Friday, 4 October 2019
Inspirations - Castrovalva
In looking for his new Doctor, producer John Nathan-Turner knew that he had to find someone who was very different from Tom Baker. Baker had been in the role for 7 years, and for many children he was the only Doctor, as they'd grown up with him. To go for a similar actor would look like copying. JNT therefore decided to go for the youngest Doctor yet and, as is often the case with JNT, he favoured someone he had already worked with. This was Peter Davison, who was best known for playing vet Tristan Farnon in All Creatures Great And Small. He was working on a sit-com at the time, and when he was finally convinced to accept the role, his continuing work on the other series had to be agreed. A lucrative series of beer commercials Davison had signed up to had to be cancelled, as this would not be appropriate for someone who was about to become a children's hero.
For the costume of his new Doctor, JNT was inspired by a photograph in his office of a charity cricket match which Davison had participated in.
His commitments on other series led to there being a longer than usual gap between seasons 18 and 19. To remind the public that Baker wasn't the only actor to have filled the role, and as part of his efforts to keep fandom happy, JNT had included clips of companions and villains from Baker's era in the final episode of Logopolis - the Doctor's life passing before his eyes. JNT would then arrange for a whole series of repeats to be shown by the BBC, called The Five Faces of Doctor Who. This was the first time that archive stories had ever been repeated. Prior to this there had only ever been two repeats in the B&W period - a re-screening of An Unearthly Child immediately before The Cave of Skulls (because everyone had been distracted by the Kennedy assassination news), and the whole of Evil of the Daleks - to bridge the gap between seasons 5 and 6, and where the repeat was actually built into the stories either side of it in terms of narrative.
The 1970's had seen summer repeats (and the odd unscheduled one replacing rained-off cricket), but only of stories from the most recent season.
For The Five Faces... that first episode would get another airing, as the whole of the first story was shown, along with The Krotons, representing the Troughton era, The Three Doctors and Carnival of Monsters (representing Pertwee, as well as showing the first two Doctors in colour), and Logopolis - representing Baker, but also allowing Davison to be included as the Fifth Face thanks to the closing regeneration scene.
The first story for Davison was originally going to be the one which writers Andrew McCulloch and John Flanagan had prepared as the last story for Tom Baker - the one known as "Project Zeta Sigma". This had been championed by outgoing script editor Chris Bidmead. Problems with it meant that it get being pushed back. As soon as Bidmead resigned, and JNT went off to the USA for a convention, interim script editor Anthony Root scrapped it, with the blessing of Barry Letts, who was about to step down from his watching brief over the series. Root joined the series on a short term secondment only, and never actually commissioned any new stories - only working on submissions which had already been accepted.
With the decision having been made to bridge the regeneration with a trilogy reintroducing the Master, and with Bidmead himself stepping in to write Baker's last story, he was then asked to also write Davison's debut, to more seamlessly tie up the arc.
Terence Dudley's "Day of Wrath" (soon to be renamed Four to Doomsday) was quite well advanced, it was decided that this would be the first story which Davison would actually record. His debut would be recorded fourth in production order, to give the actor time to get comfortable in the role before the viewing public would see him for the first time. This out of order production schedule was becoming commonplace, but did lead to continuity problems with Davison's hair, which had to be shorter for his sit-com role. By the time Castrovalva was made, Root had already moved on and Eric Saward had been appointed new script editor, on the strength of his Season 19 story The Visitation.
Castrovalva is the name of a hill town in the Abruzzo region of Italy. It had inspired a lithograph by the Dutch artist M.C. Escher in 1930:
This image inspired the idea of the story's Castrovalva been perched on a cliff-top. Bidmead had already decided to use Escher owing to a picture which JNT's boss had on his office wall. It was the one with the weird perspective of people going up and down seemingly impossible stairs:
Bidmead had decided to use the concept of recursion in his story. This derives from mathematics and from computer science - and we all know how obsessed Bidmead was with computing. At its simplest, recursion is when a thing is defined by itself. In order to understand recursion, you must understand recursion. That's an example of recursion. An example from Doctor Who might be the exchange between the Doctor and Jo in The Time Monster, where the Doctor tells a story involving a "thraskin". He says that this word was replaced later by "plinge". Jo asks what a "thraskin" is, and the Doctor says he's already told her - it means the same as "plinge". Their argument could have gone round and round in an infinite loop.
Bidmead chose to have the new Doctor trapped in a recursion, created by the Master using Block Transfer Computations and the captured Adric's mathematical abilities, which you'll recall we mentioned under Logopolis as being another computing reference.
Director Fiona Cumming also looked to Escher's work for the visuals, having the interior of Catrovalva look like other pieces of his work.
Escher was very popular in the 1980's as this was the era of the "executive toy" - most famous of which was the hanging metal spheres which hit each other back and forth seemingly forever once started. Escher's prints were the visual equivalent of these toys.
We don't know what JNT's opinion was on executive toys, but we do know that he really didn't like the Escher print in his boss' office. He found it's surrealist trompe l'oeil imagery irritating.
One literary inspiration for Castrovalva might well be Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, published in English translation in 1970. In this a man dreams of a city of mirrors which reflect the world around it - a place called Macondo. A mirror plays a significant role in Castrovalva, as it reflects the discord away from the Doctor, shielding him for a time. The man decides to make it a reality by building it himself. The book then tells of the trials and tribulations of the city, and numerous generations of the man's family. The ideal city reflects the real world too much, and it becomes an increasingly bad place in which to live. Once the city has crumbled away to nothing, the last surviving descendant of the founder translates an old document, which gives the history of Macando up until the time of whoever is reading it. In Castrovalva, the Doctor discovers that the town's history volumes, although supposed to be ancient, run up to the present day.
Lastly, during the early stages of the Doctor's new regeneration, he revisits some of his previous incarnations. To find his way through the TARDIS corridors he unravels the Fourth Doctor's scarf to leave a trail for himself - unravelling his old persona as he searches for his new one. he picks up a recorder - synonymous with Troughton's Doctor, and speaks to Adric in the vocal tones of the Hartnell version. He also seems to be recalling an unseen adventure in which the Brigadier helped him against the Ice Warriors. He also calls Adric 'Jamie' at one point, whilst Tegan is called both 'Jo' and 'Vicki'.
Talking with the Portreeve, he ends a story by mentioning the Ogrons and the Daleks. We don't know if he has been telling him about Day of the Daleks, or Frontier in Space. It would be funny if it was the latter, as the Portreeve is, of course, the disguised Master - who was there at the time.
The Delgado incarnation of the Master sometimes wore disguises - even of his own face.
Next time: Frogs - In - Space!!!
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Inspirations
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