It was Cecil Edwin Webber who first came up with the idea of miniaturising the Doctor and his companions as a potential story idea. 'Bunny' Webber (will we ever find out why his friends called him that?) had been commissioned by Head of Drama Sydney Newman, newly arrived from ITV franchise ABC, to develop a new Saturday tea time adventure series from a recent BBC report into the science fiction genre.

Early in 1962, Head of Serials Donald Wilson had asked Alice Frick and Donald Bull, of the BBC Survey Group, to provide an overview of the genre, its potential and the kind of audiences it might attract. A follow up report was duly presented on 25 July 1962 by Frick and writer John Braybon that outlined the kind of stories and concepts that could be developed as a science fiction series. In March 1963, Webber and Wilson then developed an outline for a drama called The Troubleshooters but this was abandoned after further brainstorming between them and Newman was consolidated into a document, drafted in May 1963, called 'Dr. Who - General Notes on Background and Approach'.

This document essentially devised the format, structure and characters of the series that would eventually become Doctor Who. It was here that Webber first postulated the kinds of stories the fledgling series concept might tell: 'The first two stories will be on the short side, four episodes each, and will not deal with time travel. The first may result from the use of a micro-reducer in the machine which makes our characters all become tiny.' (1) Oddly enough, he also suggested 'Was Merlin Dr. Who? Was Cinderella's Godmother Dr. Who's wife chasing him through time?' Funny how the series would eventually return to what Newman thought were rather fanciful ideas.

'hardly practicable for live television'

Webber developed the idea into a storyline 'The Giants' which was intended as the very first serial to launch the series. It contained elements that would eventually be transferred to Anthony Coburn's An Unearthly Child (also variously titled The Tribe of Gum and 100, 000 BC), then intended as the second serial, after his proposed synopsis was received with some reservations by Newman and then returned to Donald Wilson on the 7 June 1963. Newman was not altogether happy with the four episode breakdown and noted it was 'thin on incident and character'. He also felt that the scale of Webber's ambition, the use of large scale sets and visual effects and of the reduced-in-size Doctor and his companions encountering spiders, was 'hardly practicable for live television'. (2)

Rex Tucker, whom Newman had hired as an interim producer for the proposed Doctor Who series and who had a great deal of input into its development, understood Newman's thinking and had already sent a memo to Wilson stressing that, in his opinion, Lime Grove Studio D was not fit for purpose for the technical requirements of Doctor Who. Tucker had already made initial contact with composer Tristram Cary with a view to producing the series' theme, been involved in early casting and was lined up to direct the first serial, planned as Webber's story.

He rejected the draft scripts of 'The Giants' after Webber had attempted to refine them and asked Coburn to rewrite An Unearthly Child with a view to replacing Webber's story. Tucker's rejection of them was certainly because of the technical problems that would face the production in Lime Grove D and studio allocation would be a continuing thorn in the side of the series' production throughout 1963 and 1964.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Philip Martin, the writer of Vengeance on Varos, had plied his trade on Z Cars (1962-78) initially as an actor and then made the transition to writing for the series before moving on to writing scripts for Thirty Minute Theatre (1965-73), New Scotland Yard (1972-74) and Shoestring (1979-80). Martin achieved a great deal of kudos as a television writer with Gangsters (1976-78) a drama series that had evolved out of his Play for Today of the same name.

The play and the series were produced at BBC Pebble Mill Birmingham by David Rose, head of what was then known as English Regions Drama which set out to "promote drama that was regionally-produced, allowing the local production skills-base to develop, and using regionally-based writers whenever possible". (1)

Rose had been inspired by a screening of The French Connection (1971) and through Barry Hanson made contact with Martin to capture that film's sensibilities within an English regional setting which on this occasion was Birmingham, the city he saw as he gazed out of his train window after seeing the film. The relationship between Rose and the development of Gangsters was very informal and he provided Martin with funding to live in Birmingham to research the communities in the city for three months and generate potential ideas for a play.  

Gangsters can be seen as typical of Martin's work and his ability to structure genre as a route into a distinctive use of social commentary. As the series progressed he used the tropes of film noir, B movie thrillers and Bollywood films to tell a bleak and cynical tale of exploitation and violence in the multiracial and ethnically diverse reality of contemporary Birmingham, to "hitch contemporary social problems to genre fiction". By series two, and as a reaction to the criticisms of the portrayal of violence in the first series, Martin turned things on their head and became very experimental in his approach.  

'it's just people in a studio'

The series became an examination of the television viewer's relationship to the 'reality' that the series was presenting on screen where Martin was saying "this isn't reality, it's just people in a studio, yes, it's entertainment, I hope it's amusing you, but it's only a script". (2) This allowed Martin free reign to contextualise the violence of the first series through his own authorship, not just as the writer of the series but as an actor. He plays a villain, Rawlinson, in the first series and in the second returns as himself, a symbolic writer figure as a Greek chorus seen to comment on and rewrite the narrative and characters, and as a villain inspired by W.C. Fields. 

Indeed, David Rolinson has compared Gangsters requirement to turn the actuality of violence seen in its first series into a meta-text about television realities in its second series with Doctor Who's own metamorphosis in 1977 from Gothic horror realism into witty postmodern meta-science fiction. His comparison also shows the ways both programmes shifted the emphasis away from the depiction of violence within the wider context of debates about censorship at the BBC during the same period. Indeed, as Rolinson notes, Vengeance on Varos exacerbated another crisis about on-screen violence in Doctor Who that was also reflected within the panic about 'video nasties' that raged in the mid-1980s. (3)

The self-reflexive use of genre, narrative and televisuality would find its way into Martin's post-Gangsters work. For example, The Unborn (Playhouse tx 16/5/80) was also 'narrated' by Martin, portraying an angelic figure from the future, who sets the scene for a play which explored rationalism and superstition, dream and reality. As Ian Greaves notes in his review, the play's mise en scene, where bedroom becomes hi-tech war room, is also concerned with "dissolving the gap between premonition and reality" as an expectant father has a vision of his son as a future dictator who initiates a world war. (4)

He had originally been invited to pitch for Doctor Who in 1980 by the then incumbent script editor Christopher Bidmead. It was two years later that Martin submitted an idea to Bidmead's replacement Eric Saward, after, he recalls, "My daughter Hilary, who was then seven, began to watch Doctor Who independently of me. One day she said ‘Will you come and watch with me?’, so I watched a couple of weeks of early Peter Davison episodes. I woke up one morning with the idea for what eventually became Vengeance on Varos." (5)

In 1982, the series was in its two 25-minute episodes per week day transmission pattern and Saward commissioned a storyline from Martin in April that year, titled Domain, featuring the fifth Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa. Martin had been wondering what the entertainment industry of the future might consist of and in Domain this idea also worked in tandem with a story about a prison planet where the officer class ruled over the descendants of the original prisoners and subjugated them with violent entertainments. Domain's political overtones were a concern to John Nathan-Turner and he advised Saward to closely monitor Martin's development of the storyline. Martin spent some time gestating ideas throughout 1982 and it was only in October that he was specifically commissioned to write one of the four episodes with the commission for the other three following in January 1983.

Dolly Parton's The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas was mistakenly seized as pornography 

The development of the scripts took place during the infamous moral panic about 'video nasties'. This emerged after the release of several unregulated video titles, featuring violent, gory and sexual content, in the growing home entertainment market of the early 1980s. In an era before the BBFC either granted them a certificate, imposed severe cuts or banned them, these films gained a certain notoriety via the Director of Public Prosecution's list of videos that were likely to be confiscated if found on retailers' shelves.

Naturally, Doctor Who's old friend Mary Whitehouse went in for the kill when she was made aware of the nature of such films as The Driller Killer (1979) and Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and her public campaign gained support through The Sunday Times and The Daily Mail during 1982, culminating in MP Graham Bright's introduction of his Private Members Bill in 1983 and leading to the passing, in 1985, of the Video Recordings Act 1984.

This made the BBFC responsible for the certification all films released on video. Gone were the days when police raids on hire shops were common and often a source of amusement when the likes of Dolly Parton's musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982) was mistakenly seized as pornography. Ironically, it was during 1983 and 1984 that BBC Video began its VHS and Betamax release of Doctor Who stories as part of its 'Video Tasties' campaign. Even the BBC Enterprises sales sheet for Varos mentions 'video nasties' in the programme's synopsis.

The other landmark to note here is that, in between the transmission of both episodes of Vengeance on Varos, a six month experiment began in the House of Lords to allow the BBC and Channel 4 to televise debates. The first of these was scheduled for 23 January 1985 and was a debate on the state of the economy, the government's relationship with trade unions and the effects of the on-going miners' strike. It's interesting to note that under the strict regulations that the Lords applied to the televising of such debates, cameras were not allowed to cut away to a noisy demonstration up in the gallery in support of the strike . (6) The protracted and divisive strike and the related dismantling of British industry also offers a parallel to Varos, where the mining for Zeiton 7 ore is carried out without knowing the mineral's true worth and its workers are placated by entertainment featuring others worse off than themselves.

During this period, Martin's completion of the script had to take into account many changes within the production of Doctor Who itself. Peter Davison had been replaced by Colin Baker and the characters of Nyssa, Tegan and Turlough had come and gone and Martin admits, "I remember doing one draft when we didn’t know who the new Doctor was going to be, we didn’t know who the companions were, and we weren’t even sure of the time slot!" (7) It wasn't until November 1983 that Domain, now retitled Planet of Fear, was recommissioned as two 45-minute episodes for the forthcoming Season Twenty-Two. Between November and February 1984, Martin collaborated with Saward on the scripts, expanding Peri's involvement, shifting emphasis to the alien Sil, making the Governor more of an unwilling participant in the machinations and introducing the 'Greek chorus' of Varos's desensitised citizens Arak and Etta.

Planet of Fear was scheduled as the fifth story of the season but was shifted to second in line when Pat Mills' Space Whale fell by the wayside. It was also retitled Vengeance on Varos when Nathan-Turner deemed its original title too close to 1983's Planet of Fire. Originally, Michael Owen Morris (The Awakening) was due to return to the series to direct but Vengeance on Varos was finally assigned to Ron Jones who set about casting the production in the Spring of 1984. Jason Connery, then better known as son of Sean, was cast in only his second television role in May 1984 as the rebel Jondar. Shortly after he was headed for greater recognition when he became Robert of Huntingdon in Richard Carpenter's Robin of Sherwood (1984-86), after its producers had rejected the likes of Simon Dutton, Paul McGann, Jason Carter and Neil Morrissey. When the BBC promoted this story they emphasised his recent Robin of Sherwood casting.

Jones had unsuccessfully auditioned several actors of short stature for the role of Sil and Nabil Shaban, whom he eventually cast, was discovered through a serendipitous series of coincidences. Martin Jarvis's wife, Rosalind Ayres, had remembered Shaban from his appearances in several recent documentary films, including editions of Arena, Thames Television's Help and a Channel 4 film The Skin Horse, and suggested to Jarvis, who had already been cast as the Governor, that Ron Jones contact him.

A floor manager working on Doctor Who suggested that Shaban be reached through the disabled actors’ theatre group 'Graeae' which Shaban had co-founded with Richard Tomlinson in 1980. At the same time BBC producer Alan Shallcross had sent a memo out to colleagues encouraging directors and producers to cast more disabled actors in their productions, mentioning 'Graeae', and Jones subsequently visited the group. However, Shallcross was rather disconcerted when he discovered Jones and Nathan-Turner had cast Shaban as the villain Sil.

After Shaban had visited the costume and effects department in June for a fitting, Vengenance on Varos went into TC6 on 18 July 1984 for the first of two, three day recording blocks. The session on that day also included the now infamous 'acid bath' sequence and even after completing the scene with a number of retakes, Jones still had some concern about the way it was shot and the implication that the Doctor caused the horrific deaths of two men.

The impact of the acid burnt victims was reduced in the final edit but the difficulties with the scene continue to linger according to Patrick Mulkern in his Radio Times review: "I saw that being recorded: the make-up on the scalded victims was horrible and, ultimately, less offensive takes were aired. The problem remains that the Doctor’s clumsiness is shown to cause two grisly deaths."(8) Other problems during recording included a section of scaffolding collapsing during the gallows scene and Nicola Bryant's allergic reaction to the feathers used in the scene of Peri's transmogrification.

Varos is that rare animal in mid-1980s Doctor Who. It's a clever, multi-layered narrative and manages to incorporate a strong moral message and social commentary. It achieves this while employing an interesting structure that plays on the relationships between the actuality of Varos, its televised representation to its own populace and the audience watching at home. As Philip Sandifer succinctly puts it, Varos is structured as "a television program in which several of the characters appear on a television program and in which the audience repeatedly watches people watching television. And it frequently makes clever little cuts between these levels so that events move from being watched by diegetic characters to being watched by the audience."(9)

... apathy with political systems... vote rigging... and a wry commentary on quality television

This reaches its height in the cliffhanger to episode one where the direction of the programme switches between the Governor deciding when to do close ups on the dying Doctor and cut the scene and Ron Jones sat in the gallery in TC6 pulling back from the Doctor, cutting to the Prison Control monitor screen and then, as the Governor asks for the cut, rolling the end titles.

Martin's concerns about ritual humiliation, torture and lowest common denominator mass entertainment are more relevant now than ever before. Don't forget, this was before reality shows such as Big Brother, so it's partly prescient but also reflects the then knee-jerk reactionary debate over screen violence and cruelty (the 'video nasties' debacle of the period) and the exploitation and dehumanisation of vulnerable members of society through mass communications and observation. But the other 'Big Brother' is clearly an influence here too - the Varos logo is surprisingly similar to the insignia designed for Oceania in Michael Radford's recent film of Orwell's 1984 and the uniforms with their medals and sashes have a suggestion of South American dictatorships. Argentina's 'Dirty War' may well have some resonance to Varosian politics and society here too.

The narrative is framed by the 'viewer appreciation' figures of commentators Arak and Etta, perhaps symbolising the bored and jaded audience seeking entertainment in any form and typically representative of audiences that are often targeted in the so called 'ratings war'. They also effectively sum up an apathy with political systems, hint at vote rigging and provide a wry commentary on quality television while they sit there in their little hovel watching dead entertainment. Tat Wood sees this device as a either an expression of the need to pad the story out (Martin's scripts under ran and Saward had to put material in to get them to length), as an example of Brechtian de-familiarisation or postmodern self-reflexivity. Or all three at once. (10)

As Matthew Sweet acknowledges in the documentary, it's also a story that tries to have its cake and eat it. Just as it comments on exploitative entertainment and TV for kicks, it is in itself exploiting violence and body horror to depict the ramifications of a society that has evolved out of the hierarchies of prison life, with Martin suggesting that this is the dead end of a society dominated by media exploitation. There are people falling into acid baths (the Doctor does not push anyone into an acid bath but his parting quip is certainly callous), poisoned by vines, turned into birds and reptiles, tortured and shot. Some may feel this is a grim place for the series to end up but there are checks and balances with the blackly comic figure of Sil, the political satire of the Governor and his voting audience lightening the darker areas of the narrative.

Martin himself has offered that the examination of violence at the heart of the story is in part an acknowledgement of Whitehouse's and the National Viewers and Listeners Association's concerns of the day: “What we’re actually doing, in a way, is arguing on their side, but are they intelligent enough to see it? They should be, because it’s there, but then you need a sophisticated response, and you have to have shows like this, so people’s critical faculties can spot what is gratuitous and what is there for a purpose, almost a moral purpose. (11)

Vengeance on Varos works because it also has a particularly strong central cast. Martin Jarvis is terrific as the Governor and he wonderfully captures the barometer of the narrative. The Governor is just as corrupt as the henchmen he works with but you get a sense of his ache for something better and more honorable through Jarvis's sensitive approach to the role. The character provides an essay in turncoat politics, quite apt in the era of Thatcherism, as the Governor faces the popular vote with steely determination and the power structures that make Varos function begin to dissolve around him.

He's also a symbol of Martin's core concern about finding the truth at the heart of the situation and is complimentary to the rebels Jondar and Areta and voters Arak and Etta as they all provide slightly different versions of Varosian reality for the audience to consider. Stephen Yardley and Sheila Reid are excellent as the chorus of Arak and Etta. Forbes Collins is also great as the Chief Officer with a lovely line in sneering pomposity that almost equals the puffed up nature of the Sixth Doctor. His manipulation of, and crossing swords with, Jarvis's Governor provides the story with some fascinating political interplay and commentary on media manipulation.

Nabil Shaban grabs the role of Sil and uniquely makes it his own. An actor's performance which is an object lesson in projecting character from behind encumbering prosthetics, using physicality and vocal mannerism to underline Sil's dangerous but child-like nature, always petulant if he doesn't get his own way. He's a mixture of intergalactic Soho porn-baron and commodities broker who simply exists to exploit others and Shaban plays him with great energy and conviction. Here is an actor capable of providing the Doctor with a decent foil and it is entirely clear why the character was deemed successful and returned the following year, albeit less effectively, in Mindwarp.

And then we come to Colin Baker. Here he perfectly sets out the Sixth Doctor's stall and it's one of his best performances as the Doctor, somewhat freer of the excesses of other scripts in the season. Love it or loathe it, but the characterisation could never be described as boring. He jumps from sulky indignation and manic outrage to clear compassion and bravado within the space of the story and Baker never falters, never bats an eyelid as the performance he gives twists and turns.

... you don't win at the end of game. You die.

While some of the Doctor's actions are deeply questionable - the criticism was that he did 'cause' a number of deaths by proxy (the trap with the vines, the acid bath etc) - and seem very atypical of the Doctor, this needs to be seen in relationship to what particularly Eric Saward was doing. The loss of innocence of the Doctor, as exemplified by his role in stories such as Resurrection of the Daleks and The Caves of Androzani, was the overture to the Time Lord's ongoing relevance in Saward's increasingly hostile, amoral universe, perhaps itself a more conservative reflection of the equally vilified brutality of the Holmes/Hinchcliffe era. 

There is a distinction here between comic book, fantasy violence prevalent in the 1970s and the more realistic approach seen in the series from Season Twenty-One onwards. That the Doctor gets tough at this point is not just part of Saward's penchant for the template of The Caves of Androzani but it echoes the politics of the time. With the 'no such thing as society' line taken by the Tories, individuals were seriously encouraged to 'get their hands dirty' and succeed in both the marketplace and in attaining class position. Could the Sixth Doctor be a manifestation of the 'by any means necessary' individual then being born out of such times?

Another concern here is that the character of Peri does continue to be reduced to the status of victim, despite some great banter between her and the Doctor, and this is especially evident in the transmogrification sequence. However, some have commented that this scene, like many of the traps in the Dome, is redundant to the plot. They are rather the point of the narrative, all functioning as trials set up deliberately to exploit the unfortunate rebels who end up in the Dome. All the devices are there purely to wring out the maximum humiliation for a desperate audience of viewers wanting their ounce of snuff. It's just like the inmates completing tasks in the Big Brother house but you don't win at the end of game. You die.

There are some problems with certain scenes and performances. The scene in the TARDIS at the beginning of the story, which is very lengthy, is more or less rather dull padding, symptomatic of the way stories would open and close in this period and the increasing desire to delay the Doctor's entrance into the story proper. The sequences with the security golf buggies are very unconvincing as it's clear that anyone could out run such vehicles and the various moments of gun play are a sop to younger audiences.

The weaker second episode has its moments - the Doctor and Jondar going to the gallows has a surreal aesthetic all of its own that heightens the story's use of artifice - but the ending, where Sil's invasion plans are thwarted by the discovery of a new supply of ore on a distant asteroid doesn't quite make sense. Surely, the Galatron Mining Company would cut its losses with Varos and force the price of the ore down even further? Instead, the Governor seizes it as an opportunity to get a higher price for Zeiton 7. Quillam doesn't get enough screen time to establish himself, is more a stereotype than a fully rounded character, and consequently Nicolas Chagrin is rather wasted in the role.

While Jason Connery is very lovely to look at here as Jondar, he is rather over-earnest with his reading of some lines and often misplaces the emphasis on them. It does tend to make him sound a little wooden but he does capture a certain reckless innocence and determination that is appealing. Geraldine Alexander as Areta often suffers with the same problem and again gets very little screen time to truly establish the character. Tat Wood has suggested that, given Martin's use of postmodern ambiguity in much of his work, and in Gangsters particularly, then the nature of these performances could be deliberate and as a signal to the audience that these are the stereotypes you'd expect to find in the tapes created by the punishment Dome.  

Lighting and production design also raise the standard of the story. Tony Snoaden's minimal sets are beautifully lit by Dennis Channon and there is a claustrophobic and hallucinatory nature to the story generated by shadows, smoke effects and use of colour. Jonathan Gibbs doesn't smother the soundtrack in synthesisers and is very precise in spotting scenes with music, often allowing silence and sound effects to convey the emotional essence of a scene. His cues often have a macabre quality all of their own, adding to the nightmarish nature of the scenarios encountered in the Dome.

It all provides the right atmosphere for such a grim, dystopian tale that seems even more relevant than before and doesn't pull its punches in the delivery of that final coda with Arak and Etta. As their televisions screens go blank, they ponder their future and their freedom from tyranny. What exactly are they going to do with it? It seems to be suggesting that all our perceived freedoms are tyrannies of some kind whether we know it or not.

(1) Stephen Lacey, Critical Studies in Television: David Rose and English Regions Drama
(2) Interview with Philip Martin by Richard Amphlett & Matthew Newton, Newton's Laws of Television
(3) David Rolinson, British Television Drama, Scene vs Scene: Assassins vs Gangsters
(4) Cheer up! It Might Never Happen, The Unborn reviewed by Ian Greaves
(5) Philip Martin quoted in the Doctor Who Interview Archive
(6) Ibid
(7) Glyn Mathias in Bob Franklin, Televising Democracies
(8) Patrick Mulkern, Vengeance on Varos Radio Times  
(9) Philip Sandifer, Do You Think Anybody Votes for Sweet
(10) Tat Wood, About Time: Seasons 22 -26, the TV Movie 
(11) Philip Martin quoted in the Doctor Who Interview Archive

Special features
Commentary
As per the original DVD, a very entertaining track featuring Colin Baker, Nabil Shaban and Nicola Bryant.
Nice or Nasty? The making of Vengeance on Varos (29:37)
Matthew Sweet goes all Governor of Varos on us and from the voting box regales us with the behind the scenes development and production of the serial. Or is this Carry On Varos? From the opening line, "this is a story that has its fans but it also has its knockers", as an image of Peri fickers onto the screen, and descriptions of old men in nappies and Jason Connery running around in his trousers, you'll recognise Sweet's trademark approach. The documentary is then framed around interviews with Philip Martin and Eric Saward.

There's a great moment when Saward talks about how writing for Doctor Who is difficult and that it would be hard to even accommodate Harold Pinter within the series format. Sweet manages to get an unfulfilled desire out of Saward that he wished he'd asked Pinter to write for the series. It's rare that Saward cracks a smile and he's positively giggling with delight here. He's also very honest about how much the Holmes/Hinchcliffe era was an inspiration to him at this time and discusses the 45 minute format of the series where Sweet suggests that Doctor Who was mutating into a science fiction anthology series.

Martin relates Nathan-Turner's suspicions of his desire to write for the series and the insulting demand from JNT that Martin do a scene breakdown before he could be considered for the job. He also notes Sweet's comments about Varos's concerns with the media and the state, recalls the fall of Bhutto's government in Pakistan and how the media is always a target for control, and that the agencies of power in Varos are themselves trapped in the system. He also discusses the breaking down of the fourth wall in Gangsters and The Unborn.

There are also recollections from Sheila Reid who reveals that she and Stephen Yardley didn't see any of the clips they viewed on screen until they began their recording block; Nabil Shaban on the creation of Sil's laugh; composer Jonathan Gibbs on covering up noisy security golf buggies and creating the sound of Varos. Overall, this a great half hour that finds time to explore the themes of Varos with those that created it.

The Idiot's Lantern (7:29)
An interesting but all too brief examination, hosted by Samira Ahmed, of how television has been used in the series to comment on the nature of reality and how Doctor Who has used the medium to comment on itself, to subvert other genres and reality through mock news programmes.
Extended and Deleted Scenes (17:42)
The original set of deletions/extensions running to about ten minutes on the original DVD release have been added to. The additional seven minutes here include more of the Governor's broadcast to the people of Varos, slightly extended versions of the TARDIS scene, the fight with the chained up Jondar (that includes the Greek chorus of Arak and Etta), the journey into the 'purple zone', the Doctor's death, the acid bath scene, the Doctor's encounter with Quillam, the aftermath of the show trial and hanging, Quillam's rant at the Governor and the Doctor rescuing Peri from the transmogrifier.  Many feature unused bits and pieces from Arak and Etta.
Acid Bath Scene with alternate music track (1:37)
Even with a different score it's still the same contentious scene.
Behind the Scenes (4:42)
As featured on the original release, a brief look at one scene between the Governor, the Chief and Peri and the retakes required to perfect it.
Outtakes (03:07)
As per the original DVD release, this is the selection where Sil's burly aides nearly tip over his water tank and Forbes Collins forgets where his prop chair should be; the gallery forgets to insert the footage of Peri and Areta being transmogrified into the confrontation between the Doctor and Quillam.
Trailers (0:43)
The two BBC1 trailers as featured on the original DVD.   
Continuities (0:35)
As featured on the original DVD, the BBC1 on-air announcements.
Tomorrow's Times - The Sixth Doctor (12:56)
Sarah Sutton hosts this edition of 'Who the Papers Say' and covers the announcement of Baker ("a green eyed blond with a crow's nest coiffure and the burly build of a boxer" cooed The Daily Express) becoming the next Doctor, JNT's threatened abandonment of the Police Box prop, the reactions to Baker's debut "strangling that awful girl sidekick". And JNT's overflowing mailbag and Baker's fifteen year old knickers don't bear thinking about. This also takes in the media reaction to the 'hiatus' and Baker's eventual departure from the series.
News (1:09)
John Simpson announces Baker as the next actor to play the Doctor on BBC1's news bulletin of 19 August 1983. This features comments from Baker, at his first photo call, to reporter Frances Coverdale and a clip from Arc of Infinity.
BBC Breakfast (05:41)
From 22 August 1983, after clips from The Web Planet, The Mind Robber, Spearhead from Space, Pyramids of Mars and Enlightenment, Frank Bough interviews Colin Baker about his forthcoming role as the Doctor.
Saturday Superstore (15:07)
In a March 1984 edition, Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant promote the transmission of The Twin Dilemma and are interrupted by Anthony Ainley during their phone-in with viewers.
French and Saunders sketch (7:31)
There's one reason why this sketch, shot on the Trial of a Time Lord set in 1987, was never transmitted. Sadly, it's not very funny. Which is ironic given that it was originally included on the video release of the much funnier The Curse of Fatal Death.
Slightly extended and better presented gallery of images
Mono Audio, 5.1 Remix and Isolated Score Options
As well as the original mono audio, there is the mono production audio (no post-production effects and score), a new 5.1 mix and Jonathan Gibbs' score in mono and 5.1 flavours as an isolated set of tracks.
A new and impressive set of notes by Paul Scoones which primarily unravels the differences in the various scripts of Varos as well as offering up plenty of production trivia. The first pressing of the original DVD release had a fault on its production notes and fortunately that doesn't reoccur here.
PDF Material
Radio Times billings and several outraged viewers' letters about the violence and horror in Vengeance on Varos. Plus we get BBC Enterprises promotional sales sheet for the story.
The Ambassadors.... crash... of Death

Doctor Who: Vengeance on Varos
BBC Worldwide / Released 10 September 2012 / BBCDVD 3512 / Cert:PG
BBC 1985
2 episodes / Broadcast: 19 January – 26 January 1985 / Colour / Running time: 89:28

Asylum of the Daleks
BBC One HD
1st September 2012, 7.20pm 

The review contains plot spoilers.

33 years to the day that Terry Nation's Destiny of the Daleks trundled its way onto our screens to open Season Seventeen and, taking a leaf out of the Barry Letts and John Nathan-Turner book of grabbing the audience from the off with 1972's Day of the Daleks and 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks, writer Steven Moffat decided to open Doctor Who's latest series with a Dalek story, Asylum of the Daleks. All three stories from the Classic series were something of a valedictory return for the tin pot pepper pots so inextricably connected to the success of Doctor Who. Letts dusted them down after nearly five years since their last screen appearance, Graham Williams dragged them back after four years in exile, and Nathan-Turner didn't strike a deal with their agent for three and a half years. Launching a series with the Daleks can add to your viewing figures, after all, and the marketing and PR buzz associated with them often pays dividends. It was no surprise that after Doctor Who's eight-month absence from BBC One, the hype was on overload for Asylum of the Daleks.

Apart from cameos in The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang and The Wedding of River Song, their last story proper was Victory of the Daleks. Its meshing of Dalek and World War 2 mythologising might have seemed thematically appropriate but I think it's fair to say that the mixed reception to the giddily coloured new paradigm of the Daleks it introduced hadn't been accounted for nor expected. To say their redesign was a divisive move is something of an understatement and their role in a less than satisfying story begged the question: where now for Skaro's mutated meanies and their 'nippy hatchback' make-overs? Especially true when Moffat himself declared in May 2011 that 'They aren't going to make an appearance for a while. We thought it was about time to give them a rest.' With that in mind, it must have seemed like a good idea to launch the series with a Dalek story as an attempt to redress the balance and prove that the cosmetic changes were just that and their latest convalescence was entirely justified.

... a little fillet of fan wank thrown to the fans

On the surface, this retrenchment works for Asylum of the Daleks. On the burning vistas of Skaro, the skyline is dominated not by the hunched over silhouette of the new paradigm but by the far subtler tweaking applied to 2005's model. Those brass necked, armoured tanks that originated in Dalek are the dominant representation here despite the publicity overdrive, complete with Matt and Karen posing with the silver and blue old school Dalek, breathlessly informing us that the new episode 'will feature every kind of Dalek ever faced by the Time Lord – including the legendary Special Weapons Dalek!'  Fortunately, even the new paradigm take a back seat and only make brief appearances. The decision to hire Nick Hurran, who did an extraordinary job of directing The Girl Who Waited last season, definitely works in the story's favour when it comes to reestablishing the Daleks visually.

After a visit to Skaro, the existence of which many will say contradicts what the Classic series and Russell T Davies established about its demise, the Doctor and his friends, the Ponds, find themselves deposited within the parliament of the Daleks. However, you'll need to place Skaro's survival in the context of one of 2010's Adventure Games, considered 'canon' by ex-producer Piers Wenger, where Skaro is removed from the Time War and returned to its time line by the Daleks. The majority of viewers will not notice or care, naturally, and it remains a little fillet of fan wank thrown to the fans. And by pointing that out to you, then I too am guilty as charged m'lud, but I should clarify that the internet is a wonderful thing and I've never played City of the Daleks.

A parliament with the post of Prime Minister comes across as rather a democratic institution for a bunch of pathological totalitarian ideologues. How do they get elected? Did they form a coalition with the new paradigm? Is the Supreme representative of Nick Clegg and the mutant-in-a-jar PM a tongue-in-cheek dig at Cameron? Do they have back-bench committees where the finer points of dominating the universe, concepts of beauty, the pasty tax and rail fares are argued over? Whatever the reasons for adding to the already overflowing back catalogue of the Dalek mythos, the scenes in the parliament are visually impressive and underline the one line pitch of 'epic movie poster' that Moffat, no stranger to employing the epic judging by previous form, is applying to the episodes this year.

Whether that will work remains to be seen in a series where the ordinary and the extraordinary are a consistent trope, where human frailty has been a grounding for the more outré elements of storytelling such as monsters and digital visual effects. It is a delight to see the massed ranks of Daleks chanting in unison, their little headlights blinking on and off as they entreat both the Doctor and, with some irony, Moffat to save them. The parliament scenes are beautifully shot and Hurran is a bit like a kid in a sweetshop, his camera floating across and between the Daleks, with bits of them out of focus in the foreground adding to the overall feeling that the viewer is actually among them. There is also humour in the way he tracks them observing the Doctor, all turning their heads in unison, focusing their eye stalks on him as he paces back and forth. It's a lovely touch.

'you were just pouting at a camera'

Love and hate as a concept is singled out rather blatantly in the opening sequence as Amy, wearing her modelling success with aloofness in the face of a disintegrating marriage, punches at the screen with her 'love' and 'hate' tattoos, signalling the later discussions between the Doctor, Rory and Amy about the Daleks' own subtraction of love from their human victims as a metaphor for the couple's redaction of each other. It ripples out from Amy's attitude as she finds succour in a media career, where surely the choices of 'love' and 'hate' are already reduced to lifestyle blipverts and magazines, and work which is then cuttingly reduced down to size by Rory's comment of 'you were just pouting at a camera'.

The heartlessness between the two is also tied in with one of Moffat's major signatures, the idea that your humanity can be lost by forgetting who you truly are and then recovered or restored by the act of remembering, by delving back into your memories. Much of this familiar stock in trade is reworked throughout Asylum of the Daleks.

'Make them remember you,' suggests the Doctor to Amy as they come face to face with the Daleks; 'do you remember who you were before they emptied you out and turned you into their puppet' he asks Darla, the Dalek agent; the Doctor's encouragement to the insane Dalek of 'come on, who's your daddy?' more or less begs his arch enemy to consider the deep rooted father complex that exists between them; and the meta-textual coda of Oswin's knowing aside to camera that asks both the Doctor and the audience to 'remember' her. Forgive the pun, but the latter is a tad over-egged in the way it underlines that she'll be back in the series, suggesting the Doctor will somehow encounter her again. Whether that's a case of the Doctor rewriting time again or his engagement with Clara is on a similar basis to the time-out-of joint one he has with River is still moot.

The destruction of the Pond's relationship, culminating here in the signing of divorce papers, was foreshadowed in the Pond Life webisodes promoted in the week leading up to the episode. For me, they had the unfortunate twofold side-effect of turning the Doctor, the last of the Time Lords, into the unloved, name-dropping relative you can't stand and who insists on turning up on your doorstep, and revealing the Ponds were as cold and as empty as the flat they live in. Much of this and the later scenes in the Dalek asylum between Rory and Amy unpack the debates about the love, or lack of it, in their marriage and the perceptions, derived from much of the fifth series, that Amy manipulates Rory and subtracts and adds him to her emotional life when it best pleases her.

Since Series 5, she's never really completely thrown that image off and Moffat attempts to counter it by revisiting the consequences of Melanie's birth at Demon's Run and the final cruelty that Madame Kovarian was indeed as good as her gynaecological inspired name. Hurran uses Darvill and Gillan's body language, their positions within the space of the settings of the story and a riot of focus pulling to underline all of this distancing until the key moment in the asylum where Amy provides us with the devastating reason for the breakup and attempts to regain her validity within the marriage.

'who's your daddy? 

Clearly, the psychological scars run deep and need to be salved and attended to but I would question that throwing your husband out (Amy's euphemism 'giving him up' also suggests she's now condoned to put him, slightly used, back on the market) is probably the worst thing you could do when there are plenty of other options to discuss when it comes to wanting kids.

As a theme it's handled with little subtlety or complexity in the midst of epic spectacle, a brief emotional compress about their failing marriage as a subtraction of love, melodramatically trowelled onto Moffat's discussion about love and hate in the wider context of the story where Daleks discuss hatred as something beautiful and necessary to their function.

Moffat defines the Daleks' fear of the Doctor as the addition to hate, giving their existence a meaning beyond the rabid nature of their purist ethics, but by the episode's conclusion has that beautiful hatred subtracted from their raison d'etre by companion-to-be Oswin, the mad old Dalek who thinks she's human. The Dalek concept of divine hatred, the asylum containing Skaro's mentally scarred and the Doctor's discussion with the Dalek Prime Minister are some of the strongest elements of the script, particularly when the Prime Minister admits to the Doctor about their fear of him: 'Perhaps that is why we have never been able to kill you.'

With no concept of who the Doctor is, are the memory-wiped Daleks left behind at the end of Asylum of the Daleks, their playground chants of 'Doc-tor Whooo?' a reflection of Moffat's The Wedding of River Song meme of 'the question that must not be answered', hurtling us towards a Year Zero where all of the Doctor's enemies forget who the hell he is? Tinkering with the Doctor's relationship with the Daleks, how they define their own nature, is a risk, just as risky as dolling them up in a colourful wardrobe and calling them the new paradigm. The pertinent question here is one the Doctor asks of one of the inmates of the Asylum - 'who's your daddy?'- and by the conclusion of Asylum of the Daleks the usual answer no longer seems to apply. Removing the one fear that makes them stronger either renders them completely fearless, and therefore even more threatening, or reduces them to monsters with no points of reference, a lumbering, generic threat.

On the evidence here, even though the journey through the world of insane Daleks is as atmospherically executed as an archetypal exploration of a haunted house where the Doctor and his companions are submerged into the Dalek unconscious, it's possibly the latter. Even their war cry is broken down, ridiculed, made redundant. Granted, the final scene where the Doctor confronts Oswin Dalek is quite affecting as she/it struggles to summon up the will to exterminate the Doctor but stops when her humanity overcomes the Dalek conditioning.

None of the Daleks even succeed in exterminating anyone throughout the entire episode. Given that Asylum of the Daleks' closest parallels are with Dalek, where the death count could be the basis for a drinking game, their effectiveness seems curiously neutered. They truly have become 'tricycles with a roof', that equally knowing reference to the way Dalek operators moved the props around locations for The Dalek Invasion of Earth in 1964.

If we're talking about Moffat's signature, then several other well used tropes pop up again. We get the nano-cloud of nano-genes that convert you into a human Dalek agent, where the Dalek eye piece popping out of the forehead of anyone living or dead not only reflects the transformation of humans into gas-masked zombies in The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances and the various other human/machine conversions and hybrids that litter Moffat's work, but also gives nostalgic credence to that familiar children's activity of wearing a saucepan on your head, grabbing an egg-whisk and running round the house screeching 'Exterminate' at the cat. I know a few adults who've tried it too. And who hasn't used or heard the old 'eggs-terminate' gag?

The fact that some of these transformations take place in ordinary surroundings for Amy and Rory (getting on the bus will never feel quite the same again) also taps into Moffat's reworking of the uncanny and making the familiar unfamiliar. Also note that director Hurran uses a lot of reflections in mirrors to symbolically indicate what is happening, suggesting that Amy and Rory are in a hall of mirrors and facing a reflection of what they may become, the unconscious evil, hating self that the nano-genes will foster once they arrive in the Dalek asylum and are whisked away from their domestic sphere.

... never quite fulfills the trade description of showing every Dalek that ever featured in the show

Hurran's a very visually literate director. Plenty of shots reflect each other: Rory looking out of the Dalek porthole is repeated later with the Doctor looking in through the grille at Oswin the Dalek, the image sliced across with horizontal and vertical bars; the countless repetitions of circles in the hatchways; the track down through the floor of the Dalek parliament to the planet below matched by the track down from the snowy surface of the planet into the asylum itself; the POV shots of the Doctor as seen by Oswin (her Dalek perception one of the clues about her that Moffat hides in plain sight); the teleport area and the giant eye symbolism of Oswin's glorified chat room.

Add to this the sequences in the asylum, suitably atmospheric and packed with handheld and overhead shots, full of demented Daleks and crowned with the superb scene where Amy hallucinates and sees Daleks as people. Hurran uses a camera mount to shoot Gillan using suitably warped, surreal imagery and intercuts overhead shots of the ballet dancer with the red hair (suggesting an analogue to Amy herself) that fans out around her as she whirls round in a Dalek manner. The snowy vistas of the Sierra Nevada also provide epic value for money, boosting the show's 'quality television' status and offer an admirable scale to the production as well as a passing nod to The Empire Strikes Back and the R2D2 gag using the Dalek periscope.

The asylum sequences are by turns both impressive and disappointing. Crammed with Daleks, lit in dark browns and sepias and matched by their appropriately tense and explosive encounters with Rory and the Doctor, these scenes never quite fulfill the trade description of showing every Dalek that ever featured in the show. If you don't pay attention you'll miss what few shots there are of the 1963-89 era Daleks, including the Special Weapons Dalek, still down there recovering from its encounter with Sylvester McCoy.

Understandably, it would have been hard to give each one a passing acknowledgement but where Hurran missed a trick was in the scene where Oswin lists the Doctor's previous encounters with the Daleks now abandoned in intensive care. The images feature the bronze versions from 2005 and it would have been so much better if the list matched the Daleks in the scene, with a number of variants reflecting encounters on Exxilon, Spiridon, Vulcan and Kembel. Finally, a few words for Nicholas Briggs, whose vocal performances as the various Daleks were exceptional, and designer Michael Pickwoad whose fantastic production design, together with Hurran's visuals, made these scenes so powerful.

And so to Jenna-Louise Coleman who was the biggest surprise of the episode. It's a miracle her appearance was kept quiet by those members of press and public who saw the advance screenings in London and New York. However, I do hope she's not going to be lumbered with the moniker 'Soufflé Girl' for the rest of her incumbency in the series because that's as trite as all the other Moffat idioms and catchphrases. Can we not move on from reducing characters to 'the Legs, the Nose and Mrs Robinson' or 'the Chin' or 'chin boy' or whatever?

It's all getting as repetitive as the nano-genes, the oft-used altering of perception and the human/Dalek hybrids presented as living-dead zombies. I have no bone to pick with Coleman, who was actually very good, but when, and if, Oswin actually returns as the Clara Oswin of the forthcoming Christmas Special I would hope that the material she's given moves on from the generic 'feisty girl genius', perhaps exaggerated in Asylum of the Daleks by dint of her being a Dalek, and that the partnership with the Doctor more reflects, let's say, the combination of Romana and the Fourth Doctor.

Again, she's displaying some of the traits that Moffat tends to give his women characters, another variation of those he's been using since he started writing for the series. The use of Carmen on the soundtrack is also the equivalent of putting a big flashing neon sign up declaring this woman to be rebellious, sexually liberated and as many other similar adjectives covering female emancipation you may want to add to the list. Naturally, these are initial assumptions and it is too early to tell exactly which direction the character will take but like the red dress she wears, it's all a bit obvious and familiar to those of us who know Moffat's work on Doctor Who and from his other shows. I look forward to seeing Coleman defy these conventions as there are some very fine qualities in evidence beyond Moffat's broad prescription, found especially in the final confrontation between the Doctor and her as a Dalek that echoes the similar themes in Dalek and underlines the love/hate dichotomy explored in the rest of this story.

Overall, it's a competent return that looks and sounds great, completely fulfilling the remit that episodes this year will come across as small-screen epic movies and a great deal of that has to do with Hurran's direction of this episode. Performances are good, with Smith brushing aside that rather irritating version of the Doctor as seen in Pond Life, Gillan and Darvill effective in their melodramatic emotional confrontation in the Dalek asylum and the promising introduction of Coleman whose further appearances will decide if Oswin/Clara can overcome the tokenism of Moffat's approach to character. The idea of a companion born out of a conversion into a Dalek is very original and that is hopefully a development we will see. However, beyond the eye candy of Asylum of the Daleks, it's slim pickings as far as plot is concerned and there's a wealth of ideas and tropes here that quite honestly are simply ticking the boxes off on the Moffat formula checklist.

It's not just the divorce between the Ponds we have to worry about here, a state of affairs that can only be emotionally effective depending on your own love/hate for the characters, as there's also the parting of the ways between Doctor Who and the Daleks, a separation of two forces so historically and inextricably linked together, each defining the other, that leaves the Daleks metaphorically scratching their heads in puzzlement about that odd fella with the police box. How will they define themselves now? Hopefully, by subjugating races and planets and being particularly horrible to the universe all over again rather than spending nearly 50 minutes gazing at their own navels.

Dinosaurs on a Spaceship
BBC One HD
8th September 2012, 7.35pm 

The review contains plot spoilers.

