Along with Robert Hamer, director Alexander Mackendrick established his own style and approach within Ealing and this month StudioCanal celebrate his centenary by screening a fully restored digital print of The Man in the White Suit as part of the BFI Southbank's Mackendrick retrospective. The film also gets its first Blu-Ray release.

Alexander Mackendrick brought his distinctive tone to five Ealing films, Whisky Galore! (1949), The Man in the White Suit (1951), Mandy (1952), The Maggie (1954) and The Ladykillers (1955). He arrived at Ealing in 1946 after the collapse of his Merlin Productions, set up with his cousin Roger MacDougall and which made films for the Ministry of Information.

Prior to this he had worked on Pathe newsreels, propaganda films for the British Army and had written scripts for animated propaganda shorts for Halas and Batchelor. By 1937 he had worked as an artist for the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, scripted commercials and co-written the feature film Midnight Menace (1937). He even made stop motion animated commercials for Horlicks with the legendary George Pal. (1)


Working as a script writer and production designer on Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948), Mackendrick eventually emerged as a director during Ealing's boom year for comedy in 1949. Whisky Galore, scripted by Compton Mackenzie from his own novel, was something of an experiment after Michael Balcon teamed Mackendrick with Ealing's publicity director turned producer Monja Danischewsky.

What emerged was a satirical, anti-bureaucratic theme that would permeate many of Mackendrick's films while 'delivering comedy narratives that superficially conform' to the trademark Ealing formula. (2) The battle between the islanders and the officious Captain Waggett over the contraband whisky of the title takes on a mythic dimension and ambiguously explores the patriarchal strictures of the real world in contrast with the poetic, mystical and spiritual existence of the islanders.

a 'rich parable critical of industrial practices and the alienation of science from society'

Mackendrick followed this success up with The Man in the White Suit, equally a morally ambiguous exploration of trade unionism, capitalism, industrial unrest and scientific progress. The film was developed from a play by Mackendrick's cousin Roger and eventually scripted by him, Mackendrick and John Dighton. Dighton, who had co-written the screenplay for Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), added an edge to the script, one that gleefully picked apart the intertwined social and industrial mores of the film, that would eventually be nominated for an Academy Award.

The film's opening immediately symbolises the moral and ethical dilemmas that it will unwind as a hand reaches out and operates a loom and sets in motion a 'rich parable critical of industrial practices and the alienation of science from society'. It also explores the post-war attitude to entrepreneurship and British industry's view that it would only take on new processes when they were deemed profitable.

As it was generally argued that 'British businesses were too beholden to the market and did not develop the powerful "visible hand" of modern corporate capitalism', Mackendrick's film explores this idea of commercial progress through the prism of industrial relations, trade unions and research and development to show a Britain not quite sure how it or even if it wants to progress in the early 1950s. (3)

The central character Sidney Stratton (one of Alec Guinness' best performances for Ealing), a lowly lab assistant in a textiles factory, secretly uses the research purchasing accounts of the factory to set up his own experiments into synthetic fibres under the radar of the chief executives.

The result is a fabric that is allegedly indestructible and becomes the product, first welcomed and then vilified, within an industrial and commercial tug of war, between the unions and executives of the textile industry. The irony is that Mackendrick actually brings what would naturally be the opposite sides in such industrial relations together and unites them when the executives realise that such a cloth would completely collapse the market and the unionists fear they'll be out of employment when that market implodes.

As Philip Kemp asserts, 'to anyone approaching Mackendrick’s comedies without preconceptions, ‘ruthless’ is surely the very word that comes to mind. The world of Mackendrick’s comedies is about as cosy as a snakepit'. (4) Ruthless self interest is at the heart of the film -  in the executive cross talk when Sidney's illicit experiments are first discovered at Corland's mill, the zealous attempt by Birnley (Cecil Parker) to exploit Sidney's discovery, at first blind to the consequences within the industry,  and in the cold but innocent ambition right in the heart of the film's initially sympathetic hero, Sidney Stratton.

'To the North'

That opening scene at Corland's mill, wherein Birnley, Corland's lab technicians and Corland's executives attempt to quantify the burbling apparatus that Sidney has not so quietly set up in the corner of the lab, operates as a thematic template for the rest of the film. Everything has its price in industry, from the cost of the equipment and materials that Sidney tries to bury in the accounts, to the quarter of a million pound bribe the industrialists offer him to suppress the fabric.

This results in their buying off Birnley's daughter Daphne (a deliciously sultry turn from Joan Greenwood), who has already cottoned on to Sidney's project and with whom she has developed a friendship, to try and seduce Sidney into accepting their will. It makes 'explicit the association between capitalism and prostitution where everything, ultimately, has a price.' (5)

There's also something interesting being said about class and education here. Sidney has been ejected from Cambridge University and has ended up working in Northern mill towns. The film positions him as a naive figure caught in the 'dichotomy between North and South, aristocracy and middle class, finance and industry'. (6)

This remove is epitomised in the later sequence when Birnley and Corland have their differences of opinion about the production of Sidney's fabric mediated by the patriarchal figure of Sir John Kierlaw (a great cameo from Ernest Thesiger). Symbolic of the conservative political, industrial patriarch, he arrives from London in the middle of the night, his car speeding past a road sign that plainly states 'To the North'.

The success of Sidney's experiments reflect the political changes in the decade between the early 1950s and 1960s where science was socially subordinated as 'red-brick, not Oxbridge; it's Manchester not London; it is Harold Wilson and not Harold Macmillan... politically radical rather than conservative.' (7) His scientific radicalism is so extreme that he has to inveigle himself within the more rigidly run mill towns, dependent on the relationship between labour and capitalism, where his bubbling chemical experiments fill and then disturb the film's soundtrack. Mackendrick, a stickler for detail, apparently worked for weeks with the sound department on the film to create the bizarre effects that herald Sidney's subversion of the work space.

Stratton wants to succeed at all costs, even if his failures mean racking up huge expenditure and demolishing sections of the laboratory. His perception is fixed, his scientific hubris and deviousness will not allow him to see the consequences of his work until the very end of the film and even then we are left in little doubt that despite his failures he will carry on.

When he is discovered, the world closes in around him and Mackendrick reverses the 'cosy' sense of community that permeates many Ealing films, and depicts a post-war world, of satanic mills and dark streets, that demands entry on its own terms and that is 'dangerous and intensely self-protective'. (8)

The emotional core of the film lies in that final chase where the two competing textile factories Birnley and Corland, their executives, their shop stewards and workers attempt to finally suppress his invention and his technical expertise after failing to buy him off and use Daphne to seduce him into conformity.

It is only when Sidney, on the run, meets his landlady Mrs Watson (Edie Martin) that he becomes aware of the true extent of his own scientific myopia when she admonishes him about the impact of his invention on those beyond the capitalist-industrial relationship.

Her cry of 'Why can't you scientists leave things alone? What's to become of my bit of washing when there's no washing to do?' is a gorgeous moment of vulnerability that pre-empts the fraying distress of the very material that Sidney has created, the instability of his polymers becoming a metaphor for his own blindness about the self-destructive attitudes in society and industry.

These attitudes eventually tear him and his fabric apart, humiliating him and punishing his 'excess of idealism'. (9) But as has been suggested even this scene is as ambiguous as the 'hero' of the film, offering not only, on one hand, a call to arms for the Ealing derived sense of community but also a question about why such a woman is reduced to making a living from washing clothes when scientific progress might well offer her the leisure time she so richly deserves.

... a maverick attempting to find his own originality within Michael Balcon's collectivist vision

Daphne is one of many women in the film who can see beyond the executive dilemma. She spies Sidney surreptitiously avoiding Birnley and Corland's tour of the mill and later recognises him after he has been dismissed from Corland and has used his education to gain a position at Birnley after they invest in an electron microscope. Perception and the closing down of it is a key theme in the film and Mackendrick delights 'in the sudden opening-out of a hitherto restricted horizon or by contrasting a closed mentality with a more receptive one' in the film. (10) This is also visually emphasised, with characters seen partially through doors, windows or beyond a cluttered foreground.

An untypical, quite sexually subversive Ealing woman, Daphne spends time to understand Sidney's processes and realises what he is striving to create while Birnley and Corland argue over industrial minutiae. Her intended, Corland (Michael Gough) only sees their union in terms of capital power, of getting funding out of Birnley. She is a means to an end.

Relationships are often at cross purposes, especially when Daphne is sent to seduce Sidney but then shifts into helping him concoct an escape from Kierlaw. Sidney's relationship with Bertha (Vida Hope), the strident unionist, also flips from her attachment to him, often signified as a bit of an infatuation, to joining his suppressors in an out and out attempt to prevent his escape from the clutches of Kierlaw's highly regulated textile market.

Mackendrick gleefully shows various traditions mirroring each other, the complex relationships between the imperialist executives of industry and the working class unionists who fought for every tea break, and then marshalling their indignation at a single non-conformist entrepreneur.

That mirroring also feeds into that singular image of Sidney parading in front of the mirror in his white suit, an emblem of progress multiplied but ultimately contained and doomed to fail. Some have read this as analogous to Mackendrick's own position at Ealing, as a maverick attempting to find his own originality within Michael Balcon's collectivist vision for the studio.

Visually, Mackendrick and his cinematographer Douglas Slocombe use expressionistic shadows and angles to heighten the claustrophobia that Sidney gradually experiences and the film's chase sequence, the final and physical realisation of this suppression culminating in the mob's clawing the suit to pieces, is both fantastical and farcical. As Sidney's glowing white figure is pursued by the Mephistophelean Kierlaw and his band of executives and workers, there are a number of wonderfully funny moments as the little girl who helps him escape from Bertha's rooms sends the pursuing mob in the wrong direction and a baker, wearing a white overall, is mistaken for Sidney, is chased and then suddenly meets him in the street, scientist briefly reflecting as worker.

Mackendrick suggests in the coda that change must inevitably come as Sidney Stratton, dismissed from Birnley's, walks away from the industrial crisis and realises where he went wrong. As the trademark noise of his experiments fills the soundtrack, he is clearly prepared to have another crack at not only loosening the strait-jacket of corporate, industrial hegemony that Britain is contained by but also to better understand what constitutes the effect of progress on community and class.

(3) David Edgerton, Science, technology and the British industrial decline
(4) Philip Kemp, 'Mackendrick Land', in Sight and Sound, Winter 1988/89. 
(5) Geoff Mayer, The Man in the White Suit, Guide to British Cinema
(6) David Edgerton, Science, technology and the British industrial decline
(7) Ibid 
(8) Philip Kemp, 'Mackendrick Land', in Sight and Sound, Winter 1988/89
(9) Monica Garrido, Alexander Mackendrick, Sense of Cinema, October 2003
(10) Philip Kemp, 'Mackendrick Land', in Sight and Sound, Winter 1988/89
About the transfer
This is overall rather lovely. Restored from a 2K scan of a fine grain inter-positive, the transfer is clean and sharp. There are very rare instances of dirt or white marks and some scratches are evident very intermittently. A smashing film-like grain is present and correct and fine detail can be seen in faces, clothes, props and sets. Contrast is nicely layered and is robust and pretty consistent throughout the film. This is certainly the best I've seen The Man in the White Suit and the improvements in contrast, detail and stability should please those wanting to revisit the film and enjoy it all over again. The mono sound is quite crisp and clear and reproduces Benjamin Frankel's wonderful score, the sound effects and dialogue with very few problems.

Special Features

Revisiting The Man in the White Suit(13:20)
Brief featurette in which Stephen Frears, Ian Christie and Richard Dacre discuss the themes of the film - how it presents British post-war attitudes to industry, science and progress, how it ushered in a new form of British comedy - and reflect on the work of director Alexander Mackendrick and Alec Guinness.
Stills gallery
Nine behind the scenes stills but unfortunately no publicity materials such as lobby cards, posters or promotional stills.
Restoration Comparison (5:02)
Split screen 'before' and 'after' sequence which presumably shows the film as scanned from the fine grain inter-positive in its raw state before repair, clean up and grading.
Trailer(2:40)
Unrestored UK trailer

The Man in the White Suit
Ealing Film Studios Production 1951
StudioCanal Blu Ray & DVD / Released 19 November 2012 / OPTBD2396 / Cert U / 85 minutes / Black and white
BD Specs: Region B / Feature Aspect Ratio: 1.37:1 / Feature Audio: DTS HD / PCM Mono 2.0 / Video Codec: AVC / 1080p / English Language
DVD Specs: Region 2 / Feature Aspect Ratio: 1.37:1 / Feature Audio: Mono 2.0 / English Language

By way of an explanation, the material about Jekyll (BBC 2007) I'm presenting here started life as research for a chapter I'd been asked to contribute to the forthcoming book The Eleventh Hour: A Critical Celebration of the Matt Smith and Steven Moffat Era, edited by Andrew O'Day and to be published by I.B.Tauris next year.

Andrew had asked me to include Steven Moffat's 2007 series Jekyll in my examination of Moffat's very recognisable signature in Doctor Who and with one thing and another I amassed a close reading of Jekyll that amounted to about 8,000 words on its own. The only problem? Not enough room to include much of that in a chapter that was predominantly about Doctor Who. In fact, I could have written an entire chapter, possibly even a book, about Jekyll by the time I'd finished. With the chapter finished, it struck me recently that it seemed a shame not to share the Jekyll material with a wider audience.

The following is a partly combined, rewritten and edited version of two drafts of the material. It does look at Jekyll in context with many of the recognisable motifs that can be found in the Steven Moffat era of Doctor Who and it also touches on many other themes and ideas that the six-part drama explored that were outside of the remit of my original chapter. This is quite a long article so I'm going to split it into three parts. I suggest you put the kettle on, make some tea and take your time. Part One today and Parts Two and Three in the next few days. Enjoy.

Notes on Steven Moffat's 'Jekyll'

Part One: 'The child is father of the man' - Mummy, Daddy, Jekyll and Hyde

Before his appointment as showrunner on Doctor Who (1963-89, 2005-) and the success of his and Mark Gatiss' modernist Gothic reinterpretation of Conan Doyle in Sherlock (2010-), writer Steven Moffat developed and expanded many of the themes in his episodes of Doctor Who between 2005 and 2008 with Jekyll (BBC/Hartswood/Stagescreen 2007). His ‘sequel’ to Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde interrogates a number of familiar motifs, including Gothic horror’s preoccupation with the doppelgänger and identity, dysfunctional family relationships, the manipulation of the body by science and technology and the structuring of narrative and specific mise-en-scène that continues to figure prominently in Moffat’s authorship of Doctor Who as head writer and producer.

Jekyll is a dark satire on the male struggle to achieve the work-life balance as well as a tragi-comedy about masculinity, men’s and women’s attitudes to each other, and their commitment to family structures. Six episodes explore Hyde’s emergence from the tragic figure of Tom Jackman (James Nesbitt), Moffat’s reinterpretation of Stevenson’s ‘hero’ Dr Henry Jekyll, and how ‘evil’, in the form of Jackman’s uncanny ‘other’ Hyde, is repressed, controlled and eventually assimilated within masculine subjectivity and by the connections to wife and family. Hyde is depicted as a necessary evil and, in similar fashion to Moffat’s depiction of the monstrous in Doctor Who, is seen as a by-product of the misguided and misunderstood intentions of his genesis, created out of abandonment, victimisation, loneliness or by sheer genetic accident.

The drama explores the constructions of family, marriage, fidelity and particularly the relationships between adult and child. Hyde’s emergence is not only marked by physical transformation, where black eyes, pointed chin, ears and altered hairline signify immediate visual difference, but by the escape of Jackman’s repressed sexuality, a change in nature that has forced Jackman to close down his emotional responses to his wife, Claire (Gina Bellman) which leave her erroneously suspecting extra-marital affairs as the root cause.

Yet, it is an affair that Jackman is having with his ‘other’, his ghost, and a struggle between ‘daddy’ Jackman and his ‘boy’ Hyde. This internal parent-child battle is also reflected in Jackman’s relationship with his wife and two sons, his dysfunctional life at home, the domestic sphere that he attempts to protect from this doppelgänger. In the first half of the series this is symbolised by the juxtaposition of the cosy, domestic spaces of the family’s house and garden with the monastic prison cell of Jackman’s anonymous flat, a confessional space on the borderland between repression and release where he manages his transformation, and the brothels and disused houses that Hyde frequents.

‘a child with the body and drives of a fully grown adult’

Emphasising Moffat’s oft-used trope of narratives focusing on abandoned children, Jackman’s origins describe him as a foundling left in a railway station – subtly echoing the fate of Wilde’s Ernest Worthing and his double life in The Importance of Being Earnest– and raised by foster parents.  Hyde, similarly, is a rejected child, precocious and unpredictable, but obsessed with his estranged parent. When Jackman meets private investigator Miranda Callender (Meera Syall), she categorises Hyde similarly to how the Doctor described Jamie, in Moffat’s 2005 Doctor Who episode ‘The Empty Child’, as a child with the power to tear down and rebuild the entire human race. Miranda recognises Hyde as ‘a child with the body and drives of a fully grown adult’, ‘brand new’ and as a miracle mistaken for a monster, reflecting Moffat’s idea that the monstrous is often misunderstood, is not necessarily evil in nature and is often a side effect of a character’s status as victim.

Jackman’s wedding ring is also symbolic and is one of many objects, including the dictation machine, the telephone and the key, that define the vicissitudes of his dual existence as Jackman and Hyde. An emblem of the Jackman/Hyde and Jackman/Claire marriages in the drama, the ring is sloughed on and off as part of the containment routine that Jackman and Hyde doggedly follow until Hyde discovers Jackman’s family and he inveigles himself into Jackman’s domestic life, posing as a relative of the family called Uncle Billy. Jackman keeps defining his subjectivity as parent and husband in opposition to Hyde. ‘He’s not married, I’m married’ is how he differentiates himself and throughout Jekyll’s six episodes this difference is symbolised either by the voluntary removal or the loss of his wedding ring every time his evil side appears.

Claire similarly defines Hyde in contrast to her husband, ‘He’s like you…only alive’, suggesting the repressed Jackman has become unheimlich, the living dead or undead, ‘unhoused’ from his true self. However, Hyde is also defined by violence, debauchery and immorality and through an uncanny mise-en-scène that sets the world off-kilter through strange angles, blurred images, the use of rapid, overcranked or slow motion footage and where, momentarily, there are glimpses of him as a bestial, fanged monster. As Moffat offers, Jekyll is a story about ‘A man trying to be civilised and decent within the confines of a normal civilised marriage who still has this dreadful male part of him kept under a slab and he has to get out and rave at times otherwise he’ll go mad.’ (1)

Jackman’s status as father is quantified via the dictation machine that acts as the two-way communication between Jackman and Hyde. During the first episode, having discovered that Jackman has a family about which he was unaware, Hyde refers to Jackman as ‘Daddy’ in an audio log on the Dictaphone. How they regard each other recalls Jamie’s relationship to Nancy as his ‘Mummy’ in ‘The Empty Child’/‘The Doctor Dances’. Hyde positions himself as the new head of the household, as the leader of the pack, as the alpha male in control of Jackman’s wife Claire, with, ‘Do you know about lions, Daddy? Do you know what lionesses do when there’s a new head of the family?’ Jackman responds to this provocation by demanding ‘They’re not your family’ and attempting to re-authenticate his own patriarchal status. 

Later, from Claire’s perspective, this horrific secret is eclipsed by comedy. Claire is rather affronted to discover, out of all the characters in the series, she is the only one unaware of Jackman’s situation when she finds herself a prisoner of Klein and Utterson, the corporation with a long-term interest in Hyde's appearance. ‘No one think it was worth telling me I married a werewolf’ she snaps, indignant that a man’s prerogative not to tell women everything should also prevent him from admitting ‘I’m Dracula!’ This relationship between the female and the Gothic, although played as broad comedy in the scene where Claire is made aware of her husband’s condition, foreshadows Jekyll’s eventual return to the 19th century where Claire’s relationship with Jekyll and Hyde, and her own categorisation as ‘other’, acquires a more sinister and significant dimension.

Throughout the first three episodes of Jekyll, Moffat layers in many clues about the perilous state that Jackman maintains and the gradual incursion and domination of Hyde. The transformations become unpredictable and Katherine Reimer (Michelle Ryan), the psychiatric nurse that Jackman hires to manage his dual nature, begins to question the man’s identity during one scene where he wakes in the night and calls for her. ‘I woke up during one of his dreams,’ Jackman says, suggesting that there is now a blurring of boundaries between human and monster. As she checks the bolts on her bedroom door, a cut to Jackman/Hyde’s point of view outside her room clearly indicates that it is Hyde outside her door and he has successfully acquired the power to mimic Jackman, attempting to fool her into letting him in. One morning she also momentarily sees Hyde standing there after Jackman has turned and left the room.

When Benjamin Lennox (Paterson Joseph), Klein and Utterson’s henchman, uses Jackman’s child to trap Hyde as part of a plan he and his associates have been waiting 100 years to set in motion, a marriage, rather than a separation, between ego and id is indicated. It is the first collaboration between Jackman and Hyde that Moffat uses to hint at the importance of the symbiotic relationship between them. Small clues herald the dominance and power of Hyde before the climactic encounter with Lennox at the zoo. Jackman drives to his home to pick up his children and take them to the zoo and we see a shot where both he and Hyde are in the car as the two boys run towards him. Their cries of ‘Daddy’ turn to cries of ‘Uncle Billy’ and one of the boys, on finding that Jackman is alone in the car, claims to have seen Hyde’s Uncle Billy sitting next to his father in the car. Stopping at a café, Jackman again shifts into Hyde while admonishing his son Eddie to wipe his running nose. Jackman is unaware that he has shouted at the now traumatised child. As in the Stevenson novel, the distinctions between Jackman and Hyde are breaking down and Hyde is in the ascendancy. That ascendancy is also connected to the breakdown of relations between Jackman, his wife and children.

Katherine rings Jackman at the zoo and warns him that Hyde is awake and is ‘In your head right now.’ She recalls the recent moments when Hyde has emerged – in the car, in the café – and she tries to rationalise these encounters with Jackman. However, Katherine’s call is simply a manifestation of Hyde, another of his ghostly appearances and an example of his ability to inhabit those close to Jackman. Only he would know what happened in the car and at the café and like Jamie’s disembodied voice using the phones, the tape machines and the typewriter in ‘The Empty Child’ and the data ghosts of ‘Silence in the Library’, Hyde haunts his alter ego and projects himself into Jackman’s unconnected phone. He taunts Jackman, his voice descending in register until he whispers, ‘Daddy!’ Jackman throws away the phone and confirms ‘I’ve just taken a call from my own id!’

Jackman discovers that Hyde is hyper-sensitive to his own physical and mental state and can pull images from Jackman’s memory, blurring present and past, to unveil the threat from Lennox’s henchmen as they close in on him and his son Eddie at the zoo. In a neat visual parallel, Jackman argues with Hyde about the distinction between what is real and what is construed as fantasy only for Hyde to indicate he has ceased his ransacking of memory and for Jackman to turn and reveal that, out of focus in the background, Eddie is standing in the lion enclosure. Jackman becomes Hyde, the alpha male pack leader strong enough to challenge the male lion for supremacy over the pride. Accompanied by his singing of ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’, a song perhaps symbolic of the sleeping animal that lives within Jackman, Hyde invites Lennox and his men to confront him and he rescues Eddie.

'... a sort of ridiculous, metaphorical fable of masculinity.’

The dual nature of the man, one man talking to his own id, is expressed again in the scene where Jackman/Hyde attempts to extract information from Christopher (Al Ashton), one of Lennox’s security men who like Lennox and, later, Colonel Hart (Malcolm Storry) and the mercenary Carver (Julian Lewis Jones), are all symbols of pure masculinity ranged against Hyde. In a dingy, candlelit derelict room Jackman warns Christopher of his unstable nature: ‘Don’t annoy me. That’s not a good way to go. You’ve heard of good cop, bad cop? This is the movie.’ He points to himself, underlining the fact that his dual nature has become unstable and now merged. During another supernatural phone call, where Hyde projects himself into a phone without a connection, Jackman reasons with his other self. Hyde suggests that he kills Christopher to send a message back to Lennox. When Jackman deliberates, Hyde warns him that his children will die. ‘You don’t care about my children’ rages Jackman. The image of the child devouring monster so prevalent in Moffat’s Doctor Who emerges here, ‘I love children, me. Snack-sized people. Always leave you wanting more’. But it is also a trope that Moffat subverts because as we discover later, Hyde matures enough to understand that he must protect Jackman’s family.

Later, Jackman feels remorse about Hyde’s violent attack on Christopher and returns to the hospital where Hyde abandoned his victim, unaware that Katherine, Lennox and a woman who appears to be Jackman’s mother Sophia are waiting for him. Sophia Jackman (Linda Marlowe) reveals that she was the one who left him in the railway station forty years ago and refers to Jackman and Hyde as ‘both my boys’, just as Amy similarly refers to both the Doctor and Rory in Moffat’s tenure on Doctor Who. She tells Jackman that Hyde is his ‘brother’, a sibling who ‘reduces you piece by piece, all the easy options. He’s evil, that’s what evil does.’ Mrs Jackman also confirms that Hyde is a creature who will drain the life from Jackman, he will ‘get stronger, you’ll get weaker. It’s always the same, every Jekyll, every Hyde.’ This reinforces Moffat’s exploration of masculinity as a form of sadistic relationship with the self, between Jackman and Hyde, and told as ‘A particularly masculine sort of story… a sort of ridiculous, metaphorical fable of masculinity.’ (2)

The significant relationships between children and their parents, between a husband and wife, and the binaries of male and female become very skewed in one of the more disturbing sequences in Jekyll. Jackman, suffering from lack of sleep after attempting to keep Hyde at bay, phones his wife from a train, fearing for the lives of his children and implores her not to tell him where his boys are, believing that the emerging Hyde will attempt to kill them. As he falls asleep, the train carriage becomes an uncanny space, the mise-en-scène is dominated by lights flickering on and off, images becoming abstract and blurred and the carriage is briefly transformed into the cell containing the restraining chair in Jackman’s flat.

Claire appears, as if in a dream, enticing Jackman to sleep and drift away but Jackman realises that Claire is actually Hyde attempting to trick him. His demonic presence is projected onto the figure of Claire as she admits, ‘Of course, it’s me Daddy! Who else lives inside your head?’ Claire and Hyde become a single entity attempting to seduce him and subvert Jackman’s grasp on reality. ‘Let me dream for you. I know what you want. I know what you like’ she/he offers, with Hyde adding a suggestion that he has explicit, voyeuristic knowledge of Jackman’s desires. ‘Sleep, Daddy. Sleep with me,’ implores this sexually ambiguous figure, content to explore a dream-like Oedipal, incestuous and narcissistic form of marriage.

Jackman challenges Hyde to look inside his head to understand how he feels, how much he misses Claire and reasserts himself when Hyde, only driven by lust, fails to understand the nature of Jackman’s feelings for Claire and the concept of idealised, pure love and the emotions that he associates with it. Hyde is again categorised as an immature child, the untempered male hiding inside Jackman, unable to fathom complex emotions and moralities and who shrivels away when Jackman informs him that the adult world is ‘Nothing you’re ready for, stupid child’. However, just as Moffat exposes Jackman’s bond with his wife and family, giving him power over Hyde, he also foreshadows the journey that Hyde undertakes to avow his uncanny nature in the last third of the drama, using the familiar Moffat motif of the child acquiring the maturity to better understand the adult world. Hyde’s increasing closeness to Jackman’s family, his growing desire to protect them, is also Hyde’s weakness in juxtaposition to Jackman’s strength.

Jackman gradually begins to understand that there was a real Dr Jekyll. He is in some way related to the Jekyll that Miranda presented to him, a Jekyll who experimented on himself and whom he bears an uncanny similarity to. He sets out to confront his friend and boss Peter Syme (Denis Lawson), who is revealed to be Jackman’s minder, hired by Jackman’s employers Klein and Utterson to monitor the emergence of Hyde. After Syme is attacked by Hyde and is thrown into a cellar, Jackman’s wife Claire comes out of hiding and witnesses his transformation from Jackman into Hyde. Syme confirms that Jackman, Hyde and the Uncle Billy figure that visited her children are the doubling identities of the same person.

Hyde tells her that he is not her husband, about the schedule he and Jackman have arranged and that recently Jackman has repressed him and kept him contained, frightened that Hyde would revisit his home and kill his children. This marital debate between Hyde and Claire, which heightens her fears and apprehensions about Jackman’s identity, offers another example of Jekyll’s use of the female Gothic to describe Claire’s situation, a text perhaps seen as typically featuring ‘a female protagonist caught up in a matrix of domestic paranoia, trapped within a decaying home by a suspicious and/or murderous husband’. (3)

Hyde’s desire to be a ‘superman’ demands of him an emotional maturity that can only be found in the bond with a wife and children that Jackman prizes above all else. Hyde’s dilemma is initially expressed in the return to 1886 when contemporary Hyde meets his ancestor, Dr Jekyll's id, and is informed that Claire and her doppelgänger, Jekyll’s maid Alice Cameron, are the key to understanding the appearance of Hyde. The last third of Jekyll explores Hyde’s decision to cease being a child and accept that, as half of one man, Jackman is essential to his maturity. This need is illustrated in a stand off between Hyde, now ‘divorced’ from Jackman, and the woman who has been leading the attempt to capture him, Ms Utterson (Linda Marlowe). She calls his bluff when he threatens to kill himself to save his family and concludes that Hyde is ‘Too afraid of dying, like all children. You’re just a child Mr Hyde. We took the man in you away.’

This precipitates a plaintive search by Hyde, questioning why he has failed to be the superman that he was supposed to be. He appeals to ‘father’ Jackman, just as a child would turn to a parent, ‘I’m supposed to be dangerous. Why am I not a superman? Are you listening to me, Daddy? I’m supposed to be Superman!’ This admission locates Jekyll and its interpretation of Hyde as monster within an analysis of superheroes and their dual identities. Greg M. Smith relates the secret identities of superheroes like Superman and the Hulk to Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde where ‘the classic secret identity holds out the fantasy that we can switch between the two, like Jekyll and Hyde, potentially making monsters of us all. Stevenson emphasizes… that there is not such a radical disjunction between two personas as it might appear on the surface, that Hyde’s animalism and Jekyll’s rationalism are linked.’ (4)

The only way Hyde can integrate the two is to acknowledge the controlling influence of Jackman, the human to his beast, and as Marina Warner offers, ‘within today’s myths of human nature, the warrior and the wild creature, the child and the beast, don’t stand at opposite ends but are intertwined, continuous, inseparable.’ (5)  Moffat also acknowledges the fairy tale connotations of Beauty and the Beast in Jekyll with the relational flux between Claire, Hyde and Jackman. It is worth noting that Warner also sees the tale as one about the ‘female erotic pleasures of matching and mastering a man who is dark and hairy, rough and wild’. (6)Jekyll not only proposes that masculinity requires both the monster and the man in order to function properly but that the emotional and erotic powers of female figures such as Claire, Alice, Sophia Jackman and Ms Utterson are also integral to this function.

Jekyll proposes that the two halves of the male psyche can be balanced and integrated, where the individual can be completed and repression managed. This successful individuation is seen by Christopher Hauke as ‘the dual struggle of the subject with, on the one hand, the ‘inner world’ of the unconscious, with all its infantile, personal and collective aspects, and, on the other hand, the struggle with the ‘outer world’ of the collective society.’ (7) The message Jackman/Hyde asks his traitorous friend Peter Syme to send to those who have kidnapped his wife and sons symbolises the child-father individuation that Hauke describes, ‘Three words. We are coming. Send it. Sign it… Jekyll… and Hyde.’

Later, this newly negotiated hybridity is manifested, as per Moffat's usual motifs, in Hyde’s ability to make supernatural use of technology to send messages that possess the computers and mobile phones of Syme and his Klein and Utterson colleagues. Hyde’s warning of ‘Run if you want to live’ appears everywhere as his supernature invades their consciousness, ‘transmitting, bleeding into everything’. The final episode of Jekyll underlines this again when the title sequence shows the Jekyll logo flash and transform into a Hyde logo. These dual states and messages repeat a similar motif of uncovering and revealing half-concealed, repressed truths that weave throughout Moffat’s Doctor Who.

© 2012 Frank Collins. You must seek the permission of the author to reproduce any of the material in this article. 

(1) Steven Moffat interviewed for ‘A Tale Retold’ documentary on Jekyll DVD (Contender 2007)
(2) Ibid
(3) Wheatley, Helen, Gothic Television (Manchester University Press, 2006)
(4) Smith, Greg, M., ‘The Superhero as Labor: The Corporate Secret Identity’ in Angela Ndalianis (ed), The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero (Taylor & Francis, 2008)
(5) Warner, Marina, Managing Monsters (Random House, 2010)
(6) Warner, Marina, From the Beast to the Blonde (Random House, 1995)
(7) Hauke, Christopher, Jung and the Postmodern: The Interpretation of Realities (Routledge, 2000)

And here's Part Two of my research notes on Steven Moffat's 2007 drama Jekyll.

The following is a partly combined, rewritten and edited version of two drafts of the material. It does look at Jekyll in context with many of the recognisable motifs that can be found in the Steven Moffat era of Doctor Who and it also touches on many other themes and ideas that the six-part drama explored that were outside of the remit of my original chapter.

This is quite a long article so I've split it into three parts. I suggest you put the kettle on again, make some tea and take your time. The first part is here. Where the first part looked at the relationship between the 'Jekyll' figure of Tom Jackman and his alter-ego Hyde, this second instalment looks at the female characters and how the series evoked the female Gothic within the parallel narratives featuring Tom's wife Claire and her duplicate Alice Cameron.

Part Three in the next few days. Enjoy.

Notes on Steven Moffat's 'Jekyll'

Part Two: ‘the only woman in a hundred years that Dr Jekyll has ever loved’ 

Jekyll is not just content to explore the strengths and weaknesses of masculinity. Stevenson’s novel is often seen as a very masculine text and ‘a story about communities of men’ [where] ‘the romance of Jekyll and Hyde is instead conveyed through men’s names, men’s bodies, and men’s psyches’. (8) Moffat sets out to subvert this by referencing specific female Gothic texts to underpin how Stevenson’s text was later adapted to include female characters.

Jackman’s wife Claire and Jekyll’s maid Alice, both played by Gina Bellman, are doubles of the Jekyll and Hyde characters, both played by James Nesbitt. Claire is also inextricably linked to Hyde’s emergence because she is a descendant of Alice, reinforcing the domestic relationships in Moffat’s story. They and other male and female characters, such as Syme, Jackman’s sons, Katherine, Miranda, Min and Mrs Jackman, are adaptive inclusions that fulfill what Brian Rose sees as the effects of adapting the novel for stage and screen.

Rose notes that 'the central motif of the story was augmented with the presence of a female character and her familial connections; they collectively allow it to serve as a site for anxieties relating to domestic issues’. (9) In this way, Jekyll emulates the kind of changes included in adaptations as varied as Mamoulian’s 1931 film, the Spencer Tracey remake of 1941, Hammer’s The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll (1960) and Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971), Amicus’s more faithful I, Monster (1971) and the various stage and musical versions that have regularly emerged.

Katherine, Miranda and Min (Michelle Ryan, Meera Syal and Fenella Woolgar) are also examples of female Gothic noir, three characters that typically address the construction of the heroine and the link with Gothic settings and female sexuality. Miranda and Min are a couple who run a private investigation agency and they provide one of the most stable relationships in the drama. The female detective or investigator is also another recurring motif in Moffat’s work on Doctor Who, from the characters of Sally Sparrow and Kathy Nightingale in ‘Blink’ to the metamorphosis of River Song into the pulp noir figure of Melody Malone featured in ‘The Angels Take Manhattan’.

Miranda Callender is hired by Jackman's wife Claire to find out why Jackman has rejected her and his domestic idyll. After discovering that Miranda has been conducting photographic surveillance of him, Jackman comes face to face with her in the characteristic noir setting of her office with its low-key lighting and blinds obscuring the window. During and after an unpleasant encounter with Hyde, Miranda becomes a central expositional figure, often revealing more information about Jackman’s connection to the real Dr Jekyll, Klein and Utterson’s actual motivation in attempting to capture Hyde and how Alice’s identity and relationship with Jekyll was concealed.

Katherine Reimer is a psychiatric nurse hired by Jackman to help him control Hyde’s influence on his private life but it is also revealed that Jackman’s mother Sophie has employed her to unlock some of the secrets about Jackman’s origins. One evening, after drugging Jackman, she searches the flat for evidence, taking on the role of feminine Gothic protagonist searching for identifying clues within the darkened passageways of the flat, a space of containment that resembles the Gothic space of a cell or dungeon.

As she uncovers secrets about Jackman and Hyde, found in a locked box containing a letter from his ‘mother’ about his past, Jackman turns into Hyde. The flat becomes a haunted space in which Hyde stalks her, prevents her from restoring the lights and surveillance cameras and hijacks a phone call to her client. As previously noted, like many of Moffat’s monsters he is able to project himself into devices and conversations and he terrorises her through his voice on the phone.

‘I’ll eat you’ he demands and Hyde operates as the supernatural monster in juxtaposition to his human victim, a woman who is gradually denuded of her confidence and strength, momentarily taking on the symbolic role of ‘the final girl’, a horror film trope that reduces her to a female victim chased, cornered and potentially wounded or devoured.

He teases her on the phone with more singsong rhymes. ‘She’s running, she’s crying / she’s turned out the lights, she’s dying’ is another variant on some of the rhymes and songs found in many episodes of Doctor Who in the Moffat era and their equivalents here that emphasise the child-like nature of Hyde. Hyde demonstrates more supernatural abilities in the corner of the eye removal of the fuses and all the keys and to suddenly confront her outside the flat when she finally unlocks the front door to escape. His triumphant roar of ‘Come to Daddy!’ not only reiterates Hyde as a malign father figure but also taps into a number of metaphors in Gothic texts that ‘foreground the direct links between psychosexual development, patriarchal family dynamics… heirs and kinship ties’. (10)

These underline Jackman/Hyde in the role of demonic father as Katherine searches for evidence of his legitimacy on behalf of his ‘mother’ within an understated context of sexual attraction between Jackman and Katherine, Hyde and Claire. The chase through the flat is visually presented in a blur of abstract, out of focus, slow motion shots and Katherine is left cowering in the flat offering to tell Hyde who sent her as long as he spares her and turns the lights and cameras back on. The emphasis is again on the psychological power of light and dark.

