On This Day... 7th February

 

The Silurians Episode Two made its debut today in 1970. 

In 1976 we had another second instalment - this time of The Seeds of Doom. This brought the Antarctic "prequel" section of the story to a close.

And it was another second episode in 1981, this time for The Keeper of Traken.

Today we remember another of the series' great directors - Christopher Barry (above, with Peter Purves). He passed away on this day in 2014, at the age of 88. 

Barry directed the first two episodes of the first ever Dalek story, returning for parts four and five. This was followed by The Rescue and The Romans - two consecutive stories which were recorded as one six week block. He was back towards the end of the Hartnell era to direct The Savages. The image above, taken during Purves' final story, is significant in that Barry was instrumental in getting proper catering facilities introduced for location filming.

Having experience of directing Daleks, and wishing to work with Patrick Troughton, Barry agreed to direct The Power of the Daleks, his introductory story. He then distanced himself from the series, for fear of being too closely associated with it, but was talked back for The Daemons. This was mainly due to his fascination with archaeology. During the lengthy location filming for this story he was forced to miss his sister's wedding, as the schedule had to fit around Jon Pertwee's cabaret work. 

Next up was The Mutants, which he took on for its technical challenges, and then Barry handled another post-regeneration story - Robot, with Tom Baker. 

Barry then got to appear briefly on screen on his penultimate story, when he donned an Elizabethan costume to feature as one of the earlier Doctors in the mind-bending contest in The Brain of Morbius. 

His final story was The Creature From The Pit, which was an unhappy experience all round. It has some great jungle filming at Ealing, but the creature of the title was a big disappointment, and Barry did not like the changes he saw in Tom Baker since their last work together. He decided not to work on the programme again after this, though new producer John Nathan-Turner introduced a policy of avoiding directors who had worked on the series prior to his time anyway.

Barry had one further association with the programme, when he came out of retirement to direct an independent video production called "Downtime", which was a sequel to the two Troughton Yeti stories. The cast included Debbie and Jack Watling, Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier and Lis Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith.

The Blu-ray of The Daemons has a very good career-spanning interview with him, filmed at the story's location of Aldbourne. (This was previously an extra on the DVD of The Creature From The Pit).