Spearhead From Space
(Season 7, 3rd Dr with Liz and UNIT, 3-24/1/1970, producer: Barry Letts, script editor: Terrance Dicks, writer: Robert Holmes, director: Derek Martinus)
Rank: 75
'Fez...Must find my fez...No wait, that's not me yet. This face would have been very useful on the planet Delphon where they communicate with their eyebrows...I went there once in my shouty Scottish self and got locked up for insubordination. Wait, how did I know that?' These regenerational insights are so complicated!'
Even in a series that’s all about the inevitability of change this is the big one, the biggest sea-change in one go in Dr Who history! (Yes even the sixteen/none year gap of ‘Survival’/‘The TV Movie’ to ‘Rose’ seems a smaller jump than this). Seven months after Patrick Troughton swirled away into Gallifreyan darkness the series is back three days into a new decade with a new Doctor and a new production team and this time it’s in colour! (Green mostly, with large swathes of brown, which is to this era what orange sparkly pixie dust is to new-Who). To keep the Beatles analogies of the 1960s going this is the early solo period when the fab 4 are releasing some of their best work (only here ‘solo’ effectively means Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks, who go from being two of many people working on this show to being the showrunners – you could stretch a point to most of the ‘old’ team leaving to make ‘Doomwatch’ if you want) and break new ground by entering new places – and even though where they go separately will end up in time more repetitive than anywhere they went as a team, here everything is so vibrantly wonderfully ‘new’ and shiny that it’s hard not to get caught up in all the enthusiasm. Season 7 of the show is special: to push the analogy of 1970 to breaking point it has the honesty of ‘Lennon/Plastic Ono Band’, the down-to-Earth back-to-basics storytelling of ‘McCartney’, the morality and deep-thoughts of ‘All Things Must Pass’ and the melancholy of ‘Sentimental Journey’. Maybe it’s no ‘Revolver/Dalek’s Masterplan’ or ‘Sgt Peppers’/’Evil Of The Daleks’ and its not the jaw-dropping new kid on the block anymore like the days of Dalekmania/Beatlemania, but it’s a show that’s found new ways to say new things for a whole new decade, breathing new life into a franchise that was beginning to unravel and get just a bit hit-and-miss in its last 1960s year.
Given the sheer amount of changes the show has undergone in one go it’s amazing that ‘Spearhead’ hits the ground running as immediately as it does. To start with the obvious if you’re watching in sequence, it gets forgotten now what an immediate change moving into colour was and it comes at the perfect point, after the 2nd Dr swirls away into nothingness with goodness-knows-what happening before the Dr makes it down to Earth in his new form (the comic strips continued the story and had the Dr have new adventures before hiding as a scarecrow which makes the casting of a pre-Worzel Gummidge Pertwee more than a little eerie; equally this is accepted by a sizeable minority of the fanbase as the era where the 2nd Dr ended up in ‘The Two Doctors’ and ‘The Five Doctors’). New technology often comes with new teething troubles and given the January 1970 transmission date this story was slightly ahead of the curve for a BBC1 show in what was the great crossover-into-colour year for the station’s flagship programmes, after dabbling in colour on the more experimental secondary channel BBC2. People seriously wondered at the time if Dr Who, one of the shows that made the best use of monochrome (particularly when the Daleks and Cybermen were on to cast shadows) could even work in colour. But it does – from the first scene it all feels so ‘right’ for the show. The show feels more vibrant, more in-yer-face than shadowy menace and there’s a pulsing green ‘fiendish thingy’ to show off the new techniques in all their neon glory. Later stories will play the colour down (a majority of viewers were still watching in black and white as colour sets were so expensive) but ‘Spearhead’ has fun making the most of all this riot of colour, with a first scene set in a field and lots of running around outside as well as exploring a Victorian hospital. The effect is like seeing ‘our’ world again anew, the way The Doctor does.