The Doctor and the dinosaurs. It seems you can't have one without the other. If they're not jumping up and down, unconvincingly, in some Derbyshire caves during Doctor Who and the Silurians (1970), then they're popping up in London, even less convincingly realised, as part of some fiendish plot to roll back time in 1974's Invasion of the Dinosaurs. Eric Saward even dropped Adric and a spaceship on them. Dinosaurs under a spaceship, then, in Earthshock (1982). Back then, it was all very well and good for the series to tap into what has been, and continues to be, a popular and successful sub-genre - dinosaurs have been a source of cinematic fascination from the 1925 silent The Lost World (with Willis O'Brien pioneering the special effects techniques that would make King Kong and a whole raft of classic Ray Harryhausen films possible) through to the digital shenanigans of Jurassic Park (1993) and its sequels - but Doctor Who never could make men in rubber suits and rod puppets a match for sophisticated stop motion animation, animatronics, go-motion and the latest computer generated beasts. However, Letts and his fellow Doctor Who producers all had one thing in common: ambition.

Jurassic Park is often cited as the film that really crossed the special effects Rubicon, both it and Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) transformed the industry, and Doctor Who fans have wistfully looked back on the likes of Invasion of the Dinosaurs and pondered about Barry Letts' thwarted ambition, often considering a 'what if' potential re-imagining. This was probably more keenly felt when dinosaurs rampaged through a plethora of ground-breaking documentary and popular drama series, from the natural history-based approach that spanned Walking with Dinosaurs (1999) to Planet Dinosaur (2011) to the various species casually turning up as 'monster of the week' in Primeval (2007 - ).

Primeval's approach, what Charlie Brooker called 'unashamedly Saturday night populist viewing for the masses', is perhaps where Dinosaurs on a Spaceship takes its cue. This and Moffat's determination to 'write it like a movie poster. Let's do big, huge mad ideas' for the current season made the inevitable - dinosaurs and Doctor Who - closer to successful realisation.

I've discussed the influence of Spielberg and spectacular cinema on Moffat's Doctor Who before. Back when I was reviewing The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang I'd noted the use of the epic in Series 5, the way that genres were being spliced together in the first episode of that two-part story, was akin to a Bakhtian 'carnivalesque ambivalence for logic, an irreverent desire to break the rules and to cross boundaries'. Replace that with 'bonkers' or 'mad' or 'fun' or any other over used production office one word summation that's usually bandied about with Doctor Who these days. This influence affects pace, the relationship between the viewer and the image, the use of logic and chance in driving the narrative, and introduces what could be termed as 'the movie as ride' that 'can offer new and incredible visual treats in lieu of narrative innovation'. (1)

Dinosaurs on a Spaceship describes exactly what the episode, in terms of ambitious spectacle, is about. And that is one of its problems, as it too could be labelled 'Spielbergian' - implying an all encompassing accusation that action and adventure texts are both popular and debased, spectacular and manipulative. Doubtless there is nothing wrong with being popular and Doctor Who as a format surely represents Bakhtin's notion that texts are elastic, malleable and hybrid in nature. Hence, we get the mash-up of Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, a bit of Douglas Adams and Doctor Who that walks the thin line between narrative and spectacle in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship. The episode's pitch is more than adequately represented in the final moments of the pre-titles sequence when, to a triumphant burst of John Williams-esque brass, dinosaurs do indeed appear on a spaceship. About which there can be no doubt when the Doctor verbally reminds us of it, just in case we'd forgotten.

There is no denying that Dinosaurs on a Spaceship is a visual triumph. Even at the fringes of its central narrative it is often substituting images for exposition, employing a visual shorthand if you like. When the episode opens, Nefertiti's Egypt is summarised with a beautifully lit shot of the TARDIS parked in an Egyptian temple that immediately swipes upwards (the visual movement in the frame suggestive of a launch into space) to show the titular spaceship of the episode tumbling toward Earth. That image then becomes the diagnostic on a viewscreen in the command centre of the ISA in 2367. From there the Doctor and Nefertiti rush towards camera, the shot dissolving to the Doctor meeting Riddell on a moonlit African plain. It is kinetic, visual exposition to set up the larger narrative.

'how many Ponds does it take to change a light bulb'

This accumulation of the gang of adventurers in an episode prequel who will then participate in the story - the 'bonkers gang' that writer Chris Chibnall pitched to Moffat and is allegedly a 'new' thing according to the Doctor - reflects Moffat's well-worn device of using narrative shortcuts to bring characters together. Gangs are formed or characters pass messages between each other in the opening of The Pandorica Opens, are a rallying of forces in A Good Man Goes to War and the re-use of historical figures in the time-confused London of The Wedding of River Song. So, it's not 'new'. 

Nefertiti (Riann Steele) is shown as yet another of those historical names, particularly female figures, who find the Doctor an object of desire. He's 'loved' them all and left them - Elizabeth I, Madame de Pompadour and Marilyn Monroe to name a few - and one wonders when his 'babe magnet' status will finally exhaust itself. It really has become such a tired, simplistic and unnecessary aspect of the Doctor's character. If you want logic-defying characters then this is a Nefertiti that takes time machines, the year 2367, spaceships, teleports and dinosaurs - both the Jurassic and misogynistic male variations - in her stride.

She's paired with Liddell (Rupert Graves playing a not so easily disguised riff of Lord John Roxton in Conan Doyle's The Lost World and the ubiquitous Indiana Jones) so that the episode can maintain its fair share of unresolved sexual tension and innuendo. You might as well call this sample of sophistication Carry On Nefertiti as it gets to a point where, in the middle of a discussion between her and Amy about who is married to whom and with Nefertiti explaining that her current husband leaves her cold, Riddell pipes up and claims she needs an adventurous man and 'one with a very large weapon' as he brandishes a rifle. A cock joke to go with the balls joke that appears later.

It's at this juncture that the Ponds are brought into the story. Apparently, the Doctor drops in on them unannounced some ten months after their last encounter with the Daleks. I'm over the Ponds, particularly Amy. She's needfully hanging on to the Doctor long after the most interesting aspects of her character arc have been explored and analysed and, frankly, I can't wait to see the back of her.

These last five episodes to feature them are slowly evolving into an extended series of hellos and goodbyes, even though a perfectly good exit for the characters occurred in Toby Whithouse's The God Complex. Appropriately enough, in its breaking of Amy's faith in him, it was a fitting coda to her abandonment issues influenced relationship with the Doctor. No doubt this is all leading up to the most traumatic and final goodbye of all but I wish they'd get on with it and be done with the delaying tactics.

One of the problems here is that Amy is stuck in the middle of the episode's Disneyfication of characters. Her encounter with Nefertiti and Riddell is all based on how 'cool', 'awesome' and 'famous' they are as individuals, and attempting to high-five the Egyptian Queen and ignoring Riddell because he's a drunken misogynist she'd didn't learn about in school. Amy is not a nine year-old, she's an adult woman and it beggars belief she's given dialogue so trite.

The worst aspect of this writing down to the audience is the presence of the two fussy robots, who seem to have escaped from Disney's production of The Black Hole. I've no problem with Mitchell and Webb doing the voices but some of the material they've been landed with would make any nine year old demand a re-write: 'Who are you calling rusty? 'You try being on this ship for two millennia and see how your paintwork does ' are just the first lines in a series of exchanges that made my toes curl. Narrative innovation, it clearly isn't.

Personally, I'd dump the whole bally lot of them now and just keep Brian Williams as the companion. If you are looking for one of the few reasons to enjoy this episode beyond the slick visual effects, then look no further than the lovely little relationship between Rory and his dad. Never mind your Nefertiti and your Riddell, the dinosaurs and the very irritating and surplus to requirement robots, Brian is the most rounded and affecting of the characters to leave an impression on the viewer. And the relationship between father and son is visually, narratively and symbolically bookended by the simple domestic activity of replacing a light bulb. The 'how many Ponds does it take to change a light bulb' gags should be inserted here. Yeah, Brian, I think it's the fitting that's wrong here too. And writer Chris Chibnall's wobbling the ladder.

Brian's ladder incident is also a neat little barometer of the Pond marriage - 'I don't know what he said to you to make you marry him, but he's a lucky man' he informs Amy as she impresses him with her ladder securing skills. Cue the Doctor's arrival ('did you leave the back door open? asks Brian as the TARDIS back draft fills the living room) and Brian is whisked off into space and time. It's a lovely sequence and his reaction to the TARDIS and Rory's attempt to explain what exactly has happened is beautifully played by Williams and Darvill. Later, Rory also gets some great moments with Brian, particularly when Solomon shoots his dad and his nursing skills come in useful. Their interaction is the most satisfying aspect of the episode and a proper bit of character development that Chibnall manages to achieve beyond the rather obvious humour he derives from the slighter stereotypes of Nefertiti and Riddell.

'even a monkey could use them'

I particularly enjoyed Brian's remonstration with the Doctor on the beach. 'Thank you Arthur C.Clarke... we're on a spaceship with dinosaurs, why wouldn't there be a teleport. In fact, why not teleport now!' is his frustrated response when his baptism by fire as a member of the Doctor's gang starts to get to him. As Rory observes, he hates travelling and 'only goes to the paper shop and golf'. His frustration is echoed in Rory's own reactions to the Doctor too and the Doctor acknowledges both son and dad's penchant for stating the bleedin' obvious as they hear the approach of Solomon's robots.

Brian's observation of the circling Pterosaurs - 'is that a kestrel?' - is quite priceless and his practicality as a trowel-carrying, golf-ball owning dad ('it's all about the pockets in our family' as Rory observes) is second to none. This culminates with the Doctor's enquiry of 'you don't have any vegetable matter in your trousers, do you Brian?' in the encounter with the Triceratops that precipitates what is probably Doctor Who's first on screen gag about testicles.

There are dinosaurs aplenty and the Mill deserve some applause for their hard work because spectacle is not without its pleasures and there's lovely detail in some of the sequences. When the two Ankylosaurus (yes, I looked it up) rumble past the Doctor and his gang, even the TARDIS gets a bit of a knock, its rooftop lamp flickering on and off. The episode achieves its cherished goal of cinematic spectacle in various sequences; where the Doctor and his gang defy the flying hordes of Pterosaurs on a windswept beach; escape the sorry excuse for robots by riding a Triceratops and stun a gang of marauding raptors. These are exciting and technically ambitious but also function as the window dressing to the grinding gears of the episode's narrative, its locating of the plot and the moral dilemma proper that space pirate Solomon poses. 

I wish there was also a different way of getting exposition across in Doctor Who than having various characters seen reading off computer screens, especially when the point of view is from behind the graphics that the character is seeing. It's fast become a visual cliche and the equivalent of the 'look at this, Doctor' or 'what's that Doctor' of the companion's function in the Classic series. It's everywhere in this episode and readouts are plastered over Amy, Nefertiti, Riddell, the Doctor, Rory and Brian. Granted, there has to be exposition that reveals the ship, about to plunge into the Earth in 2367, is of Silurian origin and an ark sent out with a cargo of dinosaurs, but it is heavily reliant here on people peering into cameras and 'talking' to computers.

Solomon is the other reason this is worth bothering with. Or should that be David Bradley's performance, all dirt under the fingernails, seedy misanthropy and bloody minded cruelty. However, it is a full twenty minutes before we actually get to see him meet the Doctor and witness a performance from Bradley that is a masterclass in creating menace and threat from a bundle of well-worn Doctor Who tropes. He's one of the few, decently fleshed out villains, properly evil and capable of 'piracy and genocide', that the Moffat era has presented on screen. The era has often veered away from such characters, deciding instead to present evil as an abstract effect of the misunderstandings and mistakes made by morally grey individuals. Here, Solomon shoots first and asks questions later and is quite prepared to kill anyone and anything to get his way.

The encounter is somewhat marred by the Doctor's name-dropping again. This time he apparently helped Schubert out with the Fantasia in F minor. I am heartily sick of these regular claims to fame as it now seems iconic works of art and recognisable historical figures can never get by without the Doctor claiming to have stuck his oar in. What was often a source of subtle humour in the series has become a laboured character trait. We get it. He travels in time and meets lots of historical and famous figures. Don't rub our noses in it. However, that's a minor quibble in one of the better scenes in the episode when we discover that Solomon is injured and needs a doctor rather than the Doctor.

We also get further confirmation, as part of what is an on-going meme, that out there in the galaxy even the 'Argos of the universe' claims the Doctor is temporarily out of stock and doesn't exist. It's a great scene and one where Bradley manages to raise the acting stakes, consequently providing us with an equally intense Matt Smith. When Smith gets a two-hander like this then we get an acknowledgement that he doesn't necessarily need all the physical ticks and 'don't pause for breath' dialogue that are the broad brush strokes so often used to represent the current Doctor.

I like the fact that in the end, despite all the show stopping special effects and guest characters, Brian and Rory are the heroes of the story, their father and son genetic compatibility enabling them to fly the ship out of danger, despite the Doctor's rather cruel joke about the flight controls, suggesting 'even a monkey could use them - oh, look, they're going to.' If I'm being generous, then it reminds us that the Ninth Doctor and his view of humans as 'stupid apes' is still part of the Time Lord's experience of the universe.

'boisterous but rather empty stuff'

The scene is finally a brief opportunity for the Doctor to check in with Amy, with her admitting her inability to settle is because she's always listening out for 'that stupid TARDIS sound' even though she actually claims that she has given up waiting for him. Pointedly, there's a moment of foreshadowing here as she tells him that she worries something will happen to him and he'll never turn up again. 'You'll be there till the end of me,' he assures her but she jokily responds, 'or vice versa'. That joke, as inappropriate as the one about Rory and Brian, is given space to sink in, both characters looking at each other, almost registering they know the end is getting near. A lovely, quiet, introspective moment in the noise of the episode.

That noise is of course the pleasure of the visual effects on display and the build towards the episode's climax. Director Saul Metzstein's swiping motions across the frame between scenes, seen in the pre-titles, is most effectively employed in the gunfight with the raptors that segues into Rory and Brian's attempt to pilot the ship away from Earth. It's a pacy style that's appropriate to an episode trading on the epic action film's immersive qualities and one which rides the tension between our astonishment at visual effects and then our realisation that they are in fact effects created as a product of technology, best expressed as 'the oscillation between emotion and reason' we experience as a viewer. (2)  It also translates as a gaming experience for the characters, sharing their task as if in a MMORPG, whereupon the skills employed to drive the ship also allow Brian to understand that 'it's better than golf.' 

What's equally interesting is that the Doctor actually adds to the death count and specifically sets up Solomon's ship as the target. He warns Solomon, 'I don't respond well to violence' and is as good as his word on this occasion even though he attacks Solomon for judging him by his own standards of trying to turn a quick profit from the misfortune of others. A thoroughly nasty piece of work is blown up by the missiles launched from Earth, deliberately so by the Doctor. It's very rare that the Doctor acts out of anger but it has not been uncharacteristic or uncommon in the past for him to get his hands dirty. It will no doubt reignite the debate about the Doctor's morality and use of violence.

The episode is crowned with perhaps its best moment. Brian sitting in the doorway of the TARDIS looking down on the Earth in wonderment, with his flask and sarnies. It is a poetic image that reminds us, Amy and Rory why we travel with the Doctor. And looking at the expressions on the Doctor's face as he looks at the couple in the TARDIS doorway tells us all we need to know about the impending conclusion to the Ponds travels in time and space. Dinosaurs on a Spaceship should end there or with the scene back in the Ponds house where Rory has become his dad, a figure now absent and inspired by the Doctor to travel the world, and he agrees that, after all, 'it is the fitting' that's important in his domestic relationship with Amy. We are left to wonder what tragedy might disturb this conformity.

Dinosaurs on a Spaceship is a schizophrenic episode, burdened by its responsibility to the movie poster tagline, the duty of delivering said creatures in a realistic and exciting manner while attempting to develop characters. The dinosaurs are splendid but they have arrived in an era when other documentaries and dramas can deliver them by the dozen and, good as the set pieces are, they end up as the side dish to a lukewarm main course where character development and the emotional power of drama should have president. The script is populated by guest characters often given situations and dialogue that children's drama would find risible. Riddell, Nefertiti and the robots are weak contrivances. The narrative is only made bearable by the central relationship between Rory and his father and the performances from Mark Williams and Arthur Darvill are natural, warm and funny. David Bradley also makes for a terrific villain and works wonders with the material he's given. Bar a couple of excellent and dramatic scenes, this is boisterous but rather empty stuff.

(1) Martin Flanagan, 'The Chronotope in Action', Action and Adventure Cinema
(2) Stephen Prince, Digital Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality

Lawrence Gordon Clark's next venture into adapting M.R. James, Lost Hearts (tx: 25/12/73), saw a number of changes in production. The BBC's drama department, noting the success of the 'Ghost Stories for Christmas' when A Warning to the Curious attracted nine million viewers in 1972, suggested to BBC1 controller, Paul Fox, that their department should be responsible for production of these films rather than them originating from within General Features. To this end, 'basically, what happened was the films were taken over by them and Rosemary Hill was assigned to produce them,' notes Clark. (1)

Hill had accrued a substantial track record at the BBC as a producer, her most recent production being an adaptation of Alice Through the Looking Glass, also transmitted on Christmas Day 1973, and she would continue to have a significant influence on the development of the annual ghost stories and work as a producer at the BBC and ITV well into the late 1980s. Clark recalls 'I walked across Shepherds Bush from my office at Kensington House to the Television Centre and met my new colleagues' and where he found Hill to be 'a very intelligent, funny and altogether lovely person.' (2)

It was agreed that he would continue to direct the adaptations but that a screenwriter and a script editor would now be brought on board to handle the adapting process. Clark retained the services of his cinematographer John McGlashan and sound recordist Dick Manton, both of whom had made significant contributions to the look and feel of the previous two films he had written and directed. Although the resources of the drama department were now at his disposal and he was blessed with a slight increase in budget, he only had 12 days to shoot Lost Hearts compared to the 18 he had for A Warning to the Curious. He also notes in the introduction on this DVD that any additional money was allocated to the paying of writers and script editors that the films now employed.

Hill turned to Robin Chapman to write the screenplay for Lost Hearts, one of the earliest M.R. James stories and presented to the members of the Chit Chat Club on 28 October 1893. As Simon Farquhar notes, Chapman de-clutters the original James story and embellishes much of the script with multiple hauntings and a slightly different ending, turning it into 'a straightforward, pacey tale' where, in contrast to the long-anticipated reveal of other filmed stories, the ghosts 'appear even before the first minute of screen time has elapsed.' (3)

Chapman had gained a considerable reputation with a number of crime dramas created, written and produced at Granada Television. Three of these were discreetly linked together by a number of recurring characters - The Man in Room 17 (1965-66), The Fellows (1967) and Spindoe (1968) - but Big Breadwinner Hog (1969), and its controversial gangland violence, was probably his most memorable and innovative work made at Granada. His skills as an adaptor of Huxley's Eyeless in Gaza (BBC 1971) had also presumably impressed Hill when they came to work together in 1973 on A Picture of Katherine Mansfield, a BBC drama series that was part biography and part adaptation of Mansfield's short stories.

It's clear from interviews that Clark found the new production regime a bit of an imposition and saw the restrictions it brought with it as anathema to the director's vision he had so carefully forged on the previous films. Although he and Hill had their disagreements, mainly over when the script was locked down, he acknowledges that, 'They also became tighter, because they were now scripted by well established writers and then put before a script editor.' (4) It's certainly born out by the running times of the three films on this disc which all come in at roughly 30 minutes compared to the 50 minutes lavished on A Warning to the Curious.

Shooting took place in Lincolnshire during the Autumn  of 1973, in and around the Georgian splendour of Harrington Hall (to represent the Aswarby Hall of the original story) with its 'wonderful drawing room and staircase and a very creepy attic and corridor that suited perfectly for the story'. (5) He also explored and used locations on the Fens and the Wolds and found the cupola and its stained glass domed roof not far from the Harrington Hall location.

Clark used the season's weather and light as an appropriate accompaniment, with the low sun and the early morning dew and mist offering ample opportunities to enhance the images he, John McGlashan and designer Don Taylor set out to capture. This included getting the crew up at 4.00am to try and get a shot at sunrise of the coach bringing the orphan Stephen to his uncle's house only to discover the sun was hidden by a blanket of mist which in the end proved to be just as fortuitous.  

Hill cast Joseph O'Connor as Mr. Abney, another of James's bachelor scholars whose deeds, as Robert Lloyd Parry indicates in the DVD booklet, might well have been inspired by James's own researches and translation of the Life of William of Norwich, detailing the ritual murder of a 12 year old boy in 1144. O'Connor and Clark decided that they would give the character a manic quality inspired by Robert Wiene's Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920) and its featured performance and appearance of Werner Krauss as the titular owner of the cabinet. 

Clark and McGlashan establish the story's link with the landscape

One of the period's most respected and busiest of child actors, Simon Gipps-Kent, who died tragically young at the age of 28 from a morphine overdose, was contracted to play nephew Stephen. Clark comments on his affinity with child actors in the introduction on this DVD, their lack of self-consciousness and preparedness to experiment and invent, and this enables him to get a very convincing and assured performance from Gipps-Kent and a notable unearthliness from the two children playing the revenge-seeking ghosts, despite the somewhat theatrical nature of their appearances. 

The film opens with the beautifully atmospheric emergence of the coach and horses from the morning mist. This establishes Clark's interest in Stephen's point of view as he is driven towards the estate of Uncle Abney. He intercuts Stephen's POV of the fields and of a brief vision of the two ghostly children waving at him, a foreshadowing of their purpose in the story and of Stephen's potential fate. The coachman's reply of 'only a step, don't lose heart' to his enquiry of how much further they have to go also provides a blackly comic hint of this.

Most important is Clark's and McGlashan's desire to establish the story's link with the landscape, a strong presence that endures throughout the film and provides an evocative connection between childhood, the supernatural and the environment. Clark transforms the boundless but empty gardens and fields into something of an antipastoral, representative 'of the dislocation of childhood, children severed from the world of adults, or the child part of the adult from a more acceptable adult self.' (6) It is a fertile place where children might innocently play but where they also become the unwitting victims of a man who dabbles in ritual sacrifice to recapture youth and even seek immortality.

Indeed, it is with childish glee that Abney greets Stephen, with the camera circling round both figures and Abney's shadow briefly and symbolically passing over Stephen's face as he declares him an 'excellent boy'. When Stephen meets the housekeeper, Mrs Bunch (a gorgeous performance from Welsh actress Susan Richards), she informs him that despite Abney's status as an old bachelor 'he's very partial to children'. There are also many scenes where Clark establishes the boundaries between the experiences and knowledge of the adult and the child, the intense borderline between generations that the film explores.

Abney thirsts for knowledge of the old world and wishes for his own work to live on and we see from Stephen's point of view, in a series of very brief intercuts, that he has surrounded himself with the esoteric paraphernalia of the occult - a statue of Arimanius, the lion-headed Mithraic God of the Dark who holds the keys to heaven, is seen on Abney's desk and Mithraic astrological symbols hang on a wall.

Abney seems to be, on the surface, a larger than life eccentric and O'Connor's performance not only fills the screen to bursting point but he also rather cleverly understands when to pull back on the eye-rolling and manic disposition to reveal something far more sinister beneath. As he looks out of the window at Stephen, he is already mapping out a destiny for the boy, putting him 'out to grass' as it were, until the appointed hour.

The establishing shot of the house and its environs is one that Clark repeats throughout the film and he couples this with a number of extraordinarily beautiful images as Stephen explores the grounds and discovers the cupola. In the cupola there is a sense of Stephen's fate, and the fates of two other children who stayed with Abney that Mrs Bunch told him about, caught in the stained glass of the roof with its throngs of cherubic angels frozen in the morning light suggesting a Christian alternative to the demonic heaven of Mithras that Abney subscribes to.

Heaven is also mentioned several times in the story. When Stephen is reprimanded for the deep scratches made on a wall and he enquires of Abney what could have made them, he is informed that 'there are more things in heaven or earth' responsible for the damage. Later, with doubt creeping in about his guardian, Stephen asks Mrs Bunce whether Abney is 'a good man' and if he 'will go to heaven'. It again reminds us of the the cupola and its stained glass angels where Stephen is first properly aware of the presence of Giovanni and Phoebe (Christopher Davies and Michelle Foster), the boy and girl he saw from the coach and who now haunt the grounds.

After Stephen glimpses them at the cupola, laughter and exaggerated footsteps reverberate on the soundtrack and Clark cuts from the audience's view to Stephen's point of view with a hand-held track round the cupola. Viewers of Clark's previous films will be well aware of how he, McGlashan and Minton use quick cutting, point of view camerawork and densely mixed sound to 'create' their hauntings. Stephen continues to see them in reflections and, after climbing a tree, he briefly encounters Phoebe. Clark associates these ghosts with earthly elements such as water, trees and sunlight, as spiritual manifestations of nature where landscape is both the repository of our fears, is alien and disturbing, but also holds regenerative and restorative powers. This is suggested in the later sequence when Stephen is out flying his kite and the landscape, inhabited by the ghosts, whispers to him, accompanied by quick cuts to fields and trees.

'I was never sure if we got Lost Hearts right.' 

Mrs Bunce also emphasises this idea in her recollection, typically as a Jamesian narrator telling a tale at the fireside to Stephen, of how Abney met both children, both of whom seem to be wanderers freely roaming the countryside. Folk song and music feature heavily on the soundtrack, from horn pipes and whistles to the strangely discordant hurdy-gurdy that becomes the overriding theme for the ghosts. As Helen Wheatley notes of the film: 'Music becomes a vital tool for the creation of an eerie atmosphere and is constantly tied to the appearance of the supernatural.' (7) The flashback also includes a use of silhouetted figures placed against the landscape that Clark repeats in the film as the ghosts return to the Hall to haunt Stephen and then to kill Abney. 

There is a wonderfully playful shot that underlines much of the film's subtext about nature, landscape and the sudden appearance and disappearance of innocent children within it. A pair of garden shears looms into frame and appears to almost slice off the head of a stone cherub standing in the garden as Abney, humming contentedly on the soundtrack, takes cuttings from his plants. 'Borage... exhilarates the heart' claims Abney, adding yet more heart symbolism to the story. As he greets Stephen and babbles about the boy's fantastical explorations, Stephen is distracted by a scraping sound and turns to see the two ghosts starring out from a window at the top of the house.

Clark builds up the mystery and suggests that these spirits are benign to Stephen, are there to warn him. Their movement of bringing a finger to their lips as a plea of silence about their presence is in parallel to Abney's secret pact with Stephen. Clark also fully reveals their forms which is quite unusual for these films, their terrors reticently emanating from mere glimpses or suggestions of the uncanny rather than the full blown manifestations Clark goes for here.

Caught indistinctly in silhouette at the cupola, followed by shots of them looking down on the Hall and waiting in the grounds, Clark then has them slowly appear at a window to the accompaniment of chanting and whispering. He emphasises their talons in close up, intercuts their point of view and allows the sound of the hurdy-gurdy to dominate Giovanni's hypnotic effect on Stephen. This culminates in the film's major reveal, a rather bloodcurdling scene where Stephen, and the audience, understand the meaning of the story's title. Gipps-Kent is particularly good at realising the boy's terror.

The hurdy-gurdy is also a symbol of the rejection of this old man. Clark composes a shot where Abney looms high above it as he retrieves what he sees as a troublesome reminder of his past indiscretions, leaps back in fear at the sight of the two ghosts tapping at the window and then, using a very uncanny tracking shot, where just the neck of the instrument (fashioned into a head) dangles into frame, disposes of it on the fire. Abney refers to this in his observational journal as 'some annoyance may be experienced from the psychic portion of the subjects... where they can command the allegiance of... material objects.'

Unlike many of the earlier Clark films, this positions James's reticent terrors within the abjection of horror cinema, where imagery of the soulless body, the corpse, blood and and body parts create a two fold reaction: a perverse pleasure in this visual presentation and, simultaneously, a desire to reject it. As Clark notes: 'I was never sure if we got Lost Hearts right. I worried that we saw too much of the ghosts, when I was well aware of the power of suggestion'. (8) The use of visceral horror perhaps also underlines Stephen's unconscious rejection of the unstable 'father' figure of Abney, suspecting of both what he does to children and what this warped adult masculinity has in store for him. Note that it is the comfort of Mrs Bunch that Stephen seeks after this shock rather than his father in absentia. It also taps into the fears that children have of the old and the many psychological defences that they array against them as the more the elderly remind them of their mortality, the more they become potent reminders of oncoming sickness and death.

Clark denies the oft-made reading that the film is about child abuse and claims he wouldn't have made it if he felt that was the sub-text. He rather sees it as 'about the monsters that children fear' and 'one of the great nightmares that your father or mother may turn into an ogre or a witch'. (9) At the same time Peter Hutchings sees the instability of the father figure and the family as a common theme in horror films of the mid 1970s. Within such titles as The Creeping Flesh (1973), And Now The Screaming Starts (1973) and Demons of the Mind (1972), he suggests, 'these films often concentrate on the difficult relationships between fathers and their children, with the father often seen as preventing his children from becoming adults.' (10)

Abney is constantly reminding Stephen that he is 'a big boy, nearly 12' but not yet a man. He must remain a child, and a virgin one suspects, in order for the ritual to have full potency. The implication of child abuse is difficult to assuage when one of the most uncomfortable scenes in the film shows Abney violently forcing Stephen to drink a glass of drugged port and sees Abney rip open the boy's shirt ready to receive 'the finest birthday gift' of a sacrificial blade, a secret that he and Stephen must keep as 'between men'. The film ends with Abney's disenfranchised ghost children turning his power against him, symbolised in the startling shot in silhouette of their talons wresting the ritual blade from his grasp and then, from his point of view, closing in on him for the kill as their chanting, whispering and the hurdy-gurdy fills the soundtrack. It's a disturbing end to a rather unnerving, often strikingly beautiful 35 minutes even if it doesn't quite resemble the more sedate ending of James's story.

'... a typically mischievous Bowen subplot involving fake mediums and gullible old ladies' 

The Treasure of Abbot Thomas (tx: 23/12/74) boasts a screenplay that was adapted from M.R. James' story of 1904 by John Bowen, a seasoned television writer with credits on The Power Game (1965-69), ITV Play of the Week (1955-68), Mystery and Imagination (1966-70), The Guardians (1971) and Dead of Night (1972). Much to Clark's regret, the original location of Germany and, in particular, the sunken well and its steps featured in the story went unrealised because of the budget and he found alternative locations closer to home for the film in Wells Cathedral and its close.

Bowen, 'a marvellous writer who understood James'  worked with Clark's choice of locale despite their 'little tiffs' but he also refashioned much of the original story, embellishing it with elements that purists were unhappy about, according to Clark. (11) These included 'bringing in a typically mischievous Bowen subplot involving fake mediums and gullible old ladies and introducing a protégé for the inquisitive academic' Somerton, as played by the great Michael Bryant. (12) 

Wells Cathedral provided an excellent base once Clark had placated its Dean, still smarting from the criticism levelled at him by the Friends of Wells when they discovered he had allowed Pasolini to shoot an orgy sequence in its cloisters for The Canterbury Tales (1972). Clark was able, via John McGlashan's impressive camerawork and lighting, to imbue 'a benign place' with an appropriately malevolent atmosphere when shooting took place there, in the Autumn of 1974, and at the Orchardleigh House and Estate in Frome to represent the Dattering's home and Graveley church. He was also inspired by a particular cowled gargoyle figure on the roof of Wells to specify, for the film, the location of the treasure to Reverend Somerton (Michael Bryant) and Lord Peter Dattering (Paul Lavers in a quietly impressive performance). 

Bryant's casting was a bit of a coup and it was Rosemary Hill that persuaded him to play the part of Reverend Somerton. He was primarily a stage actor, described by the Guardian as 'a pillar of the National Theatre' and 'a rock-solid company man who always gave of his best', but he also had some memorable film television performances to his credit. These included his performance in one of Clark's favourites, John Hopkins' Talking to a Stranger (1966), lead roles in a number of BBC dramas such as Roads to Freedom (1972) and Nigel Kneale's celebrated The Stone Tape (1972) and guest roles in Colditz (1972) and Fall of Eagles (1974).

With The Treasure of Abbot Thomas Clark again establishes landscape and architecture as a key motif of the film during the title sequence before engaging in the histrionics of a seance. Peter Dattering, watching sardonically from the sidelines 'is a presence which is hostile to a manifestation' and this prompts him to invite the academic rationalist Somerton to the next seance. The sole purpose of this is to reveal it to be a sham, to prove that the supernatural is just the irrational obsession of the chattering classes.

There's a lovely sequence at Wells, where he and Dattering explore the library and Clark uses his point of view motif to track Somerton as he walks through the corridors and past shelves of books, looking back into the camera as he converses with his friend. It's here that we learn that the two men have become interested in the fabled gold hidden in the monastery by the alchemist Abbot Thomas. The story slowly evolves into a treasure hunt dictated by the clues noted down by the Abbot.

The pairing of Somerton and Dattering is often visualised in long tracking shots of them pacing through the library, through the grounds or in hand-held point of view shots as they mount the steps to the roof of the cathedral. As Clark notes in his DVD introduction, there are also little glimpses of a cowled figure in some of the library scenes that suggest the Abbot may already be waiting to spring his trap. It's a wickedly subtle bit of manipulation that's fitting in a film that, like A Warning to the Curious, is concerned with perception, of seeing and understanding what is hidden in plain sight.

As Somerton takes tea with the ladies and Mr and Mrs Tyson (Frank Mills and Sheila Dunn), the charlatan mediums, Bowen's script and Clark's direction turn this confrontation with 'the higher silliness' of spiritualist gatherings into a witty but rather black drawing room comedy. At the same time, this scene also sets Somerton up as the disdainful Jamesian scholar, an advocate of Christianity as a rational system of belief and full of his own hubris and greed, destined for one almighty fall.

Clark makes much of the rituals of tea and cake (it's apparently indulgent and sinful to go for the petits fours rather than the slab cake), tracking a proffered cup of tea around the circle of guests by way of introductions and Somerton's arrogant depreciation of them. He puts the fear of God into the Tysons by suggesting their dabbling with the spirit world would have had them burnt at the stake in the period of history he is studying. It's all beautifully played by Bryant, Mills and Dunn and very funny.

The seance again displays Clark's visual embellishments - a stunning overhead shot of their hands and the reflections of their faces in a metal bowl, a circular symbol that is repeated later in the lens of a camera, a code-breaking wheel and the burst of the suns rays from between the trees and finally beyond the silhouette of the avenging Abbot Thomas. The camera also circles the faces of the seance's participants, under lit and framed in deep black. The overhead shot also prefigures many of the later views from the roof of the Cathedral as the two men locate the treasure or, in the conclusion, where a frightened Somerton, immobilised in his bath chair, is seen from high above in the centre of a driveway that forms a gigantic cross. It is a final reminder that while he cleaves to his Christian rationalism it will not protect him from vengeful otherworldly forces.

While Somerton debunks the Tysons there is, in contrast, a brief close up of Dattering and the suggestion that a communication from the Abbot is heard by him alone, a whispering invitation to fall into the trap of misplaced pride and arrogance. Dick Manton is back working his magic on the sound mix and he puts together some unearthly noises and voices for the production that culminate in the sickly wet sounds for the slime creature that Somerton eventually releases from the treasure's hiding place.

'flapping his academics gown at the camera while grimacing in affrighted panic.'

As the two men begin to assemble the clues, Clark and Bowen again add to James's original by reflecting the discourse about the effects of technology on the late Victorian era and the borderlines between science and the supernatural. 'I thought you were all for science,' Dattering asks Somerton while he photographs the stained glass windows where they locate the Abbot's clues. This process reveals another hidden clue that can only have been discovered through the medium of photography despite Somerton's verdict that 'photography does not yet to seem to me to have become an exact science' and that, tellingly, 'I've seen too many blank plates.'

Bowen's version of James's story is the epitome of the hybridisation of ghost and detective fictions of the period, Conan Doyle in particular, as well as a nod to the prevalence of spirit photography to suggest that 'something invisible could somehow materialise visibly on the sensitive plate of the camera'. (13) The camera is also highly symbolic of the film's themes - the paradoxes of superstition and science - and an instrument capable of recording evidence of both the rational and the uncanny.

Running through the film are more of Clark's visual relationships with elements and nature. The Abbot's clues are located in the 'church on the water' and the two men are briefly depicted as tiny figures in the natural landscape and, similarly, seen from the air, to be lost in the vastness of the cathedral's grounds, a representation of the Abbot's clue 'he looks down from on high to what is revealed'.

Somerton's ascent to the roof of the cathedral also precipitates a frantically shot and edited elemental attack, prefigured earlier in a very brief shot of 'something' flying past the stained glass windows they are investigating, but here rationalised as an encounter with a flock of crows. Clark created this sequence out of the simple effect of Bryant 'flapping his academics gown at the camera while grimacing in affrighted panic.' (14)

As Simon Farquhar notes, Somerton's quip 'Your Mr Sludge is quite discomforted' directed at the embarrassed Mr Tyson, the fraudulent spiritualist, also 'comes back to haunt Somerton' when he explores the earthy tunnel beneath the cathedral close. He wades through water, past walls glistening with slime and peppered with slugs, to find the location of the treasure is guarded by a 'Mr Sludge' of a very different kind. Clark again cleverly pre-empts the black slime that oozes under Somerton's door in two earlier scenes, with his accidental knocking over of a bottle of black ink that spreads over the plans of the stained glass and Dattering's scraping away of the black paint that obscures the Abbot's cryptogram on the glass.

Finally, this is the first of Clark's films to have a specially commissioned score and Geoffrey Burgon rises to the occasion magnificently with his mixture of organ, plainsong, counter-tenor, percussion and weird noises, generated by bicycle chains apparently. His score adds a palpable dimension of unease and disquiet. There are some beautifully shot scenes of Somerton walking through the cloisters, the moonlight breaking through and casting long shadows, and the excavation in the tunnel, the 'church under the water' as it were, that are even eerier because of Burgon's music. 

The quick cutting used in the rooftop attack comes in handy later when, as Clark points out, there was little time to ensure that the emergence of the slimy guardian was achieved more effectively, and the loathsome, slimy thing could only be suggested through the editing and shooting. For all its simplicity, the sequence is still unnerving, dropping in subliminal images of a grimacing face reflected in the water in the tunnel, of slime covered fingers caught in Somerton's hair and mixing them with Dick Manton's soundtrack of slapping and sucking noises, screams and Burgon's counter-tenors. A truly disturbing moment in a tightly constructed story, precisely filmed and edited, boasting an exceptional performance from Michael Bryant.

Rudkin's themes of transgressive sexuality, mythology, nationality, the supernatural and landscape... 

A year later and Lawrence Gordon Clark was back on BBC1 with The Ash Tree (tx: 23/12/75) and this time working with writer David Rudkin on what would be his final M.R. James adaptation for the BBC. Rudkin's work had spanned theatre and television and he had been exploring the themes of transgressive sexuality, mythology, nationality, the supernatural and landscape in many of his works for theatre, beginning with the success of Afore Night Come at the RSC in 1962. That play followed the growing tensions, frustrations and suppressed hatreds among a group of seasonal labourers working at a Bromsgrove fruit-farm for the pear harvest. As the day wears on there is violence and bloodshed and Rudkin employs a sub-text that dwells on themes of fertility and paganism.

His first television play, The Stone Dance, transmitted as ITV's 'Play of the Week' (24/9/63), also explored repressed sexuality, ancient landscapes and oppressive religious beliefs. It was his 'Play for Today', Penda's Fen (BBC 21/3/74) that alerted Clark to his talents. Time Out London included Penda's Fen in its 2011 survey of the 100 best British films and summarised it as: 'A multi-layered reading of contemporary society and its personal, social, sexual, psychic and metaphysical fault lines. Fusing Elgar’s ‘Dream of Gerontius’ with a heightened socialism of vibrantly localist empathy, and pagan belief systems with pre-Norman histories and a seriously committed – and prescient – ecological awareness.'

The Ash Tree centres on the curse placed on Sir Matthew Fell, who sends a local woman, Mrs Mothersole, to hang for alleged witchcraft. The sins of the ancestor manifest on Fell's heir, Sir Richard and his stricken estate where the ask tree outside his bedroom window produces nightmarish creatures that invade his sleeping hours.

Clark's shoot, again with John McGlashan behind the camera, was complicated by the frustrations of finding suitable locations. The original story was set in Suffolk and finding a manor house with an ash tree of the required size was next to impossible. Finally, Clark shot the sequences featuring the tree in his own garden in Bokelly, Cornwall, and this enabled the crew to create a platform in the ash tree outside his farmhouse big enough for the extensive filming, stunt and visual effects work required. He complimented this with exteriors and interiors filmed at Prideaux Place near Padstow, which had 'a wonderful dark oak room with carved wooden figures and beautiful parkland to film the rest of the story.' (15)

The film opens with an extended sequence that heralds the arrival of Sir Richard Fell at his estate and as the new Squire of Castringham. His ride through open country is the first of many sequences that enshrine landscape and the natural world, its fecundity in particular, at the centre of the film. The servants line up and greet him, Clark using point of view to emphasise their acknowledgement that this is the heir to Sir Matthew's estate. However, a child seems to understand something of Matthew's taint that eventually eclipses Richard's boundless energy as he transforms the house and the narrative's gradual slippage between past and present. In voice over we hear the servants gossiping about 'the new Sir Matthew' and his apparent status as bachelor resonating with the film's revelation that Richard and Matthew are, in essence, a continuation of the same person cursed by Mistress Mothersole.

Clark reigns in his visual talents in this adaptation and even though it is a very competently unsettling drama, it misses the ambiguity of previous tales, where connections and contrasts are made through images. What holds this together is Edward Petherbridge's intense performance as the film casually slips back and forth in time, between Matthew's first sexually charged encounter with Mothersole (Barbara Ewing) and Richard's slow decline under her chilling curse, 'mine shall inherit'. Her declaration echoes over the climax of the film, appropriately attached to an image of the Fell estate.

Despite his best endeavours to eradicate the malign influence of his ancestor Matthew - making alterations to the house; filling it with rather dubious erotic art; dreaming of adding an Italianate entrance to the hall and planning a life of future contentment and offspring with Lady Augusta (Lalla Ward in a pre-Doctor Who appearance) - he eventually succumbs to the 'uncle to uncle' inheritance of blighted farmlands and barren bachelorhood.

Sound mixer Dick Manton, in lieu of any music scoring the film, creates a febrile atmosphere of echoing and whispering voices emerging from the depths of time to taunt Richard; exaggerates the scraping of trees against windows and the cracking of branches and suggests something unearthly living in the ash tree outside the window through a pulsing noise mixed with the mewling of babies.

Clark supplements these hauntings with silhouetted figures, with Mothersole's execution and ultimately with glimpses of her progeny seeking revenge on Richard. The slippage between Matthew and Richard is wonderfully conveyed and the evocative use of memory and flashback can often take the viewer unawares. When we see Richard attempting to sleep one night, he observes Mothersole sitting in the ash tree and suddenly, through dialogue, we realise that he is in fact Matthew bearing witness to her flight through the trees and, through an abrupt cut to stock footage, her metamorphosis into a hare.

The ancient powers of the land are evoked both by placing tiny human figures against the splendour of woodland and coast and by Richard's fatal attempt, as a 'pestilent innovator', to clear Mothersole's grave from the churchyard when he plans extensions to the church to house a new family pew. There's a very effective sequence when Richard discusses this with Dr Croome (Preston Lockwood) and his present thoughts about the grave meld into Matthew's sentencing of Mothersole. 'The lady has to die' is overlapped with 'she must be removed' as time folds in on itself.

That the sacred burial should be respected is made clear when Croome tells Richard that Mothersole's place in the churchyard was a bequest of the farmers on the estate. There is here some kinship with the themes of ancient beliefs and their overturning of rationalism in Kneale's Quatermass and the Pit, where this 'disruption of the church buildings, the shaking of their foundations, and the staging of dramatic events within their aged stones signifies a moment of crisis in the nature of the beliefs to which they stand as a monument'. (16)

'lust and loathing' 

'Mothersole' is equated with 'mother's soul' or 'mother's hole' here, suggesting a pagan Goddess' regeneration in connection with the land (the ash tree drains all the goodness out of the house), the issuing of new life from her/its body (the life draining progeny she gives birth to in the tree) and then unleashes on male power in the form of Matthew and Richard. The curse clearly originates from his ancestor's punishment of an attractive young woman who forces him to deny the sexual longings that are anathema to his controlling and puritanical upbringing.

