Inspirations - City of Death

City of Death, the second story of Season 17, is credited to David Agnew, who you'll recall was also the writer of The Invasion of Time back in Season 15. Cast your mind back to that story, and you'll know that this credit was used by the BBC as a nom de plume for those occasions when the real author(s) could not be credited, for one reason or another. Back then, it was really producer Graham Williams and script editor Anthony Read who were the actual writers, having to step in at the last minute to salvage things when the planned story proved impossible to produce.
This time, it is Williams and his new script editor Douglas Adams who are the writers, after a script from David Fisher (Stones of Blood, Androids of Tara) fell through. Whilst Williams may have contributed, it is obvious that the story as broadcast is very much Adams' work.
And what a work it is. Quite possibly the most perfect Doctor Who story of any era - funny and clever, with Tom Baker at the top of his game and a villain worthy of a James Bond movie (or Indiana Jones, or Star Wars - Julian Glover has played a villainous role in all three franchises).
If you wanted to introduce a friend to the Classic era of the show, this is one of the stories you would select to demonstrate just how good a series it has always been. Personally, I think it is better than that thing Douglas Adams is better remembered for - the thing about towels. There, it was his own show and he could do what he wanted with it, so he could be overly self-indulgent, but here he is having to work to someone else's format. It could have limited him, but it made him a lot more focused, and the humour serves a purpose - rather than being there just for its own sake.

Fisher's original storyline does bear some resemblance to City of Death, so Adams did not start again from scratch. The basic structure is Fisher's. His story was called "A Gamble With Time", and was set on in Monte Carlo in the 1920's. The Doctor and Romana would have visited the famous casino, and spotted someone using anachronistic technology to cheat at the roulette tables. The villain was doing this to raise finance to fund his time travel experiments. The action would have flitted between the 1920's and the present day. Earlier drafts had set the action in Las Vegas. Fisher included the plot about multiple copies of the Mona Lisa, and he also had an image he wanted to use of the first creature coming out of the sea on to the land, only for someone to step on it, and so upset the whole of history.
Also investigating the villain was a private detective named "Pug" Farquharson. This character was inspired Bulldog Drummond. Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond was a gentleman adventurer who was created by H C McNeille, who went by the pen name of "Sapper", in 1920. The character had been used unsuccessfully as a policeman in a magazine story, and Sapper retooled him to make him more of an independent man of means action hero. McNeille died in 1937, leaving 10 novels, a number of short stories, a couple of plays and a film treatment. The first movie was made in 1922, and a number of noted actors took on the role over the years, including Ronald Coleman, Ray Milland, Ralph Richardson and Walter Pidgeon. John Howard played the character 7 times. "Pug" - a breed of bulldog - eventually evolved into Duggan in City of Death.

The Doctor Who production office looked into filming in Monte Carlo itself - Production Unit Manager John Nathan-Turner working out the logistics. A number of ITC adventure series had been set on the Riviera, and they had been studio-bound, with some stock location footage to set the scene - so this was another option.
Fisher revised his scripts to move the setting to Paris, but still in two time zones - 1928 and 1979. The sequence where an artist sketches Romana was in Fisher's scripts - but it was set in a Montmartre cafe, and the artist drew her with three eyes instead of having a clock for a face. This is because the alien villain was to have had three eyes, with one in the centre of the forehead. They were known as Sephiroth at this stage, and the story had begun in similar fashion to the televised version in showing us their spaceship exploding on prehistoric Earth.
Although it was broadcast later, Fisher had already delivered his scripts for Creature from the Pit, which was the first story of Season 17 to be made. Problems began when Fisher experienced some marital problems at the time of the story's development, as well as having to move house, so he wasn't able to give it his undivided attention. There were concerns about achieving the period setting, as well as having to set some of the story in a different time zone.
When it became clear that Fisher could not proceed any further with the story, he agreed that Williams and Adams could complete it and make any alterations they deemed necessary.
The director had already been booked - Michael Hayes - so he and Adams went to stay with Williams for a weekend, during which Adams was fed with black coffee by Hayes and set to work rewriting - with Williams commenting on what he came up with and throwing in a few suggestions of his own.