The new Doctor hits the
ground running too, at least from episode three when he’s fully awake. The
famous story is that Jon Pertwee was nagged into applying for the job by his
old ‘Navy lark’ co-star Tenniel Evans (who’ll turn up alongside his old friend
in ‘Carnival Of Monsters’ in a few
years’ time), who heard about the vacancy and recognised that Pertwee’s mix of authority
and eccentricity would make him a perfect fit for the show. Pertwee wasn’t sure
but asked his agent to give it a go, who doubled up with laughter at the idea (Pertwee
was a comedian who specialised in funny voices, so different to Hartnell or
Troughton) but put his name forward anyway, ringing up to receive shock silence
down the end of the phone. The agent apologised and said he thought it was a
daft idea too and was sorry for wasting their time, but that wasn’t why Letts
and Dicks were quiet; by chance they had just put together a list of ideal
candidates not really expecting to get any of them (they just wanted a ‘general
idea’ of who would be good for the part) – and legend has it that Pertwee was
second on that list. Who was first? Some sources say it was Ron Moody who
didn’t want to do a ‘children’s series’ (he’d have been awful); other John Le
Mesurier but he was too busy doing ‘Dad’s Army’ (who might have worked as a
sort of vague Doctor, but the series would have had to rely a lot on the
supporting cast). Pertwee himself struggled with working out how to play the
part: while Hartnell tended to play the same sort of ‘rough guy with charm’
roles in his pre-Dr Who work and Troughton’s characters had a similar ‘feel’ to
them despite his vast range, Pertwee was most famous for inventing a huge
variety of different mostly quirky people on the radio. He really hadn’t done
that much telly and only a little bit in films (one, ‘Murder At The Windmill’
was on the very wonderful channel ‘Talking Pictures TV’ the other day and
that’s probably more what people were expecting: Pertwee plays a buttoned up
buffoon of a policeman who acts like his Navy Lark character Petty Officer
Pertwee and speaks like a posh Worzel prototype. In short he’d have been more
like the pompous bureaucrat buffoons the 3rd Doctor will go on to
butt heads with). Sensibly though everyone realised that putting on a fake
voice would be exhausting for such a punishing film schedule and in the end
Shaun Sutton, head of the BBC drama department in those days, told his worried
star he should ‘just be himself’. Pertwee replied, as many an actor would ‘But
I don’t know who that is!’
They compromised by
having Jon play an exaggerated version of himself: he’s as eccentric and mad
and fun as both a comedian and indeed an alien stuck on Earth ought to be, but
also authoritative and commanding, as someone who’s lived that long with that
much experience stuck on a backward planet would be. He’s way more hands on and
bouncy than either of his predecessors: it speaks volumes that his first scene
to be filmed was being tied up in a wheelchair – rather than be replaced by a
stunt double, as intended, Pertwee did the scene where he wheels away himself (its
worth remembering that, at fifty-one, Jon was only five years younger than
Hartnell had been on his first episode and he was actually four years older
than Troughton, for all the 3rd Dr will become known for his action sequences
and running around). There are flashes of the comedy and madness that everyone
who knew Pertwee from other series would have been expecting in this story but
they’ll gradually get phased out in favour of a more straightforward Doctor,
one who is reliable where Troughton was mercurial and unpredictable and one that’s
in the heart of the action compared to the ‘overseer’ type Hartnell was. Despite
Pertwee’s worries about taking on the job, he’s instantly ‘right’ in this story
too: he’s delirious and manic for the opening episode (a brave move given how
much was a resting on it), then brilliantly funny in the largely improvised
scenes of ‘escape/showering’ in episode two (note that the Dr has a tattoo on
his arm that seems to have gone by the time we next see a Doctor this unclothed
when Matt Smith tries out a naked hologram – see the ‘prequels/sequels’ column
for some more thoughts on this), then owns the camera by being a
straightforward dashing hero in a way neither of his shiftier predecessors were
by episodes 3 and 4. Even the costume, actually a bit of improvised desperation
when the Radio Times booked him for a photo-shoot and he realised he needed
something to wear, is perfect: Pertwee figured there was something of the
Victorian/Edwardian in The Doctor and that he would be a man out of time even
in the 1970 and picked out a cape belonging to his grandfather, figuring it
made him look like a ‘mother hen’ to the Earthlings he was protecting (original
the opening titles had a sequence of him draping his cape over the camera,
something mercifully dropped in favour of a brilliantly colourised version of
the old ‘howlaround’ graphics which look terrific, suddenly glam rock rather
than mod or psychedelia as before). By chance costume designer Christine
Rawlins had come up with exactly the same idea before she saw the shoot.