That god-fearing connection is also reinforced by another character, Dr Croome, who spans the two eras of the Fell dynasty - the scourge of the witchfinders and the reforming zeal of more enlightened times. There's a beautifully shot sequence where Croome and Richard walk across the coastline, the sea glittering behind them, and reflect on Matthew's strange demise and the supernatural effects of the ash tree.

The imagery of the torture and execution here is evocative of films with a similar theme such as Witchfinder General (1968) and Blood on Satan's Claw (1970) and, similarly, Mothersole is 'a martyr of the old beliefs, sacrificed to the rigid and controlling ideology of the new, dominant religion'. (17) The added realism here comes from Clark's use of point of view shots as Matthew observes her treatment by the witchfinder and bears witness to her transgressions.

She is a victim of Matthew's 'lust and loathing' that Clark describes in his introduction, and her persecution is seen in contemporary context of religious bigotry, but Clark also underlines that for James, she is also a supernatural being, 'a malign and evil woman who could bring huge spiders out of trees and kill people' and he remains unsure if he and Rudkin departed from that conception to the detriment of the film. 

The denouement of the film, where Richard's lack of sleep drives him to spend a night in Matthew's room, is revoltingly macabre. Clark was impressed with John Friedlander's visual effects to create the horrific, hairy, baby-faced spiders that scuttle out of the tree but still felt that 'we maybe dwelt too long on those' and 'the longer something is actually on the screen the less effective it is.' (18) Friedlander would have been more familiar to Doctor Who viewers, having created the memorable Draconian masks for Frontier in Space (1973) and the original Davros make-up for Genesis of the Daleks (1973) but between 1967 and 1976 he also supplied visual effects to Doomwatch, Dad's Army, Jackanory and I, Claudius. The creatures for The Ash Tree are sparingly seen, hinting at rolling eyes and sharp teeth and, combined with Dick Manton's sound effects of babies crying and suckling, the sequence of their possession of Richard is certainly one of the most memorable moments in television horror of the period.

The ambiguous flavour of James's reticent horror, brilliantly captured in Clark's earlier films, is further undercut by this ending. After the spiders drain Richard's body, the tree burns down and a gnarled, ancient skeleton is discovered in its roots, its position suggesting the throes of childbirth. None of this explicit detail is in the James original. 'All of this is Rudkin translating James. None of the horror of birth and sex is present in such explicit and disturbing form in the story' as Jez Winship notes and this adds a completely new dimension to the adaptations.
____________________________________________________________

(1) Simon Farquhar, Lawrence Gordon Clark profile, DVD booklet, Ghost Stories
(2) Simon Farquhar, Ghosts of Christmas Past, Sight and Sound archive
(3) Simon Farquhar, Lawrence Gordon Clark profile, DVD booklet, Ghost Stories
(4) Ibid
(5) Lawrence Gordon Clark, Introduction to Lost Hearts, Lawrence Gordon Clark's Ghost Stories for Christmas. 
(6) Roni Natov, The Poetics of Childhood
(7) Helen Wheatley, Gothic Television
(8) Simon Farquhar, Lawrence Gordon Clark profile, DVD booklet, Ghost Stories
(9) Lawrence Gordon Clark, Introduction to Lost Hearts, BFI DVD 
(10) Peter Hutchings, Hammer and Beyond - The British Horror Film
(11) Lawrence Gordon Clark, Introduction to The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, BFI DVD 
(12) Simon Farquhar, Ghosts of Christmas Past, Sight and Sound archive
(13) Hilary Grimes, The Late Victorian Gothic: Mental Science, the Uncanny, and Scenes of Writing
(14) Lawrence Gordon Clark, Introduction to The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, Lawrence Gordon Clark's Ghost Stories for Christmas.
(15) Lawrence Gordon Clark, Introduction to The Ash Tree, Lawrence Gordon Clark's Ghost Stories for Christmas.

About the transfers
Lost Hearts, The Treasure of Abbot Thomas and The Ash Tree were all supplied to the BFI as standard definition transfers. Shot on 16mm they are often soft and grainy but this is commensurate with that particular format. The contrast on all the films can vary but for the most part these are clean images, certainly not as dirty as the transfer of A Warning to the Curious and betraying only the odd speckle. Perhaps of the three, The Ash Tree is the weakest of the transfers with a little more dirt and sparkle on the image and an intermittent lack of contrast. Colour and detail are often good and I didn't detect much difference from the versions aired by BBC4 back in 2004 and 2005. 

Special Features
No sign of further editions of Ghost Stories for Christmas with Christopher Lee (BBC 2000) and its adaptation of The Ash Tree would have been a welcome bonus here. However, we do get plenty of anecdotes from director Lawrence Gordon Clark to open each film.

Introduction to Lost Hearts by Lawrence Gordon Clark (10:50)
Clark chats about the transition of the films from the documentary to the drama department of the BBC under the aegis of producer Rosemary Hill. He talks about the production, shooting on location with John McGlashan, casting and working with child actors. 
Introduction to The Treasure of Abbot Thomas by Lawrence Gordon Clark (10:39)
He talks about Bowen's adaptation, looking for appropriate locations and using the gargoyles on the roof of Wells to inspire the story, the decision to start the film with the fake medium scene and provide Somerton with a companion and using Geoffrey Burgon as the film's composer.
Introduction to The Ash Tree by Lawrence Gordon Clark (8:05)
Clark recalls the building of the camera platform in the ash tree at his farmhouse, the visual effects created for the film and the differences between Rudkin's interpretation of Mothersole and the original character in the James story.
Booklet
This features new essays on all three films each by horror writer Ramsey Campbell, Alex Davidson and Dick Fiddy; a biography of M.R. James; more of Simon Farqhar's profile of Clark and the films and Robert Lloyd Parry's look at the locations that James used in his stories.

Ghost Stories: Classic adaptations from the BBC Volume 3
BFI DVD Released 17 September 2012 BFIVD961 Cert 12

Lost Hearts (1973)
UK / colour / 34:51 / English / DVD9 / 1.33:1 / Dolby Digital mono audio 320kbps
The Treasure of Abbot Thomas (1974)
UK / colour / 36:50 / English / DVD9 / 1.33:1 / Dolby Digital mono audio 320kbps
The Ash Tree (1975)
UK / colour / 31:53 / English / DVD9 / 1.33:1 / Dolby Digital mono audio 320kbps

A Town Called Mercy
BBC One HD
15th September 2012, 7.35pm 

The review contains plot spoilers.

Doctor Who and the western genre are not the easiest of companions. Donald Cotton's sorely underrated pastiche The Gunfighters, transmitted in April 1966 and featuring William Hartnell's first Doctor, was the last time that the series decided to take a swig of bourbon at the Last Chance Saloon. Then, the series was trading on the retelling of the O.K. Corral legend in the Hollywood westerns of John Ford (1946's My Darling Clementine and 1964's Cheyenne Autumn) and John Sturges (1957's The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral) and was certainly made with the historical significance of this Old West shootout in mind given the programme's then faltering remit to engage its young audience with history and science fiction. By virtue of Cotton's allegorical satire and musical parable, it also sat slightly at odds with the bold and colourful television westerns being produced in America such as The Big Valley (ABC, 1965-69), Bonanza (NBC, 1959-73), Gunsmoke (CBS, 1955-75) and The Virginian (NBC, 1962-71).

However, two years before The Gunfighters appeared in Doctor Who's third season, the genre was undergoing something of a transformation in the hands of director Sergio Leone. The major innovation that Leone brought to the western was to transform the black and white morality of the Old West depicted in Hollywood fare and replace it with an altogether more complicated set of values. The appearance of his protagonists also forsook the sanitised look of the Hollywood cowboy and, using his trademark shooting style of big close ups and panoramic long shots, he presented the criminal tendencies of the Old West in all their dusty, sweaty, grizzled glory.

His films, A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) were mainly shot in Almeria, Spain and were as romantically connected to its landscape as Ford's were to Colorado's Monument Valley where he filmed seven of his westerns. However, Leone's westerns, a synthesis of Hollywood conventions seen through a European perspective, were often criticised at the time for the aestheticising of violence within Leone's discourse of the civilising of the Old West and the democratic and technological conquest of the mythological frontier.

'a man who lived for ever, but whose eyes were heavy with the weight of all he'd seen' 

Toby Whithouse's A Town Called Mercy makes its own journey back to Leone's original locations and sets, using the Almeria and Tabernas based theme parks of Mini Hollywood and Texas Hollywood to stage the environs of Mercy itself and the surrounding desert to fulfill the series' blockbuster ambitions. The episode is beautifully shot. Director Saul Metzstein and director of photography Stephan Pehrsson go for golden browns and saturated blues in the palette for the exteriors, using landscape, blazing sun and skies to tell as much of the story in visual terms.

Murray Gold also gets an opportunity to broaden his musical palette and his score is one of the highlights of this episode. There are wonderful references to and pastiches of a number of film and television composers. You should be able to spot nods to the legendary Ennio Morricone compositions for Leone's films, the brassy Jerome Moross score for The Big Country (1958) and the classic Elmer Bernstein themes for The Magnificent Seven (1960) as well as the traditional bluegrass subtleties of David Schwartz's music for Deadwood (HBO, 2004-6) and Jeff Beal's superb scores for Carnivàle (HBO 2003-5). A far cry from Lynda Baron warbling 'The Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon'.

The episode opens with a narration about 'a man who lived for ever, but whose eyes were heavy with the weight of all he'd seen. A man who fell from the stars.' This reflects the similar narration on Asylum of the Daleks, recounting the legend of the Doctor and his apparent death and resurrection.

As the episode unfolds this story clearly sets out the stall for Whithouse's examination of morality within the three figures of the Doctor, the war criminal Doctor Kahler-Jex and his creation, the cyborg cowboy Kahler-Tek (Andrew Brooke). The western genre is populated with such anti-hero outlaws, those 'psychologically disturbed or profoundly disillusioned protagonists who were estranged from or threatening to the larger society' watched over by the good sheriff who is forced 'to confront the reality of his own dehumanisation' in the face of unchecked violence or the hypocrisy of the people he is pledged to protect. (1)

The opening scene, set at night, however, does not locate the viewer in this world until the final close up on Kahler-Tek, the cyborg with a conscience, as he systematically hunts down those who created him. Metzstein keeps him at a distance, out of focus, and concentrates on the paraphernalia of science fiction with security drones and readouts festooning the screen, providing no clues as to where this story is set. Only the score and a shot of the stetson wearing cyborg suggest anything different. After the title sequence, Metzstein instantly establishes the location proper with a sweeping crane shot that frames the Doctor in front of the Almerian landscape and the town's frontier. After he reasons with Amy and Rory about disregarding 'keep out' signs, there is also a cut to a stunning panoramic wide shot of the town and the surrounding landscape.

If you've been paying attention, a clear correlation has emerged in all three episodes thus far between light and dark, not only in the way interiors and exteriors are presented in such dramatically contrasting ways but in subtler ways too. Here, we have the shadowy, dusty interiors of the marshall's office, the claustrophobic confines of Kahler-Jex's spaceship and the jail aligned with the brilliant sunlight of the desert landscape; in Asylum we shifted between the ice planet exteriors, the Dalek asylum and Oswin's Dalek confinement; and in Dinosaurs it was the contrast in the bright domestic scenes, the beach sequences and the darkness of the Silurian ship.

The Ponds are also tiring of their travels with the Doctor and at the end of this episode they decline his offer for further adventures. With this in mind, there are other symbolic instances of lightness/darkness, perhaps as a foreshadowing of what is about to happen to the Doctor, Amy and Rory. Each episode has featured flickering or malfunctioning light bulbs. Each episode's title sequence is getting darker. Compare Asylum's opening titles with this episode's and you'll see the vortex is closing down, becoming sickly green and darker by the week. Light is being extinguished and with it surely rests the fate of the Ponds and the Doctor's uncertain grasp on morality.

The Doctor observes 'that's not right' of the fizzing, flickering street lamp in the town square, the provision of electricity being ten years ahead of its time, but also perhaps a signal that this will be no easy encounter with the world and morals of the Old West. Also note the shot of the Doctor observing the fizzing lamp in the marshall's office which emphatically underlines this idea while at the same time providing him with clues as to who Kahler-Jex is. The Doctor also seems to be of the opinion that all his Christmases have come at once so far this series and it may well be a case of 'be careful what you wish for' as we hurtle towards the last of this year's five episodes.

'We call this town Mercy for a reason' 

Whithouse does put some of his characteristic humour into the tale and includes some sly winks to the cliches of the western. The Doctor's near choking on a tooth pick, his swaggering entrance through the saloon doors, Abraham the undertaker's eagerness to measure him up (played by Garrick Hagon, last seen as Ky in The Mutants in 1972), the townsfolk's eagerness to dump him outside the frontier and getting to know a horse called Susan are all lovely, funny touches. Although, what Carole Ann Ford will make of Susan as a talking horse is anyone's guess.

The town's dread of the alien is of course inherent in the fear of the cyborg-with-no-name who stalks Mercy attempting to track down the last of its targets. The Gunslinger, as he's known to Isaac, the town's marshall played by Farscape's Ben Browder sporting a magnificent 'tache, seeks a refugee alien doctor and has sealed off Mercy until he gets what he wants. In essence, this is the scenario of The Magnificent Seven and High Noon (1952) - an allegory about communities threatened by external forces, be they villages threatened by bandits or towns afraid to support their marshall in the stand against murderous foes.

The Doctor puts the clues together and unmasks Kahler-Jex, the survivor of a space ship crash and a member of 'one of the most ingenious races in the galaxy'. On the surface, he seems like a good man and helping those sick from cholera and providing the town with electric light are good enough reasons for Isaac to protect him from the Gunslinger. 'We call this town Mercy for a reason' offers Isaac and acts of redemption and the idea that America is the land of second chances are the nub of the episode's exploration of the morality of both Doctors.

The townsfolk are becoming uneasy and, like the occupants of Hadleyville opposing Gary Cooper's marshall in High Noon, they would rather Kahler be handed over to secure their future comfort. High Noon has been seen as an attack on opportunism, complacency and materialism and 'reverses the traditional Western ideal of reconciling heroic individualism with the larger social good' and this resonates with Kahler-Jex's misplaced aspirations. (2)

Isaac recounts that the war only ended five years ago and that its violence still lurks under the surface of everyday life. He sees handing over Kahler-Jex as a descent into chaos and lawlessness even though Kahler-Jex later intimates to Amy that 'all that was good in me' has been given to the Kahler, suggesting what remains may well be unpalatable opportunism and like the Doctor, one of the few survivors of the Time War, he can start again, 'remember myself' and 'help people'. It's a quietly intimate scene, where Kahler-Jex looks back on his life and realises that to end suffering was all he ever wanted to do even though Amy's enquiry if he is a father suggests that he is more of a parent to the very chaos that Isaac is protecting him from.

Adrian Scarborough is impressive as Kahler-Jex, initially generating great sympathy for the character and yet, later, leaving us far more conflicted about him when the truth is revealed and Kahler-Jex's help to the townsfolk is simply seen as self-appeasement. By the time he's goaded the Doctor into violence, Scarborough's performance ensures you really can't stand the bugger. The light and the dark of Kahler's actions are symbolised in that flickering light bulb just as the Doctor and the Gunslinger's silhouettes often block out the sun. Whithouse suggests that even the Doctor's search for moral validity may still be driven by guilt over the amount of blood on his own hands.

After a charming scene of the Doctor attempting a rodeo ride on what looks like Mork's spaceship from Mork and Mindy (ABC, 1978-82), the episode switches gears and Kahler-Jex's ship becomes the biggest and bitterest of pills to swallow when the Doctor learns of the man's experiments from his personal files. The horror of these experiments is appropriately left to the imagination with only a close up of the Doctor's eyes and the recorded screams giving us an intimation of the crimes witnessed, where 'things may have been uncovered' that Isaac, the Doctor and Amy might not be able to forgive.

'the communal rule of law displaces the individualistic code of the six-gun'

Whithouse leads us to the very contentious scene where the Doctor forces Kahler-Jex over the frontier and offers him as a target of the cyborg's gun and swift justice. The Doctor's anger is well conveyed by Matt Smith as he confronts the murdering alien scientist, his bellow of 'sit down!' to the so called 'war hero' probably the angriest we've ever seen his Doctor. The Doctor explains the nature of the cyborg to Isaac and in doing so differentiates between this killing machine and an aspect of the Moffat signature - the melding of humans and technology either as a force for good or as an accident of programming. This very neatly reflects the idea of the dehumanisation of the individual through violence and war.

We've seen this with the nano-genes in The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, the blindly obedient clockwork men of The Girl in the Fireplace and CAL preserved in the computer in Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead. Here, the machine-human hybrid is a weapon, created to end a war. The Doctor's anger is directed at Kahler-Jex's unorthodox search for an advantage in that conflict and yet he too could be considered the advantage that ended the Dalek and Time Lord confrontation. In a way the modern Western reflects this, with for example, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) proposing that eventually 'the communal rule of law displaces the individualistic code of the six-gun'. (3)

That code of the six-gun is a very potent and powerful visual symbol and Whithouse shows that even the Doctor will allow himself to be swayed by it. The image of the Doctor brandishing a gun, one that is such a vital symbol of both law and disorder in the Old West, is quite shocking. This takes us back to the notion that the Doctor's moral compass needs to be tempered by his companions and reflects equally memorable scenes in Dalek and The Runaway Bride where he is pulled back from the brink of further violence by Rose and Donna. Yet, this didn't happen in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship where the Doctor brooked no mercy at all for Solomon. Could this have been deliberate preparation for the issues that this and possibly future episodes raise?

Here, the dichotomy is clear. Either the Doctor becomes the Leone-Eastwood hero, who has 'no illusions to begin with' and no 'cause worthy of commitment other than looking out for oneself in a bleak, violent world' or he rejects it in favour of the redemptive power of mercy and forgiveness, preserving the frontier from the dehumanising effects of war, technology and monsters without recourse to violence. (4)

It's a choice the Doctor has faced on more than one occasion and this idea of a Doctor struggling to comprehend the bleakest and most violent of universes was partly the modus operandi of his sixth incarnation and is reiterated in this episode as his guilt associated with the victims of Kahler-Jex, the Master, the Daleks - 'all the people who died because of my mercy'.

As Kahler-Jex suggests to the Doctor, 'You cannot apply the politics of peace to what I did' and Whithouse presents various reactions to the scientist's past actions - Rory condemns him as a war criminal and Amy suggests they find another solution other than handing him over to his cyborg hunter. Pointedly, the Doctor is lost in a reverie when Amy rejects the idea of allowing Kahler-Jex to be executed and his moral bearings seem to have momentarily abandoned him. Perhaps, he is dealing with the memories of his own acts of violence, his inner conflict underlined by the appropriately chilling comment from Kahler-Jex that 'looking at you Doctor, is almost like looking into a mirror. Almost.'

The Doctor looks into himself and briefly wrestles with the accusation that he lacks 'the nerve to do what needs to be done', is unable to give in to the very impulse that Kahler-Jex celebrates. The Doctor is at breaking point, his conscience pricked by a final insult from Kahler-Jex that at least his own people didn't have to rely on the Doctor to save them. Amy is also clearly shocked that even Rory believes that the Doctor's actions are justified when he drags the man out into the street. 'We can't be like him. We have to be better than him', she later implores the Doctor.

He genuinely doesn't know if he can shoot Kahler-Jex, just as he genuinely didn't know if he could gun down Davros in Resurrection of the Daleks, and it is only Amy, like Rose and Donna before her, who reminds him that he has changed. She brandishes a gun on him and offers that maybe she too has changed just as he's been 'taking stupid lessons' since she last met him. Amy's actions, which eventually manage to sway the Doctor back to a sense of communal law, do offer some comedic relief as she inadvertently fires her gun and Isaac, mindful of her inexperience behind a six-shooter, requests, 'OK, everyone who isn't an American, drop your gun.' That quip holds more than a few grains of truth in it about a frontier society that matures with its gun culture still intact.

'face the souls of those I've wronged' 

Sadly, Isaac becomes another of those victims and dies saving Kahler-Jex from the cyborg's gun. This is the noble sacrifice motif that often crops up in the series and here the dying Isaac underlines the nature of the heroic within the context of this story by asking the Doctor to preserve Jex and the town because 'you're both good men... but you just forget it sometimes'. Metzstein captures this sacrifice in a glorious overhead shot, spiraling up in a very Sergio Leone manner, ending in the redemptive action of the Doctor assuming his marshall's status, pinning on his badge and facing the High Noon challenge from the cyborg.

That 'violence doesn't end violence' but merely 'extends it' suggests the Doctor has found some equanimity with his own nature by the time the townsfolk confront him and urge him to hand Kahler-Jex over to the cyborg. This affords a further scene with the scientist, where Whithouse pauses to explore again the man's nature and his mirroring of the Doctor. Just as the Doctor noted to Amy and Rory about the townsfolk, 'frightened people. Give me a Dalek anyday', Jex also rejects this as too simplistic an approach to the morality of the situation. 'It would be so much simpler if I was just one thing, wouldn't it? The mad scientist who made that killing machine or the physician who has dedicated his life to serving this town,' he argues.

Rather like the Davros the Doctor encountered in Genesis of the Daleks, Jex is both, he - ending a war through the modification of human victims and also bringing the benefits of his skills to the frontier town, Davros - the brilliant Kaled scientist who ensured the Kaled's survival but only as ideologically dominated machines of war.

However, despite the Doctor's accusations that he is assuaging his guilt, Jex counters that he only fears death because that is when he will be forced to shoulder his burden, when 'we all carry our prisons with us' to the grave. It's only when Kahler-Jex is sitting in his spaceship, counting down to its self-destruction, he redemptively accepts that he is as much a monster as the killing machine hunting him down and he must 'face the souls of those I've wronged.'

With the climax to the episode, Metzstein stages the obligatory face-off as an homage to High Noon, in typical gun fight style, between the Doctor and the Gunslinger cyborg. He uses some lovely deep-focus shots of the clock behind the Doctor and the quintessential image of the gun-fight, a shot between the Doctor's legs at his oncoming opponent, while intercutting to the townsfolk praying for their lives in the church. The ensuing chase around the town adds some much needed action to the proceedings after several lengthy scenes of exposition and it all concludes in the spectacular destruction of Kahler-Jex and his spaceship.

The strongest episode of this season so far, A Town Called Mercy offers a complex, thought-provoking treatise on the morality of war, the decivilising effects of violence and the burdens of responsibility that the Doctor must continue to wrestle with. It's often quite a powerful episode, particularly the sequence where the Doctor threatens to use a gun, using imagery that may be alienating in its directness but supportive of the message in the story, that violence is no means to an end.

Matt Smith and Adrian Scarborough are best served here, both giving performances that show their respective protagonists descending into the darkest moments of self-reflection. Although Amy is used very sparingly in this episode, she does have a key role to play in forcing the Doctor to consider his actions. Rory is presented as having a viewpoint fleetingly and then disappears into the background for most of this episode and doesn't get an awful lot to do. Ben Browder is effective as Isaac and certainly wouldn't have looked out of place in an episode of Deadwood.

Like the outlaw gunfighter who finds himself redundant as the Old West is over taken by the encroaching modernity of America's turn-of-the century expansion and industrialisation, the Gunslinger cyborg accepts his fate and offers to wander off into the desert to self-destruct. However, the Doctor sees him as the protector of the peace and, at the conclusion of the episode, we not only see the way the Old West becomes a source of nostalgic playfulness in the mock shoot out between the Doctor and Dockery (Sean Benedict) but also the way it is mythologised in the closing narration, where the Gunslinger becomes the ultimate marshall of a town called Mercy.

(1) John Lenihan, Wanted Dead or Alive - The American West in Popular Culture
(2) Ibid 
(3) Ibid
(4) Ibid

Lawrence Gordon Clark and Rosemary Hill had planned another adaptation for the BBC, of M.R. James' Number 13, in 1976 but found it difficult to translate the story and its Scandinavian setting to the screen. 'I just had a feeling we weren't going to get it right', he notes, 'so we went back to the drawing board and chose 'The Signalman'. (1) This was published in Dickens' 1866 Christmas edition of All the Year Round, his weekly literary magazine founded in 1859, and as one of his Mugby Junction collection of short stories.

There are perhaps two inspirations for the story. Dickens' own involvement in the 9 June 1865 Staplehurst rail crash, where he attended to injured and dying passengers. This had a profound psychological effect on the rest of his life, causing flashbacks, nightmares and nervous anxiety. Secondly, he may have been inspired by the Clayton Tunnel crash of August 1861 which highlighted the dangers of trains travelling too closely together, leaving signalmen to judge the safety of such situations, and the faults of communications and signals within the system itself.

Andrew Davies undertook the screenwriting duties on this adaptation of the Charles Dickens story, marking it as one of the first of many literary dramatisations he would eventually gain a reputation for. Since 1967, he had been writing for television with contributions to The Wednesday Play (BBC, 1964-70), Thirty Minute Theatre (BBC, 1965-73), Centre Play (BBC, 1973-77), Play of the Week (BBC, 1977-79) and drama such as The Legend of King Arthur (BBC 1979). He would be responsible for creating and writing his own series in the 1980s and 1990s - the contemporary education satire of A Very Peculiar Practice (BBC, 1986-88), sit-com Game On! (BBC, 1995-98) and a children's series derived from his own books featuring Marmalade Atkins (ITV, 1981-84).

An extremely versatile writer, he also adapted R.F. Delderfield's To Serve Them All My Days (BBC, 1980), Laura Black's Mother Love (BBC, 1989) into a highly enjoyable psychological thriller, was responsible for a very amusing observation of the British on holiday in Ball-Trap on the Cote Sauvage (BBC, 1989) and dramatising Michael Dobb's political satire House of Cards (BBC 1990-95) and its sequels. He is renowned for his literary adaptations of Dickens, Eliot, Austen, Thackeray and Trollope that span the highly popular BBC Pride and Prejudice of 1995, Vanity Fair (BBC, 1998), The Way We Live Now (BBC, 2001) and the lauded serialisation of Dickens' Bleak House (BBC, 2005). (2)

The Signalman (tx: 22/12/76) was shot in October 1976, with Rosemary Hill producing, David Whitson behind the camera and Stephen Deutsch providing the score. The Severn Valley Railway, Kidderminster provided the locations (it would later become familiar to viewers of The District Nurse (BBC, 1984), Box of Delights (BBC, 1984) and a 1987 Joan Hickson Miss Marple‘The 4.50 from Paddington’) for production designer Don Taylor's signal box, sitting in the cutting on the Kidderminster side of Bewdley Tunnel. The interior of the signal box was filmed at Highley Station (seen in action again in Disney's 2005 cinema version of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) and Bircham Coppice Cutting doubled as the mist-enshrouded valley the traveller walks through.

Clark acknowledges Whitson's contribution to the film in the introduction on this DVD, offering 'I had drawn up storyboards for the entire piece but they don't take into account the genius of his lighting and or his composition,' and the inspiration of the locations on the script and filming. (3) However, the Kidderminster location created its own problems with children from a nearby estate and a local school disrupting filming.

'I think it's some of the best work in all our Ghost Stories' 

Clark's and Hill's penchant for good casting also paid off. Denholm Elliot, one of the greatest character actors of his generation, loved the script and found time in a busy schedule to take part. 'I think it's some of the best work in all our Ghost Stories' notes Clark, even though he amusingly reveals in his introduction that, at the start of filming, Elliot was reading from cue cards posted around the set because he hadn't had time to learn the script. The film is essentially a two-hander with fellow actor Bernard Lloyd and with both actors matched to Davies' very faithful script, Clark felt that performances and the 'marvellously cardboard stiff Victorian dialogue' were left to 'express that time better than any authentic set decoration or costume.' (4)

Clark's film brilliantly captures Dickens' text and its themes, resonant with his personal experiences at Staplehurst and the media coverage of the Clayton Tunnel disaster. On the surface, it is a tale of predestination as the signalman at a lonely signal box meets an unnamed traveller and recalls his encounters with a warning spectre. The spectre has apparently foreshadowed, on two earlier occasions, accidents on the line and the signalman is anxious that he will be visited again.

It's a cyclical narrative. The traveller arrives, like an angel descending to earth, and greets the signalman in a way that he recognises and that strikes him with fear because it is the same greeting that the spectre makes on its materialisation. By the end of the tale, we learn that the signalman is destined to die and that the traveller is himself a manifestation of the spectre. The story gradually works its way to this revelation but it also sets up a number of other sub-texts too.

The viewer is left wondering whether the signalman is actually already dead and the traveller is simply meeting a ghost who is recounting his earthly demise and also, as Zbigniew Tycienski acknowledges, 'if the signalman is really dead then the railway now requires a signalman, and for most of the story the narrator has been receiving the necessary training for this job. Perhaps part of the signalman’s premonitions involved finding and training his own replacement.' (5)

Symbolically, Dickens may also have been foreshadowing the complete dominance of society by the industrial revolution and the anxieties about the mechanisation of the routines of the day, the signalman's alienation in his monotonous tasks and the loneliness generated by his isolation and lack of interpersonal communication. The distance between the industrial and the natural is also visually represented by the traveller's surroundings and the signalman's workplace, between the mist-enshrouded valley that the traveller walks across and the claustrophobic confines of the signal box.

Divining the meaning of communication is an important theme in the story. 'The story is about the attempt to communicate and the consequences of miscommunication, about speaking and listening and about the limitations of the spoken word'. (6) The signalman's world is one dominated by bells, chimes, the clicking of the telegraph, the sound of approaching trains and the pressures of time and fate.

The traveller is representative of human verbal and gestural communication, a seemingly rational person the signalman can eventually open up to and to whom he can ambiguously spin a tale. Gestures such as pointing, shaking hands and the chilling repetition of the waving that demands a clearing of the way are also important motifs. The sounds in the signal box and the blood red light at the mouth of the tunnel are portents of the inevitable, the palpable crush of fate and the supernatural.

The film opens with the traveller walking across the countryside on a bright day, briefly in silhouette against the hills (a typical Clark motif) and in silence save for the singing of birds. The whistle of the train then dominates the soundtrack and the traveller turns to see a train dashing through the landscape, plumes of steam rising into the air. The industrialisation of the nation theme is encapsulated immediately.

Clark reconnects with landscape in the film when the traveller is seen walking back to his inn in the foggy dusk or looking from his window at the misty dawn. The traveller's hail to the signalman is the central image around which the tale is fashioned because it soon becomes a harbinger of doom, a form of communication that the signalman would rather he not use when he returns to visit.

The next shot we see is of the tiny figure of the signalman walking slowly along the track from his signal box in a deep, darkly shaded valley, an overwhelmed 'half-light and half-darkness' figure whom we will learn is struggling in a self-made purgatory. The opening scene 'implies that the man is bound to his dark situation, and his environment and indeed to his fate.' (7) Stephen Deutsch breaks with tradition on this film and employs a modernist, minimal electronic score and, as the signalman looks up at the distant figure of the traveller beckoning him, his eerie tonalities underscore the situation to tell us something is awry in this meeting, dominated by the prominently glowing red tunnel signal.

We hear these tonalities again as the traveller quickly glances at the telegraph wires as he walks along the railway line towards the signalman, the humming perhaps indicative of the noises in the wires, but also overlapping them visually and aurally with the rail tracks too as two examples of mass communication. Deutsch's score often merges with the other sounds in the film, of bells and chimes and ticking, and there are suggestions that these electronic embellishments can be heard by the signalman. Elliot's body language in this scene is extraordinary. He stands absolutely straight, as if rooted to the spot, staring out into limbo and as if he was listening to these sounds.  Later, we see him tense up as the electronic tone and quick cuts to shots of the signal box's warning bell are used to imply his great trepidation at misunderstanding a supernatural communication connected to the previous accidents on the line.

'look out, look out below there!'

The red signal is a key visual motif - of the signalman's duty and his link to the tunnel - and it overlaps with a number of other symbolic images in the film. It is as vibrant as the glow of the fire into which the two men stare, prominently placed in the centre of the first of many two shots and then regularly cut to in close up. It is the fireside hearth where tales are traditionally told but it also becomes a foreboding motif linked to the rail crash in the tunnel that the signalman later recounts and which the film flashes back to.

The sulphurous, hellish orange vision of the crash emphasises the underworld of the signalman's existence in contrast to the quiet, domestic chat before the fire in 'this place of peace' in the signal box and, later, during his fateful encounter with the train, the glowing coals of the steam engine. 'The use of carefully timed juxtaposition and repetition support the viewer's sense of the fusion of the physical world with the supernatural one' and these are accumulated in connections between the signal, the chiming bells, instances of birds being disturbed and ultimately in the screaming visage of the warning spectre matched with that of the falling bride, the traveller's own shocked face and the passage of the signalman into and out of the gaping tunnel mouth. (8)

The meeting between the two men becomes a confessional and where the signalman unburdens his concerns. Clark sees this as part and parcel of Dickens diatribe on fate, where 'the dutiful signalman...  is an impotent witness to the disasters, personal and cosmic, that a new dark age is bringing in.' (9) He is a man allegedly responsible for the running of part of the vast Victorian industrial machine but it is about to overwhelm and destroy him. When the traveller returns to his inn and fitfully sleeps (a scene added by Davies), his dreams are filled with more combinations of images and sounds connected to the signalman's fate.

A close up of his eye dissolves to a tracking shot out of the tunnel into daylight, the red signal is overlaid onto the strangely chiming bell and this is accompanied by the signalman's instruction to him, 'don't call out.' But there are also images here of confinement - the traveller sitting in his cell-like room or standing and staring out of his window at glorious, misty countryside - suggesting a visual equivalent of the traveller's earlier line 'I've been confined' and it 'makes us ponder whether this Traveller is referring to a claustrophobic working environment or perhaps even a spell in prison.' (10) It may also be referring to the release of the supernatural augur, the dark angel free to go about his business and fulfill the prophecy of the signalman's doom.

This consistent use of images and sounds culminates in the unsettling finale. After a further night of disturbed sleep, wherein the warning symbols become ever more strident, the traveller makes his way to the signal box, whistling jauntily. Clark matches this with the signalman, also whistling as he goes about his work, and forges their fateful connection. He even repeats the image of the steam train hurtling across the countryside, the traveller's silhouette and the tiny figure of the signalman on the track that opened the film. At the same time, the two men both seem to hear the supernatural hum that is a pre-text to doom and the film's closure with that significant gesture of waving and the ominous call of 'look out, look out below there!'

The Signalman marks the apotheosis of Clark's work on the series with his vision perfectly matching Davies' precise and assured screenplay, bursting with metaphor and ambiguity. It is also a return, after his workmanlike efforts on The Ash Tree, to a more evocative and ambiguous use of landscape, sound and performance. He is aided in this by a stunning central performance from Denholm Elliot and support from Bernard Lloyd, exceptional use of location filming and David Whitson's photography and lighting. It quite rightly attains its place as one of the very best of the BBC Ghost Stories and has never been matched since.

Stigma completely shifts the annual Christmas Ghost Story away from the usual period setting

The following year marked a departure from the classic format of adapting highly-regarded period ghost stories with Clark returning to direct Clive Exton's specially commissioned screenplay Stigma (tx: 28/12/77). Clark and Rosemary Hill had tried to mount an adaptation of M.R. James' Count Magnus in 1977 but shrinking finances at the BBC forced them to abandon it. By then Clark had gone freelance and was working at Yorkshire Television but he was invited back to the BBC to direct Stigma. As Helen Wheatley points out in her essay in the booklet accompanying this release, the contemporary milieu of Stigma completely shifts the annual Christmas Ghost Story away from the usual period setting and from the reticent terror of James and the premonitory hauntings of Dickens. (11)

Exton had made contributions to The Wednesday Play (BBC, 1964-70) and Armchair Theatre (ITV, 1956-74), gaining some notoriety with difficult material when his play for the latter, The Trial of Dr Fancy, was held up for transmission for two years, until 1964, after fears that the black comedy about a murder trial might cause offence.

He also adapted John Wyndham's Dumb Martian for Armchair Theatre, a production which acted as an introduction to the science fiction anthology Out of This World (ABC, 1962), would provide scripts for Play for Today (BBC, 1970-84), ITV Playhouse (1967-83), Survivors (BBC, 1975-77), Killers (Thames, 1976) Doomwatch (BBC, 1970-72) and The Crezz (Thames, 1976) and was also responsible for the screenplay of Richard Fleischer's 10 Rillington Place (1971). He would adapt M.R. James' Casting the Runes for Lawrence Gordon Clark in 1979. Later, he was much lauded for his work on Jeeves & Wooster (ITV, 1990-93) and Agatha Christie's Poirot (ITV, 1989-)

As Phil Tonge acknowledges, Stigma is 'a straight down the line horror story' rather than a ghost story and that, regretfully, 'it just doesn't fit in with the feel of what a Christmas ghost story should be'. (12) After stripping away the period trappings that were the tangible aspects of the other ghost stories in the series, it embraces contemporary cues from modernist horror and occult works such as Dead of Night (BBC, 1972), The Stone Tape (BBC, 1972) and Beasts (ATV, 1976). Its link with ancient stone circles also reflects children's telefantasy drama such as Escape into Night (ATV, 1972), Sky (HTV, 1976), Children of the Stones (HTV, 1977) and Raven (ATV, 1977).

The body horror depicted and the contemporary take on witchcraft also, as Wheatley notes, reflects many of the elements in Hammer House of Horror (ITC, 1980). All these series, in one way or another, exploited the 1970s interest in 'alternative faiths and religions as orthodox beliefs struggled to survive the secularism that dominated the 1960s. Everything Atlantean and Crowleyan was popular and was reflected in books, films, music, comics and television of the time.' (13)

However, this does Stigma a slight disservice. It's a compact tale with a tremendously bleak ending, told with little dialogue and where the themes are implied almost exclusively in visual terms. Clark's visual dexterity lifts a script that steadfastly defies any attempt at exposition or explanation about what has actually happened after a standing stone has been disturbed by local labourers to enable the owners of a cottage, the Delgados, to lay a new lawn.

The film opens with a blurred, out of focus shot of the motorway, the screen dominated by a red dot that eventually resolves itself into the car that is carrying mother and daughter Katherine and Verity. Rather obviously, the dot foreshadows the dots of blood that will spring from Katherine's body once it has been afflicted by the force released from beneath the standing stone.

There are several sub-texts operating in the film. Female desire and menstrual cycles; the ancient landscape under threat from modernisation; the juxtaposition of modern life and pagan knowledge all weave through the story. The relationship between Katherine (Kate Binchy) and 13-year old Verity (Maxine Gordon) is under stress, presumably because Verity is struggling towards sexual maturity and independence. As the car approaches, we can hear wind on the soundtrack and this again foreshadows the ancient blast that hits Katherine later when the stone is removed from the garden.

The dichotomy between modern and ancient life is modestly articulated: Verity is annoyed that she can't get her favourite radio station 'down here'; the progress of the Voyager spacecraft and its measurements of 'peculiar radiations' can be overhead on the radio as Katherine prepares dinner; the labourers bring in heavy plant to shift a stone that was placed there thousands of years before any such machines existed. Clark introduces the tractors that the labourers use through a low shot of a field, with the machines gradually overwhelming the frame, and cuts in wide shots of Katherine's car (aptly red in colour) speeding past ancient stone circles. The bleak ending of the film also suggests that, for all our modern appurtenances, the unknown and the unknowable can still have an impact on life.

'peculiar radiation'

As ever, Clark uses landscape to great effect, framing characters against standing stones and tors. His first shot of the stone that is being removed is also done as point of view and, after showing a discussion with the labourers, one of whom remarks 'still, I wouldn't move it', Clark pans past them and to a field where we see more standing stones, suggesting the stone being removed is part of an ancient link with the landscape. Clark also spends a lot of time building up sexual tension between Verity and one of the young labourers (Christopher Blake) and forging links between fertility, female power and the landscape.

When she first arrives, Verity symbolically pushes away childish things such as dolls (she puts one upside down in a vase) and turns her attention to the activity in the garden outside. We see her through the kitchen window, over Katherine's shoulder, talking to the two men. She flirts with the younger man, attracted by his display of male virility as he chains up the stone ready for its removal. Later, Verity's view of her encroaching female emancipation is echoed in the lyrics of 'Mother's Little Helper', the Rolling Stones song she plays as, down in the kitchen, Katherine, the dutiful housewife recovering from the psychic, and psychedelic, energy released by the stone, prepares dinner.

As the labourers try to remove the stone Katherine sends Verity off to the shops. Clark rather overdoes the visual symbolism here as the crane lowers the hook for the chain in a point of view shot that implies a hangman's noose around Katherine's head. Clearly, the poor woman's doomed even before she can enjoy a roast dinner with her husband.

There's a clunky metaphor here about the burgeoning womanhood that is about to descend on Verity as the cursed 'ill wind', the 'peculiar radiation' from beneath the stone now descends on Katherine, receiving the stigma of the film's title, what Phil Tonge sees as 'the male fear of menstruation' represented in the story. (14) The later scenes of Katherine's husband Peter (Peter Bowles) finding her in a blood soaked bed evoke this rather viscerally.

This ancient 'ill wind' manifests itself in the shaking of the house, cracking of walls and displacement of objects. Significantly, one of these is a framed print of Henry Fuseli's 'The Nightmare' suggesting some correlation between the forces attacking Katherine and the painting's themes of female sexuality and the predatory nature of desire, symbolised by the incubus sitting on the female figure, and their relationship to folklore about possession, while sleeping, by demons and witches. This folklore is refered to again in the link between the stigmata, knives and onions (onions were allegedly effective against evil spirits invading the home or preventing sickness and plague) that play out in a sequence when Peter investigates the kitchen late at night. He hears female laughter and witnesses said onions and knives possessing a life of their own.

Once these ideas are established, the rest of the film deals with the manifestation of this ancient force. Katherine begins to bleed but the source can never be found, blood seems to ooze out of her skin. Clark depicts this is in a series of sequences that do not use dialogue, with actress Kate Binchy left to effectively convey the abject panic that the prospect of bleeding to death might create over the sound of a running bath, her heavy breathing and the gradually increasing sound of howling wind. To ensure you get the theme at the centre of Exton's script, Katherine's frantic attempts to staunch the flow of blood and clean up after her are intercut with shots of Verity happily and freely enjoying a walk through the standing stones. This is no longer about using the subtlety of the James' adaptations.

The film culminates with the return of the labourers and the uncovering of a burial chamber beneath the stone, filled with the remains of a ritual murder, just as Peter discovers Katherine's fate and Verity, rather conveniently filling us in on 'the old religion' that she's read about in a book, sports a fearsome set of red nails and starts peeling an onion. Does this intimate that Verity is somehow possessive of the old religion in the same instance that she has become sexually available? Again, it is left to the viewer to decide. Clark hurtles towards a terribly bleak ending, through Peter Bowles' performance effectively conveying the husband's horror and shock, and concludes a rather odd film with a symbolic final shot, high overhead, of the stone circle, the cottage and Peter's abandoned car.

'The Ice House sometimes verges on surrealism'

The Ice House (tx: 25/12/78) brought the strand to something of a unusual conclusion. Produced by Rosemary Hill and written by John Bowen, who had adapted The Treasure of Abbot Thomas in 1975, the story focuses on a middle aged man Paul (John Stride) who decides to take a break at an isolated health spar after the failure of his marriage. What transpires is unlike anything else in the series and as far away from M.R. James as you can get by suggesting no cause and effect for the bizarre events at the health spa. As Robin Davies notes,' this resists easy supernatural or psychological interpretation and sometimes verges on surrealism.' (15)

Paul is, in effect, seduced by the brother and sister, Clovis and Jessica (Geoffrey Burridge and Elizabeth Romilly), who run the spa. It seems to be a house and gardens whose occupants are unable to communicate, seemingly frozen in time, mentally and physically. The other guests rarely speak to him, a masseur who pleads with him to help him escape then disappears and Clovis and Jessica obsess about a vine that grows over the ice house in the grounds. The relationship between the vine, sporting a deep scarlet and a white flower, and the siblings is never fully explained but visually they match the brother and sister, who both dress in the same colours.