To simplify things, Adams first of all set the new version of the story primarily in present day Paris. He decided to concentrate on the Mona Lisa heist, so the whole cheating at gambling idea was dropped. There would still be one visit to another time period - but this would be to Florence in 1505, as the Doctor visited Leonardo da Vinci's studio.
Leonardo moved to the Tuscan city when he was 14, to join the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, where it is claimed that his talent soon outgrew that of his master. He later moved to Milan, between 1482 and 1499. 1502 saw him in Cesena, which is when he became employed by Cesare Borgia. The soldier tasked with guarding the Doctor for Captain Tancredi (one of Scaroth's splinters) mentions having worked for the Borgias. Leonardo returned to Florence in 1503, and was there until 1506 - so the date of 1505 is an accurate one. It is known that he had begun the painting we all know as the Mona Lisa in 1503, but it was later taken on his travels and he worked on it for years afterwards. It was with him when he died in France, in 1519, where he had come under the patronage of King Henri I. The painting's proper title is La Gioconda - La Jaconde in French. The sitter with the most famous smile in art history was Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo, a wealthy Florentine silk merchant. Mona is basically a contraction of ma donna, or madam. Poor old Francesco obviously never received his commission, and it was typical of Leonardo to leave a project unfinished as his interest moved on to something else.

The plot of City of Death sees the alien Scaroth caught up in the explosion of his spaceship, which causes him to be splintered and scattered through time. Each splinter assumes a position of authority, influencing human development so that the latest of them - posing as Count Scarlioni in present day Paris - has the technology to build a time machine, so that he can go back to prehistory and prevent the spaceship from being destroyed in the first place. Time machines cost money, so Scarlioni is selling off his art treasures to raise funds - which is how Duggan has come to be employed by a group of art dealers to investigate him (finding out if the items are genuine). Scarlioni has Shakespeare's original draft of Hamlet, and a few Gutenberg Bibles in his collection.
One of the splinters - the aforementioned Tancredi - has commissioned Leonardo to make multiple copies of the Mona Lisa, which will be left bricked up in the house in Paris which Scarlioni will inhabit in 1979. Scarlioni will secretly sell all of them to various buyers, who will keep quiet about their purchases as the painting will be stolen from the Louvre. Each will think they are getting the one and only painting.
We've mentioned before that Doctor Who stories not only draw their inspiration from other sources, but sometimes they themselves inspire later ones. In 1985 ITV serialised the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, with Jeremy Brett in the lead, and when it came to The Final Problem they found that the plot didn't quite cover the programme run time. They also wanted to increase the role of Professor Moriarty, who only ever appears in this one story, so they added a whole new opening section - wherein Holmes is in Paris stopping Moriarty from selling multiple copies of the Mona Lisa after stealing the one from the Louvre...

Douglas Adams had briefly been a member of the Monty Python team, but he had worked on the last series, in which John Cleese had not appeared. (Adams had taken on Cleese's co-writer role with Graham Chapman). He was able to persuade Cleese to make a cameo appearance in City of Death. Cleese agreed so long as it was uncredited, and his daughter could visit the Doctor Who set. (She got to see Destiny of the Daleks being made). Adams wanted Alan Coren to partner him as the pair of art critics who mistake the TARDIS for an art installation in episode four, but Cleese suggested they try to get Alan Bennett or Jonathan Miller. Eleanor Bron eventually joined him. Cleese filmed his scene whilst he was visiting the BBC to edit the Basil the Rat episode of Fawlty Towers.
Exactly 30 years later a TARDIS did end up on display in an art gallery - Mark Wallinger's mirrored Police Box, a piece called Time And Relative Dimensions In Space, 2001.

JNT did manage to balance the books, so that Doctor Who got its first ever foreign location shoot. Only three of the cast got to go to Paris, with a minimal crew, to keep costs down - Tom Baker, Lalla Ward and Tom Chadbon, who played Duggan.
As you can see, there were quite a few story elements which Fisher had introduced which made it through to the finished serial. He elected not to take any credit, but he was did accept a substantial part of his fee.
Next time: from the sublime to the ridiculous. There is a massive green blob of a monster. They call it "the Creature". It lives in an old mine shaft. They call it "the Pit"...