‘It’s you… it’s all about you’ 

Claire is a major character in Moffat’s reinterpretation of the Stevenson story, one that he sees as ‘A metaphor for repressed Victorian sexuality [but] not as relevant or as poignant as applying the metaphor to modern people, to a modern man.’ It could be argued that he makes Claire and her Victorian doppelgänger Alice the metaphorical turning point of the narrative during the fifth episode. In the episode’s return to the 1886 roots of Stevenson’s novel, Hyde’s ability to sift Jackman’s memories uncovers the truth behind Stevenson’s fiction.

Her connection with Stevenson’s book is made explicit by Miranda’s explanation for Jackman’s affliction during their incarceration at Klein and Utterson. Claire questions the series’ own relationship with horror fiction at this point. ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde? Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was a story,’ she demands, unable to accept that the boundaries between her reality and what is regarded as horror fiction have become so blurred. Miranda assures her that Jekyll was real and that she is indeed ‘Mrs Jekyll and Hyde’.

Hyde, like Utterson in the novel, tracks Jekyll through the London fog and observes him visiting his maid Alice Cameron in her lodgings and learns that it is not a potion that causes Hyde to emerge but Alice’s presence. Alice triggers the emergence of Hyde, and it is accompanied by familiar motifs - the guttering and dying of the gas lamps and the reuse of slow motion and a distorted music box theme on the soundtrack. Upon this revelation, images of Claire and Alice are juxtaposed, overlaid as doubles of each other, to emphasise this idea and Hyde confronts Claire in the present and tells her she is back in 1886 with Jekyll.

‘It’s you… it’s all about you’ he confirms, in a similar way that the Doctor will suddenly turn to Amy at the conclusion of ‘Flesh and Stone’ and, saying exactly the same line, understand Amy’s central significance in Moffat's major Doctor Who story arcs, including her link to the explosion that creates the cracks in the universe and the exploration of her role as River’s mother.

Claire and Alice are two figures who influence and manage their respective versions of Hyde. The Hyde of 1886 expresses how Jekyll’s love for Alice and of Jackman’s for Claire is ‘the one thing that keeps him here and keeps you weak. Look at her. You will always be weak with her in the world.’ This reflects the monster’s need to exist outside the emotional bond with his wife and children that Jackman prizes above all else while perhaps reinforcing the stereotypical view of the feminine as weak, physically and emotionally. The original Hyde suggests that if Alice, and by extension Claire, was dead then he would be free of this debilitating influence.

He moves to suffocate Alice with a pillow and Hyde wakes up in the present day, calling for Claire. The boundaries are blurred between reality, dream and memory as Claire also wakes abruptly and begins to enquire with Miranda during their incarceration at Klein and Utterson about photographs of Jekyll’s friends and members of his household. She finds a photograph of Alice but her face has been scratched out, and just as the fiction of Stevenson’s book is used to hoodwink those looking for the formula, the damaged images suggest that determined steps were taken to conceal Alice’s identity and relationship to Jekyll and Hyde, to remove her from the scene of the crime. Alice is a clue that has been hidden in plain sight by Moffat because all is not exactly as it seems.

The fifth episode concludes with Hyde in ascendancy and Jackman driven ‘down a deep dark hole’ inside the rampaging expression of his id. Claire is convinced that her husband is ‘still in there’ and the familial ties with her and their children will see his return. However, Hyde uses a rouse to test the emotional bond between Jackman, Hyde and Claire and to allow Claire and the two children to escape from Klein and Utterson’s facility with Hyde’s help, using Jackman’s knowledge of the institute.

As the original Hyde noted in 1886, Claire is the one person who makes him weak, makes him susceptible to the emotional life that Jackman cherishes, makes him care and protect Claire and the children. To convince them of his fidelity, he appeals to the two boys and asks them to look into their hearts and recognise that their father is Hyde, that he is an aspect of Jackman they recognise. As Moffat notes, Hyde is ‘an explosion of repression… [but] he’s kind of forced to grow up and choose which side he’s on’ and this also applies to Claire in some respects because she has to understand that Hyde is that repressed core of her husband. (11)

In the final episode, Claire and Jackman’s sons are taken to a country house, referred to as Klein and Utterson Mark One and suggesting that the institution itself is an architectural duality. While her two sons are placed in the same stabilising chambers that were used by the institute to remove Jackman from Hyde, Claire is sedated and she plunges into a Gothic nightmare where dark tunnels merge with the foggy streets of London in 1886. She sees a vision of herself as Dr. Jekyll’s maid, Alice and hears Jekyll reassuring her ‘It’s all right, it’s me. Don’t be afraid. He’s gone. Do you hear me Alice?’

Here the narrative switches from Moffat’s intended exploration of masculinity, what could be referred to as the Male Gothic where female subjectivity is repressed and subverted in favour of the patriarchal symbolism of fathers and sons, to one that embraces the Female Gothic, where Claire, Jackman’s mother Sophie and Ms Utterson are expressions outside of the patriarchy of Jackman, Jekyll, Hyde and Syme. We shift from a ‘father’s story’ to a ‘mother’s story’ as Claire wakes to find one of the ‘other’ mothers in the story, in the form of Sophia Jackman, introducing herself.

‘Hyde is love. And love is a psychopath’

Sophia Jackman is one of the many ghosts in the story, a woman who died 15 years ago, yet has reappeared, seemingly alive, who has not aged and can magically escape the security of the Klein and Utterson institute. Again, Jekyll concerns itself with the deceptiveness of appearances, of things not being what they seem to be in the normal world. She is ready to reveal the secrets at the heart of Klein and Utterson, the Gothic ‘family secrets and the immediate past of its transgressive protagonists’ that David Punter and Glennis Byron see as a symptom of the Gothic space. The period trappings of the Utterson mansion, the house as ‘a site of domesticity [and] a place of incarceration, a place where heroines and others can be locked away from the fickle memory of “ordinary life”’ are the site where the secrets of Jackman’s origins are ‘buried deep below this building’ and can be recovered by Claire according to Mrs Jackman. (12)

Escaping from her bedroom, Claire finds her way to the ground floor, into the dark, dripping tunnels of the basement where these secrets are kept in a replay of her dream when she was sedated. She finds a makeshift ward, another of Moffat’s visual symbols previously seen in ‘The Empty Child’ and ‘Blink’ and that will be used again in ‘The Eleventh Hour’. Here, several Jackman/Hyde doppelgängers or ghosts are kept confined. According to Sophie Jackman, these are the monsters created by Klein and Utterson after its many failed attempts to clone Jekyll.

This manipulation of Jekyll through capitalist technological means also references Moffat’s fascination with the way the human body can be changed or preserved by science, the way bodies can be reproduced or altered by strange or scientific methods beyond the traditional mother/father parental binary. This is a continuation of themes found in ‘The Empty Child’, ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’ and ‘Silence in the Library’ and, later, that will find an even greater affinity with the theme of the doppelgänger in ‘The Almost People’ and ‘The Rebel Flesh.’

Jackman is interpreted not as a clone but as an illegitimate descendant of the original Hyde, as ‘the only perfect throwback, a chance in a million, a perfect genetic duplicate, generations later.’ This merging of sexuality, illegitimacy and the monstrous, all of them Gothic tropes, is conflated here with the ‘creation’ of Jackman’s partial and contradictory identity as Hyde, as a hybrid of nature and culture. Hyde is characterised as the devil, just as Jekyll described Hyde as ‘my devil’ in the original novel, and yet as Mrs Jackman explains, he is not representative of rage, greed or lust but simply the impulse to protect his own at the expense of others.

She claims, ‘Hyde is love. And love is a psychopath.’ In this way then Hyde fulfills the function of the Gothic hero-villain, a being who, in Stevenson’s novel, ‘renders Jekyll unheimlich’ and ‘“unhoused” as Hyde ultimately assumes total control of Jekyll’s house and laboratory’ and here unhouses the corporate culture of Lennox, Syme and the employees of Klein and Utterson in order to preserve Jackman’s family. (13)

The major revelation at this stage in the narrative, and the climax to one of Moffat’s signature uses of misdirection, is that Claire is the clone of Alice, a literal doppelgänger rather than a symbolic, ghostly one, grown from the cells of Alice Cameron: ‘To summon Hyde you need Alice Cameron. They needed to bring back the only woman in a hundred years that Dr Jekyll has ever loved.’ This displaces the masculine subtext of the original relationship between Jackman and Hyde and positions Claire and Alice as the agency for the return of the repressed nature of Hyde, albeit one which still maintains the stereotype of the victim.

It is female sexuality or ‘love’ that releases Hyde’s long dormant desires according to Jekyll and this mirrors the addition of female characters to the many adaptations of Stevenson’s novel and the idea that Jekyll’s repression is not just purely driven by lust but also by a compulsion to love. The focus shifts to Claire as the orphaned child, fostered out to parents that were chosen for her and, like Jackman’s abandonment at a railway station, she becomes an expression of ‘the extraordinary power and pervasiveness of the family as an organizing structure in Gothic’ and ‘where published stories about bizarre and disturbing family behaviour may serve to displace anxieties generated by a world that is changing in the most unsettling ways’. (14)  These anxieties are symbolised by the confrontations between Hyde, Syme and Utterson as they battle to control him through the incarceration of Jackman’s children and wife, to control the construction and function of the family.

Hyde’s supernatural physiology allows him to survive the final confrontation between Utterson and her armed guards as he sacrifices himself to rescue the two children after she threatens to cut the power to their life support caskets. The notion of the family at the centre of the narrative, the roles of parents, the nature of repression and sexuality, of monstrosity and evil is all part of the Gothic’s ‘reformulation, a recasting of the rules, a reimagining of the self-in-the-world’ and in Jekyll the supernatural nature of Hyde is hereditary as a result of the female rather than the male hero-villain. (15) 

This organising structure extends to the hint in the final scenes that Jackman’s two sons are also Jekyll and Hyde descendants and in a flash-forward encounter between Jackman and his mother, which reveals that Sophie Jackman is Ms Utterson, a female expression of the Jekyll and Hyde duality. She is the origin of Jackman’s curse and the final shot of Jekyll is of Jackman recoiling abjectly from Utterson, his real mother, as she transforms into a monstrous, fanged creature and demands a ‘kiss for mommy’.

© 2012 Frank Collins. You must seek the permission of the author to reproduce any of the material in this article. 

(8) Showalter, Elaine, Sexual anarchy: gender and culture at the fin de siècle (Penguin, 1991)
(9) Rose, Brian, A., Jekyll and Hyde Adapted: Dramatizations of Cultural Anxiety (Greenwood Press, 1996)
(10) Brinks, Ellen, Gothic Masculinity: Effeminacy and the Supernatural in English and German Romanticism (Bucknell University Press, 2003)
(11) Steven Moffat interviewed for 'A Tale Retold' documentary on Jekyll DVD (Contender 2007)
(12) Punter, David and Byron Glennis, The Gothic, (Wiley-Blackwell 2004)
(13) Davison, Carol Margaret, ‘A Battle of Wills: Solving The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ in Allan Hepburn (ed), Troubled Legacies: Narrative and Inheritance (University of Toronto Press, 2007)
(14) Williams, Anne, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (University of Chicago Press, 1995)
(15) Ibid

And here's Part Three of my research notes on Steven Moffat's 2007 drama Jekyll.

These are the last notes combined, rewritten and edited from two drafts of the material. This final part features many of the recognisable motifs that can be found in the Steven Moffat era of Doctor Who and it specifically looks at narrative structure and the use of memory and flashback in Jekyll. 

I suggest you put the kettle on again, make some tea and take your time. The first part is here and the second part is here. The first part looked at the relationship between the 'Jekyll' figure of Tom Jackman and his alter-ego Hyde and the second instalment looked at the female characters and how the series evoked the female Gothic within the parallel narratives featuring Tom's wife Claire and her duplicate Alice Cameron.

The notes were part of the research for a chapter I was writing on Moffat's Doctor Who but Jekyll is only used briefly in the finished piece. You'll be able to read my contribution to the forthcoming book The Eleventh Hour: A Critical Celebration of the Matt Smith and Steven Moffat Era, edited by Andrew O'Day, when it's published by I.B.Tauris next year.Many thanks to Andrew for supporting my idea to make the approximately 9,000 words on Jekyll available.


Notes on Steven Moffat's 'Jekyll'

Part Three: 'I’ve got digital rewind. It’s like Sky Plus in here!’ - Memory, structure and narrative expectation

Jekyll reveals more of the familiar imagery and sounds that often form Moffat’s recognisable palette as a writer. Specific mise-en-scène, objects, songs and rhymes accumulate as markers of subjectivity. These are placed within a narrative that increasingly encompasses Moffat’s predilection for merging of prolepsis and analepsis, integrating this style with the Gothic of Stevenson’s original novel and to track the central character's disintegration of subjectivity, examining Jackman and Hyde as representations of contemporary anxieties surrounding notions of masculinity.

Dani Cavallaro sees our collective anxieties and fears particularly represented in Gothic texts because ‘fragmented and disunified stories reflect the monstrous and spectral forms which cultures ideate in order to express their unease in the face of an unquantifiable Other’. (1) As a result, Moffat loops and reverses aspects of the narrative, often to misdirect audience expectations, within an organic, superfluid text that allows for a multiplicity of representations, a disordering of plot components and the collaging of styles and genres.

These fragments include a barrage of familiar Moffat devices. For example, Hyde’s emergence is always signaled with big close ups of Jackman’s eye turning black, a representation of the symbolic ‘evil eye’ and of the writer’s fascination with the unnatural seen in the corner of the eye, exposed through the simple act of looking or blinking. His presence as the uncanny child in the story is often defined through play, games and songs. His joy in amoral play, including the recurring ‘lion’ motif as a symbol of dominating masculinity, defines threat and violence as well as his immaturity. 

Moffat marries together a number of symbols and texts that are associated with childhood, particularly with the child’s development of socialisation skills or where the fantastical is connected to the liberation from repression. Hyde refers to Katherine Reimer, the psychiatric nurse hired to take care of Jackman, when she introduces herself as his new nanny, as ‘Oh, Mary Poppins, I love Mary Poppins! I could eat Mary Poppins!’ and chastises Jackman’s fatherly instruction via Dicataphone as ‘It’s raining, it’s pouring. Jackman is boring’. Most significantly, Hyde’s presence acquires its own musical meme, in the form of the nursery rhyme ‘Boys and Girls Come Out To Play’, a meme that usually denotes his emerging monstrosity and impending violent behaviour.

Much of this is tied into how Moffat treats the structure of narrative. While the first three parts of Jekyll are predominantly linear storytelling, the final half of the drama is structured around both flashes forward and back, the construction of memory and the production and manipulation of television imagery. In the third, fourth and fifth instalments of Jekyll, the narrative structure develops into a series of jumps into the immediate past that lead back to the present, covering the incidents of one day, recollective montages or memories buried deep in Jackman/Hyde's subconscious, and it integrates with the story’s examination of the modernist construction of self. The Gothic of Stevenson’s original novel reflects the fissures in subjectivity that Jekyll experiences, reflected here in the fluctuations between the identities of Jackman and Hyde.

In the third episode, the story flits from a country house, where we see a blood covered Jackman falling out of a tree, to a dingy room, where according to the on-screen caption some twelve hours earlier, Jackman is seen chained to a radiator and recovering from his last incarnation as Hyde. The fairy tale monster, Moffat’s oft mentioned child-eating horror, is invoked again when we see the lights outside a seaside boarding house flickering on and off, the familiar signal that the ordinary world is being affected by Hyde’s presence. Jackman reads a message daubed in blood on a wall,  where Hyde warns him, ‘when you sleep, I will eat your children’. Again, we have a visual repetition of warning messages Sally Sparrow found under the wallpaper in ‘Blink’ or that Amy and Canton found at Graystark Hall in ‘Day of the Moon’.

The twelve hours between Jackman leaving the boarding house and falling out of a tree in the grounds of Klein and Utterson’s mansion recall his journey by train as Lennox attempts to capture him and his fateful encounter with Syme and Claire at the mansion. The emergence of Hyde, and Jackman’s struggle to contain him, continues to be signalled by the flicker, fizz and pop of the electric lighting around him. This is marked in a scene at the train station, where a young boy wakes Hyde as Jackman is dosing in the waiting room and it builds upon Moffat’s fascination with the child and the monster, the innocent confronting the horror of the adult world.

Jackman/Hyde is a creature half in and half out of the dark and this symbolism is extended later into the way light and dark dominates episodes of the 2012 series of Doctor Who. Moffat also uses this twelve-hour flashback to pose a question over whether Hyde has murdered either Syme or Claire or both. Only until the narrative reaches the aftermath of Jackman’s fall from the tree can the viewer piece the clues together and solve the mystery.

‘You’re down the rabbit hole now. Everything you think is wrong’

It is revealed in flashback that Jackman confronts both Syme and Claire at the mansion. During this Claire manages to knock Hyde out and chain him up in the cellar. Moffat’s misdirection about whom Jackman/Hyde murdered is conflated with the origin of a key that we see Jackman eventually handing to the police when the narrative flashes forward. The key becomes another motif of doubling, joining a parade of symbolic doppelgängers and objects, as Claire is seen to swallow the key to Hyde’s chains just as Syme was forced by Jackman to swallow the key to the cellar. Yet again this is another moment of misdirection as flashbacks tell the audience that Claire only feigned swallowing it.

As an object the key also gains metaphorical significance to the relationship between Jackman, Hyde and Claire. Hyde is revealed to Claire just as Syme’s duplicity is uncovered by Jackman and as the narrative takes the three characters to a point where the truth is unlocked, recognised and acknowledged. The key to the cellar and the key to Hyde’s chains are symbolic of the hidden secrets in Gothic novels, the locked rooms of Stevenson’s novel or the closed attic of an equally relevant Gothic text about identity, Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray, wherein Linda Dryden sees embodied, ‘the pain of growing up, of aging and of self-recognition’. (2)

Jackman’s own maturity and his own pain of self-recognition dominate the fourth instalment of Jekyll. This episode leaps back a full seven years and Moffat employs a familiar trope in his narrative structure by compressing time with several montage sequences to exploit a sense of tragic inevitability in the storytelling. A good example of this is how, in Doctor Who, he introduces the character of Melanie Pond in ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’ and fills in background details of her life with the young Amelia and Rory until her encounter with the Doctor dovetails her backstory with the weaponising of River Song.

Here, he puts together a narrative sequence that not only depicts Claire and Tom’s courtship, their love life and the birth of their twins but also uses this montage of past domestic bliss to suggest Jackman’s dangerous birthright. The initial emergence of Hyde is noted, both as Jackman observes his hairier arms in a bathroom mirror and their midwife questions them about the prevalence of twins in the family, foreshadowing that his boys are also the physical manifestation of his own dual nature that will form the conclusion of the story in the sixth episode.

The episode’s narrative constantly leaps back and forth as Jackman, now encased in the life support system after his arrest at the Klein and Utterson mansion, arrives at their institute in the present day just as Moffat begins to fill in details about Hyde's origins. Jackman’s emerging dual nature and changing physiology is seen in various montages as the episode flashes back to him starting work at Klein and Utterson after the birth of his children.

When he meets Syme at the institute, he begins something of a journey into a haunted labyrinth where Jackman’s life starts to acquires a series of uncanny twists. He briefly sees the ghostly silhouette of a woman observing him through a darkened two-way mirror and his thumbprint will not clear him at security. An on screen scan, shown only to the viewer, of Jackman’s two different thumbprints, suggests his physical duality is already known to Klein and Utterson. Syme even equates the secure areas of the institute with an underworld straight out of Lewis Carroll, where nothing is quite what Jackman expects it to be, as he tells him ‘You’re down the rabbit hole now. Everything you think is wrong’.

Moffat’s use of parallel repetition is shown when Syme repeats this observation to Claire as they enter the same building in the present day, describing it as a place where Jackman, the victim of Klein and Utterson’s life-long deception, only ‘thought he worked.’ In flashback, Jackman settles into work but there are uncanny knockings at his door and when he goes to answer it there is no one there. The flashbacks also underline the nature of the repression that becomes Jackman’s hallmark in his relationship with Claire as his PA quits after she construes his notes as sexual harassment because they state over and over: ‘I’m coming’. Hyde’s lasciviousness becomes evident as a double meaning to suggest a sexual climax and his own imminent emergence, haunting Jackman as he gains physical presence in the ordinary world.

All the familiar visual and aural signatures, the emblems of the uncanny that accompany Hyde’s presence, occur in a flashback that takes the narrative to a sea side resort where Jackman and Claire are away on holiday from the children. The resort setting is another parallel narrative space as this is the same resort to which present day Jackman retreats to spare his family any further harm from Hyde. An ice cream van plays ‘Boys and Girls Come Out to Play’ as Claire gossips on the phone to her friend that she can turn Jackman’s eyes jet black when they have sex. When a biker and his gang humiliate the pair, Hyde threatens to emerge and the tune from the ice cream van becomes distorted as Jackman tries to contain Hyde’s rage.

In the evening, Jackman watches the gang from his hotel window. He is assaulted by visual and aural hallucinations. The lights in the room flicker, he sees a non-existent dark figure pass behind him and he hears the sound of the ice cream van’s tune when the van is no longer present. He and Claire are served three glasses of wine. When he signs for the drinks he simply writes ‘I’m here’, suggesting that Hyde has finally arrived, and when the waiter comes to query this, he has disappeared out of the window. Jackman becomes Hyde and takes his revenge on the gang, cornering the leader in a tunnel as ‘Boys and Girls Come Out to Play’ whistles on the soundtrack. This flashback marks Hyde's proper emergence as a violent, feral creature.

Jackman wakes up under the pier at the seaside the following morning. In the sand is a message ‘I’m coming’ which, when Jackman moves out of shot, becomes ‘I’m coming back’ and is again the equivalent of the warning behind the wallpaper in ‘Blink’. He retreats to a toilet and washes his face. More uncanny images occur: a sink full of blood and a momentary vision of his doppelgänger standing next to him. When he looks at himself in the mirror, the shot is framed so that it seems there are two Jackmans again but he is just seeing himself in the looking glass and asking ‘Who are you? What are you?’ This emphasises, as Alec Charles suggests, that ‘Mr Hyde, like so many of Moffat’s monsters and heroes, lives an uncanny half-life: he is the knock on the door when no one is there, the shadow cast by nothing, the second reflection in the mirror.’ (3)

‘It is not a tale, it is a trap’

This is visually reproduced in a final, disturbing flashback when we see an estate agent showing Jackman through the dark, dilapidated empty flat that will eventually become his bolthole. He sees the room that will eventually become the cell with the restraining chair. The screen goes black and briefly we see the doors open on the room as it will eventually look, suggesting that Jackman is already picturing it that way, seeing its potential as a place of containment and withdrawal.

Jackman prepares to record the emergence of Hyde in the room. Recovering from his first controlled transformation in the flat, he wakes up and plays back the footage recorded of it on a television monitor. His own face stares out at him and like the previous mirror image, this scene both comments on the agency between viewer and screen explored in ‘Forest of the Dead’ and ‘Blink’, where respectively Cal watches parts of the episode on her television and Sally and Lawrence piece together a series of DVD easter eggs into a televisual conversation with the Doctor.

Again, Moffat offers a twist on the projection of consciousness through familiar objects seen in many of his Doctor Who episodes. Jackman meets Hyde, his doppelgänger, for the first time via a television screen and fear of his ‘other’ is expressed when Hyde, as a newly born creature threatens, ‘I’m coming to get you, daddy. I’m coming to eat you, daddy’ The fear of an evil child, a twin wishing to devour itself, is overwhelming enough for Jackman that he hallucinates Hyde bursting from the television set to throttle him. Again, Moffat merges several motifs in this scene: the monster that eats its victims; the child questioning its relationship to its parent; imagination taking on real form and fear of the ‘other’ reaching out of the television screen to haunt characters and audience alike.

Structure is not only determined by the fragmentary nature of the original Stevenson book, the fluctuating emergence and repression of Hyde told in flashback, but also by Moffat’s interest in televisual agency and how, in many Doctor Who stories, he has explored the manipulation of memory and consciousness. In the fifth episode Moffat returns to the Stevenson source by giving Hyde the supernatural ability to re-experience Jackman’s memory and the truth about his ancestral 'other', Henry Jekyll. Hyde can dip into these experiences randomly like the pages of a book, surfing television channels or using rewind and fast forward on recordings. He can play, stop and freeze frame memories, possess them, walk around in them and examine them in detail. ‘I’ve got rewind. I’ve got digital rewind. It’s like Sky Plus in here!’ he declares.
 
Moffat describes an alternate 1886 reality in which the real Dr Jekyll, played by actor James Nesbitt in a third role alongside those of Jackman and Hyde, meets Robert Louis Stevenson (Mark Gatiss), the author of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, but he also has the modern-day Hyde interpolate this sequence again after the television audience has seen it at the beginning of the episode, effectively rewriting the scene within the context of the episode itself.

The 1886 mise-en-scène can be read as classic Gothic Victoriana as the two men, in period costume and illuminated by the firelight, discuss the novel and the nature of its secrets, offering a meta-textual analysis of the original story, a moral allegory about public and private expressions of masculinity told in a circular rather than a linear structure, that has its roots in the detective genre and in Gothic and melodrama.

In the first version of this scene, Stevenson explains his concerns about the text to Jekyll, ‘It is has the appearance of a fiction but the substance of the facts’ and ‘is not in my normal style. There are those, a few, who might suspect its origins in truth.’ Stevenson suggests that the text of the novel will in itself inspire investigations into its origins and may inspire others to seek the potion that allegedly transforms Jekyll into Hyde, foreshadowing the one hundred year research undertaken by Klein and Utterson, the corporation desperate to use Hyde in the advance of science. Stevenson promises to keep the secret of the potion’s formula, of ‘Dr Jekyll’s last secret’, and that it will die with Jekyll.

Later, Hyde channel hops, like Cal did in ‘Forest of the Dead’, through Jackman’s memories and discovers ‘a costume drama’ which is the meeting between Stevenson and Jekyll in 1886 that the audience has already seen. Hyde observes in his child-like way, ‘It’s like Victorian times. And Daddy’s here. No, not daddy. Granddad. No, Great-Granddad. Great, great whatever…’ and Moffat also manages to have some fun at the expense of other adaptations of the story, with contemporary Hyde confirming that his other double is ‘Doctor Jekyll. The original. Doesn’t look a bit like Spencer Tracey.’ Another little detail is also provided by Syme who explains that Jekyll was originally pronounced by Stevenson, a native Scot, as ‘Jeekul’ thus intriguingly suggesting that ‘Jeekul’ is yet another double, another appearance in a gallery of male and female doppelgängers in the series.

The rewind function allows Hyde to eavesdrop on Stevenson and Jekyll, who are no longer in private, and to witness Stevenson writing down the formula that many have been looking for and passing it to Jekyll before it is thrown on the fire. Hyde uses his ability to rewind Jekyll/Jackman’s memory, to rewrite time, by pulling the discarded formula out of the fire. The secret at the heart of Moffat’s interpretation of Stevenson’s story is finally revealed as a big close up of the note declares, ‘there was no formula. It was the girl’.

Hyde uncovers the meaning of the note when Jekyll’s maid Alice is revealed to be a relative of Claire, Jackman’s wife. Hyde and Jekyll simultaneously recite ‘It is not a tale, it is a trap’, suggesting that the book is a smokescreen to divert any future attempts to resurrect Hyde, and in the present day Hyde informs Syme that the institute, in their attempts to replicate Jekyll’s formula, has been sent ‘on a wild goose-chase. With a bit of murder on the side’. In essence this is also what Moffat has achieved with the viewer in his customary use of mis-direction, red herrings and dislocated sub-plots in Jekyll.

Again, the use of prolepsis and analepsis and Hyde’s ability to engage and interject in memory offers a wry commentary on television viewers and agency, on the producing and experiencing of multiple viewpoint narratives in Jekyll that align with Stevenson’s own elusive and fragmented Gothic text where the subjective viewpoints are also in flux. The original is, like many Gothic texts, as Elaine Showalter remarks, ‘composed of fragments and fractions, told through a series of narratives that the reader must organise into a coherent case history’. (4) The audience watching Jekyll are asked to do the same just as they will continue to have a duty, with increasing frequency, to organise Moffat’s Doctor Who.

© 2012 Frank Collins. You must seek the permission of the author to reproduce any of the material in this article. 
 
(1) Cavallaro, Dani, The Gothic Vision: Three Centuries of Horror, Terror and Fear, (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2002)
(2) Dryden, Linda, The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)
(3) Charles, Alec ‘The Crack of Doom: the uncanny echoes of Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who’, Science Fiction Film and Television 4/1 (2011)
(4) Showalter, Elaine, ‘Dr Jekyll’s Closet,’ in Ken Gelder (ed), The Horror Reader (Psychology Press, 2000)

"When I was on the river I heard the strange babble of inhuman voices, didn't you, Romana?"

"Oh, probably undergraduates talking to each other, I expect. I'm trying to have it banned."

Shada, the untransmitted six part story that was to have closed Doctor Who's seventeenth season, continues to generate a certain mystique even to this day. Prior to the release of this three disc DVD set that includes the 1992 version of Shada and the 1993 documentary More Than Thirty Years in the TARDIS accompanied by a wealth of often quite eclectic special features, Douglas Adams's season finale has enjoyed something of an extended life.

Many elements from Shada would eventually find their way into Douglas Adams' 1986 novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency despite him not thinking very highly of the original scripts he wrote in 1979. On this DVD release, you'll even find the Big Finish version of Shada, an adaptation that swaps the Fourth Doctor for the Eighth with the Flash animation that accompanied its original publication on BBCi in 2003. Over the last year, we've also seen the publication of Gareth Roberts' adaptation of Douglas Adams' scripts into a novel that realised much of the potential of the television version. And there was the privately funded project from Ian Levine which saw the ill-feted production completed with animation but couldn't be accommodated by BBC Worldwide when Shada's turn came in the DVD release schedule.

Adams believed at the time of its VHS release in 1992 that "the sort of cachet it gained was simply from the fact that it never got made." (1) He had initially refused to allow any of the material to be released and when permission to release the story on video was given after "he thought he was signing the contract for City of Death... not only did Adams believe that Shada wasn't worthy of release, but he was also concerned that it might infringe on a deal he'd signed for the film rights for his book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency". (2) Nevertheless, the video release went ahead and Adams donated all his royalties to Comic Relief as a salve to his irritation and Dirk Gently finally materialised many years later in theatre, on radio and as a BBC4 adaptation.

"Beat you, cock!"

Shada's six part story would have brought the curtain down on the Graham Williams era and been the culmination of a season that had seen some of the series' highest viewing figureswith City of Death hitting the then all time high of 14.5 million viewers. With Doctor Who in part benefiting from the ITV strike of August to October of 1979, the irony here is that Shada itself was never completed because of industrial action at the BBC.

Shada's genesis was more or less a result of Douglas Adams realising that, as scripts were coming together for the seventeenth season under his aegis as script-editor, far too many of them were unsuitable, couldn't be salvaged and were rejected despite a number of rewriting rescue attempts. This was the fate that befell material received from John Lloyd, Allan Prior, Pennant Roberts and Philip Hinchcliffe, leaving him to step in by late June 1979 and write the concluding serial for the season.

Adams came to the attention of Doctor Who via his submissions to the then script-editor Robert Holmes, first in 1974 with an untitled story that eventually became the 'B Ark' storyline of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and then in 1976 with a story called The Krikkitmen. Although Holmes rejected it, Adams later attempted to pitch it as a Doctor Who film treatment to Paramount Pictures in 1980 and, like its predecessor, The Krikkitmen was also reused in the third Hitchhiker's novel, Life, the Universe and Everything in 1982. Eventually, it was Anthony Read, Holmes's successor, who would commission Adams for The Pirate Planet in July 1977 and from whom Adams agreed to take over as script-editor in October 1978.

However, the story for Shada was not Adams' preferred or first idea. He had approached producer Graham Williams with The Krikkitmen but this was rejected and he then pitched another story where the Doctor's attempts to retire are constantly frustrated by various universe-threatening crises. When Williams also vetoed this, Adams was left with very little time to devise another storyline and both men then collaborated on Sunburst, a story that would delve into Gallifreyan justice and examine how the Time Lords dealt with their criminals. Over a six day period in July 1979 Adams and Williams put together a first draft. This included the Cambridge setting and the Professor Chronotis, Chris Parsons and Clare Keightley characters and the plot involving Skagra, the Krargs and the Think Tank scientists.

Graeme MacDonald, Head of Drama, thought the Sunburst scripts "over-extended" and inadequate for a six part story and requested some attention be paid to certain characters, notably Chris Parsons whom he felt should be more contemporary and have a romance with Romana, as a solution to expanding the scripts. (3) The romantic sub-plot was rejected by Williams and Adams but throughout August and September they undertook a number of rewrites and the story was eventually retitled as Shada.

Director Michael Hayes, who had handled City of Death and been originally selected to work on Shada, was replaced by Pennant Roberts by the time the scripts were ready for the Cambridge location filming between 15 and 19 October. The problems with extending the scripts continued well into the location filming and studio rehearsals when certain episodes were found to under run. Roberts, working with Williams and Adams, added a number of new scenes, unscripted bits and pieces of wit and physical comedy developed in rehearsals and on location.

Joining Baker and Ward in the cast were Daniel Hill and Victoria Burgoyne as Chris Parsons and Clare Keightley and, as villain Skagra, Christopher Neame. Neame had been showcased by Hammer in Lust for a Vampire (1971) and Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972) and was recognisable from his excellent television work in Colditz (BBC 1972-4), Edward the Seventh (ATV 1975) and Secret Army (BBC 1977-79). Veteran character actor Denis Carey, whose career stretched from appearances as a dancer in Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes (1948) and Oh... Rosalinda! (1955), Don Sharp's cult horror Psychomania (1971) and roles in The Wednesday Play (BBC 1964-70), Theatre 625 (BBC 1964-68) and Armchair Theatre (ITV 1956-74), Elizabeth R (BBC 1971), Paul Temple (BBC 1969-71), I, Claudius (BBC 1976) and Crown Court (ITV 1972-84), was cast as Professor Chronotis, Cambridge's incumbent Time Lord retiree.

Location filming began, with the scenes of the Doctor and Romana punting down the Cam, on 15 October and, despite Tom Baker trying his hand at punting the day before on the river by the Garden House Hotel, it took several retakes to get the scenes in the can. Various camera positions were taken up on the river bank at the Backs of King's College, on Clare Bridge and on the river using a second punt containing camera and sound crew. Chris's bike ride along King's Parade, Skagra's traffic stopping sashay around Cambridge (despite Adams' claims to the contrary that it would be the one place where such dress would never cause a fuss), his obtaining a lift from an unsuspecting driver and the Doctor's near cycle pile up with Chris (changed from its 'on foot' incarnation in the original script) were all filmed on the same day. (4)

October 16 saw filming in Granchester, just outside Cambridge, where the scenes featuring Skagra's invisible spaceship, the arrival of the TARDIS and the fisherman nobbled by Skagra's mind absorbing sphere were completed. This, incidentally, saw the use of visual effects man Dave Harvard's nifty sphere prop that, using a wrist mounted, concealed motorised car aerial, could be shown moving into shot or towards camera. It is best demonstrated in Skagra's challenge to the Doctor filmed on 19 October on the bridge at Garret Hostel Lane.

Special arrangements with Emmanuel College allowed filming for scenes at and around the college entrance on 17 October, standing in for St. Cedd's in the story, with the crew apparently agreeing to follow traditional college rules not to walk on the grass unless a don was present. An attempt to film Skagra's attack on the driver of the car he steals was abandoned and a chase scene at night, to be filmed on the evening of 18 October, was also cancelled because of an electrician's strike, which resulted in the technical manager being summoned back to London and leaving the production without lighting. Roberts and Williams decided to remount the chase during the day on Friday 19 and this was completed with the addition of St. John's Choristers, who successfully approached the team about making an appearance during a retreat to a local pub and in return agreed to make Baker an honorary fellow of St. John's. (5)

The crew completed the revised chase sequence and returned to London. Monday 22 October saw filming at Ealing that covered many of the CSO effects shots required to show characters walking up an invisible ramp into Skagra's invisible ship. Adams had originally described this more ambitiously in contrast to the resulting footage: "the ideal effect would be to see light beginning to pour out of the space ship door as it opens". Model effects of the destruction of the Think Tank station were also shot on the same day. (6)

After rehearsals for the studio recordings on 25 October, the production moved into TC3 for the first recording block. Between 3 and 5 November, even as industrial action at the BBC continued, this block was left unscathed by strikes and covered most of the opening Think Tank station sequences, the action in the Professor's study and the prison cell on Skagra's ship. However the material planned for the last day of this block, including material on Skagra's ship, the emergence of the Krargs and the Doctor's journey in the vortex, was postponed. Costume designer Rupert Roxburghe-Jarvis and video effects operator Dave Chapman had worked together so that the Krarg costumes could be combined with an inlaid, fiery effect. A series of model effects shots were also completed at the end of 5 November.

It was, however, when the cast came to record the second block from Monday 19 November in TC6 that the production ran into problems. The cast found themselves locked out of the studio due to a demarcation dispute and the recording had to be abandoned. Contractually, rehearsals continued for the the final block due to be taped at the beginning of December but the dispute rumbled on until 1 December and Roberts discovered that none of the sets, having been constructed, were erected for the block because senior management were prioritising the recording of other Christmas programmes.