This brittle atmosphere is, depending on your opinion of the performances, either aided or destroyed by the very artificial delivery of Bowen's contraction-less dialogue. The non-naturalistic performances suggest the nineteenth century rather than the twentieth and perhaps this would have worked all the more effectively if it had been set in period surroundings. As Paul notes at the beginning of the film, the spa thrives on 'quaint, old fashioned ways.' and often Burridge pushes his overstated performance of Clovis dangerously towards camp. Stride cleverly picks up on this non-naturalism and as he progresses through the film his speech becomes more and more akin to theirs, suggesting his immersion in the dumb conformity of the strange world they exist in.

When we meet Paul, he is drowning in upper-middle class conformity, living a life away from the effects of capitalism on urban existence. The icy preservation of this comfort is metaphorically expressed in the masseur's description of his having cold hands as 'a touch of the cools' that is then threaded through the film and symbolically realised in the automaton-like guests, the frozen interior of the ice house and Paul's descent into cold paranoia. This is reflected in the the design of the film where the spa is crisply decorated in pale colours, has white peacocks in the grounds, and Clovis and Jessica always wear cream or deep red respectively.

Director Derek Lister manages to evoke a dream-like quality in the images, of a nightmarish sunlit paradise, a perverse garden where death is postponed and life is suspended by the intoxicating perfumes of the strange vine and the incestuous powers of Clovis and Jessica. His direction reflects the restraint of the earlier Ghost Stories, slowly building up atmosphere and not fussing with over indulgent visual touches. 

Clovis and Jessica are the bold flowers of the vine, overwhelming their guest with an intoxicating, suffocating and soporific duty of care. There is a weird sexual tension between Paul, Clovis and Jessica too, first intimated when Paul is walking the grounds and singing the praises of the place and Clovis expresses her enjoyment of the guests as 'having them' and then in the 'delightful' touch of Clovis when he replaces the masseur and later, after Paul's discovery of what is in the ice house, Clovis's offer to sleep next to Paul and nurse him through his nightmare.

That nightmare is partly Clovis and Jessica's determination to ward off decay and putrefaction and is signaled in the after-dinner conversation where Paul's declaration to 'help people get through life' is countered by Clovis and Jessica's claim that he 'should assist people to end their lives not to get through them.' This hints at their function but the film's ambiguity does not allow for further elucidation. Roy Gill intimates 'there could be a suggestion of vampirism in Bowen's script' and that 'the pair somehow draw vitality from the lonely guests they draw to their establishment.' (16) But this is perhaps more about their function as suppressors of emotions and beliefs specifically and the rejection of the very life that Paul explicitly sets out to support in his profession.

That these elements are not thoroughly explained may please and irritate in equal measure but there is a horrible inevitability that, once Paul understands the function of the ice house, he will be unable to resist the invitation to become part of it, trapped in the everlasting rounds of tea on the lawn, croquet games and dinner in the evening, the perfumes of the vine keeping him in thrall to the pleasures that Clovis and Jessica provide. As Alex Davidson concludes, when Clovis and Jessica lead Paul back to the ice house, 'a scene recalling Death leading the peasants in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957)', he has given up on life and willingly seeks preservation in 'this chilly, sterile limbo.' (17)

(1) Simon Farquhar, Lawrence Gordon Clark's The Signalman, BFI DVD booklet
(2) Dave Rolinson, Andrew Davies, BFI Screenonline
(3) Lawrence Gordon Clark, Introduction to The Signalman, BFI DVD
(4) Lawrence Gordon Clark, Introduction to The Signal-man, Lawrence Gordon Clark's Ghost Stories for Christmas.
(5) Premonitory Tales: From Dickens' Signalman to the Radio Broadcasts of A.J. Alan
(6) Sarah Cardwell, Andrew Davies, The Television Series
(7) Ibid
(8) Ibid
(9) Lawrence Gordon Clark, Introduction to The Signal-man, Lawrence Gordon Clark's Ghost Stories for Christmas.
(10) Simon Farquhar, Lawrence Gordon Clark's The Signalman, BFI DVD booklet
(11) Helen Wheatley,  Stigma, BFI DVD booklet 
(12) Phil Tonge, Stigma review, Creeping Flesh Volume 1
(13) Frank Collins, Zodiac review, Cathode Ray Tube
(14) Phil Tonge, Stigma review, Creeping Flesh Volume 1
(15) Robin Davies, The Ice House review, Creeping Flesh Volume 1 
(16) Roy Gill, The Ice House review, Creeping Flesh Volume 1 
(17) Alex Davidson,  The Ice House, BFI DVD booklet

About the transfer
All three films were provided as standard definition transfers to the BFI. As with all the other films in the series, they were shot on 16mm. The grain is inherent in the format and offers plenty of texture to the images. Images on all three films are, for the most part, solid and clean with scratches, specks or blobs only occasionally disturbing them. The Signalman and The Ice House are often detailed and sharp whereas Stigma is paler and less robust. In the main, contrast levels are reasonably good and there are only a few instances where this appears as faded and grey. Colour is understated andis richer in both The SignalmanandThe Ice House whereas Stigma is again quite pale and washed out.

Special features
Introduction to The Signalman by Lawrence Gordon Clark (10:41)
Clark discusses the origin of the Dickens' adaptation and Andrew Davies work on the screenplay. He reflects on the performances of Denholm Elliot and Bernard Lloyd and on the themes of man's fate in the shadow of the systems he creates.
Introduction to Stigma by Lawrence Gordon Clark (8:45)
He explains the circumstances which led to him directing the Clive Exton script, the location shoot in Avebury and working with Kate Binchy and Peter Bowles. He also discusses his move to Yorkshire Television and directing Harry's Game.
Booklet
This features new essays on all three films each by Matthew Sweet, Helen Wheatley and Alex Davidson and Simon Farquhar's profile of Clark and The Signalman.

Ghost Stories: Classic adaptations from the BBC Volume 4
BFI DVD Released 17 September 2012 BFIVD962 Cert 15

The Signalman (1976)
UK / colour / 38:15 / English / DVD9 / 1.33:1 / Dolby Digital mono audio 320kbps
Stigma (1977)
UK / colour / 31:47 / English / DVD9 / 1.33:1 / Dolby Digital mono audio 320kbps
The Ice House (1978)
UK / colour / 34:13 / English / DVD9 / 1.33:1 / Dolby Digital mono audio 320kbps

The Power of Three
BBC One HD
22nd September 2012, 7.30pm 

The review contains plot spoilers.

The female narrator has taken pride of place in the opening of many Doctor Who episodes since 2005, significantly with Rose Tyler's 'this is the story of how I died' introduction to Doomsday, but it has become something of a precedent in this year's five episode run. We've already had Darla's paean to the death and resurrection of the Doctor in Asylum of the Daleks and the young girl's recollections about both the Doctor and the Gunslinger that bookended A Town Called Mercy. These metadiagetic commentators can often stand outside the grand narrative of the episode, both commentating on and taking part within it simultaneously and acting as the internal subjective view of the characters. This is a device that underlines the way The Power of Three and its writer Chris Chibnall seeks to explore the emotional realism of travelling and living with the Doctor.

Here, the opening narration from Amy Pond/Williams also offers an immediate pre-titles comparison between 'life with the Doctor' - a montage of moments from the past three years of the series since The Eleventh Hour, rendered as Amy's memories by post-production blur and colour grading - and 'real life' - the soap drama aesthetic of phone messages from opticians, out of date milk and running out of washing tablets. For Amy and Rory the choice between their adventures and the mundanity of staying at home is, it seems, constantly postponed.

I'm convinced the Taj Mahal has its own agent negotiating these appearances

If you were paying attention to the end of A Town Called Mercy and the couple's decision not to take the offer of a trip away from Earth with the Doctor, concluding 'our friends are going to start noticing that we're ageing faster than them', then bear that in mind as Chibnall explores the effects of such voyages away from home. He also examines why the Doctor chooses to be with his companions and how life might be like when the Time Lord is sat on your sofa in a narrative that spans a year in their lives. As Amy acknowledges, 'everytime we've flown away with the Doctor, we'd just become part of his life but he never stood still long enough to become part of ours. Except once.'

This is the prelude to the 'year of the slow invasion' and the series' return to the dynamics of the Russell T Davies era and its grounding of the fantastic and extraordinary within the 'normal' activity and the private lives of the Doctor's companions and their families. Matt Hills once referred to this era as the 'intimate epic' that 'sought to combine a close-up focus on emotion and characters' private lives with large-scale spectacular SF conceits such as alien invasions'. (1)

Once a methodology regularly used for the series to touch base with the reality of living in the present day and to engage the viewer at an emotional level, the Moffat era has taken a different route, rarely using the 'Earth invasion' format and concentrating solely on the developing emotional maturity of one companion, Amy Pond. Chibnall seems to indicate that enough distance and difference exists between the Davies and the Moffat era that an unashamed homage to the Davies era can be considered and that we should take a look at 'All the Ponds, with their house and their jobs and their everyday lives' and just how time passes for them in relation to their visiting Time Lord friend.

Hence, we get a return to contemporary Earth and, most specifically, the Russell T Davies contemporary Earth of Doctor Who, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures. Here, alien invasions are tracked by the media juggernauts of television and multimedia reportage (now joined by Facebook and Twitter, much to the Doctor's chagrin), celebrity commentator cameos and the Doctor's alignment with the latest incarnation of UNIT. I looked in vain for the return of Lachele Carl's Trinity Wells in the montage of news reports about the 'invasion of the very small cubes' because let's face it that would have been the apt flourish to this re-use of the Davies signature. AMNN must have closed down.

Instead, we had Matthew Amroliwala, Sophie Raworth and split screens depicting the cube infested landmarks of Big Ben, the Sphinx, the Great Wall of China and the Taj Mahal. I'm convinced the Taj Mahal has its own agent negotiating these appearances as this is its third since the Cybermen popped up in Army of Ghosts/Doomsday and Jathaa sungliders marked The End of Days for the Torchwood team. Also getting his teeth round the vexed question of where the cubes come from and retreading the trails blazed by, among others, Derek Acorah, Alistair Appleton, Trisha Goddard, Richard Dawkins, McFly, Paul O'Grady, Sharon Osbourne, Anne Widdecombe, Barbara Windsor and Sir Patrick Moore, is Professor Brian Cox.

The icing on this particular cake is the appearance of Kate Stewart and UNIT. This provides something of a double whammy as far as self-reflexive texts are concerned. UNIT returns to the parent series after a long break, together with its Tower of London headquarters last seen in The Christmas Invasion ('terrible ventilation' apparently), and a new Head of Scientific Research in the form of Kate Stewart, the daughter of Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart and his first wife Fiona. Not only is this a welcome extension to the UNIT set up and history but it is also inclusive of what could be considered, until now, its unofficial history.

As pointed out by Stuart Ian Burns in his review of this episode, this is one of those few instances where the Doctor Who urtext embraces the peripheries of fan created works such as the direct to video productions of Marc Platt's Downtime and David Howe's Daemos Rising. This is continuity that underlines the way in which the production of Doctor Who (itself a fan production of sorts these days) can often incorporate other, alternative fan discourses and then re-signify them as official texts. Cementing this recreation of the Davies era and its recommission of UNIT is the return of Douglas Mackinnon, the only director other than Richard Clark to have worked on Davies era episodes (The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky and Gridlock respectively) and move into directing Moffat era stories.

What emerges from Chibnall's script is a sense of the Pond narrative returning to its origins and where real life might be able to begin again. Intriguingly, the episode also manages to play with the concept of time, a very specific part of the Moffat signature, in several ways. It has been ten years of adventures for the Ponds in the TARDIS 'on and off', their ordinary lives operating in real time interludes between that time machine based elastic span of existence. As the Doctor understands it, it is also the ten year journey of maturity undertaken by Amy and she is now 'all grown up', as the adult Wendy to his still youthful Peter Pan. Equally important, in its own sweet way, is the scene where he, Amy and Rory share fish fingers and custard together on the sofa as they watch The Apprentice, that particular 'pudding yet savoury' delicacy regarded as the sine qua non of the first Amelia/Doctor encounter in The Eleventh Hour. Once more, we're at the beginning of the Amy Pond story.

She no longer postpones maturity as she did in her first series and there is a sense that the cycle of their Peter Pan/Wendy journey is coming to an end. When she describes herself as a journalist this surely reminds us of someone else who went on to live a life parallel to the Doctor's, Metropolitan magazine's very own Sarah Jane Smith. As this process occurs, we also watch as the slow invasion unfolds over the span of a year, with Mackinnon adding a lovely visual touch, flicking through the months like pages in a calendar and subtly acknowledging the month in various and appropriate fonts.

Kate Stewart is also another analogue to Amy. The mature scientist, a nod back to Caroline John's Liz Shaw, having an impact on UNIT's evolution, dragging 'them along, kicking and screaming' into their own twenty-first century maturity. Note that Kate chooses to be known as Stewart and not Lethbridge-Stewart, demanding to be recognised as an authority in her own right and not through the privilege of her illustrious parent. Jemma Redgrave puts in a marvellously committed performance that leaves you wanting more from the character in future episodes, as a continuation of the Lethbridge-Stewart legacy.

'what you do isn't all there is'

The Doctor is shown struggling with way time passes on Earth. He is momentarily placed on the slow path, spending days to observe the apparently inert cubes, becoming increasingly agitated and bored 'while everyone eats endless cereal'. The episode uses slapstick humour to contrast the Doctor's hi-speed life with the quieter ones of Amy and Rory in a sequence that shows him paint a fence, mow the lawn, practice his football, do the housework and rip the guts out of a car. In about an hour, apparently. Contrast this restlessness with Brian, Rory's dad, sitting in the TARDIS for four days watching the cubes and merely offering that adage of the mature, 'doesn't time fly when you're alone with your thoughts.'

It appears the Doctor would go mad if he even considered being left alone with his own thoughts. He's a hyperactive child who thinks everyone should come out and play without recourse to the responsibilities of jobs and homes. As Rory pointedly remarks to the Doctor, 'what you do isn't all there is'. Mackinnon frames this scene marvellously using the three actors and their body language to suggest the evolution of Amy and Rory visually and their realisation that they simply can't live life at the same pace as the Time Lord. Amy has her back to the Doctor and remains stoically silent throughout.

We see the months go by and observe life as it is lived by the Ponds, enjoying the important human moments and relationships. Amy is asked to be a bridesmaid, committing to the task despite having missed key moments in the bride's life and Rory is offered full-time work even though he often disappears for months. These moments suggest that human life carries on with or without them being present and the crucial notion is whether they can have an ordinary life and still travel with the Doctor.

They ask each other, did real life get started because they made commitments to their friends and their employers? That's a moot question by the time we get to the conclusion of the episode because Amy and Rory's wedding anniversary turns into a series of celebratory leap-frogs through time, dining at the Savoy of 1890 and visiting Henry VIII, which go disastrously wrong. There's a Zygon ship under the hotel and Amy inadvertently gets married to the monarch and these scribblings in the margin of their anniversary demonstrate human moments and Doctor moments can't necessarily be separated.

It's later reflected in the short scene outside the Tower of London, between Amy and the Doctor, where she admits that 'there was a time, there were years that I couldn't live without you' but since he provided them with a house, she and Rory have built a life and they may be considering this as their priority over TARDIS travels. Both lives 'pull at each other', she admits, but the Doctor makes an impassioned defence of his lifestyle, the speed of life he must use just to keep up with the universe before events 'flare and fade forever'.

A lovely, quiet 'through the looking glass' moment, the scene again suggests the cycle of the Pond storyline is about to close as the Doctor explains that he keeps coming back for them because they were the first faces his eleventh incarnation saw. He reverses the point of view of his Time Lord relationship with time and space to one which is about him running to them before they 'fade from me.' It's a reflection of their mortality and the Doctor's view, as expressed in School Reunion, 'I don't age. I regenerate. But humans decay; you wither and you die'. It clearly provides Amy with pause for thought.

It's wonderful to have Mark Williams back as Brian. His scenes where Brian uses a video camera to observe the cubes, 'Brian's log', remind me of Elton's chat to camera in Love and Monsters, an episode about what happens when the Doctor isn't around and that shares some themes with this script. The video log is another symbol of the passing of time, where we join him on day 67, and it provides us with the warmth of the father-son relationship with Rory. 'My middle name is diligence', says Brian after he informs Rory of his researches and he rebukes his son's mocking with 'I'm doing what the Doctor asked'. Brian's log stretches to day 361 and it is through his tenacity that the world wakes up to the slow invasion.

Later, it is Brian's diligence that notices Amy and Rory's little time hops back to their own June anniversary. He asks of the Doctor that dreaded question, 'what happened to the other people who travel with you' perhaps as a foreshadowing of what may well turn out to be the tragic end that the Ponds are hurtling towards. In a beautiful little scene, Williams and Smith cut through the froth and brilliantly get down to the brass tacks about how dramatically the Doctor can affect lives. He reassures Brian that Amy and Rory will never be forgotten, left behind or die as a result of his presence but I suspect this is simply preparing us for the finality of next week's episode. The Doctor's sentimental decision to stay with Amy and Rory is merely his prolonging of the inevitable just as Amy has attempted to do likewise about growing up.

The slow invasion of the cubes also reminds me of the science fiction books I read as a child in the 1970s. A particular book, Trillions, written by Nicholas Fisk in 1971, also has the Earth showered by mysterious objects. In this instance, it's an invasion of strangely behaving crystals. One of his other books, Grinny, from 1973, tells of an alien robot, taking the appearance of an elderly relative, infiltrating a family to gather intelligence about humanity and the Earth prior to invasion. It's interesting to see these similar themes in The Power of Three and how they also dovetail with the Moffat signature's use of possessed children, doppelgangers and human-machine hybrids. This renders the hospital scenes with a great deal of uncanniness as patients are carted off by humanoids looking like they've swallowed cubes, all controlled by a child with glowing blue eyes. They bear a passing resemblance to the gas-masked zombies of The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances.

There is also a sub-text, in depicting the sheer ubiquity of the cubes, about the highly networked culture that we live in. The cubes are 'like iPads that dropped from the sky' and are a metaphor for the omnipresence of information technology design, digital consumerism (news reports of 'the greatest stealth marketing campaign in business history' and Alan Sugar asking his apprentices to flog cubes both wittily underline this), the creation of user generated content and the myriad apps that are pitched to us. The cubes represent the ways we cope as 'digital natives' in a rapidly changing globalised mediascape.

Chibnall is also suggesting something sinister behind this, where the cubes become the computers and corporations that constantly survey us, where the sharing of data becomes entwined within the virtual and real worlds and affects and shapes human relationships - from the bullying effects of the online environment to our mental and physical health and well-being. As Kate notes, citizen engagement with the cubes is achieved by 'taking them to work, taking pictures, making films, posting them on Flickr and You Tube' and inspiring Twitter accounts. The infiltration of the cubes is analogous to the positive and negative aspects of social media as civic media, of how communication and interactivity can be used as a form of cyberespionage and Chibnall emphasises this through the aliens gathering their intelligence through the Internet televisions sitting in our living rooms.

If there is a problem here it is that the cube invasion storyline is hurriedly resolved, almost as a condition of the Doctor's earlier demand that he wants the cubes 'invulnerable with a nice Achilles heel', and that's a shame as the slow build up and their completely alien and mysterious concept provide an absorbing balance to the sub-plot of the problematic intertwining of human and Time Lord lives. It's interesting that the 'nice Achilles heel' the aliens exploit in humans is purely the need for their bodies to be maintained by a pumping heart and not, strangely enough, our impending doom caused by listening to the Birdie Song on a loop. It must come close, though?

The countdown, Brian's kidnapping and the mass cardiac arrests ultimately lead us to an immediate distrust of hospital orderlies, very long corridors and disused service lifts. The service lift is the inter-dimensional portal to the ship where Steven Berkoff is lurking menacingly as the Shakri, an ogre from a Gallifreyan fairy tale and an intergalactic pest-control agent threatening to destroy all human life. We're back in the realm of 'monsters under the bed' with the Shakri and the use of fairy tale motifs to warn children that there are creatures in the universe who will eat you. There's even a reference to Red Riding Hood, a motif that the series has associated with Amy since her first appearance.

The Shakri is the proverbial 'man in black' for the story and yet again, like Oswin, Solomon and Kahler-Jex, he meets his demise in a massive explosion. Four episodes with the same explosive climax is becoming rather repetitive and we also have the rather improbable concept of mass heart defibrillation on a global scale. 'Creatures of hope' doesn't quite cover it. Fair dos though, this is perhaps Chibnall's best script, certainly more thoughtful and nuanced than Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, and with enough genuinely good character moments to offset some of the absolutely shameless riffing on the Russell T Davies era and a somewhat fudged conclusion with the Shakri.

The episode does indeed extoll the power of three - the Doctor, Amy and Rory - and there are certainly excellent performances from all involved and plenty of material for the companions after the dearth of activity last week. Hopefully, the improved UNIT and Kate Stewart will come back again. Once more, Mark Williams steals the show as Brian, the father who can assess with pin point accuracy the dilemma that Rory and Amy face. He concludes that, like an addiction, 'it's you they can't give up Doctor' as the couple wrestle with their consciences just as the Doctor makes to leave without them. Brian gives them consent to travel in time and space but understands the need to stay grounded too, because after all, 'somebody's got to water the plants.' Ominously, he demands of the Doctor to 'just bring them back safe.' Famous last words judging by what's in store in New York when The Angels Take Manhattan.

(1) Matt Hills, The Triumph of a Time Lord - Regenerating Doctor Who in the Twenty-First Century

On the strength of his script for The Enemy of the World, former series story-editor David Whitaker was commissioned by Derrick Sherwin, the incumbent script-editor of Doctor Who in 1968, to develop a storyline about Earth's first contact with aliens, initially titled Invaders from Mars.

As Whitaker developed the idea, the Doctor Who production office endured a script development crisis and some changes of the personnel running the series. The round of office musical chairs left Peter Bryant and Derrick Sherwin overseeing the series' transformation, in the aftermath of the departure of Patrick Troughton and his fellow actors Frazer Hines and Wendy Padbury, and Terrance Dicks, Sherwin's assistant, promoted to script-editor. 

With the dust still settling on this arrangement and with many decisions now being made about the future of Doctor Who as it moved into colour and into the 1970s with a new Doctor, Dicks commissioned Whitaker in May 1969 for a seven-episode storyline breakdown. Now titled The Carriers of Death, this needed to encompass the format's changes such as the Doctor's exile, his new companion and the inclusion of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and UNIT.

Some two months later, this became a full script commission for seven episodes and already included a scenario featuring 'a gangster who takes advantage of some gullible but invulnerable alien ambassadors who were sent to Earth as a swap for humans who went to Mars'. (1) However, Whitaker struggled with the demands of a production which still hadn't defined the new Doctor and the Earth-based format. Jon Pertwee had only just been cast as the next Doctor and Caroline John, playing Liz Shaw, wasn't contracted until July. Sherwin wasn't happy with the first two scripts he had delivered and, in an attempt to show him what they wanted, asked script assistant Trevor Ray to perform a re-write on episode one which he then returned to Whitaker in August 1969.

'all the messing about he'd gone through'

Whitaker persevered with The Carriers of Death until October and was then confronted with a further shake up at the Doctor Who office. Sherwin and Bryant were sent, midway into production on the opening serial of the new season, Spearhead from Space, to rescue Paul Temple (1969-71), a BBC drama co-production with German TV. Their replacement, Barry Letts, was appointed as producer on 20 October, inheriting a production with barely any useable scripts and with one story about to go before the cameras.

Both he and Whitaker couldn't muster any enthusiasm for the three completed scripts of The Carriers of Death and Letts decided to cut his losses in November 1969. When Whitaker moved to Australia during the scripting process Letts and Dicks turned to Malcolm Hulke to rewrite the second and third instalments and write, from scratch, the other four episodes.

To enable Hulke more time, having just delivered the scripts for Doctor Who and the Silurians early and with filming already underway on Spearhead from Space, the transmission order of Silurians and what would eventually become The Ambassadors of Death was transposed. Whitaker was paid in full for the first three episodes and received credit on screen for all seven episodes, as recompense for what Dicks refers to on the DVD commentary as 'all the messing about he'd gone through', while Hulke, Dicks and Ray went uncredited.

With the scripts now reshaped, from the basics of removing characters and changing names to Hulke's own take on the first contact situation, filming commenced on 23 January 1970 under the direction of Michael Ferguson. Ferguson had already worked on the programme, beginning as an uncredited assistant floor manager threatening Barbara with a Dalek plunger for the climax of episode one of The Daleks and later directing The War Machines and The Seeds of Death, and was always intrigued by the visual potential of television.

He was intrigued enough by Barry Letts' studio test run of CSO on 3 January 1970 to confidently use the technique on The Ambassadors of Death, working with designer David Myerscough-Jones, to extend the studio sets and create the various screens in Space Centre, the futuristic British equivalent of Mission Control, and visualise the alien ship interiors using a combination of actors, models and props in studio. He also approached Letts and Dicks about inserting a sequence into the start of the first episode, showing the Doctor and Liz popping in and out of existence, to underline the versatility of the new video editing technology at the BBC.

Location filming, which commenced on 23 January 1970, was overseen by BBC film cameramen A.A 'Tubby' Englander and Tony Leggo. Initial sequences were shot at the Little Marlow Sewage Treatment Works, as background for the raid on the isotope store in episode seven, and Folley's Gravel Pit at Spade Oak was used to film Reegan's disposal of the irradiated bodies of his henchmen. The following week Reegan's sabotage of the fuel variant at the Space Centre was completed at the Southall Gas Works and then filming for the warehouse attack on UNIT took place on 27 and 28 January in the familiar surroundings of the abandoned TCC factory in Acton. Then owned by the BBC and used as a costume store, this is where UNIT had had previous engagements with Cybermen and Autons in The Invasion and Spearhead from Space respectively.

At the end of January, the exterior of Heldorf's quarantine lab was filmed at Wycombe Air Park, Marlow was used as the backdrop for the car chase and pursuit of Liz on foot to the weir, with Caroline John and Roy Scammell swapping skirt, wig and hat for the stunt driving and falls, and Beacon Hill became the exteriors for Reegan's base. In early February, the battle for the Recovery 7 capsule, complete with helicopter, jeeps and motorcycle outriders was mounted in Aldershot and the entrance to Space Centre was provided courtesy of the Northfleet Blue Circle Cement works. (2)

Recording for the story took place in Television Centre Studios 3 and 4 between 13 February and 27 March. The rapid intercutting between cameras in episode one, when Van Lyden enters Mars Probe 7 and everyone is assaulted by the alien signal, was a Ferguson motif last seen in The Seeds of Death (as was his penchant for filming monsters in silhouette against the glare of the sun). As Martin Wiggins' production notes reveal, this cutting was achieved in studio, during live recording, by using a RACE box attached to the vision mixer's console to switch rapidly between cameras.

The cockpit for Recovery 7 was a set built and jointly financed by the Doctor Who and Doomwatch (1970-72) production teams to reduce costs. Dicks notes that the Doomwatch team had sent a memo to them regarding storylines, suggesting they both confer about upcoming episodes to avoid reproducing themes and ideas, but nothing further came out of that mooted collaboration. Overseen by the two designers working on these episodes, Ian Watson and David Myerscough-Jones, the set debuted in the Doomwatch episode, Re-Entry Forbidden. This was recorded two days before The Ambassadors of Death which subsequently used a modified version of the set that also included an airlock.

Model effects were handled by Peter Day and Ian Scoones, with Scoones returning to Doctor Who after working for Hammer Films and Gerry Anderson and assisting, as an outside contractor, on the effects for The Space Pirates. Costumes were designed by Christine Rawlins and, to achieve the look of the alien ambassadors, she contributed the padded space suits, eventually seen again in Colony in Space and Planet of the Daleks, and recycled a number of space helmets from Hammer's ill-feted 'space-western' Moon Zero Two (1969).

... monsters from outer space walking down the high street

The Ambassadors of Death is a grim tale, perhaps lacking some essential humour, that emerges out of the 'first contact' brief given to David Whitaker and from Mac Hulke's own political slant on the subject. The story sits at the heart of Sherwin and Bryant's rebuff to Harold Wilson's now infamous trumpeting of unfettered progress through science and technology and the vision of a 'Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution [that] will be no place for restricted practices'.

The series' developing format, a heady brew of Quatermass, The Avengers (1961-69), George Orwell, Department S (1969-70), The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and James Bond, certainly fetishes this vision but also acknowledges that the cracks are beginning to show in a world buffeted by political scandal, environmental disaster, inflation and an oil crisis.

The unmasking of initially friendly aliens and revealing them to be aggressive subversives is a theme that often appears in Doctor Who, with The Claws of Axos as the following year's example minus many of the moral issues of xenophobia raised here. Ferguson makes their silent, blank advance, with the sunlight casting them in silhouette, a visual symbol of the uncanny in Doctor Who, an overt representation of the ‘other’ in the physical form of monsters from outer space walking down the high street, and a projection of the decade's internalised fears about misguided science, immigration and cultural change.

The radioactive alien ambassadors are a metaphor for the not-so-white heat of technological progress, their presence mirroring the super heated funnel that delivered the Nestenes and their affinity for plastics, the Silurian's Derbyshire hot house created via the Cyclotron and Project Inferno's world of untapped, new forms of energy engulfed by red hot lava. It's a vision of Britain in thrall to the 'white heat' of technology but also one that questions where it will lead us politically, socially, psychologically and economically. 

The Ambassadors of Death are also perhaps representative of the growing obsession with the paranormal and UFOs that emerged in the early 1970s, epitomised by the Uri Geller and Erich von Däniken effects. The Letts era of Doctor Who regularly taps into these cultural phenomena (see the ancient astronauts, magic and science stand offs and the Atlantean flavour in The Daemons and The Time Monster respectively) and here it pre-empts Geller's night club act in the Doctor's apparent 'transmigration of objects' conjuring trick with the computer tapes when he's held at gunpoint by Dr Taltalian.

Francis Wheen also notes that 'the history of UFOria in the second half of the twentieth century certainly indicates a remarkable correlation between extraterrestrial sightings and periods of political and economic paranoia.' (4) To top it all, in 1970, two Readers Digest journalists were also trying to convince the world that the Soviet Union were conducting serious research into psychic and paranormal powers to gain the upper hand over the materialist West. 

While on the one hand we have a British space programme launching missions to Mars and a fetishism for technology and gadgets of all kinds, on the other we also see a Britain entangled in the struggle between rational pacifism and paranoid militarism. The Ambassadors of Death powerfully articulates the era's paranoid style: 'Conservatives feared that the very fabric of the state was under imminent threat' and radicals had a 'mistrust of political, military and business institutions'. (5) In the space of one serial we have an ex-astronaut, General Carrington, who uses the criminal underground to kidnap foreigners from outer space and who hoodwinks a government minister into believing the aliens are invaders, rather than the emissaries they really are, by linking them with the anti-democratic activities of 'foreign' powers.

It clearly signifies the escalating mistrust that industrialised societies now had in their respective governments and the military/industrial complex at the end of the 1960s. Carrington drags politicians, scientists and mercenaries into his conspiracy to exploit the alien ambassadors, with various consequences and outcomes for all the parties involved. The xenophobia of governments and individuals is a central theme that ties in with Wilson's 1966-70 term that witnessed growing public concern over the level of immigration to the UK. This tension was clearly dramatised by the infamous 'Rivers of Blood' speech by the Conservative politician Enoch Powell, where his warning against the dangers of immigration was affecting enough to convince workers, who would neither consider themselves as 'racist' nor rabidly agree with his politics in general, to march in support of him.

Carrington, a figurehead for these concerns, is, ironically, also made very human by John Abineri’s skillful playing and is portrayed as a man who believes he’s doing the right thing. His 'moral duty' to protect the planet by starting a war is a repeated echo of history that is still relevant today. Hulke's view of the character runs parallel to the similar figures in Doctor Who and the Silurians, in the misguided scientist Dr. Quinn, the paranoid civil servant Lawrence and Carrington wannabe Major Baker. Much of this exploration of the extremes of left and right would also flavour Hulke's Invasion of the Dinosaurs in 1974.

Carrington convinces minister Sir James Quinlan of his opinion of the aliens who, as Minister of Technology in the story, is surely an analogue for Tony Benn's role in what was referred to as 'MinTech' during the Wilson government between 1966 and 1970. He also has a number of very ambiguous figures on his payroll, including scientists Lennox and Taltalian (whose motivations aren’t entirely clear), and he collaborates with the mercenary Reegan, certainly one of the nastiest characters in this season and wonderfully played by William Dysart. 

Carrington's attempts to blame 'foreign powers', argue the 'moral duty' is to blast the aliens out of the sky with nuclear missiles, and to try and question the Doctor's own authority and role, is sensitively handled in the final scene. The Doctor confronts Carrington and then allows him to surrender with dignity, demonstrating that he sympathetically recognises Carrington as a rational human being whose irrational hatred, a consequence of misunderstanding and miscommunication, has sent him down a moral dead end. He is the victim of circumstances beyond his understanding.

... an impressive performance from his false beard

The action-adventure aspects of Season 7, with the Doctor as action hero in the middle of political conspiracies, alien invasions and the schemes of mad scientists, reach new heights in The Ambassadors of Death, emulating The Avengers (think of The Positive Negative Man as an influence here) and the plethora of glossy ITC series of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Not only do we get HAVOC and Michael Ferguson pulling the stops out on some standout action sequences but we also stray into James Bond territory. The dynamism and grittiness of these ‘action thriller’ elements, given credence by the various gun battles, chases, dives off buildings, tumbling into weirs, brief case bombs, disguised bread vans and gas guns, which are present as strong Bondian elements, reposition the series as ‘action-adventure’.

This referencing of other cultural texts by the series reflects the way that the Bond franchise itself would shift into a parodic structure, 'playing on popular memory by referring to the earlier Bond films and to the more general figure of Bond [and] referring it to more influential genres within the contemporary cinema'. (6)  However, the filmed sequences of the attack at the warehouse and the car chase with Liz Shaw also anticipate the groundbreaking all film action series The Sweeney (1975-78).

These scenes and the gritty male severity of Reegan, with his cold despatch of the radiated corpses in the gravel pit, match the much harder, realistic thriller elements of the villains and gangsters in such seminal British films as Get Carter (1971). He epitomises a more amoral, crueler masculinity prevalent in the gangster sub-cultures of the UK that would feature in such films and television shows but he's also a gangster with an enterprising, free market attitude towards the aliens whom he believes he can use to rob banks and, ironically, à la Goldfinger (1964) break into Fort Knox.

This striving for realism goes further and Ferguson has Michael Wisher’s reporter directly addressing the camera to relate the events at the Space Centre in much the same way audiences would have seen or heard Apollo missions described in the early 1970s and is perhaps a pastiche of James Burke who had been covering Apollo on the telly. These faux pieces of reportage would crop up again in later seasons giving the series a verisimilitude that has been revived again recently in the new series. Wisher, playing the reporter John Wakefield, also 'acted' as if reading from a newsreaders autocue when the autocue machine the team had hired for that job had broken down. That's dedication to your craft.

Dedication permeates much of The Ambassadors of Death, with Ferguson eliciting serious performances from the supporting cast of Abineri and Dysart, the equally good Ronald Allen as stoic mission controller Ralph Cornish, Cyril Shaps as twitchy disgraced scientist Lennox, and committed work from Pertwee and Caroline John. In fact, John gets a huge amount to do across the seven episodes and Hulke's scripts manage to give her a fiercely independent streak where she can properly spar with the likes of Dysart.

The only other element letting the side down, apart from Liz Shaw's costume homage to Brian Jones and the magic trick with the computer tapes, is Robert Cawdron as Taltalian. His French accent errs towards the comedic and half the time he's battling against an impressive performance from his false beard. It should also be noted that this is John Levene's first appearance as Benton since The Invasion, making a last minute appearance in the story, and Geoffrey Beevers pops up as Private Johnson, a full eleven years before he makes his mark as the Master in 1981's The Keeper of Traken.

Ferguson produces some very slick work in studio, going for quick cuts, interesting profile and overhead shots, extending sets with CSO and generally trying to get cameras, equipment and effects to do interesting things. He also establishes the now iconic sting that will go on to scream into every cliffhanger until 1989 and provides a cracking set of said endings to show how well it can be done. With much of Season 7 still in shakedown mode, like many of his colleagues he can't resist mucking about with the series' titles and actually splits the opening titles with an episode reprise and declares the story's title with a less than successful electronic burp to announce the 'of Death' bit.

Dudley Simpson also contributes to the successful merging of sound and music in The Ambassadors of Death where he contributes a poetic and lyrical piece of incidental music to accompany the space suited aliens silhouetted in the sunlight as they carry out Reegan’s orders. He also provides the homage to 'A Whiter Shade of Pale', 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) or Jacques Loussier, depending on your view, to Ian Scoones model sequences. There’s a strident theme for UNIT and some single plucked bass motifs to rack up the tension amidst more flurries, from the Radiophonic Workshop, of bizarre sonic messages from outer space, humming and throbbing noises coming from the Space Centre, its environs and Carrington’s secret laboratories.

The Ambassadors of Death is underrated. Terrance Dicks feels it isn't quite what Doctor Who should be and to an extent that's true as the thriller elements tend to dominate. The biggest problem is sustaining the story for the length of seven episodes and by episode five it does flag as the gears of the story, the conspiracy within a conspiracy element, become all too evident. The narrative does feel as if it is being pulled in various directions - alien encounter, spy thriller, space adventure, paranoid conspiracy - and that may be down to the various authors pitching in on the scripts. However, there is an awful lot to admire here and Ferguson's direction is often inspired and, combined with some genuinely good performances, he copes well with the bumpy narrative and hybrid genres.

(1) Tat Wood with Lawrence Miles, About Time 1970-74 / Seasons 7 to 11
(2) Shannon Patrick Sullivan, A Brief History of Time Travel, The Ambassadors of Death
(3) Michael Seely, Doomwatch.org - Re-Entry Forbidden review
(4) Francis Wheen, Strange Days Indeed - The Golden Age of Paranoia
(5) Ibid
(6) Christoph Lindner, The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader

Special features
Mention must go to the most special of features - the full restoration of colour to The Ambassadors of Death which previously existed as a mixture of black and white prints, off-air colour NTSC recordings and the only surviving colour PAL 2" quad tape, of episode one.

The VHS release could only present 90 minutes of additional colour using the off-air and 16mm black and white recordings but the advances made by the Colour Recovery Group and the Restoration Team have enabled the patterning that affected the Betamax recordings to be more or less overcome and better colour to be recovered from the chroma dots of the black and white 16mm films. Some of the painstaking work here is astonishing when you stop and think where the colour was recovered from.

Commentary
Recorded in 2009, moderated by the ever reliable Toby Hadoke, and featuring actors Caroline John, Nicholas Courtney, Peter Halliday and Geoffrey Beevers, director Michael Ferguson, script editor Terrance Dicks, stunt coordinator Derek Ware and stunt men / members of HAVOC Roy Scammell and Derek Martin. Sadly since this was recorded we've had to say goodbye to three of the actors - Carry John, Nick and Peter - so this is often a bittersweet listening experience.

Dicks covers the Bryant and Sherwin format for the show and the 'troubled genesis' of the story, discusses the way the story was cobbled together by him, Trevor Ray and Mac Hulke. Ferguson reflects on casting, the new techniques he was able to employ - everything from the then 'brand new' CSO to lightweight, hand held video cameras, kicking video disc machines and the influence of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey on the music and model shots. Later, he recalls the expansion of a relatively minor scene ('a bicycle and a copper') into the action packed hijack and the recce and stunt work at Marlow Weir. He, Dicks and Courtney also pay their respects to producer Barry Letts and Jon Pertwee.

Ware takes us through the warehouse battle in episode one ('I think I get killed seven times') and is joined by his mates Roy Scammell and Derek Martin for a very amusing commentary on episode two. He explains how he came up with the idea for HAVOC - 'specialists in hazards' - and, after founding it in 1965, how the team worked with actors and directors on the show, including the practical jokes or the 'wind ups' as Derek Martin calls them. Ware notes how the advances in visual effects are now to the detriment of stunt work, placing human bodies in situations that defy gravity or laws of physics. Listen out for the lovely stories about 'gentle man' Ronnie Allen, the self-parodic style of John Levene ('his stand up is a sight to behold') and the late Alan Chuntz's kung-fu connection to the Krays. They all take us through the hijack of the capsule, the stunts and the mishaps on location and still manage to get some little digs at each other.

Carry John joins them in episode three to 'dilute the testosterone' and chat about the stunt sequence at Marlow Weir, her escapades driving Bessie and the dynamic between her, the other cast members and the stunt team. She also recalls watching the famous stunt by Roy Scammell in Inferno and Ware similarly remembers having to talk Pertwee into avoiding vertigo during the filming of that scene. John comments that the inclusion of more action sequences, the earthbound setting and the use of colour upgraded the series, making it more than a 'kid's show'. Pertwee was apparently very keen the acting should be top notch and advised John 'just use a four letter word, duckie' if she wanted to do a scene again.

Peter Halliday joins the commentary for episode six and he regales us with his work on the show, originally providing the voices for the Silurians, and then for the aliens in this story. He had of course previously appeared in The Invasion with Pat Troughton, as Tobias Vaughan's henchman Packer, and would go on to appear in Carnival of Monsters, City of Death and Remembrance of the Daleks. Geoffrey Beevers (Mr Caroline John) takes part in the chat on the final episode. 

Mars Probe 7: Making the Ambassadors of Death (25:52)
This nicely links the transmission of the story, and the series' own aim for more realism, with the real-life drama of the Apollo 13 accident that could have claimed the lives of astronauts Jim Lovell, John Swigert and Fred Haise when an oxygen tank exploded on the service module as they made their way to the Moon. Episode four went out on 11 April 1970, the day the mission launched from Kennedy Space Center and episode five had been shown by the time they returned to Earth on 17 April 1970. A case of art briefly mirroring life. 

Chris Chapman's excellent documentary then charts writer David Whitaker's attempts to produce a workable script just as the whole series underwent a revamp - new producer, new script editor, made in colour and with the Doctor earthbound. Terrance Dicks illuminates us on how he and Mac Hulke then contributed to the rewrites and pulled the serial into shape. 

Director Michael Ferguson outlines the production of the serial and the potential for action and how he developed the working relationship with Derek Ware and his stunt performers, HAVOC. Look out for some fantastic archive clips from what looks like a documentary, Dying for a Living, featuring a very buff Roy Scammell, Alan Chuntz being shot at, AFM Margot Hayhoe avidly describing motorcyclist Marc Boyle in his black leathers and some shower and sauna scenes with the lads. Is it warm in here? 

Ware and Ferguson describe how they put together episode one's big warehouse shootout and dragged up Roy Scammell ('he had extremely good legs') to double for Carry in the sequences at Marlow Weir where Liz almost ends up in the river. Margot Heyhoe also remembers that the crew had no idea that Carry was pregnant at the time, the trouble they had with space helmets steaming up and the legendary laundry-cum-bread van (named after her and director's assistant Pauline Silcock). And then there's that hijack of the space capsule where Ferguson and HAVOC have a field day at the expense of Barry Letts' nerves and budget and culminating in an unforeseen visit to hospital for Pauline Silcock.  

There's also a brief look at Ferguson's work in studio and how they simulated G-force on Pertwee's face, the highly effective model work and his manipulation of the cliffhangers and opening titles. Ferguson concludes that 'it was the most enjoyable times of my career' and this documentary is a particularly lovely tribute to him, to Derek Ware and the HAVOC stunt team and how they enjoyed 'playing' on Doctor Who.

