Inspirations - The Sontaran Experiment

When it came to setting up Tom Baker's first season as the Doctor, Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks - along with new script editor Robert Holmes - decided to populate it with some favourite alien creatures, to help ease the transition for viewers still pining for Pertwee. One of these was a relative newcomer to the show - the Sontaran. The Time Warrior had proved to be very popular with the viewers and production team alike - especially Kevin Lindsay's performance as Linx. Holmes was obviously far too busy to write their return himself, what with having to script edit the whole season, write The Ark in Space, and heavily rewrite Gerry Davis' Cyberman story. Letts and Dicks therefore turned to Bob Baker and Dave Martin, who had provided some notable stories for them in the recent past.
As we mentioned last time, the decision had been made to dispense with a six part story, partly filmed and partly studio recorded, and split this into two separate stories - a four-parter which would be studio-bound, and a two-parter which would be filmed entirely on location. This latter was to be The Sontaran Experiment, though its working title was "The Destructors".
I say filmed, but the programme was to be recorded on the new light weight video cameras.
Baker and Martin had a building in their scripts - an old ruined chapel which would house Field-Major Styre's dungeon. However, the location down in Exmoor did not have such a structure in the vicinity, and there was to be no studio work involved, so Styre conducts his work en plein air.

The main location, where the Sontaran has his spaceship, was Hound Tor - miles away from the cast and crew hotel, and set back some distance from the nearest road.
Lindsay had suffered for his art with Linx, especially in the hot studio. He had a heart problem and this, plus the costume, caused him to collapse during the making of The Time Warrior. He was keen to reprise the role of a Sontaran, and so a modified costume was created to make life easier for him. This meant a much lighter mask, and he was only required to wear his helmet over it for one brief scene - when he first steps out of his ship for the cliffhanger to Part One. Even so, when it came to lunch breaks, Lindsay had his meals brought up to him on the Tor, to save him walking all the way down to the road and back. The story goes that one lunchtime a woman came past walking her dog, and was startled to discover him sitting alone amongst the rocks.
Lis Sladen was still feeling rather insecure, convinced that new producer Philip Hinchcliffe would want to replace her with a companion of his own devising. Her opinion changed when Hinchcliffe ran all the way from the Outside Broadcast van, up to the Tor, to tell her how much he had just enjoyed her performance in a scene.

As they were playing colonists from another planet, the actors cast as the Galsec spacemen adopted South African accents. One of them was actor Glyn Jones. He had earlier written a story for the William Hartnell era of the programme - The Space Museum - making him the first person to have both written for and appeared in Doctor Who. He held this distinction for a very long time, as the next would be Mark Gatiss, when he appeared in The Lazarus Experiment, after having written The Unquiet Dead and The Idiot's Lantern. To date only one further person has managed this - when Toby Whithouse got to feature in Twice Upon A Time.
The main thing everyone knows is that Tom Baker broke his collar bone during the filming. You can see the moment on screen (and hear the crack) when Styre strikes the Doctor just after he has come to rescue Sarah from the "fear" experiment. As he had little to do on this story, but was still needed on location, designer Roger Murray-Leach volunteered to accompany Baker to the hospital, and the two bonded over the experience.  This was only Baker's second story to be recorded, and he was naturally worried that they might have to recast were the injury serious. In the days before mobile phones, Hinchcliffe was unable to find out what was happening, but that evening Baker turned up at the hotel with his arm in a sling. The weather on location was cold and wet, so the Doctor was sporting a large coat. He also had his soon-to-be trademark scarf to act as a sling, so it was relatively easy to conceal the damaged arm, and Baker was mostly shot in close up from this point on.
Stuart Fell had been hired to act as stunt extra for Kevin Lindsay, as he was not fit enough to manage strenuous scenes like fight sequences, whilst Terry Walsh - who had been Pertwee's double and who had a small role as a Galsec crewman - became Baker's stunt double. This means that for much of the second episode, you are actually watching two stuntmen battling it out.

For Bob Baker and Dave Martin, their main inspiration for the story was their reading about Nazi war crimes - in particular the experiments conducted on prisoners in the concentration camps. The most notorious exponent of these was Josef Mengele, who worked at Auschwitz from 1943. He was transferred to another camp just days before Auschwitz was liberated, and managed to flee Germany at the end of the war - travelling to Argentina, then Paraguay and finally Brazil. Various attempts to extradite him - both legal and illegal - failed. He eventually headed Hell-wise in 1979 after suffering a stroke whilst swimming. Buried under a false name, his remains were later disinterred and identified in 1985.
Styre's mission is to conduct experiments on captive humans to test their resilience in the event of a planned invasion. The plot rather falls apart over this. Where is the threat from humans on a planet which doesn't have any - and why conduct experiments on humans on a planet that doesn't have any? Styre has to lure the Galsec crew to Earth to carry out his work. He is also determined to carry out all of his planned experiments, even though his High Command should be able to work out the risk from just a couple of them - yet they sit waiting for his final report. The Grand Marshall (also played by Lindsay, with a modified collar) then meekly accepts the word of the Doctor that there is a force strong enough to defeat them.
Like many great Bond villains before him, Styre also opts for the old "I will kill you, but not right now" approach - which leads to his undoing. Harry sabotages the machine which re-energises him, causing it to feed on him and he deflates like a balloon.
This is the first story since The Sea Devils in which there is no sign at all of the TARDIS - due to the on-going story arc for this season. The Doctor and his companions beamed down from space station Nerva by transmat to Earth, and they depart in the same manner.
Next time: the Daleks are back to fight the Doctor, but this time they've brought their dad...