Inspirations - The Hand of Fear

We mentioned once before how the seasons of the classic era of Doctor Who did not conform to the pattern we see today, of significant events being saved for season finales or season openers. Other than the fact that the final story of each season between 1975 and 1979 was an extra two episodes in length, they simply didn't have season finales in the sense we know them. (It could be argued that the recent Series 11 didn't have a finale either, but that is more down to the last episode's relative weakness, rather than a lack of intent on the part of the production team).
William Hartnell handed over to Patrick Troughton at the end of the second story of Season 4, and all the companion departures / arrivals occurred mid-season throughout the 1960's. It was only when we got to the Pertwee era that companions bowed out at the end of a season - Barry Letts realising that the introduction of a new companion in the season opener was an audience draw.
When it came time for Lis Sladen to depart the programme, after a hugely successful three years, she elected to go part way through her fourth series - insisting she leave when her character of Sarah Jane Smith was still popular. It is believed the reason she did not go at the end of the previous season is that she still hoped that the proposed Doctor Who movie might still be made ("Doctor Who Meets Scratchman", which was co-authored by Tom Baker and Ian Marter, with input from its planned director James Hill).
So it is, then, that Sarah departs in only the second story of Season 14. The story is The Hand of Fear, and it is written by Bob Baker and Dave Martin.
The story we got on screen was built on the remains of two rejected stories - both of which just happened to feature the demise of a regular cast member.

The Hand of Fear was originally going to be a six parter, designed to close Season 13. It would have been set in a London of the near future and was to have featured UNIT in a prominent role. The aliens were a race called the Omegans, who were a silicon-based lifeform. Society would have been seen to have collapsed, with UNIT fighting another military group loyal to the aliens. The story would also have seen the death of the Brigadier, as he flew a suicide mission to crash a 'plane into the Omegan mothership which was in orbit above the city.
Whilst Baker and Martin developed this storyline, director Douglas Camfield was trying to get his first writing commission on the series. He had earlier contributed a story set during World War II - provisionally entitled "Operation Werewolf". It didn't feature wolfmen, but was instead about a group of Nazis trying to invade Britain using a teleport device. Much earlier, Brian Hayles (creator of the Ice Warriors) had tried to get a WWII story commissioned, but the BBC of the time did not think stories set during the war were acceptable - the events of the conflict being too recent in the public's mind. (Jimmy Perry and David Croft had encountered the same opposition when they proposed a sitcom about the Home Guard in the late 1960's. They persevered, thankfully, and we got Dad's Army).
Obsessed by all things military, Camfield had a particular fascination with the Foreign Legion. He proposed a story set in a fort in the North African desert, to be called "The Legion of the Lost". Camfield had Sarah die heroically at the conclusion.
The one thing which Sladen did not want, however, was to be killed off. She did not think that this would be fair to the legions of young fans of her character.
Camfield's story never got beyond the storyline stage. He did not have any more to do with Doctor Who after this, moving on to other projects - one of which, appropriately enough, was a highly successful adaptation of Beau Geste for the BBC's Sunday evening classic serials slot, produced in 1982 by Barry Letts.

Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes, meanwhile, were having serious reservations about the shape of the Baker and Martin script. Even the name of the aliens was a problem, as the same writers had already called the villain of their 10th Anniversary story (The Three Doctors) Omega.
The story was pushed back into the next season so that a virtual rewrite could be carried out, and the episode count was reduced to four. It was quite clear that the UNIT regulars had all moved on to other work by this point, so UNIT's involvement was dropped - even though the new version was still set in the present, and involved a situation in which the Doctor would normally have involved his old colleagues.
One of the only things left from the original story idea is that the aliens - now known as Kastrians - are silicon-based.
The new story sees the Doctor and Sarah arrive by TARDIS in a quarry-like landscape - only to discover it actually is a quarry this time. They get caught up in a rock blasting accident, and when Sarah is dug out of the rubble she is found to be clutching a fossilised hand - humanoid in form but many millions of years old. She is taken to hospital where Baker and Martin employ a joke where an intern thinks that Gallifrey must be a place in Ireland. They will use the exact same joke in another hospital scene in the next season. The stone hand is found to be living matter, rather than a bit of old statue, and it absorbs radiation to reconstitute itself. Sarah has held onto a blue crystal ring from the hand, and it exerts an hypnotic influence over her - compelling her to take the hand to a nearby nuclear power station. Baker and Martin had intended this to be the same power plant they had used in their very first story - The Claws of Axos - but the name was changed slightly from Nuton to Nunton.
Baker and Martin lived near Oldbury power station, and could see it from their homes. For research they contacted the station and were invited for a tour, and the authorities were more than happy for their story to be filmed there.
Episode One ends with the hand stirring to life.