Trailer (1:29)
Restored television trailer that plays like Quatermass meets James Bond and was transmitted just before an edition of The Debbie Reynolds Show.
Tomorrow's Times - The Third Doctor (13:08)
This edition is presented by Peter Purves and covers Pertwee's casting and the initial coverage of his stories ('he looks like Danny Kaye and sounds like Boris Karloff'). The suitability of the series for children is also mentioned, especially the controversial Terror of the Autons, as is the alleged violence of the show. There's also a look at the response to the 10th anniversary.
Photo Gallery (4:27)
Generous selection of colour and black and white material that covers official BBC publicity shots (some used on jigsaws in the 1970s, I recall) of the Doctor, Liz and the Brigadier with Bessie and the helicopter used in the action sequences, shots of the production and visual effects teams, set designs and candid on-location material.
PDF Materials
Radio Times listings for all seven episodes
Production Information Subtitles
Very well researched and written set of notes from Martin Wiggins that are chock full of facts and insights into the making of the story. A fascinating read.
Coming Soon
'Axos calling Earth!' Yes, the special edition of The Claws of Axos is on its way.

Doctor Who: The Ambassadors of Death
BBC Worldwide / Released 1 October 2012 / BBCDVD 3484 / Cert:PG
BBC 1970
7 episodes / Broadcast: 21 March – 2 May 1970 / Colour / Running time: 2:52:09

Hammer's celebrated film noir Hell is a City (1960) is heading to DVD on 8 October and Cathode Ray Tube has two copies, courtesy of StudioCanal to giveaway in its latest competition.

It was filmed, mainly on location in Manchester and in part at Elstree Studios, between September and November of 1959. Writer-director Val Guest used his spare, economic documentary style, clearly one of the most successful elements of his work on Hammer's The Quatermass Xperiment in 1955, to capture the city and its suburbs as a backdrop to his adaptation of Maurice Procter's detective noir novel of the same name.

Born in Nelson, Maurice Procter became a police constable and served in the Halifax area for nearly 20 years. His writing career began in 1947, with the publication of his first novel No Proud Chivalry, and soon after he left the police force.

Most of his novels were the police procedurals of their day and his experience as a former policeman provided insight into the methodologies of both the criminal and police force fraternities. One of his major characters, Detective Chief Inspector Harry Martineau, made his debut in Hell is a City, published in 1954, and he would reappear in a further 14 novels from Procter between 1957 and 1969. His 1952 novel, Rich is the Treasure, had already been made into a film by United Artists in 1954 and was released as The Diamond. (1)


Hammer executive Michael Carreras sourced Procter's Hell is a City and offered it to Val Guest to script and direct. Guest's penchant for realism was well suited to Procter's story of Martineau's attempt to track down an escaped jewel thief and murderer, Don Starling. Starling returns to Manchester to recover the spoils of his previous heist.

The film essentially becomes a race against time as Starling attempts to flee the country. His intention to rob bookmaker Gus Hawkins goes awry and Martineau continues to hunt down Starling and his gang across Manchester and Yorkshire, variously tracking him and his associates to illegal coin-tossing gangs on the outskirts of Oldham and via his violent affair with Hawkins' wife.

To this end Guest uses Manchester city centre locations, the old Central Station, Oxford Road, Mosley Street and Piccadilly Gardens among others, and brings the film to a gripping climax atop the old Refuge Assurance Building, now the Palace Hotel. He also ventures out into the streets of Levenshulme, Moss Side, Oldham and further afield to Marsden in West Yorkshire.

Guest later cited Jules Dassin's innovative The Naked City (1948) as one of his major influences for the film and Hell is a City certainly follows in the tradition of Dassin's British noir Night and the City (1950). He mixes violent criminality and amoral characters with intimate scenes that catalogue Martineau's troubled home life and disintegrating marriage. 

Riding on the crest of the British New Wave, Hell is a City features a sensational British ensemble cast, including Stanley Baker, Donald Pleasence, Billie Whitelaw, Warren Mitchell, Maxine Audley, George A. Cooper and the uncredited Philip Bond, John Comer and Doris Speed, as well as American actor John Crawford who was cast (or miscast if you being particularly critical) as villain Starling because of pressure from Columbia or Warner, the studios with which Hammer had financing and distribution deals at the time. Even though it emerged at the same time as Look Back in Anger (1959), Room at the Top (1959) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), the film is often neglected in the assessment of the cinema of that era.

Arthur Grant's cinematography, both capturing the post war neglect and rebuilding of the early 1960s in high contrast black and white, and Guest's gritty direction fastens the seediness and rawness of the locations to a winning central performance from Stanley Baker.

As Andrew Spicer notes, Baker offers 'a tense, irritable touchiness' as Martineau, a character who understands how his opponent Starling thinks because they grew up together on the streets of Manchester. Spicer sees the film as ahead of its time in depicting the 'blurring of moral boundaries, the disturbing mirroring of policeman and villain.' (2)

Hell is a City had a gala premier at the Apollo, Ardwick in Manchester on 10 April 1960 and was a major success for Hammer. Guest's script was nominated for Best British Screenplay and Billie Whitelaw received a Most Promising Newcomer nod at the 1961 BAFTAs.

Hammer were delighted with the film to such a degree that they attempted to mount a television series featuring the character of Martineau. As George Nixon elaborates, Carreras put together a pitch document in 1967 for a television series to be made in colour and with the intention of Baker reprising the role.

From an initial reading, it was clearly being pitched as a UK/US co-production as Carreras mentions James Goldstone as a prospective director for the series, well known for his work across all television genres in the US. It also suggests a draft script was in existence as Procter comments on this in a letter from his Gibraltar home in April 1967.

What became of the project is not entirely known but Michael Carreras was still hoping to get the series off the ground in 1972 and had pitched it to Lloyd Shirley of Thames Television who rejected it but suggested 'a series as much of the North as this one' might interest his colleagues at Granada. (3)

However, its legacy remains intact and Hell is a City is still one of the finest British noir thrillers to emerge from the era, showcasing Val Guest's skills as a fine, versatile director and Stanley Baker's reputation as one of the period's great actors.

The DVD is digitally remastered for this release but this sadly neither includes the excellent Val Guest and Ted Newsom commentary from the Anchor Bay edition of 2002 nor the original trailer. However, the alternate ending, which was prepared but never used, is presented and would have replaced the original downbeat conclusion to the film.

(1) George Nixon, Hell is a City File, Levenshulme History - Then and Now
(2) Andrew Spicer, Typical Men, The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema
(3) George Nixon, Hell is a City File, Levenshulme History - Then and Now

Hell is a City
A Hammer Film Production
Associated British - Warner Pathe 1960
StudioCanal DVD OPTD2376 / Released 8 October 2012 / Cert PG / 92 mins / Region 2 / Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 / Black and white / PAL / Audio: Mono 2.0




Cathode Ray Tube has two copies of HELL IS A CITY to give away courtesy of StudioCanal. Simply answer the question below and submit your entry via email.

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Question: What was the title of Val Guest's 1961 British science fiction film? 

Email your answer to the question above, with your name and address, and we'll enter you into the prize draw.

The Angels Take Manhattan
BBC HD
29 September 2012, 7.20pm

The review contains plot spoilers.

'New York. The city of a million stories. Half of them are true, the other half haven't happened yet,' drawls the cod private eye narration at the beginning of The Angels Take Manhattan, dialogue that comes complete with the cinematic tropes of that picturesque skyline dissolving to a clattering typewriter. Sam Garner (Rob David), the private eye hired by Grayle (Mike McShane), is one of several narrators, indeed one of several investigators, that are typical of the Moffat signature in Doctor Who. And true to form, they are all telling us the story from different perspectives. It may be told as a hard boiled thriller in the style of Chandler and Hammett in the opening sequence and is modified later when River and finally Amy take on the narrator/writer duties, but it is also a self-reflexive return to the way Sally Sparrow and Kathy Nightingale in Blink were the equivalents of ITV's Rosemary and Thyme and likewise how their encounter with the Weeping Angels was told via amassing clues and messages.

The pre-titles sequence is beautifully redolent of the period, full of atmosphere and threat, silhouettes, shadows and moving statuary, including the Statue of Liberty. It immediately takes us back to the promise of Blink's final coda where the Doctor addresses the audience while a series of images of statues, gargoyles and public art appears on screen, suggesting it is not just the Angels but that every statue may come to life if we look away. It harks back to mythological symbolism of the Gorgon and Baba Yaga and fairy tales where dwarfs turned to stone in sunlight. The very act of looking and the fear of blinking, the glimpse of something extraordinary in the corner of the eye, becomes the primal, childhood fear of monsters springing to life and creeping up on you, the uncanny generated by our ordinary, everyday surroundings.

'Death of a Detective'

Director Nick Hurran capitalises on this feeling, with high, overhead shots of Garner entering the doors of Winter Quay where, according to Grayle, the Angels live. He intercuts or frames shots of the statuary on the building with the faces of people who are seemingly trapped within and must be forever vigilant lest the stone masonry comes alive. It's a suitably creepy sequence, tapping into Blink's themes about Gothic space and childhood fears especially when a brief shot shows a child mimicing the Angel's pose and almost playing peek-a-boo with Garner.

In Garner's dialogue and attitude, his dealings with Grayle and his exploration of the Winter Quay building, this episode uses the 'thick nocturnal atmosphere and semi-expresionist style, tough guy dialogue, seedy urban demimonde, stock criminal characters from the gangster film and... a sense of large-scale intrigue and conspiracy' often shared by detective pulp fiction and Gothic romance (1). The typewriter reappears, setting Garner's fatal experience within the fictional milieu of a novel, completing the heading of Chapter I - 'Death of a Detective'.

It is hyperbolised Gothic, where buildings, rooms, objects and people convey secrets, hidden messages and clues to solve a particular mystery. The Winter Quay building and its corridors also reflect back to Toby Whithouse's 1980s-styled hotel in The God Complex (which in itself presented a hanging narrative of the Pond's departure) and the film-noir science fiction of Dark City (1998) and Blade Runner (1982) and their bleak, fatalistic tones.

We learn that White Quay is a prison, a battery farm (a time-fueled recharging station in another sense) for the permanent residents affected by the Angels' disorientating ability to send you into the past to die while ‘in the present they consume the energy of all the days you might have had'. Behind the doors of the building, the victims wait to catch up with themselves. It's a wonderful opening that also cheekily keeps the promise of Blink and something speculated upon the last time the Doctor found himself in the vicinity of the Statue of Liberty.

The expressionistic style of The Angels Take Manhattan is very appropriate to some of the visual symbolism that I've been discussing over the last five weeks. Besides the metadiagetic narrator, episodes have been highlighting a darkness and light scheme and they have seen the light being engulfed by the dark in the opening titles, in the use of the light bulb motif and the way stories move from brightly lit locations and into dark interiors. Last week, the slow invasion was perpetrated by the alien Shakri, a Gallifreyan nightmare from the dark space between dimensions and this week we have an almost black vortex down which the TARDIS tumbles, a noir New York full of Weeping Angels who truly appreciate being alive in the dark and shots at twilight as the sun sets over Times Square and Brooklyn Bridge and day gives way to night. There's even a light bulb being soniced by the Doctor in the final attempt to escape from Winter Quay and the Doctor changing the TARDIS's rooftop light bulb too.

So, after a superb five minute opening sequence we then get Sting rather unnecessarily telling us the bleeding obvious as Nick Hurran makes a virtue of his Central Park and Times Square locations. It's the backdrop for the Doctor and his companions and their banter about Amy's need for reading glasses, a set of Harry Potter specs that really do not suit her, and her horribly lined face.

This is before Rory goes and gets himself hurled back in time to an encounter with the Angels at Winter Quay. He only popped out for a coffee, bless him. Meanwhile the Doctor gets rather hot under the collar reading a pulp detective novel and Moffat, with some irony no doubt, momentarily transforms the Time Lord into said young Mr. Potter.

In effect, The Angels Take Manhattan is not only told through the clues in these typewritten thoughts but then, most importantly, through the pot-boiler novel ghostwritten, one could say, by River Song as Melody Malone. River is a natural author, having already written a detective novel in the form of a diary that presses the pages of her life with the Doctor together but which is experienced by them both in random form. The reading of this book, or more specifically its chapter headings, is almost a parallel to the peeling back of the wallpaper in Wester Drumlins in Blink, both being a supernatural augury of events that have happened, are happening and will happen.

More significantly, the book's word for word description of the events affecting the Doctor, Amy and Rory also remind us of that scene in Blink when Sally and Lawrence have pieced together the clues and answers in the DVD Easter egg conversation in linear order just as Lawrence simultaneously transcribes them in shorthand. Non-linear clues and obfuscating messages emerge as a visible linear narrative, one shaped by how Lawrence’s transcript eventually reaches the Doctor at the end of the episode. Here, Melody Malone's book has somehow found its way into the Doctor's pocket and its narrative, written in a future/past that we haven't seen yet, begins to unfurl on screen.

It's worth noting the storytelling motif here too which is a familiar trope in Moffat's Doctor Who and certainly one that has shaped Amy's own story and her childhood recreations of adventures with the Raggedy Doctor she met in her garden so long ago. The Doctor reading back to Amy a book to which she has already added the final word, the coda to her own adventures, seems an absolutely perfect way to start to draw the threads of the Amelia/Amy text together. It also allows the characters' knowledge of what is happening back in time where Rory has been trapped and, through its chapter headings, the book provides tantalising clues to an unfolding episode as watched on its first transmission.

'once we know what's coming, it's written in stone' 

The effect of this relies somewhat on no prior knowledge of the events of the episode and that's another common trope in Moffat's work and symbolised here by the notion of events being affected by the reading ahead of Melody Malone's novel just like the 'spoilers' warning attached to River's diary. Is the Doctor's warning to Amy prophetic? Would reading ahead to 'find that Rory dies' have alerted her to the fate that awaits them? The Doctor is certain that prior knowledge will mean events are 'fixed' but does this also mean that River actually knew what would happen to her parents?

After several seasons where Moffat demonstrates that time can be rewritten or unwritten, he throws something of a spanner in the works and suggests that neither the Doctor nor River can interfere with time, 'not once you've read it' in a book. To emphasise that rather unconvincing volte-face Moffat gives the Doctor the dire prediction to Amy that 'once we know what's coming, it's written in stone'.

Hurran also prefigures the 'fixed time' climax of the story with a slow pan down to Rory's tombstone in the New York cemetery. Later, this is emphasised in the scene where the Doctor has to free River's wrist from the grip of the Angel. He demonstrates to Amy that, because she read this incident in the book, he no longer has free will and must break River's wrist and follow the book to the final letter.

By the end of the episode, this is given significance when it is Amy we hear narrating the book's coda and taking the Doctor and the audience back to the little Amelia sitting on her suitcase in her Leadworth garden to tell the tale anew. What was it the Doctor said to her in The Big Bang? - 'I'll be a story in your head, but that's OK. We're all stories in the end. Just make it a good one, eh? Cos it was, you know, it was the best. A daft old man who stole a magic box and ran away.'

The chapter headings and the last page of the book - significant of the delayed endings and hanging narratives of Moffat's work on Doctor Who - are also symbolic of the closure of the Amy Pond story. It's been foreshadowed for so long now and this last delay, the Doctor's insistence 'then it doesn't have to end', is only temporary. When the Doctor reads that last page, the one eventually written by Amy and that expounds on the exciting adventures that have been and will be again, it is almost as if we're back in the TARDIS while the Doctor reads the letter left to him by Madame de Pompadour in The Girl in the Fireplace.

There have been many, many letters and messages of significance in Moffat's era - Reinette's goodbye, Kathy Nightingale's letter to Sally, Evangelista's letter to Donna and the various messages sent by River, to recall but a few. Just as Gothic stories litter their plots with clues placed or hidden in artefacts and letters, we not only get the significant last page of the novel but also the instructions in the novel about bypassing the time distortions preventing the TARDIS's landing and River's suggestion for a side trip to China to discover the message hidden in the vase that guides the TARDIS to land in 1938. 

Nick Hurran intercuts his New York travelogue with lingering shots of statuary, finding menace in ordinary surroundings, and pre-figures Rory's fate in that brief shot of the cherubs supporting the Angel of the Waters fountain, momentarily bearing a snarling visage and coupled with the manic, child-like laughter on the soundtrack, that accompanies his passage under the Bethseda Terrace and his meeting with River in 1938.

This same sense of foreboding then underlines Hurran's slow crane shot above the cemetary, after the TARDIS has managed to land and both Amy and the Doctor understand the connection to the Weeping Angels, with the figure of an Angel prominent on the left hand side of the shot. 1938 and 2012 are 'causally linked somehow' and one assumes that this suggests the surviving Angel that seals Rory's fate, the hanging thread that Moffat will give a vicious tug at the end of the episode.

It's not quite clear what the motivation for Grayle's arrest of River and Rory is. How did he know who to arrest, where to arrest them and how they were connected to the Angels? Yes, he's 'a crime boss with a collecting fetish', has an Angel chained up in his front room and sent a private investigator to check out Winter Quay. The only way that Grayle can know of River's connection is through the Melody Malone novel and we must presume he's read it or is reading it while it writes itself during the episode.

However he more or less comes across as a crude cipher whose role is to get our characters from point A to point B, as River flirts madly with the Doctor using Chinese earthenware and Rory ends up babysitting in the basement. It's a bit of thankless role for Mike McShane it has to be said.

The sequence in the basement is rather glorious and Hurran manipulates the scares and the dark/light motif effectively, repeatedly plunging the screen into darkness and intimating the movement of the stone cherubs through sound effects alone. He uses the faint glow of fire from a match to briefly illuminate proceedings and the final plunge into darkness after the cherub blows out Rory's match is used to jump to River's own predicament. When the Doctor arrives, the scenes with River still afford much of the husband-wife screwball comedy banter that Moffat likes to use between the Doctor and River. Smith and Kingston achieve it with their usual twinkle of mischievousness.

However, there is a feeling, when she updates him as to where they are in their mutual timelines, her days as 'Professor Song' carry as much a sense of foreboding as do the combined fates of Amy and Rory. We're nearing the end of her story too. Also note that in contrast to the Melody Malone novel relating the last days of the Ponds, we have River's timeline edging towards completion as the Doctor's story is being deleted 'from every database in the universe'. The continuing flirtation with the idea that 'silence will fall when the question is asked' is present and correct as is the familiar notion of time written and unwritten. River is the woman who killed the Doctor but then, 'Doctor who?' and Rory's attempt to run from the Angels also suggests a paradox that can 'un-happen' the creation of Winter Quay.

'Death at Winter Quay'

The chapter headings of River's book not only tell us where Rory has been but also enlighten the Doctor to Amy's possible fate. River's broken wrist is also symbolic of the fact that rewriting the future or vowing to resolve a problem through sentimental attachment is not always possible and that a physical injury or death can often ensue.

As River notes, 'when one's in love with an ageless god who insists on the face of a 12 year-old, one does one's best to hide the damage' and reprimands the Doctor for healing her injury with his regeneration energy. It is a lesson he will clearly learn by the end of the episode when his own sentimental attachment to Amy and Rory is tested, their mortality is finally put into the context of his immortality. River herself warns Amy that 'he doesn't like endings', suggesting that her own impending death is as much a part of the Doctor's ability to outlast her.

That theme also resonates in the disturbing scene where Rory meets his dying, older self in Winter Quay and where the moment of death is simultaneously being set in stone as a chapter in Melody Malone's novel: 'Death at Winter Quay'. Rory, as cursed as Kenny in South Park, dies again. In fact, he dies several times over in this single episode. The tragedy leads him into the last desperate escape from the building and the rooftop suicide. This is probably the strongest scene in the episode, dramatically, with Rory's faith in the paradox and his self-sacrifice to prove it shaking off Amy's last remaining attachments to the Doctor.

This is the man she finally has faith in, it seems, even though it takes her some time to summon up that unswerving belief in him. Moffat uses this to reflect the River/Doctor relationship too, the notion of changing the future and rewriting time as faith in each other, as their 'marriage'. What bothers me slightly is that the Doctor has so little faith in his companions judging by his reaction to the creation of the paradox. It goes without saying, Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill are great but then the sequence ends with their jump off the roof and we're in different territory.

This sequence will only work if you've made a decent emotional connection with Amy and Rory and you haven't spotted that hanging thread that Moffat's left in plain sight in that Manhattan cemetery. I have to admit that I have spent the last two and half years struggling with my empathy for these characters. Sadly, the episode spirals into an excess of melodrama when they jump off the roof. This was inevitable given that at the end of Doomsday Billie Piper cried through her mascara and into the hearts of the nation and it seems something similar - a tugging at the heartstrings - was deemed to be de rigeur here.

It's as overblown an ending as that of Doomsday, which didn't quite know where to end appropriately either, and the slow motion and syrupy musical scoring as they fall from the roof descends into manipulative nonsense, especially in light of the rug that Moffat then pulls from under the viewer's feet at the end of the episode. There, the paradox of their death is created and Winter Quay destroyed, yet an Angel somehow survives and kills Rory.

The Doctor, who can reboot the universe and set time back on its path at the drop of a hat, the god with a 12 year-old's face, then claims he can't go back into time to rescue Rory. New York would apparently be crushed in the new paradox created. No emotional send off for Rory then, who for me is the better of the two characters out of the Ponds, despite not getting the lion's share of the scripts, but we get yet another teary salute from Amy.

It's a bit of an overworked, sentimental ending which I suppose is appropriate considering that a major theme in the episode is about the Doctor avoiding such chronic sentimentality. Perhaps it would have worked if, after the jump from the roof, it had faded directly to the scene in the cemetery and the Titanic-style histrionics had been avoided. I quite like the fact that Amy ignores the Doctor's pleas to get back in the TARDIS and actually wants to be with Rory rather than him and that River, both as another mortal and as her daughter, understands this as the Doctor angrily orders them to 'stop it, just stop it'.

So Amy and Rory live happily ever after in the past, not quite properly dead. Moffat just can't bring himself to kill characters, can he? Everyone seems to get an afterlife; River, Amy, Rory and even that ultimate example of a character cheating death, Oswin, who's about to enter stage left, in some guise or other, in the Christmas special.

The Time Lord is shown as powerless to do anything, especially in the presence of something as complicated as love, of a sentimentality that 'creates fixed time', apparently. Another instance of Moffat quickly chucking a spanner in the works there to suggest a finality to Amy's action and yet, later, we hear River acknowledge that the book she will write, as Melody Malone, will get sent back to Amy to add her afterword. How does that 'fixed time' work? You can't go back and rescue companions yet you can send them books and go and visit their younger selves to effectively write their adventures as your companion well in advance. 

So in the end The Angels Take Manhattan is a recycled brew of major ingredients from the Moffat signature, successful for the most part but perhaps, by offering yet another permutation of the Weeping Angels and their abilities, he simply diminishes his creations to a marauding monster of the week. It looses cohesion in some instances and if you haven't invested in the Amy and Rory dynamic, which is one of my difficulties with this era, then the ending of the Ponds' story is either a tearful tragedy or perhaps something of a welcome change.

Moffat does redeem this sense of uncertainty about his characters and all those ambiguous rules about fixed time by returning to that elusive last page of the Melody Malone book and the delightful afterword proper of adult Amy, in voice over narration, asking the Doctor to drop in on little Amelia, sat on her suitcase in her garden, and fulfill a punchline that Moffat has apparently waited two and a half years to deliver. Talk about hanging narratives. Once upon a time...

(1) Martin Rubin, Thrillers

'I should rank The Curse of Frankenstein among the half-dozen most repulsive films I have encountered in the course of some 10,000 miles of film reviewing.' That was C.J. Lajeune's humble, if not hyperbolic, opinion, in The Observer of 5 May 1957, of Hammer's first horror film made in colour which established the signature of their Gothic horror cycle revival and the credentials of the team that formed to produce them.

For Hammer, this was an extraordinary convocation of the talents they had been nurturing through the 1940s and 1950s, particularly director Terence Fisher, screenwriter Jimmy Sangster, producers Anthony Hinds and Anthony Nelson Keys, cinematographer Jack Asher, production designer Bernard Robinson, composer James Bernard and make-up designer Phil Leakey.

Nelson Keys was actually instrumental in bringing the talents of Robinson and Asher to the company. Keys, Fisher, Asher and Len Harris, the camera operator, had worked together at Gainsborough Studios in the late 1940s. These individuals would create in The Curse of Frankenstein a template for Hammer horror that continues to be admired to this day and it remains a key film in the evolution of British cinema per se.

'to exaggerate what is brutal and nauseating, as opposed to what is merely good, tense horror'

It was the first British horror film in colour, and the first of their films to pair together two actors now synonymous with Hammer, the legendary Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Its humble origins can be found in the aftermath of Hammer's success with The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), itself a co-production and distribution deal with American film producer Robert Lippert who supplied the finance, American actors and distribution. Hammer, under its Exclusive moniker, distributed his films in the UK. After the film's success, Hammer were keen to develop further finance and distribution deals and it would be executive James Carreras's association with the Variety Club that would lead him to Eliot Hyman.

Hyman, based in New York, was head of Associated Artists Pictures and he was, by a circuitous route, presented with an adaptation of Frankenstein from Max J Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky (they would later form Amicus, one of Hammer's rivals in the 1960s and 1970s). He was unsure that the pair had the experience to produce the film but knew exactly who to approach and sent the script to Carreras in London.

As Quatermass 2 went into production, Carreras's son Michael spent some time corresponding with Subotsky and Rosenberg about the inadequacies of the script and the potential legal problems they might face with Universal in trying to avoid duplication of elements from their 1931 Frankenstein. He eventually invited them to a meeting in London on 9 May 1956.

A revised screenplay from Subotsky, now titled Frankenstein - the Monster, was submitted to the BBFC for their consideration. They immediately categorised it as an X and their reader Audrey Field offered that the script tended 'to exaggerate what is brutal and nauseating, as opposed to what is merely good, tense horror'. (1) Hammer were dictated a memo requesting many changes, reducing the focus on the more horrific elements such as the scenes involving surgery on the monster, various strangulations, screams, rats and rotting corpses.

Anthony Hinds stepped in at this juncture, unhappy with the Subotsky script and somewhat disheartened by James Carreras's notion that this would be made quickly, cheaply and in black and white. He eventually turned to Jimmy Sangster to write an alternative script after Sangster had professed an interest in taking a shot at it. He had joined Hammer in 1949, working as an assistant director and production manager on many of the pre-Gothic horror cycle B-pictures the studio made. By 1955, he had scripted a short film, A Man On the Beach and had written his first feature, X the Unknown (1956), which was planned as a Quatermass sequel but then changed when Nigel Kneale refused Hammer permission to use the character.

Sangster's screenplay reinvigorated the studio's approach to the property and Hinds pushed for the film to get the resources he felt it deserved and, in collaboration with Anthony Nelson Keys and Jack Asher, budgeted and scheduled for the film to be made in colour. Meanwhile, Universal were getting twitchy about Hammer's decision to go into pre-production on Frankenstein and, with impending litigation on the horizon, Hammer's lawyers set to work.

Their conclusion was that Hammer was free to adapt the original Mary Shelley book, as it was in the public domain, but that the company should avoid reproducing any material specifically created by Universal in their own adaptation. This would have repercussions down the line, particularly when Phil Leakey was assigned to design the creature make-up for The Curse of Frankenstein.

Hinds was meticulous and, after studying Universal's Frankenstein (1931), The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Son of Frankenstein (1939), he recommended using Sangster's script as he felt that the Subotsky version used too many ideas from the Universal films, particularly Bride, and it would require some painstaking revisions. Meanwhile, Eliot Hyman was kept informed of the decision to use the Sangster script and Subotsky and Rosenberg were offered a percentage deal for their work in developing the project. He was also party to Universal's constant legal threats, which would continue throughout production of The Curse of Frankenstein, and was instrumental in Hammer closing a distribution deal with Warner.

Sangster submitted what was now titled The Curse of Frankenstein to the BBFC on 9 October 1956. His take on the Frankenstein story would usher in a significant refocusing on the central character of Victor Frankenstein, rejecting, as David Pirie notes, 'the bland and self-pitying martyr of fate, whom Mary Shelley envisaged' and replacing him with 'a magnificently arrogant rebel... with an utterly unscrupulous and authoritative elegance'. (2) This Byronic figure would also find favour with Peter Cushing's approach to the role, one that never entertained the idea that the Baron was mad but rather was an intelligent, passionate scientist steadfastly determined to prove his ideas.

'infinitely more disgusting than the first script' 

As an indication of the bumpy road ahead for the censors and Hammer, the BBFC were equally appalled at Sangster's script. Readers Audrey Field and Frank Crofts were unanimous in their apoplexy, with Fields describing it as 'infinitely more disgusting than the first script' and 'really evil' and Crofts attacking Sangster's intention to 'pile horror on horror' in 'a monstrous script'. (3) Both recommended significant changes would be needed for the BBFC to even consider an X certificate.

Among the various bones of contention, they demanded restraint in the depiction of the young Victor performing vivisection on a rabbit; the revival of the puppy in Victor and Paul Krempe's first experiment; the cutting down of a corpse from a gibbet; the attack on the old man and the little boy and the use of close ups of the dismembered hands; the mutilated head that is destined for the acid bath; eyeballs; bodies in coffins; the creature's body and face. They also found the association between this sturm und drang and Victor's infidelity with his maid Justine, and her subsequent pregnancy, very unsavory.

Hinds ploughed on regardless and made some amends to the script as the £65,000 production took up residency at Bray Studios and he gathered together his cast and crew. Peter Cushing was an award winning television actor, fresh from success with the BBC's adaptation, by Nigel Kneale and Rudolph Cartier, of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Hinds and James Carreras had been pursuing him, hoping his presence in a Hammer film would grant them a certain kudos.

Cushing actually saw the announcements for Hammer's colour Frankenstein in the trade press and asked his agent, John Redway, to submit his name just as Hinds and casting director Dorothy Holloway were considering a further approach to him. Even though James Carreras had, however, promised Lippert that the film's cast 'would have no trace whatsoever of British accent' the film was cast completely with British actors. 

It was a fortuitous move for Cushing. The theatre world, to be followed shortly by television and film, was in thrall to the era of the 'Angry Young Man' and 'kitchen sink drama' after the huge success of Osborne's Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court in 1956. Coward and Rattigan, often vehicles for Cushing, were now in retreat. How apt then that, after he attended a private screening of X the Unknown to gauge Hammer's suitability as an employer, 'in one move he established a new career for himself and was given a rather different type of angry young man to play' when he signed on the dotted line to play the Baron on 26 October 1956. (4)

For their fee of £1,400 pounds, Hammer engaged a perfectionist in Cushing, a meticulous craftsman grateful that at least one British studio hadn't dismissed him as merely a television actor, an actor who would research anatomy, learn how to handle medical instruments and the intricacies of medical procedure. He was fastidious about props and costumes and first assistant Derek Whitehurst recalled, 'he was very particular about the whole set up, the fob watch, the magnifying glass, the boots and the cane.' (5)

Robert Urquhart, playing the Baron's tutor and associate Paul Krempe, had won an ex-serviceman's scholarship to RADA and had joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1948. After working in rep and the West End, he made his film debut in 1952 with You're Only Young Twice, followed by Tread Softly and Paul Temple Returns (one of his co-stars was Christopher Lee) in the same year. This garnered him a contract with Associated British (ABPC). ABPC's co-financing deal with Hammer for The Curse of Frankenstein suggests he was cast as part of the deal.

Urquhart, initially enthusiastic about the project, became rather antagonistic towards the film and, according to co-star Hazel Court, regretted his involvement and even walked out half way through the film's premier screening. Marcus Hearn elaborates on this in the commentary and details how he irked the Hammer executives by openly criticising the film to journalists. Rigby quotes a 1994 interview with him where he praises the competence with which the film was made but was horrified at 'what it did' to audiences.

As for his co-star Christopher Lee, it was agent John Redway (he and Cushing shared the same agent) who volunteered him for the role of the creature when Hammer had requested to see tall actors. For a while, the casting was between him and future Carry On stalwart, the slightly taller at 6' 5" Bernard Bresslaw. According to Melvyn Hayes, Lee came cheaper. He was signed the day shooting commenced, leaving make-up artist Phil Leakey with roughly 20 hours to come up with the creature's appearance.

... the creature 'should look like it had been put together, literally'

Leakey came from a family of doctors and scientists, had developed an understanding of medical procedures and used his experience in the film industry to experiment with new materials. He joined Hammer, then known as Exclusive, in the 1940s and moved with them to Down Place, a country house on the banks of the River Thames between the towns of Bray and Windsor, which would eventually become Bray Studios. There he worked on the more elaborate make up effects for Stolen Face (1952), The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), X the Unknown (1956) and Quatermass II (1957) before being thrown in the deep end with The Curse of Frankenstein.

Leakey had to create a unique creature and Lee recalls Leakey didn't have much of a brief and was constantly being reminded by Tony Hinds not to mimic the Karloff make up for fear of legal proceedings from Universal. As well as testing on Lee, Leakey would try things out on other members of the team, including Derek Whitehurst.

'I remember two - one of which was totally grotesque and made me look like the Elephant Man... and another test on me which made me look like an animal, really', recalled Lee of Leakey's experiments. (6) The tests were deemed unsuccessful and, after Leakey struggled to come up with ideas, he and Lee discussed how the creature 'should look like it had been put together, literally'. Using mortician's wax, Leakey improvised to replicate the kind of surgical procedures the Baron would have used.

Although the cameras began rolling on 19 November 1956, with the priest's arrival at the prison the first scene to be filmed, Leakey was under considerable pressure to get the creature make up ready for a press junket in London on 21 November. Leakey considered that the version of the make up revealed to the press was only the first steps to something more elaborate and he wasn't entirely happy with the outcome, deciding it was 'a bit of a mess'. To alleviate the boredom of replicating and applying the make up on shooting days, Lee and Leakey used to listen to the Olympic Games coverage on the radio.

He also took Lee to Paxtons, an opthalmic specialist in London, to measure him for the prosthetic misted cornea that he would require for the creature, and was asked to create the severed head for the notorious acid bath scene, a long lost sequence, and the severed hands that Frankenstein proudly displays to Krempe. Leakey tells an amusing story that, as he drove to the studio with the head and had stopped to buy some cigarettes, a cyclist parked by his car and, alarmed to see the prop on the front seat, made a hurried exit. The head was cast in wax, inserted with rabbit innards, Alka Seltzer tablets and a reactive dye and suitably frothed away when Cushing dropped it into boiling water on the set.

Frankenstein's laboratory, lounge, hall and stairs were shot on one of two stages, the New Stage, while the prison cell was filmed on the Ballroom Stage at Down Place. Chief electrician Jack Curtis created the electrical effects for Bernard Robinson's laboratory set and, among the luridly coloured bottles, test tubes and valves, he installed a functioning Wimshurst generator that could produce lethal voltages in the wrong hands.

Director Terence Fisher was picked to make The Curse of Frankenstein by Hinds because he knew that Fisher's abilities could bring the film to life and fulfill his idea that this new Hammer horror should be 'rich looking, slow, deliberately paced, bursting with unstated sex but with nothing overt.' (7) Fisher had been a jobbing director since 1947 at various studios, including Highbury and Gainsborough, and was noted as a man with much experience in low-budget film making. 'To the Public Danger (1948), an impressively staged adaptation of a Patrick Hamilton radio play, was the best of these, and some critics have retrospectively seen it as anticipating Fisher's laterhorror work', notes Peter Hutchings. (8)  

After the closure of Gainsborough, where he had directed four films, Fisher spent a period making support features, many of them for Hammer. Films such as Stolen Face and The Four Sided Triangle hinted at his talent and some of the themes he would articulate to a greater degree in the horror films made at Hammer from 1956 onwards. He was a man of meticulous detail and recalled a fruitful collaboration with Jack Asher on The Curse of Frankenstein, where they both wanted to see how far they could push their experimentation with colour. 'Jack Asher makes a very stylised use of colours... and can also create a highly surreal atmosphere with very little means', recalled Fisher. (9) While shooting the encounter between the creature and the blind old man, Fisher also painted leaves and berries red to underline the symbolic use of colour, the hidden meanings it conveyed in the film.

The film completed shooting on 3 January 1957 and by 11 January, Hinds had submitted a black and white print of the first cut to the BBFC. They were still concerned about the sounds of heads being severed from bodies and wanted these and the screams of the burning creature at the film's climax removed altogether. The dropping of the severed head into the acid was also seen as excessive and they asked for that shot to be excised too. When they finally saw the colour version in February, they demanded further changes to shots featuring the severed hands, the eyeball sequence and the creature's bloodied face. The film was eventually awarded an X certificate on 8 April and was premiered at the Warner Theatre Leicester Square on 2 May 1957. (10) And the rest is history...

... a symbol of Hammer's exploration of authority and masculinity

The Curse of Frankenstein offers something of a test run when it comes to the creation of the signature Hammer style. It was also a style that performed as a barometer of the times. The film was released at a period when Britain, as a world power, was in retreat, when consumerism was in its ascendance and when deference to class and age were being challenged by the shifts in popular culture marked by the emergence of the teenager and the 'Angry Young Man'.

It's notable that for their first colour horror film, one based on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the emphasis that was placed on the creature in Universal's adaptation is entirely redirected to the character of Baron Frankenstein himself. The Baron becomes a rebel with a cause and as Peter Hutchings has examined, he is a symbol of Hammer's exploration of authority and masculinity,  'where the unassailable confidence of Baron Frankenstein, Van Helsing and Sherlock Holmes sits along side slightly more troubled representations of professional activity.' (11)
 
The Curse of Frankenstein therefore emerges at a time of shifting patterns in national identity but also within a period where masculine authority is being questioned. In Hammer's first foray into Gothic horror these enquiries are mounted within a lush, period fairy tale where troublesome desires are restricted to the drawing room and not the laboratory. As Marcia Landy succinctly puts it about Hammer horror, 'such films worked over issues of authority gone awry and of beleaguered masculinity and femininity in an anti-realist cinematic language that invoked the sexual images and scenarios earlier identified in Gainsborough melodramas.' (12)

As the film progresses, the male dominated world of Frankenstein and Krempe is purely concerned with exploring knowledge and acquiring academic and professional success. In fact, the two men, with Krempe as tutor to pupil Frankenstein early in the film, swap places in the echelons of authority. Frankenstein becomes the driven, professional supreme and Krempe the nagging moral consciousness of the film. Sangster and Fisher then use the characters of Elizabeth (Hazel Court), the child bride cousin promised to Victor, and Justine (Valerie Gaunt), the maid with whom he has an affair and makes pregnant, to puncture Frankenstein's authoritarian detachment.

Granted that the female characters in early Hammer horror are never really given autonomy, their decorative presence is often enough to suggest female desire as a provocative influence on male authority in these films. Justine demands the sexual attentions of her lover while Elizabeth demands the proper role of the husband in domestic and social relationships.

There's tension here between men and women that reflects the view, in popular culture of the 1945-65 period, that women who deviated from their assigned gender order (here the categories of wife and servant) were often punished symbolically for daring to display autonomy of thought and action. Frankenstein is allowed to aspire and move between the domestic and private spheres whereas his women are not.

When women do threaten to interfere with his work in The Curse of Frankenstein, Frankenstein offers the guarded warning given to Elizabeth or the final punishment as reward for Justine. This theme would permeate Fisher's work well into the late 1960s, 'with male authority figures increasingly viewed with suspicion and doubt especially in their dealings with women'. (13)

Frankenstein pays lip service to both women but rejects their attempts to become involved in his academic life. He even uses the threat of bringing Elizabeth into his experiments to manipulate Krempe into continuing as his associate. That academic life is, of course, devoted to the creation of his mirror image in the creature. It is a symbol of masculinity, his narcissism reproduced in the ideal, sophisticated man, with the hands of a renowned sculptor and the brain of Professor Bernstein, an eminent intellectual.

His ambivalence to female figures is present from the start to the end of the film. In the opening, young Frankenstein (Melvyn Hayes) fobs off a young Elizabeth and her aunt with the continuance of an annual allowance and later, he'd rather salivate over a pair of severed hands than welcome her to her new home, satisfy himself with the maid, spend his wedding night in the laboratory consummating a marriage of a different kind and use his creature to murder/rape the pregnant Justine. The latter is one of the central scenes of the film, evoking German expressionist horror, an undercurrent of transgressive female sexuality and situating the creature, already 'aborted' once by Krempe shooting it in the head, as his doppelganger in the relationship with Justine.

It is the birth of Hammer horror. 

The Curse of Frankenstein tentatively and often soberly gathers momentum, reflecting Hind's opinion that this new horror, which would go on to revitalise the genre in cinema, should be conducted at a gradual pace. The film is framed by a prologue and epilogue and the events in between are a flashback related by Frankenstein from his cell. As noted on the commentary, if you didn't know any better then you'd almost believe that the first twenty minutes of the film was a Gainsborough bodice-ripper and not a horror film.

Sangster's economic narrative takes a left turn only ten minutes into the film when Frankenstein and Krempe revive the puppy and he steers the script towards the grander themes of Frankenstein's single-minded, god-like ambitions. The sedate opening evolves into a series of set pieces, each escalating the mounting horror as Frankenstein fulfills his ambitions to build a man and bring him to life.

A quarter of an hour in and the film's Gainsborough origins have been replaced by two men cutting a body down from a gibbet, a steely scientist cutting the corpse's head off, casually wiping blood on his frock coat after he's done, and then dumping the head in a bath of acid. All this is done with casual effrontery by Fisher, in full colour, and with James Bernard's score of brass and strings ratcheting up the hysteria. It is the birth of Hammer horror.

Naturally, this is where the Cushing iconography begins too, with the close up on his bright blue eyes as he listens for the puppy's heartbeat as an opening invitation to the sequence where he peers through a magnifying glass at an eye, admires a nice pair of severed hands or eyes up Professor Bernstein's brain. These are further indications from Fisher where 'apparent sobriety was punctuated by moments and segments that could in certain instances reasonably be described as expressive' and escalate in intensity towards the most explosive moment of all - the reveal of the creature, with its overcranked camera zooming into it as it rips off its bandages. This in itself shows how Fisher's dynamism would eventually mature and shape the kinetics of Dracula (1958). (14)

There are also examples of Fisher's maturing style in the way that humour is placed within the film. As well as the legendary 'pass the marmalade, my dear' of the breakfast scene that's adjacent to the murder of Justine, from which Frankenstein gets a certain amount of arousal by the looks of it, there is the subtlety of Bernstein's final moments at the top of the stairs. Here, Frankenstein asks him to peer at a reproduction of Rembrandt's 'The Anatomy Lesson' before pushing him to his death. His penchant for dropping in a bit of comedy is also prefigured in that brief moment at the wedding reception when one of the male guests overindulges in a series of toasts. British character actor Miles Malleson would provide similar comedy relief in Fisher's Dracula (1958), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959) and The Brides of Dracula (1960).

As well as Cushing's meticulous and precise performance, praise should be directed at Christopher Lee. He is only now getting proper acknowledgement for a very physical and affective presence in the film. The creature is like a puppet with broken strings, evoking a great deal of pity through its dumbness and inarticulacy, and Lee transmits the physical and mental damage in a spasmodic way, through his sheer physicality and mimetic abilities. It culminates in that disturbing scene where Frankenstein treats the creature like a lap dog, triumphantly presenting to Krempe its wretched attempt to sit down as some sort of evolutionary advance.

The Curse of Frankenstein is a collaborative effort and is not only the summation, at that point, of the talents of Fisher and his actors but also of composer James Bernard, production designer Bernard Robinson and cinematographer Jack Asher. Bernard's music, all soaring strings, bellowing woodwind and brass, is established as a signature of Hammer's output and his themes tease out the disturbing psychological undercurrents in the film. Robinson's genius was to create luxury out of nothing and the laboratory set is simply but effectively executed and very much a taste of the lavishness to come.