As Daniel Hill notes on the DVD, Pennant Roberts was hoping to race through the five days worth of incomplete material and record it in one fell swoop and Williams also attempted to schedule a remount over the Christmas period. This proved fruitless, both in terms of timing and economics, and on Monday 10 December Shada was officially cancelled. Suffice it to say, Baker recalls on the DVD documentary 'Taken Out of Time' that the BBC party held for the departure of Williams and Adams was a muted one that would "make you long for death sometimes".

Incoming producer John Nathan-Turner attempted his own rescue operation and Adams reworked the script, condensing material so that it was possible for Shada to be presented as a two part special for Christmas 1980. Working with Roberts, Nathan-Turner believed that the abandoned material required for the special could be recorded in two blocks during October 1980. However, BBC management refused the allocation of studio time to pull Shada together and, by June 1980, it was given up completely.

With what remains of the television version of Shada it's impossible to judge just how well this story would have been received had the full, six-part version been transmitted. Adams seemingly wasn't very fond of it and the script was certainly under constant revision prior to and during production, suggesting that it perhaps needed a further rewrite. However, Baker and the cast are full of praise for the script on the DVD documentary 'Taken Out of Time' and certainly when you see how Gareth Roberts tackled the material in his novelisation, dealing with many of the faults in the original and providing much cohesion, Shada provides an interesting, intriguing story. Much of its 'lost classic' reputation does seem to emanate from its incomplete status but we'll never quite know how good the 1979 version would have been. Some obvious problems remain also with the version that was released in 1993 and is now on this DVD.

However, the newly graded and restored location footage on DVD is the crowning glory of the story. The Cambridge environs are highly appealing and director Pennant Roberts, despite the problems with strikes putting the kibosh on the planned night shoot, makes a virtue of them, especially in the chase sequence. The production certainly has the Williams/Adams imprint on it and the sequences on location are breezy and have a quintessential Englishness about them that goes right to the heart of the series appeal.

"I’m not mad about your tailor"

Many of Adams' recurring themes are here. We have the concerns about personal identity in the Chronotis/Salyavin binary and Chris and Clare as human counterparts of the Doctor/Romana relationship; the nature of power and authority and who wields it in the story of Skagra's obsession to control the universe by imprinting his mind on every being in the cosmos; the use and misuse of knowledge, particularly in the form of a book The Worshipful and Ancient Law of Gallifrey; and the relationship between humanoids and machines that is shown most effectively in the philosophical debates about mortality, never committed to video tape, between Skagra's ship and the Doctor.

Adams manages to balance most of the elements in the same way that he did on City Of Death and both stories feel like something of a breakthrough in making philosophical points via satire and science fiction. As Margery Hourihan notes, Adams' work is often about the deconstruction of the hero and the villain within an absurd universe. In Doctor Who he finds the perfect space to explore that absurd universe, specifically the Doctor's desire "to avoid inflicting harm on others as far as that is possible" as "perhaps the only intelligible moral position" and the villain's desire to dominate even though "mastery is both impossible and meaningless where there are no clearly defined binary opposites and instability is the only constant." (7)

It bristles with lovely ideas – the Worshipful and Ancient Law of Gallifrey book as a key to Shada, the Time Lord prison planet, activates a TARDIS by turning its pages, Chronotis’ TARDIS disguised as Cambridge rooms and Skagra’s mind draining sphere (which comes over very well as a visual effects triumph in the filmed chase sequence). There’s only just enough plot to fill six episodes with some judicious use of the chase sequences but the structuring of such serials had long been a bone of contention for Doctor Who's writers and script-editors.

The strengths of what remains lie in many of the performances. Baker and Ward are very much on form, with rehearsal ad libs and changes embroidering Adams' sparky script. My favourite has to be Denis Carey as Chronotis. It’s a lovely, dotty little performance, well judged, especially in its early inferences to his true identity and as another of Adams' confounding heroic archetypes. Certainly one of the great performances of the Williams era and a pity it never got its full due.

I’ve always been a fan of Christopher Neame too and his performance as Skagra very much echoes his similar work for Hammer in that guilty pleasure Dracula A.D. 1972– the arrogance, vanity and cruel streak are all to the fore. The frustration here is that so little of Neame's performance was recorded and therefore we don't get a truly complete on screen representation of Skagra, beyond a rather outrageous costume and hat. "I’m not mad about your tailor" is indeed an appropriately witty initial reaction. The supporting characters of Chris and Clare are more or less paler versions of Arthur and Trillian from Hitchhiker but Daniel Hill provides a good line in bewilderment and Victoria Burgoyne's scenes with Carey's Chronotis have an eccentric Ealing comedy flavour to them.

Unfortunately, it suffers from the main bug-bear of the Williams era. It looks cheap despite the assertion that Williams allocated a bigger budget to the season finale in order to avoid the problems he'd had with The Invasion Of Time and The Armageddon Factor. The same budgetary constraints that much of his era struggled with are evident in some of the sets for the Think Tank and Skagra's ship but, on the positive side, the Professor's rooms are beautifully realised. The monsters, the crystalline Krargs, whilst an interesting concept on paper, also come off second best with little representation on screen to define their impact and a nagging feeling that they are simply there to fulfill audience expectation. Adams was always interested in the motivations of the villains rather than the scariness of the monsters and he tended to push the scariness of the various aliens very much to the margins in favour of an intellectualisation about the nature of morality.

In its television form it is a rather muted farewell to the Graham Williams era. He has to be applauded for his ambition and hard work in the face of mounting inflation, interference from the higher echelons of the BBC, strikes, and a leading man in love with his own hype. It’s also hard to watch what remains of Shada as presented in its 1993 form as there are both good and bad things with the version that John Nathan-Turner oversaw for video. Despite little or no sound effects, some missing dubbed dialogue for K9 or much of the completed visual effects footage, he at least managed to get David Brierley and Dick Mills' help in the former and some decent work from Ace Editing on the latter, especially the incomplete sphere effects. These knit together the remaining footage remarkably well.

However, it labours under a score provided by Keff McCulloch which simply does not compensate for the more appropriate music from the then resident Who composer Dudley Simpson. It betrays its 1990s origins too readily and many scenes are frenetically over scored. The other issue is that Tom's narration, which fills in the narrative where sequences are missing, is delivered in the first person, as the Doctor, and the contradiction lies in the fact that Tom looks utterly different from his on screen persona. Most painful of all is that this version of Shada becomes a series of diminishing returns by virtue of the fact that Tom's narration dominates the second half of the story as the studio and location material runs out and we are simply left with him attempting to tell the story. However, his opening introduction is pure Tom(foolery). Nothing can prepare you for his cry of "Beat you, cock!" to Professor Kettlewell's K1 robot as he sets the scene.

Shada then is a bit of a curate's egg. A production and script full of decent ideas and concepts, some more developed than others, where the good performances and a breezy style help it along immensely. I would be hard pushed to label it a 'classic' but 'potential' is the word I would use here and it's a pity it never got to realise it.

(1) Nicholas Pegg, Shada DVD Production Notes
(2) Paul Scoones, The Making of Shada: New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club - Tetrap.com 
(3) Nicholas Pegg, Shada DVD Production Notes
(4) Andrew Pixley, Shada, The DWM Archive, Doctor Who Magazine 267
(5) Ibid
(6) Ibid
(7) Margery Hourihan, Deconstructing the Hero: Literary Theory and Children's Literature 

Disc One Special Features
The VHS version from 1993 is presented with two viewing options, as a 'play all' 1 hour and 49 minutes version or as six individual episodes of varying lengths.
Shada - BBCi/Big Finish Version
Available to view on PC and Mac, this is the adaptation from 2003 featuring Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor and Lalla Ward reprising her role as Romana. The audio play was the result of considerable efforts on the part of Big Finish and BBCi, the team that originally oversaw the BBC's official Doctor Who website, to secure the rights from Douglas Adams. The Eighth Doctor's involvement was established by suggesting that the events of The Five Doctors, in which clips of Shada had been used, had somehow wiped that adventure from the Fourth Doctor's timeline. The Eighth Doctor was therefore used to repair this anomaly by participating in the events ofShada himself. The serial appeared on the website in May 2003 as part of the series' fortieth anniversary celebrations and was later released on CD. Lee Sullivan provided the illustrations for the Flash animations that accompanied the audio on the website. 
Production Information Text
Courtesy of Nicholas Pegg's thorough research, you'll uncover a fascinating behind the scenes story, full of detail, covering Shada's origins, creation, production and eventual cancellation. A mine of information that comes highly recommended in lieu of a commentary for the story and is sprinkled with some welcome witticisms.
Coming Soon
Trailer for The Reign of Terror

Disc Two Special Features
Taken Out of Time -  The Making and Breaking of Shada (25:38)
Chris Chapman's evocative documentary takes actor Daniel Hill, his wife Olivia Bazalgette (who was then the director's assistant on Shada), assistant designer Les McCallum and production assistant Ralph Wilton back to Cambridge to recount the making of the story. Fond memories of Douglas Adams and director Pennant Roberts are framed by the sunlit architecture of Cambridge's university campus and the glittering waters of the Cam. Chapman also weaves in archive interviews with Roberts and a new interview with Tom Baker, presumably out walking his dogs near his East Sussex home. "Cambridge was the backdrop to the most glorious, glorious week of filming I'd ever had" notes Hill and the feeling of a group of actors and programme makers really bonding on location is communicated wonderfully.

The delights include Tom's punting prowess in front of students watching the filming ("it was terribly humiliating") and Daniel's cycling accident near miss on the streets of Cambridge. The warmth that extends to the growing romance between Hill and Bazalgette and Tom's drinking escapades in Gerald Campion's bar soon cools when Wilton relates how the planned night shoot was cancelled by an electricians' strike. Angus Smith, of St John's College Choir, recalls how half a dozen of the choir ended up in the group of college singers that Tom Baker whizzes by on a bicycle and their disappointment that the story never made it to the screen. The high spirits that Hill, Bazalgette and Wilton convey includes Denis Carey's role in the rehearsal and studio sessions that were recorded in Block 1. Block 2 however never got off the ground beyond the camera rehearsal. As Tom notes, "it was terribly sad" that a strike locked the cast and crew out of the studios.

There is a true sense of frustrated ambitions on Pennant's part, who was determined to race through Blocks 2 and 3 in one go and complete recording, but other shows got priority after the strike was over and Shada was cancelled. "We were devastated" notes Bazalgetteand McCallum underlines this by describing how the lab sets, never seen on camera, were eventually struck and disposed of. The final word goes to Tom who provides a bittersweet sense of his difficult relationship with producer Graham Williams, a man who he felt he hadn't helped and then regretted was leaving Doctor Who on the back of a failure.
Now and Then - Shada (12:44)
Richard Bignell provides a lovely exploration of the various Cambridge and Grantchester locations that feature in the story. The majority of the locations have hardly charged at all and with the use of maps and the 1979 location footage and contemporary coverage, he builds a sense of how influential the Cambridge background was to the story.
Strike! Strike! Strike! (27:48)
A perfect accompaniment is this documentary, produced by James Goss, about how industrial action plagued the BBC and ITV companies during the 1960s and 1970s, seen through the prism of various Doctor Who stories that were affected in one way or another. Shaun Ley explores how unions, a veritable "alphabet soup" of associations and guilds asex-president of BECTU Tony Lennon recalls, dominated the production of television and enforced regulations, including recording times (the infamous ten o'clock studio recording cut-off) and the demarcation of activities (who was responsible for props, visual effects, make up). Liberal Democrat Peer Lord Addington recalls the "closed shop" which demanded that you had to be a union member to work in television, the rights and pay that emerged from collective bargaining and how these generated conflict that was, at the time, regarded as "normal".

Gary Russell, former script editor and union rep, is also very erudite in describing the trials that beset those working in television and on Doctor Who. Nicola Bryant and director Richard Martin recall how time was precious and overruns were only permitted by union rep consensus. Not only does this fascinating half hour cover ITV's failed Autumn launch in 1968 and Nigel Kneale's apocryphal story of dealing with strikers on the production of The Year of the Sex Olympics but it also looks at the problems that extend from Hartnell's run in with his dresser, the reasons that Spearhead from Space ended up on film, the miner's strike of 1972 taking Peladon and Sea Devils off the screen, a PA strike that almost saw The Monster of Peladon made in black and white and a scene shifters strike that gave the limelight to an errant step ladder in Robot and saw Blue Peter recording on its sets. For those of a particular generation, you'll smile upon hearing how, because of strikes, cricket was replaced by a repeat of The Sea Devils and Wimbledon was exterminated by a Dalek film in the mid 1970s.

The Invasion of Time, The Armageddon Factor, The Creature from the Pit and Shadawere all victims of various disputes and, as Lord Addington points out, this was all taking place during the period that led to the infamous "winter of discontent". The ABS union's pay dispute finally put the mockers on Shada much to Graham Williams's chagrin. Lennon underlines the painful truth that Doctor Who was not a priority for the BBC and was merely a "cheap pot burner that filled a slot on a Saturday evening and commended a reasonable audience". Lennon believed the attempted remount was probably not seen as economically viable by the BBC despite John Nathan-Turner's determination to rescue Shada.

This fascinating documentary, brilliantly researched by Andrew Pixley and Thomas Guerrier, concludes with further tales of union intervention that effected Eric Saward's Warhead (aka Resurrection of the Daleks), The Caves of Androzani and the twin challenges from Thatcher's labour policies and TV-AM's determination to reduce staffing levels which, although leading to a strike, signalled the end of union solidarity at ITV and damaged the bargaining powers of unions representing production staff. Definitely a highlight of the DVD collection.
Being a Girl (30:11)
Not entirely sure why this documentary is included with Shada but it tackles a number of pertinent questions about the representation of women in Doctor Who. Narrated by Louise Jameson, the documentary both unpicks the casual misogyny that epitomised the classic series's stereotypical depiction of the screaming companion and celebrates the strong, independent women who came along later. Broadcaster Samira Ahmed initially looks at what a female producer and characters say about Doctor Who in the 1960s and believes that at the time they better represented 1950s values than the rapidly changing decade that followed. She is perhaps quite harsh on the representation of women in the programme but rightly sees Verity Lambert's role as producer as the appropriate challenge to how the male orthodoxies of the BBC prevented many women in television from doing much at all.

As Emma Price of Doctor Who Magazine's Time Team panel notes, the cliched 'ankle twisting' companion is a dominant codification but a character such as Susan is meant to be the child identification figure and is perhaps not entirely indicative of the sexist trope. Mind you, as The Five Doctors demonstrated, Susan as a grown woman never really got out of the habit of twisting her ankle. Barbara is seen as more equal to the male characters rather than those companions in the current series demarcated by their sexual attraction to the Doctor and the likes of Zoe and Liz are codified as physically strong and highly intelligent. Ahmed's discussion of Sarah and Leela focuses on the positive aspects of the characters, where the acting more than compensates for a feminist agenda or a sexualisation mainly constructed by male producers and writers. Sadly there is no discussion about Romana as played by Lalla Ward who, for all intents and purposes, gradually became the female equivalent of the Doctor, both challenging and equaling his heroic masculinity.

The introduction of Ace is seen as something of a significant change, offering a depiction of a strong female character influential enough to inform the development of "ordinary woman" Rose in the revival of the series in 2005. Ahmed briefly raises concerns about class in the discussion of Ace, something that's rarely touched upon when it comes to understanding the depiction of both male and female characters in the series. Class is also an element of the Rose, Martha and Donna characters as dominant as the new levels of intimacy that are developed on screen. This leads to River, perhaps one of the strongest, most rounded and complex female characters that the series has ever seen. How the series has also returned to the likes of Jo and Sarah to provide a fuller picture of their lives is seen as the precursor of the child to adult journey of Amy.

Balance is also provided by looking at female companions in contrast to their male counterparts like Harry, Adric and Captain Jack and Rory. On the one hand, the classic series' male companions seem subservient to the stronger Doctor and on the other, the latest incarnations explore the tenets of contemporary masculinity. There are also discussions about 'gender-blind' casting and how villains and monsters allow the series to introduce new ideas about gender but often also fail to empower the audience. Emma also makes a valid point of how many of the female characters end up with the right man, married off at the end of their journey, and Samira sees the eternal wish fulfilment of being with the Doctor as sacred, where "fancying the Doctor" was never the priority of this goal. A fascinating half hour that concludes with the revival of that old shibboleth - a female Doctor.
Photo Gallery
Keff McCulloch's music plays over a collection of colour images from Shada including the sets for Think Tank, Skagra's ship and Chronotis's study.

More Than 30 Years in the TARDIS
After the proposed anniversary story The Dark Dimension had foundered amid the feud between BBC Drama and BBC Enterprises and the conflict of interest with Philip Segal's negotiations for a revival of the series, Kevin Davies, the producer-director of this 90 minute documentary celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of Doctor Who, pitched several ideas for other programmes to BBC producer John Whiston. Davies had proved his mettle with the excellent Making of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy documentary in 1993 and was involved in the post-production side of The Dark Dimension while Whiston had overseen a 1992 edition of BBC2 The Late Show 'Resistance is Useless'. This was a light hearted grab bag of Doctor Who clips, categorised and linked by a trivia spouting anorak. With a Brummie accent.

John Whiston took to the idea of showing the concepts and development of the series within the framing device of a small boy reliving iconic moments from the programme's past and using interviews with actors and crew at famous locations featured in the series. With only a nine week schedule to make the programme, Davies was given the go ahead in September 1993 and eventually started shooting on location in October for what was a 50 minute programme. That first day's filming included perhaps one of the most impressive sequences in the documentary, material for a continuous tracking shot of the boy, played by Josh Maguire, walking through the police box doors and into the control room of the TARDIS, something that hadn't been achieved on the series itself.

And it is that moment that perhaps sums up the documentary's intentions as a nostalgic wallow in the history of Doctor Who, one that is certainly bigger on the inside, and it gathers together interviews with many of those who worked on the show in front of and behind the cameras, 'celebrity' fans and cultural commentators. These are interwoven with a huge amount of archive footage, advertisements and clips to demonstrate the cultural impact of the series. Interspersed are impressive recreations of iconic moments including among many others shop window dummies crashing through store fronts; dinosaurs at the South Bank; Cybermen pursuing Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant on the steps outside St. Paul's Cathedral; Daleks on Westminster Bridge and Frazer Hines and Debbie Watling in a splendid recreation of the Emperor Dalek's control room.

The list of interviewees and participants is impressive and includes Jon Pertwee, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, Verity Lambert, Mat Irvine, Sophie Aldred, Carole Ann Ford, Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks, Hartnell's granddaughter Jessica Carney, Nicholas Courtney, Elisabeth Sladen with daughter Sadie and John Nathan-Turner. There are also some rather amusing encounters with Gerry Anderson and his son Jamie who eschews Century 21 for Gallifrey, Toyah Willcox and her well documented love of PVC, Mike Gatting and Ken Livingstone. The two Dalek films of the 1960s are also celebrated with some excellent recreations and interviews with Roberta Tovey and Jenny Linden, the Susan and Barbara of those Technicolour widescreen epics.

Added to this mix are a number of rare archival finds, including Hartnell's personal appearance at the Finningly Airshow of September 1965; Tom Baker and Lalla Ward's Prime computer ads; clips from editions of Blue Peter; Dalek footage from Brian Hodgson, donations from private collectors and title sequence tests from the very earliest episodes of the series.

With only 50 minutes at his disposal and an edict from Whiston and producer John Bush to make changes and add in what became the 'Essential Information' sections and more interviews with Philip Hinchcliffe and Mary Whitehouse, Davies had to leave a lot of his material out of the final edit and compress what he kept in. He was not altogether happy with this situation and made his protests clear at the time. Eventually, the BBC1 transmission on 29 November 1993 ran to nearly 48 minutes.

However, in 1994 Davies was able to reinstate a lot of the material when BBC Video commissioned an extended version of the documentary with a 90 minute running time and also include some rare clips and behind the scenes studio material that he had since amassed. Sadly a number of items never made it into either version of the documentary and perhaps the greatest omission were the interviews conducted at the then BBC Radiophonic Workshop studios with Brian Hodgson, Dick Mills and Delia Derbyshire to discuss their contributions to the series'music and sound effects. A Weetabix advert was also dropped at the last minute when the appropriate clearances weren't made and the final cut ended up at 88 minutes and was released 7 November 1994, almost a year after its original shorter television transmission.

More Than Thirty Years in the TARDIS remains an accessible and fan pleasing documentary that captures something of the cultural value, the thrills, the whimsy and the sheer imaginative scope of the programme. Like the best of Doctor Who, it is a labour of love by Kevin Davies and he richly deserves the plaudits associated with the project. From our current viewpoint its ending is now delivered with a certain ironic twist, as the programme interviews the then Controller of BBC1, Alan Yentob, prior to the January 1994 agreement that would see the BBC/Fox/Universal co-production of the Doctor Who television movie finally get the green light. Who would have believed what was actually in store for us and the series back then...

Reference:
The Making of More Than Thirty Years in the TARDIS by Paul Scoones published in the March 1995 edition of Time Space Visualiser.

Special Features

Remembering Nicholas Courtney (25:59)
Moving tribute to the actor hosted by his biographer and friend Michael McManus and elegantly directed and produced by Ed Stradling. Why it is tucked away here when it may have been better in context on the forthcoming special editions of Inferno or The Green Death is a bit of a mystery but that's being churlish about an excellent documentary that, at its heart, features a final, unfinished interview with 'Cairo Courtney' from 2010. This initially explores Nick's childhood in Egypt and the trials and tribulations of a broken family, school bullying and finding his metier in acting. He explains that only after gaining a sense of independence during Army service did he think that drama school would be the making of him.

Weekly rep, support from actor-manager Sir Donald Wolfit and his graduation to television acting are covered but he was rather critical of his first telly, No Hiding Place, and despaired that his performance was "far too much". There's a smashing clip of him as an officer in 'Sword of Honour', a play in the Theatre 625 strand, performing with Edward Woodward and already setting a precedence for the singular role that was to come.

Director Dougie Camfield spotted Nick and auditioned him for the role of King Richard in 1965's The Crusade, a part which eventually went to Julian Glover, but this encounter brought Nick aboard, as Bret Vyon, for The Daleks' Master Plan later that year. Dougie cast him again, originally as the doomed Captain Knight in The Web of Fear but when David Langton, playing Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart, dropped out, he was given a serendipitous promotion. The rest is Doctor Who history, including eyepatch, Cromer and 'five rounds rapid' and all covered in various interviews from The Story of Doctor Who and Doctor Who Night.

What elevates this further is the arrival of Tom Baker, first appearing at a window like some errant mad uncle and then joining the interview. It's lovely that Tom, clearly very fond of Nick, is involved and their friendship radiates from the screen as they rib each other about the night Tom stayed at Nick's. "We shouldn't tell the fans about that," booms Tom, with a glint in his eye. Nick conveys his sadness that the UNIT family was eventually dropped from the programme and he only appeared in two of Tom's stories before McManus then relates his post-Doctor Who stage and Equity careers. The latter remained a fixture for 30 years and he was active in the union right up until his death.

Clips from Juliet Bravo, Sink or Swim (his first on screen encounter with Peter Davison) and his role in the Frankie Howerd vehicle Then Churchill Said to Me led into his guest starring in a number of Doctor Who stories, Mawdryn Undead, The Five Doctors and finally Battlefield which was intended as the Brig's swansong. Nick relates how grateful he was to Jon Pertwee for encouraging him to come out of his shell and his growing support for the programme and its fans through the 'wilderness years' is underlined by McManus. A shame that the 2010 interview wasn't completed but I'm grateful that we did at least get to see some of it and this very fitting tribute, another highlight of these DVD special features, is brought to a close with the publication of his autobiography Still Getting Away With It, his final appearance as the Brig in The Sarah Jane Adventures in 2008 and his death and memorial in 2011.
Doctor Who Stories: Peter Purves (13:31)
Material from the 2003 documentary The Story of Doctor Who in which Purves relates, at £30 a show, his experiences working on Doctor Who as companion Steven Taylor, including jumping up and down on a trampoline with Jean Marsh, working with elephants and a sword fight with Barrie Ingham. As ever Purves is erudite and honest about the limitations of early Doctor Who and how chatting to the second Monoid on the right ("weird... with George Harrison wigs") or the third Dalek on the left ("a bore to work with") removes any notion for him of the programme's scare factor. He also waxes about the originality of the TARDIS, guest actors, how the series killed his acting career and he ended up on the training team of the director's courses for colour television. Oh, and how, after he threw away the Trilogic Game prop that he'd kept from The Celestial Toymaker, his Blue Peter career suddenly and uncannily beckoned.
The Lambert Tapes: Part One (10:35)
Confusingly this part is now released after the second part came out earlier in the year on the Planet of Giants DVD. However, it's good to see more of this interview from 2003's The Story of Doctor Who. Verity discusses the show's format and creation and her elevation, at 27 years old, to the position of producer in a male dominated BBC. Tidbits she offers up include being checked by MI5, fighting her corner while working with director Rex Tucker on the first serial, her good relationship with his replacement Waris Hussein and her concerns about 'the grunting' of leggy cavemen. Inevitably, she turns to the Daleks. Sydney Newman's aversion to BEMs apparently "shattered our confidence" in Terry Nation's serial but her confidence was restored by recognising the real appeal of the Daleks. Overall, her desire not to fail as a young producer dominates the interview and fortunately for Doctor Who she was fearless about getting the series to work.
Those Deadly Divas (22:38)
Camille Coduri, Tracy-Ann Oberman and Kate O'Mara - the latter a bona fide deadly diva unless your view also includes Gareth Roberts - try to spell out what exactly a deadly diva is. Roberts offers that the diva is "too cold or too hot blooded" compared to the Doctor's companions, whereas Oberman believes a successful diva should "try and flirt with the Doctor as much as possible". Judging by the bar where Oberman is speaking from, I'd say it involves plying the Time Lord with plenty of drink too. Interestingly, as Oberman points out, many female villains are highly sexualised and this does tie in briefly with Being A Girl's analysis of how women are portrayed in Doctor Who. Money, business and robots are apparently the ruthless woman's concerns in the universe of Doctor Who. Naturally, the likes of the Rani are up for discussion and Roberts and his co-writer Clayton Hickman are unashamed members of the Rani Appreciation Society.

Look out for the careers of Lady Peinforte (a "bloody brilliant hitchhiker" with "terrifying ringlets" according to Roberts and Coduri), Captain Wrack (an "off the scale" part that O'Mara was happy to fight Lynda Baron for), Lady Adrasta (who would probably have thrown the graphics person into the pit for spelling her name wrong on the caption here), Krau Timmin (the disdainful secretary with the all purpose TV remote control), Madame Kara (the Servalan substitute who laughs at Davros' jokes) and Yvonne Hartman (big haired "BBC tea girl" elevated to Director General) and the hallmarks of various possessed companions. As you can surmise, this is a very tongue-in-cheek 22 minutes and perhaps reaches its zenith when Coduri ponders whether Alexandra Moen would really dance like Lucy Saxon when about to face the apocalypse.
Photo Gallery
Behind the scenes shots from Kevin Davies' 1993 documentary with a superb suite of Mark Ayres' music specially composed for the programme. 
PDF Material
Radio Times listing for Thirty Years in the TARDIS
Easter Egg: Richard Martin's Memories of Verity (1:49)
Sweet little piece wherein Martin recall's Verity Lambert's battle to gain respect at the BBC and her unorthodox approach to celebrating Christmas.

Doctor Who: The Legacy Collection
BBC Worldwide / Released 7 January 2013 / BBCDVD 3388 / Cert: PG
Shada
6 episodes / Never broadcast: / Colour / Running time:109:36
More Than Thirty Years in the TARDIS
Originally broadcast in shorter form 29 November 1993 / Colour / Running time: 87:52

The Snowmen
BBC One HD
25th December 2012, 5.15pm 

The review contains plot spoilers.

Victoriana. From the alchemical time-travel of The Evil of the Daleks to Weng-Chiang's pastiche of Sax Rohmer and Conan Doyle, Doctor Who has often plundered these and its Wellsian roots.

Of late, it has been with increasing regularity and has taken in that quintessential Christmas narrator, Charles Dickens. Television's current obsession with nostalgia tends to acquaint 'ye olde Christmas' with stove pipe hats, the Industrial Revolution, cheeky Cockney flower girls, snow or fog enshrouded streets, orphans and urchins, moral strictures and sexual repression. The Snowmen finds Steven Moffat retracing his steps down those familiar streets. Where before we saw him raid Dickens for A Christmas Carol, in this year's Christmas special we're also plunged into Henry James and Conan Doyle territory.

The story opens in 1842, where a snow bound walled garden and pond is filled with the laughter of children and we find the lone figure of Walter Simeon building a snowman. He's the typical lonely child in Moffat's oft-used signature and one of the symbolic figures that occupy several representations of the family or its absence in The Snowmen.

Moffat's Christmas offerings always seem to highlight the dysfunctional or transnormative family, with the wounded and repressed father or mother figures of Kazran Sardick and Madge Arwell the focus of attention in previous editions, and the rejected and emotionally crippled Simeon the lynchpin of the story here. As his parents look on and bemoan their child's introverted life ('he's so alone. It's not right, it's not healthy'), Simeon converts this canker at the heart of the Victorian ideal into a full blown steampunk powered attempt to conquer the world. 

'profit'

Naturally, Moffat has to find the horror in the ordinary, particularly the innocent activity of building a snowman, and as Simeon constructs his frozen hearted simulacrum, the snowman gains a voice and agrees with him that the hand-wringing adults are 'silly'. Once again, the uncanny lies in how the inanimate is made animate through voice, just as many of the children in Moffat's narratives project themselves into objects to articulate their crises. To this end, Ian McKellen is a superb choice to portray the Great Intelligence and his mellifluous tones are, forgive the pun, the icing on the cake.

It is through the snowman's offer of help that the story leaps 50 years, a wonderful dissolve between the boy Simeon and his sour faced adult counterpart symbolising the poor lad's possession, the hardening of his heart traced in Simeon's ascendancy to the role of institute executive. The capitalist running his satanic mill, Dr. Simeon (the completely hiss-able pantomime villainy of Richard E. Grant) now collects the snow from newly generated snowmen and feeds his workers to them. His promise to feed them is not quite in the spirit of the charitable giving of the numerous food banks we've seen springing up of late in Cameron's neo-Victorian era.

The 'GI' insignia of Simeon's operation, one of Moffat's clues in plain sight, is overlaid on collecting jars, carriage doors, business cards and iron gates throughout the episode, a corporate branding of industrial power, crushing opposition and driving forward the planned invasion. The Doctor, examining the 'new' snow concurs that the first thing you look for in 'something you've never seen before' is 'profit'. It is a profit that he also sees within an uncaring universe which he is no longer willing to care about.

We're back with Dickens again, where the rejection of 'family' is transformed into a ruthless business for Simeon. 'Dickens's novels are situated at a point in British history when family capitalism was in the process of transitioning into corporate capitalism,' notes Christopher Parkes and certainly the notion of how Victorian values destabilise and disconnect families runs through The Snowmen. (1)

Simeon pursues self-interest under the influence of the Great Intelligence, an amorphous mass seeking physical existence through the DNA of a drowned former governess to Captain Latimer's children. Latimer (Tom Ward), presumably widowed, is also a father who is unable to connect emotionally with his children. Again, we have a disconnection from the middle-class Victorian ideal and a damaged relationship between a dead governess, two children and a father that echoes the Jamesian horror of The Turn of the Screw.

The governess is another singular figure in the story. Notionally the Jamesian repository for hysteria and repression, the drowned governess is described as a cruel, punishing ghostly figure and yet she is also, through Clara, transformed into a magical Mary Poppins figure. When we first meet Clara, she's a barmaid at the Rose and Crown, but with little explanation she becomes the governess Miss Montague. She oscillates between a variation of Dickens' working class Nancy from Oliver Twist and the middle class governess as provocateur with ease and the mystery of her disguise remains.

There is more than a suggestion that Clara is a supernatural figure (referred to in the series' trailer as 'the woman twice dead'), psychically powerful enough to influence the manifestation of the Great Intelligence and destroy it. In her first encounter with the Doctor, she even echoes Simeon's childhood view of 'snow that can remember' as 'silly' only to be told by him, 'what's wrong with silly?' Despite the Doctor's retreat into the shadows, there is still an indication here that his childlike view of the universe is alive and well and she is attracted to that as much as she cares for Latimer's children Digby and Francesca.

The analogy to Mary Poppins, as a figure challenging the status quo of Victorian child-rearing, is made clear throughout the story in broad visual terms. Her initial pursuit of the Doctor where she ends upside down in a carriage turns our view of her metaphorically upside down and the umbrella and ladder ascent into the clouds to escape the icy clutches of the previous governess and the counsel for Francesca's nightmares all capture the essence of Pamela Travers creation or at least its 1964 onscreen incarnation. Moffat returns to fairy tale and the golden age of children's literature to influence The Snowmen as much as he taps into childhood fears and the more adult repressions and hysteria of James' The Turn of the Screw.

The Poppins and Clara analogy deepens when you turn to Travers original text and find that Poppins is called the Great Exception, a person who 'has managed to transcend the limited nature of humans... progressing from lower states of being to higher ones'. (2) Clara's ascending and descending the spiral staircase into the clouds to visit the TARDIS is a perfect visual expression of this. The impossible spiral staircase and the TARDIS parked on a cloud amid the starlight have a fairy tale charm and surrealism and there's a hint of Cinderella too in the way that Clara runs away from her first encounter on the cloud and drops her scarf. 'She is impossible' declares the Doctor in the series' trailer and she seems to exist between worlds as we see in the later shot transition from her 19th century gravestone to her resurrection in what looks like the present day.

The memories of a cruel governess become realised in ice because 'ice remembers' as Simeon informs Captain Latimer, and snow functions as 'memory snow' that feeds on the thoughts and memories of those it comes into contact with. Vastra warns 'I hope it's listening to the right people' when she challenges Simeon about his fascination for the material. Remembering and forgetting are crucial elements in many Moffat scripts and The Snowmen is no different and it remains a key component in the development of Clara's mystery. The Doctor's advice to her about psychically melting the snowmen is remembered later as she dies and even though he insists she forget about him, she seeks him out and causes him to remember her previous death in Asylum of the Daleks.

'children are not really my area of expertise'

Memories, nightmares and dreaming figure prominently: the memory worm that eradicates short and long term memory, the snow that can remember and represent your fears, Francesca's fear of the old governess and flashbacks alluding to Clara's own ghost like return from the dead function as the 'liminal sphere in which the barriers between the everyday reality and the suprasensual become diffuse'. (3) The Sontaran Strax is an interesting counterpoint to Clara and is another living/dead figure in the story. He died during the events at Demon's Run but according to the Doctor has been resurrected by a friend.

Clara's declaration of 'Doctor? Doctor Who?' ushers in a new title sequence and underlines the sense of tradition inherent in the programme, despite that joke's dwindling effectiveness. As Vastra indicates to the reclusive Doctor: 'It's the same story every time and it always begins with the same two words.' The new titles are a return to the time tunnels of previous eras, to the use of the Doctor's face as a constant motif and the re-arranged theme is a slightly stripped back affair, demanding more of the ethereal, disconcerting ululations of the Delia Derbyshire original. Quite appropriate for the 50th Anniversary year that we're about to enter.

And, metatextually, we have the influence of Conan Doyle too. As hinted at in A Good Man Goes to War, Madame Vastra and Jenny Flint occupy this corner of Victorian London and are now joined by Strax, the former Sontaran nurse, after the Doctor decides to retire (an idea previously proposed but then rejected for Shada) and give up saving the universe. In the prequels, 'The Great Detective' and 'Vastra Investigates' and in the e-book The Devil in the Smoke Vastra, Jenny and Strax more or less become the Holmes, Watson and Mrs. Hudson inspiration for Doyle's stories, a matter that Simeon indicates in his encounter with them here.

The encounter with Simeon is one of many that positions Vastra and Jenny, now married, as the antithesis of the Victorian values that Simeon epitomises. As Jenny points out, he remains a bachelor, the lonely patriarch looking after Victorian ideological dogma, the institutionalising of 'a selfish and materialistic creed' where 'wage-labour is not distinguished from slavery, investment from speculation, and entrepreneurial acumen from dishonesty and fraud'. (4)

The Victorian obsession with truth is also played out when the Doctor, dressed as Sherlock Holmes, arrives at the Institute to investigate further. The Doctor is no stranger to deerstalker and Inverness cape, as The Talons of Weng-Chiang illustrated, and Moffat's playfulness with the genre is reflected in the little musical riff that might belong in Sherlock and greets the Doctor's entrance as he masks his intellect with a series of daft deductions: 'do you have a goldfish named Colin?'

However, even though Simeon reminds him that Holmes is nothing but a fictional character, the Doctor effectively deducts the nature of this 'talking snow'. Later, the allegation from Strax that he is Holmes simply serves to emphasise the fact that the Doctor has become interested in the world again and, like Holmes, enjoys it when a problem needs to be solved.

Much of Vastra and Jenny's 'taboo busting' approach to the lives of Victorian gentlewomen in the prequels is also matched in their introduction to Captain Latimer and his family, with his depiction ('children are not really my area of expertise') shifting into the emotional inarticulacy of Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music and mirroring much of the male detachment of the Doctor and Simeon.

The word test sequence is also vital to understanding the notions of truth and honesty that Vastra and Jenny represent in the Victorian milieu. 'Lies are words, words, words' suggests Vastra during the interrogation with Clara but when Vastra claims that the Doctor will not protect her and does not interfere in the affairs of others, Clara simply replies: 'words'. This lying, Vastra's self-transparent subterfuge, draws out the truth that Clara suspects about the Doctor. And of course the trigger word here is 'pond' - the one 'impossible' word that would stir the Doctor into activity. This is underlined by the Doctor removing and staring at his glasses as he hears the word, the same glasses that Amy once wore.

