind. Tragically, this would completely delete her entire knowledge of him. She would revert to the ordinary temp from Chiswick. Were she to ever remember anything of recent life, she would die.

The Doctor was alarmed to encounter Wilf a few months later - worried that Donna would remember him. She was due to marry a taxi driver named Sean Temple.

The Master caused everyone on Earth to transform into himself - except Donna. As she started to recall her time on the TARDIS, a defence mechanism which the Doctor had built in was activated, saving her life.

As a wedding present, he borrowed £1 from Geoff Noble and used it to buy a winning lottery ticket.

Shortly after regenerating into an incarnation he had experienced before, the Doctor was surprised to randomly encounter Donna once more at Camden Market. She had given all her money away, unconsciously influenced by the Doctor's altruism, and had a transgender daughter named Rose. The Doctor strove to prevent her remembering their previous time together, but failed. However, the meta-crisis failed to kill Donna. It transpired that Rose had inherited it, and they could control it to help defeat the alien Meep.

The Doctor showed Donna the new TARDIS but she accidentally spilled coffee into the console and it set off with her on board. She and the Doctor encountered ruthless copies of themselves on an alien planet on the edge of the known universe. The Doctor almost took the fake Donna away with him, until he spotted a slight anomaly in its physique.

Returning her home, they met Wilf who warned that the planet was engulfed in chaos. Travelling to UNIT HQ, they discovered that this was the work of the Toymaker. Donna accompanied the Doctor to the London of the 1920's where she encountered deadly puppets. Back in the present day, the mortally wounded Doctor began to regenerate once more, but this time experienced a bi-generation - meaning that there were now two simultaneous incarnations of him. With the Toymaker defeated, the original Doctor elected to take a break from saving the universe, leaving his fifteenth incarnation to carry on his adventures.

The Fourteenth Doctor settled down for a while with Donna and her family. Rose Temple-Noble would later join UNIT.

Played by: Catherine Tate. Appearances: The Runaway Bride (2006), Partners in Crime - Journey's End (2008), The End of Time I & II (2009/10), The Star Beast - The Giggle (2023).

• Tate was best known as a comedy performer, appearing with the Big Train team (which included Simon Pegg) amongst others before getting her own show.
• Initially dismissed as stunt-casting, Tate quickly silenced her critics with the strength of her performance, as the initially abrasive Donna showed her more sensitive side.
• Not expecting Tate to return for a full season, RTD had originally devised a journalist character named Penny for Series 4.
• Donna was brought back to feature in David Tennant's swan-song, which was to headline Bernard Cribbins' Wilf as the companion.
• Tate and Tennant would go on to work together on several other projects, including a West End theatrical run in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing.
• A lockdown tweet-a-thon led to Tate jokingly suggesting a reunion, which RTD eventually brought into being for a trio of 60th Anniversary episodes.