SEASON 5
PRODUCER: Peter Bryant (The Tomb of the Cybermen, The Web of Fear - The Wheel in Space), Innes Lloyd (The Abominable Snowmen - The Enemy of the World)
STORY EDITOR: Victor Pemberton (The Tomb of the Cybermen), Peter Bryant (The Abominable Snowmen - The Enemy of the World), Derrick Sherwin (The Web of Fear - The Wheel in Space)
REGULAR CAST: Patrick Troughton (The Doctor), Frazer Hines (Jamie), Deborah Watling (Victoria, to The Wheel in Space Ep.1), Wendy Padbury (Zoe, from The Wheel in Space Ep.2)
Synopsis:
The TARDIS departs Skaro, and the Doctor and Jamie welcome Victoria Waterfield into the TARDIS. They explain to her the nature of the craft, and the Doctor at one point admits that he is around 450 years old in human terms.
On the desolate planet of Telos an archaeological expedition led by Professor Parry is searching for the lost city of the Cybermen. The group comprises Parry and fellow archaeologists Viner and Peter Haydon, as well as their financial backers Kaftan and Eric Klieg. Kaftan is accompanied by her mute servant Toberman. They have arrived here in a chartered spaceship piloted by Captain Hopper.
They have just blasted apart a rock face and uncovered a pair of huge metal doors when they hear the TARDIS materialise nearby. When the Doctor and his companions appear, Viner takes them to belong to a rival expedition.
The doors are flanked by stylised images of Cybermen, and the very mention of their name causes the Doctor to insist on remaining here.
When one of the spaceship crew attempts to open the doors, following Kaftan's offer of financial reward, he is electrocuted. The Doctor realises that the stored electric charge has been dissipated and it is now safe to touch them. Jamie tries and fails, but Toberman succeeds in opening them.
They enter a large vault dominated by a circular wall panel covered in strange symbols, with controls set in front. There is also a massive metal hatch on a raised dais.
The Doctor points out two other doorways leading to other parts of the complex.
Klieg is a member of the Brotherhood of Logicians, and he decides to set to work in deciphering the symbols in order to activate the controls. Suspicious, the Doctor elects to help him.
The others agree to split up into two groups to investigate the other sections. Victoria will join Viner and Kaftan, whilst Jamie goes with Haydon.
Parry and Toberman will remain in the main chamber with Klieg and the Doctor. Parry surmises that the tombs of the Cybermen must lie underground, accessed by the hatch. The creatures are thought to be extinct, having been absent from the galaxy for some 500 years.
Victoria's group find a chamber in which there is a large gun-like device, standing in front of a sarcophagus shape. Viner deduces that this is where the Cybermen may have recharged themselves.
Jamie and Haydon, meanwhile, have entered a room in which they find a small metal creature with a segmented body. It appears to be dead.
Operating a control activates a swirling pattern of lights on one of the walls, and Haydon takes this to form a subliminal pattern. He believes it to be a weapons testing room, with the wall pattern acting as a target.
Victoria is examining the sarcophagus when Kaftan locks her in and activates the recharging machinery, unseen by Viner. The Doctor arrives in time to rescue her.
Realising the dangers of this place, he goes to find Jamie.
He has been instructed by Haydon to operate the rest of the controls to see the entire cycle.
Just as the Doctor and the others arrive, a Cyberman suddenly appears from behind a hidden panel and Haydon is shot dead...
