Inspirations - Black Orchid

Read most reviews of Black Orchid, and you'll usually see the name Agatha Christie mentioned as an inspiration. Mrs Christie was, of course, one of the world's most prolific writers, who specialised in crime. The vast majority of her novels and short stories are specifically about murder - and they are usually 'Whodunnits'. A crime is committed, and the reader has to try to work out who the perpetrator is by following the clues unearthed by the story's investigator - hopefully spotting the culprit before they do. For Christie, the investigators were Hercules Poirot, a private detective; Miss Marple, an old lady who just happens to have remarkable insight into the way criminals think; or the Beresfords, a terribly, terribly posh crime-solving couple. There is a lot of crime / police drama on TV, and the most popular programmes tend also to be of the Whodunnit variety - such as Inspector Morse and its spin-offs, Lewis and Endeavour. Chris Chibnall's Broadchurch is another good example.
However, Black Orchid isn't a Whodunnit. We know from the opening scene that the killer is the figure locked away in an otherwise disused wing of the house. None of the other characters is ever set up as a possible killer, for us to try and work out who may be the guilty party.
What Black Orchid really is is an example of the Country House Mystery. These can often also be Whodunnits, but not always. The premise is always a group of people brought together in a country house - so relatively isolated from the wider community, where a crime is committed and someone works who did it and why, though we, the reader / viewer, may already have been told / shown.

Being a country house, the protagonists are invariably well-healed, although one of the old cliches about these kinds of stories is that it was the butler who did it. In Black Orchid, the butler is one of those murdered, and indeed all the victims prove to be servants of one sort or another.
Apart from the killer, the deranged eldest son of the Cranleigh family, all the posh folk make it to the end, and the mother, Lady Cranleigh, even seems to get away scot-free with being an aider and abetter, and so complicit on the murders.
All the trappings of a Country House Mystery are in place in this story. We have the house for a start - Cranleigh Hall; a family secret - the hidden away son; the period setting - 1920's; the clueless police; and the private investigator who works out what's going on - the Doctor. Other common trappings are the killer being masked (such as with The Cat and the Canary, probably the best known Country House Mystery) and secret panels (The Cat and the Canary again).

Before the Doctor and his companions become embroiled in the murder mystery, we have a game of cricket. This is obviously there to highlight the fact that this new Doctor is a huge cricket fan. Davison's whole image as the Doctor was based on a photograph JNT had on his office wall of the actor when he participated in a charity cricket match.
On arriving at the cricket match, the chauffeur mentions "the Master", which naturally gives the Doctor a start. He then qualifies this by referencing William Gilbert "W G" Grace - the other Doctor. W G Grace (1848 - 1915) was nicknamed "The Doctor", as he had qualified as a medical practitioner. The cricketer who was nicknamed "The Master", however, was Jack Hobbs. Hobbs (1882 - 1963) is widely regarded as the greatest cricketer of all time. He was primarily a batsman (only gaining one wicket as a bowler in his entire test career), he scored nearly 62000 runs in first class matches.
Hobbs passed away in December 1963, so you never know, he might have actually seen the first couple of episodes of Doctor Who.

The Doctor and his companions soon get to meet the Cranleigh family, and Nyssa finds that Charles Cranleigh's fiancee is her spitting image. You'll recall that Nyssa was written out of Kinda, but Sarah Sutton gets to make up for it by having a double role here.
Lookalikes and identical twins can also be a staple of murder mysteries.
Doubles are nothing new for Doctor Who. The First Doctor encountered an android duplicate of himself, created by the Daleks, in The Chase, before Steven Taylor met the Abbot of Amboise, who just happened to look exactly like the Doctor, in The Massacre. The Second Doctor later had a run in with his doppelganger Salamander, in Enemy of the World. The Fourth Doctor's face was purloined by the mad computer Xoanon, before he came across Meglos, who impersonated him to steal the Dodecahedron power source from Tigella. He and Sarah Jane Smith also encountered android duplicates of themselves, as well as of Harry Sullivan and RSM Benton in The Android Invasion. More androids on Tara meant that Romana not only met her biological double, but a mechanical one as well.

Black Orchid has the distinction of being the first purely historical story since the genre was abandoned following The Highlanders in 1967 (on the basis that the production team didn't think they were very popular, following low audience appreciation figures for The Gunfighters). Whist this is accurate, the story does have a monster of the week, in the form of the deranged and mutilated George Cranleigh. Even at the time, some people found this distasteful - presenting disfigurement as monstrous.
According to Eric Saward, who had taken over as script editor by this time, writer Terence Dudley simply dusted off an old script he had in his drawer - so Black Orchid had originally been intended as a non Doctor Who work.
The story is also a two parter - the first since The Sontaran Experiment back in Season 12.
The reason for this is that two episodes of budget was set aside in order to make the spin-off, and potential pilot, K9 and Company: A Girl's Best Friend. Season 19 would therefore only have 26 episodes, instead of the 28 which Season 18 had enjoyed.
Next time: Shocking events on Earth, and off it. The writing's on the wall for Adric as an old enemy makes a long overdue return...