Asher uses colour very radically for the time, using green and red as symbolic totems throughout the film. The laboratory is particularly a kaleidoscope of colour but the red and green palette is accentuated in the costumes, especially Krempe's bright red dressing gown and Frankenstein's green overcoat, in the green tinge of the creature's flesh in contrast to the garish blood that drips from its eye after Krempe shoots it, and with the greenery of the locations and their highlighted red leaves and berries.

As David Pirie notes: 'For a combination of reasons, the rich mix of personalities who contributed to Hammer films originated a revolutionary kind of popular art.' (15) With the incredible success of The Curse of Frankenstein neither would screen horror nor British cinema be the same again. The re-emergence of Hammer and the restoration and rediscovery of its legacy will hopefully allow a greater understanding of the impact their 'revolutionary popular art' had, and continues to have, on British cinema and culture.

(1) Wayne Kinsey, Hammer Films - The Bray Studios Years
(2) David Pirie, A New Heritage of Horror - The English Gothic Cinema
(3) Wayne Kinsey, Hammer Films - The Bray Studios Years
(4) David Miller, The Peter Cushing Companion
(5) Ibid
(6) Christopher Lee and Phil Leakey DVD interviews from Greasepaint and Gore: Phil Leakey
(7) Fangoria, Tony Hinds tribute to Terence Fisher
(8) Peter Hutchings, Terence Fisher: BFI Screenonline
(9) Terence Fisher interview, Richard Klemensen, Little Shoppe of Horrors
(10) Wayne Kinsey, Hammer Films - The Bray Studios Years
(11) Peter Hutchings, Hammer and Beyond
(12) Marcia Landy, British Cinema Past and Present 
(13) Peter Hutchings, British Film Makers - Terence Fisher 
(14) Ibid
(15) David Pirie, A New Heritage of Horror - The English Gothic Cinema

About the transfer
**UPDATE: Frame grabs above are now images taken directly from the Blu Ray disc. The 1.66:1 images below are from the standard definition DVD.
This is somewhat disappointing for what is the best quality release of Hammer's 'ground zero' Gothic horror film and a landmark in British cinema. The positives first. Unlike the Warner DVD release of 2002 - presented in 1.85:1 - the grain has not been obliterated by DVNR. It is present and correct. The transfer is clean and dirt free, practically immaculate in that regard. Colour is richer too, tending to accentuate the reds and green of Jack Asher's original palette, and this certainly benefits the laboratory scenes and locations. However, it's not as vivid a transfer as I was expecting.













The image is soft overall, rather lacks consistent sharpness and can be a little bright as a result perhaps of contrast boosting. This gives the picture some excellent black levels but the finer detail in the lighter areas of the picture is sometimes lost. It only really comes alive in big close ups or relatively tight two shots. The layers of depth and sharpness one expects from an HD presentation are absent and the condition of the original materials might be the issue here. The 2002 DVD does show detail and sharpness but I do think that's by way of enthusiastic use of edge enhancement. So, don't go expecting anything of the standard of StudioCanal's Quatermass and the Pit transfer. It was unlikely that it would ever come close to that benchmark but this is quite poor as an HD experience.

The other immediate worry is that the DVD and the Blu-ray versions in this package are almost indistinguishable and I'd go so far to say that to my eyes the SD transfer on DVD is actually sharper than the HD transfer on the BD. This potentially opens up questions about bit rates for the two versions of the film in respect of squeezing all the featurettes and extras together on the BD. *Update 4/10/2012: According to the Hammer restoration blog all the features on the BD are in standard def and the "The bitrate of BOTH versions of the feature is ~25Mbps. There was ZERO additional/further compression used to fit both versions on the Blu-ray. If the HD version looks “softer”, it’s because the resolution is better and any flaws are being highlighted to a greater degree" and "any perceived “softness” is due to the source materials and to our unwillingness to over-manipulate the picture captured from them."
 
Special Features - Blu-Ray:

The Curse of Frankenstein 1.66:1 ratio
*Review amended 6/10/2012*
There is much debate over which aspect ratio the film was projected at in cinemas with a suggestion that it was either composed for eventual projection in 1.66:1 or 1.85:1. Here, as well as presenting the 1.37:1 ratio, you have the option to see the film in a matted 1.66:1 widescreen format which was probably how UK audiences saw the film back in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

I was informed by Bob Furmanek at www.3dfilmarchive.com that "as a matter of studio policy, Exclusive/Hammer began composing for 1.66:1 widescreen while still protecting for the 1.37:1 standard ratio in August, 1953"

Furmanek also offers further research about the possibility that 1.85:1 was also a composition ratio: "Sometime in 1955, Exclusive had adopted 1.85:1 as their widescreen standard. Curse began filming on Monday, November 19. Only eight days later on November 27, a distribution deal was announced with Warner Bros. in Daily Variety.

It's very likely that WB, now funding the production, would have instructed Exclusive to compose for 1.85:1. The world premiere took place at the Warner Theatre on Leicester Square which had been converted to widescreen sometime in late 1953.

When it premiered in the U.S. the following June, 1.85:1 is the ratio that was recommended to exhibitors. Therefore, the badly matted 1.66:1 version on this disc is not only framed improperly which is why heads are getting clipped in medium shots, it's the wrong ratio."

I have also had the pleasure of discussing this further with Hammer historian Marcus Hearn since Bob Furmanek offered his comments here on the 4 October. Marcus, who has worked with Hammer over the last 18 years, offers that during this period of "studying the paperwork in their archive, I have never seen anything to suggest that the company adopted a blanket policy of composing for 1.66:1 in 1953."

"I agree with Bob Furmanek’s view that the (non Scope) films were generally protected for 1.37:1 - I believe this is because many British cinemas in the 1950s were still not equipped for widescreen. I have spoken to people who vividly remember seeing the original Hammer horrors projected in 1.37:1, and I understand that this is the way Michael Carreras projected his own 16mm prints of these films.

There is a lot of paperwork from Warner Bros in the archive, but absolutely none of it instructs Hammer to compose The Curse of Frankenstein for 1.85:1 or indeed any other ratio. While I am aware that 1.85:1 was a common projection ratio for these films in the US I do not believe it was favoured for Hammer films in this country during the 1950s and 60s. It certainly doesn't do any favours to the DVDs of Hammer films that have been issued in this ratio (e.g. Dracula)."

"The point will remain subjective unless any contemporary paperwork turns up. I have never found any such paperwork relating to The Curse of Frankenstein in the Hammer archive or the British Film Institute, and have never seen any reported in the trade press of the day.

If anyone does have any documents that prove this film had a definitive aspect ratio – as opposed to different ratios that were considered equally acceptable in British cinemas – then I would very much like to see it. But in the meantime I must say I'm very happy with the carefully considered decisions that went into the presentation of the film on these new discs."

After watching these discs, the 1.66:1 presentation seems, to me, very tight visually and loses picture information at the top and bottom of the frame but gains slightly right and left and vice versa for the 1.37:1 version. There are instances were the frame is so tight that tops of heads do get cropped and in the bottom of the frame hands also disappear. I quite admire the 1.37:1 ratio but the handling of the 1.66:1 framing has been insensitively carried out. I also re-viewed the original Warner 1.85:1 DVD of 2002 during the process of reviewing and I believe it offers a better example of how to compose widescreen formatting on DVD for films such as these but I do note that the 1.85:1 framing on the Warner DVD is not centrally cropped all the time but occasionally pushed towards the top of the frame in comparison with the 1.66:1.

Marcus Hearn also kindly responded to my observation that the cropping to 1.66:1 was too tight to the bottom of the frame and that the 1.37:1 offered plenty of head room to better accommodate a 1.66:1 composition: "As for the new BD of The Curse of Frankenstein, I can recall two instances where heads are briefly cropped in the 1.66:1 version. I would argue that this is probably how the film would have appeared when it was masked at this ratio on its original projection. Having spent a lot of time with this film over the last few months, I now consider 1.37:1 to be its ideal format."

Update 16/10/12: Bob Furmanek
"New documents have been discovered which confirm that Exclusive was composing for 1.65:1 widescreen, with a common top.

Please see this post for the relative data: http://www.hometheaterforum.com/t/319469/aspect-ratio-research/1140#post_3989270 "

Commentary with Marcus Hearn and Jonathan Rigby
Available on both aspect ratio presentations of the film, this really is a delight. Two horror and Hammer experts amiably engage in a lively conversation about the film and from the off provide nuggets about the cast, Sangster's original script depicting a ten-year old Frankenstein in the film's opening, the fate of the original dog that the Baron and Krempe revive, Urquhart's disgust at the film, the BBFC's concerns and the missing head-in-the acid scene. They discuss the way colour is used in the film, the 'Cushing finger', the return of the 'eyeball scene', Lee's performance, unsung heroes such as Bernard Robinson, Phil Leakey and Les Bowie, and the debut of Hammer glamour. Recorded in August 2011, this is absolutely essential listening.
Frankenstein Reborn: The Making of a Hammer Classic (32:53)
The origins of the film are explored with a wide variety of Hammer stalwarts and many others. Archive interviews with Hammer executive Michael Carreras are included with newly shot material featuring writer Jimmy Sangster, horror cinema experts Denis Meikle, Jonathan Rigby and actor Melvyn Hayes. They briefly and entertainingly trace the development of The Curse of Frankenstein from an initial script by Milton Subotsky and how Hammer horror emerged during a period in Britain where there was a 'drive for change'.

Sangster reflects on the relief of suspense with humour and Hayes charmingly recounts his encounter with actor Peter Cushing. Sangster refers to him, quite rightly, as 'the backbone of Hammer films'. David Miller, author of 'The Complete Peter Cushing', provides plenty of background about Cushing's career to that point, how he was cast for the film, recounts his particular way of preparing for a role, the legacy of the Lee-Cushing screen partnership and his status as 'horror's Olivier'. Hayes supplies wonderful stories about working with him on Basil Dearden's Violent Playground and why Christopher Lee was cast as the creature (Bernard Bresslaw was up for the role too). Rigby discusses the development of the creature's make-up, Lee's mime skills and his extraordinary performance.

Hayes discusses his casting and working with the 'laid back' Robert Urquhart and Rigby notes Hazel Court's appearance as the epitome of Hammer horror glamour. The documentary then turns to the methodical skills of director Terence Fisher and cinematographer Jack Asher's use of colour and we also welcome back David Huckvale whose knowledge about composer James Bernard is erudite and invaluable. There is even a brief visit to Deluxe 142 to note how the film was restored from the only available materials, using a colour interpositive scanned by Warner, the recovery of the infamous 'eyeball' scene from a separate source held at the BFI, grading the film and working with aspect ratios.

Denis Meikle concludes this fascinating half-hour, produced and directed by Marcus Hearn, with a summary of the talents that went into creating what we now know as Hammer horror - the Gainsborough legacy of Terence Fisher, Anthony Nelson Keys, Jack Asher and operator Len Harris and the influx of new talent such as Sangster and Anthony Hinds.

Life With Sir(12:05)
A rather moving tribute to Peter Cushing from his personal secretary Joyce Broughton. Broughton was assistant to 'Sir', as he was known, and she particularly helped him through the loss of his wife Helen, through his illness and supported him until the day he died. In his last years, he lived with Joyce and her family and she eventually encouraged him to take up painting again. She confirms what many of us knew, that Cushing was a sensitive, gentle man. 
Four Sided Triangle (1:17:59)
Terence Fisher's 1953 science fiction B movie wherein boyhood friends Bill and Robin compete for the affections of Lena, a beautiful girl about their own age. In adulthood, the two men collaborate on the invention of the Reproducer, a machine that can exactly duplicate physical objects. Bill is disappointed to discover that Lena loves Robin and intends to marry him. Seeing the hopelessness of winning Lena for himself, Bill convinces the young woman to allow him to use the Reproducer to create a duplicate of her. As Robert Simpson expertly notes in his PDF booklet, this film and Fisher's Stolen Face (1952) are considered the stepping stones towards his work on the Gothic romances of the late 1950s and 1960s. Both explore the tropes of scientists 'playing God' and, as Peter Hutchings notes, Four Sided Triangle's themes 'dwell upon some of the more disturbing aspects of male desire'.
Tales of Frankenstein television pilot (27:27)
Hammer's pilot, produced with Columbia's Screen Gems television arm, for a proposed 26 half-hour Frankenstein television series, with half of the episodes shot at Bray and the other half in Hollywood, didn't quite turn out as they wanted. Sangster's promising pitch for the series, very much in the idiom of the Frankenstein Hammer had resurrected, remained just a promise and when Michael Carreras arrived in Los Angeles on 12 November 1957 he found that Sangster's pilot script 'The Single Minded Blackmailer' had been rejected. Columbia weren't interested in Hammer's ideas and merely saw them as a third party to a separate contract Screen Gems had set up in Hollywood with another production company. In the end James Carreras realised that Screen Gems were trying to 'pull a fast one'. It was all too late and, with Anton Diffring on board as Frankenstein, Screen Gems proceeded with their own script 'Face in the Tombstone Mirror', directed by Curt Siodmak. Siodmak, no stranger to the diminishing returns of the Universal horror cycle, simply replicated what had gone before. A curio but miles away from the Hammer style and Sangster's take on the Baron. Note: The documentary about Tales of Frankenstein is now absent from this release.
World of Hammer - The Curse of Frankenstein (24:54)
Another edition of the Sidaway series, covering all the Hammer Frankenstein cycle. Cue clips and Oliver Reed's rumbling narration.  
Gallery(7:50)
Wonderful gallery of rare colour and black and white stills from the film, many I haven't seen before, and a great selection of studio portraits, front of house lobby cards, posters, ads and behind the scenes material.

Main Feature - DVD Disc 1:
The Curse of Frankenstein 1.37:1 'Academy' ratio 
The Curse of Frankenstein 1.66:1 ratio
Commentary with Marcus Hearn and Jonathan Rigby

Special Features - DVD Disc 2:
Frankenstein Reborn: The Making of a Hammer Classic
Life With Sir
Four Sided Triangle
Tales of Frankenstein television pilot
World of Hammer - The Curse of Frankenstein
Gallery
Easter Egg: Melvyn Hayes
Comedy business from our Melvyn with a lovely Hammer mug
PDF - The Creator's Spark: Hammer's Frankenstein Begins
A beautifully designed booklet crammed with information covering the development of Hammer's Gothic horror films, the origin of Terence Fisher's style in The Stolen Face and Four Sided Triangle, the production of The Curse of Frankenstein and the aborted Tales of Frankenstein television series. Illustrated throughout with colour and black and white stills and wonderfully written and researched by Robert J. Simpson.

The Curse of Frankenstein
Hammer Films Production 1957
Distributed by Warner Brothers

Icon/Lionsgate Double Play Edition 1 x BD and 2 x DVD / Region B/2 / LGD94955 / Released 15 October 2012
BD: 1.37:1 and 1.66:1 and DTS MA 2.0 Audio / English HOH subtitles on main feature
DVD Disc 1: 1.37:1 and 1.66:1 and Dolby Digital 2.0 Audio / English HOH subtitles

Missing your Doctor Who fix now that the current series has finished and the Ponds have departed?

Not to worry, Cathode Ray Tube has two Doctor Who books looking for a Time Lord-loving owner. Our latest competition will give away to one lucky winner one copy each of J.T. Colgan's Dark Horizons novel and graphic novel The Dalek Project, by Justin Richards and Mike Collins, courtesy of BBC Books and Ebury Publishing. That should help with the withdrawal symptoms.


Dark Horizons
J.T. Colgan

A thrilling new adventure starring the Doctor, as played by Matt Smith.

"Now, you may or may not have noticed, but we appear to be on fire..."

On a windswept Northern shore, at the very tip of what will one day become Scotland, the islanders believe the worst they have to fear is a Viking attack. Then the burning comes. They cannot run from it. Water will not stop it. It consumes everything in its path - yet the burned still speak.

The Doctor is just looking for a game on the famous Lewis chess set. Instead he encounters a people under attack from a power they cannot possibly understand. They have no weapons, no strategy and no protection against a fire sent to engulf them all.

Add in some marauding Vikings with very bad timing, a kidnapped princess with a secret of her own and a TARDIS that seems to have developed an inexplicable fear of water, and they all have a battle on their hands. The islanders must take on a ruthless alien force in a world without technology; without communications; without tea that isn't made out of bark. Still at least they have the Doctor on their side... Don't they?

Published by BBC Books, 7 July 2012

The Dalek Project
Justin Richards & Mike Collins

A stunning new graphic novel, featuring the Doctor as played by Matt Smith in an exciting adventure with the Daleks.

1917. It's the height of the Great War and Hellcombe Hall is a house full of mystery: locked doors, forbidden rooms, dustsheets covering guilty secrets, and ghostly noises frightening the servants. Most mysterious of all, the drawing-room seems to open directly onto a muddy, corpse-filled trench on the Western Front...

Arriving at this stately home, the Doctor meets Lord Hellcombe, an armaments manufacturer who has a new secret weapon he believes will win the war: he calls it ‘the Dalek’. Soon, the Doctor and his new friends are in a race against time to prevent the entire Western Front from becoming part of the Dalek Project!

Published by BBC Books, 6 September 2012


Cathode Ray Tube has one copy each of Dark Horizons and The Dalek Project to give away to one winner courtesy of BBC Books and Ebury Publishing. Simply answer the question below and submit your entry via email.

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Question: In which episode did the Doctor declare "I wear a stetson now, stetsons are cool"?

Email your answer to the question above, with your name and address, and we'll enter you into the prize draw. Good luck!

Hammer's eventual involvement in The Devil Rides Out was the outcome of two serendipitous attempts to gain the rights to Dennis Wheatley's original novel, written in 1934. Michael Stainer-Hutchins and Peter Daw, who had set up a company to develop optical and special effects, saw an opportunity to develop films from Wheatley's occult thrillers and had approached him directly for the rights, having already tussled unsuccessfully with his agents. They eventually secured the rights to The Devil Rides Out, The Satanist and To the Devil a Daughter in 1963.

Similarly, Hammer were pursuing new properties and Wheatley's novels were of interest to them despite their fears about the problems they could face with the BBFC and various religious representatives about the black magic subject matter. As Christopher Lee noted in his autobiography: 'After years of urging black-magic themes on Hammer, I had a breakthrough with The Devil Rides Out. Conservative, Hammer had always worried about the Church's reaction to the screening of the Black Mass. But we thought the charge of blasphemy would not stick if we did the thing with due attention to scholarship.' (1)

Lee also knew Wheatley, had first met him in the book department of Harrods in 1964 and was his neighbour. He also approached the 'Prince of Thriller Writers', as he had been described, to get his support. Lee then informed Hammer that Wheatley had given his permission for them to adapt The Devil Rides Out and recommended they negotiate with Stainer-Hutchins and Daw.

In 1964, having secured Wheatley's blessing, producer Anthony Hinds commissioned a script from John Hunter, an American writer based in the UK who had provided the script for one of Hammer's black and white thrillers, the hugely under rated Never Take Sweets from a Stranger (1960). Sadly, Hinds felt the resulting script was 'far too English', his view being an indication perhaps of Hammer's ongoing need to make films that would play well in the American market. In September 1964, he turned to another American writer, Richard Matheson.

'Let’s not be beastly to the Hun'

Matheson already had an established career as a highly regarded science fiction - horror writer, producing a number of short stories as well as his first novel Someone is Bleeding in the 1950s. By 1964, he had published several novels including the much lauded I am Legend, contributed a number of episodes to The Twilight Zone and had adapted his own novel The Shrinking Man as the film The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). In the 1960s, he also wrote a number of the Roger Corman produced Edgar Allan Poe adaptations for American International Pictures.

Matheson came into Hammer's orbit after Anthony Hinds had bought the rights to I am Legend in 1957. Shortly after the flush of success with The Curse of Frankenstein, Matheson was invited to England to adapt the novel as the film Night Creatures. Terence Fisher was already being lined up to direct but the BBFC were displeased with Hammer's attempt to film the novel and threatened to ban it. Hammer sold the property on to Robert Lippert, one of their American funders and distributors, and eventually the film materialised in 1964 as The Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price.

When Hinds commissioned Matheson for The Devil Rides Out, he had just completed the screenplay for their psychological thriller Fanatic (1965). He proceeded to streamline Wheatley's original novel and yet managed to remain very faithful to the story in the 95 minute running time he had at his disposal, even though the main reason for black magician Mocata's pursuit of Simon Aron, as a sacrifice to enable him to possess the Talisman of Set, is a vital element of character motivation that is missing.

He also curtailed much of the 'relentless parade of factoids' and 'esoteric lore about the astral plane, elemental spirits, the inner meaning of alchemy, familiars, grimoires, scrying, and the rest.' Major themes of the book, sympathetic to Wheatley's politics, were also jettisoned. The notions that Satanists were trying to start a new war, that the Nazis had misappropriated the swastika, that Rasputin had caused World War 1 were 'part of the book’s inner message, which is (to borrow a line from Noel Coward) "Let’s not be beastly to the Hun."' (2)

The Matheson script was duly submitted to the BBFC for their approval in 1965 and Hinds was provided with a response, including the vetoing of the film's original ending, from John Trevelyan that required from Hammer a script 'in a very much altered or modified form.' But there were other more pressing problems that Hinds had to contend with including the threat of a dwindling budget and the relationship with Michael Stainer-Hutchins and Peter Daw.

Hammer's negotiations with Stainer-Hutchins and Daw were drawn out between November 1963 and August 1967 and often rather fraught. James Carreras, in a letter from November 1965, outlined the problem: 'Stainer-Hutchins is willing to sell his interest in the picture [but] he is quite determined to do the special effects. We are told that this could be very costly to us and that he is not really capable of carrying out the high standards of special effects required for Hammer pictures... we want to get out of any commitment to Stainer-Hutchins, even if it costs us money!' (3)

Hinds was fretting about the money too. In May 1965, Carreras demanded Hinds keep the budget down to £180,000 and he responded with characteristic candour, to the implementation of such drastic reductions in cost, 'I doubt that the script will be recognisable!' (4) By the time the budget had risen to £285,000 the film was part of the Seven Arts - Fox - Warner/ABPC package that Hammer had set up in 1966. Hammer stalwart Terence Fisher was appointed as director and when shooting started at Elstree on 7 August 1967, Stainer-Hutchins and Daw retained their uncredited role as associate producers and the former oversaw the majority of the film's special effects.

Christopher Lee, having been instrumental in bringing The Devil Rides Out to the attention of Hammer, had been lobbying for the lead role in the film and Wheatley had supported him in his aim. Though he was tempted to play Mocata, the black magician, he was eventually cast as Mocata's nemesis the Duc de Richleau. The actor recalled, 'I told Hammer, "Look, enough of the villainy for the time being, let us try something different and let me be on the side of the angels for once."' (5) 

As a reflection of his own interest in the occult and the character's status as the mirror image of Mocata, Lee took the trouble to visit the British Museum to supplement Matheson's script with authentic conjurations for the film's climactic Sussamma ritual. There, he consulted an edition of the Grimoire of Armadel, a 17th Century book of ceremonial magic, and a specific spell to incarcerate the Devil in a bottle, to produce those legendary words 'Uriel Seraphim Io Potesta, Zati Zata Galatim Galata'. (6) 

Joining Lee was Charles Gray as Mocata, a role originally considered for Goldfinger's Gert Fröbe. Gray's portrayal as the silky voiced sophisticate was completely different from the bald-headed, pot-bellied Mocata depicted in the book and, allegedly, a manifestation of Aleister Crowley, the magician and occultist whom Wheatley knew socially and had taken to lunches at London's Hungaria Restaurant while researching for the book in the 1930s.

Opera singer Leon Greene, cast as Rex van Ryn, was previously Hammer's Little John in A Challenge for Robin Hood (1967) and eventually dubbed here by Patrick Allen because, according to Allen, 'he sang his lines and they just felt it could be improved upon'. The rest of the cast featured Sarah Lawson (Marie Eaton), Patrick Mower (Simon Aron), Paul Eddington (Richard Eaton) and newcomer Nike Arrighi (Tanith Carlisle), who arrived from a stint in television on Out of the Unknown (1965-71), Theatre 625 (1964-48), The Saint (1962-69), The Prisoner (1967-68) and Man in a Suitcase (1967-68).

'a strong sense of something evil stealthily invading this ordered world'

Location shooting took place around Elstree and Borehamwood, with the car chases filmed on country roads that would be very familiar to television viewers as the 'Avengerland' featured in the filmed seasons of the television series The Avengers (1961-69). The conjuring of the Goat of Mendes, the accompanying 'orgy' and rescue of Tanith and Simon were filmed in the ubiquitous Black Park; Mocata's lair was at High Canons, a house at Buckettsland Lane, Well End and a couple of miles to the north of Borehamwood; Richard and Marie's house and green were provided by the environs of the Elstree Country Club, now the Corus Edgwarebury Hotel. 

The car chases and process plates for the later studio based inserts were manged by second unit director Christopher Neame and were beset by several problems, including a car crash and a camera being run over. Neame also oversaw the unit that filmed the entrance of the Angel of Death with a wheezy old horse whose wings fell off on the first attempt to film the sequence. (7)

Michael Stainer-Hutchins handled most of the visual effects save for the Angel of Death sequence which was supervised by Hammer's effects maestro Les Bowie, (the asthmatic horse was known as 'Les's horse' by the crew according to David Pirie) and Stainer-Hutchins' daughter remembered riding it at the studio. 

The Angel's skeletal face was a mask made by Roy Ashton, the make-up expert who had left Hammer after The Reptile (1966) but who returned briefly to help the film's make-up designer Eddie Knight. He also made the mask for the Goat of Mendes, worn by stunt man Eddie Powell on the night shoot at Black Park, and where the extras involved in the orgiastic rituals had their enthusiasm somewhat dampened by the muddy terrain. 

When Hinds finally saw a rough cut, he was concerned that all was not well with the film and composer James Bernard recalls that Hinds telephoned him and requested 'you have to do all you can because I'm not sure the film is working out as it should.' Bernard's score, certainly one of his best, combined with good editing and the re-dubbing of Leon Greene salved Hinds' worries. (8)

Uneven and incomplete visual effects aside, Hinds really had no cause to worry. The film benefited from extremely good performances from Lee and Gray, both playing characters that forcefully underpin 'the tension between England’s exterior pastoral elegance and class respectability, and its repressed bacchanalian urges'. (9) Lee, in particular, offers one of his best performances and initially casts the Duc de Richleau as a complex, imperious authority figure. However, if you look at the relationship between de Richleau and Simon, Lee cleverly drops the severe exterior of the character to reveal his genuine and tender concern for Simon when he discovers his meddling with black magic. 

Director Terence Fisher was also at the height of his powers at Hammer and his meticulous efforts, coupled with Bernard Robinson's lush period production design and cinematographer Arthur Grant's use of Technicolour, perfectly encapsulated Wheatley's novel of the English demimonde and their taste for occultism. The Devil Rides Out is a summation of Fisher's own themes and styles set within a disciplined yet dream-like film. 

The more intense moments of the film are surrounded by adventure genre tropes, car chases and rescues, that culminate in the Grand Sabbat, the orgiastic ritual to mark Simon and Tanith’s intended baptism into the left hand path, where de Richleau and Rex ride directly at the Goat of Mendes and hurl a crucifix at it. 

As Peter Hutchings notes, Fisher stages the adventure as an ideological struggle between the good father - de Richleau - and the bad father - Mocata - for the possession of two conflicted children, Simon and Tanith. James Bernard's score also exquisitely underlines the film's themes of the transfiguration of evil by good. 

Not only is it the quintessence of Fisher's use of spiritual allegory, where the depiction of evil as attractive and deadly can only be destroyed by a faith in innocence and Christian enlightenment (often symbolised by the crosses and holy water in the film) but it is also extends the power of female agency over authoritarian, patriarchal male figures. In the climax of the film it is the combined power of Marie, her daughter Peggy and the supernatural presence of Tanith that disintegrates Mocata's evil and overcomes de Richleau's fear of using the Sussamma ritual. 

Many of the set-pieces in the film remain extraordinarily powerful. Mocata's attempt to influence Marie Eaton, as she clutches her daughter's doll (another symbol of innocence and the parent-child relationships in the film), is a beautifully controlled use of camera movement, performance and editing where 'the balance and order of Fisher's approach helps to stress the surface mundaneness of the sequence... while the slow (to the point of being nearly imperceptible) camera movements give a strong sense of something evil stealthily invading this ordered world.' (10)

When Mocata sends various agents to attack the characters that represent spiritual good within the pentacle, we again get a sense of Fisher's control of the camera as it tracks back and forth along the edge of the circle. 'The final full-scale collision of good and evil in Fisher's work' operates as a trial by combat, unsettling the faith of the good through deception (the imitation of Rex demanding to be allowed into the house), weakness and scepticism (the doubts of the Richard Eaton character played so wonderfully by Paul Eddington), through the corruption of innocence (the spider attack on Peggy) and the terror at approaching death and the inevitability of mortality. (11)

It was also, very briefly, in tune with the 'Aquarian Age' obsessions of late 1960s culture. With Aleister Crowley staring out from the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the revival in occultism went hand in hand with counter-cultural movements and anti-establishment thinking, the sloughing off of repression and deference. Roman Polanski would, however, take up this mantle with Rosemary's Baby (1968) and tap into contemporary fears of conspiracy, religious doubt and the permissive society. The Devil Rides Out, when released in the US as The Devil's Bride, would trail unfavourably in its wake and this perhaps accounts for its failure to have an impact on the US box office.

Despite the film not fulfilling its potential, The Devil Rides Out is something of a last hurrah for the the mid 1960s period of Hammer as the studio attempted to move forward, find new subject matter and adapt the Dracula and Frankenstein franchises as the next decade approached. It is certainly one of the best, if not the best, of the films Terence Fisher made at Hammer and an example of Christopher Lee's abilities as an actor beyond the, by then, thankless role of Dracula that the studio insisted he continued to play. 

(1) Christopher Lee, Tall, Dark and Gruesome
(2) Phil Baker, The Devil Rides Out: How Dennis Wheatley sold black magic to Britain, Fortean Times, January 2010
(3) David Pirie, A New Heritage of Horror
(4) Ibid
(5) Nick Louras and Lawrence French, Replay: The Devil Rides Out, Quarterly Review, Vol 6, No 2, Summer 2012
(6) Ibid
(7) Wayne Kinsey, Hammer Films - The Elstree Studios Years
(8) Ibid 
(9) Andrew Leavold, Senses of Cinema
(10) Peter Hutchings, British Film Makers: Terence Fisher
(11) David Pirie, A New Heritage of Horror

About the transfer
CGI enhancements aside (and I'll get to those in a minute) this is a beautifully restored high definition transfer at 1.66:1. The colours are especially lush and vibrant, spectacularly so in costumes such as Mocata's purple robes, Marie Eaton's dresses and Richard Eaton's bright red dressing gown. The detail is also impressive, again in the costumes, particularly the men's suits, but also the vintage cars, the landscapes, the stunning set decor from Bernard Robinson that really stands out in the Eaton's drawing room (check out the red and white sofa), the Duc de Richleau's yellow themed apartment and the interiors of Simon's house.

Faces are incredibly fine and full of depth and layers. A healthy grain is present, there are good contrast levels and the image is bright. Quality does drop on a number of occasions, with grain and colour variations due, as one would expect, to the use of process shots that show characters driving in cars or where other optical effects have been used to create the various apparitions that plague our heroes.

Special features
Commentary
Hammer historian Marcus Hearn moderates a commentary with Christopher Lee and Sarah Lawson. The commentary, I am reliably informed, was recorded in December 1997 and was originally featured on the laser disc of The Devil Rides Out released by Elite Entertainment. This was ported to the Anchor Bay DVD release of the film in 2000. Hearn adds in background to the film's production, the development of the script and Hammer's fears of the BBFC's and religious opinions of the film. Lee expounds on the Wheatley characters featured in the film and makes some interesting comparisons with Wheatley's book, highlights the black magic themes and symbols while Lawson adds notes on the actors and the performances. Hearn reveals that Gert Fröbe was the original choice for the potbellied Mocata of the novel, that Leon Greene may well have been cast for his build and the dubbing of Greene may well have been a demand from distributor Fox.

Lee also points out Bernard Robinson's superb contribution to the film with the elegantly designed sets. There are some lovely memories of Terence Fisher as a very generous director, as 'a great arranger' as Lee offers. Hearn also notes that by the standards of the day the visual effects were of quite high quality but Lee does takes pains to note which effects were deemed unsuccessful at the time. This is an informative conversation with Lee dominating and proving to be very erudite on the black magic subject matter of the film.

Black Magic: The Making of The Devil Rides Out (33:34)
The house style for these documentaries is now very slick and consistent and again Marcus Hearn puts together an informative half hour about Hammer's foray into the black magic novels of Dennis Wheatley. This includes interviews with Hearn, Denis Meikle, Jonathan Rigby, Mark Gatiss, Patrick Mower and, a real treat, writer Richard Matheson. Meikle traces the 'age of Aquarius' vibe of the late 1960s and the rise in popularity of Wheatley's books and Hammer's interest in them as potential properties and the development of the script which ultimately led Hammer back to Matheson.

Rigby and Meikle examine the Corman/Poe legacy and matters of religion on screen. We also get context from Phil Baker, the author of The Devil is a Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley who notes how Wheatley's publishing career was 'saved' by the 1960s occult revival. Hearn covers the involvement of Michael Stainer-Hutchins, who bought the rights to Wheatley's occult novels, and how he worked with the Hammer team on the visual effects. His son and daughter, Dan and Kiffy, recall how their father knew Wheatley and wanted to develop the books into films.

Matheson discusses adapting the book and his relief that Hammer decided to stick with the period setting and not update it for the screen. Rigby and Baker suggest that Matheson actually streamlines Wheatley's book by losing the Satanism/Nazism subtext and adding grace to the dialogue. Gatiss and Rigby reflect on Christopher Lee's and Charles Gray's much loved performances. Mower relates an amusing story about how short he was in comparison with Lee and Leon Greene, who played Rex. He recalls discovering Greene, at six foot six, stuffing newspaper into his shoes in a game of one-upmanship with Lee over their respective heights.

Although Matheson initially disliked most films he had worked on he admits that he has found much to admire in Terence Fisher's direction on the film. Rigby also praises Fisher's work on the film, Phil Baker offers that Fisher was perfectly in tune with Wheatley and Mower remembers him as a director who wanted ideas from his performers. From Dan and Kiffy Stainer Hitchins we learn of the asthmatic old horse that 'only had one lung' and featured in the film's famous Angel of Death sequence and the poor tarantula that expired under the studio lights.

This concludes with a discussion of the visual effects which, even at the time, Hammer struggled with because of the low budget, and an appreciation of James Bernard's masterful music. Dan and Kiffy knew their father was upset that 'a number of aspects of the film never quite got made to the standard that he would have hoped' but was also 'very proud of the film'. Our old friend David Huckvale, with his usual passion, examines Bernard's powerful score which was seen as a crucial element to the success of the film.

Once again, Hearn and production partner Rorie Sherwood have produced an absolute treat of a documentary.


The Power of Light: Restoring The Devil Rides Out(11:30)
Here we get to the contentious issue of what is 'restoration' of the film and what is 'embellishment' to the original film. Dan and Kiffy Stainer-Hutchins make it clear that their father was not happy about the effects and that with time and money he would have preferred to finesse a number of sequences. Many reviewers have singled out the poor effects as an element that diminishes the film. These views seem to have inspired Hammer to ask Cineimage, the post production company who restored The Devil Rides Out from the original negative, to tidy up some of the effects sequences and add new effects.

Let me state from the outset, I don't have a problem with tidying up the poor matte work on the film but some of the work here goes beyond tidying up and embellishes scenes with contemporary effects that are arguably often out of context in a film of this age. There's a different version of The Devil Rides Out presented on this DVD, a 'what if' version that addresses the Stainer-Hutchins' concerns about the opticals and 'completes' effects about which we have no evidence for how they were meant to be finished or if they were supposed to look a certain way. We don't know what Fisher or Stainer-Hutchins actually intended and some of the new effects are therefore an artistic decision made from a contemporary perspective of the film. I presume this is also in part Hammer's own response to the market that has opened up because of the success of The Woman in Black.

Adam Hawkes, Ed Schroeder and Steve Boag of Cineimage examine some of the sequences that have been addressed. They take us from the matte effects that depict Simon Aron's house and observatory, to the appearance of the genie in the observatory, the Angel of Death's arrival and reveal of its face, the spider effects and the fiery climax of the film. Originally achieved through a mix of blue screen, matte and model effects, the effects were limited by budget and time. Mattes display instability and telltale fringing in the compositing of the elements and some effects were never completed properly. The changes made to the film for this release are rationalised by Cineimage as, 'these days people aren't so forgiving over the images'.

Admittedly some of the effects are rough and needed a bit of tidying up. I admire the efforts of Cineimage as they claim to have made about one and half million fixes to the film. I'm sure that a vast majority were warranted to restore the film in its original incarnation. I respect that Cineimage have attempted to be 'sympathetic to the original material' and I quite like some of the effects - the lightning strike at the altar is good and the water effects added to the death of the spider are fine - but with others I really didn't see why they made the effort. The CGI clouds rolling above Simon Aron's house look exactly what they are - digital clouds - and the Angel of Death can never be a completely successful sequence with its very obvious and rather comical rewinding of the footage of horse's hooves to suggest its near trampling of Simon. Adding CGI light sources to its arrival does nothing to dispell the already risible aspects of this scene. 

Putting the ethics of whether you should go back and revise or enhance films to one side, I believe not including the original, restored version without the enhanced effects on this release is an error of judgement. Both versions should have been on the disc to satisfy fans, old and new, and to quote Marcus Hearn, fulfill 'the efforts that have been made to present [these films] as most British audience-members would have originally seen them.' Clearly they never saw the film with CGI clouds, smoke and water and I'm sure many of us would like the choice to see the restored film as such.

Dennis Wheatley at Hammer (12:42)
Phil Baker provides background on 'Britain's occult uncle' Dennis Wheatley and Christopher Lee's connections to Wheatley and Hammer. Jonathan Rigby and Marcus Hearn enlighten us about the other Wheatley works that Hammer completed or attempted, including The Lost Continent (1968), an adaptation of Wheatley's 1938 novel Uncharted Seas, 1976's To the Devil a Daughter and the abandoned scripts for The Satanist and The Haunting of Toby Jugg. Baker compares the original book of To the Devil a Daughter with the 'loose inspiration' of the modernist Hammer version that Wheatley hated. As a result, he apparently banned Hammer from making more films of his books. 
World of Hammer episode: 'Hammer'(24:50)
Oliver Reed rumbles through another episode of the clips show and yet again, we've got that Dolby Digital 2.0 sound problem that plagued the episode featured on the Quatermass and the Pitdisc. Reed narrates from the left hand channel as everything else is pushed through the right hand channel.
Stills Gallery (5:00)
Lovely selection of posters, ads, colour and black and white lobby cards and film stills set to a suite of James Bernard's terrific music.

The Devil Rides Out
A Hammer Film Production
Seven Arts - Fox - ABPC 1968
StudioCanal Blu-Ray and DVD Double Play / OPTBD0697 / Cert: 15 / Released 22 October 2012
BD: Region B 1080p AVC / PAL / Feature Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1 / 96 minutes / English / LPCM Mono 2.0 Audio
DVD: Region 2 / 92 minutes / PAL / Feature Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1 / English / Mono 2.0 Audio

It was apparently actor George Woodbridge who suggested the idea of filming Prince Felix Yusupov's memoir Lost Splendour to Hammer producer Anthony Hinds in 1961. However, it wasn't until Christopher Lee returned to Britain from his Swiss tax exile in the summer of 1965, and back to making films with Hammer on a regular basis, that the project was scheduled to be made. Rasputin the Mad Monk was essentially the carrot dangled to Lee to persuade him to sign a contract to play Dracula in the film that would be made back-to-back with Rasputin at Bray Studios, Terence Fisher's Dracula Prince of Darkness.

For Hammer, the development of the script was of immense concern. They were probably aware of the law suit brought against MGM in 1933 by Princess Irina Romanoff Yusupov who claimed the film Rasputin and the Empress had invaded her privacy and had erroneously portrayed her as Rasputin's mistress. She won a settlement in an English court in 1934 and received an out-of-court settlement from MGM the same year. Felix Yusupov also sued CBS for $1,500,000 in a New York court in 1965 for broadcasting a play about Rasputin's assassination in 1963. His claim was that some events were fictionalized and that, under a New York statute, Yusupov's commercial rights in his story had been misappropriated. CBS eventually won the case.

'the usual nasty Hammer stuff with the emphasis on bleeding stumps'

It's not known if Hinds had the legal complexities in mind as he put the first draft of the script together because he took great pains to base the script on Yusupov's own memoirs. However, Yusupov's estate were soon in contact, issuing a letter warning Hammer of the outcomes of misrepresentation, and Hinds duly revised the script completely, changing events, names and familial relationships and ejecting a number of characters to comply with Yusupov's wishes.

Hence, Yusupov was transformed into Francis Matthew's character Ivan Keznikov and details about Rasputin's relationship with Alexandra, the wife of Nicholas II, Tsar of Russia, the healing of their son Alexei and Rasputin's influence over the court were either drastically altered or completely abandoned in the final script. Certainly, the role of Tsarina Alexandra was reduced significantly, leaving Lee's co-star Renée Asherson rather unhappy when she came to film her scenes.

Hammer, to avoid any possible future litigation, requested that Yusupov sign every page of the finished script. To make absolutely sure, the opening page of The Mad Monk, as it was then known, clearly stated: 'This is an entertainment, not a documentary. No attempt has been made at historical accuracy... all the characters and incidents may be regarded as fictitious.' (1) It's as well to bear that in mind watching Rasputin the Mad Monk.

Christopher Lee had his own connections to those supposedly involved in the assassination of Rasputin and recalled meeting Prince Yusupov and Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich as a child, 'Two of the conspirators, yes. I was pulled out of bed in the middle of the night by my mother. She said there are two people here in black tie and tuxedos, you will remember having met them - but that’s about all. And then of course years later it meant a great deal. But I can’t remember their faces. Then I played the part in ’65, although it was not correctly played, because even then Prince Yusupov was alive and he would always bring legal action against anybody who used his name or his wife’s name in a film.' (2)

Hinds' story therefore concentrates on Rasputin's humble origins as an outcast healer in Tsarist Russia, banished from a monastery for his violent, sexual behavior and unorthodox supernatural skills. He arrives in St. Petersburg and in a local cafe meets the drunken Dr. Boris Zargo (Richard Pasco, who had a strong leading role in 1964's The Gorgon) and is enmeshed in the social circles of the Russian court.

It is represented by Sonia and Peter Vasilivitch, Ivan and Vanessa Keznikov (played by the supporting cast of Dracula Prince of Darkness - Barbara Shelley, Francis Matthews and Suzan Farmer joined by Dinsdale Landen as Peter). When Rasputin discovers that Sonia is the Tsarina's lady-in-waiting, Rasputin seduces and hypnotises her, ordering her to injure the Tsar's child and effect his entry into, and influence on, the royal Russian household.

The script, credited to Hinds' screenwriting pseudonym John Elder, was then submitted to the BBFC in May 1965 to be met with the usual disdain from its readers. Frank Crofts poured scorn on 'the usual nasty Hammer stuff with the emphasis on bleeding stumps' and his colleague Newton Branch regretted that though 'the Rasputin story is a "natural"... it's a pity that Hammer plays the fool with it in this squalid fashion.'