Written by Kit Pedler & Gerry Davis
Recorded: Saturday 1st July 1967 - Lime Grove Studio D
First broadcast: 5.50pm, Saturday 2nd September 1967
Ratings: 6 million / AI 53
VFX: Michealjohn Harris & Peter Day
Designer: Martin Johnson
Directed by: Morris Barry
Guest cast: George Pastell (Klieg), Shirley Cooklin (Kaftan), Aubrey Richards (Parry), Cyril Shaps (Viner), Bernard Holley (Haydon), George Roubicek (Hopper), Clive Merrison (Callum), Roy Stewart (Toberman)
As can be seen from the details at the top of this post, Season 5 was another one of transition with two producers and three story editors. Unlike Season 3, however, these big changes in behind-the-scenes personnel were carefully planned ones - and could have gone even smoother than they did. Innes Lloyd had been grooming Peter Bryant for some time in readiness to replace him, whilst Bryant himself was readying Victor Pemberton as his own replacement. The two had worked together in radio drama for many years and were friends - and Pemberton was already associated with the show thanks to a story contribution - more later - and an appearance as a crewman in The Moonbase. Unfortunately Pemberton preferred to write his own material rather than edit others' work, and so decided to withdraw after this story. His script submission would be commissioned by Bryant for production later this season. To replace him, Bryant and Lloyd looked to another one-time actor with writing experience, Derrick Sherwin. He had featured in the football drama United!, previously story edited by Gerry Davis, before contributing scripts for soap opera Crossroads.
Whilst this is the only story to have Pemberton credited as story editor, he also helped prepare the next couple of stories during his brief tenure.
The Moonbase had seen an increase in viewing figures and the production team knew that the Cybermen were popular with the audience. Before its final episode had even broadcast, Gerry Davis approached Kit Pedler to provide another story featuring them. Director Morris Barry had written to the actors portraying the Cybermen to thank them for their work - and to put them on standby for further Cyberman adventures.
This next story would be recorded as the final production of the fourth season, but held back to launch the fifth, which it was now known would be the first not to feature any Dalek involvement.
This was the reason for the TARDIS scene at the beginning of this episode - a way to reacquaint viewers with the basic premise of the series.
Having been encountered on Earth and on the Moon, Davis suggested a story set on another planet, possibly looking into the origins of the Cybermen. He also decided to move away from another "base under siege" scenario, going for something even more claustrophobic.
With both Davis and Pedler sharing an interest in Egyptology, it was therefore decided to set the new story against an archaeological backdrop, with a party excavating their tombs after they had vanished from the universe.
Pedler came up with the idea for the Cybermats, which both men hoped could be marketed by the BBC like the Daleks. Spotting that the Cybermen were popular, Pedler had tried to get his writing fee increased, but this was rejected.
The character of Kaftan was written especially for Shirley Cooklin, who was the wife of Peter Bryant - the pair having met during the making of The Grove Family, and both had been members of the same theatrical company. For this role, she was to have a "near Eastern accent". The scripts gave little detail about any of the guest characters, other than that Toberman was to have been deaf and to have worn a hearing aid, and Viner was described as "nervously cleaning his glasses".
Toberman's hearing aid was to have been a visual nod to the way in which technology is used to help with physical impairment or weakness - the process which, taken to extremes, had led to the creation of the Cybermen, and hints at Toberman's eventual fate. Bryant decided to veto the idea, however.
The "Cyberman Leader" - the Controller - was described only as having an unusual head design, which was illuminated.
Much more detail was given of the Cyberman complex on Telos, which pretty much made it to screen.
The Egyptology references in this first episode begin with the whole archaeological expedition to a desert-like environment. At one point we see a pyramidal mountain in the background. The Cybermat represents the sacred Scarab Beetles which were of significance to the ancient Egyptians, and the tomb complex features large bas-reliefs - just as we see adorning the walls of the temples and civic buildings of Egypt.
The story initially went by the provisional title of "The Ice Tombs of Telos", and a caption was even prepared with this for the final episode of The Evil of the Daleks, when it was at first thought that it might be shown immediately after.
When it came to other casting, a couple of James Bond actors were considered. Desmond Llewelyn ("Q") was a possible Professor Rufus Parry, and Vladek Sheybal (Cronsteen in From Russia With Love) was offered the role of Klieg. This went instead to Cypriot actor George Pastell, who was well familiar with the Mummy Horror genre. He had played a similar role to Klieg in Hammer's The Mummy (1959), co-starring with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee; and he also made an appearance in the company's Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1964).