'I never know why. I only know who.'

Clara's slippery association with telling the truth and lying are also a very Poppins-like defying of logic when she encourages the Latimer children to accept her stories of 'inventing fish' and 'being born behind the clock face of Big Ben'. This not only deepens the intrigue about her and her origins but it acts as an effective way to frame the story of 'the Doctor' who 'lives on a cloud in the sky' as the one dominant narrative for the children to believe in and that reinstates the Time Lord as the one man who can stop them having bad dreams. The reinstatement, of course, is symbolised by the bow tie which he doesn't even realise he's put on until he sees himself in a mirror.

Director Saul Metzstein captures much of the story in visually expressive terms. Clara's journey up the staircase has a magical quality to it and then our first glimpse of the new TARDIS interior is accomplished beautifully in one tracking shot following her through the TARDIS doors. The new interior of the TARDIS is an expression of the Doctor's retreat and another marker of certain traditions that The Snowmen is harkening back to, still expressing a Verne-like quality in the design while appreciating the simplicity of Brachacki's original TARDIS of 1963.

Cleverly, Clara's search around the outside of the TARDIS both replicates Rose's first encounter with the time machine and subverts it when Clara confirms, 'it's smaller on the outside'. The overlapping of the Doctor with Holmes, the Artful Dodger and Mr. Punch offers a delicious summary of the Matt Smith portrayal and the interplay between him and Jenna-Louise Coleman is sparky and agreeable. 'That's no more a box than you are a governess,' he retorts to her when she first describes the TARDIS. The deceptive appearance of the TARDIS is another appropriate expression of the mystery that surrounds Clara, the nature of things not being what they are a common trope in Moffat's narratives.

A layer of the mystery is briefly exposed when she sees the interior of the ship and asks if there is a kitchen, mentioning offhandedly, 'I like making soufflés'. Not only does this scene confirm that Oswin Oswald and Clara are connected but the importance of the umbrella to the escape from Latimer's house illuminates the subtle nature of the Doctor's choice to bring her with him. As he hands her the TARDIS key, he declares his recognition of her as companion material: 'I never know why. I only know who.' He has surrendered to the idea of travelling with a companion again and begs her to remember it.

However, Moffat subverts this scenario and, before Clara can officially take up her status as the new companion, he has her carried off by the frozen old governess and we see her plunge to her death. Not the usual scheme of things and a habit that Clara/Oswin can't seem to shake. We're reminded of this as she dies, when her and the Latimer family's tears psychically turn into rain and melt the snowmen, with a repeat of her last lines in Asylum of the Daleks: 'run, run you clever boy. And remember.' It's clearly an invitation for the Doctor to investigate this 'impossible' person.

For long term fans, these acknowledgements to the past offer the delicious possibility that the Great Intelligence which the Doctor defeats here, with the memory worm hidden in a tin decorated with a 1967 Tube map, is the origin of the force which will animate Yeti robots in Tibet and cover London in a web of fear. 'The dream outlives the dreamer,' gloats the Intelligence as it possesses the memory drained body of Simeon in an attempt to murder the Doctor. Those future encounters are proof that the nightmare of the Great Intelligence will live on even if the continuity might need to stretch a bit.

The Snowmen is definitely the best of Moffat's Christmas specials to date. The previous festive instalments lacked a certain scope, focusing as they did on specific characters who needed to repair their own human deficiencies, and it has been rectified by making the story a twofold narrative about an invasion and the ongoing mystery of a new companion. The period setting is beautifully created by production designer Michael Pickwoad and his team and Saul Metzstein turns it all into a visual feast. Vastra, Jenny and Strax are welcome participants too and there is a spin-off series clearly begging to be made. The story still reflects the Moffat signature - lonely children, dysfunctional families, childhood fears and a critique of conservative values - but tempers this with splendid performances from Matt Smith and Jenna-Louise Coleman who turn the reinstatement of the Doctor through his meeting with Clara into a fully rounded and emotional story. 'Watch me run' indeed.

(1) Christopher Parkes, Children's Literature and Capitalism: Fictions of Social Mobility in Britain, 1850-1914
(2) Cristina Pérez Valverde, Dreams and Liminality in the Mary Poppins Books
(3) Ibid
(4) G.R Searle, Market and Morality in Victorian Britain.

By the mid-1950s, Ealing Studios reputation was founded on its cosier comedy output rather than the subversive material of directors such as Robert Hamer and Alexander Mackendrick and their films Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and The Man in the White Suit (1951). It was writer T E B Clarke who probably did more to secure the "nostalgic and conformist" elements of their output, in films such as Passport to Pimlico (1949) and The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), and it is received wisdom that "Clarke's films come closest to the popular image of Ealing and conform with Balcon's stated desire not to attack established institutions too forcefully." (1)

T E B Clarke's The Titfield Thunderbolt, directed by Charles Crichton, is often considered the epitome of this relaxation of attitudes. It celebrates its 60th Anniversary this year and Studiocanal have re-released the film in a beautifully restored high definition transfer. While much of its charm lies in the depiction of rural England, shot in Technicolour, and the fantasy of the tightly knit community coming together to defeat what they see as the short sightedness of government modernity and nationalisation, the film attempts to stall the fragmentation and dilution of the upper classes and the gentlemanly old order that took place in the late 1950s and the effects Labour victory of 1945 that introduced such game-changing legislation as the 1947 Railways Act and the Agricultural Act.

... a fantasy of an Empire still untainted by war or consumerism

Former Cambridge law student Thomas Ernest Bennett ('Tibby') Clarke, whose career encompassed journalist (editing the British Temperance and General Provident Institution's monthly magazine before going freelance), door-to-door salesman, novelist and wartime reserve constable in the Metropolitan Police (until asthma forced his discharge), arrived at Ealing in 1942. His contribution to a book on British pubs, What's Yours?, used partly as an inspiration for the film Saloon Bar in 1940, had piqued the studio's interest in his work. It was Monja Danischewsky, director of publicity at Ealing Studios, who set Clarke to work on fixing problematic scripts before he eventually received a screen credit for script contributions on 1944's For Those in Peril and The Halfway House, Basil Dearden's propagandist ghost story.

After writing additional dialogue for the golf story sequence directed by Charles Crichton in the supernatural portmanteau film Dead of Night (1945), it was his first script for "the Ealing film that begs to differ" Hue and Cry (1947) that inaugurated his long association with Ealing comedies and set the template for the particular social structures, themes and characters that would dominate the idiosyncratic worlds of Passport to Pimlico, The Lavender Hill Mob and The Titfield Thunderbolt. It is a world where East End boys use their favourite comic book to round up criminals, rationing is temporarily abolished when a London community is annexed to Burgundy and a mild mannered bank clerk turns master criminal and melts gold bullion down into souvenirs of the Eiffel tower.

The inspiration for The Titfield Thunderbolt seems to have originated from 'Tibby' Clarke's visit, in 1951, to the restored narrow gauge Talyllyn Railway, a volunteer run service carrying passengers and slate on the coast between Towyn and Abergynolwyn, in Wales. Tom Rolt, the honorary manager of the volunteers running the railway, had also written a book Railway Adventure and this apparently inspired many incidents in Clarke's script, including the sequences where passengers are required to push the train carriages and the engine is supplied with buckets of water from nearby rivers and streams.

Ironically, when Clarke was writing The Titfield Thunderbolt in 1952, his neighbour at the time was Richard Beeching, then Director of ICI. In 1963, as chairman of the British Transport Commission, he was responsible for the infamous The Reshaping of British Railways report that paved the way for massive cuts to British Rail, then losing £140m a year, the closure of many local branch lines, of over two thousand stations and the loss of nearly 70,000 British Rail jobs. Protests from the kind of local communities that were epitomised in Clarke's story fell on deaf ears.

This was the first Ealing comedy to be shot in Technicolour and Crichton and his cinematographer Douglas Slocombe oversaw a six week location shoot in the summer of 1952. This included the use of a closed GWR line between Limpley Stoke to Camerton outside Bath and areas of Monkton Combe and Midford in Somerset for the railway sequences, including the viaduct and the cricket ground. The closed branch line station of Monkton Combe was redressed as Titfield and the Thunderbolt's destination of Mallingford station was filmed at the Bath Road Bridge end of the main platform at Bristol Temple Meads station. The scenes in Titfield village and church were completed at nearby Freshford and the duel between the steam roller driven by Sid James and train at the site of the former Dunkerton Colliery. (2)

The sequences involving the removal from the town museum of the Titfield Thunderbolt engine were shot at the now demolished entrance of Imperial College opposite the Albert Hall, using a wooden replica of the train. A genuine 1838 Liverpool and Manchester railway locomotive, the Lion, was used on location in Bath and Somerset. Woodstock High Street in Oxford was the setting for the stolen 1400 Class engine's drive through the village and for these sequences a replica 1400 engine was built onto a lorry chassis and included a prop fire box. The subsequent crash was shot in Richmond Park and involved an elaborate set up to get a shot of birds (pigeons hidden in special boxes) flying out of the tree when the engine crashes into it. (3)

Even at the time, the film offered a rose-tinted hue of the English sense of Arcadia, a fantasy of an Empire still untainted by war or consumerism. It is a gentle comedy that opens with the closure of the Titfield branch and the cessation of a train service relied upon and regularly used by the local community. A coach service, run by Alec Pearce (Ewan Roberts) and Vernon Crump (Jack MacGowran), seeks to exploit the gap in the market and replace the train with a modern, commercially aggressive operation.

However, Pearce and Crump find themselves in a battle to the commercial death when the local squire Gordon Chesterford (John Gregson) and Titfield's railway enthusiast reverend Sam Weech (George Relph) persuade wealthy drunk and self-made man Walter Valentine (Stanley Holloway) to back a volunteer passenger rail service by tempting him with a licensed bar on the train in lieu of his waiting for the pubs to open. Former train driver Dan Taylor (Hugh Griffith) is recruited and the community-run railway service is given a trial period much to the horror of Pearce and Crump who then set out to literally derail the entire endeavour.

Beyond the film's quaint, surface charm, one besotted with the romance of steam and a feudal dream of villages run by squires and vicars, there are a number of themes at work. As the film opens, Charlie the station master is handed a "death warrant" in the form of a poster announcing the closure of the line that places the film's events within the period where the cold hand of modernism was closing in on British Rail. The British Transport Commission (BTC) had already set in motion a plan to close the least used branch lines at the end of the 1940s just as 1950 Britain saw the end of petrol rationing and a boom in car ownership and economically rail passenger and freight services were beginning to decline.

The dominance of the road and the use of steam engines in their construction are represented perhaps by Hawkins (Sid James) and his steam roller: it blocks the squire's access to the station, it is used to block the line after Dan, Gordon and Sam start running their train service. It literally attempts to roll the past out of existence. As well as the steam roller, Crichton also introduces the Pearce and Crump bus company and their commercial intentions, as underlined by Pearce as he gazes upon the new coach he has bought: "five years from now they'll be calling this place Pearcetown."

The decline of trains handling freight might well be comically signalled by the gag in the opening sequence where the conductor of the train hurls a package defiantly labelled as 'fragile' across to Charlie and it crashes to the floor with the unmistakable sound of breakage. British Rail's imposition on branch lines is also clearly codified when the train threatens to leave squire Gordon behind on market day. He's four minutes early according to the church clock but the conductor reminds him that "British Rail is run by Greenwich not Titfield time". He retorts that his great grandfather built the railway "for Titfield not for Greenwich". Immediately, this branch line is shown more as the property of the squire and his community rather than a cog in a nationalised state industry.

The community's attempt to preserve tradition, and its eventual reliance on the Titfield Thunderbolt locomotive itself, is also highlighted early in the film. When Gordon breaks the news of the line's closure to Sam, Sam picks up a framed drawing of the Thunderbolt and looks longingly at it and mourns: "the oldest surviving branch line in the world. It's unthinkable. They can't possibly close it." These words would not be out of place in the mantra of the Railway Development Association, founded in 1951 and set up to fight the BTC's closures and who would gain ground when it came to fighting the Beeching proposals. The foreshadowing of the Thunderbolt's role is also made by Crichton in his filming of the transport inquiry, the engine dominating the foreground and background of many shots.

"the home of the amateur"

When Sam decides to disregard red tape and attempt to run a new rail company he again has to remind Gordon of tradition, in the form of his great grandfather who built the railway, in order to persuade him the legacy should not wither under the combined assault of state and rival bus company. After they recruit Walter Valentine via a purely selfish motivation of early doors drinking on the train and former train driver Dan through his sense of pride, Crichton defines the battle lines with Pearce and Crump looking on with disdain and a cut to the Ministry of Transport, the edifice of state that regards the volunteer group as "amateurs".

This is a point underlined by Pearce and Crump's own back of a wagon campaign "a victim of amateuritis". As it trundles through the pastoral Titfield, it suggests that state controlled transport policy is a patient in danger of dying on the operating table at the hands of those ill-equipped to operate. Ironically, at the time of the film's release, the American management expert David Granick's research in the 1950s had concluded that Britain was "the home of the amateur" and observed in post-war Britain an old fashioned management, based on the cult of the gentleman amateur, was stifling the drive towards modernisation. (4)

Modernisation and commercialism are the community's enemies and this battle is visually set up after the Titfield residents secure their line's reprieve. Crichton frames train and bus criss-crossing through the landscape, both bringing their villagers to the line closure inquiry, driven on by composer Georges Auric's jaunty, insistent themes. The inquiry itself is a dissection of inspired amateurs,  learning to drive trains, becoming guards through private tuition, commercial interests and union effrontery and labour protest. The squire Gordon reminds all that this battle is also about the deleterious effects of modernism and commercialism on tradition: "You realise you're condemning our village to death. Open it up to buses and lorries and what's it going to be like in five years time? Our lanes will be concrete roads, our houses will have numbers instead of names, there'll be traffic lights and zebra crossings..." Decades later and you could say his prophecy has come to pass with today's constant reports of the death of the high street and the various attempts to revive it.

This battle cry frames the rest of the film as it becomes a fight to overcome the various attempts by Pearce and Crump to scuttle the train service and deny the triumph of the amateur over the commercial professional through ideological and criminal proceedings. They rope in Hawkins to seek revenge after the train trashes his steam roller in a neat scene that parallels that other symbol of commercialism: television. In the village pub it just happens to be showing a western where a gang struggle to hold up a train as they too sit down to plot. Crichton matches a shot of the three cowboy gangsters on television with a shot of Pearce, Crump and Hawkins scheming away and later has Hawkins and Dan taking pot shots, in a surreal English parallel of cowboys and indians, as the train arrives to take on water.

Dave Rolinson suggests that 1950s British comedies sought to depict communities triumphing over ruthless business practices where "consumerism is the enemy of consensus, an alienating presence impinging on the value of work and, through the individualising agency of television, the domestic space."(5). Crichton shows the television transmission breaking down and the shot of the "normal service will be resumed as soon as possible" caption card suggests that the conflict is now in the real world, not just the fantasy of a western, and it is a fight to assert which service - amateur and non-profit or professional and commercial - will be resumed and ultimately successful.

The final hour becomes a fantasy of community solidarity - fixing up the station, preparing the engine - that attains its greatest significance when, first, water supplies are deliberately cut off for the engine and a chain of villagers, who seem to emerge from nowhere, attempts to fill it with water carried in any receptacle they can find, literally throwing the baby out for the bath water in one instance. Finally, when Pearce, Crump and Hawkins do eventually derail the engine, the community raid the local museum and bring an ultimate symbol of traditional values, the Titfield Thunderbolt, out of retirement to secure the traditions of the past in the present.

Before this, Dan and Valentine go on a drunken reverie, steal another 1400 engine and in the film's highlight, actually turn the engine into an all terrain vehicle, taking it off the rails in a witty moment where it crashes through an advertising hoarding for Guinness, depicting a cartoon figure holding up a steel girder and implying the stout is "for strength". The strength needed to smash the capitalist chicanery of their rivals, one presumes, and use the train to briefly replace the bus service by driving it down the high street, in a spectacularly incongruous vision, before it crashes into the trees and the two men are arrested, having "sinned in a good cause" according to reverend Sam.

The film concludes with the line's effort to pass inspection by the Ministry of Transport using Heath Robinson amateurism to run a service harnessing together the Titfield Thunderbolt and Dan's former home of passenger carriage. It is so precariously put together that rail stock is literally held together with string and at one point the passengers get out to push the train when it all comes apart. Their triumph with the Ministry is greeted by running white horses, squawking chickens, gangs of villagers, a disbanded cricket match - all in thrall to this symbolic act of self-preservation.

Crichton's film is a delightful whimsy and brings together a wonderful cast, many of whom had become Ealing regulars, including Stanley Holloway, Edie Martin, Sid James and John Gregson and many English actors who made their name in wartime British cinema. Crichton's light touch and visual sense capture a fleeting flavour of Englishness and a romantic view of rail travel that has long since vanished and was even something of an anachronism in 1953.

A perfect indulgence for a wet Sunday afternoon, The Titfield Thunderbolt remains, in reality, a celebratory backward glance to a pre-war parochial England and as Charles Barr notes, it is: "Timeless and self-sufficient - like the railway of the credits - going round in circles, protected from the world outside" and depicts a rose tinted view of community in 1950s Britain which was already conservative and static. It was a view that earlier Ealing comedies had successfully interrogated just as Britain strained to unite community stability with the demand for economic prosperity, modern services and appliances, better housing and physical and ideological reconstruction. (6)

(1) Jeffrey Richards and Anthony Aldgate, Best of British: Cinema and Society from 1930 to Present
(2) and (3) Alex Seal, The Titfield Thunderbolt (http://www.alextrack.co.uk/movies/the_titfield_thunderbolt/) and SimonCastens, The Titfield Thunderbolt (http://eis.bris.ac.uk/~liserc/tit.html)
(4) Judith A Merkle, Management and Ideology
(5) Dave Rolinson, ''If they want culture, they pay': consumerism and alienation in 1950s comedies' in British Cinema in the 1950's:An Art in Peacetime
(6) Charles Barr, Ealing Studios, A Movie Book.

About the transfer
Pinewood Post and Narduzzo Too oversaw the restoration of the film from a 2K scan of the 35mm re-combined dupe negatives and further details about that are here. I only had the DVD at my disposal for this review so my comments reflect the standard definition picture.

However, judging by the improvements that can be seen on DVD I expect the Blu Ray will show off the restoration even better. What we do get is excellent reproduction of the Technicolour, vastly superior to the quite faded version I last saw on DVD and correcting many of the colour registration issues. Douglas Slocombe's photography is well served, especially in his capturing of the Somerset and Bath locations and the green landscapes resonate and glow. The flesh tones are robust and the palettes for costumes and interiors are reproduced very satisfactorily. Detail is also impressive too in hedgerows and trees, on all the various trains, buses and cars and in the costumes, with their preponderance to tweeds and dog tooth checks. There are good contrast levels that afford the transfer depth and the requisite grain is present and correct. Naturally, with some sequences using back projection and optical mattes the picture quality does occasionally dip. The DVD provides a very enjoyable viewing experience.

Special festures
Making the Titfield Thunderbolt (9:13)
A brief exploration of the making of the film with Ealing critic Charles Barr, assistant director David Peers and draughtsmen Norman Dorme and Tony Rimmington. They discuss how Clarke was inspired to write the story, the cast, the shooting on location, finding engines and drivers and creating trains that could drive down high streets. Sound recordist Rex Hipple and David Peers also discuss the use of Technicolour and working with director Charles Crichton.
Douglas Slocombe Home Movie Footage (10:22)
A lovely record of the location recce and shooting courtesy of Slocombe's 16mm camera. The footage is accompanied by an interview with Slocombe that Matthew Sweet conducted in October 2012. Plenty of detail about the period and what Ealing demanded of the location. This shows the closed Monkton Combe station before the production transformed it into Titfield and the subsequent shoot in Woodstock of the engine running down the high street and crashing in Richmond Park. Slocombe and Sweet touch on the notion of a "disappearing England' that the film seems to capture.
The Lion Locomotive (5:40)
Liverpool Museum's Sharon Brown provides a welcome history of the Lion locomotive used in The Titfield Thunderbolt. Made for the Liverpool and Manchester railway, Lion survives to this day since leaving service and being sold to the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board in 1859. Brown relates the recovery and restoration of the engine, its film roles and taking part in the 150th celebrations of the railway and its return to Liverpool's Great Port Gallery.
Locations featurette (2:34)
A brief comparison between past and present of the locations of the film. Footage does not have a commentary and is backed by the film's theme music.
Douglas Slocombe on Charles Crichton audio interview (4:22)
Further material from the interview conducted by Matthew Sweet that focuses on Slocombe's thoughts about director Charles Crichton. Some amusing anecdotes about beards, sauce and punch ups in restaurants.
Stills Gallery
A selection of posters, publicity stills and behind the scenes images.
Restoration Comparison (3:39)
Split screen affair that demonstrates the picture and audio clean up. Of note is the correction of the Technicolour registrations and the reduction in some of the flicker in the image too.
Trailer (2:30)
Unrestored UK trailer. According to its narrator the Thunderbolt is "still blushing at the memory of the night when she was whistled at by Stevenson's 'Rocket'."

The Titfield Thunderbolt
Rank presentation of an Ealing Films Production 1953
Cert: U / Released 14 January 2013
DVD tech specs: Region 2 / Total Running Time: 80 mins approx / Colour PAL / Feature Aspect Ratio: 1.37:1 / Feature Audio: Mono 2.0 / English Language / HOH Subtitles / Catalogue No: OPTD2522
Blu-ray tech specs: Region B / Total Running Time: 83 mins approx / Colour / Feature Aspect Ratio: 1.37:1 / Feature Audio: Mono 2.0 LPCM / English Language / HOH Subtitles / Catalogue No: OPTBD2522

An atypical last flourish from Ealing Studios, Nowhere to Go (1958) was hacked by Metro Goldwyn Mayer and lost 15 minutes of its running time to accommodate it within a double bill on original release. Studio Canal offer the unmolested version of the film on DVD this month and serve up a welcome opportunity to witness the dying days of Michael Balcon's studio in Seth Holt's visually assured, downbeat film noir crime thriller.

Balcon had already sold the Ealing production base to the BBC in 1955 and had struck a deal with Metro to make films under the Ealing banner at Borehamwood. But by 1958 times were changing and the claim by Balcon to "go on making dramas with a documentary background and comedies about ordinary people with the stray eccentric among them - films about daydreamers, mild anarchists, little men who long to kick the boss in the teeth" didn't generate much faith about the studio's survival as new forms of British cinema arrived to take centre stage, leaving Ealing behind as an anachronism.

Writer T E B Clarke clearly understood that the Ealing heyday, with its focus on community, would find it hard to survive at MGM Borehamwood, "I don't think any of us welcomed the change. There was little hope of the old team spirit being preserved now that we had ceased to be a self contained unit and the intimate atmosphere of our previous home was sadly missing from the new bleak areas of characterless buildings." (1)

In an attempt to ring the changes, Balcon went looking for new blood and after reading theatre critic provocateur Kenneth Tynan's article about Ealing in Harpers magazine, entitled 'Tight Little Studio', he offered Tynan the post of script editor in 1956. The £2000 per annum job lasted two years and did not prove particularly fruitful for either Tynan or the studio, with Nowhere to Go being the only film he scripted that made it into production. His projects that fell by the wayside included a Nigel Kneale adaptation of William Golding's Lord of the Flies and Lindsay Anderson's script about a hospital ward.

Tynan co-scripted and adapted Donald MacKenzie's novel Nowhere to Go with Seth Holt. Holt had joined Ealing in 1943, invited there by his brother-in-law Robert Hamer. As assistant editor he contributed to Ealing's Champagne Charlie (1944), Scott of the Antarctic (1948) and Passport to Pimlico (1949) and graduated to editor on Dance Hall (1950), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), Mandy (1952) and The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953) and was associate producer on The Ladykillers (1955). By the time Balcon offered Holt the chance to direct Nowhere to Go, Ealing was in decline.

For what he considered as "the least 'Ealing' Ealing film ever made" Holt stylishly embraced film noir and Nowhere to Go is a worthy addition to a whole clutch of British noir crime thrillers that explore feverish paranoia, claustrophobia and a specific male crisis found, for example, in I Became a Criminal (1947), Brighton Rock (1947), Odd Man Out (1947), The Third Man (1949)and Night and the City (1950).

Nowhere to Go's examination of one thief's descent into desperation also provides a lineage between Ealing's own It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) and Hammer's later thriller output, especially Hell is a City (1960). This particularly vivid flowering of the genre seemed to articulate the concerns about the post-war increase in crime just as Harold Macmillan declared we'd "never had it so good" in the economic boom of the 1950s.

Nowhere to Go opens with a prison break, as Victor Sloane (Bernard Lee) silently negotiates a deserted railway station to go over the wall and break out accomplice Paul Gregory (George Nader, a handsome gay American actor who would benefit from Rock Hudson's lifelong friendship and estate). There is no music or dialogue, only the sound of muted conversation as prison guards leave their shift serenaded by trains roaring in the distance and dogs barking in a bravura slice of pure cinema. Holt and cinematographer Paul Beeson capture Sloane's progress in crisp black and white, during a boldly expressionistic opening as Gregory blows up his cell and goes over the wall, coolly supplemented with a downbeat jazz score from Dizzy Reece

He immediately becomes a man on the run and, after he finds his way to an apartment prepared by Sloane, Holt takes the opportunity to go into flashback as Gregory lies in the bath and recalls the recent past and a complex scheme to steal Canadian widow Harriet Jefferson's collection of rare coins, get jailed for the crime and stash the loot until he gets out. The back story is told in a pile up of short sequences, neatly compressing time, as Gregory's scam unfolds within an economic series of vignettes showing how he inveigles his way into Harriet's confidence. 

"nobody's gonna be on your side when it comes to doing much"

Nader plays Gregory with icy detachment, as an alienated anti-hero caught in the space of the film, within a cold architecture delineated early in the film by Holt and Beeson in some stylish camera set ups. As the original crime is detailed, figures and objects are placed either in extreme foreground or diminish into the background. Dizzy Reece's sleazy, brassy music is dropped into the film but does not dominate, offering a musical punctuation to the criminality unfolding on screen often driving Holt's editing processes and his increasingly off kilter and forced perspective vision, 

In the valuation office, when Gregory sells the stolen coins, his face dominates the left of the screen as his anxiety escalates, as he is suddenly aware that the office secretary may have spotted the bloody evidence of his break in, a finger cut on the broken glass of the coin case.

Holt's vision superbly articulates the growing anxiety of the central character as he ends up in jail longer than he expected and then, in a great twist, is threatened by his partner in crime, Sloane. In the apartment, the camera moves in planned geometric lines, often simply tracking left to right, an extended expression of the meticulously planned escape and scheme.

Changing identity is central both to the con and to the man and Gregory pretends to be the club footed Milligan when Bridget Howard (Maggie Smith in her first major film role) turns up at the flat looking for its original owner. His sloughing on and off of the stacked shoe to effect this disability disguises him from those overseeing the safe deposit boxes containing the proceeds from the sale of the coins. It is also perhaps an indication of the disabling and fracturing of his own masculinity. There is the shoe, the cut finger, the beating that Sloane gives him and a fateful encounter with the local farmer that symbolise the breakdown of his detachment and the flight from London to Wales.

Sloane too undergoes a dramatic change, from avuncular partner into threateningly cold con man out to secure all the money for himself. He had already disguised himself as Lee Henderson to con Harriet in the flashback and now Holt emphasises the descent into the darker recesses of Sloane's greed by shooting low, showing Sloane savagely knocking Gregory to the floor and then shooting from floor level as Sloane ransacks the flat looking for the money recovered from a safe deposit box. Noir inflections in the lighting, Beeson's photography and Holt's crisp editing make this one of the most striking scenes in the film with its skewed perspective unveiling raw criminality and troubled masculinity.

Gregory's revenge is equally raw. He breaks into Sloane's home and attacks his wife and then coldly calculates his own physical attack on Sloane in another brilliantly executed sequence. Sloane is shown in a doorway, peering down at a pile of sand that Gregory has placed on the hall floor until he's distracted enough for Gregory to cosh him over the head. Holt intercuts from close ups to a great shot of the two men in a doorway as Gregory moves the inert Sloane. Both men are shown as equally cruel and cold.

However, after Gregory ties up Sloane and his wife, he desperately searches, to no avail, for the key to the safe deposit box. Holt imbues this frustration with great psychological tension. A chiming Christmas ornament gets louder and louder on the soundtrack as he searches the home and Gregory momentarily pauses while looking at a painting of a girl, the metal ornament reflecting across it as the chime increases. It tracks his frustration to the point that he smashes the painting, losing his cool, his criminal identity fracturing under the pressure. Holt shows him sweeping bottles and glasses directly into the camera.

After this, the film tracks his desperate flight across London. He attempts to break into a Mayfair residence to steal its contents now that the money from his previous crime seems out of reach. Again, Holt and Beeson create a claustrophobic atmosphere, full of looming shadows, objects forced into the foreground, a labyrinth of doorways.

It's a psychologically tainted visual expression of Gregory's troubles, exacerbated by the arrival of the housekeeper who then calls the police when she discovers his presence. A superb shot shows Gregory at the top of the stairs watching the housekeeper speaking to the police, her turning to see him and in two close ups their brief exchange before he tears off out of the door and into the night.

He turns to various associates: a nightclub owner who has gone straight and then shops him after he gets one of his hostesses, Rosa (Andree Melly sporting a rather unconvincing Irish accent), to harbour him overnight, and a criminal gang, led by Sullivan (a lovely cameo from a pre-Steptoe Harry H. Corbett), rejects him out of fear they will be tainted by associating with him. His escape from Rosa's flat is well staged in a clamber across the rooftops at dawn after being woken by a cat, shown prowling on a ledge in the foreground, as the police arrive outside in the street.

Holt underlines the link between masculinity and the outcast or the transgressor with nationhood. When Gregory meets Sullivan the backdrop is Pall Mall and Mayfair, the city as an alienating presence when Sullivan informs Gregory that Sloane is dead and he has been elevated to the status of murderer.

He is now persona non grata, an isolated figure even in the criminal community where "nobody's gonna be on your side when it comes to doing much." It's then emphasised by Gregory's lonely figure walking away down the Mall. When Sullivan wishes him luck the film also continues its theme of fated goodwill that started with Sloane's 'be lucky' note in the apartment that greeted Gregory after his prison break out. It's a hollow form of luck that doesn't seem to do him any good at all and he is clearly a victim of fate right from the beginning. 

Gregory eventually meets Bridget again after a botched attempt to recover the money he has locked in a safe deposit box. She is the first person to whom he confides his failure and a woman we presumed was simply a minor character becomes a sympathetic figure, helping Gregory get out of London and hiding him in a cottage in Wales. Equally, Gregory generates some sympathy from the audience, becoming 'Greg' in the process, his detachment and ambivalence giving away to something approaching tenderness and compassion as they both discuss how he has cut himself off from "any decent human society". It all goes appallingly wrong, naturally, and his detachment is brought into sharp relief when on the drive to Wales he forces Bridget to run over a dog as they make their escape.

This is also a journey from city to country, briefly out of darkness into light, from the alienating forces within the urban landscape to a kind of natural release found in the regional space of the Brecon hills. However, even refuge in the cottage will not keep the forces of law and order away and his bleak odyssey is completed with a tragic anonymity as he dies slumped over the wheel of a lorry, losing control of the vehicle when a shotgun wound saps his remaining masculine vitality, all criminal solidarity and male power subtracted. It's ironic that the last shot is of Bridget walking off into the landscape, under grey skies, framed by factory chimneys belching out smoke, unaware of Gregory's fate as the one woman who could have loved him.

A rarely seen film, Nowhere to Go is a neglected gem and suggests that if Ealing had survived then Holt, like many of his predecessors at Ealing, may had found one way for the studio to look forward into the next decade. The film feels very much on the cusp of the 1950s and 1960s, its grittiness laying to rest much of the outmoded charm of the studio's earlier output. Nader is well cast, his stony faced detachment perhaps providing something of a one note performance and yet rather effective for a character that in the end only reveals a little of his inner self beneath an essential and calculating selfish masculine ambiguity.

He's supported by some recognisable British faces. Bernard Lee is excellent as the equally savage Sloane, Maggie Smith, in a BAFTA nominated performance, turns what could have been a limited character into an interesting female figure already caught up in the failures of one man only to become sympathetic to those of another and willing to subvert law and order to do so. As well as an early appearance from Harry H. Corbett also look out for Geoffrey Keen, as Gregory's nemesis Inspector Scott, and the likes of Glyn Houston, Noel Howlett and Lionel Jeffries.

(1) Charles Barr, Ealing Studios, A Movie Book

About the transfer
Paul Beeson's stylish, grainy black and white cinematography benefits from a decent presentation here in this digitally remastered edition. Contrast varies a bit, often becoming a bit grey and murky in places but on the whole is inky and solid. Picture quality does decline, as to be expected, when the film uses background opticals and that can be seen particularly in the sequences on Pall Mall. Overall though this is a decent transfer with very rare instances of specks of dirt and dust that is good on detail and atmosphere. A very enjoyable DVD viewing experience.

Special features

Revisiting Nowhere to Go (12:49)
Charles Barr charts the last days of Ealing, the work of Kenneth Tynan and the production of the film, including a few words on Reece's jazz compositions. First Assistant Michael Birkett recalls the shy Seth Holt as "the best brain" at Ealing and Tynan as a "very gifted creature" and Herbert Smith, Camera Assistant underlines something of Holt's drink problems that would eventually destroy his career.

Nowhere to Go
MGM presentation of an Ealing Films Production 1958
Cert: PG / Released 14 January 2013
Studio Canal DVD / Region 2 / Total Running Time: approx. 100 min / Black & White / Feature Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1 / Feature Audio: Mono 2.0 / English Language / Catalogue No: OPTD2400

An unusual diversion within Ealing's output of male dominated post-war comedies and war films, Dance Hall follows the fortunes of four working class women as they navigate the restrictions and turbulence associated with love, marriage, community and dance competitions. While Dance Hall can lay a claim to having an almost entirely female focus in opposition to the male groups featured in a large selection of Ealing films, and exclusively so in The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) for example, it is also worth highlighting the importance of female characters in other Ealing films such as It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), Cage of Gold (1950) and The Feminine Touch (1956).

Indeed, Dance Hall epitomises a series of films which reflect the choices women faced during a period of post-war reconstruction, after the restrictive and traditional roles within the family and at work had been partially relaxed and reinterpreted by wartime tribulations. Dance Hall focuses on women facing these challenges within a climate of change in post-war Britain, retaining their femininity, balancing their working lives with the boom in leisure while the option of "marriage as a career seemed under threat as evidenced by a dramatic rise in the divorce rate". (1)

These concerns were somewhat ill at ease with the general approach of Michael Balcon's studio, with Ealing described as something of a middle class, young gentleman's club and where Diana Morgan, the only female writer on staff and Dance Hall's co-writer incidentally, was referred to as "the Welsh bitch". (2) Morgan had had a successful writing partnership with husband Robert MacDermott, creating a string of witty and satirical revues, stage shows and plays during the 1930s before the call came from Ealing in the 1940s. As a freelance writer she was asked to add some interest to Ships with Wings (1941) but was put in her place by co-writer Patrick Kirwan, claiming the love scenes for himself while demanding she work on the sea battles. (3)

... the dance hall provides a gilded sheen to frustrated desires

Later, having prevailed this baptism of fire and noted for her naturalistic dialogue, she enjoyed a good working relationship with Angus MacPhail, one of Ealing's most talented writers, and they worked together on such notable Ealing fare as Went the Day Well? (1942) and The Halfway House (1944). Her only solo credit was for Robert Hamer's Pink String and Sealing Wax (1945), another Ealing film that highlighted a central female character and the talents of Googie Withers, and she regarded Hamer as one of the very few male directors working at Ealing who understood women.

Dance Hall was the last film she worked on at Ealing and the screenplay is credited to her, Alexander Mackendrick, who directed the second unit, and E.V. H Emmett, whose dulcet tones were more recognisable to audiences of Gaumont British Newsreels of the 1930s and 1940s and who would add his narration to Ealing's wildlife films with Armand and Michaela Denis.

Despite director Charles Crichton's apparent reluctance to direct Dance Hall, after ushering in the boom of Ealing comedy with Hue and Cry in 1947, he accepted the job presumably after some pressure and certain promises exerted by Balcon. Diana Morgan recalled that he was "bliss, lovely to work with - a lovely, funny man and very understanding" and while he may have regarded his efforts as workmanlike on the film, he does articulate the themes of the film effectively in visual terms.

He was assisted in this by Alexander Mackendrick, fresh from the success of Whisky Galore! (1949) and drafted in to handle the second unit filming, a function he similarly carried out on Basil Dearden's The Blue Lamp in the same year. Between them, and utilising Seth Holt's reknowned editing talent, the dichotomy between the post-war privations of day-to-day working and domestic lives and the glamour and aspirations of the dance hall is keenly described in the film.

The travails of the four female characters - Eve (newcomer Natasha Parry in a fresh and enjoyable performance); Mary (Jane Hylton); Carole (Diana Dors on the verge of breaking into the mainstream) and Georgie (Petula Clark making the transition from child to adult roles) - are defined by a mise-en-scène that captures the post-war popularity of mass entertainment (sport, cinema, holiday camps and dance halls) and a consumer boom where "the palais de danse was further evidence for this kind of consumer revival. It was the natural forum for boys to meet girls in a relatively classless setting of transatlantic relaxation." (4) 

The exoticism of the dance hall in the film provides a gilded sheen to the frustrated desires and marital tensions that the characters exhibit. It is a place of contradictions, where relationships are formed and also dissolve and break, where pleasure is sought to escape the drudgery of factory work in a palace constructed for profit. Escape is temporary and the brightly lit dance floor, band stand and bars give way to dark railway tracks, car parks, tenements and factories.