There’s a whole new set
up too, as The Doctor throws his lot in with some old army chums, the one bit
of continuity allowed from the past series. Producer Barry Letts won’t
officially turn up till the next story but he was on the sidelines already and
he and script editor Terrance Dicks put their stamp on a series they’ve been
involved in but have never been in charge of till now and instantly ‘get’ what
will keep viewers watching in the 1970s compared to the 1960s: we’re no longer
exploring aliens worlds or exploring space; we’re saving ‘us’, the
near-contemporary Earth of the viewers watching. The show is now full of
spectacle and action, rather than philosophy and imagination (though that’s in
there too, ready to peek out at unexpected moments, to keep older viewers
watching). While the show will soon settle back into longer more relaxed
storytelling (mostly through budgetary reasons) ‘Spearhead’ couldn’t be less
different to where it left off with the slow motion of ‘The Space Pirates’ and
gradual build of ‘The War Games’. Here there’s no time for long scenes of
exposition and if you look away you’re in danger of missing something and
you’re only ever an episode away from a fight or a stunt or something big and
alien and green.
It was a clever idea
having The Doctor exiled to Earth by the timelords as both a money saving device
and because colour filming was less ‘forgiving’ when it came to make believe
and alien sets. With inflation costs biting, no extra budget and audiences
falling it makes perfect sense to cut the cost of building alien planets and
building on the growing use of location filming while having ‘everyday’ sets
built in a TV Studio. While restricting the Doctor to Earth in...whatever year
this is (UNIT dating varies wildly – officially it’s the ‘near future’ for
viewers in 1970, which some writers take to mean ‘next decade’ and others mean
‘next week’) will become dull in time, here it’s exciting: there are very few
black and white stories set on ‘present day Earth’ (‘An Unearthly Child’ ‘The War Machines’ ‘The Faceless Ones’ ‘The Web Of Fear’ ‘The Invasion’. That’s it out of
fifty-two). There’s an extra frisson watching this series now, that the aliens
aren’t invading a time or place you have to imagine but your home right now and
that your own life might change if everyone ‘loses’, not to mention that what
you see on the screen could perhaps happen tomorrow in your street. By 1970 two
of the scenes fans talked about most were The Daleks on Westminster Bridge (‘The Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ and The Cybermen
walking past St Paul’s Cathedral (‘The
Invasion’), but where ‘Spearhead’ beats both of these is by having its
monsters walk down what could be any high street in Britain, Autons smashing
their way out of shop windows. This is Dr Who saying you’d better get ready,
the monsters may be coming to your town (wait, whoops, wrong band…)
The set-up with UNIT is
at its best across season 7 too. By the time The Master turns up in every other
story in seasons 8 and 9 as the Doctor’s own ‘Moriarty’ to his ‘Sherlock, The
Brigadier will have been re-written as the bumbling ‘Watson’, making mistakes
and always two steps behind. Here, though, he’s still the tough no-nonsense
military might we met in ‘The Web Of Fear’ and
‘The Invasion’. In different scenes
he’s the only person who believes The Doctor (he’s remarkably quick, actually,
to accept the concept of regeneration) while in others he’s the only person
willing to stand up to him. Many of the best scenes in this story and the next
two come from the Doctor’s battles with The Brigadier – though they’re on the
same side in trying to keep Earth safe they have very different ways of doing
it and the Brigadier has the might of the military behind him. The Doctor’s
never had this with any companion before (even when Ian used to argue with the
1st Doctor he was never allowed to win the way the Brigadier sometimes does). Theirs
is a relationship of mutual need but theirs mutual respect too, both
recognising that the one has qualities the other needs. Newly recruited
scientist Liz Shaw, too, is at her best in this story when she’s a fellow cynic
who doesn’t fully trust either of them (before she throws her lot in with the Doctor,
more often than not, though never forgetting that the Brig effectively pays her
salary, something the Dr couldn’t care less about). The original plan had been
to keep Zoe on, before Wendy Padbury realised that she’d miss her two pals too
much to stay on, but she shares the same intelligence, the closest Dr Who came
to a truly ‘feminist’ independent companion who doesn’t need The Doctor despite
all the near-misses with Sarah Jane, Leela and Romana. The decision to have her as a ‘new recruit’ at the start of
this story is clever too: we get to learn about UNIT through her eyes first,
while The Doctor remains asleep.
