Inspirations - Pyramids of Mars

The writer credited on screen for Pyramids of Mars is Stephen Harris. You won't find anything else credited to him, as he doesn't exist. The name is actually a pseudonym for Robert Holmes and Lewis Griefer. However, what you are watching when you sit down to view this story is 100% Holmes.
Griefer was commissioned to write a story with an Egyptian theme, and what he came up with was set in the present day and involved UNIT. The plot revolved around ancient Martian seeds stored in the British Museum, which the villain of the piece wanted to use to reseed the Red Planet. Holmes and Philip Hinchcliffe were not happy with the first draft and requested changes. Some further drafts were submitted but then Griefer got a job overseas and was unable to carry out any further work on the story. Holmes then decided to carry out a Page One Rewrite, retaining only the title.
For inspiration, he looked to classic horror movies - which were in turn inspired by literary works and by a famous archaeological discovery. We also have elements from a Terry Nation Dalek story, which was one of the first scripts which Holmes story-edited.

In 1903 Dracula author Bram Stoker had published The Jewel of the Seven Stars. This was a tale about an archaeologist who breaks into the tomb of an Egyptian Queen who was a practitioner of the Black Arts. At the same time that he and his colleagues enter the tomb, his wife dies in childbirth back in London, leaving him with a baby daughter. 16 years later, the Queen's spirit, which has been inhabiting a mummified cat at the archaeologist's home, is ready to be reincarnated in the daughter's body. Stoker revised the story in 1912, to give it a happier ending. As well as a TV adaptation as part of the Mystery and Imagination series in 1970, the story formed the basis for Hammer's Blood from the Mummy's Tomb (1971), and the Charlton Heston movie The Awakening (1980).
Stoker was deeply interested in Egyptology and carried out rigorous research. Egyptologist Flinders Petrie is mentioned in the text, and all the artifacts described are accurate.
The first craze for Egypt and all things Egyptian had taken place back in the early years of the 19th Century, when Napoleon Bonaparte had taken an army of archaeologists with him on his Nile campaign. French Empire style contains many Egyptian motifs.
The next big bout of Egyptomania began in November 1922, when Howard Carter discovered the untouched tomb of the "Boy King" Tutankhamun. Carter's expedition was financed by Lord Carnarvon, who frequently wintered in Cairo following a serious motoring accident. Carnarvon was about to pull the plug on Carter when a set of stone steps were uncovered in an obscure corner of the Valley of the Kings where excavations had been abandoned a couple of seasons earlier.
The find made headlines across the globe, but soon a curse became attached to the dig. Lord Carnarvon was bitten on the cheek by a mosquito. Shortly afterwards he cut the wound whilst shaving and contracted blood poisoning, and died on 5th April, 1923. It was claimed that all the lights in Cairo went out at the moment of his death (even though each of the city's quarters had its own power supply), and back home in England his dog is supposed to have let out a wail and dropped dead. Other personnel associated with the dig were said to have met untimely deaths. Carter himself seems to have been unaffected, living until 1939, though his reputation has come under some scrutiny in recent years.