Indeed the opening titles of the film indicate how precarious the membrane is between these two worlds. The Chiswick Palais is in darkness, a cleaner sweeps between stacked up chairs, the band is tuning up but, as the credits for Geraldo and his Orchestra and Ted Heath and his Music appear on screen, the soundtrack swells with a romantic sweeping theme, full of promises. This is abruptly curtailed by a close up of a factory lathe and its deafening racket. Crichton tilts his camera up and pans across the four women desperately trying to sing above the din of the factory floor, straining to gain some pleasure as they work. Factory and domestic life punctuates the film, a 'crossing of the rubicon' between realism and palais de danse fantasy, and is a state to which all the protagonists must eventually return.

"At work they are subservient to their machines... overalls emphasis their working class status" (5) and Crichton then places these women within the crowded family tenement environment as each prepares for the dance hall. After they gather in the shadow of the Victorian building, transformed by their evening wear, the image dissolves to a tuxedo wearing drummer and, with a drum roll and a trumpet call, the camera glides towards the dance floor, above the heads of the dancers and comes to rest in a two shot of Eve and Mary. The film immediately establishes the female point of view and "the audience is positioned with them - we know why they do what they do". (6) Interestingly the two shot becomes a three shot at this point as Phil (Donald Houston in a confident and effective performance) joins them and embraces both women, foreshadowing one of the dilemmas of the story - Phil and Eve's stormy relationship and marriage - and Mary's centrality to its resolution.

Other opening scenes tell us about Georgie's relationship to her dancing partner Peter (Douglas Barr), at first simply a platonic one between competition dancers but then, through the course of the film and the stages of the dance competition, it grows into a fully fledged romance and engagement; and Mary's lack of success with men where she dances with a GI but parts with him at the end of the number unlike the others who retain their partnerships. Although we know little about Phil at this stage, when the bandleader announces an 'excuse me' this is the cue for another male character to enter the dance hall, the lothario Alec (Bonar Colleano) who literally does 'excuse' himself between Phil and Eve throughout the rest of the film.

Alec is representative of the "demonic, affluent Yank corrupting British society with natty suits, Benny Goodman records, and abrasive sexuality". (7) He is a reminder of the thriving black market during the privations of post-war rationing and his skills securing rationed goods reflect his attitudes towards women. Where Alec is an emblem of instant gratification and the devil of excess consumption, Phil represents the male struggle for modernity, a skilled aviation worker who looks to the future but is often absent and inept at dealing with jealousy and responding to Eve's desires.

These themes are emphasised by the sequence where he takes Mary on a motorbike ride into the countryside to watch the latest gliders and where Mary is further codified as the slightly older woman to whom Phil can confess his feelings of jealousy. Mary loves Phil but eventually sees him get married to Eve and, later in the film, this confessional is reversed when she uses her love for Phil to berate him for his stupidity and weakness in his treatment of Eve. It's also an opportunity for Jane Hylton to shine in the role, a symbol of unrequited love and loneliness in contrast to the other women who, by the end of the film have reconciled their relationships and through engagement to their partners.

Carole offers a comedic counterpoint to the other relationships and Dors is vivid in this briefest of appearances. In her search for a man, she dismisses several admirers (one of whom declares he's a married man) and stumbles across the silent and imposing figure of Mike. Mike does not say a word throughout the entire film and is perhaps symbolic of Carole's continual declaration "I'm finished with men." What she means is she's finished with men who can answer back, feeding her the usual dominant patriarchal attitudes and stubborness. As she later declares, "Mike's not a man, he's a mountain" and he mutely moves through the film as a force of nature determined to woo Carole and succeeds through entirely the materialistic draw of a diamond ring.

"you're only dreaming, what a fool you are" 

Alec's corruption of Eve is a particularly interesting element of the film as it also underlines how dancing and music trace the expressions of desire and the fulfillment of fantasy in the film for all of the female/male partnerships. Crichton and Mackendrick emphasise the knit of desire between the couples and dancing with close tracking and gliding shots of then and floor level shots of dancing feet intercut with close ups of the band's soloists and players. In an amusing little moment, even a cleaner is seen following the steps of a dance instructor during a lesson at the Palais. A skilled dancer, Alec literally waltzes Eve off her feet.

Later, as a pair of professional dancers perform the Tango, that old idiom 'it takes two to tango' is expressed in Crichton's evocative handling of Eve and Alec's one night stand. The tango dancers are framed in the middle of a reverse two shot of the couple as Alec caresses the back of Eve's head, almost emulating the passionate moves of the tango. This cuts to a shot of Eve's face that then pulls back into a two shot with Alec. He then signals her to look out of a window, their eye contact suggesting they leave the Palais for the silhouetted skyline beyond the filmy drapes. Once out of shot, Crichton tracks towards the window as the drapes flutter in the breeze.

The fantasy of the Palais has dissolved into the realisation of Eve's sexual desire back at Alec's apartment, the sometimes in tandem, sometimes in opposition interpretation of the tango captured in Eve's claim of "we're crazy. I must get back" as she changes her mind mid-embrace, makes for the door, halts and then, as Crichton holds on a shot of Eve's face, presumably chooses to return to Alec's bed. Eve makes a mistake because Alec is simply interested in sex and not long term commitment while at the same time Phil, the man who loves her, is driven into a jealous rage in a pub by the dance band music, a tune heard right at the start of the film in the Palais, playing on the juke box. Again, dance and music delineate the often ambiguous and corrupted nature of desire in the film.

As Christine Geraghty notes, the film underlines that Eve makes the wrong choice by sleeping with Alec and must make amends by marrying Phil because in this and similar films it is "impossible for the women to follow these individual desires for sexuality and glamour without colluding with the dubious morals of the men who represent such positions". (8) Otherwise these women would become pariahs in their own community. An early casualty of this choice is her ceasing participation in the dance championships.

Eve's marriage to Phil is something of a disaster because on the one hand she still years for the fantasy world of the Palais and its glamorous freedom and on the other she refuses to conform to Phil's demands on her to cease working at the factory and undergo her transformation into a married woman. Equally, Phil conducts his marriage at long distance, his work taking him away from home, and his jealousy is easily manipulated by Alec who continually reminds him of Eve's transgression.

When Eve does return to the Palais, a solo singer informs her "you're only dreaming, what a fool you are" as she makes her way through the crowds and the mise-en-scène is rendered in very high contrast lighting, full of shadow. At the same time, Alec wanders into this dimly lit fantasy, a noir figure redolent of the song's "an old refrain" lyric as he spots Eve contemplating the singer and the song, now clearly a warning not to indulge in her fantasies. Sadly, on her return home she finds an angry Phil, dismissive of her return to the Palais and again jealous of Alec.

Simultaneously, post-war rationing also becomes quite symbolic: Alec devours enough food for twelve people in a fit a pique over Eve's abandonment of her wifely duties and this anger is stoked when, later, he discovers Eve has bought and served up Alec's black market kippers. There is a notion here about control and autonomy within the domestic sphere, where transgressive consumption has emotional and economic consequences. When Eve picks the kippers up from Alec's apartment, the song she heard at the palais is playing on the record player and she again contemplates the choices she's made and the things she can't have. However, at this point she realises that she feels nothing for Alec and is perfectly happy to tell him. His angry reaction, unseen by her, is to hit the record player and cease the syrupy and sentimental song.

With Eve and Phil's marriage in tatters, the film concludes with two very effective sequences - a double resolution of the melodrama - as a New Year's party brings matters to a violent and almost tragic end. The jollity of the New Year's party is shown as a strange, orgiastic masquerade, the party continuing as Eve confides in Mary about their troubles. She in turn berates Phil for his weakness, for being "stupid and cruel... thick headed and smug".

At the same time, Alec attempts to convince Eve of his own jealousy. Crichton intercuts big close ups of frenetic brass players, a singer informing the audience about the alleged realities of marriage with the lyric "when you walk down that aisle, you better find yourself a sickly smile" and a party crowd in the throes of bacchanalia. In contrast, Eve is shown wandering empty, shadowy corridors, a visual equivalent of her hysteria and emotional overload.

Symbolically, she attempts to find a way out of the maze of these darkening New Year fantasies and perhaps accept the conforming social structures of marriage and community. As 'Knees Up Mother Brown' blasts on the soundtrack and a band member turns to the camera wearing a Frankenstein mask, a surreal expression of this Palais nightmare, she bursts through an exit door and finds herself leaning over a railing, looking down from the rooftop as below her a train speeds by. Crichton slowly zooms on her sweat and tear covered face, the train's whistle dominating the soundtrack, and intercuts a close up of a trumpet player as the nightmare of the New Year revelry merges with this urban soundtrack and the contemplation of her alternate choice: suicide.

Simultaneously, Phil and Alec meet in the car park and, despite Phil's attempts to rationalise the situation, they fight. It's again lit in the style of film noir, full of heavy shadows and high contrast, with a gritty edge used in direct juxtaposition to the dream world of the Palais. The neon sign of the palais is in the background as they tussle amid the deserted cars. It is disconcerting that Phil manages his weakness and stubborness through violence and attempts to wring a confession about the one night stand from Alec. He demands to retain his fixed male position. Crichton matches shots of the sweat beading on Phil's brow with that on Eve's as she turns away from the rooftop.

Amusingly, the averted tragic ending is punctured by physical comedy as she finds herself locked out, attempts to get back into the building through a side window, loses a shoe standing on a broken box and ends up with a soaking after pulling a drain pipe off the roof. As midnight arrives, she's dirty, wet, cold and alone as Crichton intercuts quick shots of the other happy couples - Carole and Mike, Georgie and Peter - and then takes great delight in showing Eve venting her utter frustration and about to hurl the broken box at the door. Phil bursts through the exit to embrace her as she yells, "Oh, I hate you, I hate you!" and the drain continues to gush water in the background. Some have commented on this melodramatic reconciliation as rather overtly Freudian in tone, suggesting that the water is a symbol of constrained fertility finally released.

Dance Hall ends with all the women, except Mary, finding a possible escape in the traditional conformity of engagement and marriage but the film offers a fillip to the experience, showing some relationships being reworked "through the experience of rationing and harsh economic restraint into an acknowledgment of what the hard work of domestic life and the lack of warmth in marriage felt like." (9) It's not an earth shattering conclusion to make but at least the film attempts to show that the perceived escape routes and assumed roles for women in the post-war world could be questioned and analysed through such melodramatic entertainments.

(1) Christine Geraghty, Post-war choices and Feminine Possibilities in Heroines without Heroes:
Reconstructing Female and National Identities in European Cinema, 1945-1951
(2) Melanie Williams, The Feminine Touch? in Ealing Revisited
(3) Jo Botting, Diana Morgan - BFI Screenonline
(4) Kenneth Morgan, Britain Since 1945: The People's Peace
(5) Philip Gillett, The British Working Class in Post-War Film
(6) Christine Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the 'New Look'
(7) Tony Williams, Structures of Desire: British Cinema, 1939-1955
(8) Christine Geraghty, Post-war choices and Feminine Possibilities in Heroines without Heroes:
Reconstructing Female and National Identities in European Cinema, 1945-1951
(9) Christine Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the 'New Look'

About the transfer
A fairly clean looking transfer to disc with good contrast and detail and only the occasional white speck popping up on the image. A very enjoyable presentation. The only thing that mars this is the quite hissy and crackly quality of the mono soundtrack which is a bit of a concern at the beginning of the film but seems to settle down later. It seems to handle the reproduction of the music dominating the film reasonable well though. 

Special Features

Remembering Dance Hall(11:06)
Charles Barr reflects back on his own estimation of Dance Hall and considers how the film has grown in stature with social historians and film scholars as more complex and important than he previously realised. He looks at how writer Diana Morgan attempted to redress the balance of the male-dominated stories in Ealing's output, at Charles Crichton's own reluctance to direct and its reflection of post-war female social mores and their connection to community and articulation of desire.
Behind the Scenes Stills Gallery
A selection of posters, portraits and production stills from the film.

Dance Hall
General Film Distributors present an Ealing Studios Production 1950
Cert: PG / Released 21 January 2013
Studio Canal DVD / Region 2 / Total Running Time: approx. 78 min / Black & White PAL / Feature Aspect Ratio: 1.37:1 / Feature Audio: Mono 2.0 / English Language with HOH Subtitles / Catalogue No: OPTD2398

The Reign of Terror marked the end of the first season of Doctor Who and its making was fraught with particular difficulties at a time when the series' future was in the balance. As director Henric Hirsch attempted to record its six episodes in July 1964, the decision to renew the series beyond a proposed break still hadn't been made and its production at Lime Grove was also creating a number of logistical nightmares.

On Terry Nation's recommendation, story editor David Whitaker turned to writer Dennis Spooner to develop a story which would replace an abandoned serial about the Spanish Armada. After completing his National Service, Spooner had briefly attempted to get a comedy double act career with Leslie Garbon off the ground. Comedian Harry Worth advised Spooner to try breaking into script writing after Spooner had sent him material on spec and this led to work on radio variety programme Workers' Playtime (BBC 1941-64) and television scripts for Coronation Street (ITV 1960-) Bootsie and Snudge (ITV 1960-63) and Tony Hancock's attempt to revive his television career in ITV's Hancock in 1963. Spooner met Nation during the 1950s while both were scripting radio shows.

By the time Whitaker approached him, Spooner had also made the transition to writing for children's television programmes and other prime-time dramas. He had amassed significant writing credits on a raft of Gerry Anderson productions, including Supercar (ITV 1961-62) and Fireball XL5 (ITV 1962-63), and completed a number of contributions to The Avengers (ITV 1961-69), No Hiding Place (ITV 1959-67) and Ghost Squad (ITV 1961-63). In March 1964, he met with Whitaker to discuss a proposed story set in 1794 and during the French Revolution, an idea originally suggested to Whitaker by William Russell. Spooner would eventually replace Whitaker when he left the series in October of that year and in August he was already officially trailing Whitaker as the penultimate episode of The Reign of Terror was being recorded and as he prepared his last production as story editor, The Dalek Invasion of Earth, a serial eventually held over for the start of Doctor Who's second season.

... cackling peasants, dank prison cells and guillotines are present and correct

The Reign of Terror was commissioned in April 1964 and planned as the story that would open the second season with a proposed six-week break in production after The Sensorites. However, the story ended up as the last of the first season when Chief of Programmes Donald Baverstock curtailed the production break and planned it for later in the year. After many production wrangles with Lime Grove's studios, which were still proving to be unsuitable for the production of the series and accommodating its large scale sets, it was agreed that not only could Doctor Who avail itself of the smaller TC3 and TC4 at Television Centre but production could be moved to Riverside Studios in Hammersmith.

The first four episodes of The Reign of Terror, which went into studio in July 1964, were recorded in the narrow confines of Lime Grove Studio G and the remaining two were mounted at TC4, much to the relief of cast and crew who were struggling in the hot, cramped conditions at Lime Grove. The scripts were also structured to allow for William Russell's holiday break and his brief appearances in episodes two and three were filmed at Ealing Studios prior to his absence. This filming also included the model shots of the burning farmhouse for episode one. 

This also marked Doctor Who's first journey beyond studio confines with location filming taking place at Denham Green after Production Assistant Tim Combe was requested to track down an appropriately 'French looking' avenue of poplar trees as the backdrop to the Doctor's walk to Paris in episode two, 'Guests Of Madame Guillotine'. Stand in Brian Proudfoot emulated Hartnell's mannerisms and walk during the June location shoot, derived from close observations of Hartnell during recording for The Sensorites and much to the lead actor's irritation according to Carole Ann Ford in the DVD's documentary.

Considering the problems, in hindsight it is a wonder why Hungarian émigrée and experienced theatre director Henric Hirsch was chosen to direct The Reign of Terror. His selection was at Verity Lambert's suggestion after she'd seen his work, either on an edition of First Night 'Goodbye, Gloria, Goodbye' (transmitted in March 1964) or Festival's 'Bloomsday' which went out on the 10 June. As the DVD documentary and Tim Combe's commentary suggest, while working on these plays he was used to plenty of rehearsal time and a stately pace for studio recordings and hadn't had much experience directing television, having only recently completed the BBC's director's course when the Doctor Who gig arrived.

Reportedly not enamoured of Doctor Who as a series, he apparently didn't hit it off with Hartnell, the mounting pressure of the schedule and technical complexities severely affected him and Combe found him collapsed from nervous exhaustion after being taken ill during the recording of episode three 'A Change of Identity'. No one is quite sure who directed episode three and Combe suggests either John Gorrie or Mervyn Pinfield took the reins until Hirsch recovered to oversee the final three episodes. Gorrie's name was apparently on the paperwork but he had always disputed his involvement. Despite this, Hirsch's work on the serial is solid and competent if heavily influenced by his theatrical experience.

As The Reign of Terror completed recording, Donald Baverstock decided to renew Doctor Who for a further thirteen episodes and the next two stories due to be recorded, Planet of Giants and The Dalek Invasion of Earth, would thus be held over to open the second season after a seven week break that followed the transmission of The Reign of Terror episode four 'Prisoners of Conciergerie' on 12 September 1964.

Dennis Spooner certainly sets about putting his own idiosyncratic stamp on the historical serials by mixing up the period drama with some highly enjoyable whimsy and dark humour. Borrowing heavily from Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel and Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities (cackling peasants, dank prison cells and guillotines are present and correct) and capturing something of the early Bond films in the story's concentration on espionage, code names and double agents (Stirling... James Stirling), Spooner also manages to transmit some of the fear and paranoia running through Revolutionary Paris, providing a sense of intrigue and danger about who of the many supporting characters are friends or foes of the TARDIS crew, or both.

The series' view of history also alters little here even though Spooner would eventually refashion it. In Marco Polo, the past was both educational and a mysterious, spectacular place to visit and in The Aztecs history was used as a lesson about altering the course of time and attempting to change a civilisation's destiny.

Heavily influenced by David Whitaker's dictum on non-interference in events, The Reign of Terror proposes that historical events are something our time travellers simply have to survive through and where, as the Doctor explains to Barbara, "the events will happen just as they are written... we can't stem the tide but at least we can stop being carried away in the flood." However, that attitude would change completely once Spooner took over as story editor and meddling in history was, soon after, up for grabs.

The First Doctor still retains an element of danger about him, is still the alien with a steely purpose and even here at the end of the first season the character continues to gather form, often surprising the viewer with his attitudes and actions. The TARDIS scenes in the 'The Land of Fear' show a gruff, quite rude and irascible Doctor so the process of his mellowing that will come to the fore in later seasons isn't quite complete. However, humour also becomes part of that process and it's there at the beginning as Ian and Barbara mock the Doctor's ability to control the TARDIS. Barbara brushing down the Doctor's coat and putting her arm around his shoulder is a witty and tender moment.

As Andrew Pixley notes, "When pacing his scripts, Spooner opted to use humour for selected scenes in order to break up what he felt was a very long plot" and certainly the characters of the overseer and the jailer provide these breaks. The other surprising thing is how brutal the humour is, epitomised in the scene at the roadside where the Doctor wallops the greedy overseer over the head with a spade and then places coins in his eyes and, later, when he similarly assaults the jailer. This again not only exploits Hartnell’s talents as a comic actor but also parallels the Doctor's motivations in An Unearthly Child where he used violence to solve an immediate problem.

Hartnell’s at the height of his powers again and seizes the script’s emphasis on the Doctor’s mischievous, mercurial qualities in the bleakly witty scene where he tricks the works overseer at the roadside and in the way he haggles with the tailor to acquire his period costume or hoodwinks the jailer at the Conciergerie. The scenes with the jailer, where he's vainly sporting the outrageous hat and costume of Regional Officer of the Provinces, provide a visual and verbal treat. It also helps that he's sparring with the likes of Dallas Cavell as the overseer and the Yorkshire accented Jack Cunningham as the jailer.

Humour is vital because it gives Hartnell a chance to shine and add some sparkle to what are rather grim proceedings. 'The Land of Fear' shows grim reality enclosing around the characters as the French farmhouse they explore is raided by Robespierre's troops and then burnt to the ground but by 'Guests of Madame Guillotine' Jack Cunningham's jailer is coming on to Barbara in a cloud of bad breath (watch Jacqueline Hill's reaction to the old lech) and the Doctor's tramping across Buckinghamshire-en-France to some jaunty tunes courtesy of Stanley Myers. The contrast is enhanced visually when Henric Hirsch also juxtaposes a shot of the Doctor being forced to wield a pickaxe with the tax dodgers at the roadside dig and Barbara's efforts to hack her way through the prison cell wall.

However, poor Susan is down in the dumps and, boy, she lets us and Barbara know it, with the result that Barbara points out, "I've never heard you talk like this before, You're usually so optimistic." Carole Ann Ford does what she can but it is clear the writers, including Spooner and Whitaker, have run out of ideas for Susan and judging by the material here it is little wonder Ford decided to leave the show shortly after. It's also a bit rich that Ford was told off by Henric Hirsch for being too maudlin in her acting and her justifiable reflection of Susan's sorry predicament.

Susan spends pretty much all of The Reign of Terror as a weak, whingeing and pathetic creature rather than the super clever, resourceful alien woman she should be and Ford wanted her to be. She’s rubbish at digging out of her prison cell while facing the resident rats and when the chance comes to escape from the tumbril taking her to the guillotine she complains she’s got a headache and flops around all over the place. That the character gets sidelined into a prison cell thrice in one story is obviously symptomatic of the writers not knowing what to do with her at a time when, as Donald Baverstock was vacillating about his decision to renew the series, he was also discussing the fates of Susan and Barbara in the series if it did continue. At this point Hartnell has certainly become the centre of the show and two foils, in the form of Barbara and Ian, seem more than adequate to provide audience identification.

'A Change of Identity' witnesses a similar change of gear in the story and an intriguing guessing-game of 'spot the traitor' begins with the introduction of Lemaitre (James Cairncross), Léon Colbert (Edward Brayshaw sporting some swish threads), and double act Jean and Jules (Roy Herrick and Donald Morley). The foetid conditions of the Conciergerie are briefly replaced by candle-lit interiors and intimate conversations over wine and maps. Sadly, The Reign of Terror was one of the many victims of the BBC's archive purges of the 1970s and episodes four and five - 'The Tyrant of France' and 'A Bargain of Necessity' - were not retained and we have a much reduced appreciation of performances and production, particularly Keith Anderson's turn as Robespierre. 

... eyes roll a little too enthusiastically and seem very glassy, as if everyone's been on the vino

However, these episodes have now been animated, a co-production by animation company Theta Sigma, Big Finish and Pup, and we can now watch a visual approximation of the soundtrack. The animation is stylish, particularly resembling 18th Century woodcuts in the use of heavy shadows and areas of white and grey space to define faces, but it is limited.

The backgrounds, depicting the interiors of Jean's house, Robespierre's office and the prison are the highlights of the work undertaken. One of the oddest things about the animation is how the eyes of the characters look and react. They roll around a little too enthusiastically and seem very glassy, as if everyone's been on the vino. Still, the efforts here are very worthwhile and capture the atmosphere of the story well, driving it forwards effectively enough.

These dialogue heavy animated episodes tend to be driven by a reliance on cutting between close ups of faces, often reduced to extreme views of mouths and eyes, and the feel of these two episodes, by their very nature, is quite different from the originals that survive. As their own 'bargain of necessity' they tend to be focused on delivering the dialogue as economically as possible rather than attempting to faithfully replicate a camera script. Henric Hirsch didn't use many of these close ups and or much brisk cutting for example but then it probably would have been far more time consuming and expensive to try and replicate the visual flow and timing of scenes à la 1964.

Roderick Laing's set designs tend to be divided between the well executed, candle-lit period interiors and the less successfully realised exterior streets and jail cells. The downside of restoring these episodes is having the latter revealed too readily as painted flats, their lack of dimensionality often betraying their theatricality. They still generate an appropriately squalid, gritty and tangibly claustrophobic atmosphere and help to define the drama but realism isn't their strongest quality. Daphne Dare provides some superb costumes too, from the flamboyant frills of the revolutionaries and royalists to the grungy, dirty looking attire of the jailer and the peasants.

As the story progresses, Spooner avoids piling in loads of research about the French Revolution and simply attempts to tell a rollickingly good adventure story using certain elements of historical fact (or not) to provide verisimilitude along the way. However, he does mix the personal and the political in the affection between Barbara and Léon which takes on a dramatic turn when he is revealed to be a traitor. Barbara and Ian's argument about judging people by their causes provides an anchor within the turbulent times the companions find themselves in.

The subject matter doesn’t have the glamour of Marco Polo and The Aztecs and six episodes probably wouldn’t do it justice if the story adhered rigidly to the political complexities of the period. Spooner therefore relies, perhaps slightly unsatisfactorily if you're an ardent history buff, on a presentation of the situation that is, forgive the pun, very black and white, making the royalists the good guys and the revolutionaries the baddies. Barbara does try and address this by arguing that the revolutionary cause and the revolutionaries were far more complicated than actually presented here, especially in light of Ian's pragmatic attitude to the shooting of Léon.

When Spooner connects Napoleon directly with Robespierre’s downfall, it is merely an instance of dramatic licence to add a bit of flavour to the final episode which is primarily Ian and Barbara having a thrilling time undercover as inn-keepers. This licence provoked some complaints to the Doctor Who production office from the Napoleonic Society decrying the Emperor's involvement in the events at 'The Sinking Ship' inn. Mind you, Robespierre getting shot in the gob at the end of 'Prisoners of Conciergerie' is factually accurate so what you lose on the swings you gain on the historical roundabouts.

As well as the excellent work from Hartnell, there are a couple of stand out supporting characters too. His comedic manipulation of Jack Cunningham's Yorkshire jailer is an undoubted highlight and Cunningham is brilliant as the jailer, swerving between truculence and sycophancy. James Cairncross is perhaps rather theatrical, verging on the wooden, as Lemaitre but, dare I say it, he's quite 'Stirling' support and Edward Brayshaw is very suave and dissembling as Léon. It is a genuine shock when he turns out to be a traitor. Tony Wall also makes an effective Napoleon in the final episode. William Russell and Jacqueline Hill are solid as a rock next to Hartnell and Hill is one of the series' greatest assets in these early stories and gives a rounded, warm and compassionate performance here.

This is a grim, black humoured story and it does outstay its six episodes despite Spooner's efforts to keep the gears of the story moving along but the whole is bookended by some heartwarming repartee between the Doctor and companions that puts a definitive seal on the first season of the series. That lovely voice over at the end of episode six, against a backdrop of stars, says it all: “…our destiny is in the stars, so let's go and search for it”.

Sources:
Shannon Patrick Sullivan, The Reign of Terror - A Brief History of Time (Travel)
Andrew Pixley, DWM Archive - The Reign of Terror, Doctor Who Magazine #204
Tise Vahimagi, Dennis Spooner, BFI Screenonline
Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles, About Time: The Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who Seasons 1 to 3

Special Features
Commentary
Toby Hadoke moderates a fascinating batch of commentaries. It's a revolving door of guests that starts with Tim Combe, Carole Ann Ford and Neville Smith (the ill-feted Dargenson of episode one). Combe is highly informative about his work on the story and the crisis that faced director Henric Hirsch and he's worth listening to. Ford recalls the team spirit of the quartet she was part of and the initial success of the series. They are joined by Jeffrey Wickham (the equally ill-feted Webster who snuffs it in his prison cell) for episode two and he evokes fond memories of telesnapper John Cura and an appreciation of Stanley Myers' score. Caroline Hunt (the maid Danielle) pops in for the third instalment and dredges her memory about what was her first television job and the conversation with Combe returns to the directing of this episode which resulted in Hirsch's collapse and whether John Gorrie or Mervyn Pinfield eventually picked up the reins. The animated episodes offer something of a change: 'The Tyrant of France' is a conversation with acclaimed actor Ronald Pickup who played the duplicitous physician in the episode and it's an evocative chat about his early career and skills as an actor; 'A Bargain of Necessity' features missing episode hunters Paul Vanezis and Philip Morris and an intriguing personal history of recovering lost television, including what remains of The Reign of Terror and other gems from the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation. For anyone interested in how such recordings were recovered it is essential listening. Last episode 'Prisoners of Conciergerie' features Patrick Marley (a briefly seen soldier) with Combe and Ford.
Don't Lose Your Head (25:05)
Another of Chris Chapman's fascinating featurettes takes you behind the scenes on The Reign of Terror with actors Carole Ann Ford, William Russell and Production Assistant Tim Combe. This covers the trials and tribulations that director Henric Hirsch encountered working on the serial and how Combe found locations in Denham and eventually had to share much of Hirsch's burden. He also contemplates the question of who completed the work after Hirsch fell ill during the recording of episode three. Russell and Ford chat about their admiration for the guest cast, recall navigating leaking, bucket strewn rehearsal rooms, the cramped studio conditions at Lime Grove and Hirsch's abrasive relationship with Hartnell. Overall, an illuminating exploration of the strains and stresses of recording television in the early 1960s to which Combe in particular makes a significant contribution.
Robespierre's Domain Set Tour (2:45)
A show reel of the excellent animated backgrounds created by Austen Atkinson's Theta-Sigma animation company. Providing a tour of the recreated sets, this demonstrates some of the period detail that went into the backgrounds for the two animated episodes.
Photo Gallery (4:11)
Great selection of colour and black and white production stills. The colour material is particularly lovely and there are plenty of images of Roderick Laing's sets for the interiors and streets.
Animation Gallery (3:40)
Character and costume sketches and a series of frames from the animated episodes.
Production Text Subtitles
Essential reading about the 'televising of the revolution' courtesy of Nicholas Pegg who provides a flood of details about the production, the script, the cast and crew and the eventual fate of Doctor Who in August 1964.
PDF Materials
Radio Times listings for all six episodes and a brief preview of the story.
Coming Soon
Trailer for The Ark in Space Special Edition. 'Wirrn! Wirrn! Wirrn!'

Doctor Who: The Reign of Terror
BBC Worldwide / Released 28 January 2013 / BBCDVD 3528
6 episodes / Broadcast: 8 August – 12 September 1964 / Black and White / Running time: 102:14

 

After pursuing a successful career as a cinematographer, director Mario Bava's relationship with Italian horror films began rather inadvertently with I Vampiri (1956), the first Italian horror film of the sound era, where he replaced the original director Riccardo Freda. After similarly rescuing Jacques Tourneur's The Giant of Marathon (1959), he was offered his own directing assignment and, inspired by Hammer's horror output, elected to make La maschera del demonio (1960, aka as Black Sunday or The Mask of Satan), a black and white horror classic that rivaled the evocative output of the British studio.

His catalogue then embraced horror and thrillers (Black Sabbath, Baron Blood), science fiction (Planet of the Vampires), westerns, spy-fi (Danger: Diabolik) and action films (Hercules at the Center of the Earth). He is also credited with kick starting the 'giallo' thriller sub-genre in 1962 with La ragazza che sapeva troppo (aka The Girl Who Knew Too Much) and Sei donne per l'assasino (aka Blood and Black Lace) in 1964, both of which would have a huge influence on directors such as Dario Argento.

As writer Troy Howarth notes, "No matter what the subject matter, Bava's obsession with key themes like the deceptive nature of appearances and the destructive capacity of human nature shone through, and his wholly distinctive visual style endeared him to a generation of film fanatics."

... a breathtakingly visual expression of Bava's ideas

Lisa and the Devil, Bava's fever dream of a film made in 1973, was the second collaboration with producer Alfredo Leone after Leone and Bava had enjoyed international success with Baron Blood in 1971. On Lisa and the Devil Leone afforded Bava a generous budget, his biggest at $1million, and more or less left him to his own devices, giving him freedom to express himself without bowing to commercial concerns.

With Bava seeing the film as a chance to capture a personal summation of his achievements as a film maker, location filming took place in Toledo (the cathedral is featured heavily in the opening scene), the backstreets of an Italian village, Faleria, and the interiors included a villa in the Frascati region of Rome and a semi-derelict castle on the outskirts of Madrid.

The Faleria location, as Tim Lucas notes, has a direct connection with Bava's earlier film Kill, Baby... Kill! (1966) which not only used the same village's winding back alleys to depict its night time environs of Karmingen but also reflects the premise and characters of Lisa and the Devil with its Gothic stylings including a signature shot of a malevolent entity looking through a window, hand pressed against the glass.

It comes as no surprise then that the writers of Kill, Baby... Kill!, Romano Migliorni and Roberto Natale, developed the first drafts of Lisa and the Devil as The House of the Devil which Leone and Bava then worked on together, with the final script credited to them both. Natale was not best pleased about his missing credit on the film as can be evidenced in the documentary on this release.

German actress Elke Sommer also returned from Bava's Baron Blood to play the eponymous Lisa Reiner, a tourist who alights from a bus in Toldeo and is engulfed in a highly charged, logic-defying nightmare. She finds herself trapped in a mansion where multiple murders, death, reincarnation and a hundred year old necrophilic Oedipal triangle between a son, his wife and his mother are fused with a mise-en-scène full of symbolism and "allusions to religion, mythology and art history". (1)

Sadly Lisa and the Devil only ever played at the Paris Theatre during the 1972 Cannes Film Festival and received a limited theatrical release in Spain. It failed to pick up a distributor and the film was deemed a failure when Leone struggled to sell it. In 1973, Leone persuaded Bava to shoot entirely new scenes to include in the film in response to the success of William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973), which was becoming influential on an entire sub-genre of horror and, at Leone's urging, Bava apparently flew to London to see a screening.

Bava agreed to adding the new scenes but he refused to oversee any sequences that featured profanity and nudity when Leone planned to introduce a framing story, riddled with cliches of the 'demonic possession' sub-genre, about the Elke Sommer character's possession by the devil and a visiting priest, played by Robert Alda, who comes to exorcise the demon in a Rome hospital. Apparently, Bava rehearsed and set up the shots and then left the set and placed the direction of the new scenes in Leone's hands. He even attempted to persuade Sommer not to perform in such scenes.

Much of the abstract and lyrical Lisa and the Devil, shorn of approximately twenty minutes, operated as a nightmarish flash back for Lisa in the newly edited film which emerged as 1975's The House of Exorcism. It enjoyed some success in drive-ins and grindhouses in America and secured distribution and sales to the UK, Europe and the Far East but its notoriety as a cheap Exorcist rip-off is its only lasting reputation. The original cut of Lisa and the Devil, considered lost, didn't see the light of day until after Bava's death and the removed footage was recovered and restored to the film even after the original negative was destroyed by Allied Artists when Leone sold the film rights for television distribution.

Photographed by Cecilio Paniagua, Lisa and the Devil is often a breathtakingly visual expression of Bava's ideas. The plot is elliptical, non-linear and bizarre and begins with Lisa wandering away from the group of tourists in Toldeo who have been drawn to look at a fresco of the Devil carrying away the dead. The Devil resembles the film's other star, Telly Savalas and she encounters him, as Leandro, in an antique shop. There, he oversees the construction of a dummy and she briefly sees the Devil of the fresco superimposed over Leandro's face while an ornate music box, symbolic of the medieval danse macabre, plays in the background.

After wandering through the back streets in an increasingly agitated state, Lisa again encounters Leandro carrying the dummy and the music box. The Devil and the dummy are both reincarnated figuratively as a reflection of the fresco, and the dummy is transformed into the flesh and blood form of Carlo.

Carlo (Espartaco Santoni) greets Lisa as "Elena" and she, confused by this stranger's familiarity, knocks him to the ground. Again this foreshadows the reincarnation and familial anxiety sub-plots that are revealed towards the end of the film and Bava emphasises a close up of Carlo's broken pocket watch, a recurring image suggesting a temporal fracture is at the heart of the film's disjointed and absurd dream world. As Tim Lucas notes in the commentary, Bava's visual lexicon takes in paintings, clocks, mirrors and other artifacts that "often prefigure a triumph over time and allusions to reincarnation". (2)

The fracture in time is evident when the film cuts from day to night and sees Lisa, now lost in the back streets, acquire a lift with a married couple Francis and Sophia (Eduardo Fajardo and Sylva Koscina). After the car breaks down, their chauffeur George (Gabriele Tinti) takes them to an isolated mansion and they are inculcated within the household overseen by a blind Contessa (Alida Valli) and her neurotic, psychologically unhinged son Maximillian (Alessio Orano). The rather beautiful Orano, sporting an outrageously winged white shirt, plays a role originally intended for Anthony Perkins. Perkins presence would perhaps have over-emphasised the elements of Psycho played out here between domineering mother and psychopathic son.

As the film progresses, the mysterious and ghostly Carlo reappears at the mansion and we understand that Sophia and George are lovers and Maximillian has the hots for Lisa because she is the incarnation of a lost love, Elena. Leandro, now a lollipop sucking butler to the Contessa (this was before Savalas adopted it as his Kojak motif), is collecting mannequins of each of the principal characters to construct the danse macabre, a symbolic last supper for the souls in the mansion before the Devil carries them off.

The film increasingly becomes hallucinatory and the marooned characters start killing each other off, each character symbolic of a transgression that becomes the Devil's due. As Lisa descends into a dream, she is plunged into the past and manifests as the Elena sought by the mysterious Carlo. Bava reveals that Lisa is both the reincarnation of Carlo's wife and Max's lover as the family's sexually tainted past bubbles to the surface.

... death and time dominate, doppelgangers and substitutes litter the film

Max goes on a rampage and he not only bludgeons Carlo and Sophia to death but also chloroforms Lisa in an attempt to have sex with her on a bed next to the skeletal remains of Elena. Confronting his mother about the rather tawdry family history, he kills her but then meets a decidedly sticky end himself when, seemingly reanimated, she glides towards him.

Lisa reawakens in the derelict remains of Elena's bedroom and, emerging back into present day Toldeo, the local children believe her to be a ghost from a hundred years ago. But her trauma is far from over... The Devil/Death has been chasing Elena ever since she evaded him and, even reincarnated as Lisa, she will not escape again.