What’s interesting about
the Doctor in this year in particular is the unique way he manages to be both
the establishment figure who turns up with the full backing of a United Nations
army unit and the perennial outsider. Normally in a set-up like this the
outsider would be either the cynic or the comedy relief, but the plots come
from the fact that the Doctor has far more experience than all the Earth-bound
idiots trying to stop him and by virtue of the fact that we know he’s telling
the truth. The comedy comes from the government officials who assume authority
but are either trying to make money out of a situation or hopelessly out of
their depth. Though its new to Who it’s not completely without precedent and
sensibly Dicks and Letts seem to have modelled their new-look series on four
very popular projects, three of them past Dr Who alumni have gone on to create.
One is ‘Department S’ created by old script editor Dennis Spooner that saw an
eccentric man in a frilly shirt try to solve that week’s (more human) based
dilemma with an all-action sidekick and a posh girl; two episodes even feature
plastic dummies (though, weirdly, those are the two where Peter Wyngarde of ‘Planet Of Fire’ fame dresses the most
normally). Another is ‘Doomwatch’, created by other script editor and Cyberman
creator Gerry Davis with Kit Pedler and has a team not unlike UNIT going round
investigating unlikely problems and fighting bureaucracy to put them right. Once
again there’s a no-nonsense military type in charge, a pretty girl and an
‘investigator’ with an eccentric dress sense (though his taste is more for
cravats). Their first episode, debuted a fortnight after ‘Spearhead’, even
concerned an alien that ate plastic, though there are no shop dummies (as old
friends it’s not inconceivable someone from the Dr Who office saw an advance
script and it would be very in character for Holmes to pay a ‘homage’ to
another writer with a jokier take on the same idea). And then there’s original
Who producer Verity Lambert and her series ‘Adam Adamant Lives’, which has a
time-traveller of a sort who goes to sleep in Edwardian England and wakes up in
Swinging London. Guess what? He fight bureaucracy and unlikely cases etc etc
(and he even wears a cape just like the 3rd Dr’s) while there’s an episode
about aliens infiltrating the government (in the episode ‘Counterstrike’)
though no plastic this time. Although of course the big influence is the one
that’s cast a long shadow over Dr Who ever since the beginning: Quatermass. The
BBC’s first scifi series it was all about alien invasions of Earth and monsters
appearing in familiar places, from the London Underground to a field in
Carlisle (where meteorites fall out the sky in the second film, just the way
they do in this story). Professor Quatermass might work alone for the most
part, but he’s an interesting mix of all three characters: the eccentric
outsider, the military man of action and the scientist with the degree. One
could almost say about this era of the series that it’s going back to basics,
closer to the way Sydney Newman probably envisioned it before David Whittaker
and Verity Lambert started adding in the mystery, alien-ness and time travel
(indeed, had this reboot of Dr Who failed, Sherwin was under orders to come up
with a reboot of Quatermass instead for the same slot). In other words, this is
a change that wasn’t just about the money but was something that was clearly in
the air – the difference is that, as an alien, the Doctor has more scope to see
things the people around him can’t than in the other series; he’s automatically
got more age and authority than the people trying to stop him while he’s even
more eccentric and removed from the world than any of these other characters in
other series.