John Trevelyan summarised the script's issues to producer Anthony Nelson Keys and raised concerns about the opening scene where Rasputin, seducing a local woman, hacks off the hand of the man trying to rescue her ('needs care and discretion both in its sex and its violence') and a later shot of the severed hand; Rasputin's seduction of Sonia and the scene's exploitative display of nudity; Sonia's attack on Rasputin; Rasputin forcing a prostitute to eat fish ('quite disgustingly sadistic'); the presentation of Peter's acid-scarred face and Rasputin cutting off Peter's fingers and, finally, the depiction of Rasputin's death. (3)

Assuring Trevelyan that discretion would be adhered to, Nelson Keys was keen to get the production underway as Dracula Prince of Darkness was about to complete shooting on 4 June and Rasputin would commence, initially on location in Black Park and then after using the same sets on the Bray backlot, from 8 June. Fresh from his success on other Hammer films, including Kiss of the Vampire (1962) and The Devil-Ship Pirates (1964), and Anglo-Amalgamated's lush period version of The Face of Fu Manchu (1965), also starring Christopher Lee, Australian director Don Sharp was invited to bring Rasputin to the screen.

'the "Marks and Spencers" of art direction'

Bernard Robinson and his art director Don Mingaye revamped the Castle Dracula frontage to stand in as the exteriors of Ivan Keznikov's house, reusing the frozen moat, in which previously Dracula had perished, and now where Sonia would injure Alexei and Rasputin would eventually plunge to his death. Stage 2 housed the cafe (originally Dracula's cellar) and the St. Petersburg market (fomerly the courtyard of Shandor's monastery) and, on the other stages, the interiors of Rasputin's villa, Keznikov's house and the Tsar's palace were handled by Robinson with his usual penchant for revamping and recycling sets.

'Robinson characterised himself as the "Marks and Spencers" of art direction, someone who provided value for money' and, despite the prevailing lack of budgets, Robinson's time working at Bray saw him at the height of his powers. (4) However, Rasputin was a victim of budgetary problems, wherein scenes at a ball and the Tsar's court were either scaled down or jettisoned altogether, despite securing Renée Asherson to play the Tsarina. The opening of the ballroom scene ended up using a stock shot from 1956's Anastasia rather than go to the expense of building sets and employing extras.

Lee characteristically spent much time researching the role, as Francis Matthews attests to in both the commentary and the documentary on this disc, and worked closely with director Don Sharp on his performance. His determination to play the part truthfully also reportedly saw him consulting a number of medical experts about the effects of cyanide poisoning for the climactic scene where Ivan and Zargo tempt Rasputin with deadly chocolates.

Sharp noted of his lead actor, 'Chris always did a lot of research on his roles and he talked quite a lot about aspects of Rasputin that weren't in the script but just interested him' and the pair collaborated on ideas, many of which would embellish the script that Lee had already voiced his disappointment in. (5)

He decried the inaccuracy of the film's ending, the lack of references to the conspirators and the lack of scenes at the court of the Tsar but understood perfectly that Yusupov had prevented Hammer from presenting the story of Rasputin's assassination with complete accuracy. However, by the time of his autobiography he was content to regard Rasputin as 'a real actor's part, one of the best I'd had. And I had a long drawn out exquisite death I could get my teeth into.' (6)

The film contained a number of quite physical scenes. Barbara Shelley, filming Sonia's attack on Rasputin in Zargo's laboratory, also suffered from a displaced coccyx when a stunt with Lee and a pair of curtains went wrong. Rasputin's death scene originally included a very intense fight sequence, filmed over three days, between Lee and Matthews. As Matthews recalls, 'It was the big climax to the film and I did an awful lot of fairly dangerous things. I had to smash into a huge glass cabinet and go over the back of it and then we had a lot of fist fighting.' (7)

Later, Francis Matthews was rather disgruntled when most of this sequence ended up being cut out of the film, possibly because of pacing as Denis Meikle postulates in the documentary on this disc. It did, however, leave the continuity of the scene in something of a disarray and the film with a rather truncated ending. Lee also filmed an extension to his demise on the icy moat, showing Rasputin with his hands held to his forehead in benediction. Allegedly, it was deemed unsuitable on religious grounds and was removed from the film.

The BBFC still required their pound of flesh and a black and white print of the film was submitted to them on 19 August, almost a month after principal photography had been completed. John Trevelyan was still bothered by the severed hand and wanted it out of the film, concerned by the scene depicting Rasputin's seduction of Sonia and her fight with him ('we certainly want you to remove all shots in which the flask of acid is near her face').

He was also worried about the acid attack on Peter and Rasputin's vomiting and retching after eating the poisoned chocolates ('could you not replace this by moans and groans?). (8) Nelson Keys stood his ground and the debate over these scenes continued until 28 October when the film was finally granted an X certificate after various edits had been agreed. The film went on release 6 March 1966 on a double bill with John Gilling's The Reptile.

'a neglected gem'

It remains something of an under rated film in Hammer's catalogue with many critics rather unfairly attacking the film's low budget and sparse settings. Granted, most of the film does take place indoors and only the Black Park locations, the rather limited views of the St. Petersburg market and the exteriors of Ivan's house punctuate a film that emerges from dingy cafes, tatty apartments and opulent palaces and villas.

However, there's something of an injustice being perpetrated here. The restrictions become a virtue and Don Sharp and his cinematographer Michael Reed, who had just shot the equally luscious looking Dracula Prince of Darkness, introduce a schematic of picking out areas of the sets with delicate pools of light, to highlight certain characters, to suggest their psychological states and to generate a particularly intense atmosphere.

This is evident right from the opening scene when Rasputin arrives at an inn to heal the sick wife of the landlord and, as he begins the laying on of hands, faces emerge from the gloom and the praying landlord is bathed in a halo of golden light.

It's a lighting scheme that Reed manipulates to greater effect later when Rasputin arrives in St. Petersburg and meets Dr. Zargo. Bernard Robinson's cafe set allows Reed and Sharp to use lighting to both isolate the various customers, presenting Rasputin and Zargo as tableaux vivant, and highlight areas of the cafe.

He also puts it to good use whenever Lee has to indulge in Rasputin's hypnotic ability (there's a wonderful moment where Rasputin's face emerges from the shadow of a window and he glares across the rooftops to ensnare Sonia), when he's fighting off Sonia (the lighting on Lee and Shelley is superb) and in the superbly atmospheric stand off with Peter which is illustrated as a series of faces drawing back and forth from the shadows.

At the centre of the film is a monumental performance from Christopher Lee that allows him to use all his physical attributes, including his eyes, his huge and incredibly expressive hands and that deep bass voice. He almost dominates the film and, where it not for the effective performances from Shelley and Pasco, he would completely own it. Barbara Shelley is quite wonderful as Sonia, both sensitive and sensual and certainly matching Lee for physicality in their fight together. Richard Pasco provides the moral centre of the film and, as an alcoholic doctor struck off from practice slowly engulfed by Rasputin's influence, he shows how a buffoon gradually finds the courage to understand how thoroughly manipulative and corrupting a creature he is.

Sharp also manages to leaven Lee's brooding intensity with some rather welcome moments of comedy. The drinking contest is another example of Lee's ability for physical performance and mimetic skills and Richard Pasco joins in the fun by falling down drunk after attempting to dance. He also punctuates this with scenes at the ball where Sonia necks back the champagne, proving she's a bit of a good time girl, before she, Peter, Ivan and Vanessa decide to head downward socially and join the working classes for a bit of entertainment at the cafe where, as Ivan puts it, 'someone always gets drunk and starts fighting'.

Reed's visual scheme also works in close relationship with Robinson's sets and you can clearly see various symmetries in the film, where characters are caught in physical space, in moral limbo perhaps, because of their inability to challenge Rasputin's influence over the Romanov family. It is expressed perfectly in the scene at Alexei's bedside with shots that arrange various figures in the drama to the left and right of the screen, and the child's bed, and then place Rasputin directly in the centre.

Robinson's settings offer the film up as a strategy, where Rasputin's ambitions as personal healer to the Tsarina leave the tragic demise of Sonia and physical injury to Peter in their wake. The couples in the film, pairs of brothers and sisters, Rasputin versus the court's rational and religious figures Dr. Zieglov (John Bailey) and the Bishop (Joss Ackland), are therefore equally part of this symmetrical pattern. When Ivan baits Rasputin to attend a clandestine meeting with his sister Vanessa, the ornate cabinets and figurines that Ivan handles and examines are highly symbolic of the pawns in this strange game of chess and Ivan's need to negotiate Rasputin towards his own demise.

Unfortunately, Rasputin's ambitions and influence on the Tsarina are not particularly well articulated. The court and the Tsarina disappear from the film and the narrative devolves into a straight forward battle between good and evil. The political intrigue of the story is abandoned after about an hour, leaving the last thirty minutes to the downfall of Sonia, with Shelley letting rip in her performance and the superbly filmed clash between Rasputin and Peter, given typical Hammer horror touches by Peter's disfigurement with acid.

The final battle between Rasputin, Ivan and Zargo certainly ratchets up the tension but also teases us with comedic touches. Pasco is wonderfully twitchy as Zargo as he injects chocolates with cyanide. Hiding from Rasputin, as he arrives resplendent in furs and silks, Zargo and the audience are treated to Lee's penchant for mime and gesture, 'comic touches that artfully increase our apprehension', as Rasputin is gradually tempted by the chocolates and booze on offer. (9)

The ensuing fight, featuring some 'baroque acting, culminating in Rasputin, still replendent in his red silk tunic, crawling slug-like across the floor' begins well but is let down by its very abruptness and could desperately do with the much grander face off filmed between Ivan and Rasputin that hit the cutting room floor. There's also a too obvious dummy that falls, like a sack of potatoes, from the window and onto the moat to represent Rasputin's fall. (10)

All wrapped up in a Don Banks score full of doom and portent, there is plenty to enjoy here, from Lee's rambunctious performance and Shelley's ability to give Sonia vulnerability and a sense of tragedy to Reed's gorgeous looking images, Bernard Robinson's sets and the requisite horror of severed hands and burnt faces. A neglected gem.

(1) Wayne Kinsey, Hammer Films - The Bray Studios Years
(2) Interview with Christopher Lee, Strand magazine
(3) Wayne Kinsey, Hammer Films - The Bray Studios Years
(4) Laura Ede, British Film Design - A History
(5) Wayne Kinsey, Hammer Films - The Bray Studios Years
(6) Christopher Lee, Tall, Dark and Gruesome
(7) Wayne Kinsey, Hammer Films - The Bray Studios Years
(8) Ibid 
(9) Jonathan Rigby, Christopher Lee The Authorised Screen History
(10) Ibid

About the transfer
Quite stunning. There is incredible depth to this transfer (for both ratios) and a marvellous texture from the grain that gives this a truly film like appearance. Deep layers of black dominate the image (Rasputin's challenge to Sonia's brother Peter takes place in small pools of light and looks incredible), there is plenty of detail in costumes and faces and spectacular reproduction of colour.

Check out Rasputin's red silk cossack shirt, Sonia's purple cloak, the uniforms and dresses and the close ups of faces and you'll be rewarded with plenty of colour, detail and depth. The restoration also showcases the production design. Bernard Robinson's sets look amazing, particularly Zargo and Rasputin's apartment, Tsarevich Alexei's bedroom and the interiors of Rasputin's villa, and Michael Reed's master shots, which capture their full detail, symmetry and colour, look very impressive here.

Updated 23/10/2012
If there is a downside, then it is the audio on this disc. After considering there were issues with the opening titles and score, sounding very thin and tinny, and accepting that the rest of the film's sound was passable I consulted the Optimum DVD release in the Ultimate Hammer Collection. The audio reproduction on the DVD is fuller and richer overall.

There is something not quite right with the audio on the BD, requiring you to turn the volume up to get any decent depth out of the track and it sounds thin in comparison with the DVD.

Special features

Commentary 
Recorded for the Elite laser disc in 1997, then ported to the Anchor Bay DVD in 1999, this features Christopher Lee, Francis Matthews, Barbara Shelley and Suzan Farmer. This is a convivial track with all the actors dredging their memories about the making of the film where Lee comments on the genius of production designer Bernard Robinson, Shelley sings the praises of cinematographer Michael Reed and they all share their fond recollections of Richard Pasco, Cyril Shaps and Dinsdale Landen. It's full of amusing moments such as when Barbara Shelley and Lee share their memories of the seduction scene. 'I'd never done anything like that before,' notes Shelley. 'Neither had I!' retorts Lee and Shelley responds with the priceless, 'You mean we were both virgins, darling? Oh, how wonderful!'

Lee clearly knows his stuff about Rasputin, researched the part in some depth at the time, and here offers up a wealth of information about Rasputin's life and times. He apparently met two of the alleged conspirators, Prince Yusupov and Grand Duke Dimitri, when he was a child and discusses previous film versions and Yusupov's law suits against film companies intending to film Rasputin's story. The track can often fall into short periods of silence but when it is in full sway it is very entertaining and informative.

Rasputin The Mad Monk 2.55:1 Version
A fascinating and welcome addition for those of us curious to see what the film would look like at its 2.55:1 ratio. The film was shot using anamorphic lenses that squeezed a 2.55:1 image into a standard 1.37:1 frame and it was always intended that it would be matted and screened at 2.35:1, losing picture information at the left and right of the frame. The use of these lenses produces the fish eye, concave effect on the picture that can still be detected on the 2.35:1 version but is more evident in the 2.55:1 version, particularly when director of photography Michael Reed pans his camera left or right across the frame. You'll also notice that any figures at the extreme right and left tend to get squashed and look taller and thinner than their counterparts in the centre of the frame. As the on screen note indicates, with the 2.55:1 ratio you do get a greater sense of the symmetry in Bernard Robinson's production design and the results of what must have been a close collaboration with Reed.
Tall Stories: The Making of Rasputin the Mad Monk (24:21)
Another fascinating exploration of the film's origins with Denis Meikle, who recounts actor George Woodbridge's suggestion to Hammer that they adapt Yusupov's book Lost Splendour and how the film fitted into the then penchant for epics and was an extension of Hammer's own historical genre pictures, and where Jonathan Rigby highlights some of the Hammer horror credentials of the film and its re-use of the Dracula Prince of Darkness sets and locations. Andrew Cook, author of To Kill Rasputin, identifies the characters in the film with their historical counterparts, sorts out the historical fact from the fiction about Rasputin ('he was neither mad, nor a monk'), the myth of Rasputin's death created by Yusupov and the reality that he was assassinated by British Intelligence to prevent a German peace initiative.

The documentary then shifts to Lee's portrayal of Rasputin and both Barbara Shelley's praise for her friend and Francis Matthew's respect for him as a dedicated actor. We also learn of Francis's impressions of Eric Morecambe, about his idol Robert Donat and meeting Donat's wife Renée Asherson on Rasputin the Mad Monk. Finally, David Huckvale, author of Hammer Film Scores and the Musical Avant-Garde, waxes lyrical about Don Banks' score for the film and Denis Meikle discusses the cuts made to the film, particularly the missing fight scene. This all makes for an informative and entertaining supplement to the film from the Hearn and Sherwood team. 
Brought to Book: Hammer Novelisations (14:32)
A delicious wallow in nostalgia as this brief featurette looks at the tie-in novels and novelisations of Hammer films that began with Spaceways in 1953. Rigby and Mark Gatiss take us through the back catalogue, from the novelisations of The Camp on Blood Island and Revenge of Frankenstein to the Phantom of the Opera. There is a brief look at the books issued by Sphere and Fontana in the early 1970s and Gatiss rightly points out that the novelisations were the only way that you could relive the horror films featured in late night slots in the ITV regions or in the BBC's summer double-bills that began in 1975. Writer John Burke is appropriately lauded for his effect on horror obsessed teenage lads of the 1960s and 1970s and Rigby traces the publication of Burke's omnibuses in 1966 and 1967 which adapted a number of classic Hammer films. Author Johnny Mains takes up the story of Burke's involvement and provides a very moving little tribute to a writer, a reputable horror anthologist, he was lucky to work with. Finally, the Hammer publishing story is brought up to date with the latest imprint in association with Arrow which has seen the issue of new novelisations of Hammer films and original horror novels.
World of Hammer: 'Costumers' (24:47)
A trot through Hammer's historical 'epics' with Oliver Reed, who even disses his own performance in The Brigand of Kandahar, covering everything from The Stranglers of Bombay and The Pirates of Blood River to The Sword Of Sherwood Forest and, yes, even some clips from John Hough's Wolfshead before we get to The Scarlet Blade. No audio problems on this episode, thankfully. 
Stills Gallery (3:15)
Selection of posters, trade ads, pressbooks, full colour lobby cards, publicity stills (shots of Renée Asherson larking about with a brolly are amusing and some coquettish Hammer glamour snaps of Babs Shelley are rather wonderful), and behind the scenes photographs showing director Don Sharp and the crew at work.

Rasputin the Mad Monk
A Hammer Film Production 1966
Seven Arts - Fox - Warner Pathé
StudioCanal Blu-Ray and DVD Double Play / OPTBD0632 / Cert: 15 / Released 22 October 2012
BD: Region B 1080p AVC / PAL / Feature Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 and 2.55:1 / 92 minutes / English / LPCM Mono 2.0 Audio
DVD: Region 2 / 88 minutes / PAL / Feature Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 and 2.55:1 / English / Mono 2.0 Audio

Two book competitions!

Yes, one competition for those Who fans out there! A chance to win Stephen Baxter's The Wheel of Ice featuring the Second Doctor. And for anyone yearning for more Torchwood, we've got a chance for you to win a the new Torchwood novel from John and Carole Barrowman, Torchwood: Exodus Code.


The Wheel of Ice  
Stephen Baxter
Published by BBC Books
16 August 2012

Resilience. Remembrance. Resolution. Whatever the cost.

She had no name. She had only her mission - she would return Home. And bathe in the light of a long-dead sun... Even if it meant the sacrifice of this pointless little moon to do it.

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The Wheel has been plagued by problems. Maybe it's just gremlins, just bad luck. But what's the truth of the children's stories of 'Blue Dolls' glimpsed aboard the gigantic facility?  And why won't the children go down the warren-like mines? And then sixteen-year-old Phee Laws, surfing Saturn's rings, saves an enigmatic blue box from destruction.

Aboard the Wheel, The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe find a critical situation - and three strangers who have just turned up out of nowhere look like prime candidates to be accused of sabotage ... The Doctor finds himself caught up in a mystery that goes right back to the creation of the solar system.  But it's a mystery that could have dire repercussions for the people on the Wheel. It's a mystery that could kill them all.

A thrilling, all-new adventure featuring the Second Doctor, as played by Patrick Troughton in the legendary, classic series from BBC Television

Torchwood: Exodus Code
John Barrowman and Carole E Barrowman
Published by BBC Books
13 September 2012

From Torchwood star John Barrowman, and Carole Barrowman, an epic thriller that finds Captain Jack and Gwen in a race to save humanity itself...

It starts with a series of unexplained events. Earth tremors across the globe. Women being driven insane by their heightened and scrambled senses. And the world is starting to notice – the number one Twitter trend is #realfemmefatales. Governments and scientists are bewildered and silent. The world needs Torchwood, but there’s not much of Torchwood left.

Captain Jack has tracked the problem to its source: a village in Peru, where he’s uncovered evidence of alien involvement. In Cardiff, Gwen Cooper has discovered something alien and somehow connected to Jack. If the world is to be restored, she has to warn him – but she’s quickly becoming a victim of the madness too…

Cathode Ray Tube has one copy of The Wheel of Ice and one copy of Torchwood: Exodus Code to give away, courtesy of BBC Books and Ebury Publishing. 

To win the books simply answer the relevant question below and submit your entry via email.

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THE WHEEL OF ICE Question

In which Second Doctor story did the sonic screwdriver first appear?

TORCHWOOD: EXODUS CODE Question

What were the names of the two female Torchwood agents who captured Jack Harkness in the second season episode 'Fragments'?

Email your answers to the questions above, with your name and address, and we'll enter you into the prize draw for either book - whichever your choose to enter. You might even win both if you enter both competitions. Good luck!

The Mummy's Shroud was the last film Hammer made at Bray Studios and it therefore marked the end of a particular era for the company. Producers Anthony Hinds and Anthony Nelson Keys had attempted to maintain the lot at Bray with back-to-back productions but this merely offered a temporary solution to the problems facing Hammer. Bray Studios were now too expensive for Hammer to run during an increasingly desperate period for the British film industry.

The use of Bray had declined since 1964 after the deal with ABPC, Fox and Seven-Arts had required them to shoot their ABPC roster of films at Elstree rather than their home at Bray. In the summer of 1964, the back lot had been cleared and the sets for the four back-to-back productions of Dracula Prince of Darkness, Rasputin the Mad Monk, The Reptile and The Plague of the Zombies, which couldn't be accommodated at Elstree, would be erected. Those exteriors would eventually be revamped for Frankenstein Created Woman and The Mummy's Shroud in 1966.

After the shooting of The Mummy's Shroud, between 10 September and 21 October, Hammer left Bray for the last time in November 1966. As Michael Carreras noted, 'I look back with tremendous nostalgia on what I call our "Bray period". There is no question that having a permanent unit in a permanent house gave the films a uniquely personal quality which we never recaptured once we were out in the bigger world of commercial studios.' (1)

... he did not endear himself to The Mummy's Shroud and considered it his worst effort

The Mummy's Shroud was the third of Hammer's mummy films, this particular sub-genre a legacy of their access to the Universal back catalogue after they struck a rights and distribution agreement with the studio following the success of The Curse of Frankenstein. It also marked the end of their current eleven picture distribution deal with ABPC, who were willing to continue their deal with Hammer but under the proviso that an agreed schedule of films would be shot at Elstree.

The original story for the film came from Anthony Hinds and then director John Gilling, for whom this would be his last film for Hammer, developed the story and produced a shooting script by September 1966. Gilling had a troubled relationship with Hammer and was notoriously difficult to work with but he had already turned out a number of successful films for the studio. However, he did not endear himself to The Mummy's Shroud and considered it his worst effort.

This may have had something to do with the formulaic premise of the mummy film itself, as indicated by Jonathan Rigby and Denis Meikle in the accompanying documentary on this disc and where, as Jasmine Day notes of the classic formula and its repetition of 'the mummy kills those who pillaged the tomb of his beloved princess (or, in Shroud, of a prince in his care)... [and]... Some of the violators ignore warnings about the curse and refuse to believe the dead can revive, so they are slain by the mummy.' (2) Gilling was aware of the limitations of the formula and attempted to add some interesting touches to such standard fare, with some visual flourishes enlivening a rather pedestrian affair.

With a budget of £134,000 Gilling first took cast and crew for a one day location shoot at Wapsey's Wood quarry at Gerrard's Cross to simulate the Egyptian sands of the film's prologue and, beyond the opening titles, the discovery of prince Kah-to-Bey's tomb, guarded by the mummy of Prem. Wapsey's Wood will look familiar to Doctor Who fans as it was later used in the following summer of 1967 as the locations for Telos in The Tomb of the Cybermen, itself a variant of the mummy sub-genre. The streets, alleys and bazaar of Mezzera were all shot on the Bray back lot and various stages housed, among others, the interiors of the tomb, the museum, the hotel and Haiti's lair.

Gilling's crew featured the cream of Hammer talent, including production designer Bernard Robinson, art director Don Mingaye and cinematographer Arthur Grant and the ensemble cast was headed by André Morell, the highly respected film and television actor and no stranger to Hammer from roles in The Camp on Blood Island (1958), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959) and The Plague of the Zombies (1966). Joining Morell was David Buck, replacing John Richardson and familiar to television viewers as the narrator/central character Richard Beckett of ABC's Gothic horror anthology series Mystery and Imagination (1966-70).

The ensemble also included: ubiquitous character actor John Phillips; Elizabeth Sellars rounding off her Hammer career at Bray, having starred in their first film made there, Cloudburst (1951); veteran British character actress Catherine Lacey who had worked with Hitchcock, Orson Welles and Michael Powell; newcomer Maggie Kimberley who would appear shortly after in Michael Reeves' Witchfinder General (1968); Hammer stalwart Michael Ripper and, of course, Roger Delgado who had made a career out of scheming foreigners, popping up in The Stranglers of Bombay (1959) and The Terror of the Tongs (1961) for Hammer, and later immortalised in the 1970s as the Master in Doctor Who.

Lumbering around in George Partleton's mummy costume, his authentic design based on exhibits in the Egyptian Rooms of the British Museum, was stunt man Eddie Powell who had doubled in bandages for Christopher Lee back in 1959's The Mummy. Filming his murderous rampage was not without its problems. A sequence where the mummy murders photographer Harry Newton (Tim Barrett) and has acid thrown on it caused Powell some discomfort when the fumes from the smoke effects penetrated the mask he was wearing and almost asphyxiated him.

Special effects were handled by Les Bowie and his assistant Ian Scoones who built a section of the museum's floor and set in Bowie's Slough studio to enable Scoones to use his own arms to create the effects for the mummy's demise, as it crushes its own body and crumbles into dust at the climax of the film. Scoones later recalled, 'We completely reconstructed the set from Bray which we put on a rostrum so we could work underneath it. The disintegration of the mummy was something we worked for weeks to perfect - we tried everything from acid to poppadoms to get the right effect. In the end we used Fuller's Earth mixed with paint dust on a wax head.' (3)

The BBFC offered little resistance to the film when Hammer submitted it for certification. They simply requested that a number of black and white reels that they had seen be resubmitted in colour to reassess Newton's murder, potentially request a cut to the scene and to look more closely at the mummy's disintegration at the end of the film. It was passed for X certificate on 27 March 1967 and opened as part of a double bill on the ABC cinema circuit with Terence Fisher's Frankenstein Created Woman on 18 June 1967.

'Archaeologists are portrayed as staid, incapable of comprehending the wonder of what they uncover'

The Mummy's Shroud begins with a rather long and drawn out eight minute narrated flashback to relate the escape, into the desert, of young prince Kah-to-Bey and his Chief Slave Prem from a palace coup. The prince dies and Prem buries him beneath the shroud of the film's title. Despite Hammer's best intentions, the low budget does not hide their overstretched ambitions to mount an epic fight to the death, between the Pharaoh and those who wish wrest power from him, on some very confined sets with a handful of extras. Clearly an attempt to recapture the flashbacks to ancient Egypt that featured in Terence Fisher's The Mummy, it holds the film up unnecessarily.

In 1920, an archaeological party, headed by Sir Basil Walden (Morell) and including language expert Claire de Sangre (Kimberley), fellow archaeologist Paul Preston (Buck) and photographer Harry Newton (Barrett) stumble upon the resting place of Kah-to-Bey after a violent sandstorm. A guardian of the tomb, Hasmid (Delgado) warns them of the tomb's curse but he is ignored and, despite Walden's injury from a snake bite, he and his team open the tomb after they are joined by a rescue party led by Paul's father, Stanley Preston (Phillips) and his much put-upon aid, Longbarrow (Ripper).

When Kah-to-Bey's remains are discovered, Claire refuses to interpret the inscriptions on the sacred shroud, afraid of the power they may unleash. When the remains of Kah-to-Bey and the shroud are reunited with the mummy of Prem, now housed in the museum, Hasmid and his clairvoyant mother Haiti use the shroud to awaken Prem and carry out the murders of those who desecrated the tomb.

After the slightly underwhelming opening, the film relocates to the Egyptian city of Mezzera and with events confined mainly to the interiors mounted at Bray. Bernard Robinson's production design miracles transform the rather cramped sets and, for the site of much of the film's claustrophobic colonial return of the repressed, he goes for a plethora of marble in the hotel and its rooms. The Restoration Room at the museum is his attempt to emulate the Egyptian Rooms of the British Museum. All are the environs of the professional and the masculine - blustering capitalist Stanley Preston, the press snapping at his heels and the local police led by Inspector Barrani (Richard Warner). Contrast these with the interior of Haiti's lair, luridly lit and decorated with masses of bric-à-brac.

One of the key themes in Hammer's horror cycle is the slow attrition and devaluation of the professional male figure, a theme I touched upon in my review of The Curse of Frankenstein. Many of the mummy films feature archaeologists being punished for their imperialist hubris and rational paternalism. The Mummy's Shroud illustrates this in some interesting ways and director John Gilling uses his visual flair to underline it. Four male professionals - Sir Basil Walden, Stanley Preston, Harry Newton and Longbarrow - fail to see what is under their noses, to understand the nature of the curse. 'Archaeologists are portrayed as staid, incapable of comprehending the wonder of what they uncover... they cannot see that the world is enchanted' and this failure of perception is used by Gilling to symbolise their rationalism in contrast to the supernatural power of the ancient curse. (4)

Walden, presumably poisoned by snake venom, collapses in the museum, his point of view seen as blurred and out of focus before his blackout. Later, at Haiti's house he is still in a state of delirium, reflected in a crystal ball before the mummy murders him. Harry Newton, searching for clues to the meaning of the sacred shroud using the rational and realist representations of photography, sees the approaching mummy reflected in a tray of developing fluid and then is blinded by acid and burnt to death.

Longbarrow breaks his spectacles and can only see the blurred figure of the mummy before it murders him. Preston is strangled from behind, never seeing his assailant. There is also a symmetry when Walden and Preston's heads are seen to be visibly crushed and, later, the mummy Prem will crush his own own when the curse is lifted and he is freed from protecting his long dead young prince Kah-to-Bey.

The female figures of the film are ranged against this. All are Cassandra symbols and are prophetic seers of one kind or another. There is Haiti, gazing into her crystal ball and predicting death, Claire who has an uncanny knowledge of the power of the sacred shroud and Elizabeth Sellars as Barbara, Preston's wife, who spends much of the film in a state of doomed expectation.

It is interesting to note the same symmetry in how Haiti works together with her son Hasmid to wreak revenge and how Paul Preston eventually trusts Claire to say the words of power that will lift the curse and 'it is women's warnings that convince Paul to abandon the conventional logic that is impotent in the face of the supernatural.' (5)

This also suggests a relationship to the very beginning of the film, when the Pharaoh watches his wife die after childbirth and perhaps witnesses the loss of female intuition and power that would have prevented his ignorance of the forthcoming coup. There are also constant reminders of blindness and sight in the film, be it the sandstorm that suddenly clears to reveal Kah-to-Bey's location, the press intrusion and photography that trigger's Preston's search in the desert for his son Paul or Harry Newton's role as a photographer at the uncovering of Kah-to-Bey's remains. When all these aspects and themes of the film are married to Gilling's visual flare, The Mummy's Shroud briefly attains some of the symbolic thrills of his earlier work on The Plague of the Zombies.

Gilling's style surfaces most effectively in the murder sequences, using unusual angles to denote threat, high contrast between light and dark or a single primary colour, focus and wide angle lenses to skew perception. Beyond the cliches of action adventure, he also has a preponderance to place faces and objects very close to the lens in the foreground, often partially obfuscating the view, closing off or emphasising vision. It's also symbolised in the big close ups of Prem's eyes, caked in centuries of dust and wrappings, slowly opening as he is sent out on his murderous quest. It all adds to the creeping sense of claustrophobia that the film quietly generates.

Unfortunately, there isn't enough of his visual stamp on the film and a string of very wordy scenes are only intermittently punctuated by these exotic visuals and the pace of the film suffers. However, Gilling's film is also blessed by some sensational performances. The team of Catherine Lacey and Roger Delgado positively crackles with life when on the screen. Lacey is astonishing as the wizened, wide-eyed and toothless Haiti auguring the worst for the archaeological stiff upper lips. Delgado doesn't get a lot to do but relishes his moments on screen, his expressive face and eyes speaking more volumes than his dialogue ever could.

Morell is always good value for money but when his character Sir Basil is murdered half way through the film his dependable presence is greatly missed. John Phillips is excellent as the infuriatingly selfish and pompous Stanley Preston. He is the perfect foil for Michael Ripper's scene stealing performance as Longbarrow. Probably one of Ripper's best ever outings for Hammer, it's a precisely measured expression of Longbarrow's constantly undermined and bullied little man. He's one of the few characters that the viewer can have any sympathy for.

Of the young leads, David Buck is suitably clean cut as the boyish hero Paul Preston and is most effective when Paul gets to tear a strip off his father. Maggie Kimberley's performance as Claire is a constant cause for speculation as her line readings are often rather odd and distant and its difficult to grasp whether this is a deliberate ploy to emphasise her repressed psychic abilities or whether she's just not very good in the role.

After the four murders, the film suddenly picks up some pace and the conclusion, with the mummy wrecking the museum in its quest to kill Paul and Claire is rather good. The police chief Inspector Barrani, who has singularly failed to solve any of the crimes in the film, finishes off Hasmid as the mummy trashes the place and nearly strangles Paul to death. Gilling even manages to generate sympathy and dignity for Prem as he crushes himself to pieces when Claire recites the words on the sacred shroud.

A minor entry in the Hammer canon but not without some flashes of excitement, The Mummy's Shroud represents the end of an era for Hammer, an experience which actor Michael Ripper summed up as 'when I finished my final day on that film, I must admit I was upset. To leave Bray and that period of Hammer behind was a sad moment indeed.' (6)

(1) Michael Carreras interview, Fangoria, Issue 61.
(2) Jasmine Day, Mummy's Curse - Mummy-mania in the English Speaking World
(3) The Mummy's Shroud, Hammer Horror, Issue 3, May 1995
(4) Jasmine Day, Mummy's Curse - Mummy-mania in the English Speaking World
(5) Ibid 
(6) Derek Pykett, Michael Ripper Unmasked

About the transfer
Another clean and spotless high definition transfer for this third release from StudioCanal. The results of this restoration aren't quite as eye popping as the work carried out on The Devil Rides Out and Rasputin the Mad Monk but it's pretty close and there is plenty here to enjoy.

Colour is perhaps not as lustrous as the previous transfers but rises to the occasion in many scenes, particularly when we get to the murder sequences and the interiors of fortune teller Haiti's room. Here, oranges and reds really resonate. Flesh tones can also tend towards orange and brown, which isn't surprising with many Caucasian actors sporting tans or blacked up for their roles in the Egyptian setting.

Arthur Grant's colour schemes are lit with a predominance for browns, yellows, blues and greys punctuated by highlights of green, red and white. Detail is good and often quite excellent. The film revels in close ups of faces and there's a lot of sweat, heavy lines, wide eyes and the drooling Catherine Lacey on offer. You'll also enjoy the finer patterns of period decor (Bernard Robinson goes for lots of marbling on walls and columns) and costumes, particularly the suits and uniforms, and the mummy itself looks rather fine, particularly its bandaged arms.

There's a healthy presence of grain that ensures an appropriate film-like texture and contrast is deep and layered throughout much of the presentation although the contrast in the murder of photographer Harry Newton, bathed in red light, isn't quite as deep as the rest of the film. Overall, quite a delightful and very pleasing presentation.

Special features
The Beat Goes On: The Making of The Mummy's Shroud (22:00)
Denis Meikle explains Hammer's exploitation of the Universal back catalogue and how they developed the 'mummy film' franchise. John Johnston, of The Egypt Exploration Society, compares the narrative of The Mummy's Shroud with past mummy films, including Hammer's The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb, their use of  Egyptian mythology and the film's connection with the discovery, by Howard Carter and the Earl of Carnarvon, of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922. Jonathan Rigby notes that director John Gilling, limited by the premise made an attempt to pep up this ensemble piece with some stylish murder sequences while Meikle covers Gilling's long but turbulent history with Hammer. They all examine the casting of the film, Michael Ripper's moment in the limelight as the 'downtrodden little man' and Johnston highlights the combination of Roger Delgado and Catherine Lacey in the film. David Huckvale also returns to analyse Don Banks's score. This may amount to something of an apologia for what is perhaps a minor entry in the Hammer canon, one that Gilling himself had no love for, but it is none the less an engaging featurette.
Remembering David Buck (5:37)
A moving little tribute to actor David Buck from his widow Madeline Smith, an actor familiar to Hammer fans for her roles in Taste the Blood of Dracula, The Vampire Lovers and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell. She recalls how they eventually met after working on Granada's Crown Court in 1974 and recognised him from his work on the Mystery and Imagination series. She offers that he was a funny, talented, intellectual man and regrets that, because of her fears about repeating the failure of her parents' marriage, she didn't marry him until, tragically, he was diagnosed with a brain tumour and was left with six months to live.   
Stills gallery (6:09)
Comprehensive selection of posters, ad art, colour lobby cards, black and white and colour stills, some Hammer glamour shots of Maggie Kimberley, various portraits and behind the scenes images, including Eddie Powell drinking 'his daily pinta', still in costume as the mummy, for a Milk Marketing Board campaign.
Hammer trailers (14:46)
If you've been wondering where all the trailers have gone from these releases then there's a whole bunch to get your teeth into here. The Mummy's Shroud US trailer, in both restored and unrestored states, is present; as is an unrestored double bill US trailer for Rasputin the Mad Monk (where's my free beard?) and The Reptile, and finally The Devil's Bride (the US retitling of The Devil Rides Out) is represented with a TV spot and an unrestored and restored trailer.

The Mummy's Shroud
A Hammer Film Production 1967
Seven Arts - Fox - Warner Pathe
StudioCanal Blu-Ray and DVD Double Play / OPTBD2474 / Cert: PG / Released 22 October 2012
BD: Region B 1080p AVC / PAL / Feature Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1 / 90 minutes / English / LPCM Mono 2.0 Audio
DVD: Region 2 / 87 minutes / PAL / Feature Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1 / English / Mono 2.0 Audio

The Claws of Axos was certainly a long time gestating under the auspices of 'the Bristol Boys', Bob Baker and Dave Martin and they came to write for Doctor Who by a slightly unusual route.

Bob, a monumental mason, film maker and an animator had been making short films for Vision On (1964-76), created by Ursula Eason and Patrick Dowling and presented by Tony Hart and Pat Keysall. While refurbishing a shop and considering how to write the script to an animated film of the Peter Grimes section of George Crabbe's poem The Borough, Baker met Dave Martin, an advertising copywriter, after Martin came into the shop as it was closing.

'It was lucky for me that Dave could type and that he owned a typewriter!' recalled Baker about collaborating and writing their script for Peter Grimes. They both tried to get director Clive Donner, whom Baker had been working with as a location scout, interested in the project. Although the film never got off the ground, they were encouraged to keep writing and 'we just wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote – piles and piles and piles of scripts'. (1)

Both were close friends of the late Keith Floyd, who would eventually become a television chef of some repute, and their comedy play about Floyd's life in the Army, A Man's Life, had found its way to Terrance Dicks via the BBC's Script Pool. Dicks was then working as script editor with Peter Bryant, Derrick Sherwin and Trevor Ray on the transformation of Doctor Who from its black and white origins to the colour series that would launch the seventh season in 1970.

... astronauts turning into carrots

Dicks, Bryant and Sherwin, mindful that they needed fresh blood to write for the show as well as commissions from tried and tested writers like Mac Hulke and Robert Holmes and intrigued by A Man's Life, met with the pair and in due course asked them to submit ideas for the series. Their first attempt, called The Gift, was an epic that could have filled a seven part story and featured ambitious ideas involving skull shaped spaceships landing in Hyde Park, huge space battles with jellyfish-like ships and astronauts turning into carrots.

The central premise of The Claws of Axos was present in The Gift, namely an alien humanoid race generously offering humanity a gift to mask their real intention to destroy the Earth. By the time Dicks had mentored the two writers to scale back their idea for a potential six part commission in December 1969, Jon Pertwee had taken on the title role and his first season was already lined up for transmission.

When the script of the first episode finally arrived the following April, it was rejected. Following producer Barry Letts' advice to concentrate on the idea of benign aliens actually turning out to be evil, 'themes involving trade, greed and capitalism were worked in' after Dicks commissioned them for a six part story The Friendly Invasion. (2)

During the summer of 1970, Baker and Martin were then asked to include the Master, the Doctor's Time Lord arch-enemy devised for the eighth season, into what had then become The Axons. The first episode of The Axons was commissioned in September and Dicks continued to mentor the two writers.

Dicks offered ideas, suggesting for example that the Axon ship was organic and could drain the energy from its surroundings, and requested the roles of Filer and Chinn be expanded. He sent them scripts from Terror of the Autons and The Mind of Evil as specific examples of what the production office were looking for.

As Bob Baker explained about the writing process, 'Dave and I learned the ‘Doctor Who’ formula with The Claws of Axos. It took us a year to write that. The formula is to have a little something every couple of minutes, a small climax every five minutes, something big every ten minutes, and something huge at the end. It’s a structure you work to, using your characters to shape it. And it’s good fun.' (3)

By November 1970, all four scripts for The Vampire from Space, a title suggested as more Who-ish by the production office, were delivered as the production crew was being assembled under the direction of Michael Ferguson who had previously directed The Ambassadors of Death and had just finished work on Paul Temple. 

Ferguson had proved to be a very visual director on Doctor Who. He was interested in the technologies now available to colour television production and, with the more exotic requirements of the script in mind, he booked an experimental studio session on 22 December 1970 to try out a number of CSO effects, using Axon costumes and make up already prepared by external contractor Jules Baker, and to work with designer Kenneth Sharp on how to blend studio sets and backdrops keyed in with CSO. He also experimented with video discs, lighting effects previously used on Top of the Pops, front and back projection techniques.

Location filming began on 4 January 1971 in Dungeness, Kent with film cameraman A.A. Englander. The first sequence shot on that misty, snowbound afternoon was Derek Ware's turn as Pigbin Josh on the rubbish tip and then cycling into the icy waters of a ditch. Pigbin Josh's demise was also shot using a wax model of Ware's face to achieve the effects of his face disintegrating. It was considered so overtly horrific by Letts, concerned about recent complaints suggesting Doctor Who was too scary for children, that in post-production a white-out was added to the end of the sequence.

The regular cast of Pertwee, Manning, Courtney, Franklin and Levene were joined by Donald Hewlett (Hardiman), David Savile (Winser) and Peter Bathurst (Chinn) to film all the sequences outside the Axon ship in freezing conditions. The following day saw the filming of the arrival of UNIT's Mobile HQ (in reality a BBC Outside Broadcast van) including Army men provided by the Risborough Barracks and a gun mounted Land Rover.

The freezing temperatures caused Courtney's false moustache to fall off when the glue holding it on froze while Manning's feet were almost frostbitten and she required make-up to disguise the effects of the cold. As a consequence, many of the cast and crew took to warming themselves over running car engines. On 6 January, they were also joined by Roger Delgado for more sequences outside the Axon ship. The ship was a prop built from foam and latex on a chicken wire frame and came complete with opening doors and a tendril manipulated by wires.

Ferguson, Englander, Derek Ware and the HAVOC stunt team filmed a number of sequences on 7 January including the Master's jump, performed by Jack Cooper, from a bridge onto a passing lorry and the Axon attack on Yates and Benton complete with exploding Land Rover. Filming then switched to the Dungeness Nuclear Power Station, doubling for the story's Nuton Power Complex and this covered various Axon attacks on UNIT personnel and scenes involving the TARDIS.

Before studio recording began on 22 January in TC3, model sequences of the radar station seen in the first episode, the emergence of the Axon ship and the Nuton Complex being blown up in the last episode were all filmed as rehearsals continued at the 'Acton Hilton' where the cast was joined by Bernard Holley playing the Axon Man. Holley had previously appeared in Tomb of the Cybermen and had been a regular in Z Cars (1962-78). The TC3 recording first concentrated on scenes at UNIT HQ, in the mobile HQ, the radar station and the lorry cab (with Nick Hobbs simulating the movement of the vehicle in studio but looking as if he's simulating something else entirely).

The second day saw material recorded on Kenneth Sharp's series of connected sets, fabricated in plastic, foam and latex, for the interiors of Axos, using CSO to create foreground and background extensions. Sharp was apparently inspired by the film Fantastic Voyage (1966) to integrate moving sections into the sets to suggest the ship was pulsating with life. The golden Axons, including Bernard Holley, were created using a combination of gold greasepaint, wigs, prosthetics incorporating ping-pong balls to simulate their eyes, and body stockings. Apparently, Holley sported his Z Cars police cap when he first walked on set as an Axon. (4)

Ferguson used some material from his experimental session in December to create the layered psychedelic imagery for the serial and also incorporated spinning lighting effects, back projection, distorting lenses and roll back and mix as well as the combined output of five cameras. 

