Synopsis:
The Doctor and Susan are puzzled by the TARDIS instruments. They appear to show that they have landed - yet are still moving...
It is Barbara who suggests that they have landed inside something. The scanner does not help, as it is covered in static.
Stepping outside they find that they are on the bridge of a spaceship. There are two crew members present - a man and young woman - but both appear to be dead.
The Doctor notices that their wrist watches, which are kinetically powered, are still working, so they can only have died in the last few hours.
Unable to do anything they elect to return to the TARDIS, but are shocked when the crewman suddenly groans and moves. He indicates a small device on a nearby shelf. Ian gives it to him and it revives him. The man, who introduces himself as Captain Maitland, urges them to use the device - a form of heart massager - on his colleague, Carol.
Maitland explains that they are in orbit around a planet known as the Sense-Sphere, which is home to a race called the Sensorites. They have been keeping the spaceship in this region of space, disabling them by placing them into a comatose state - though they are aware that the Sensorites visit and feed them.
There is a third member of the crew elsewhere on the ship - a man named John - and he has been driven mad by the aliens.
The spaceship comes from the Earth of the 28th Century.
Deciding that there is nothing they can do to help, the Doctor guides everyone back to the TARDIS. He is horrified to discover that the entire locking mechanism has been removed. The door cannot be forced.
The spaceship suddenly begins to plunge towards the planet and the Doctor helps guide it back into orbit. He deduces that the Sensorites have been trying to frighten them, as fear allows them to control the mind.
Barbara and Susan offer to fetch some water for a meal. They misread Maitland's directions and leave the bridge. John double locks the door behind them and starts to follow them.
Ian realises they are missing, and he and Maitland find that they must cut their way through the lock to reach them.
Barbara and Susan find that John is not a danger to them at all, as he breaks down and begins to cry. He explains that the Sensorites control his mind and are trying to get him to harm them, but he is resisting.
On the bridge, everyone hears a high-pitched sound, which seems to freeze Maitland and Carol with fear. It is an approaching Sensorite craft.
The noise stops, and Maitland tells everyone that the aliens must now be on the ship. Ian spots movement at the exterior window, and is horrified to see a bizarre alien figure staring in at them...
Next episode: The Unwilling Warriors
Written by: Peter R Newman
Recorded: Friday 29th May 1964 - Television Centre Studio 3 (TC3)
First broadcast: 5:15pm, Saturday 20th June 1964
Ratings: 7.9 million / AI 59
Designer: Raymond P Cusick
Director: Mervyn Pinfield
Guest cast: Lorne Cossette (Captain Maitland), Ilona Rogers (Carol), Stephen Dartnell (John), Anthony Rogers (Sensorite)
Peter R Newman was the first writer to be commissioned after the series had commenced broadcasting - and so was the first to have seen what it was like before he started work on his scripts.
He had written a play titled Act of War which, retitled Yesterday's Enemy, had been produced by the BBC in 1958. Controversially, it revolved around a war crime committed by British soldiers in Burma during World War II, apparently based on a true story. The play was adapted for the big screen by Hammer the following year, starring Stanley Baker, Gordon Jackson and Leo McKern.
There are elements of this drama in the latter stages of The Sensorites, which we'll cover when we get to them.
Newman had a couple of other projects developing with Hammer, including a horror movie based on the Spanish Inquisition, but this fell foul of the Catholic church and was scrapped.
He wrote a Western screenplay - The San Siado Killings - which formed the basis for one of the first ever "Spaghetti Westerns" - 1961's Savage Guns.
Turning his back on cinema after the Hammer set-backs, he elected to concentrate on writing for television.
The Sensorites was commissioned in February 1964, and at the time was being considered as the final story of the first season.
Some time appears to have passed since the TARDIS crew's encounter with the Aztecs, as Barbara states that she has gotten over that incident. However, the intervening time appears to have been entirely without incident, as nothing unseen is mentioned when the TARDIS crew reminisce about all their adventures together since first meeting up in Totter's Lane.
Only the events of The Edge of Destruction are omitted.
Another adventure from the time before Ian and Barbara joined the TARDIS is mentioned, as the Doctor and Susan recall an encounter with King Henry VIII. The Doctor deliberately upset him, by throwing a parson's nose at him, so that he would be thrown into the Tower of London, as this was where the TARDIS was parked. The Doctor suggests that this was quite a while before Totter's Lane.