With all that going on
Robert Holmes’ Auton plot (based on a comment by producer Derrick Sherwin that
mannequins were ‘creepy’) often gets forgotten but it’s another big plus for
this story – a story outline simple enough that it feels like a valid threat
even with so much screentime given over to the new setup.
It was a sign of faith that Terrance Dicks gave this all-important idea over to his new mate Robert Holmes, who had only written two Dr Who scripts before this, neither of which had been the biggest hits the show had seen (though I for one have a soft Kroton-shaped spot for his first one). A faith that was returned given how quickly Holmes nails this new Doctor (at the time uncast, Holmes ended up writing it for a ‘more pompous sounding Troughton’), his new assistant, an inherited Brigadier he hadn’t written for and a whole new alien species in ‘The Autons’ Holmes clearly understands Dr Who far more than with his first two scripts for the series and now it’s becoming a full-time job he’s looked into the history of it. Somewhere along the line someone must have given him a tape or a script for ‘The Web Of Fear’ and told him ‘this is what we want the series to look like’. The Nestene Consciousness, a big ball of alien goo, is very much the Great Intelligence again: this is an alien entity that doesn’t always have a body, which can separate its consciousness out into other things and control them. Rather than a whispery Humany voice, though, it’s all alien and very ‘other’. It’s a sort of take on ‘The Faceless Ones’, where aliens could take over people without anyone knowing (itself a twist on cold war films where Russian spies infiltrated Britain or America without anyone realising), but this time with the added fear that they’ve already taken over people in power – and we wouldn’t notice! The inspired idea to make them control plastic and especially mannequins is clever indeed, perhaps the greatest example of Dr Who making the ordinary extraordinary. Every child knows what they are, every town has them, they’re already slightly creepy in that sense that they’re almost Human but not quite right, while even as early as 1970 there was the growing sense that making all this plastic artificial tat was a bad move somehow. There’s also the very period insult that if somebody was ‘plastic’ they were ‘false’, easily malleable, without opinions of their own (this is the same year The Kinks released their single ‘Plastic Man’, who ‘no one gets the truth from’). The scene of shop window dummies getting up and walking away, to screams of horror, has rightly become one of the most celebrated and remembered scenes in all of Dr Who: it sums up the series and it’s everyday terror well (even though the budget is so low they can’t actually afford to break any glass). Though their second story ‘Terror’ is the one that fleshes out the idea, having the Nestene consciousness control other plastic items and giving them a collaborator to do all the talking is a great move. They’re already a highly memorable foe: the idea of a loved one being replaced by an Auton alien replica and nobody believing you is one of Dr Who’s darkest creepiest plots (it’s actually a real psychological condition ‘Capgras Delusion’ – well, not the alien part, but the ‘replaced by replicas’ part). Holmes, always one to ‘borrow’ from another source, might well have got the idea from the Twilight Zone episode ‘The After Hours’ from 1960 (one of the best), where a mannequin leaves to become a ‘real person’ for a day when forgets who she really is (you spend most of the story siding with her that all the people looking at her funny must be wrong but, nope, she really is made of plastic). He must surely have known about American series ‘The Invaders’, in which aliens take over people and re-create them perfectly (not least because that’s why the Dr Who production office turned down his earlier idea for the 2nd Doctor, ‘The Alien Hive/Mind’, which this script borrows from. Indeed Holmes wrote a script for a 1965 feature film titled ‘Invasion’ where an alien crashes into some woods near a hospital, who are amazed at odd his vital signs are, exactly happens with The Doctor in this story. Even the line about them having two hearts, something invented here as Holmes was surprised at how little lore for the show there was, given that Verity Lambert and David Whittaker had both preferred ‘mystery’. Holmes was too scientific and hands-on a writer for that and invents more and more background for The Doctor including the name of his home planet and the revelations to come in ‘The Deadly Assassin’: even so in ‘The Sensorites’ he only had one, leading to all sorts of fan theories that the second heart only kicks in after regeneration!) In other words Holmes was no dummy: in writing about shop dummies he manages to put together all sorts of Human fears and phobias in one big Nestene consciousness sized ball of dread. It’s an idea simple yet striking enough to be perfect as the easily-to-understand plot for a story that’s really about getting to know the characters and doesn’t have time to go into explanations. Which is why Russell T Davies brought it back for his comeback opener ‘Rose’ (minus the ‘regenerating Doctor’ parts, which ended up in ‘The Christmas Invasion’).
