Inspirations: Thin Ice

The phrase "on thin ice", meaning to be in any potential danger, first appears in an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1841.

As a story set around a particular historical event, that's our obvious starting point.

As already mentioned, new companions tended to get the same trio of introductory story types, with the third one being a trip into the past.

Steven Moffat had been impressed with Sarah Dollard's previous story - Face The Raven - and asked her if she had any other ideas. 

A friend of hers had done a lot of research on the last great Frost Fair on the Thames for another project, which had also intrigued Dollard. 

Originally the Doctor was to have taken Bill to visit it deliberately, but this was later amended to be a random visit by the TARDIS.

The river Thames used to freeze over frequently, with the first ever recorded mention back in Roman times.

Henry VIII is said to have used a sleigh instead of his usual barge to travel between Westminster and Greenwich in 1536.

The river used to be slow moving, the climate colder thanks to the Little Ice Age, and London Bridge's 19 piers interfered with the flow of the Thames - ideal conditions for it freezing over during particularly severe winters.

Staging a fair on the ice, in the centre of London, took place for the first time in 695. Others followed in 1608 (the first time the setting up of stalls and entertainments on the ice was actually called a Frost Fair), 1683-84, 1716, 1739-40, 1789, and finally in 1814.

The freeze of 1683-4 was notable for lasting nearly two months. An entire street was built across the Thames from Temple to Southwark, with hackney coaches running its length. When the thaw finally came, a ship moored against a riverside pub broke free and pulled the building down, killing 5 people.

The last time a significant section of the Thames froze over was the winter of 1962-63, in the upper part of the river.

These Fairs ended due to climate change and the demolition of London Bridge in 1831, followed by the building of the Victoria and Albert Embankments which channelled the river quickly through the city.

It is the Frost Fair of 1814 which interests us, however.

The previous episode - Smile - had ended with the Doctor and Bill emerging from the TARDIS to find themselves not where they expected to be - back at St Luke's University. Instead, they had seen ice, and an elephant wandering towards them from out of the fog.

This was one of the most famous events of the 1814 Fair - the ice so thick that an elephant could be led across it by Blackfriars Bridge. The freeze began just after Christmas, 1813, and lasted until 7th February 1814.

As well as food and drink stalls, there was dancing and nine-pin bowling, and a dozen or so printers set up their presses on the ice to print souvenir pamphlets about the Fair.

When the thaw came, a number of people drowned.

The Doctor fails to mention to Bill that he visited this very event with River Song, when he got Stevie Wonder to sing to her for her birthday - as mentioned by her in A Good Man Goes To War.

The Big Finish audio "Frostfire" claims that the 1814 freeze was caused by an alien, whilst different Doctors and companions had visited earlier Fairs in novel and comic adventures.

Whilst the setting for Thin Ice might be the Frost Fair, the actual story revolves around a gigantic serpentine creature trapped beneath the ice in the Thames, which is being exploited by a ruthless peer of the realm during the Industrial Revolution.

The idea for a serpentine entity came from Steven Moffat observing that the Thames, as it appears in the opening credits to EastEnders, looks like a giant snake.

The showrunner was also interested in doing a story involving a sea monster, thinking of movies such as The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and The Giant Behemoth (1959).

Lord Sutcliffe is the villain of the piece, and he has somehow discovered that the creature's excrement can be processed to become a fuel source, capable of providing great heat.

In a nutshell, the Industrial Revolution came about in Great Britain due to the coming together of several key components - readily available resources of water, wood, coal and iron ore, plus the men (and it was mostly men) who had either the vision or the money to exploit them. These were the inventors, and the businessmen / land owners who were wealthy enough to commission the ideas of the former and put them into money-making practice.

Wood, coal and charcoal could only burn to a certain temperature, and to create certain metals this wasn't high enough. New methods of producing power were invented, in the hope that greater, more sustainable, temperatures could be achieved, and so stronger metals could be produced.

There's a lot more to the Industrial Revolution than that, of course, but this is the key element as it relates to this story.

On top of his exploitation of the creature, Sutcliffe plans to bring about the destruction of the ice whilst the Fair is in full swing, as a means of feeding it and so increasing its "output".

And he's a racist to boot.

Whenever a new companion makes their first visit into the past, they often speak about two issues - the "if I step on a butterfly will it change the future?" scenario (as in Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder short story of 1952); and - if they are Black - will they be carted off as slaves. 

We saw this first with Martha Jones on her visit to Elizabethan London in The Shakespeare Code, and it gets a mention again here. In both cases, the Doctor points out that the city has always been more cosmopolitan than people think, and we see a wide range of ethnicities amongst the background cast.

The Doctor here talks about the "whitewashing" of history, though the danger is that the programme is actually presenting an idealised version of the past which ignores the racism of the time.

The idea that Sutcliffe is somehow atypical of early Victorian Britons, of any class, in his attitudes is a bit of a nonsense.

The children whom the Doctor and Bill encounter are orphaned street-urchins who make their living scavenging and stealing - which naturally makes us think of the juvenile pickpocketing gang recruited by Fagin in Oliver Twist or, The Parish Boy's Progress, by Charles Dickens (1838). One of the gang - a boy nicknamed "Spider" - steals the sonic screwdriver and is subsequently killed after being pulled under the ice, eaten by the creature. This is an extremely rare instance of a child being seen to die in the series. His bright red hat stands out, which is presumably a directorial nod to the girl in the red coat in Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List.

The Doctor tells the children the story of Der Struwwelpeter, or Shock-Headed Peter - an 1845 German children's book. Written by psychiatrist Heinrich Hoffman, this comprised ten stories which each had a cautionary element, where naughty behaviour has a nasty consequence for the children involved.

Steal sonic screwdrivers - get eaten by sea monsters...

Pie Men were a common sight in Georgian and Victorian London, walking the streets with a tray of freshly baked pies - usually meat but often eel - on their head or strapped to their waist. The best known example in literature is the one met by Simple Simon in the nursery rhyme. Unfortunately, the quality of the contents of the pies varied considerably - hence their cheapness.

Not perambulatory, another famous fictional pie seller is Mrs Lovett, who made her wares from the victims of Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street...

Next time: Who's there? The series' oldest gag gets an airing as the Doctor helps Bill move into her new accommodation. No jokes about wooden acting, please...