Kevin Heffernan sees the danse macabre symbolism - in the music box, the mannequins and the group of characters - as central to the film and Leandro is emphatically a Devil/trickster figure, a symbol of death, who "summons a group of humans to their fate in order of their earthly prominence" and where the music box and its circling wooden figures reflect the criss-crossing of the beginning and end of time and the collection of representative mannequins, flesh and wax gathered by Leandro in the mansion. (3)

The Dance of Death, the collecting of bodies and the arrangement of souls are familiar motifs in Bava's other films, such as Black Sabbath (1963) and Blood and Black Lace (1964), and the dance is visualised in the arrival at the mansion as the guests walk in a line through the grounds, reflected in a lake as they cross a bridge or in the last supper codification at the end of the film when Max joins his fellow souls at the table. As Tim Lucas notes, Bava's obsession with duplicates and mannequins also reflects a childhood memory of his father Eugenio's workshop where he would carve likenesses of the saints and where he found a dummy in a workshop drawer. (4)

Death and time dominate, doppelgangers and substitutes litter the film - the production design by art director Nedo Azzini and set decorator Rafael Ferri makes use of legions of stuffed animals and birds, sculptural features such as cupids, lions, female figurines and various clocks and mirrors. The mansion is encrusted with funereal Art Nouveau glassware, candelabra, statuary and ornately framed portraits. Characters also gaze into mirrors or are reflected in surfaces, a symbol of the thin membrane between reality, dream and the temporal ellipsis that the film constantly plays with.

For example, the twin figures of Lisa and Sophia, both wearing yellow, are shown as reflections before they physically enter adjoining scenes. Sophia is superimposed over a chiming grandfather clock and then her tryst with chauffeur George is framed in the open lid of a silver cigarette case while Lisa is seen doing her make up in a mirror and inadvertently knocking a pocket watch onto the floor, the broken time piece recalling her first encounter with Carlo and the crossed fingers underlining the split in time at the centre of the film.

Later, Maximillian is shown bringing a slice of chocolate cake to Elena's bedroom by opening a mirrored door to the room, a lover entering a transgressive past that is meant to be forgotten ("did you know he was back...? I will not let him come between us again") and a portal into his own tortured mind and soul which is given full vent in the next scene in Carlo's study.

Leandro is also captured as a reflection in a pool of spilled wine after a bottle falls to the floor during the dinner, suggestive of the spilled blood that will decorate the rest of the film, and he is seen again on the bridge over the lake where Bava pans down from him to the water as he throws his lollipop into it, shattering momentarily the depiction of his tricky, elusive nature.

The notion of deceptive appearances and of reflections is echoed in the blindness of the Contessa, particularly in the scene where Leandro describes Lisa's face to her as she tentatively reaches out to feel the profile of her guest. She is an apt symbol of the surrounding decay of the gloomy mansion and gardens, trying to maintain the fiction that nothing has happened even though her blindness could be symbolised as a punishment for the transgressions of her strange family.

This surreal, oneiric film is also brimming with Bava's virtuoso control of the camera and editing. At the dinner in the mansion he goes for a vertiginous overhead shot of the table and the dinner guests, another visual reformulation of the carved figures on the danse macabre music box which is repeated at the end of the film when Leandro's collection of souls is gathered together.

During an intensely melodramatic moment, as Max burns a photograph of Elena, Bava jump cuts back and forth between the photo and Lisa to emphasise the connection between the living and the dead. Bava uses a circling camera and lushly romantic palette in Lisa's regression into the past where she, as Elena, meets Carlo in the grounds of the mansion and, finally, there are many beautifully lit and impressive tracking shots and cuts as various characters meet their doom in the corridors of the decaying mansion. The latter were clearly an influence on Argento's Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980) as was Bava's penchant for intense colour and use of primary reds, greens and blues.

The film's sepulchral intensity is perhaps best achieved in the very disturbing scene where Max, having anaesthetised Lisa, takes unsuccessful sexual advantage of her as she lies naked next to the rotting remains of Elena. This attempted rape scene is suffused with necrophilic allusions and Max's behaviour suggests of the necrophile what he "truly desires is to hold onto something transitory, the illusion of beauty" in the face of his domination over an inert body. 

Sexually frustrated, Max wants to regain his male power over her and demands Elena/Lisa remains as "permanently and eternally unchanging" as the mannequins the Devil composes for each guest at the mansion. The shot of the frozen clock in this scene seems to underline Max's desire to hold on to his encounter with Lisa, to make time stand still long enough for him to deal with his sexual inadequacy. (5) Elena, of course, has the last laugh in this remarkable sequence. 

Most of the performances hit the right note and, in particular, Telly Savalas is wonderfully sardonic and mercurial as the lollipop sucking figure of Death. Sommer exudes serenity, innocence, bafflement and terror as Lisa is overtaken by the dark dream of her situation and becomes a Sleeping Beauty trapped by destiny. Alessio Orano is perfect as the son trapped by his own spiral into psychopathic destruction and the Contessa allows the magnificent Alida Valli to effectively convey the decay of maternal and female power in the family. These and Bava's control of light, colour, camera and editing techniques are given greater resonance in the distinctive score and its use of the pop variations of Concerto D'Aranjuez by the Paul Muriat Orchestra and Carlo Savina's title composition To Mirna, dedicated to his wife. 

Lisa and the Devil is a conundrum, a beautifully styled psychological and symbolic contemplation of death, mortality and sexuality. Don't expect copious blood letting (try The House of Exorcism for some gorier material not included in this television cut) or Gothic horror elements such as vampires and monsters. Mind you, some of the murders towards the end of the film are pretty vicious and graphic in and of themselves. This is a personal film for Bava, his exploration of a waking dream steeped in death that skews the horror film into art cinema and is a reflection of his own work, summarising, recreating and referencing his back catalogue.

(1) Kevin Heffernan, Art House or House of Exorcism? in Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style and Policitcs, ed. Jeffrey Sconce.
(2) Tim Lucas commentary, Lisa and the Devil DVD
(3) Kevin Heffernan, Art House or House of Exorcism? in Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style and Policitcs, ed. Jeffrey Sconce. 
(4) Tim Lucas commentary, Lisa and the Devil DVD
(5) Anthony Ferguson, The Sex Doll - A History

About the transfer
There are definite differences between the footage of Lisa and the Devil in the original film and the The House of Exorcism. Both are enjoyable viewing experiences but the former looks grainier and slightly less defined. This may have something to do with the origins of the version of Lisa and the Devil that exists, presumably a dupe of the cut prepared for television after Leone sold the negative to Allied Artists. The transfer on Lisa and the Devil is plagued intermittently with white specks of dust and dirt and the layers of contrast are inconsistent, with some scenes offering a charcoal grey instead of a robust deep black. However, colour is represented very welland is rather sumptuous on both versions of the film. Detail is slightly better on the Lisa and the Devil footage in The House of Exorcism.

Special Features
The House of Exorcism (1:31:26) Three and a half weeks additional shooting with Bava and his son, Lamberto, allowed Leone to frame Bava's original material for Lisa and the Devil as an extended flashback from the scene of the possessed Lisa ranting and railing in the back of an ambulance and in a hospital room. As a trashy exploitation flick this is enjoyable in its own way and Sommer's vomiting, throwing up frogs and her use of some very colourful language are now rather hilarious. You have to hand it to her for putting in a bravura performance in the new footage. However, it does no favours to Bava's elliptical, ambiguous and dream-like poem of a film although Bava and Leone should receive some kudos for returning to the villa in Frascati to shoot the final sequences of Exorcism and tie them together with Lisa and the Devil.
Audio Commentary on Lisa and the Devil 
This is detailed exploration of the film by Bava biographer and expert Tim Lucas, originally produced for the 2007 Anchor Bay DVD release, and is packed with detail about the development of the film, Bava's personal investments in it, the symbolism of the imagery as well as biographical details about the cast and crew. An absorbing listen.
Audio Commentary on The House of Exorcism 
From the 2000 DVD release. Producer Alfredo Leone and star Elke Sommer discuss the production of Lisa and the Devil, Bava's humour at the expense of his American producer, the influence of Bava's father on the film ("we built a film around these mannequins, around his father's statues"), Sommer's involvement in the film and Leone and Bava's failure to sell the Lisa and the Devil. He recalls sending Bava to London to see The Exorcist, hiring new writers and bringing Sommer and Bava back to film new material for The House of Exorcism. Leone defends his decisions all the way but acknowledges that Bava disagreed with them. An equally fascinating listen that sheds much light on the making of both films.
Introduction to Lisa and the Devil(3:31)
Author and critic Alan Jones describes the film as a "subtle and personal masterpiece" and notes the influences of Krafft-Ebing'sPsychopathia Sexualis, Lovecraft and Dostoyevsky on a "lushly lyrical" film. The film's failure was, according to the very superstitious Bava, down to the purple dress worn by Alida Valli.
Introduction to The House of Exorcism(2:56)
Alan Jones poses the question: "judge which one you think is the better version for yourself" and praises the re-shot and re-edited exploitation film as among "the finest achievements that Italian horror has to offer." I'd have to disagree. 
The Exorcism of Lisa (25:05)
Assistant Director Lamberto Bava, screenwriter Roberto Natale, Roy Bava and Alberto Pezzotta discuss the making of both versions of the film. Plenty of background about the survival of Lisa and the Devil beyond its re-editing as The House of Exorcism and many reflections on Bava's craft as a director, the development of the film, its nostalgia for a Gothic sensibility that was already passé  in the 1970s and its narrative influences from, among others, Klossowksi's 'The Baphomet'.
Deleted Scene (2:35)
The Sylva Koscina and Gabriele Tinti sex scene in its full, soft porn glory and the inclusion of which Bava very much disapproved of.
Unfinished Lisa and the Devil trailer (3:19)
A trailer in progress, abruptly halted when no distributor picked the film up, and it remains an interesting curiosity as the film never got a full theatrical release.
The House of Exorcism trailer (3:18)
Hilarious. "Don't break my balls, priest!"
The House of Exorcism U Cert trailer (1:15)
The same trailer without all the effing and blinding. Plus, booming Bill Mitchell voice over!
The House of Exorcism Radio spot (00:59)
Bill Mitchell earning his pay packet again. "Rated R. Under 17 not admitted without parent!"
Reversible sleeve
Featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Graham Humphreys
Collector’s booklet
Featuring new writing on the film by critic and author Stephen Thrower illustrated with original stills and archive posters

Lisa and the Devil - 1974
The House of Exorcism - 1975
Euro America Produzioni Cinematografiche - Leone International - Roxy Film - Tecisa
Arrow Video Dual Format Blu-ray and DVD Edition / FCD757 / Released 4 February 2013 / Cert: 18 / 1.85:1 / Colour / High Definition Blu-ray (AVC 1080p) and Standard Definition DVD presentation of both versions of the film: Lisa and the Devil and The House of Exorcism producer’s cut / Optional English and Italian audio on Lisa and the Devil / English SDH subtitles on both features and a new English subtitle translation of the Italian Audio of Lisa and the Devil / Region B/2

Mario Bava, a cinematographer of some repute by the mid-1950s and heavily influenced by his father Eugenio's accomplishments as sculptor, set designer, visual effects technician and cinematographer in Italy's silent cinema era, made the transition to directing through uncredited work on several films in the post war period. Bava gained his early directing experience often by stepping in at the eleventh hour to turn round beleaguered productions he was hired to photograph or provide effects for.

Director Riccardo Freda hired Bava as cameraman and effects designer on I Vampiri (1956), the first Italian horror film of the sound era, after the two friends had decided it was time to return to the horror genre since horror films had been previously banned by the fascist regime in the 1930s and 1940s. Convincing the film's backers that they could shoot the production in 12 days and get the censor to pass the script, Freda set to work. Only half the film was completed in the allotted schedule and the production company refused to allow him an extension to continue production. He abandoned the project and Bava took up the reins, finishing the film in two days.

After uncredited directing work on La fatiche di Ercole (1957, aka Hercules), Ercole e la Reina di Lydie (1958, aka Hercules Unchained) and La battaglia di Maratona (1959, aka The Giant of Marathon) he once again found himself working with Freda, as cinematographer and effects technician, on Caltiki il mostro immortale (1959, Caltiki the Immortal Monster). After two days, Freda once again vacated the director's chair and Bava replaced him. Freda later claimed this was a deliberate choice because he wanted to give Bava, a man too modest to realise his ambitions, an opportunity to direct.

... family corruption, doppelganger descendants and female power 

Lionello Santi, the founder of Galatea, the distribution company for three of the films that Bava had rescued, was impressed enough with Bava to approach him to select a project for his directorial debut proper. At the same time the huge success of Hammer's revival of the Gothic horror film with The Curse of Frankenstein (1958) and Dracula (1958), with their emphasis on colour, sensuality and gore, influenced Bava's direction. He combined his admiration for Terence Fisher's Dracula with a very loose adaptation of 'Viy', a Nikolai Gogol story written in 1835 about three students terrorised by an old witch that Bava had read to his children to scare them at bedtime.

His four page treatment retained only the Russian setting and the demonic witch from Gogol's tale and this was developed by screenwriters Ennio De Concini and Mario Serandrei into The Mask of Satan (aka Black Sunday, 1960) with the film's Italian title La maschera del demonio an affectionate play on the Italian release title of Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein– La maschera di Frankenstein. The film emerged as a full blooded homage to the aesthetics of both the classic Universal horror cycle of the 1930s and the transgressive style of Hammer.

Serandrei, particularly, was a huge influence on the narrative structure of the film because he was also Bava's film editor and worked with him again in a similar capacity on Black Sabbath (1963) and Blood and Black Lace (1965). As Tim Lucas reveals on the commentary star Barbara Steele also shed some light on how Bava and Serandrei put the film together and how the cast never received a complete script and pages for scenes would arrive on the day of shooting. This reflects what Lucas believes was Bava's jigsaw puzzle methodology used to shoot and structure the film.

Produced over a six week schedule, shooting commenced March 28, 1960 at Titanus Studios in Rome where Bava and Freda had made I Vampiri in 1956, and the film's exotic exterior locations were created with exquisitely designed sets built on sound stages although some exteriors were shot at Prince Massimo's Castle, Arsoli in the Lazio region of Rome. Bava, with an eye on the international markets being conquered by British horror films, cast ex-Rank contract players Barbara Steele and John Richardson in the lead roles. They had appeared together in Bachelor of Hearts (1958) and then Rank, unsure of what to do with the two actors, sold their contracts to Fox. Steel had just walked off the Elvis picture Flaming Star (1960) when Bava came calling.

As Steele recalled of her and Richardson's casting and journey to Rome: "It’s very odd that we both ended up being in the film. I couldn’t understand why I was there. I had a little spread in Life magazine, and I think Mario Bava saw one of these photos. Anyway, he invited me to go to Rome, where I’d never been, and I must say I’ve never recovered. (1) Richardson, an ex-male model, would eventually work for Hammer as the male lead in She (1965). However, Bava found Steele something of a handful to work with. Her lack of punctuality and reticent attitude delayed work.

She and fellow actor Arturo Dominici, playing the demonic vampire villains Asa and Javutich, were originally fitted with sharp vampire fangs but these were abandoned when the rushes revealed how fake they looked. Steele argued about her wig, had it changed a number of times, struggled to understand the Italian crew and, for an intimate scene with Richardson, was reluctant "to allow them to tear open my dress and expose my breasts, so they got a double that I didn't like at all, so I ended up doing it myself - drunk, barely over eighteen, embarrassed and not very easy to be around." (2)

Samuel Z Arkoff and James H Nicholson of American International Pictures were always looking for European films they could squeeze onto double bills with their own product and, after seeing the film, they snapped up the rights to The Mask of Satan for $100,000. AIP edited, re-dubbed and re-scored the film, losing about three minutes from various scenes including the opening torture sequence, the staking of Kruvayan's eyeball and Prince Vajda's close encounter with a fireplace. The implications of an incestuous relationship between Asa and her demonic brother Javutich were also erased and some dialogue was made more audience friendly. The romantic score by Roberto Nicolosi was replaced by what was considered a score more in keeping with the horror genre from Les Baxter. Retitled as Black Sunday, it made its US debut on February 15, 1961.

British audiences would have to wait until 1968 to see the film, re-cut and released as Revenge of the Vampire. The film was submitted to the BBFC by Anglo Amalgamated in 1961 but John Trevelyan and his readers gave the film a tough ride and demanded many cuts. After a second submission, they refused to give it a certificate and the film was effectively banned until 1968, deemed unsuitable for exhibition. A fully uncut version only emerged in 1992.

The sensibilities of the 1960s audiences would still have been tested by the re-cut Black Sunday as Bava reinterpreted the Hammer aesthetic with an even greater emphasis on violent and gory content. It is a testament to his abilities that he married this sensationalism with a lush homage to the studio bound horror movies of the Universal era and introduced many of his own recurring narrative motifs. The power of The Mask of Satan / Black Sunday lies in its themes of family corruption, doppelganger descendants and female power coupled with Bava's extraordinary, kinetic camerawork and editing.

He demonstrates this admirably from the start with the still startling torture sequence set in 1630. The witch-vampire (the film doesn't quite make its mind up whether she's either or both) Asa (Steele) is being condemned to death by her brother and the Inquisition for consorting with her demonic lover/brother Prince Javutich (Arturo Dominici). A voice over explicitly underlines the crisis within the family as "brothers did not hesitate to accuse brothers" of dabbling in witchcraft and vampirism. Immediately, Bava's themes of incestuous destruction within the family unit, ancient family curses and the struggle between overt female sexual power and a reactionary, fearful patriarchy are set up as Asa curses all those yet to be born in her Vajda bloodline. Her punishment is to have 'the mask of Satan' hammered onto her face.

What's extraordinary about this scene is how Bava provides Asa's subjective view of the approaching mask and its interior spikes. His camera is static as the executioner brings the mask closer and it covers the screen and a transitional edit then reverses the viewpoint and we see the mask being brought towards Asa's face. Bava intercuts close ups of the interior of the mask, again showing us the hideous spikes inside from her viewpoint. The moment when the mask is struck onto her face retains its visceral, graphic power to this day.

"whether we want to or not Bava has made us children hiding our eyes at the movies." 

This prologue not only "introduces an eye motif and an injury to the eye motif that carries throughout the picture" (3) but it also sets the stage for the film's battle between feminine power and declining patriarchy. As Angela Connolly notes of the archetypical destruction of the female monster in horror: "If the staking usually represents a moment of narrative closure and restoration of order, here it is Asa's mutilation and her furious reaction to her brother's betrayal that sets in motion the plot suggesting that the disorder comes not from feminine evil but from the way in which patriarchy treats women." (4) Peter Hutchings also sees the mask as a form of female castration, an emblem of the male institution's urge, religious in origin, to curtail female power.

Her resurrection some two hundred years later is at the hands of Professor Kruvayan (Andrea Checchi), the representative of scientific knowledge and initially the Van Helsing savant figure, and his young, naive assistant Doctor Gorobec (John Richardson). Kruvayan, full of male pride, inadvertently disturbs Asa's resting place while fighting a bat, carelessly spilling his blood into her coffin, removing the religious symbol of the cross and the imprisoning mask that hold her in check. Kruvayan's hubris is exploited by the revived Asa and he falls under her control as she seeks to replace her descendant Princess Katia.

Gorobec, who falls in love instantly with Katia as soon as he sees her, then allows his romantic allusions for Asa's double to cloud his judgement. At the film's climax he is unable to tell them apart and only until the villagers and their religious leader arrive does he understand the distinction between them. Likewise, Katia's troubled father, the Prince Vajda, fails to protect his children and becomes a vampire under Asa's influence. Patriarchy crumbles before a woman who for most of the film exerts her power from within the tomb, gradually fuelling her furious revenge and only properly emerging towards the end of the film.

As Asa seeks to seduce Kruvayan, she is initially set free during a spectacular burst of her own revived subjectivity. Her will power and boiling sexual energy shatters the coffin in which she is entombed. Bava then provides a disturbing, doublingly horrific and erotic vision of a dead woman in the throes of orgasmic revivification, a bosom heaving medusa clawing her way back into life. The film's central concept of the double or evil twin reproduces this moment in a later scene where Gorobec carries the unconscious Katia back to her bedroom, having fainted at the sight of her dead father's corrupted face, and where he unbuttons her dress as she pants and heaves back into consciousness.

Bava continues to play with the double or twin motif in the film and initially fools the audience into thinking that Asa has been revived immediately after Kruvayan's molestation of the tomb when he and Gorobec are confronted by her double, Katia, in a remarkable, painterly image as she stands with her dogs in the ruins of the chapel beneath a stormy sky. Asa and Katia are also replicated in paintings in the film, one in the main hall of the castle and another, depicting a naked Asa, hiding one of the many secret passages that lead from the fireplace.

With Steele playing both Asa and Katia, Connolly believes Bava was attempting to blur the boundaries between feminine 'evil' and 'good', those sought by a patriarchy which demanded of women the presence of an evil Otherness. Certainly, that Otherness is here represented by the terrifying face of Asa, full of holes and bubbling eye sockets, and the seduction of Kruvayan with erotic kisses that codify a necrophilic longing typical of Bava's signature. Katia too is almost the victim of incestuous desire where her father, cursed by Asa, revives as a vampire and attempts to consume her as she mourns by the side of his coffin.

Asa and Katia are aspects of this distinction where "Asa is a powerful and dominating subjectivity with agency and will... and Katia is marked by her lack of vitality... and her total dependency on male agency to save herself." They mirror each other: Asa can only be revived by becoming Katia and Katia will only have will by "reintegrating the Asa-like aspect of herself." (5) However, even Steele recognised that female subjectivity would ultimately be constrained by such films and that male order and the family structure would eventually be restored: "The dark goddess can't just go on wreaking hubris and havoc ad infinitum, she gets her comeuppance too." (6)

This struggle occurs within a spectacular mise-en-scène wherein the eye motif, mirror images and reflections reoccur. Asa's dead eyes disgorge insects and hypnotise mortal men, and vampires are despatched by gruesome stakings through the eye. The mask itself is seen reflected in the Prince's hot toddy and, as Kruvayan meditates beside a pond, a dissolve shifts between the pool of water and Asa's opening eyes and commandments.

When Katia looks through her hands as her dead father revives as a monster, Bava again presents it subjectively and creates a view through her fingers. Tim Lucas evocatively sums up this moment on the commentary: "whether we want to or not Bava has made us children hiding our eyes at the movies." 

The importance of fairy tales to Italian horror cinema can be seen through much of The Mask of Satan's running time. As Danny Shipka notes, "Bava was able to create a film that would appeal to a variety of cultures as a fairy tale for adults with its mystic far away castles, fog-shrouded forests, ghosts and hidden adult sexuality."(7) The resurrected Javutich kidnaps Kruvayan with an enchanted coach and horses that on arrival glides in slow motion through the misty forests, recalling the powerful imagery of Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête (1946).

The young girl sent out to milk the cow just as Javutich rises from the grave and who must travel through an enchanted forest to complete her task is clearly a Red Riding Hood figure too. The 'evil twin' theme featuring Asa and Katia is also an example of the fairy tale demonstrating its ability to describe the humanising process of such moral stories, telling us what we lack and how we can repair that deficiency, evoking the uncanny in a familiar world and offering us situations that are both frightening and comforting.

Bava creates a dream-like spell in The Mask of Satan and locates the film on the unstable axis of the uncanny and the homely. When Kruvayan and Gorobec set out to explore, he patiently employs a 360 degree pan around the crypt to emphasise the uncanny Gothic space of the ruined chapel, re-codified as a potentially threatening feminine space when they discover Asa's tomb. Yet, when they then meet her double Katia upon their departure this female agency becomes romanticised and contrasted by Roberto Nicolosi's beautiful piano based theme.

When Bava introduces Katia's father Prince Vajda (Ivo Garrani), his camera describes the interior of Vajda castle as Katia plays the romantic piano theme. What is initially presented as a domestic, familial scene becomes more and more troubled. The camera whisks by Katia and her brother Constantine cleaning his hunting rifles and glides toward the roaring fireplace and a high backed chair, its occupant unseen. As the camera moves in, the fireplace is central and bordered either side by huge portraits of Asa and Javutich - it is the hearth as a symbol of traditional family activity but troubled by the ancestral, incestuous curse of the witch and her brother.

To underline this, Bava then reveals the Prince as a deeply troubled, introspective man gazing into the firelight and his fears are scored in the form of the discordant, ghostly note that Katia hits on the piano. The fireplace, with its ancestral symbol of the dragon, also becomes the centre of chaos and provides a passageway into the bowels of the castle and to Asa's tomb, transforming the heimlich (the homely) into the unheimlich (the uncanny, the unhomely). This theme is revisited in Javutich's revival and stalking of the Prince as a visual exploration of a force of evil wreaking havoc in the home. As the undead monster attacks the Prince in his bedroom, Bava deftly escalates the Prince's fear at the uncanny visitation with ever moving, incredibly fluid camera moves and editing.

That the film relies on a conventional ending, where vengeful villagers complete the job their ancestors failed to do by executing Asa as the romantic (and heterosexual) sub-text between Gorobec and Katia becomes triumphant, is not to its detriment. This is a magnificent debut from Bava, stunningly filmed on some extraordinary sets, that briefly allows the 'female monster' genie out of the bottle and dares to suggest that her power is not just the result of "male cultural fantasies" but is also representative of the possibility of "autonomous female desire" in the 'good' and 'evil' fusing of Asa and Katia. Steele's physical presence is vital in communicating this and her eyes, face and mouth provide an abstraction of the Otherness, the female uncanniness at the centre of the film. (8)

(1) Steve Biodrowski, Black Sunday: a retrospective, Cinefantastique March 13, 2008
(2) Mark Thomas McGee,  Faster and Furiouser: The Revised and Fattened Fable of American International Pictures
(3) Tim Lucas, Black Sunday DVD commentary
(4) Angela Connolly, 'Daughters of the Devil: feminine subjectivity and the female vampire' in Cultures and Identities in Transition: Jungian Perspectives
(5) Ibid
(6) Danny Shipka, Perverse Titillation: The Exploitation Cinema of Italy, Spain and France, 1960-1980
(7) Ibid
(8) Carol Jenks, 'The Other Face of Death: Barbara Steele and La maschera del demonio' in Popular European Cinema

About the transfer
For the most part the HD transfer of The Mask of Satan is clean and robust despite it originating from a less than recent source. There are occasional speckles here and there and contrast can often seem a bit inconsistent where some solid blacks turn to greys at the edges of the frame. White highlights also seem a little greyer than on the Image Entertainment DVD I compared this with but it is still a highly enjoyable presentation, full of depth and retaining much of its film grain. It certainly flatters the gorgeous chiaroscuro cinematography and stunning sets the film is known for. AIP's cut, the retitled Black Sunday, is marginally better when it comes to the layers of contrast and deep blacks. Audio is clear and dynamic and suffers from a bit of hiss and high-frequency trembling but there's little to complain about. The various English recordings and dubs that have been applied to the film are evident in the slight syncing problems and that's normal for this film.

Special features
You can play either the AIP cut from the menu or the original Italian cut.
Audio Commentary
Ported from the Image Entertainment DVD of 1999, this is a engaging commentary with Bava biographer and expert Tim Lucas, full of facts about Bava and his inimitable style, the cast and the production and an analysis of the symbolic imagery in the film. It can go a little quiet at times but it's a recommended listen. 
Introduction to Black Sunday (2:52)
Author and critic Alan Jones provides some essential background to Bava's early career and his directorial debut, the Gogol source of the film and the controversy over its violence and sexuality.
Interview with star and horror icon Barbara Steele (8:44)
An unpublished 1995 video interview where Steele reasons that it was perhaps the dark and intense Life magazine photo spread that generated Bava's interest and she discusses the powerful atmosphere of the film's opening scene. Lovely to see her willing to reflect back on the film that launched her career and she has some interesting comments about the power of Asa as a female character.
Deleted Scene from the Italian version with notes by Tim Lucas (3:32)
Having read about this scene, it's really great to actually see it here. This is a brief meeting between an introspective Katia and her father where he suggests she leave the castle. It is intact in some Italian prints but as Tim Lucas notes the scene's position in the film is very incongruous as it is cut into the two very intense night scenes when the maid is milking the cow and Javutich crawls out of his grave. Lucas feels it was a sequence inserted into the film without Bava or Serandrei's approval.
International Trailer (3:35)
Horror! Anguish! And Terror!
US Trailer (2:12)
"Black Sunday is like no motion picture you've ever seen" booms the AIP trailer. I'll second that.
Italian Trailer (3:27)
A "story with a morbid interest... that goes beyond our imagination."
TV Spot (0:22)
Barbara Steele's eyes transformed into a marketing campaign.
I Vampiri(1956) – Italy’s first sound horror film directed by Riccardo Freda and Mario Bava and it is here presented in a 2.35:1 ratio, up-converted to HD by the looks of it. Perfectly watchable and certainly of interest to Bava fans as his signature stylings with the camera and lighting are already ably demonstrated as are his innovative effects. The story is set in Paris where a journalist investigates a series of 'vampire murders' carried out by a crazed duchess, obsessed with retaining her youth. There are elements of giallo and Gothic horror and Bava's use of filters and make up to depict the duchess's disintegration is still a bravura use of visual effects.
US I Vampiri Trailer ‘The Devil’s Commandment’ (1:39)
Mario Bava Trailer Reel (54:02)
Exhaustive and impressive hour-long collection of trailers for Bava's major films, stretching nearly twenty years from The Mask of Satan through to 1974's Rabid Dogs and 1977's Shock!
Reversible sleeve
Featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Graham Humphreys
Collector’s booklet 
Featuring new writing on the films by Matt Bailey and Alan Jones, illustrated with original archive stills and posters

The Mask of Satan / Black Sunday- 1960
Galatea - Jolly Films - Alta Vista
I, Vampiri - 1956
America - Athena Cinematographica - Titanus

Arrow Video Dual Format Blu-ray and DVD Edition / FCD756 / Released 4 February 2013 / Cert: 15 / 1.69:1 / Black and White / High Definition Blu-ray (AVC 1080p) and Standard Definition DVD presentation of both versions of the film: The Mask of Satan– the European version with score by Roberto Nicolosi & Black Sunday– the re-edited and re-dubbed AIP version with Les Baxter score / Three audio versions: Optional Italian, European English and AIP English re-dub and re-score / English SDH subtitles for both English versions and a new English subtitle translation of the Italian audio / Region B/2

'Harry here is only qualified to work on sailors'

Robert Holmes's The Ark in Space marked the beginning of a new, more mature era for Doctor Who that included the jettisoning of the 'UNIT family' adventures that producer Barry Letts had developed as part of the Doctor's exile to Earth during the Pertwee era. Now that the exile was ended in narrative terms, Letts and his script editor considered their jobs done and, reflecting on Jon Pertwee's own departure from the series, they handed the programme over to a new team.

Tom Baker had been announced as Pertwee's replacement in February 1974 and Holmes had trailed Dicks as prospective script editor since Autumn 1973. Joining them in March 1974, and trailing producer Letts through the final recording blocks of the last Pertwee season, was young producer and writer Philip Hinchcliffe.

29-year old Hinchcliffe, a former teacher, had previously worked at ATV, initially in the story department reading unsolicited scripts and then producing and scripting on a number of shows, including Crossroads (1964-2003), General Hospital (1972-79), The Jensen Code (1973) and The Kids from 47A (1973-75). As he explains in the DVD documentary, he wanted to extend the audience for Doctor Who and make it appeal to more adults by bringing in tougher science fiction concepts and developing the dramatic potential of realistic suspense and jeopardy.

He and Robert Holmes shared this view and a penchant for high adventure science fiction-gothic stories with a basis in reality and touches of dark wit, with Hinchcliffe recalling: "We immediately felt we wanted to make the series more exciting, and what we did with The Ark in Space was to take it into the realms of real science-fiction. That point of view we then carried over into our treatment of other stories, including the ones that had been commissioned already." However, the journey to commissioning the four-part story The Ark in Space was fraught with problems.

"pop gothic TV auteurs"

Holmes had discussed initial ideas for a story, then titled Space Station, with writer Christopher Langley in December 1973 and towards the end of January 1974 had commissioned him to write the scripts. However, the scripts were deemed unsuitable and Holmes turned to a seasoned television writer, John Lucarotti, to develop the Space Station concept further. Lucarotti had also contributed some exceptional stories for the first three seasons of Doctor Who between 1964 and 1966, including Marco Polo, The Aztecs and The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve.

Departing script editor Terrance Dicks had apparently bumped into him at the offices of Universal-Tandem during a meeting about Target novelisations of the series in 1973, then commissioned him to write two episodes of Moonbase 3 (the science fiction drama Letts and Dicks made between Seasons Ten and Eleven of Doctor Who) and finally recommended him to Holmes, the in-coming script editor. Holmes and Letts then briefed Lucarotti about the need for a six-part story set on a space station housing the cryogenically-frozen remnants of humanity.

Commissioned in June 1974, Lucarotti devised the concept of the ark, a space station that housed a huge plot of countryside the size of Kent - a sort of Home Counties in space. His six-part story concerned the invasion of the ark by a species called the Delc, a spore like fungus comprised of separate heads and bodies. When the draft scripts arrived from his home in Corsica, Holmes and Hinchcliffe felt they were far too ambitious and complicated to realise on the programme's budget and Lucarotti had over-conceptualised the story.

Postal strikes had also delayed the receipt of the scripts and keeping in touch with the writer was quite problematic. Therefore, in August 1974, it was felt any attempt by him to extensively rewrite his scripts should be abandoned and Lucarotti was paid in full for his work. Reading between the lines, there is also the suggestion that Lucarotti may well have interpreted Holmes's remit for the series from the perspective of writing the show in the mid-1960s, delivering a series of scripts that simply didn't fit the current drive towards realism.

At this point, Hinchcliffe believed it would be more resourceful if two productions could share the same sets, where eventually The Ark in Space and Season Twelve's finale Revenge of the Cybermen would be set on the same Nerva space station location. He also wanted the former as an all-studio based, less expensive production in contrast to its all-location based coda The Sontaran Experiment. Not convinced of the ongoing viability of six-part stories, Holmes agreed and then completed an entire four-part re-write in eighteen days, seeking special dispensation in retrospect during October to write The Ark in Space. This was one required by the BBC when, under difficult production circumstances, a script editor wanted or needed to write for his own series.

While director Rodney Bennett recorded The Sontaran Experiment on location in Dartmoor at the end of September 1974, amendments to the scripts for The Ark in Space were undertaken through to mid-October and model filming of the Wirrn crawling along the outside of the ark, the transport ship's launch and destruction was completed by visual effects man Tony Oxley at the BBC Television Centre Puppet Theatre on 16 October. On the same day a recording session saw Gladys Spencer and Peter Tuddenham providing voices for the High Minister and various computers.

Bennett assembled his cast for rehearsals, including a number of guest actors he had worked with before such as Wendy Williams and Kenton Moore, and the production moved into TC3 for two days recording on 28 and 29 October. Tony Oxley also supervised some of the Nerva model effects shot on video, using three cameras to build the completed shot of the ark in Earth orbit, and Bernard Lodge provided a newly tinted version of the title sequence - both of which were recorded in the same studio session. This block covered the taping of parts one and two and some inserts for part three. The final recording block took place in TC1 in November, again over two days, for parts three and four. John Friedlander created the adult Wirrn costumes using bamboo frame, fibreglass and moulded latex and the larvae creatures from what was then the relatively new plastic bubble packing, finished with latex and paint.

Various edits were made to a number of scenes as the four episodes took shape but when Hinchcliffe saw the encounter between Vira and a metamorphosing Noah in part three, where he pleads with her to kill him, he referred the scene to Head of Serials, Bill Slater and both deemed it too disturbing for the younger members of the audience. Despite Kenton Moore's disappointment, reflected in the documentary on the DVD, at John Friedlander's low-budget bubble wrap effects, his performance transcended scenes where they threatened to undermine the realism of the story's nightmarish scenario.

Slater and Hinchcliffe's concern at the management of this new realism foreshadowed what the new team would face in the next three years, particularly in the form of criticism about violence and horror in the series from Mary Whitehouse. The Ark in Space is therefore an embryonic first attempt by Hinchcliffe and Holmes, as "pop gothic TV auteurs", to marry high concept ideas with striking design, visual effects and make-up, signifying images of monstrosity within genre borrowing and "condensing image and narrative together into memorable, clear and significantly pre-sold products."(1)

... body horror and Old Testament apocalypse

Most intriguingly, The Ark in Space's use of realism, humanism and horror offers a sub-text about a number of social anxieties of the mid-1970s and introduces its themes of physical and psychological possession in direct contrast to the previous serial Robot, produced by Hinchcliffe's predecessor Barry Letts.

This commentary has its roots in the alien possession and body horror themes of such ur texts as Nigel Kneale's The Quatermass Experiment (BBC, 1953 and Hammer's film of 1955) and shares the giddy B film satisfaction of It - The Terror From Beyond Space (1958). Both were science fiction commentaries on 1950s concerns such as political corruption by outside forces, bodily possession, ambivalence about a future mapped out by technology and science and the rejection of the alien Other in pursuit of a distinct human self-hood.

The Ark in Space also emerged in a period where cinema was again, through horror and science fiction tropes, exploring the essential qualities of being human and using "social allegories which articulate class and social group fears, yearnings and hopes" to reflect the general anxieties about contemporary life in the mid-1970s. (2) 

The Exorcist had enjoyed phenomenal success since its Christmas 1973 release and, together with director William Friedkin's harnessing of documentary realism techniques, it inaugurated another wave of films that articulated specific fears about ageing, dying and the corruption and disintegration of the body. In the troubled 1970s, the audiences watching demonic possessions in The Exorcist or the rampant viruses in Cronenberg's Shivers (1975) were "provided with experiences and ideas that helped them cope with economic crisis, political turmoil and cultural malaise." (3)

It comes as no surprise then that the body horror in The Ark in Space - what Matt Hills refers to as "the human body’s intense problematisation and abject breaching by an alien Other" - is also seen as a precursor to a further flowering, at the end of the decade, of this wave of science fiction and horror. (4) The likes of 1979's Alien and the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers - where sleeping humanity awakens to the invasion of an alien parasite - are analogous to Nerva's tragedy and reflect the caustic capitalism and dehumanisation of post-1960s Reaganomics that Gerald Ford was already criticising in 1976. 