With so many new things
to get right it’s amazing how little goes wrong in this story. You could argue
that the story is too glib, that it doesn’t have the depth of the very best Dr
Who stories, that there’s nothing extra to get your teeth into here and what
you see is what you get, with some scenes a little rushed and the full impact
of the Nestene and Autons never fully explored. Although in context even that
makes sense for a story designed to hook viewers in as quickly as possible –
besides there are three of the most detailed and complex Who stories of all
coming up in the rest of the year. They’re more interesting stories once you
get to the other side, stories to ponder long after they’re over, but this one
is meant to be an adrenalin rush, to be exciting, to be fun and on that score
it works well. There are a few little pointers that could be better here and there:
the Nestene plan is nuts. Why not wait until Autons were in every shop window
and invade Earth en masse (I’m sure the production team could have found some
clothes from other countries and re-dressed the mannequins without stretching
the budget too much: another couple of scenes would have done). What sort of
alien goes ‘today a dress shop in a London high street, tomorrow the world!!!’
It’s just crying out for someone to come along and stop them before their plan
is ready. The scenes of a delirious Doctor in hospital go on a bit long (and
set an unfortunate precedent where most new Doctors get to walk around dazed,
though none do it quite as well as Pertwee till Tennant comes along). The human
agent Channing, he of the big staring unblinking eyes, and his relationship to
the Nestene are rather glossed over. They’re a very dodgy looking lot of
waxworks, most of them clearly extras with a plastic ‘sheen’ added (not that
Caroline John realised: she hated the waxworks scene in the pitch black, not
knowing who was real and who wasn’t and her fright is not just acting). You can
tell that some of the parts were cast in a bit of a rush, so much so that both
producer and director had to step in for smaller parts (that’s Sherwin as the
UNIT commissionaire, Derek Martinus as the UNIT doorman and assistant script
editor Robin Squire as one of the Autons after the extra who was meant to be in
the costume reacted badly to being confined inside the mask). That first scene
with a collapsed Pertwee was intended to take place in a thunderstorm, which
would have been fantastic – alas with the cut budget we just have a man falling
over onto some grass, which after all those months waiting since ‘The war Games’
is a bit anti-climactic. The third episode cliffhanger as the Doctor is
attacked by the tentacles of the Nestene is the one place Pertwee goes a bit
overboard, a rare blip where he takes what’s a serious dramatic moment and
tries to make high comedy out of it (amazingly this is the ‘improved’ version
taped alongside the next story because the first looked silly, well sillier).
