Inspirations - The Power of Kroll

David Fisher's Prisoner of Zenda pastiche was at one point going to be the fifth story of Season 16, whilst Script Editor Anthony Read had commissioned a script from the veteran film and TV writer Ted Willis. He had written the original treatment for the 1950 film The Blue Lamp, in which PC George Dixon first appeared (as played by Jack Warner). Despite the character being killed (shot during an armed robbery by a young Dirk Bogarde) Willis created the TV series Dixon of Dock Green five years later, which would run for two decades.
Read discovered that Willis was having problems with his story, and the reason became apparent when the writer visited his office to discuss the matter. Willis turned up drunk - a state he was often in at this time. Read had no option but to cancel his commission and seek a replacement, so he turned to his predecessor, Robert Holmes, for help. Holmes agreed to write another story for the Key to Time arc, having written the opening segment a few months before. The only stipulation he was given by Producer Graham Williams was that he should include the biggest monster seen in the series so far. Early titles for this story included "Moon of Death" and "Horror of the Swamp".
As it was, Williams may have retained his "Producer" credit for The Power of Kroll, but he actually played very little part in it beyond the planning stages. He fell ill, and David Maloney was asked to step in to oversee the production. Since directing a number of highly regarded stories under the Hinchcliffe / Holmes stewardship of the programme, he had gone on to produce Blake's 7. Maloney's was a watching brief only, as the day to day running of the production was left to the series' PUM (Production Unit Manager), who normally handled the financial side of things. This was John Nathan-Turner, who we will be hearing a lot more about soon. JNT had worked on and off on the series since the end of the Patrick Troughton era, and had become the PUM from Image of the Fendahl.

Holmes' second Doctor Who story - The Space Pirates - had basically been a Western set in outer space. Milo Clancey had been an old 49'er, whose claims were being jumped by Caven and his men. General Hermack and the International Space Corps had been the Cavalry, trying to maintain law and order in a frontier region, like the old Wild West. Holmes looked to the Western genre once again for this new story. The "Swampies" were the indigenous inhabitants of the planet Delta Magna, and they were forcibly relocated to one of the planet's moons when it was colonised by people from Earth. They are Native Americans, forced onto a Reservation. Now the humans have their eyes of their moon, intent on exploiting its resources - as has happened in the US when something of value has been identified on Native American lands. There was no real reason for having the "Swampies" green-skinned - unless it was a clumsy attempt to parallel Native Americans who, at the time of the writing of this story, were still being called "Red Indians" or even "Redskins".
The Power of Kroll is also a (very) rough draft for what many believe to be Holmes' best ever story - The Caves of Androzani. Both stories deal with events on the moon of a planet which has been colonised, and which contains a valuable resource (methane here, life-prolonging Spectrox there). The villain of the piece (Thawn here, Morgus there) is secretly paying a gun-runner (Rhom-Dutt / Stotz) to supply weapons to his own enemy (Ranquin / Sharaz Jek) in order to provide an excuse to wipe them out. Clearly Holmes really liked this double-cross plot idea , and felt dissatisfied at having to use it for this particular story, so returned to it later when he thought he could use it more effectively. (Holmes would later say that Kroll was his least favourite story).

Back when Tom Baker first took on the role of the Doctor, he appeared in a story which was partly inspired by King Kong - the classic 1933 RKO monster movie about a giant gorilla which is found on a remote South Seas island and later transported to New York. Terrance Dicks had created a robot which formed an attachment to Sarah Jane Smith - just as Kong does with Fay Wray's character. The robot had grown to enormous size and carried her off - and everyone had felt sorry for it when it was destroyed. Robert Holmes also chose to reference King Kong, in the end of Part One sequence where Romana has been captured by Ranquin's tribe and is to be sacrificed to their god Kroll - who is supposed to be a giant squid. The sacrifice sees her tied to a stake, and her death will be screened from the tribe by the closure of large gates. The same thing happens to Fay Wray, though there it is because Kong has to be kept secure behind massive walls, whilst here it is because the sacrifice is to be faked by a tribesman in a costume.
The story plays with the series' own conventions here - we see the monster menace Romana and think it just looks like a man in a rubber suit, but it is supposed to be a man in a rubber suit. Romana states that she was convinced, but the Doctor says that it probably looked more convincing from the front. All very meta.

As we've said, the story had to feature the biggest monster seen to date, and Holmes elected to make this a multi-tentacled squid-like creature. In the days before CGI, tentacles were hard to realise, which is why the programme tended to avoid them. Back in 1965 we had the ever so slightly static Mire Beasts in The Chase, and that was it until the first version of the Nestene creature in Spearhead from Space. Even that did not work out very well, and the Nestene scenes had to be remounted during the making of the subsequent story, The Silurians. Holmes at least knew that his monster was so big it could only be realised using a model - and model tentacles are a lot easier to do (although some prop ones were used on location and in studio). The film cameraman was misinformed about the matte scenes for the shots where location work would be seen in the lower part of the picture, with Kroll inlaid above - leading to a harsh dividing line across the screen. (Hopefully this story might get some new CGI VFX for its eventual release on the Season 16 Blu-ray box set).

The guest cast list is interesting, in that it features a number of actors who have played other roles in the series, a couple of whom only got the parts because other people pulled out late in the day. Dugeen is played by John Leeson, who normally voiced K9. The robot dog couldn't feature in the story due to the amount of location filming in marshy terrain, so Leeson got his one and only on screen appearance. He replaced Martin Jarvis. Philip Madoc (The Krotons, The War Games and The Brain of Morbius) was a late replacement as Fenner for Alan Browning, who fell ill just before the location filming. He really wanted the main villain role of Thawn, but it had been offered to Neil McCarthy, who had earlier appeared in The Mind of Evil. Ranquin was John Abineri, who had appeared in Fury from the Deep, Ambassadors of Death and Death to the Daleks.
I'm sure you already know the story about the Swampies' green body make-up proving hard to wash off, and the actors and extras having to go to a nearby USAAF base to use their showers - much to the amusement of the base personnel. Tom Baker and Mary Tamm would go out drinking with Glyn Owen (Rhom-Dutt) of an evening, and at one point they gatecrashed a policemen's function, so much fun was had on location.
On his return from sick leave Graham Williams was not very happy with certain elements of the story - in particular the set design. Note the very wobbly walls and ladder in the scenes where the Doctor sabotages the rocket. He lodged a complaint with the head of the design department, after his own boss had complained about the sets.
Next time: Lots of endings, and some new beginnings. It's the last ever six part story, and the last time Bob Baker and Dave Martin collaborate on a Doctor Who story. Mary Tamm calls it quits, as does John Leeson (at least for now). Anthony Read is also off, but he is handing over to Douglas Adams. We also get to see the first appearance in the show of the future Mrs Tom Baker...