10 years after the discovery of the tomb, Universal released The Mummy, starring Boris Karloff. Karloff is only seen very briefly in the famous Jack P Pierce make-up, before his character - Imhotep - reappears in a more rejuvinated form a couple of years after the tomb of the Princess Ankh-es-en-amon is discovered. Imhotep was her High Priest, and he was condemned to be mummified alive after attempting to bring her back to life. He encounters a young woman who just happens to be her spitting image, in a tale of reincarnation which actually borrows heavily from the format of the studio's earlier Dracula adaptation. The film spawned a number of 1940's sequels, in that they had the Mummy trying to find the reincarnation of his princess, though the creature was renamed Kharis. Despite Karloff never revisiting the role, scenes from his film were used as flashbacks to Kharis' fate.
When Hammer came to revitalise the Horror Movie genre in gory technicolour, The Mummy was one of the first they remade. This time Christopher Lee was Kharis - who is condemned to the same fate for the same reason, and once again one of the characters just happens to look exactly like his lost princess (in this case the wife of Peter Cushing's archaeologist).
Hammer never made any sequels, unlike their Dracula and Frankenstein franchises, but they did make other Mummy movies - including the adaptation of the Stoker story mentioned above, plus standalone films like Curse of the Mummy's Tomb and The Mummy's Shroud.
One thing many of these films has in common is a fez-wearing Egyptian villain - usually the member of a sect which has sworn to protect the tomb from desecration and who uses the Mummy to wreak vengeance on the people who have uncovered it. Hammer's The Mummy sees George Pastell take on this role. He would later play Eric Klieg in Tomb of the Cybermen - another Doctor Who story inspired by Mummy movies. Roger Delgado played a similar tomb-protector role, albeit without a fez, in The Mummy's Shroud.
In Pyramids of Mars, we have the character of Namin, who is last of a long line of Sutekh worshipers.

Being Doctor Who, there is a science fiction rationale behind the horror trappings. The Mummies are service robots, covered in protective wrappings. The Egyptian god Sutekh is really an animal headed alien. The only walking cadaver we see is the reanimated body of Professor Marcus Scarman, the Egyptologist who discovered Sutekh in his prison-tomb - brought to life by Sutekh's mental powers as he himself is held immobile by a power emanating from a Pyramid on Mars. Sutekh has Scarman build a missile to destroy the Martian pyramid - and, of course, it just happens to be pyramid shaped. Sutekh also has Scarman set up a forcefield around the grounds of his estate, and the devices which power this are shaped like Canopic jars. These were used to store the viscera of those who had been mummified, to accompany them on the journey to the afterlife.
Sutekh's race are the Osirans. Sutekh is based on the Egyptian god Seth, who was the brother of Osiris and Isis. Seth killed Osiris, but was challenged by Horus, son of Osiris and Isis. In the battle, Horus lost one of his eyes, only to have it restored later. The Eye of Horus therefore became a symbol of good luck for Egyptians. Sutekh is said to have the head of a jackal. The jackal-headed god of the Egyptians was Anubis, who was associated with the dead, as jackals were often to be seen scavenging around cemeteries. Anubis helped to embalm Osiris after his murder by Seth, and so he became associated with the process of mummification. The priests who carried out the process wore jackal masks.

Part Four has some notable padding, as first Scarman and then the Doctor and Sarah have to get past a number of logic puzzles and death traps in the Martian pyramid. Sarah remarks that they are just like the City of the Exxilons - despite the fact that she never got to see any of those in Death to the Daleks. Perhaps the Doctor told her about them... This section of the story was inspired by that Dalek story, which was one of the first which Holmes worked on once he had been given the Script Editor job - although he wasn't yet credited. Death to the Daleks also features the notion of ancient astronauts visiting the Earth and influencing our ancestors. Both the Exxilons and the Osirans may have given us pyramids.
In an unlikely stroke of good fortune, Sarah just happens to have put on a period dress, just right for 1911. The Doctor says that he thinks Victoria wore it. If so, it wasn't in any of her televised stories, and the dress looks Edwardian rather than Victorian.
One sequence in the story has caused a few headaches - the bit where the Doctor takes Sarah and Scarman's brother Lawrence to 1980 to see what would happen if Sutekh were to get free. The TARDIS has never done this before, and there are all sorts of established rules in place that it shouldn't be able to do this. The 1980 date will also cause problems later on when it comes to UNIT dating, as the Brigadier will categorically be shown to have retired from the organisation by 1977.
Next time: it's welcome back to Terry Nation and Barry Letts, but farewell to Harry Sullivan and Benton of UNIT, as the Doctor and Sarah do a Steed and Mrs Peel in a quaint English village where strange things be happening...