(For the uninitiated, a parson's nose is the fatty end of the tail of a chicken or other fowl. It is also known as a pope's nose - so maybe Henry thought the Doctor was commenting obliquely on his schism with Rome...).
What seems really surprising is that the TARDIS appears never to have landed inside a moving object such as a spaceship, or even a conventional terrestrial mode of transport like a boat or train - otherwise surely the Doctor and Susan would not have been so mystified. Considering the number of spaceships which it will land inside from this point on, this is hard to believe. The TARDIS really does seem to have been very much confined to Earth's history for the most part.
Hartnell describes their adventures together to date thus:
"It all began as a mild curiosity in a junk yard, and now it's become quite a great spirit of adventure". Grammatically clumsy, this suggests a fluff.
Other fluffs include his description of the wrist watches as the "non-winding time".
On righting the ship after the Sensorites have tried to crash it: "Well I rather fancy that's settled that little bit of solution...".
Is Ian commenting on Lorne Cossette's acting ability when he says: "You weren't afraid. They just made you hopeless"?
It is strange that the TARDIS crew do not spot the Sensorite stealing the TARDIS lock, after we have seen how close the ship has materialised to where Maitland and Carol are sitting. Any burning smell on a spacecraft would surely be taken extremely seriously and be investigated immediately.
The Sensorite craft make a high-pitched noise when they travel yet we never heard this Sensorite leave the spaceship. We know he has left the ship, as the First Elder will have the TARDIS lock long enough to examine it before the Doctor and company arrive on the planet in a later episode. It may be that their craft can move silently (there ought not to be any sound in space anyway) but they are making the whining noise deliberately, to unnerve the humans.
Verity Lambert was very unhappy with the studio allocation issues afflicting the programme. Lime Grove Studio D would not accommodate the composite spaceship sets which Ray Cusick had designed. She threatened to axe the series altogether if better facilities couldn't be made available. This story would eventually be bounced around different BBC studios whilst discussions about the longer term solution went on in the background.
The series' associate producer Mervyn Pinfield was invited to direct the first four episodes, due to his great technical experience. He was trailed by Frank Cox who would handle the final two instalments. Cox had already been tried out on the second episode of The Edge of Destruction.
William Russell later admired Pinfield's technical expertise, but thought him not so good at handling actors.
Cusick based his spaceship interior on an old Dakota cargo 'plane, reasoning that spacecraft in this age would be more functional.
The small TARDIS set was constructed right next to the bridge set, so that the travellers could be seen passing from one into the other in the same shot, with an edit to jump to the TARDIS police box doors being locked.
- The first episode of a story which has always been known as The Sensorites.
- The series returns once again to Television Centre for a couple of weeks.
- Some filming took place at Ealing earlier in May, for back projection and a model shot for the final episode. The back projection included scenes outside the spaceship windows in this episode - the lights representing the Sensorite craft and the near collision with the planet.
- In his youth, Peter R Newman (the R stood for Richard) had been desperate to join the army. He ran away from school and swapped clothes with a soldier - unaware that the man was a deserter. He was briefly arrested when the police thought that he was the deserter. He eventually did serve with the Royal Air Force in Burma and Malaysia, hence the Far East background to Yesterday's Enemy.
- Stephen Dartnell had appeared in the series only five weeks previously, when he played Yartek, leader of the alien Voord, in Episode 26: The Keys of Marinus. Then, his face had been totally obscured by a mask, and he had distorted his voice slightly.
- Mervyn Pinfield was a member of the Langham Group, so named after the Langham Hotel opposite BBC Broadcasting House. This had been taken over by the BBC as office space. The Group pioneered new techniques for television. He had earlier invented a prompter machine for TV announcers - the Piniprompter - which was the prototype for the autocue, for which his family get royalties.
- Carole Ann Ford disliked her costume - apart from the blouse which her mother had made.
- The spaceship doors use the same sound effect as the ones in the Dalek city. This makes Susan's puzzlement about how the locks work all the more odd. They are opened and closed by photo-electric cell - exactly as the ones in the Dalek city were - yet she seems surprised by this technique here, as though she's never seen it before.
- Anthony Rogers was not credited for his appearance on screen or in Radio Times.
- As was now customary, Radio Times previewed the new story. Two of the guest cast are mentioned, and feature in the accompanying photograph with Hartnell and Russell.
- The BBC in-house staff magazine Ariel also previewed the story, with a similar photograph as used by RT on the cover of its June 1964 edition.
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