Jo Grant knows all about Nobel Prize-winning Professor Jones, yet hasn't a clue what he looks like. Has no newspaper or Sunday supplement magazine ever published a photo of him?
You've seen your friends turn bright green and die, and are then confronted with a bright green slime that smells horribly. Why, then, do you insist on touching it with your bare hands?
One of the biggest problems with The Green Death is its representation of the Welsh. Had they filmed it in Surrey it would have been bad enough, but the fact that they actually went to Wales to film the location scenes makes this even worse. All the Welsh characters are presented as stereotypes. They come across as anti-English, say "Boyo" and "Blodwen" rather a lot, and have 'Name-the-Job' structure titles - like Jones the Milk.
Director Michael E Briant had a considerable location filming allocation - Monday 12th March to Tuesday 20th March incl. - but still ran out of time.
This is why we get actors standing in front of really obvious CSO screens. Another CSO cock-up is when the Doctor and Jo are using a coal truck to traverse the area of the mine full of maggots. The bottom of the truck disappears - leaving the upper part floating in mid-air.
As far as model work goes, we go from the sublime to the ridiculous. The explosion of the mine workings and of Global Chemicals are very good, but the shots of 'Bessie' driving across the spoil heaps, surrounded by inflated condoms leave a lot to be desired.
As well as condoms being used for maggots on model shots, lavatory ballcocks were used as bombs on location.
The hire company for the helicopter is rather blatantly seen (Twyford Moors of Southampton), when it's supposed to be a UNIT aircraft.
To save studio time, Briant ran the closing sequence under the end credits backwards on three of the episodes, rather than rewind them each time.
When miner Dai Evans uses the phone to call for help, you see the hand of a floor assistant waving bottom right corner of the screen to give him his cue.
The ground bounces a great deal when John Levene runs over it to rescue Cliff and Jo from the cave - as he's running over a raised studio rostrum, enabling the maggot props to be manipulated from beneath. You can see the grooves for the maggot rod puppets in some scenes.
The Doctor and Jo escape from the mine up a pipeline which is about to fill with chemical sludge - yet it has a CCTV camera in it.
One very obvious issue with the latter part of this story is the sudden disappearance of the character Elgin, and the equally sudden appearance of a man named James whom we've never seen before.
Prior to the final recording block actor Tony Adams was struck down by peritonitis. Unable to take any further part in the production, his character was simply replaced by another, hitherto unseen, Global Chemicals employee - Mr James - rather than recast the part. James is played by Roy Skelton, who had already featured as the invisible Spiridonian Wester in the previous story. An old friend of the programme, he was available and happy to step in at the last minute.
The calendar in the guards' hut at main gate is for February 1972. The one in Yates' office is for April. You might expect the rarely used office to have an out of date calendar on its wall - not the other way round.
Terry Walsh, who played the security guard, was Pertwee's stunt double, and he also doubled for Richard Franklin in this story - rather obviously in both cases. Note especially when Yates is supposed to be the man jumping from the balcony above the factory's main doors.
In filming his pretend landing, Franklin split his trousers.
The cast credits for Episode Four list a character known as "Yate's Guard".
In the scenes where the Doctor is apparently climbing a steep cliff on Metebelis III, Pertwee was naturally only a few feet off the ground. Some schoolchildren watching the filming laughed at this, which really annoyed him.
A very big deal is made about needing an oxy-acetyline torch. Half an episode is wasted with the Doctor breaking into the factory in a fruitless search for this equipment. The Brigadier finds what they are after at a local garage. No self-respecting garage would be without this stuff, so why did they not think to look there first?
Barry Letts was concerned that he might get into trouble for featuring such strong ecological messages in family viewing, but the only letter received was from someone commenting on how Pertwee had mispronounced "chitinous". It came in the form of a poem:
"The reason I'm writin',
Is how to say 'chitin'".
The story presents Jones and his community as free spirits, who don't want to conform - yet Jones insists that everyone do as he says. He knows best how they should run their lives and their community. In many ways he as bad as Stevens and BOSS. He is as likely to turn into a cult leader as he is a saviour of the Valleys.
As an aside, the DVD production subtitles assure us that Wagner wrote Beethoven's Violin Concerto.
Fans would have been doubly heartbroken when watching Episode Six. Not only was the popular Jo Grant leaving the series after three seasons, but Master actor Roger Delgado had been killed in a car crash in Turkey at the beginning of that week.
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