A further weekend of recording took place in TC4 on 5 and 6 February and this included scenes in the interiors of Axos, the TARDIS scenes using Sharp's new TARDIS interior and a rebuilt console for its first appearance in colour and the CSO ageing effects on Jo Grant. The final scenes at the Nuton Power Complex, including the rigging of the sets to collapse, were completed on the evening of 6 February. During the rehearsals for the final studio session, Letts renamed the serial The Claws of Axos and this necessitated the reshooting of the titles for the first two episodes.

.... some of the strangest imagery ever made for television

The Claws of Axos is perhaps a typical example of the way Letts and Dicks set about altering the constricted format devised by Sherwin and Bryant, changing the sober nature of the Doctor's exile to Earth into something more akin to a comic book adventure. Many of the hallmarks of the format are still there but the development of the UNIT 'family', the presence of Jo Grant and the Master and a conscious development of visual style also change the emphasis.

With the comic book aesthetic and new characterisation comes a need to tell stories visually. Axos is a prime example of this experimentation in season eight, which opens with the similarly louche Terror of the Autons and concludes with The Daemons, a serial where all the fiddling about either starts to pay dividends or marks the nadir of UNIT's effectiveness in Doctor Who, depending on your opinion. The rest of the season offers the more restrained The Mind of Evil, which wouldn't look out of place in the previous season, and the first attempt to ditch the exile to Earth format in Colony in Space.

Baker and Martin's writing style, very much emerging from a collision of their backgrounds in animation and advertising, is to devise as many memorably visual ideas as possible and then throw them at the wall to see which ones will stick. Hence, seven episodes of material was finessed, if that's the right word, into The Claws of Axos. Joining their patch-work quilt of arresting visuals together is Michael Ferguson, a director who relishes in visual experimentation and stretching the programme's resources to breaking point. The results are certainly arresting, distinctly hallucinatory and some of the strangest imagery ever made for television.

The Axons, in their red spaghetti mode, are also superbly realised and highly memorable and the use of CSO and lighting to show them emerging out of the walls of Axos is still very disturbing. However, the strange lump that attempts to attack Winser and the Doctor at the Nuton Power Complex is quite the reverse. It's a man in a sack rolling around the floor of the studio in slow motion and nothing can change that. The golden Axons are also quite intriguing, very simply and effectively realised, even if they are visually the epitome of the Hipgnosis prog-rock aesthetic that dominates the serial.

However, no matter how good Ferguson is at interpreting the ideas from 'the Bristol Boys' and pushing the envelope in visual terms The Claws of Axos suffers from a lack of credibility that is down to weak characterisation and acting. Peter Bathurst, as Conservative MP Chinn, and Paul Grist, as UNIT New York's Intelligence officer Bill Filer, are perhaps the major culprits. Bathurst delivers an exaggerated, theatrical performance throughout while Grist is lumbered with a character whom we have no connection with, a speculative 'love interest' for Jo Grant that never gets off the page. Chinn is a very broad caricature of the establishment-authority figures that nag the Doctor throughout his exile on Earth and there is nothing subtle about the bombast.

The grittier tone of the previous season still lingers in much of the story but it's now competing with an aesthetic that consists of day-go orange monsters, psychedelic space ships and the Holmes/Moriarty subtext of the the season's obsession with the Master. At a time when Edward Heath, a man often as rude as his on-screen representative Chinn, was struggling to maintain relationships with the unions representing the country's power workers, the serial's themes of endless sources of new energy and food, of greed, exploitation and corruption, seem rather apt. However, we do get a nuclear power complex seemingly staffed by one man in a white coat and, when it does vanish in a ball of fire, very little concern for the radioactive fall out the explosion produces.

The establishment figures and their concerns are placed within the series' use of the monstrous embodied not only in extra terrestrial forms but, most importantly in an anxiety about new technologies, processes and materials, consumerism, nuclear facilities, laboratories and space missions. Martin's background as an advertising man is perhaps symbolised by the gift of Axonite, a material that falsely promises to alleviate all the world's worries about power and food but in fact is the tool by which the Axons will bring about its exploitation and destruction.

The uneven quality of The Claws of Axos is perhaps a result of Letts' overstretching ambition to transform the grim, adult world of season seven into something more family friendly. The problem is that the comic book broad strokes produce a story that does not belong to either camp, with the often excessive visuals being smothered in a relentless synthesiser score from Dudley Simpson that is all too much, too soon perhaps. This is in contrast to the grittier elements lacking conviction from an ensemble of players where the regulars are just about keeping their heads above water and Ferguson seems to have no control over guest actors. Even the Master, attempting to operate the Doctor's TARDIS, presciently remarks of the situation, 'Overweight, underpowered and a museum piece. No proper stabiliser. Oh... let's try again. Might as well try to fly a second hand gas stove.'

(1) Laurie Booth interview with Bob Baker, About Bob on www.bobbaker.tv
(2) Andrew Pixley, The Claws of Axos, DWM Archive, Doctor Who Magazine 264, May 1998
(3) Bob Baker, Doctor Who Interview Archive
(4) Andrew Pixley, The Claws of Axos, DWM Archive, Doctor Who Magazine 264, May 1998

Special features

Commentary
Originally recorded for the 2005 DVD release this features Katy Manning (Jo Grant), Richard Franklin (Captain Yates) and producer Barry Letts and is a friendly, chatty conversation between three people who clearly enjoyed working on the series. Letts as ever concentrates on the qualities of the production, often praising director Michael Ferguson's experimental approach to creating some of the layered images in the episodes. Manning and Yates enrich this with anecdotes about the rest of the cast and their experiences freezing on location, working in the studio and the impact of the sound and visual effects on the final show.
Axon Stations! The Making of The Claws of Axos (26:39)
Chris Chapman's wonderfully retro documentary about a story that director Michael Ferguson describes as 'a very good trip' delves into the origins of the script, via Keith Floyd's experiences in the Army, and how Baker and Martin were commissioned and nurtured by Letts and Dicks. 'We didn't know they couldn't do this sort of thing,' recalls Baker about their storyline to land a giant skull in Hyde Park and Dicks recalls 'one of their more sensible ideas' was to have the pilot of a spaceship mutating into a giant carrot. What evolved into The Claws of Axos offered Ferguson another creative opportunity and he regales us about the disastrous weather conditions that affected location filming and Derek Ware's 'sweating and shivering' experience as Pigbin Josh, the Mummerset legend inspired by an acquaintance of the writers. Katy Manning, as usual, cuts to the chase and variously describes the entrance to the Axon ship as resembling 'a part of the female anatomy', the Lycra clad Bernard Holley, playing an Axon, as 'a pale giraffe' who 'tucked it all between his legs and hoped for the best' and the Axon tentacles grabbing her boobs. Interviews with Ferguson, Manning, Baker and Dicks are supplemented with appearances from Paul Grist (Bill Filer), said Bernard Holley and stunt man Derek Ware. Grist's anecdotes about his son watching his dad and his doppelganger fighting on telly are lovely and Ferguson's enthusiasm also shines through for the 'sensible silliness' of The Claws of Axos.
Now & Then (6:33)
As seen on the 2005 edition of this story, an informative but brief return to the Kent locations, particularly the Dungeness coast and the Dungeness A and B power stations used in the filming that took place in January 1971. Narrated by Katy Manning.
Directing Who - Michael Ferguson on The Claws of Axos (14:43)
Another feature ported over from the 2005 edition. Ferguson discusses what it was like working on a multi-camera show and the creative opportunities brought about by the arrival of colour television. He discusses Barry Letts as a producer sympathetic to the directors working on the show, working on locationat Dungeness with A.A. Englander and achieving video effects in the studio through post-editing mixing and playing in material during recording.
Deleted and Extended Scenes (37:07)
From the first recording block of what was then called The Vampire from Space. Excerpts from the full 72 minute session, also included on this special edition, this is an edit of the various takes, fluffs and camera resets of the first two episodes - so the radar station material is here, complete with studio chatter from director Mike Ferguson and floor manager Marion McDougall; the introduction with Chinn (Peter Bathurst's first take of 'who is he and where does he come from' is even more overblown than the actual take!); Pertwee's face-off with Chinn and so on and so forth. Note that the decomposition of poor old Pig Bin Josh is not subject to the whiteout in the transmitted version and the effect is actually more horrific. This also includes a set of production information subtitles for your delight and delectation.
Studio Recording (72:50)
The full recording from which the deleted and extended scenes were extracted. It offers a fascinating glimpse at the actual recording of the first block in TC3 on Saturday 22 January 1971 and is complete with playing in of location footage.

Living with Levene (35:09)
Quite simply the raison d'être for considering a double dip with this release. Toby Hadoke seeks out John Levene, familiar to Who fans as Sergeant Benton but who has developed something of a reputation, shall we say, for being quite 'off the wall'. Hadoke journeys to Salisbury to meet Levene and on the way, as well as finding out about John's childhood (he was quite a sickly boy), breakfasting with John's lovely old mum, his life in LA (John receives a number of phone calls from American colleagues), playing a round of golf with John and his old school friend, he learns about what it was like working on Doctor Who in the Letts era, Tom Baker's ego and whether John acknowledges that people often regard him as a bit 'odd'. What emerges is both hilarious (John ingratiates himself with several old ladies outside Salisbury Cathedral who don't know him from Adam) and very moving when John embraces his eccentricities as a survival instinct that has emerged from a childhood spent either ill or failing to live up to his father's expectations. Terrific.
Easter Egg: Reverse Standards Conversion - The Axon Legacy (10:10)
From the 2005 DVD release, ex-Nationwide reporter Jack Pizzey explores the process of converting 525 NTSC recordings to 625 PAL format. This featurette details the history of converting programmes for overseas sales and the work of the team at Kingswood Warrenm, the centre for BBC research and development, under the aptly named Peter Axon, to record programmes on video tape. If you love the technical side of television production and recording, you'll enjoy this as it delves into the BBC's award-winning development of standards converters and brings the history bang up to date with the research conducted by Jim Easterbrook and James Insell who devised a way of unscrambling the multiple conversions and returning programmes converted from PAL to NTSC back to an original PAL quality as seen in episodes 2 and 3 of The Claws of Axos.
Production Information Subtitles
A highly informative track, courtesy of Martin Wiggins, that covers the development of the script, the location work, studio production and other ephemera related to the story.
Photo Gallery
A substantial collection of black and white and colour material, of production and behind the scenes images, and images of the Letts/Mannng/Franklin commentary being recorded all backed with a suite of Brian Hodgson's unearthly soundscapes.
Coming Soon
A trailer for January's Legacy box set containing Shada and 30 Years in the TARDIS. 
Radio Times listings

Doctor Who: The Claws of Axos
BBC Worldwide / Released 22 October 2012 / BBCDVD 3670
4 episodes / Broadcast: 13 March – 3 April 1971 / Colour / Running time: 97:19

The re-release of Robert Hamer's It Always Rains on Sunday is very welcome indeed. StudioCanal and the BFI have lavished some attention on the film, remastering and repairing from two nitrate fine grain positives for its outing during the BFI's Ealing: Light and Dark retrospective and for its high-definition release on Blu-ray and DVD.

Most importantly, the re-release champions the work of director Hamer who left behind a small but very distinguished body of work after a career and life tragically marred by alcoholism. His career in cinema began in 1934, working as a cutting room assistant for Gaumont-British before joining Alexander Korda's London Films at Denham. He worked on a number of films for Erich Pommer, who had formed a production compnay with actor Charles Laughton, and edited Vessel of Wrath (1938) and Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn (1939).

He then joined the GPO Film Unit, working with Alberto Cavalcanti, and developed skills as a documentarian that would eventually be evidenced in his work as a director. After Calvalcanti moved to Ealing, he was recruited by him in 1940 to work as an editor on a number of war films and the George Formby picture Turned Out Nice Again (1941). The studio's boss, Michael Balcon, saw potential in Hamer and promoted him to associate producer and he oversaw the production of the Will Hay comedy My Learned Friend in 1943. As Gavin Collinson notes of the film, 'the humour, much of it revolving around a sequence of grisly murders, foreshadows the blackest of Ealing's postwar comedies' and its co-writer John Dighton would collaborate with Hamer on perhaps his best known film, the spiky, bleakly satirical classic Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). (1) 

 
Hamer's first experience of directing was standing in for Charles Frend for some sequences on San Demetrio London (1943) when the director fell ill and he was also involved in reshooting some sequences for Fiddlers Three (1944) before Calvancanti offered him his debut proper with one of the stories, 'The Haunted Mirror', in his portmanteau supernatural film Dead of Night (1945).

Admired by Luis Buñuel and Jacques Prévert, the sequence tells the tale of an antique mirror that, using a glamorous other world, reflects back the underlying tensions in the relationship between Peter and Joan Cortland (Ralph Michael and Googie Withers). It 'has come to be seen as a clever allegory of sexual repression, and the disturbing presence of mirrors was to become a recurring motif in Hamer's films'. (2)

His first feature film, based on Roland Pertwee's stage play, was Pink String and Sealing Wax (1946), a melodrama that wouldn't seem out of place amongst Gainsborough's output, and he developed further his motifs about repression, fantasy, deceit and class division in the story of headstrong adolescent David Sutton (Gordon Jackson), who rebels against a repressive father when he is seduced by a street wise barmaid Pearl (Withers, again).

Hamer made further use of the complex, multiple narratives of Dead of Night and Pink String and Ceiling Wax and eloquently refined them for It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) where Withers brilliantly plays the central character of Rose Sandigate, a frustrated housewife who dominates her humdrum domestic life until an escaped convict, a former lover, Tommy Swann (John McCallum) takes refuge in the air raid shelter at the bottom of her garden. What's very important to note is that Hamer seems to have regularly fought a corner for women working in film at Ealing, a studio often criticised for its very male view point of the world, and Withers is a strong presence in many of his films.

In It Always Rains on Sunday, Hamer not only focuses on Rose's importance in the narrative but also uses sub-plots about her daughters Vi (Susan Shaw, another talent cut short by alcoholism) and Doris (Patricia Plunkett) as a reflection of her domestic role, her reignited desire and the relationship between women and male criminality. As Christine Geraghty notes of the film 'it is the woman who moves between fixed male positions [and her] capacity to change, to reflect on choices, to change their minds... and reinforces the sense that, during a time of social upheaval, the stability of post-war society depends on women's choices'. (3)

'the war's given you a free run'

This is particularly illustrated by the three 'love triangles' in the film. Rose has married an older man, George (Edward Chapman), and is sinking into the conformity of the housewife's routine before Tommy enters her life again and rekindles all of the damped down desires of her youth; Vi is seduced by Morry Hyams (Sydney Tafler), a married musician and the owner of a music shop and Doris is momentarily pulled off course by Morry's charismatic spiv brother Lou (John Slater) before returning to the side of her intended, Ted Edwards (a very young Nigel Stock).

This East End 'La Ronde' examines women's aspirations, choices and roles in the post-war period, particularly the expectation that married women who had enjoyed working and contributing to the war effort would now simply sink back into traditional roles within the home. It's powerfully expressed in George's admonishment to his daughter Vi, after her fight with Rose, about her drunken late nights, that 'the war's given you a free run' but she should now do as he says.

The sense of their freedom is echoed in the way the film uses flash backs to show Rose's previous employment as a bar maid and her first encounter with Tommy and in Vi's recollection of her night out with Morry. They show former promises of marriage and fidelity that are never kept, that are disrupted either by criminality or, in Vi's case, Morry's street wise wife Sadie Hyams. Sadie is one of the strongest characters in the film, eventually rejecting the philandering Morry and delivering a warning sermon to Vi about the kind of man she's involved with.

Hamer again uses desire as a device to delineate between fantasy and reality. Vi believes Morry will help her fulfil her pretensions to be a singer to escape the family home. Tommy's seduction of Rose is also tied in with her femininity. When Rose discovers that Tommy is on the run from Dartmoor, Hamer uses his flash back to glamourise and sexualise Rose, even briefly using a romantic score to illustrate this. He uses soft focus filters on a close up of Googie Withers, a platinum blonde incarnation briefly replacing the later severe look of the tired, repressed housewife.

He then shows the two lovers languishing and fantasising on a hill top and Tommy declaring his love with a ring, his 'present for a bad girl' suggesting stolen goods, before Hamer truncates the fantasy with Tommy's arrest. He returns us to the present day with its squalid, cramped rain lashed terraces and her singular retort of 'haddock' to her husband's enquiry about breakfast. Vi's dream of becoming a singer and Rose's flashback are both triggered by reflections in mirrors, another familiar Hamer device. The ring is emblematic of Rose continuing to extend the fantasy. Later, when they meet in her bedroom Tommy doesn't even recall the ring.

Much of this captures those simmering tensions that existed in post-war working class communities when freedoms that women enjoyed during the war, both sexual and financial, were once again expected to be shaped by male hierarchies, by men returning to their wives after the war. Hamer's film articulates women's frustrations and 'the problematic split between their social role and individual needs' but it never quite suggests what the real alternative is beyond conformity, divorce, suicide or becoming a spinster. (4)

'broken and demoralised by war'

There are some wonderful anti-authoritarian attitudes from other women in the film. Hermione Baddeley is briefly seen as the owner of a dosshouse. When the police, in the form of Jack Warner's Detective Sergeant Fothergill, enquire about Tommy's whereabouts, her attitude to the police is to quote the law at them and return to bed while scratching her bum. The dosshouse visually aligns itself with the depictions of men in the film. Men are often seen either as creatures existing on the fringes of society - homeless and criminal - or they are symbols of conformity and restriction.

Rose's husband is dependable and solid but predictable in his routines, expecting a roast on Sunday and finding pleasure in the small victories of a darts match. Change is not on his agenda. He is placed in contrast with the other triumvirate in the film, of the petty criminals Dicey Perkins, Whitey and Freddy (Alfie Bass, Jimmy Hanley and John Carol) who are tangentially associated with Tommy and, as the film unfolds, they are seen initially as rather ineffectual, attempting to offload stolen rollerskates, and then as thugs when one of them attacks their fence Mr Neesley in the film's climax.

The criminal, the spiv and the thug give a 'recognisable shape to the fears about wartime dislocation and the growth of crime and violence which had spilled over into the 'austerity' period'. Hamer's dysfunctional men are either well dressed wide boys like Lou Hyams, who fixes boxing matches, or down at heel petty criminals, 'broken and demoralised by war'.

Hamer underlines the latter both in Tommy's manipulation of Rose's affections, that ends in him resorting to violence to manage his escape from her house, and the senseless attack on Neesley, the image of the pathetic victim's false teeth landing in a puddle evoking the audience's sympathies and ambivalence. (5) These figures are placed in contrast to George, pipe smoking and paper reading through the film until the redemptive ending when he realises that life with Rose is more emotionally complicated than Sunday roasts and darts matches.

That George is shielded from certain realities is symbolised right at the start of the film when Rose is caught in the chill from the broken window of the kitchen door. The chill is a precursor to the encounter with Tommy in the air raid shelter, the ill wind of criminality re-entering her life, and the blackout material that she asks George to use to temporarily repair the window is an acknowledgement that during the war certain freedoms for women took place under cover of darkness or during an air raid. Like the mirrors used in the mise en scène, that broken window is a two way mirror, suggesting past indiscretion and the repression operating within the present.

Rain is constantly pouring in the film, a veritable tide that suggests a stifling and constraining collectivist experience for all the characters and the inevitable reassertion of routine, defining the calm and storm of interpersonal relationships. It's as constant as Hamer's insistent use of shots showing Rose looking out of the window, her back and shoulders an emblem of this tension. Withers' performance, all uptight physicality that briefly relaxes when she brings Tommy into the house and recreates the sexual freedom of that hill top fantasy, is tuned into the vicissitudes of the weather and Rose's subterfuge. Flowers also demarcate thwarted love, infidelity and deception - the daffodils that Doris brings home after her spat with a jealous Ted, that are thrown in Morry's face by his exasperated wife Sadie when she discovers his affair with Vi, and the limp blooms that Rose's son rescues from an overturned market barrow outside Neesley's house.

The climax of the film is the ultimate expression of these themes with Tommy's hijacking of car and bicycle, his journey back and forth as a geographical expression of criminality's rejection of conformity, of being on the straight and narrow. It is beautifully captured in the superbly shot and edited chase in the railway yard, a high contrast dance between the railway lines and steam engines that reflects back on Tommy's entrance into the film, where he is seen scrambling down an embankment onto a rail line. Hamer contrasts this thrilling sequence, of Tommy and Detective Sergeant Fothergill leaping across goods trains, with the silent tragedy of Rose opening the gas oven and turning on the gas and Sadie's rejection of Morry.

A wonderful film, It Always Rains on Sunday captures post-war uncertainties with impressive detail. The dosshouses and rooms to let are gripped by post-war privations and Rose's house is a cluttered, claustrophobic space, her kitchen cramped with utensils, drying washing and tin baths. There is a sense of community in the tracking shots through bustling markets, of outdoor boxing matches and smoke filled dance halls and pubs. They provide the backdrop to the conflict and divided loyalties within one family and Rose's brief transgression before she is returned to her place within male dominated order. Withers, exceptional in the film, sums up the frustrated future for Rose and Tommy as it's 'too late, ten years too late'.

(1) Gavin Collinson, 'My Learned Friend' BFI Screenonline
(2) Robert Murphy, 'Directors in British and Irish Cinema'
(3) Christine Geraghty 'Post War Choices and Feminine Possibilities', in Heroines without Heroes: Reconstructing Female and National Identities in European Cinema, 1945-1951
(4) Ibid
(5) Andrew Spicer, 'Typical Men - The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema'

About the transfer
Remastered by the BFI, this is an almost spotless high definition transfer save for a few white speckles and the odd tramline. Contrast tends to be quite grey at the start of the film but improves significantly throughout and is particularly robust in the film's climax when Douglas Slocombe's black and white photography revels in the looming shows and rain soaked streets of night time Bethnal Green. Detail is often very good, benefiting faces, costumes, interior sets and locations but the picture often veers into softness, especially in the first half of the film. It goes without saying that the climax in the railway goods yard is jam packed with detail too and is the highlight as far as the quality of the transfer is concerned. For a film of its age, it is very presentable in high definition.

Special features

Coming In From The Rain: Revisiting It Always Rains on Sunday (16:36)
Brief but welcome examination of the film with Terence Davies, Sean O'Connor, Ian Christie and Iain Sinclair. Each recall their encounters with this Ealing classic and discuss its themes and gritty vision of post-war Britain and working class communities.
Locations: With Richard Dacre(6:23)
Dacre gives us an informative tour of the locations and provides detail about Arthur La Bern's novel, the actors and the film's plot and characters.
Stills Gallery
Good if limited collection of behind the scenes stills showing Hamer and the crew at work. Shame there are no actual film stills and posters included.
Trailer
Unrestored trailer (the distorted sound is the major casualty here) with Valentine Dyall on vocal duties by the sound of it.

It Always Rains on Sunday 
Ealing Film Studios Production 1947
StudioCanal Blu Ray & DVD / Released 12 November 2012 / OPTBD2399 / Cert PG / 87 minutes / Black and white
BD Specs: Region B / Feature Aspect Ratio: 1.37:1 / Feature Audio: Mono 2.0 / Video Codec: AVC / Single Layer: BD25 / 1080P / English Language
DVD Specs: Region 2 / Feature Aspect Ratio: 1.37:1 / Feature Audio: Mono 2.0 / English Language

Andy Priestner, whose superb book on Secret Army sent many of us racing back to the DVDs to watch the series all over again, now turns his attention to BBC's Tenko (1981-85) in a lavish and comprehensive new book, Remembering Tenko, published by Classic TV Press this October.   

Admittedly, I've come toTenko in the twilight of my years and have only recently started watching the series properly. My acquaintance with it until this point had occurred tangentially either through the careers of Louise Jameson or Stephanie Beacham or by dint of the edition of Drama Connections devoted to the series in 2005. I certainly knew about it and its reputation.

Tenko inevitably settled into my orbit since I'd recently been reacquainting myself with the likes of Colditz (1972-74), finally released on DVD in 2010, Enemy at the Door (1978-80) and Secret Army (1977-79) and because I remain genuinely interested in the British experience of World War II and the upheavals of the post-war period.



As is clearly demonstrated in the book's 760-page exploration of how the series developed, Tenko set out to tell a war time story of privation and hardship based on the rarely discussed experiences of women prisoners of war. It was a subject that Tenko creator Lavinia Warner, who grew up 'absolutely fascinated by the war', gave further and much needed exposure when she became a television researcher on one of her favourite programmes, This is Your Life. In 1977 an edition of This is Your Life provided the springboard to the development of Tenko when Lavinia brought together POW camp survivors in a reunion with the extraordinary Dame Margot Turner, a nurse in Queen Alexandra's Royal Army Nursing Corps, who survived the Japanese attack on Singapore in 1942 and then spent three and a half years interned on Banka Island.

'Women supporting and relying on each other and constantly testing the notion of sisterhood.'

Warner was so fascinated by her story that, when she became a producer working at the BBC, she pitched a documentary about women prisoners of war to Tristram Powell. What became Women in Captivity (transmitted 28/06/1979) was produced for the Omnibus documentary strand and took Margot Turner and a fellow nurse Betty Jeffrey back to Sumatra to recall their experiences. It was while Warner was on a research trip visiting all the former camps she met Sister Catherinia, a Dutch nun who had also been interned in the camps, and other nuns who had nursed in Sumatra after the Japanese had taken control that she 'had the idea for Tenko there and then'.

The experiences documented in Women in Captivity reflected the ambitions for Tenko, a drama that would depict women 'as themselves according to their true natures... forced to set up their own structures, devise and apply their own politics and social order and discipline... to adapt, to be resourceful and inventive. Women supporting and relying on each other and constantly testing the notion of sisterhood.' Warner's convictions blaze brightly in the opening chapters of Andy Priestner's book and these are replicated in the highly detailed format documents that she eventually put together for each series of Tenko.

What also strikes the reader is how pioneering Tenko was at the time. Not only was the sensitive subject matter a previously underexposed aspect of the history of conflict but the relatively unique premise of a drama tapping into the tenets of feminism, reflecting issues about legal, equal and reproductive rights, sexuality, family and the workplace and driven by an ensemble cast of female actors, was also greeted with some initial resistance by male BBC producers.

Andy follows the pitch development as Warner worked with experienced producer Richard Bates to pull together the proposed narrative and characters for Tenko. It was hoped that Bates would eventually produce the series with Warner as he was a keen advocate for the premise but circumstances prevented this from happening. Warner knew what she wanted for the series, knew the kind of stories she wanted to tell, and the original pitch, as detailed here, is absolutely on the money and pretty much sets out the stall for Tenko as seen in the first series that went out in 1981.

I also enjoyed in this section of the book how Warner's research and her experiences with former internees were crystalised into the familiar characters and informed the projected plots. Andy Priestner packs in plenty of detail about the first character breakdowns and the women internees who were their inspiration, many of whom Betty Jeffrey wrote about in White Coolies and Warner would write about with John Sandilands in Women Beyond the Wire. It's this ongoing historical and personal contextualisation shaping the characters and stories across all three series and the special that makes this story of Tenko's development so vivid and fascinating.

'that awful Tenko thing' 

Selling the series was another matter altogether and after getting the nod from Graeme MacDonald, Head of Series and Serials at the BBC, Warner overheard it being described as 'that awful Tenko thing' at a BBC Christmas party in 1979 and her anger at this made her only more determined to get the series off the ground. Bates brought in writer Paul Wheeler who set to work on the opening episodes and Warner set off to Singapore on a location recce. It was at this point that Bates moved on and Warner was told she could not be associate producer on the show without his commitment. Enter producer Ken Riddington and script editor Evgeny Gridneff both of whom had their doubts about Tenko and the problems generated by a series with no male leads.

What emerges from the pre-production and production tales is how male producers and directors underwent eventual conversion from fearful reservation to enthusiastic advocacy for Tenko. Riddington was much loved by the cast but he found it uncomfortable working with them, as 'armpit-gate' hilariously demonstrates, and David Askey, to whom Pennant Roberts handed over directorial duties half way into the first series, also endured 'wig-gate' in his well meaning attempt to stamp his own impression on how characters looked.

These incidents might come across as naive but casual sexism on the part of Riddington, Gridneff and Askey but this does have to be put into context here because nothing like Tenko had ever been done on this scale before. As a concept it was untried, almost new territory, and is all the more remarkable because at the time female producers, writers and actors were rarely granted such visibility and responsibility and felt empowered enough to stand their ground. Tenko, as a television production, offered something of a watershed in the way television, dominated by male hierarchies, employed, depicted and inspired women.

In effect, the show was just as much a reflection of their own causes as it was of the strength of the characters and the figures they were based on. Priestner underlines this with his profiles of the two women writers who joined the team, Jill Hyem and Anne Valery, who recall Riddington's initial trepidation about the series. Another key figure was Molly Smith, who had been interned with Betty Jeffrey and many of the other women Warner had been in contact with.

She brought her own wartime experiences of the camps to the series and was there as a credited adviser with Warner to support the writers and the actors. Hyem and Valery often locked horns with producers on authenticity, character motivation and storylines and dealt with what Hyem describes as 'unconscious male censorship'. However, by the third series, Riddington had developed a good working relationship with Hyem and Valery and was praised for his ability to cast the show.

It's also striking how this drive towards authenticity affected Molly Smith. There are some very moving recollections of how Molly visited the studio recordings, with the cast in costume for the first time on the interior sets of the camp, now complete with resident cockroaches, and caught a glimpse of one of the guards. It clearly brought memories flooding back as did her visit to the Dorset exteriors when she saw the Chinese extras dressed as guards. This was compounded later when Dame Margot Turner offered her own seal of approval for the authentic exterior sets during a visit to the Moreton location.

Joining the team, after another Singapore recce, was Production Manager Michael Owen Morris. Morris would eventually become a director and helm episodes of Tenko's third series and the 1985 Tenko Reunion. He thought Wheeler's first two scripts were excellent despite Riddington's claim to the contrary that they were 'rubbish'. Looking at how Warner, Hyem and Valery developed the voice of the series, Priestner also shows the care and attention that the three women were lavishing on the development of the characters and the realities of living in a POW camp in Sumatra.

'it's all your fault, you bloody Welshman'

Later chapters deal with the recruitment of director Pennant Roberts who would be instrumental in the casting of the series and creating its tone despite his own concerns with the opening scripts. The book details the creation of the 'Lucky Thirteen' ensemble of women who would film and record the first series, allowing each of them a generous biography of their talents and some engaging anecdotes about how Tenko entered their lives.

The recruitment of actors to play the Japanese commandant Yamauchi and his guards also sheds light on a period when there were so few black and ethnic minority actors working regularly in the industry and the majority of non-white actors in the UK were then handled by a single agency, Oriental Casting. There's a lovely anecdote about the casting of Eiji Kasuhara and his demonstration to Riddington and a line up of BBC PAs that he could be threatening enough in the role.

On the location shoot, this would raise further problems as one young Japanese extra found his country's wartime history something of a painful revelation. However, Tenko also made great efforts to reverse the stereotypes and invested humanity in the characters of Yamauchi and, later, Shinya, played by Takashi Kawahara. 

Burt Kwouk's admonishment that 'it's all your fault, you bloody Welshman' sums up how essential Pennant was in getting the series into production and developing the early episodes. What comes across is Pennant's exceptional ability to cast good actors and his sensitivity in matching the right talent to each part that was up for grabs and taking a punt on untried actors like Joanna Hole who joined the Tenko ensemble despite having done nothing but 'one line as a French tart' in an episode of sit com Mixed Blessings directed by Pennant.

Priestner rounds up the first section of the book with a meticulously detailed examination of Tenko's production, taking us from Ealing and designer Colin Shaw's cloth boat, costumes covered in glycerine, the location shoot in Singapore, the uneasy bonding between the actors as the studio recordings began and to the construction of the camps and filming in deepest Dorset during a very hot August.

The actors recall their striving for authenticity, to honour the women they were portraying, which then extended to weight loss regimes, including the contentious use of a weighing machine in rehearsals, that almost reduced Stephanie Beacham to an anorexic state. The final studio recordings had to accommodate Louise Jameson's pregnancy, the cast's hectic social life, notes from director David Askey and a change of command in Series and Serials as David Reid replaced Graeme MacDonald. Priestner also finds room to discuss Ray Ogden's iconic title sequence and James Harpham's compelling music.

Reid wasn't keen on Tenko but was open to it continuing and discussions were already underway about a second series just as the first was about to start its run in October 1981. It's interesting to note the context in which Tenko launched, with all the favourable money on The Borgias being the huge hit of the Autumn season and competition with the debuts of Bergerac and Granada's lavish filmed series Brideshead Revisited. History has not been kind to The Borgias and it shows that perhaps the BBC wasn't really aware of what they had with Tenko.

It's debut with over 13 million viewers changed that view and a second series was in the bag. Priestner concludes his opening eleven chapters with a look at the critical and audience responses to the series (the Nancy Banks-Smith story will leave you grinning), touching on the success of the Anthony Masters novelisation and Stephanie Cole's inauguration into status as 'gay icon'. Over and above everything, there is a definite sense that Tenko's ambitions were first and foremost to honour those who had endured the hardships of the camps, ensuring it had done justice to their story.

Andy then reviews each of the thirty episodes made and transmitted between 1981 and 1984 and the Tenko Reunion feature-length special of 1985. He is as meticulous in his critiques as he is capturing the spirit and cameraderie and hard work that went into the creation and making of the series. The reviews tease out themes - religious, humanitarian and political - and character motivation to highlight the quality of the performances and the writing across Tenko's entire run.

Between the review sections, Andy brings the Tenko production story up to date. He covers the commissioning of series two and the strange decision to drop Renée Asherson and Jeananne Crowley, playing two of the most popular characters in the first ten episodes, from the series. Crowley's recollections of the phone call Ken Riddington made to her perfectly illustrate the precariousness of the acting profession but also the do or die approach it often requires to continue in your craft.

'the terrors of the mind' 

With Lavinia Warner's second series format, Tenko saw many changes - a new internment camp setting and a raft of new characters, including the formidable Miss Hasan and the duplicitous Verna Johnson, as well as a new producer in the 'refreshing' and 'highly motivated' Vere Lorrimer who was more interested in 'the terrors of the mind' the women were subjected to than the physical privations - but it resolutely stuck to its guns with hard hitting storylines featuring suicide, abortion and euthanasia.

Verna and Miss Hasan also had their roots as characters in the memoirs of Elizabeth Simons, While History Passed, and Agnes Keith's Three Came Home, underlining once again the reality that the series was based on. This verisimilitude was, most movingly of all, realised in the 'fact meeting fiction' reunion of the Tenko cast with the women who had survived the POW camps at the press launch of Warner's book Women Beyond the Wire.

Also at this juncture, the book covers the appointment of David Tucker and Jeremy Summers as directors for series two, raising questions about why women directors hadn't been invited to work on the series. There are plenty of details about the arduous filming in Malaysia, including how Stephanie Beacham pulled some strings with Malaysian royalty, the contrast between the luxury of the production's Tangjong Jara Hotel and the 'hell on earth' of filming in the heat near a pig farm.

This hell included various stomach bugs, biting red ants, and the overflowing toilet facilities of the production bus. For many of the cast this actually brought home something of the conditions that the internees suffered as they were marched through the jungle. The experience would later provide them with the necessary fortitude to brave a river crossing during filming with megaphone-mad David Tucker.

Ann Bell's recall of the conditions revealed fractious tempers over a very real concern that heat stroke would finish the cast and crew off. To Vere Lorrimer's cheery response of 'Oh, Dr. Greasepaint will make it alright' when one of the crew fainted, Stephanie Cole quite rightly retorted, 'Fuck Dr. Greasepaint! Get a medic!' There's also a terrific anecdote about Jean Anderson greeting the weary thespians at the hotel and a lovely resume of her career, the background to her character Joss Holbrook and much praise for the stalwart and down to earth Anderson from the rest of the cast.

Again, the book provides great profiles of the new cast members, such as Rosemary Martin, Josephine Welcome and Philippa Urquhart, details of the developments for the characters and storylines especially the departures and the harrowing, hard hitting demise for two of them, the studio recordings, slimming regimes, the construction of the new camp in Dorset designed by Paul Munting and the exits of several characters and the return of Louise Jameson after the birth of her son who also recounts the overwhelming experience of once again getting the opportunity to act with her peers.

By November 1982, the second series was already being transmitted as the final episode was being recorded. Gridneff's tenure on the show was also coming to a close and he made way for Devora Pope who would eventually script edit the third series. Andy Priestner looks back at the audience and press reaction to the second series and many of the actors describe the moving letters of thanks they received from former internees. A third series commission was quite a while coming because the decision had already been made that the second series would conclude Tenko.

'we were never anyone's baby'

Lavinia Warner believed that any further incarnation would need to focus on the women's liberation and the difficulties of adjusting to post-war life and she prepared an outline on the off-chance that a third series would be made. However, Stephanie Cole and Jill Hyem had their own theories about why the third series took so long to get the green light. Cole believed the series didn't get its due because 'The BBC was very, very male dominated' and Hyem just felt 'we were never anyone's baby'. 

However, by the following April, a third series proposal from Warner was approved after Controller Alan Hart's decision in the New Year of 1983 to proceed with Tenko. Warner's outline took up the story of the liberated women prisoners and their experiences in Singapore, with the Raffles hotel now a transit centre and nursing home, and their reactions and acclimatisation to a regime change, like 'passing through a decompression chamber', from Japanese to British occupation.

She again provided full character developments, bringing back characters that had had a reduced presence in the second series, such as Sister Ulrica and Blanche. This section is again crammed with detail about the various outlines that Warner produced. When the series was commissioned this setting was altered somewhat and the story relocated back to the camp to detail the women's liberation before returning to Singapore.

With all ten episodes outlined, Hyem and Valery divided the work between them, Ken Riddington returned as producer and Jeremy Summers and Michael Owen Morris were contracted to direct. Andy also provides a profile of in-coming script editor Devora Pope, fresh from working on Juliet Bravo (1980-85) and with Riddington on Diana plus her experience as secretary to Vere Lorrimer on Blake's 7 (1978-81) and dealing with the correspondence in aftermath of its shocking final episode.

She would work on scripts and storylines in collaboration with Warner, Hyem and Valery that introduced new characters Alice Courtenay, Phyllis Bristow, Jake Haulter, Stephen Wentworth and covered the crisis with marriages, relationships and faith and the eventual separation of the major characters. A interesting tid-bit refers to Stephanie Cole discovering, via an audience report, that she and Ann Bell were playing the most popular characters and how, armed with this information, they demanded a pay rise via their agents.

The third series eventually saw the proposed storylines and appearances of Louise Jameson's Blanche and Veronica Roberts' Dorothy drastically altered because both actresses were unavailable for the series. Blanche was eventually replaced by the character of Maggie Forbes, played by Lizzie Mickery because Jameson was pregnant and it was deemed impossible to schedule the series to include her. Andy covers all of these changes, the creation of the new characters - with accompanying actor profiles of Mickery, Cindy Shelley, Elspet Gray, Damien Thomas and Preston Lockwood - and the difficult Singapore recce, where the pace of development in the city was reducing the options for period settings for directors Summers and Morris, and how costume designer Andrew Rose went all out to unearth period costumes and authentic materials.

Extensive filming began in March 1984 and was complicated by swathes of red tape and the requirement to submit the scripts to the Department of Undesirable Publications in Singapore. The shoot also saw the return of Jonathan Newth, once again playing Marion's husband Clifford, filming on many of the same locations he and Bell had worked on in 1981. The rapid redevelopment of Singapore in the 1980s also affected shooting at the legendary Raffles hotel and fortunately the crew had a very cooperative hotel manager to assist them. The filming of the women's arrival at the hotel clearly left an indelible impression on many of the actors of what it might have been like for these survivors of internment to return to civilisation and Mickery relates a sense of that history in her comments about filming in the hotel's Tiffin Room.

Again, Andy does a phenomenal job of collating stories and memories, both funny and moving, from cast and crew that reflect on the themes of the drama, the camaraderie of cast and crew and the sheer hard work involved. Those that feature the stalwart Jean Anderson, the mascara wearing Damien Thomas and Elspet Gray's husband Brian Rix enduring, in a change for him, an unpleasant bout of trouser dropping are some of the most memorable. The most touching moments that emerge concern the cast meeting former prisoners of war who had returned to Singapore to retrace their steps.

Back in the UK, cast and crew reassembled for what would be the start of a complicated rehearsal, filming and studio recording schedule in May 1984. This also involved designer Ken Ledsham accurately recreating the Raffles' interiors as well as fake Singapore Slings and painted on sweat. Ann Bell sensitively reflects, after her character takes to the gin, the painful disintegration of Marion and Clifford's marriage. The recording also saw the cast back in camp prior to the liberation of the internees and Burt Kwouk's return to the series as Yamauchi.

The exteriors of the camp scenes were then shot on a very dusty location at Hankley Common in Surrey and took advantage of a June heatwave. Further filming took place at Shoreham airport and on the SS Canberra, which eventually docked late in Southampton and caused delays to filming to such an extent that cast and crew had to leave the ship via the tradesman's entrance and a waiting tug as it set off for Portugal.

Lizzie Mickery and Veronica Roberts express very well what was probably going through the minds of their characters as an extension of what the real internees must have felt - 'the precipice moment' - as filming completed on the sequence where Yamauchi declared the end of the war and the camp was liberated. Roberts is also very articulate about the development of the relationship between Dorothy and Sister Ulrica, sharing her memories of recording her last episode.

The third series of Tenko wrapped in October 1984 and went on to huge success but the cast were unaware that behind the scenes Lavinia Warner was already putting together a pitch for a potential fourth and fifth series that would eventually become the feature-length Tenko Reunion special transmitted Christmas 1985. The final chapters of the book cover the making of the special which would find the cast reunited in Singapore to tell Jill Hyem's tale of 'Malaysia's struggle towards political independence, caught between the British on the one hand and the Communist threat on the other' and 'the effect their captivity has had on our women's lives'.

Andy exhaustively covers the location filming in Singapore, including a return to Raffles and other familiar spots, and Michael Owen Morris's eternal struggle to find locations that didn't disappear over night during the rapid redevelopment of the city. Naturally, going on location had its usual ups and downs including collapsed lungs, a disturbed ants nest at the British High Commission, shenanigans with border control and extemporising toilet arrangements at a rubber plantation in Johore Bahru. It almost seems de rigeur for the exploits of the Tenko cast and crew. Further filming took place in London and Chatham before three recording days at TV Centre in October 1985.

The end of the Tenko story might well have been transmitted on Boxing Day 1985 but as Andy illustrates in his final chapter the series impact 'as a female ensemble drama' has been far reaching. Here, he explores the depiction of women on television, looking at the casts of Coronation Street (1960-) and The Rag Trade (1961-63, 1977-78) as early example of female ensembles on screen, takes us from the proto-feminism of the female roles in The Avengers (1961-69) to the lives and loves of The Liver Birds (1969-78, 1996) and the flat-sharing drama Take Three Girls (1969-71).

He examines the changing mores of the 1970s and the roles of women both behind and in front of the camera where Lavinia Warner's pioneering work is contextualised within a tribute to such names as Verity Lambert and Lynda la Plante. He also sees Warner and her collaborators paving the way for writers Debbie Horsfield, Kay Mellor and Sally Wainwright and the contemporary and period dramas driven by strong female starring roles and casts and where it becomes clear that 'the women of Tenko fought the war that made other drama series dominated by women possible'.

Remembering Tenko is a huge achievement; this lavishly illustrated book - including drawings from the series' graphic designer Ray Ogden and using over 300 photographs taken by the cast and sourced from Radio Times and the BBC - not only chronicles the creation and production of a television series in consummate detail but also captures the courage and hard work of its ensemble female cast and their enduring friendships. It also sensitively acknowledges the inspiration of the women interned in the camps in Shanghai, Borneo, Singapore, the Philippines and Java during the Second World War and is as much a fitting tribute to their indomitable spirit.

Remembering Tenko: A celebration of the classic TV drama series
Andy Priestner
With a foreword by Lavinia Warner
Published by Classic TV Press 22 October 2012
Paperback ISBN: 978095610007
760 pages and 20 pages of colour plates

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