Holmes possession themes would become a dominant driver of high concept narratives during his incumbency as script editor. The Ark in Space, with the alien Wirrn burrowing into a human society in aspic, disrupting their technologically determined family units (Vira and Noah are "pair bonded for the new life") and causing chaos with class distinctions not only touched on physical and mental alterations but also saw the story flirt with issues of race, class and national identity.

Leader Noah undergoes a nervous breakdown, an Old Testament 'father' who loses patriarchal control and surrenders the rigidity of the World Executive for a more alien and instinctual existence. Not only is he the graphic representation of physical possession and corruption, shifting from self to Other, but he also represents a 1970s anxiety, played out in many genre and non-genre films, of the patriarch losing control of his family, losing his job and losing his home to rapacious primitive monsters and alien ideologies that, in The Ark in Space, seek repossession and ownership of Nerva and ultimately, the Earth.

The undermining of a society is the fault of 'outsiders' - both the Wirrn and the figures of the Doctor, Harry and Sarah are similarly at odds with Nerva. The Doctor and his companions are almost suffocated when they arrive and then either attacked by security systems or, in Sarah's case, virtually incorporated into the "meticulously planned" Nerva society as a cryogenically frozen, ideologically conditioned and processed 'sister' in thrall to the High Minister's recorded sophistry.

In a sequence highly reminiscent of the technologically assisted death of Edward G Robinson in Richard Fleischer's film dystopia Soylent Green (1973), Sarah is praised for her sacrifice by the World Executive as, serenaded by Handel, she is processed, suggesting a chosen managerial society basing itself purely on knowledge or information or science and alienated from the notion of the Romantic self. Incidentally, as one of the great baroque composers Handel was something of a big influence on the composers of the Romantic era

It's also interesting to note how conservative class distinctions and rankings alter dramatically as the story progresses. The figures of Vira and Noah offer a reactionary contrast to the more Romantic figures of the Doctor, Harry and Sarah. The institutions of the Nerva colony, "designed for a negative fault capacity", and their rationalist, technologically enhanced and codified language and behaviour reject the conspicuously intuitive and emotional reasoning of the Doctor, Harry and Sarah.

This contrast, driven by precise performances from the actors, is first articulated in the moment when the Doctor enquires of his companion about the functions of the empty ark, "what's happened to the human species, Harry?", just as a door opens on cue and director Rodney Bennett frames them next to several cryogenically halted examples, mistaken for the occupants of a mortuary, and just prior to the Doctor's much admired and highly Utopian speech about "indomitable" humanity.

However, roles in this society are technologically determined - you're either a Medtec, an Engtec or if you're lucky a prime unit like Noah - and this implies class distinctions too. Vira haughtily asks of the Doctor and Harry, "you claim to be Medtecs?" and offers that the survivors in the ark are the chosen few and considers the unfortunately processed Sarah may be of little value. Harry retorts indignantly, "Is she of value? She's a human being, like yourself. What sort of question's that?"

Vira categorises them both as Romantics, a further underpinning of Holmes's script as a reflection of neo-Romantic Theodor Roszak who influenced the anti-science movement of the 1970s and saw humanity's alienation, destruction and enslavement through "machine culture". Holmes sees a form of emotional Romanticism, exemplified in the figure of the Doctor, as a response to redressing the balance during the Wirrn's infection of the Nerva technocracy.

Vira also refers to their "colony speech" having no meaning, suggesting a sociolinguistic class difference through accent, slang and vernacular. Their speech also marks them as "dawn timers" and "regressive" to which Harry retorts, "I'm no regressive, I'm a Naval officer." Ironically when Vira claims that Noah will "not permit contamination of the genetic pool" if they stay aboard, she is unaware that the Wirrn have already accomplished that by devouring technician Dune.

Also, it's worth mentioning the 'regressive tendencies' of engineer Rogin (a great performance by Richardson Morgan) who comes across as a one-man union branch to the World Executive, grumbling to Lycett about the tragic fates of Noah, Libri and Dune, "Didn't I tell you. Five thousand years ago, I said there'd be a snitch up." You can see him itching to start a demarcation dispute over the use of spare extension leads. Indeed, he warns the Doctor about "trouble with the space technicians' union" when both men face death under the blast of the ark's shuttle and with a punch he knocks the Doctor out and sacrifices himself to save the ark. 

Noah initially detects a threat to Earth originating from the Doctor, Sarah and Harry and his warning, "the Earth is ours", as he holds a gun on the Doctor, foreshadows the same possessive desire of the Wirrn that will eventually absorb him. Protection of the planet is reversed for Noah, as he becomes a Wirrn, into an instinctive desire to conquer it. The revived Libri sees this difference immediately when the infected Noah approaches him and, later, Noah's painful identity crisis alerts us to the unpleasant idea, proposed by the Doctor, that he and Dune have "been thoroughly digested" into an alien group mind.

Body horror and Old Testament apocalypse define the invasion and corruption of white, middle class purity by other alien races and radical classes, with Nerva's individuals becoming uprooted, isolated, anxious and alienated when confronted by the Other. It's perfectly encapsulated in the moment when Noah painfully attempts to reject the Wirrn's physical changes and encroaching mental possession as the High Minister bleats on about how "you have been entrusted with the sacred duty to see that human culture, human knowledge, human love and faith shall never perish from the universe."

This strident speech is rather hollow when in part four, we discover the reason for the Wirrn's attack is the result of human colonial domination after human space pioneers drove the Wirrn from their breeding grounds. The insects are, it seems, a revisitation of the spectre of colonial guilt and are intent upon devouring all human knowledge to secure a new habitat. It's a race memory countered only by the Doctor's appeal to Noah's basic human compassion when he and the Nerva crew fight to save the ark and its sleepers. That spectre demonstrates "more than a vestige of human spirit" in the final outcome.

"I'm no regressive, I'm a Naval officer"

Visually some of these ideas are also expressed in set and costume design. The distinctions between the Nerva occupants and their space station and the insectoid Wirrn is determined through colour and shape. Nerva is brilliantly white, sterile, preserved and cold and its occupants are dominated by a rigid executive class whereas the Wirrn are fleshy, pulsing, green, copper and yellow bodies that creep, mold, scratch and scrape against or burst out of the machine environs.

Machine and insect often overlap. The Queen progenitor, right at the beginning of part one, sees a machine world through a halo of green, hazy vision, and this 'evil eye' view is later replayed via neural cortex projectors and the Doctor's brain. Technical knowledge is absorbed and exploited too - the Wirrn reproduce in the solar stacks thanks to Dune's expertise and the Doctor discovers that electricity or aiming their weapons lower will give them a fighting chance when he links his cerebral cortex to the Wirrn's latent memories. Again, the latter owes more than a passing reference to the revelation of Martian race memory in Nigel Kneale's Quatermass and the Pit (1958).

Holmes and Hinchcliffe's determination to inject more realism into the stories was aided by a number of exceptional, committed performances, Murray-Leach's raising of the bar with his impressive multi-storey sets for the cryogenic chambers and Rodney Bennett's reputation as an 'actors director' providing the story with its requisite edge and tense atmosphere. 

Although Elisabeth Sladen is quite critical of her performance on the commentary and questions Sarah's motivation, she's being rather modest about what is quite a finely tuned exercise in communicating and transmitting her fear of the uncanny through her facial expressions, body and voice. This culminates in that delicious scene where the Doctor chides her for her defeatism during her panic attack as she crawls through the infrastructure. The rapport between Tom Baker and Sladen really comes into its own during that scene and the relationship between the Doctor and Sarah feels entirely believable as a result.

What is frustrating is how Harry Sullivan rapidly becomes written down as the comic foil in this season when he became surplus to requirement once Tom Baker demonstrated he could do the physical stuff. A shame because Ian Marter is wonderfully urbane and funny even if Harry is sometimes codified as something of an anachronistic, even for 1975, square jawed Navy buffoon. Harry's Wodehousian schtick tends to contradict the pragmatism, intellect and rationale a fully qualified medical expert would convey in such situations. However, he does ably demonstrate the latter in part three, reviving Nerva's occupants and performing an examination of the Wirrn corpse. 

The supporting cast are excellent too. Moore, as I've mentioned, clearly grabbed the role of the doomed Noah and saw an opportunity to define something of the anguish of a human being undergoing horrific alien possession on genetic, spiritual and emotional levels. Wendy Williams offers a counterpoint to Moore's performance, essaying Vira's retrieval of her human joie de vivre from the nexus of the High Ministry's dehumanising social structures as she interacts with the Doctor, Sarah and Harry and is bequeathed command of the station from the afflicted Noah. 

The Ark in Space offers a tantalising taste of what's to come under the Hinchcliffe and Holmes partnership and effectively establishes Tom Baker as the Doctor. It raises the standards for design and effects in the series and constructs a production template to enable closer creative collaboration between departments at the BBC that would bear fruit over the next two years.

(1) Matt Hills, ‘Gothic’ Body Parts in a ‘Postmodern’ Body of Work? The Hinchcliffe/Holmes Era of Doctor Who (1975-77)
(2) Douglas Kellner, Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics Between the Modern and the Post-Modern
(3) Ibid
(4) Matt Hills, ‘Gothic’ Body Parts in a ‘Postmodern’ Body of Work? The Hinchcliffe/Holmes Era of Doctor Who (1975-77)

Other sources:  
Andrew Pixley, Doctor Who Magazine 218, 26th October 1994: The Ark in Space Archive
Shannon Patrick Sullivan, The Ark in Space, A Brief History of Time Travel

Special Features

Disc 1
Commentarywith Tom Baker, Elisabeth Sladen and Philip Hinchcliffe. Recorded for the 2002 DVD and unmoderated, this begins enthusiastically with Hinchcliffe and Sladen offering details about the production and Baker discussing how as a new team they were as then unaware of the impact they would have on viewers. Sladen recalls the casting process for the new Doctor and mentions that Tommy Steele, Ron Moody, Graham Crowden and Jim Dale had been in the frame at the time. Baker relates some background to his casting via a letter to Bill Slater at the BBC and also remembers, in his inimitable way, that designer Murray-Leach "had a very beautiful wife". Hinchcliffe recalls how he attempted to pitch the programme more towards the adult audience, how it became an important part of the Saturday night schedule and the consequences of pushing the boundaries for realism and horror in the series. This is an amiable, slightly slow paced chat, often very funny courtesy of Baker's observations and with some perceptive views from Sladen of her own acting abilities and Sarah's character.
A New Frontier(29:54) *New* With a sweep of green bubble wrap Chris Chapman's documentary faithfully covers the production of The Ark In Spaceand producer Philip Hinchcliffe's determination to put his own stamp on Doctor Who. Designer Roger Murray-Leach certainly speaks for the audience of 13 million, one that caught on very quickly that the series was being taken "to a different place", watching as The Ark in Spacemarked the beginning of a new chapter for the programme. Hinchcliffe discusses his modus operandi to "explore more science fiction concepts" for the series as its incoming producer and how he shared this view with Murray-Leach and Robert Holmes. There is plenty of background about the development of the script, from Langley's Space Station concepts to John Lucarotti's ambitious ideas and finally to Holmes's eleventh hour rewrite, of Murray-Leach's versatility and inventiveness as a designer and how director Rodney Bennett tackled the material - yoyos, trollies and all. This half hour also features candid recollections from Kenton Moore, disappointed at the gulf between the high drama of the script and being reduced to acting with a "gift-wrapped" hand, and Wendy Williams on the haughty Vira as well as a discussion on just how realisticallyThe Ark in Space was able to depict body horror on a Saturday tea time.
Roger Murray-Leach Interview (10:29)
One of the original features of the 2002 DVD release, this covers Murray-Leach's work not only on The Ark in Space but also his contributions to Planet of Evil, The Deadly Assassin and The Talons of Weng-Chiang.
Model Effects Roll(7:10)
16mm model film sequences for this story showing the exterior of the ark, the shuttle taking off, and the Wirrn spacewalking.
CGI Effects Roll (1:33)
Created by BBC Resources in 2002, these new visual effects are also available as an option during viewing of the four episodes. 
3D Technical Schematics(1:09)
A fly through of the Nerva station and a look at its shuttle
Original BBC Trailer(0:51)
Promotional teaser trailer for part one of The Ark in Space that aired 24 January 1975
Alternative Title Sequence (0:43)
Bernard Lodge's title sequence for the Tom Baker era developed out of this alternative version that feels more like the titles for Pertwee's last series in 1974.
Alternative CGI Effects
The option to watch with the new effects can be toggled here
TARDIS-Cam 1 (1:24)
The Fourth Moon of Fraxis,depicting the TARDIS in a barren moonscape and with a severed Cyberman head in the foreground was the first of the six short effects sequences commissioned by BBC Fictionlab
Photo Gallery
A fuller selection of colour and black and white images taken during recording and behind the scenes. Includes shots of Roger Murray-Leach's much admired sets. 
Production Information Subtitles
Martin Wiggins provides a new set of subtitles and packs them full of behind the scenes material about the development of the script, casting and production. Essential reading.
Easter Eggs
Countdown Clock - Episode 2
Two Doctor Who Exhibition Promos
Disc 2 (contains all new material)
The Ark in Space - Movie Version(unrestored) I vividly remember watching this 70-minute repeat compilation of the story shown one mid-summer's eve in August 1975. Relive those heady days when we were treated to regular repeats of the series on BBC1. The Radio Times even pushed the boat out and plugged it with one of Frank Bellamy's gorgeous illustrations. 
Dr. Forever! – Love & War(27:37) A new documentary examining the Virgin/BBC Books novelisation range produced during the 1990-2005 hiatus. Interviewees include Russell T Davies, Mark Gatiss, Paul Cornell, Gary Russell, former Virgin Books editor Peter Darvill-Evans and BBC Books editor Justin Richards. All discuss how the books were important as vehicles for new writers, maintained the visibility of the programme when it was off screen and took it in some unexpected directions. This also covers the period up to the TV Movie and the BBC's retention of the publishing licence in 1996, leaving Virgin attempting to keep a spin-off range going. 
Scene Around Six(7:36) Christmas 1978 news footage of Tom Baker’s public appearances in Northern Ireland which astonishingly survives and gives us some idea of how popular Baker was and how his charisma demonstrably lit up the faces of kids in hospitals and schools and provided an easy charm with folks in the street.
8mm Location Footage(1:11) Muteamateur film shot during the location shooting between 28 April and 6 May 1974 for Tom Baker’s first storyRobot and capturing the outside broadcast crew and Baker, Nick Courtney and John Levene relaxed and happy at work on a sunny day.
Coming Soon Trailer 
Make some cocoa and declare your love for The Aztecs.
PDF Material
Radio Times Listings, a complete PDF of Mark Harris's Doctor Who Technical Manual from 1983,and Crosse and Blackwell and Nestle Promotional Material.

Doctor Who: The Ark in Space
BBC Worldwide / Released 18 February 2013 / BBCDVD3672
4 episodes / Broadcast: 25 January to 15 February 1975 / Colour / Running time: 98:45

As The Curse of Frankenstein opened to huge success, Hammer Films were already looking to secure a number of deals to develop, finance and distribute films, including the sequel to their first Gothic horror in colour, initially titled Blood of Frankenstein. Studio executive James Carreras had already raised the subject of that other Gothic horror franchise-in-waiting, Dracula, with Eliot Hyman at Associated Artists Productions, one of Hammer's existing financial partners. While both men were exchanging their excitement about Frankenstein's transatlantic box office success via telegram in the summer of 1957, Carreras proposed Dracula as their next collaboration.

Carreras was simply reflecting the fact that Hammer had Bram Stoker's Gothic classic already lined up in their sights. During the Autumn of 1956, Hammer's lawyer Edwin Davis had been busily investigating the tangled and complex copyright and ownership of Bram Stoker's character. Some significant clues were included in a document passed to him from Associated Rediffusion Ltd, the Independent Television franchise for London since 1954. Rediffusion had planned a six-part adaptation of Dracula but had subsequently abandoned it because of the difficulty in clearing the rights to the property.

Their investigations had found the rights were currently held with Universal Pictures who had procured them in 1930 from Stoker's widow, Florence, and Hamilton Deane and John Balderston, who had been granted permission by her to write and revise the stage version of Dracula in 1924. Davis therefore began a lengthy negotiation with Universal lasting all the way through Dracula's production and ultimately resolved in an 80-page contract just as Hammer's version went into post production in March 1958. (1)

"oughtn't we to get a little double-Dutchman?"

That production, announced to the press by Carreras at the end of July 1957, was again made in colour, reunited the team that made The Curse of Frankenstein and consolidated and refined Hammer's approach to horror cinema. After securing a three picture deal with Columbia in September of the same year, Hammer concentrated on completing a finance and distribution deal with Universal for Dracula.

Initially, Universal lacked interest and only came on board when they were offered worldwide distribution rights and after Hammer already had a commitment for £33,000 of the budget from the National Film Finance Corporation. Universal's parsimony would be reflected upon, rather ironically, in the startling announcement by Universal's Al Daff after the May 1958 New York press luncheon with the Hammer team that the international success of Dracula had apparently saved Universal from bankruptcy. (2)

Former production manager turned writer Jimmy Sangster had decided to go freelance after The Curse of Frankenstein but was struggling to find work during 1957. Serendipitously, he was considering asking executive Michael Carreras for his old job back just as Hammer came calling and offered him contracts to adapt Dracula and pen the Frankenstein sequel. He apparently read Stoker's novel several times before he started his first draft in June 1957 and spent four weeks transforming the original globe-trotting narrative told via diaries and letters into a claustrophobic three act drama set in 'Home Counties Transylvania'.

He jettisoned many of Stoker's characters and Dracula's budget-busting boat trip to England, all of the Whitby-set sequence, Renfield and the asylum and the protracted chase across Europe. In Sangster's tight and bold reduction, Harker becomes a knowledgeable if unprepared acolyte of vampire-hunter Van Helsing, going undercover as a librarian to assassinate the Count and where seduction by one vampire bride is enough to scupper his mission.

In Peter Cushing's hands, Van Helsing, an older, rather eccentric Dutchman in the novel, turns into a youthful and steely professional, physically and athletically Dracula's match. After being cast, Cushing apparently asked producer Anthony Hinds, "oughtn't we to get a little double-Dutchman?" to which Hinds responded, "I think the thing to do is to play him as you." (3)

When Sangster's second draft screenplay was submitted to the BBFC in early October 1957, a convoluted sparring began between producer Hinds, readers Audrey Field and Newton Branch, secretary John Nicholls and chief examiner John Trevelyan. This extended well into the debates and negotiations, not concluded until April 1958, over the editing of the film to achieve an 'X' certificate. Field's initial, rather typical objections about Sangster's "uncouth, uneducated, disgusting and vulgar style" also advised caution on showing Technicolor "shots of blood" and the staking of vampires. (4)

Nicholls provided Hinds with a full list of scenes deemed unacceptable and necessary restrictions including his concerns about "the sex aspect of the story" with women depicted in "transparent nightdresses... with bared breasts... in suggestive garments", caution over the vampire woman's attack on Jonathan, Dracula's violent attack on both her and Jonathan, the various stakings and, still intact in the script at this stage, the depiction of a coachman's slit throat discovered when Van Helsing and Holmwood go in pursuit of Dracula. (5)

Undeterred by this hand-wringing from the BBFC, Hinds simply got on with making the film, now budgeted at £81,412, and assembled the cast and crew. Peter Cushing was contracted as the name above the title for Dracula and for the Frankenstein sequel on 9 October 1957, with his agent John Redway securing a fee of £2,500 for the former's six week schedule. On the same day director Terence Fisher signed up to direct both films.

On Dracula, he was also reunited with production designer Bernard Robinson and cinematographer Jack Asher who had both been crucial to the success of The Curse of Frankenstein. Christopher Lee was contracted on 29 October at a rate of £60 per day and eventually received £750 for his work on the film while the supporting cast including Michael Gough, Melissa Stribling, John Van Eyssen, Valerie Gaunt and Janina Faye were all signed to the film during November. (6)

The start of filming was originally set for 4 November 1957 but a number of problems delayed this for a week and instead cameras started rolling on 15 November over the bitterly cold six-week schedule. Robinson, a man Lee praised as "the real star of the picture, who could make sow's ears out of silk purses and vice versa" spent three weeks assembling his sets prior to the start of shooting. (7)

He benefited from the newly built 90 x 80 foot Stage 1, a rebuild of an old stage from Walton-on-Thames next to the Bray car park, to house a series of sets all configured around a signature entrance, flight of stairs and balcony. Stage 2 was home to Van Helsing's room, the undertakers, the Holmwood residence and cellar and Stage 3, a long narrow space, featured the inn where Van Helsing makes his first entrance into the film. (8)

"marble plush"

However, Robinson's interior designs for Dracula's home rather alarmed the studio and there was talk of replacing him because his work, described as "marble plush" by Denis Meikle, radically avoided the typically overt, cobwebbed Gothic expressionism of Charles D. Hall's familiar settings for Universal's 1931 Dracula. Instead, Robinson opted for spartan baronial elegance and this, together with the rest of his sets and including the evocative Holmwood crypt, offered a "contrapuntal thing of horrible things in beautiful places" that provided the film with an expansive sense of space. (9)

Don Mingaye, the draughtsman who worked with Robinson on the film concurs: "They were concerned about it because the Lugosi film was the only yardstick they had. But we were talking about colour and the Lugosi one wasn't, so we had a lot more going for us." This was echoed by an acknowledgement that neither Fisher nor Lee viewed the Universal horror films, including Lugosi's Dracula, prior to the shoot, and Fisher claimed: "I didn't screen them or refer to them at all. I started from scratch." (10) Lee identified and related to aspects of the character from reading Stoker's book: "his extraordinary stillness, punctuated by bouts of manic energy with feats of strength belying his appearance; his power complex; the quality of being done for but undead; and by no means least that he was an embarrassing member of a great and noble family." (11)

Certainly, the notion that this version of Dracula was a completely fresh start was demonstrated by the film's signature use of colour and its focus on eroticism and horror. As the vibrant, Gothic red opening titles begin, overlaid on the castle's entrance adorned by a stone eagle, Fisher takes the audience on a symbolic tour of the Count's residence, the camera gliding into a tomb and filling the screen with the name on the Count's resting place 'Dracula' that is suddenly and strikingly emblazoned with a torrent of glowing red blood.

The eagle is clearly a representation of the Count himself who, although absent through much of the film, haunts it through suggestive visuals and gliding camerawork, all underpinned by James Bernard's predatory music. The emphasis is also on Hammer's use of colour with the moody, blood soaked opening titles providing a non-expositional, surreal, abstract motif "to move us forwards into a space in a manner that gives us a sense of great power" (12)

This is also our first glimpse of Robinson's splendid exterior sets for the castle, supplemented with a moat, which would be reused on a number of Hammer productions in 1959, including The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Stranglers of Bombay, until they were demolished the same year. The exterior sets are also extended with an atmospheric glass painting, courtesy of Les Bowie, to depict the upper turrets and snowy mountains in the background as Harker observes the scene.

Jonathan Harker's (Eyssen) arrival in the film evokes the Stoker novel with its voice over and, later, with further exposition via his diary where an "unsuspecting audience (is) made to feel superior to Harker" about vampire lore until their assumptions are undermined with a twist - Harker is seemingly a librarian but, in fact, turns out to be Dracula's assassin. (13) The diary is also a vital element, as Van Helsing's rationalist, observable proof to Arthur Holmwood (Gough) of the battle between light and dark, good and evil at the centre of the film. Again, Fisher's camera slowly pans around Robinson's impressive sets, circling and stalking Harker as he makes his way to the dining table and fireplace.

From the perspective of a 1950s audience, Harker's first encounter with the vampire woman (Gaunt) is suggestively troubling and leads into yet another moment, after she is alerted to some unseen presence, where expectations are contradicted by the figure shown standing in shadow at the top of a flight of stairs. The staircase and balcony here act as the central motif Fisher uses to introduce the Count to audiences. Lee, in silhouette, is seen to glide down the stairs and loom into close up to reveal a handsome, well spoken, ascetic English nobleman in a complete volte-face to the heavily accented, stilted Lugosi variation.

Fisher was acutely aware of what he was doing: "It's a physical thing, horror. The first time you see Dracula is up at the top of the stairs, in silhouette - and the audience, the ones you want to laugh, start to laugh, because they're going to see... what? Instead, they see this very handsome man, the perfect host, come down the stairs into close up. I did it this way not just to tease the audience but to show them that the whole idea of evil is very attractive." (14) As Christopher Lee recalled, this strategy paid dividends in New York when a raucous preview crowd at the Mayfair Theatre, Times Square was reduced to silence by his understated introduction.

David Huckvale also cites a Freudian analysis of the ascending and descending of staircases as a correlation to the sexual act, which seems rather appropriate for a film steeped in sex. Beyond the introduction the film, the vampire's authority and power is often visually signified by the staircases they traverse: Harker is trapped in the castle cellar when the Count mysteriously abandons his coffin unseen and reappears at the top of the stairs; the undead Lucy brings her victim Tania down a flight of stairs to the Holmwood crypt and Dracula ascends a staircase in the Holmwood residence to seduce Mina. (15)

This would seem to provide a subtext to Robinson's reuse of the same staircase and balcony on Stage 1, as a continuous spatial and thematic reconfiguration for key scenes, where the exterior of Lucy's crypt was the first set to be mounted, followed by revamping it into the castle's dining room with its distinctive candy-twist pillars, then using a simple rearrangement using drapes to construct the castle's entrance hall and, finally, transformed into the library were Harker is attacked by Dracula and, later, Van Helsing ushers in the vampire's demise.

"modernity, speed and, above all, colour"

Christopher Lee's performance is also incredibly physical in contrast to Lugosi's and degrees of physicality are informed by his skills as a mime. He sweeps up the stairs effortlessly, he holds the framed portrait of Harker's fiancée Lucy with delicacy (watch his expressive hands) and he is feral and animalistic when Fisher finally reveals his true nature in the fight in the library. An effective, almost balletic, choreography is employed when Dracula throws the vampire woman across the room and strangles Harker.

This is coupled with a ferocity that Fisher later outdoes in the final battle between Van Helsing and Dracula in the film's climax. For Nina Auerbach, Lee's incarnation of Dracula is also representative of "modernity, speed and, above all, colour." (16) Despite the fact that he gets something like 13 lines in total and is absent for much of the running time, Lee dominates the film and his powerful presence both on screen and off is indicated by Bernard's score and his ever dominant 'Dra-cu-la' theme.

The fight in the library is the first of the film's set pieces. Its dynamic combination of sex and violence certainly had the BBFC in a flutter. The sequence where the vampire woman seduces and then bites Harker on the neck was originally much more explicit but Hammer had to capitulate to the censor's demands and remove some of it. It's now probably the only sequence from Fisher's original cut of the film that's incomplete. However, the beautifully framed shot of the woman erotically eyeing up Harker's neck and then opening her fanged mouth to bite him does explicitly link, for the first time in horror cinema, the vampire's kiss with an erotic, sexual intent.

Fisher's control of the scene is exceptional. From the close up of the kiss, he cuts quickly to a long shot of the vampire woman and Harker to the left and right of the frame and in the centre, surrounded by cold blue light, is the figure of Dracula. We hear his roar and there is a huge close up of his devilish face, fanged and bloodied, eyes bloodshot.

Make up designer Phil Leakey worked with Christopher Lee to devise this look for the Count: "I took him down to an oculist, a lens maker, who took a mould of his eyes and made up these blood shot eyes that Chris would have to put in before every shot" and "we made a set, or two sets in fact, of clip on teeth which clipped on to his own eye teeth". Lee found the lenses uncomfortable and extremely difficult to see through. Leakey also experimented with a set of teeth that would pump out special effects blood to depict Dracula's bite, using a small pump operated by Lee's tongue: "He tried this once and jolly nearly choked." (17)

Dracula jumps into the frame between the other two figures, throwing the vampire woman to the floor. Fisher then intercuts close ups of Harker, the woman now fanged and bloody and provocatively showing a bare shoulder where her white gown has slipped down, and Dracula glaring at her, hands outstretched. The struggle between her and Dracula then ramps up the sheer sexual energy of the scene, barely contained by the frame and the likes of which had never been seen in horror cinema before, pumped up by the pell-mell James Bernard score.

Dracula's physical domination of the film is again emphasised in the way he overpowers Harker, punctuated by a close up of Lee's blood shot, fanged visage, and his removal of the woman via the door to the library, framed again in that icy blue light. It is still an intensely powerful eruption of the film's themes that comes hot on the heels of mounting tension and mystery.

The first act of the film ends with Harker's downfall. Harker is clearly an ingenue vampire hunter and fails to detect the signs around him, many of which the audience were already aware of. But his demise underlines the idea that vampirism is a disease that mortals will eventually succumb to. In Bernard Robinson's ornate bedroom set, he reveals the evidence of the taint his weakness has invited and, understanding there is precious time left, ensures the diary will be discovered (and thus open the next act of the story) and sets out to accomplish his mission.

In the bedroom, certain visual signatures begin to emerge in the film. Jack Asher's colour photography adds powerful highlights of red and green into what has been a predominance of blues, greys and whites. This confidence with colour emerged from the thorough apprenticeship he served, along with Fisher, at Gainsborough and his methodology developed for Technicolour which included the placing of gelatin slides over certain lenses or the use of coloured kick lights to accentuate themise-en-scène.
The red and green scheme was something he had experimented with on The Curse of Frankenstein but here it becomes, in combination wth Robinson's production design, a richer and fuller expression. From the red drapes, green and red bottles of Harker's bedroom, the film then features a green and red colour scheme in Van Helsing's hotel room, including a wine coloured jacket worn by Cushing.

There's also a flower motif in red and green on the Holmwood upholstery, Lucy's turquoise night gown in contrast to her bright red lips that is latter mirrored in the green velvet cape worn by the seduced Mina and, finally, in the blood transfusion sequence where the essence of life is exchanged against a background of green eiderdowns.

Harker's downfall is yet again another example of the control exercised by Fisher and his editor James Needs. A series of precise cuts moves our view point from the cellar stairs to Dracula lying in his coffin, to the vampire woman in her coffin, her staking by Harker (shown in silhouette), a close up of Dracula waking up, then the sun going down and Harker realising his mistake in first dealing with the woman.

The culmination of this is a superbly symbolic shot of the open cellar door as we see a shadow gradually moving along the corridor outside to herald Dracula's entrance. The snuffing out of light by darkness is emphasised when Dracula appears and then closes the door as the scene fades to black.

Van Helsing's introduction at the inn and his exploration of the castle is again, as Peter Hutchings notes, an example of how the two male leading characters define and control space. Cushing's is as much a gestural and physical performance as Lee's, offering an athleticism to Van Helsing's urgent desire to extinguish the vampire's disrupting influence over the Holmwood home and its female occupants. In the parallels between Van Helsing and Dracula the film establishes, those of rationality versus rampant desire, Hutchings also notes how both characters have a "quasi-supernatural" presence in the film, appearing suddenly and without warning, both being strong and powerful male authority figures in contrast to the weaker, "feminised" male figures of Harker and Arthur Holmwood (Michael Gough). (18)

This is underlined by Helsing's revisiting the castle and the discovery and destruction of Harker's vampirised form in the cellar. Harker as failed hero, with a suggestion that, despite an infecting bite from the vampire woman, he may also be a male victim of Dracula in the film, was eventually handled with just one establishing shot of a fanged John Van Eyssen after the planned introduction of a shrivelled dummy was vetoed by Fisher as an inconsistency in the visual taxonomy of vampires in the film.

"an infantilized girl shutting out her keepers and opening the window to her adult self"

Van Helsing's role, as bourgeois patriarch, is to contain Dracula's transmission of a sexualised self onto the female characters of the film, namely Lucy (Carol Marsh) and Mina (Melissa Stribling). Woven into this is an acknowledgement of the transgression of marriage where the weak Holmwood is shown as a rather inept husband in his response to Mina's own desires within the institution of marriage and where, as surrogate parents to Lucy, a young woman already promised in marriage to Harker, they fail to protect her from her own sexual curiosity and unfulfilled desire.

The seduction of Lucy in the second act is another of Fisher's key sequences. Set to a gnawing Bernard musical motif that escalates the mood incrementally, we see her preparing rather eagerly for her own assignation with Dracula, as "an infantilized girl shutting out her keepers and opening the window to her adult self." (19)

The mood is heavily claustrophobic and Robinson's sets are much smaller and crammed with an overwhelming amount of domestic detail to emphasise the intrusion of the Other, untrammelled by an attachment to inanimate personal possessions, into the family home. As Lucy opens the French windows and autumn leaves fall outside, Fisher contrasts this Romantic expression of the supernatural with Van Helsing's reportage in his hotel room.

We hear vampire lore according to Hammer, and synthesised by technology in Van Helsing's use of the recording apparatus, in direct contrast to the actual presence of the lore as Lucy awaits the arrival of her adulterous lover. Hutchings sees this cutting between Van Helsing and Lucy as an expression of the differences between "the feminine and the masculine, darkness and light, silence and speech, emotion and rationality." (20)

Fisher ends the scene in the hotel room with a close up on Van Helsing demanding of Dracula 'he must be found and destroyed' and Fisher cutting to a similarly framed close up of Dracula on the threshold of Lucy's bedroom. It is a very evocative visual interpretation of the charismatic dualism and parallels between the two characters.

Lucy's death then leads into the equally atmospheric sequence in the Holmwood crypt. Beautifully photographed by Jack Asher, the colour scheme is overtly blue, white and grey and reflects the deathly atmosphere of the castle, offering a "sadistic fairy land" populated by the return of the Victorian repressed. (21) This scheme is punctuated by the brown and green of foliage and Fisher again signifies the supernatural in falling leaves.

It provides the backdrop to a still rather unsettling suggestion that Lucy, now a vampire, is an equal opportunities force for evil and is happy to seduce both a child, Tania (Faye), and her own brother Arthur. Aberrant female sexuality has momentarily been unleashed but this shock is overlaid with its equally shocking rejection as, from nowhere, Van Helsing appears and burns her with a crucifix.

The subsequent staking of Lucy by Van Helsing also ran into trouble with the BBFC. On 5 February 1958, after viewing a black and white version of the film, John Nicholls demanded the removal of "all shots of the stake being driven into the girl's heart". Hinds was forced to trim these scenes, especially after the BBFC saw a version in colour. (22) The close ups of Lucy's agonised screams and the stake entering her heart were removed from the British release but survived in the print prepared for American distribution.

The destruction/restoration of Lucy is a complex moment in the film: it replays many of the motifs established earlier and simultaneously underlines a violent form of patriarchal suppression, the triumph of good over evil as emphasised in Bernard's score, and provides the necessary action that will transform Arthur Holmwood from unbeliever into Helsing's willing acolyte.

Mina's own corruption or adultery, as Christopher Frayling sees it and as Fisher himself saw it, is a further reshuffling of the elements, centred on the dissolution of the rather staid Holmwood marriage which will only be repaired in the climactic battle at the end of the film. Stribling provides a suitably erotic undertone to her performance here, positively glowing after her night on the tiles with Dracula and the result of Fisher's advice to Stribling on how to play this sensuality: "you should imagine you have had one whale of a sexual night, the one of your whole sexual experience." (23)

Her fall from grace is, in a typical piece of Fisher narrative structure, juxtaposed with a turn from the lovely Miles Malleson as the undertaker who taps comically on his stack of coffins the morning after Mina's visit to his premises and during Van Helsing's attempts to track down Dracula and his coffin, now symbolically 'at home' in the Holmwood cellar.

The corruption of the Holmwood marriage is concentrated in the one scene between Mina and Dracula, which Hinds and James Carreras fought for in their battle with the BBFC. They had already stated on 12 February 1958 that Hammer should remove: "The whole episode of Dracula and Mina together whenever either of them shows sexual pleasure. There must, for instance, be no kissing or fondling." (24)

When Dracula suddenly appears at the foot of the stairs in the Holmwood house and seduces Mina, the building sexual tension directly expresses Fisher's view that the vampire "preyed upon the sexual frustrations of his women victims." (25) Stribling is strikingly sensuous and Lee appropriately carnal in a scene which, back in 1958, ended abruptly with the jump cut to a screeching owl. The original version of this scene, now seen in the 2012 restoration, completely emphasises what Hammer and Fisher were trying to say in the film but it caused the BBFC so much consternation in taking the "sex element" too far they demanded it be truncated before an X certificate could be issued.

Cushing's meticulous approach to the role can be seen in how he handles props, particularly in the blood transfusion scene, and in his use of physical gestures (the Cushing finger is much in evidence). He reportedly spent two days learning how to drive a horse and trap for the scenes where he and Holmwood race back to Dracula's castle in the climax. For the climactic battle between Van Helsing and Dracula, Cushing extemporised on Sangster's script, which simply required Van Helsing to produce a crucifix to corner Dracula and force him into a ray of sunlight. With Fisher's support the chase and confrontation was transformed into one of the most celebrated finales in horror cinema.

The kinetic chase sequence in Dracula's home, featuring the physical struggle between Lee and Cushing, shot and edited to perfection and driven by Bernard's score dominated by snare drums, was topped by Cushing's desire to include a 'Douglas Fairbanks' moment far more exciting than the simple act of pulling out another crucifix. He wanted to jump from a balcony or swing from a chandelier but Fisher felt this was too dangerous and expensive to set up.

