Season 14 saw the end of Philip Hinchcliffe's tenure as producer of Doctor Who. He decided to go out with a lavish production - leaving his replacement, Graham Williams, to foot the bill. Hinchcliffe had allowed The Talons of Weng-Chiang to go well over its budget. This plus spiraling inflation would pose problems for Williams in his first season in charge. He had hoped to have a themed season, coming up with the idea of the White and Black Guardians and the Key to Time as part of his pitch for the new role, but seasons had to be planned too far in advance, so this idea would have to wait until the following year. Rattled by the complaints about horror and violence in recent stories, Williams was ordered by his bosses to steer the show towards lighter adventures, with more fantasy and humour.
Robert Holmes had agreed to help bridge the transition by staying on as Script Editor for a number of stories, as a replacement for him was sought.
Straight away, Williams and Homes hit a snag. Terrance Dicks was now a freelance writer, and he was commissioned to write the first story of the new season - his first contribution since the upset over the redrafting of The Brain of Morbius. What he came up with was a story which would have fitted well with the themes of the previous two years - a tale involving vampires. Tentatively titled "The Witch Lords", this story was to have seen the Doctor and Leela encounter vampires on an alien planet.
However, the BBC were at this time planning a lavish production of Bram Stoker's Dracula, to be produced by Morris Barry (director of three Patrick Troughton Doctor Who stories) and set to star Louis Jourdan as the Count, and Frank Finlay as Van Helsing. The Doctor Who production office were suddenly told to discontinue their vampire story for fear it might be seen as a send-up of the costly new Stoker adaptation. We'll hear more about Dicks' original story when we get to Season 18...
Holmes met with Dicks and asked him for a new story at short notice, to be set in a lighthouse. Terrance Dicks DVD Extras Anecdote No 433 coming up...
Back when Dicks was Script Editor he had asked Holmes to write a story set in Medieval times. Holmes said he did not know anything about this, so Dicks gave him a copy of the Boys' Own Book of Castles and told him to get on with it.
Jump forward a few years and the roles are reversed. Dicks is asked to write a story set in a lighthouse and claims he does not know anything about them, so Holmes hands him a copy of the Boys' Own Book of Lighthouses, and tells him to get on with it...
In a neat bit of symmetry, that Holmes story introduced the Sontarans, and mentioned their long-running war with the Rutans, whilst Dicks' story actually introduces the Rutans and mentions their long-running war with the Sontarans...
The other issue at the time was a lack of studio space at Television Centre, so Dicks' story was going to be recorded in Birmingham, at the Pebble Mill studios. The director chosen for the story was Paddy Russell, who had already directed Tom Baker in The Pyramids of Mars. She discovered that a lot had changed with the actor since their last work together, and she found him a lot less agreeable. This was the beginning of the "hell to work with" period for Baker. Hinchcliffe had managed this developing trait, but for Williams it was to be a slow war of attrition which he would ultimately lose.
Louise Jameson had only initially been booked to appear as Leela for the second half of the previous season. She had been reluctant to stay on longer due to the hostility from Baker towards her character, which manifested itself in a coldness towards her as an actor. One of her conditions for doing the new season was that she be allowed to dispense with the red contact lenses which she had to wear to make her blue eyes appear brown. A sequence was inserted into the end of Horror of Fang Rock where she fails to heed the Doctor's warning not to look at the destruction of the Rutan mothership and is temporarily blinded. Her sight clears, but she has suffered a change of pigmentation in her eyes.
The inspiration for many Doctor Who stories lies close to the surface a lot of the time. Few would have failed to spot the Frankenstein story behind The Brain of Morbius, for instance. The main inspiration for Horror of Fang Rock is even more explicit, as the Doctor actually quotes from the poem which lies behind it at the conclusion. This is Flannan Isle (aka The Ballad of Flannan Isle) which was written by Wilfred Wilson Gibson and first published in 1912. Set in 1900, it tells of the mysterious disappearance of three keepers from the Flannan Isle lighthouse. The Flannan Isles lie in the Outer Hebrides off Scotland's north west coast, and are also known as The Seven Hunters. The lighthouse keepers vanished without trace in December 1900.
The Doctor quotes one of the passages from the poem:
"Aye: though we hunted high and low,
And hunted everywhere,
Of the three men's fate we found no trace
Of any kind in any place,
But a door ajar, and an untouched meal,
And an overtoppled chair".
The story has gone on to inspire a number of ghost stories and horror movies, plus an opera by Peter Maxwell Davies (The Lighthouse) and even an early song by Genesis.
A number of theories exist to explain the disappearances, including abduction by UFO, which is closest to what happens to the hapless crew of the Fang Rock lighthouse, who fall prey to the shape-shifting alien Rutan.
The most commonly held opinion is that the men were washed out to sea by a wave. Their log reported severe storms a day or two before Christmas. Another popular theory is that there was some kind of argument, and one of the men killed the others before doing away with himself.
Another theory claims that they were the victims of espionage - killed or abducted by German spies.
More fanciful ideas include a ghostly intervention - either the Devil himself or the Phantom of the Seven Hunters - or attack by some kind of sea monster.
Dicks chose to increase the population of his lighthouse by having a ship wreck itself on the rocks during one of the power shortages which the electricity-devouring Rutan causes. The only member of the ship's crew to survive the wreck is named Stoker - an in-joke about the story which was to have filled this slot. The passengers who survive all have some disagreeable trait, so it is clear that they are being set up as Rutan fodder, necessary to maintain the tension for four episodes.
In order to tie the story to its source poem, it was necessary for Dicks to have every character other than the Doctor and Leela killed off. However, unlike the Flannan Isles mystery, there would have been plenty of dead bodies for the authorities to find when they arrived to investigate.
Next time: the Graham Williams era really takes off with a bit of a space opera. The Doctor falls ill then goes to see a man about a dog. Contact will be made...
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