Inspirations - The Visitation

The Visitation is the first story to be written by Eric Saward, and it was on the strength of this submission that he was offered the full-time post of script editor on the programme. That role had been temporarily filled by Anthony Root, who worked on a number of stories but never actually commissioned any of them - being only in post for three months or so on secondment.
Saward had mainly worked in radio before this, including a couple of plays featuring an actor character named Richard Mace.
The Richard Mace who appears in The Visitation is an out of work actor who has turned to highway robbery to make ends meet. His namesake in Saward's radio plays may have the same profession, but he is from the Victorian era. He is actually an actor-manager, and he gets himself involved in solving various mysteries - not a million miles away from Henry Gordon Jago, from The Talons of Weng-Chiang. The two Maces do share similar character traits, though Saward was reportedly unhappy at the casting of Michael Robbins (best known for the ITV sitcom On The Buses), as he did not meet the image he had of his character.

The reason this Richard Mace is out of work is because all of the theatres have been closed down. This is because of the plague. Plagues of one kind or another were frequent visitors to our shores. The Black Death of around 1340 wiped out whole villages of people, but other forms of pestilence arrived in Britain, via trade and travel with the continent, on and off until the year in which The Visitation is set - 1666. Our best information about this outbreak comes from Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year. This isn't a first hand account of the outbreak, which decimated London throughout 1665, as Defoe was only 5 years old at the time, but it is believed that he was using the accounts of his uncle who did experience the Great Plague. Much of the data in the book comes from the parish registers of the City of London churches, which produced weekly Mortality Lists - giving the numbers who perished in each area and the cause of death. Theatres were closed down, along with all activities which would bring large groups of people together, in a bid to stop the contagion from spreading. The playhouses also relied on the patronage of wealthy attendees - and the rich had the money to get out of town at the first sign of illness, to the relative safety of their country estates. We know that Shakespeare, of an earlier theatrical era, would often go on tour with his company. This wasn't all about bringing theatre to the provinces - it was usually about getting out of London during a plague outbreak when the theatres were forcibly closed. Shakespeare's brother Edmund, also an actor based on Bankside, died at the age of 27 during one such outbreak.
In 1666, the theatres had only recently reopened after a long period of closure during the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell -  a devout puritan. He died in 1658, though the Protectorate limped on for one more year under his son Richard before Parliament invited Charles II back from exile to restore the monarchy.
The Great Plague features in The Visitation in a couple of ways. Not only is Mace out of work because of it, but the villagers who initially attack the Doctor and his companions are burning sulphurous fires to keep the pestilence at bay. It was believed that the infection was purely airborne - deriving from some obscure miasma. The villagers also attack the TARDIS crew as they fear that strangers might bring the plague into their neighbourhood. The Terileptils plan to create a more virulent form of the plague through genetic manipulation, infecting dozens of rats which they intend to release onto the streets of London.
In all, London lost 15% of its population to the plague - 68,596 deaths being recorded. Allowing for other deaths unrecorded, it is believed the true scale to have been around 100,000 deaths in total.

One reason often given for the ending of the Great Plague is the Great Fire of London, which also features in this story. The fire certainly helped, but the mortality rates were already on the decline by the time that the fire broke out on the night of Sunday 2nd September, 1666. It began in the baker shop of one Thomas Farriner (or Farynor) in Pudding Lane. The street name doesn't refer to Thomas' profession at all. Puddings in this context were piles of offal from slaughtered animals, as Pudding Lane ran from the butchers' district of Eastcheap down to the Thames.
The winter of 1665 / 66 had been an exceptionally dry one, and the summer of 1666 a very hot and dry one. This, along with the design and layout of the houses and streets of the still mostly medieval City of London, meant that a fairly minor fire could expand to become one which would consume 32,000 houses, 87 parish churches, and St Paul's Cathedral. Some 70,000 of the city's 80,000 population were made homeless. Surprisingly, only 6 deaths were recorded. However, it is believed that many poor victims may not have been counted, and the heat of the blaze was such that some bodies could have been completely incinerated - up to 1250 degrees at its fiercest.
The fire did not come under control until Wednesday 5th September.
In The Visitation, the Terileptils are using the bakers shop as their London base, from which to release their plague-infected rats. They would have known about the shop as they are mentally controlling the local miller, who sends his wheat there from the country estate where the bulk of the story is set. The aliens rely on a highly flammable gas to compensate for Earth's atmosphere. A burning brand is dropped onto straw in a struggle, starting a fire into which one of the Terileptils' energy weapons falls. This explodes and ignites the gas - starting the Great Fire.
We're only told that this is the fire that will become the Great Fire in the closing moments, as the TARDIS dematerialises to reveal the "Pudding Lane" street sign - but fans were not daft and knew what a setting of 1666 would entail.

The Terileptils have an android, which they disguise as the Grim Reaper, presumably to scare away the superstitious villagers whom they aren't mind-controlling. The Grim Reaper is, of course, a personification of Death. He appears as a skeleton, draped in a black hooded cloak and carrying a scythe - the agricultural implement used to cut down crops. The Grim Reaper harvests souls, in the same way a farmer harvests his crops. The scythe also symbolises the cutting of the bond between life and death. The particular image of Death we have here, replete with scythe, comes from the Middle Ages, probably originating in the Low Countries.
The Terileptils get their name from a conflation of terrifying reptiles.
In Episode 3, the Doctor's sonic screwdriver is destroyed by the Terileptil leader. This came about because John Nathan-Turner didn't like the device - believing that it allowed the Doctor to get out of trouble too easily (one of the reasons he was quick to get rid of K9 as well). JNT felt that the Doctor should use his wits to get out of scrapes, improvising with whatever came to hand. You could try pointing this out to today's showrunners, but with 45 minute storylines and lucrative merchandise sales, you wouldn't get very far.

I don't know if Eric Saward ever saw it before he wrote The Visitation, but many people have pointed out the similarities to The Time Warrior. Both are examples of what we generally call the pseudo-historical genre of Doctor Who stories - adventures set in Earth's past but with science-fiction elements. Both stories begin with characters witnessing the landing of a spaceship, which they take to be a falling star. The alien sets up their base in the cellar of the home of a local big-wig. The alien employs a killer robot. The alien employs some form of mind control over humans to act as slave labour for them. The Doctor offers to take the alien away from Earth, only for his offer to be rejected.
Lastly, we should mention that the Doctor has referred to the Great Fire of London once before. At the conclusion of Pyramids of Mars, when his actions have resulted in the burning down of the old priory building, the Doctor tells Sarah that he hopes he won't get the blame - having had enough of that in 1666. Some fans have taken to this to mean that he had been there in an earlier incarnation, but to me it sounds as if he is merely joking with her.
Next time: the return of the purely historical story, after a 14 year absence, and the first two part story for 6 years (and we have K9 and Sarah Jane Smith to thank for that). There's a murder mystery at a country house, a case of mistaken identities, lots of dancing, and a game of cricket. Howzat?