This being the Hinchcliffe-Holmes era, we can look to classic horror movies once again. "Evil" hands had featured in horror films since the silent era - usually versions of the story about a concert pianist losing his hands in an accident and having a pair transplanted from another man, who turns out to have been a murderer. The pianist then finds the hands taking over and he is compelled to go round strangling people. The Hands of Orlac is the best known example of this story. Conrad Veidt starred in a 1924 Austrian version, and it was remade by Hollywood as Mad Love in 1935, with Peter Lorre in the Veidt role. 1960 then saw an Anglo-French co-production with Mel Ferrer as Orlac. The source material is the novel Les Mains d'Orlac by Maurice Renard, published in 1920.
More relevant to this Doctor Who story are those tales of disembodied hands which go crawling around on their own. A well known example of this is The Beast With Five Fingers (1946), based on a 1919 short story by W F Harvey. It also features Peter Lorre. The plot revolves around the suspicious death of a reclusive millionaire, and the household of squabbling friends and relatives who want to get their hands on his fortune - one of whom may have murdered the old man. The classic scene is when everyone hears the dead man playing the piano in the middle of the night - but of course there is no-one to be seen when they go to look, and it is then found that someone has broken into the mausoleum and cut off the corpse's left hand. The hand is then seen crawling around the house by various parties.
In 1981 Oliver Stone directed The Hand, starring Michael Caine as a comics artist who loses his hand, only for it to take on a life of its own.
The ending to both these movies is left ambiguous, as the killer is found to be mentally unstable and so we don't know if the hand was real or just in his imagination.
However, the best known version of the crawling hand tale is probably that which belonged to Michael Gough, which sets out to get revenge on Christopher Lee in his segment of the classic Amicus portmanteau horror Dr Terror's House of Horrors (1965). Peter Cushing is the tarot-reading stranger in a train compartment, who predicts dreadful things for his fellow passengers. Gough plays an artist whose work is trashed by critic Christopher Lee. Gough gets his own back by showing a group of works by another artist which Lee raves about - only to find they have been painted by a chimpanzee. His reputation belittled, Lee runs down Gough with his car, causing him to lose his hand. This then starts stalking Lee.
One final example worth mentioning is Sam Raimi's Evil Dead 2, wherein Bruce Campbell is plagued by his own demon-possessed hand.

Back to The Hand of Fear, and the titular hand regenerates into the Kastrian Eldrad, who appears female but this is because of its connection to Sarah. Eldrad forces the Doctor to return her to Kastria. The planet is found to be a dead world. The Doctor and Sarah discover that Eldrad was actually a criminal, executed by her people millions of years ago, and she is responsible for the planet's devastation. Eldrad regenerates again into her original form - which turns out to be male. The Doctor and Sarah flee - leaving Eldrad to become king of a dead planet.
Sarah throws a bit of a tantrum and threatens to leave the TARDIS - and this coincides with the Doctor receiving a mental message from his home planet. He has to return to Gallifrey - and Sarah can't come with him. Baker and Martin did not write any of the closing TARDIS scene. It was written by Robert Holmes, but heavily reworked by Lis Sladen and Tom Baker themselves.
The Doctor drops Sarah off at her home in South Croydon - but she realises too late that he has brought her to the wrong place. Decades later, when Sarah returns in School Reunion, we will learn that she is actually in Aberdeen. The last we see of Sarah in this story is her walking off whistling Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me A Bow-Wow. This 1892 music hall song was written for Vesta Victoria. Like many seemingly innocent music hall songs it contains a lot of sexual innuendo - a bow-wow was a euphemism for a male member.
Sladen couldn't actually whistle, so it is director Lennie Mayne who you can hear. This was Mayne's last contribution to the series, as he died in a boating accident in May 1977. (His yacht hit a trawler in the English Channel in the dark. His body was never recovered). He uses actors he has employed in previous stories, also written by Baker and Martin - including Rex Robinson as Dr Carter, who had featured in both The Three Doctors and The Monster of Peladon, and his wife Frances Pidgeon, who had also appeared in The Monster of Peladon.
Next time: Gallifrey turns out to be a cross between Oxbridge and the Vatican, and the Doctor goes it alone against an assassin. Not just any assassin. A deadly assassin...