Welsh actor Aubrey Richards was cast as Parry, with Cyril Shaps making his debut in the series as Viner.
Jamaican actor and stuntman Roy Stewart also ran his own gym in West London, and had just appeared with Shaps in a BBC production of The Count of Monte Cristo. Bernard Holley had just started to appear in Z-Cars, following a stint on soap opera The Newcomers.
Filming got underway at a sandpit in Gerrards Cross in Buckinghamshire on Monday 12th June, featuring the actors playing the archaeological party and the spaceship crew. There was some model work on location using false perspective - of Hopper's spaceship and the metal doors uncovered by blasting.
The guest cast were joined by the regulars in the afternoon, on what should have been their day off from rehearsals for the sixth instalment of The Evil of the Daleks.
Frazer Hines and Shirley Cooklin have told the story of how she was already in costume and make-up when he arrived and he did not recognise her - then proceeded to chat her up before realising who she was.
The following day saw the guest cast only assemble at Ealing to film sequences at the doorway. Photographs taken at Gerrards Cross were blown up to act as backgrounds.
The afternoon session saw the filming of the electrocution of the crewman.
The opening TARDIS scene was filmed at Ealing on Friday 16th June, allowing Barry to have the biggest console room set seen in the programme since its first season. Back projection was used to show the fault locator bay, and the set was furnished with items seen on and off in the ship since November 1963.
With only a single TARDIS scene, Barry had opted to film it separately here, rather than fit it into what would be a cramped Lime Grove. The three regulars had been released from rehearsals to attend.
During rehearsals, at St Helen's Church Hall, some dialogue at the doorway was dropped, in which the Doctor would have explained in more detail the science behind the crewman's electrocution and the subsequent safety in now touching the doors. Some of Victoria's dialogue was amended to make her sound more of her time - changing a "Wow!" to "Mercy!" as an exclamation, for instance.
The regulars were pleased to note that Bryant was much more easy-going than Lloyd, though Barry could be overly strict. He kept his scripts on a music stand, and at one point had insisted that an entire studio set be physically moved four inches when it did not fit his camera plans.
The first thing shot in studio on Saturday 1st July was the TARDIS standing on the Skaro landscape. This was a half size model, first seen in The Romans.
The bio-projector in the recharge room had an extra inside operating it, whilst the weapons testing room used Polaroid slides back projected for the subliminal patterning.
Being claustrophobic, Deborah Watling struggled with the scenes were she was shut up in the sarcophagus form. One very small cut was made to the episode before transmission from these sequences, as Kaftan initially thought that her actions weren't working.
The only recording break came for the effects crew to set up Haydon's death, with smoke pumped up though his costume. The empty Cyberman suit was dubbed "Fred" by the crew - a name they also gave to one of the Cybermats in a later episode.
Barry opted once again to use library music rather than a composed score, and sound effects came courtesy of Brian Hodgson of the Radiophonic Workshop.
The final scenes were captured on 35mm film as well as 405-line video, for use in the cliffhanger reprise for Episode 2.
A trailer was prepared, which included the appearance of the Cyberman at the end of the episode.
Rereading an old Doctor Who Monthly recently, I was amused to see someone write in insisting that this story was inspired by Dracula, with the Cybermen being undead vampires.
They were in the right area, but it is obviously based on the Mummy movies of both Universal and Hammer. Add to the references already mentioned above, we also get the recharge unit, which resembles a mummy case / sarcophagus. The logic symbols on the panel in the main chamber can also be said to represent hieroglyphics.
And, of course, bad things start to happen to the archaeologists as soon as they uncover the entrance to the tombs, beginning with the electrocution of a crewman. This ties in with the supposed curses said to be placed on those who disturb the tombs of the Egyptian dead, most famously that associated with Tutankhamun. Shortly after his rediscovery, the financial backer Lord Carnarvon died in Cairo - on 5th April, 1923 - from an infected mosquito bite. The story goes that the bite matched a blemish on the face of the boy king, the city was blacked out at the moment he died, and back in England his dog also dropped dead at the same moment. Others associated with the opening of the tomb are also supposed to have met untimely deaths - but can all be explained away through non-supernatural causes, and well within the bounds of probability.