No matter though: he’ll
learn, fast, will Pertwee as will everyone else for what’s one of the best and
most consistent runs in Dr Who history. For this story the plastic threat is
fantastic, the Doctor gets some great scenes to stamp his mark on the series, there’s
some superb direction (I love the way we first see a ‘possessed’ Channing through
the frosted glass of the UNIT doors where he doesn’t look quite ‘right’), there
are lots of great bits of comedy and high action drama and a general feeling
that, after sleepwalking its way through most of season 6 (and its large pile
of unusable scripts that fell apart at the last second) Dr Who has found its
feet again, as surely as if the Tardis had been given a sat-nav. Though some
older viewers were appalled at the changes and some modern viewers see it as a
first draft of ‘Rose’ without the emotion, if this big re-launch for Dr Who was
your jumping on point then it’s practically perfect in every way, full of all
the imagination, excitement and philosophy of old but with a lot more action. Though
this era will get better still after this, as the spearhead of the new-look
series this story is a valuable step in all the right directions: so many many
new things to get our teeth into and a long way from the ‘last chance saloon’
everyone thought, with Dr Who very much under threat of cancellation at the end
of the year if the viewing figures continued to fall. Instead a Radio Times boost gave the first
episode s lift from the 3.5 episode 8 of ‘The War Games’ had fallen to up to a healthy
8.4million. What’s more the story had only dropped 0.3million of that by the
last episode, the vast majority wanting to see where the series went next. The
re-launch clearly hit all the right buttons as surely as if the audience had
been made out of plastic. Yet the most incredible thing about ‘Spearhead’ is
how much it still feels like the series that had been running for six years, a
new chapter in a long story rather than a whole new book that ignores what the
old days got right (though I do miss the Tardis which is parked in the Dr’s
laboratory and forgotten about for the next two years). This isn’t some plastic
‘dummy’ version of the series that went before it: this is still Dr Who inside
and out, just as good as it was before, only suddenly very different.
POSITIVES + For one
story only the entire thing was shot on film (they won’t do this again till the
Paul McGann movie a quarter century later) which gives everything the feeling
of being lush and expensive and (for perhaps the only time) probably better on
screen than it looked when they were making it. Rather than another good policy
decision by the new production team, though, it was by accident: this is the
first of many many Dr Who stories in the 1970s to be hit by an industrial
strike, this one for the scenery department. The change to colour TV meant that
lots of shows were moving to bigger TV studios, with bigger sets and much more
heavy lifting, for the same pay as before (including Dr Who, which finally
moved out of the smaller studio at Lime Grove during the making of ‘The Space Pirates’). The strike meant there
was a backlog of BBC stories to be made and preference was given to the big
ratings-winners planned for Christmas, not the return of a series that had been
struggling for viewers and wouldn’t be on till January. Rather than abandon the
whole thing and lose his introductory story Derrick Sherwin, outgoing producer,
simply moved this story outdoors, using an outside broadcast unit rather than
official cameramen. Even the scenes that ‘are’ indoors are shot on film, as
unable to use a TV studio without breaking the strike Dr Who goes to film in
the BBC’s ‘Norton Wood’ venue at Evesham, an old Victorian hospital that the
network has bought during the war as a ‘secret’ place to do war bulletins in
case TV centre was bombed and which had since been turned into a training
facility. It’s perfect: the site is big enough and varied enough to be all
sorts of things in different scenes without ever looking like the same
building: it’s the hospital where The Doctor is brought, UNIT HQ, Channing’s
laboratory, Hibbert’s Office and even Madame Tussaud’s (the only building it
isn’t is the warehouse where the Autons come to life, which is the Guinness
factory from ‘The Invasion’ again.
Sssh, don’t tell the strikers, while the shop window the Autons come out of is
actually Villier’s House where BBC enterprises stored copies of episodes –
including Dr Who – to send overseas). Pertwee, who didn’t like sitting still
when not needed, went off to explore and discovered there was still a Victorian
shower plumbed in and working, getting permission to improvise the scene there
(and a much more fitting way of ‘stealing clothes’ than what was planned in the
script). Though it rocked the budget badly it makes ‘Spearhead’ seem a lot more
modern than other stories around it nowadays and is the only ‘old’ Dr Who you
can see in true high definition (as videotape just isn’t clear enough to clean
up, even on Blu-Ray). The only downside is that the studio set of UNIT HQ will
never ever look this good again…
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: See ‘Terror Of The
Autons’, under which you can
find a multitude of other Auton stories set after that one.
Previous ‘The War Games’ next ’Dr Who and
The Silurians’
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