Episodes - Afterlife: The Morok Freezing Machine

Pay close attention to the stories between May 1965 and January 1970, and you will spot a certain piece of technology turn up in a variety of settings. First seen - in Doctor Who - as the Morok Freezing Machine in the final instalment of The Space Museum, this large object consists of a glass dome on a drum-like base. Beneath the dome is a mound of assorted bits and pieces of electronic bric-a-brac, including circular clock-faces.

Designer Spencer Chapman and his colleagues created many bizarre futuristic props for the programme - but this wasn't one of them...

In the same year that the prop made its debut in Doctor Who, it had already featured in a low budget British science-fiction movie called The Curse of the Fly. This has been shown a couple of times recently on the Talking Pictures channel in the UK, and I spotted it immediately.

The film is an attempt to squeeze some extra box office mileage out of the US films The Fly (1958) and The Return of the Fly (1959), in the former of which a scientist (David Hedison) experiments with matter transmission. One test sees him accidentally transport a house fly along with his own good self - resulting in a fusion of man with fly's head and arm, and a fly with a man's head and arm. Vincent Price features as Hedison's brother, and he also appears in the sequel, in which Hedison's now grown-up son repeats his father's doomed experiment with identical results.

The Curse of the Fly, which stars Brian Donlevy - the original big screen Quatermass - and George Baker (Full Circle), has very little to do with the original films, beyond matter transmission experiments, and the fact that Donlevy and Baker are said to be related to the previous two scientists.

What it does have is the first screen appearance of the Morok Freezing Machine prop as part of the matter transmission laboratory set - in the foreground of the scene above. Film and TV companies could hire out pieces of equipment from specialist prop stores. Watch enough old movies and you start to recognise things like the Dalek Rel counter popping up all over the place.

The device soon appeared again in Doctor Who during Season 3 - featuring as a piece of equipment in the laboratory of scientist Daxtar. This was during the fourth instalment of The Daleks' Masterplan. Sadly, The Traitors no longer exists in the archives, nor are there any telesnaps, but we do have the above publicity image of William Hartnell and Peter Purves posing with the distinctive machine. The glass dome has been removed. It will come and go over the years.

The machine was back towards the end of the same season, when it featured as part of WOTAN's equipment in The War Machines. It can be seen with Professor Brett in the sequences set in the Covent Garden warehouse, filmed in the water tank at Ealing Film Studios. It's when he looks directly at this machine that the tramp finally realises that those present are dangerous, and he tries to run away.

The glass dome was still absent, but it was back for its next appearance - in Season 5's The Wheel in Space. Here it was playing the part of the space station's X-Ray laser control unit, which Jamie succeeds in sabotaging. Luckily the Doctor not only fixes it, but boosts its power with the TARDIS Time-Vector Generator to destroy the Cyberman invasion force.

Just two stories later - albeit at the other side of a summer-long season break - the machine had become a component of the TARDIS itself. It was seen in the ship's power room in the opening episode of The Mind Robber. Once again, the glass dome had been removed. We wouldn't see it in its complete form again in the series as it only had one further, dome-less, appearance to come.

Its one and only colour outing was as part of the UNIT laboratory equipment in Spearhead From Space, the very first Jon Pertwee serial. It was joined by a few other re-used props - two of which can be seen in the above image. The device on a green base on the right, in front of the Doctor, had earlier been seen in the Kroton spaceship and in The Seeds of Death whilst, in the background over the Doctor's left shoulder, stands a Cyberman spaceship from The Invasion. We'll look at Cybership recycling at a later date.

That makes six appearances for this distinctive piece of machinery in Doctor Who stories over five years, following a big screen debut. If anyone knows of any other sightings of the Morok Freezing Machine, in any other film or TV series, do please let me know.