Back in 1963, the notion that the Doctor was hundreds of years old had been written into the very first character outlines, but on screen this had never been discussed. All we knew was that Susan appeared to be just the age she presented as - 15 - and the Doctor was an old man. Even when his old body wore a bit thin, his true age was never mentioned. The regeneration was never adequately explained, with Lloyd and Davis sometimes describing it as a rejuvenation in interviews, whilst on screen the parallel is made with a butterfly trying to go back into its cocoon - a metamorphosis. The Doctor simply states that he has been "renewed".
Here, the Doctor for the first time gives an actual age - though he has to think about it and it looks like he's converting it for the benefit of his human companions. He says he's about 450. As a year is defined by a planet's orbit around its sun, it doesn't necessarily follow that a Gallifreyan year is exactly the same as an Earth one - which would explain his pause to calculate it. This may go a little way to explaining the oddities in the Doctor's age over the years, such as why he can be 953 in Time and the Rani but only 900 at the start of the revived series. In the former he's talking about Galifreyan years, shared with the Rani, whilst on other occasions he's talking to humans so converts for their benefit.
Now that the orphaned Victoria has arrived in the TARDIS, we see the Doctor having quieter, more contemplative moments with her - something absent with previous companions, or indeed with most of the later ones. He is taking on the role of the protective guardian / father figure with her.
Trivia:
- The ratings get off to a slow start, consistent with the end of the previous season but hardly great for the launch of a new one. The main competition was talent show Opportunity Knocks! or westerns such as Bonanza and Daniel Boone.
- During its summer break, Doctor Who had been the subject of a few letters to Junior Points of View. One suggested a story where the Doctor went back in time and met God; another suggested a series of repeats; whilst another simply stated that the programme should return soon "... or we will kill you all".
- The return of the series was promoted in August as part of the BBC's Autumn schedule of drama, which this year would include colour productions on BBC 2. Deborah Watling was amongst the stars used in this promotion, with an article about her home life.
- Patrick Troughton was profiled in The People the day after broadcast, in which was noted his lack of interviews. A number of newspapers praised the episode.
- The series was also welcomed back by Huw Wheldon at the BBC's weekly programme review meeting on Wednesday 6th September.
- First appearances for a number of actors who will feature in more than one role in the series. Cyril Shaps will be back as Dr Lennox in The Ambassadors of Death, then as Professor Clegg in Planet of the Spiders, and finally as the Archimandrite in The Androids of Tara.
- Bernard Holley will play the Axon leader and provide the voice of Axos in The Claws of Axos.
- Clive Merrison will later appear as the Deputy Chief Caretaker in Paradise Towers. He's the only actor to have played the title role in every one of the Sherlock Holmes stories, which he did for BBC Radio.
- George Roubicek appeared in both You Only Live Twice and the similarly plotted The Spy Who Loved Me, and featured in the very first Star Wars movie - becoming the first of the Doctor Who actors to have also played an Imperial Officer, though others had multiple roles in the series.
- Aubrey Richards featured in two TV adaptations of Under Milk Wood, some 24 years apart. Other roles included I, Claudius, Doomwatch and two different roles in The Avengers.
- Designer Martin Johnson was primarily employed on light entertainment shows, and this will be his only Doctor Who story. Judging by the tomb designs, this is a great shame.
- Radio Times gave readers a small preview in the issue published on Thursday 24th August:
- The magazine then gave Doctor Who the front cover the following week - the first since The Power of the Daleks. Once again, the monsters were prioritised over the regular cast members. Inside was the usual preview article, this time partly in the form of an extract from the Doctor's 500 Year Diary, accompanied by a couple of photographs - one of which actually spoils something from the final episode, had anyone studied it too closely...
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