Cushing then suggested he run down the long refectory table that dominated Robinson's set and leap up and pull down the curtains. His double eventually made the spectacular leap and brought the curtains down with perfect timing, allowing Jack Asher and camera operator Len Harris to illuminate the effects shot shaft of sunlight they had prepared on glass with pencil and light spray and angled in front of the camera. (26)

Cushing's other suggestion, the use of the candlesticks to form a crucifix, was inspired by "seeing a film years ago called Berkeley Square in which Lesley Howard was thought of as the devil by this frightened little man who grabbed two candelabra to make the sign of the cross with them. I remember that this had impressed me enormously". (27)

It becomes another part of the fight's rhythm, its savagery, as Van Helsing and Dracula's fight to the death becomes a summation of the characters' use of power and space, "the change from night to day (reversing the day-to-night transition that sealed Harker's fate), Dracula's transformation into dust, and Van Helsing's own sudden transformation from potential victim to victor. It also depends on physical effort and an expenditure of energy from both characters, with the conclusion brought about, appropriately enough, by a pure beam of energy from the sun". (28)

Dracula's disintegration was yet another bone of contention between Hammer and the BBFC. Syd Pearson and Phil Leakey's visual effects and make up certainly had them in a flap. Leakey had originally suggested creating a dummy body filled with sand coupled with a wax cast of Lee's face attached to a skull. When hot air was applied to the cast, the face would be seen to melt. (29)

However, Pearson took these ideas several stages further and Leakey concentrated on the make up showing the various stages of decomposition on Lee's face before Pearson took over with a number of physical effects. Leakey completed the make up using "a composite rubber latex face mask" and "a certain amount of dusty powder - Fuller's Earth - to drop to the floor" in an infamous stage of the sequence, one the BBFC fiercely objected to, where Dracula claws at his own face. (30) 

Pearson filmed the rest of the disintegration in January 1958, after principal photography had been completed on Christmas Eve 1957. He used dummy legs made from Fuller's earth and dust that moved and collapsed when Pearson put his arm down the trouser leg, filmed Dracula's crumbling hands by coating his own hand in Fuller's earth paste, paraffin wax and powder and then substituting it with a lever operated skeletal hand. A collapsible body, using balloons, provided the shots where Dracula's chest caves in. Finally, a latex covered skull with an articulated jaw complete with medical endoscopic lamps in the eyes depicted the last stages of the disintegrating face. (31)

However, the BBFC adamantly declared to Hammer on 14 February 1958 that "under no circumstances can the shot of his disintegrating face be seen. Very little if any of this disintegration can be permitted." Hinds negotiated on the basis now that Dracula had been scored, dubbed and prepared for Technicolour printing, the cost of remounting such scenes would be prohibitive. He also argued that much of the objectional material actually looked less offensive in colour than it did in black and white and there had been a misunderstanding over what was permitted. (32) The Board, acknowledging Hinds was pushing his luck, agreed to drop their objections to the disintegration as long as the hand pulling away at Dracula's flesh was removed. On 14 April 1958, Dracula was finally passed with an X certificate. 54 years later, the long-rumoured censored footage of Mina's seduction and Dracula's disintegration was restored to the film.

It received a mixed critical reaction on release in 1958, with the Nina Hibbin and C A Lejeune comments that "the film disgusts the mind and repels the senses" or that it was "a singularly repulsive piece of nonsense" ranged against those that praised Lee, Cushing and Hammer's production values, particularly those of Robinson and Asher. Despite this reception, the film was a phenomenal success and turned Lee into a star and cemented Hammer's reputation. Dracula, along with The Curse of Frankenstein, also revitalised horror cinema, renewing the vampire mythos for generations to come.

Its critical status has evolved from a parochial view of it simply providing a quintessential slice of full colour Hammer exploitation into deep respect as a British film classic. An adult fairy tale, Dracula has plenty to say about the 1950s - socially, culturally and historically - and British attitudes to sex and violence and the autonomy of women in a rapidly changing society.

(1) Wayne Kinsey, Hammer - The Bray Studios Years
(2) Jonathan Rigby, Christopher Lee - The Authorised Screen History
(3) David Miller, The Peter Cushing Companion
(4) Wayne Kinsey, Hammer - The Bray Studios Years
(5) Ibid
(6) Jonathan Rigby, Christopher Lee - The Authorised Screen Histor
(7) Christopher Lee, Tall, Dark and Gruesome: An Autobiography
(8) Wayne Kinsey, Hammer - The Bray Studios Years
(9) M Flannery, Bernard Robinson interview, Town Magazine, November 1966
(10) Wayne Kinsey, Hammer - The Bray Studios Years
(11) Christopher Lee, Tall, Dark and Gruesome: An Autobiography
(12) Peter Hutchings, Dracula: A British Film Guide
(13) Ibid
(14) Alan Frank, Horror Films
(15) David Huckvale,Touchstones of Gothic Horror
(16) Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves
(17) Interview with Phil Leakey, Greasepaint and Gore, Tomahawk Films
(18) Peter Hutchings, Dracula: A British Film Guide
(19) Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves
(20) Peter Hutchings, Dracula: A British Film Guide
(21) Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves
(22) Wayne Kinsey, Hammer - The Bray Studios Years
(23) Terence Fisher interview with Ron Borst: Photon, Issue 27
(24) Wayne Kinsey, Hammer - The Bray Studios Years
(25) Terence Fisher interview with Ron Borst: Photon, Issue 27
(26) Wayne Kinsey, Hammer - The Bray Studios Years
(27) David Miller, The Peter Cushing Companion
(28) Peter Hutchings, Dracula: A British Film Guide
(29) Interview with Phil Leakey, Greasepaint and Gore, Tomahawk Films
(30) Interview with Sydney Pearson, Little Shoppe of Horrors, Issue 5
(31) Ibid
(32) Wayne Kinsey, Hammer - The Bray Studios Years

About the transfer
Given the comments about the grade by the BFI's Ben Thompson on the restoration documentary and by historian Marcus Hearn and critic Jonathan Rigby on the commentary (they refer to a bluer grade several times in their conversation), viewers may find this transfer's grading and colour palette somewhat unfamiliar. For example, the shot of Valerie Gaunt lying in the tomb prior to her staking, Harker's retreat from Dracula, Cushing's arrival at the tavern and the sequence at Lucy's tomb all offer a combination of strikingly different blue colour timing and deep blacks.

The highlights of Gaunt's face emerge from a very deep and dark blue background and colour definition of her hair, for example, is somewhat buried in the image. Carol Marsh is also bathed in blue at the Holmwood crypt. Interiors are also much darker than before and the inn, Van Helsing's hotel room and the Holmwood house and bedrooms feel dimmer and full of deep shadows. The hues in the colour grade are much cooler too. The only other drawback I would mention is that perhaps some details in faces and the set decor do tend to disappear into shadow.

That said, I will gladly agree that the screencaps here don't represent its full glory and the more I've watched this the more I've enjoyed it. The image in motion is certainly very agreeable in the amount of detail in faces, clothes and set decor it provides. There is plenty of grain evident and combined with the layers of deep contrast this provides the transfer with a thick texture and depth. This is a much more robust presentation in comparison to the recent release of The Curse of Frankenstein and the BFI's access to Dracula's camera negative back in 2007 clearly paid dividends. The transfer is spotless and overall the image is stable. Quality does drop here and there - Lucy's staking betrays a minor bit of flicker in the image, for example - and, naturally, the footage rescued from Japan is given away by its loser grain structure and colour variation. However, it is expertly integrated and a delight to see.

Colour is still impressive even though the timing here is quite different from the gaudier palette of the Warner DVD, especially in the way the transfer picks up cinematographer Jack Asher's penchant for juxtaposing reds and greens. In Van Helsing's room, for example, the walls are far greener than they were and there's a dynamic contrast with the red stripes of the upholstery and Van Helsing's wine coloured smoking jacket. The red cover of Harker's diary, Harker's blue jacket and the red, green and blue schemes in his Castle Dracula bedroom are quite lush and pop out from the image. The turquoise blue of Lucy's gown is full of green highlights as is the green velvet jacket worn by Mina.  

This transfer facilitates a certain mood, of course, and having not seen the 2007 BFI restoration on the big screen it's not possible for me to confirm that this represents both the vividness of that theatrical presentation or indeed its parity with the original intentions for exhibition in 1958. Highlights and colour are very different from previous television and DVD screenings I'm acquainted with, where the image was much warmer, and the grading of this restoration may well prove divisive for some with its colder, funereal tone.

Sonically, this sounds terrific and the LPCM 2.0 audio is suitably dynamic and intense when James Bernard's booming score is in full flight. His music really benefits from the restoration and it thunders across the soundscape with some depth. Dialogue and sound effects are served equally well and there are no major problems, such as audio drop outs, crackles or distortions, to report.

Special features
Commentary
Hammer historian Marcus Hearn and author & critic Jonathan Rigby provide an amiable track that's often full of details about the production and the cast. Poor old Michael Gough comes in for a bit of drubbing about his performance and the two commentators offer an interesting assessment of acting styles in the film. Along the way you'll discover much about Sangster's script; Terence Fisher's attitudes to the supernatural and the depiction of evil; the careers of John Van Eyssen, Valerie Gaunt and Barbara Archer and a sweet recollection of Miles Malleson's contribution to the film. Despite a slight tendency to describe events happening on screen, both men constantly drop in trivia about the film and are a delight to listen to. The commentary is on both the 2007 and 2012 restorations but if you select the 2012 restoration commentary Marcus and Jonathan also mark out other subtle differences in that version such as the title sequence and, of course, the material returned to the film that features Mina and the climactic disintegration (they note how the sound of Dracula's demise is also restored as well as the infamous face clawing moment). Kudos to both gentlemen for going the extra mile and providing more detail in the 2012 commentary.
Dracula Reborn (30:32)
Interviews with writer and director Jimmy Sangster, Jonathan Rigby, Marcus Hearn, Mark Gatiss, Kim Newman and Janina Faye provide an overview of the Hammer style, consolidated in Dracula, and the adapting and shooting of the film. They cover the changes from novel to script, Sangster's "muscular" script, the essential qualities of the Lee and Cushing performances and Terence Fisher's direction. Finally, James Bernard's iconic music also receives an analysis from expert David Huckvale and Wayne Kinsey discusses Bernard Robinson's genius in recycling and revamping sets on Stage 1 at Bray.
Resurrecting Dracula (16:56)
How the film was restored by the BFI in 2007 and how Simon Rowson followed up their initial 21 month discussion with the National Film Centre in Tokyo about the Japanese cut of the film form the backbone of this featurette. BFI's Ben Thompson explains how the film was restored from the camera negative and sound elements held by Warner Brothers in California, the restoration of the UK titles and the "faithful reproduction" from the check print of the colour grading of the 2007 re-release. Rowson relates the story of how he visited Tokyo and confirmed the reels they held contained the mythical missing footage. Molinare's John Palmer then explains how they painstakingly restored the Japanese footage, matched and integrated it into the BFI's restoration. Vox pops with the enthusiastic audience watching the restoration in progress at the VAULT are followed by a coda from Deluxe 142 who, in 2012, picked up further picture and audio cleaning work on the restoration carried out by Molinare.  
The Demon Lover: Christopher Frayling on Dracula (27:48)
Very pleased that Frayling's views are represented in this featurette. His intelligent analysis of such works as The Innocents, La belle et la bête and Nosferatu is carried over here into his fascinating views about Hammer's magnum opus. He draws in a diverse range of views of the original book and its cinematic iterations as representative of "an infinitely flexible myth" or "fairy story". Hammer, he reckons, were attempting to chart the changing sexual mores of the 1950s through the use of colour and advertising, presenting Dracula as a charismatic "demon lover" and as the Other threatening the stability of marriage and revealing the hypocrisy of Victorian values.
Censoring Dracula (9:15)
A featurette in which Denis Meikle looks at the culture of censorship that Hammer operated in at the time and the tense relationship between them and the BBFC. A fascinating exploration of the censor's worries about the sex rather than the horror content of the film and great to see some of the BBFC readers comments unearthed from the archive. At the script stage, the fact that Dracula claws his own face off in the climax didn't seem to worry them as much as low cut, transparent gowns or the liberal use of Kensington Gore. However, as ever with the BBFC once they'd seen the film they raised further objections and received complaints about James Bernard's "sex music". 
Unrestored Japanese Reels 6-9 (35:01)
A presentation of the surviving reels from the water and fire damage at the National Film Center just outside Tokyo which writer Simon Rowson and his wife Michiko finally tracked down in 2011. He was able to see these reels and confirm that some of the cut material - namely Mina's seduction and Dracula's demise - did exist. These reels come with Japanese subtitles and suffer from a vast amount of damage that affects picture and sound quality. Incredible that they survive and that Rowson found them and negotiations enabled Hammer to restore the material back into the BFI restoration.
The World Of Hammer (24:53)
Another episode from the 1990 series narrated by Oliver Reed. 'Dracula And The Undead' naturally uses lots of clips and Reed's rumbling tones to cover the Hammer Dracula cycle but it also embraces its other vampire sagas, everything from Brides of Dracula and Kiss of the Vampire to Captain Kronosand Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires.
Janina Faye Reads Stoker (12:18)
A chapter of the original novel presented at the VAULT screening of the 2012 restoration. This mixes rostrum images of the book's text with Faye's enthusiastic reading of Harker's coach journey to the Borgo Pass.
Stills Gallery
Superb collection of posters (UK and international), press books and trade ads - many in full colour. A smashing set of black and white lobby cards, some stunning stills, many of which I've never seen before, and again including many rare colour photographs. Some are very amusing - Carol Marsh having a cuppa and a sarnie lying in her tomb and Valerie Gaunt literally smouldering before the camera with a ciggie on the go. It even includes Bernard Robinson sketches, the opening at the Gaumont Haymarket and the US opening. Over 100 fully-restored and rare images play over extracts from the film's soundtrack.  
Booklet by Hammer archivist Robert J. E. Simpson (PDF)
A beautifully designed introduction to the jewel in Hammer's crown, packed with colour and black and white stills and poster designs. Simpson ably and eruditely covers production, scripting and the marketing of the film as well as its incredible legacy.
Original shooting script (PDF)
A draft from 1957, the Jimmy Sangster script contains many differences from the finished film. It opens with a sequence in black and white and features an extended introduction for Jonathan Harker that emulates Stoker when the occupants of the coach he's travelling in implore him not to go to Castle Dracula. Very pleased this has been included and it makes for fascinating reading.

Dracula
Hammer Films Production 1958
Distributed by Universal International
Icon/Lionsgate Double Play Edition 1 x BD and 2 x DVD / Region B/2 / LGB95006 / Released 18 March 2013 / Cert: 12
BD: 1.66:1 and LPCM 2.0 Audio / English HOH subtitles on main feature
DVD Disc 1: 1.66:1 and Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono Audio / English HOH subtitles

Wonderful Books has now announced the Dr Who 8th Anniversary Special, a gorgeously designed and humourous homage to the RADIO TIMES Doctor Who 10th Anniversary Special originally published in 1973.

The(Not-RADIO TIMES) Dr Who 8th Anniversary Specialshowcases writer and designer Paul Smith's talents in a 36 page fanzine covering the last 8 years of Doctor Who's return to our screens. Paul has designed and written the fanzine in collaboration with an array of contributors, commissioning commentary from professional and fan writers Andrew Blair, Alison Jane Campbell, Johnny Candon, Frank Collins (that's my good self), Martin Day, Philip Sandifer, JR Southall, Keith Topping and Alex Wilcock and design from artists Lydia Butz, Benoit Drombey, Jason Fletcher, Alea LeFevre, Jon Pinto, Westley Smith, James Taylor, Will Thompson and more. What a talented bunch!

You will probably recall Paul's stunning work on The Wonderful Book of Dr Who 1965, a tongue-in-cheek look at the very first year of Doctor Who and itself a witty homage to BBC Books' The Brilliant Book of Doctor Who 2011. This proved to be a huge success as an online flipbook (more than 26,500 views on Issuu.com to date) and the positive reaction led to Paul producing a small number of printed copies, now into a second print run, with extra content. The Dr Who 8th Anniversary Special similarly offers a visual treat and a witty, affectionate tribute to the series.

The Dr Who 8th Anniversary Special - a not-for-profit publication - can now be previewed and ordered from Wonderful Books.

Writer John Lucarotti's connection with Doctor Who stretched back to his association with Sydney Newman at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, where Newman had become Supervisor in Drama Production in 1954. Lucarotti had been writing for radio, including an eighteen-part serial about Marco Polo, when Newman first met him.

After Newman was head-hunted by Howard Thomas at Associated British Corporation, the ITV franchise for the Midlands and the North of England between 1965 and 1968, Lucarotti also moved back to Britain. He retained his association with Newman and contributed to a number of shows such as The Avengers (ABC, 1961-69) and City Beneath the Sea and its sequel Secret Beneath the Sea (ABC, 1962-63) as well as Ghost Squad (ATV/ITC, 1961-64). By 12 December 1962, Newman was Head of Drama Series and Serials at the BBC and, required to devise a programme for a family audience to bridge the gap between Grandstand and Juke Box Jury on Saturday evenings, he co-created Doctor Who and recommended Lucarotti to story editor David Whitaker.

The seven-part Marco Polo, originally titled A Journey to Cathay, was commissioned from Lucarotti in June 1963 and eventually formed the first seven episodes in a second batch of thirteen for Doctor Who authorised by BBC Chief of Programmes Donald Baverstock in November 1963. In writing his Marco Polo scripts, Lucarotti returned to his original radio scripts and the research undertaken for the serial he'd written in Canada and included material from The Description Of The World, Polo's memoirs published in the fourteenth century. It was during the production of Marco Polo, in mid February 1964 when Baverstock confirmed Doctor Who would extend to a full 52 weeks on air, that Whitaker approached Lucarotti and commissioned another historical tale from him after he proposed ideas featuring the Aztec civilisation.

"the four characters cannot make history"

What eventually became Dr Who and the Aztecs continued to fulfill the original brief for the series collectively created by Bunny Webber, Donald Wilson and Newman: to mix futuristic science fiction stories with adventures set in the historical past, adhering to the Reithian diktat of entertaining, informing and educating its audience. As outlined in the format document of May 1963: "each story will have a strong informational core based on fact. Our central characters... may find themselves on the shores of Britain when Caesar and his legionnaires landed in 44BC; may find themselves in their own school laboratories but reduced to the size of a pinhead; or on Mars; or Venus..." (1)

Whitaker had also added his own revisions to this format document by July 1963 and, in retrospect, this has some bearing on how history would be treated as a genre within the first two years of the series: "the four characters cannot make history. Advice must not be proffered to Nelson on his battle tactics when approaching the Nile, nor must bon mots be put into the mouth of Oscar Wilde." (2) This revised format would be reflected in the balance of stories across the initial 52 week run.

Lucarotti had spent some time living in Mexico and, steeped in the culture of the Aztecs, was particularly fascinated by the dichotomy that existed between their advanced medicine, agriculture, astronomy, architecture and the savagery and barbarity of their belief system and its demand for living human sacrifices. He proposed using this background to explore the nature of good and evil within a culture so divergent from our own, in a story that "explores ideas of social determinism and the different ways in which one life can affect another." (3) Commissioned on 24 February 1964, Lucarotti worked on the scripts on his boat in Majorca, investing Dr Who and the Aztecs with his considerable knowledge and research. By 16 March, he had written most of the scripts and he spent the following day in London at the production office completing The Aztecs, as it was then retitled, to Whitaker's deadline. (4)

Barry Newbery, joining the BBC as an assistant designer in 1959, was assigned as designer on the serial after working on An Unearthly Child and Marco Polo. He, costume designer Daphne Dare and make-up designer Jill Summers spent a great deal of time researching the period, attempting to inject as much authenticity into their work as they could. Newbery found this rather a difficult task as material on the period was quite scarce and he not only sourced several books but also consulted a recent ITV documentary for background detail.

Dare had to exercise artistic license with the costume designs, to preserve the cast's modesty above all else, as her research indicated that the Aztecs wore little more than loincloths and cloaks and women were often topless. The feathered head-dresses worn by Ian and Barbara, Ixta's jaguar head-dress and the various items of costume jewellery all aimed for authentic representation.

Newbery also oversaw the manufacture, from fibreglass and wood, of various clubs and shields used by the Aztec warriors, their designs based on his research into the pictographic and ideographic writing systems of the period. This also extended to other props such as vases and plates and, to produce and paint those, he was assisted by a small team of art students.

As he explains on the DVD interview, one of his problems was building the heavy door to the tomb where the TARDIS arrives. The illusion of a heavy structure was created with a system of scenery rollers and counterbalancing weights. As the production geared up towards recording in April, Newbery then became concerned as to how he was going to show the open vistas of the Aztec cities in the cramped and poorly serviced studios at Lime Grove.

There were certain issues with the 30 foot painted cyclorama depicting the views from the temple roof and the garden sets at Lime Grove D, with insufficient room behind the sets to disguise the backdrop, and as he also explained: "I wasn't particularly happy with the backdrop because if you're going to have painted cloth, it's got to be far enough away from the camera for the brushmarks not to be seen." (5) He put a request in via the serial's director John Crockett to move the production to BBC Television Centre but this was refused.

Ironically, a month later, his schedule on the production of episodes two and three 'The Warriors of Death' and 'The Bride of Sacrifice' was shifted to TC3 at Television Centre. The first time Doctor Who was made at the Centre, Newbery discovered to his horror that part of his set for the Garden of Peace had been broken up by mistake and the painted cyclorama presented further problems: "Because of planning, awkwardness and changes in schedule, the following week they put us into TC3, where I had all the space in the world! And of course my cloth wasn't big enough." (6)

To create a new section of the Garden of Peace set, he and Crockett extemporised by arranging hired in greenery with re-used sections of a set built for the Ealing filming completed on 13 and 14 April when Carole Ann Ford had pre-filmed her sequences for episodes two and three. She would be away on holiday for the scheduled studio recordings in May and these scenes with Keith Pyott, as the High Priest of Knowledge Autloc, and Walter Randall as his acolyte Tonila, would be inserted into the episodes later. The fight between Ian and warrior Ixta and the sacrificial victim's jump from the temple roof were also pre-filmed at Ealing using stunt men choreographed by Derek Ware. (7)

"I can't bear to see this potentially marvellous programme go down the drain"

John Crockett, the director of The Aztecs, was a BBC staff director with a significant background in theatre, acting, painting and dancing. He had established the Compass Players in the mid 1940s and produced a number of plays for both the Birmingham Repertory Theatre and the Dundee Repertory Theatre. At the BBC he had recently directed episodes of Suspense (1962-63) and then stepped in to direct 'The Wall of Lies', the fourth episode of Marco Polo. After making the episode, he also sent a memo to David Whitaker enthusiastically suggesting a number of other historical events and figures that the series could (and eventually would) present, including the Viking raids, Drake and the Armada, smuggling on the Cornish coast, Jacobite pretender to the throne Bonnie Prince Charlie and Richard I and the Crusades.

After rehearsals at the Drill Hall, Uxbridge the cast entered Lime Grove D to record episode one 'The Temple of Evil' on 1 May with the following two episodes rehearsed and then recorded at TC3 over the next fortnight and with a return to Lime Grove to record the final instalment 'The Day of Darkness' on 23 May. As the episodes were being recorded, the debate about studio availability and resources for Doctor Who was continuing between producer Verity Lambert, Newman and Baverstock. Newman was particularly forthright about the problems with Lime Grove that Lambert had flagged up.

He  informed Baverstock on 20 May, "Studio D has worked against the best interests of Dr. Who, has tired the cast, has not allowed for sufficient camera rehearsal, the heat is unbearable, it has no technical gimmicks, and so on." He rejected Lime Grove in favour of Riverside or Television Centre and, calling Baverstock's bluff it seems, he then threatened: "Unless the proper studio can be allocated for Dr.Who... I think it would be better that I recommend its cancellation. I can't bear to see this potentially marvellous programme go down the drain through inadequate support." (8)

Inadequate support may well colour our view of The Aztecs, especially when the constraints of budget and space can be seen to undermine certain aspects of the production. Newbery's design is exemplary but his worries about the painted backdrops being too close to the camera are warranted and the cycloramas used in the studio are evidently plagued by bad lighting and visible folds in the cloths. However, it's a minor quibble because, despite this and the cramped studio facilities, his production design does achieve a sense of scale with views from the tops of pyramids, the gardens and some beautifully and richly detailed tomb interiors. The costumes and make up are excellent too and the attention to such detail and research adds to a credible realisation of an Aztec society peopled by recognisable characters.

Lucarotti brings the TARDIS to fifteenth century Mexico and frames a basic plot, where the crew have to recover the ship when it is trapped inside the tomb of former Aztec High Priest Yetaxa, with a philosophical argument between Barbara and the Doctor about the nature of history and destiny. As David Rafer acknowledges, this "presents a fascinating example of a Doctor Who story that confronts the TARDIS travellers with an historically documented civilisation and what was once a believed mythical wordview." (9) Barbara, now claimed to be the reincarnation of Yetaxa by the High Priest of Knowledge, Autloc, then uses her influence to forbid the Aztec's practice of human sacrifice, much to the Doctor's chagrin. The High Priest of Sacrifice, Tlotoxl schemes to expose her for the fraud she is.

At the centre of Lucarotti's ornate, Shakespearean script is an attempt, converging with Whitaker's script-editing one presumes, to engage with the issues triggered by the format document's attitudes towards historical genre. Lucarotti remains on Reithian message with the story's examination of Aztec culture but he also just manages to push the story and the characters beyond a simple regurgitation of the kind of history expected to be taught in schools. His attempt to tell a form of 'living history', populated by rounded, if somewhat stereotypical characters and altering the restricted observational role of the Doctor and his companions which dominated Marco Polo, also reflects elements of Whitaker's rather Hegelian view of history.

This is one that holds history at arm's length and where interaction with past civilisations, on even the smallest scale, does not posit a diversion from established events. This is prior to the 'genre-creep' of the 'historicals' overseen by Dennis Spooner, for example, where the Doctor and his companions become implicated within major historical events in such serials as The Reign of Terror (French Revolution as James Bond conspiracy) or The Romans (Nero as farce) and the sophisticated view of historical and temporal paradoxes we are more familiar with today.

Whitaker had a particular notion of how history as genre or the historical biography would be treated in the series. During the recording of the serial, he replied to a viewer's letter about the relationship the Doctor and his companions had with time travel and history. "One must look at time as a roadway going up hill and down the other side. Doctor Who is in the position of being placed on top of the hill. He can look backward and he can look forward, in fact the whole pattern of the road is laid out for him. But you will appreciate of course that he cannot interfere with that road in any way whatsoever. He cannot divert it, improve it or destroy it." (10)

He suggested the TARDIS crew were simply observers who witnessed unalterable, predestined events and who could only "interfere in the personal histories of certain people from the past... provided they are not formally established as historical characters." (11) Hegel views the course of history as a fixed, immutable fact and Whitaker seems to agree. This changes later with stories like The Time Meddler where the TARDIS crew 'protect' history rather than 'observe' it and where there is also a shift from an obsession with Earth’s history to the much wider span of cosmic history in the series along with alternate time-lines, dimensions and multiple universes.

"what you are trying to do is utterly impossible. I know. Believe me. I know!"

In The Aztecs, Lucarotti uses the Doctor and Barbara as arguments for and against actively changing the course of history. Whitaker's principle of non-interference in the established timelines of historical characters such as Montezuma is avoided by a scenario where localised intervention, sans scientific trappings, is deemed acceptable and "The Aztecs can easily be read as a science fiction story about a time traveller's failure to change the course of history... couched entirely in the human drama rather than as technobabble or special effects." (12) Further to this, while it concentrates on the Doctor's angry denouncement of Barbara's mission to civilise what she sees as the barbaric aspects of Aztec culture, it also suggests he can calmly ignore his own advice or turn a blind eye to Ian and Susan’s own blunderings into Aztec culture.

Hartnell is superb at evoking the Doctor's craftiness here. The Doctor rather sets Barbara up for a fall, quite happily using her impersonation and influence as Yetaxa as a way of getting back into the tomb and escaping in the TARDIS. The implication is that he realises from the outset that encouraging her and Ian to become deeply involved in the culture they find themselves in will be a hiding to nothing. Despite his warning of "what you are trying to do is utterly impossible. I know. Believe me. I know!", all of which suggests he's been in this pickle before, Barbara continues in her attempt to stop human sacrifices.

This is the rational and normal reaction of a middle class liberal to ‘barbaric’ rituals outside of her own culture and like most of us in that situation, as dyed in the wool civilising imperialists given the power of a God, we’d want to change it too. The sparring between Hartnell and Hill about her intervention in the sacrifice of the Perfect Victim in episode two is gripping and yet sympathetic. The Doctor realises he's being harsh and attempts to reconcile them both to what has happened and the limits of their authority.

Yet the Doctor takes her to task over it rather hypocritically, a position especially notable when he nips off to the garden and woos Cameca over a mug of cocoa in order to uncover a secret entrance to the tomb. This whiff of hypocrisy does continue to taint the story: don’t meddle with history unless it helps recover the TARDIS, allows the Doctor to inadvertently fall in love, sees Susan being forced into marriage or shows Ian embarrassing the local warriors with his powerful Judo thumb. All interventions in history in one way or another and, even though Lucarotti's imperative is to show how the Aztec civilisation doomed itself to extinction, one final iteration is the Doctor's apparent lack of objection to how Barbara alters Autloc’s point of view about his society and the unexplored consequences if Autloc himself then goes and changes history.

Despite the simplistic notion of the cause and effects of history and destiny espoused here there is a rather good story to be had. Jacqueline Hill is quite splendid as the liberal Barbara. She might abhor the practice of human sacrifice but she also sees the positive aspects of Aztec society and culture. As Yetaxa, she’s rather regal and noble in trying to save them from themselves and sees Tlotoxl as a symbol of all that’s wrong with the culture. By working on him she thinks she can get the Aztec people on her side. It is Ian who clearly understands and powerfully explains the mind-set of the priests and recognises it is Autloc she should be influencing as "the extraordinary man here" in a society dominated by Tlotoxl's beliefs and sacrifices.

The story is therefore driven by Ian, Barbara and the Doctor being outmanoeuvred by Autloc and Tlotoxl (both representative of the fall and rise of belief in particular Aztec deities) and, by the climax of the story, the unbearable tension generated both by Tlotoxl revealing Barbara as a fake goddess and the desperate attempt to get back to the TARDIS. Autloc is delightfully underplayed by Keith Pyott who brings a subtle sensitivity and melancholy to a very sympathetic character while, in total contrast, John Ringham just about gets away with his Aztec rendition of Richard III. Complete with hump and limp and Olivier delivery, he homes in on and exaggerates the Shakespearean aspect to the script and is wonderfully cruel and evil as the Machiavellian Tlotoxl. Hill, Pyott and Ringham are excellent in their scenes together, their performances capturing the moral complexities of their entwined relationships.

Hartnell's whimsicality and penchant for light comedy is also highlighted in the scenes with Cameca (Margot Van der Burgh) in the Garden of Peace. Both actors seem to emphasise these characters are, in effect, kindred spirits with their ‘engagement’ over a cup of cocoa full of wit and warmth. It’s good to see how the character of the Doctor has mellowed here and it is interesting to see him, in gentler mode, making a friend of Cameca at this stage of the series. His playing against Van der Burgh is effective and sensitive and the comedic aspects of the Doctor's sheer unpreparedness in his betrothal to Cameca are underlined by the gentle mocking from Ian later in episode three.

Hartnell and Hill's fiercely performed arguments about the changing of history are placed in counterpoint to the wistful coda in the fourth episode where they acknowledge the inevitable failure of Barbara’s ideals. The final message “you failed to save a civilisation, but at least you helped one man” is bittersweet as is the Doctor’s last minute change of mind when he leaves behind Cameca’s brooch and then impulsively rushes back for it. That coda offers an emotional depth to the main characters, making them feel real and convincing.

Unfortunately, despite a strong impression in the scenes with Barbara in the tomb, by episode two Carole Ann Ford is rather sidelined as Susan. However, she’s rather good when Susan remains steadfast in her refusal to marry the Perfect Victim. She's given a more mature outlook in this story that is sadly underdeveloped during the rest of the series. There’s good support from William Russell, evoking his days as Sir Lancelot in the adventure series The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (ITC, 1956), when he gets into macho warrior mode and uses martial arts in his fight against Ixta (Ian Cullen).

The situation does somewhat beggar belief that a history/science teacher would quite so easily step up to the mark in these activities. The wrestling match in episode two and the Ealing filmed face off between Ian and Ixta at the end of episode four fare the best out of these sequences but the fight in episode one now looks rather stagey and hesitant, the combatants lack of natural flow indicating a reluctance to go hell for leather lest the two actors involved break either the prop weapons or their own bones.

The direction by John Crockett differs from that seen in Waris Hussein’s work on An Unearthly Child or the Christopher Barry/Richard Martin double act on The Daleks. The Aztecs is, unsurprisingly given Crockett's background, more akin to a theatrical production with most of the actors facing the cameras or tracking in to big close ups for many key lines by dint of no zoom lenses on television cameras they were using at the time. However, when production moves to Television Centre and there is an opportunity to use more modern cameras, Crockett is less restricted and includes some lovely high shots in episode two, tracking shots that flow better and uses the camera to frame faces rather well. He also encourages John Ringham to stare down the lens to deliver his asides to the viewer, pre-dating much of the breaking of the fourth wall of television in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The Aztecs is an intriguing articulation of the format's views about history and destiny and it works extremely well as a tale examining the cultural values of two different times. It also offers an inspiring view of the sheer hard work that went into the production. Not only are there a number of great performances but they are also supported by wonderful design from Barry Newbery and Daphne Dare and a simple, effective score from Richard Rodney Bennett. It manages to give good sub-plots to most of the main characters, particularly Barbara and the Doctor, and continues to develop the relationships between the members of the TARDIS crew. A real highlight of the first year of the series.

(1) Howe, Stammers, Walker Doctor Who: The Handbook - The First Doctor
(2) Ibid
(3) Philip MacDonald, 'Shapes of Things' in Doctor Who Magazine Special Edition - The First Doctor
(4) Andrew Pixley, DWM Archive: The Aztecs, Doctor Who Magazine 266
(5) Mark Campbell, Interview with Barry Newbery, Skonnos webzine
(6) Ibid
(7) Andrew Pixley, DWM Archive: The Aztecs, Doctor Who Magazine 266
(8) Howe, Stammers, Walker Doctor Who: The Handbook - The First Doctor
(9) David Rafer 'Mythic identity in Doctor Who' in Time and Relative Dissertations in Space, ed. David Butler
(10) Howe, Stammers, Walker Doctor Who: The Handbook - The First Doctor
(11) Ibid
(12) Daniel O'Mahony 'History, pseudo-history and genre in Doctor Who' in Time and Relative Dissertations in Space, ed. David Butler

Special Features

Disc One (all reproduced from the original 2002 DVD release)
Commentary
A pleasant enough track featuring actors William Russell and Carole Ann Ford, producer Verity Lambert OBE and they all comment on the authenticity of the costumes and sets and the commitment from the actors. They also recall the rigors of 'as live' television production and working at Lime Grove. An early commentary, not moderated, this tends to slip into passages of silence between observations about other actors, costumes, sets, the effect of the cliffhanger and the impact of the series on children but it is well worth a listen.
Arabic Soundtrack
This optional soundtrack for episode four only is a fascinating example of how episodes were dubbed for overseas television stations.
Remembering The Aztecs (28:20)
Actors John Ringham (Tlotoxl), Ian Cullen (Ixta) and Walter Randall (Tonila) recall the production of The Aztecs within the context of television production in the sixties in general. Cullen recalls his first television experiences via Kidnapped and Doctor Who, Ringham espouses the team effort needed in television and he, Cullen and Randall explain the pressures of rehearse and 'as live' continuous recording of episodes. They also share their memories of working with Billy Hartnell and the regular cast. Ringham also discusses director John Crockett, working with him at the Compass Players and his own 'patent Laurence Olivier' performance in the story.
Designing The Aztecs (24:34)
Designer Barry Newbery talks about his work on the story, illustrated with many never-before-seen production drawings and photographs from his personal collection. He discusses the difficulties of working at Lime Grove and the processes used to design and build the sets.
Cortez and Montezuma (5:56)
An extract from a 1970 Blue Peter, introduced by Valerie Singleton on location in Mexico, giving historical background to the Aztec belief in human sacrifice.
Restoring The Aztecs (8:09)
First of all, turn the info text on before you start watching this. Otherwise, you'll be slightly nonplussed. The text provides a very informative compare and contrast of the restoration process on The Aztecs and a description of the various techniques involved: remastering from the negative, cleaning and repair and then the VidFIRE application to restore the video look to the telecine recordings.
Making Cocoa (2:30)
An animated guide to making cocoa the Aztec way, voiced in character by John Ringham as Tlotoxl and Walter Randall as Tonila, with both characters animated and presented in South Park style.
TARDIS-Cam no.3 (1:06)
Another of BBCi’s specially commissioned visual effects tableaux.
Photo Gallery
A gallery including many images of Barry Newberry's excellent set designs, behind the scenes production stills, rehearsal images, and colour and black and white publicity material.
Easter Egg
An animated BBC Enterprises logo recovered from the end of one of the prints sold overseas.
Intro Sequences
The umbrella story title The Aztecs does not appear on any of the episodes, so for the original DVD BBFC compliance a caption card with the title was provided when choosing the 'play all' option on the menu. To add interest, six versions were provided to play randomly, each with a different voiceover, in character, from three of the actors involved in the production.
Programme information text
Not only do Matthew Kilburn's superb notes brim with detail about the production, the script, the series' format and some comparisons to Lucarotti's 1984 novelisation but they also provide massive amounts of information about Aztec culture and society, their beliefs and rituals and there's even a brief guide on how to pronounce the Aztec names in the story.

Disc Two
Galaxy 4(64:45) – a shortened reconstruction of the missing story Galaxy 4, using off-screen stills, audio recordings and animation plus the recently recovered complete episode three 'Airlock' to tell the story. William Emms' third season story from 1965 is something of a throwback to the early science fiction serials produced during Doctor Who's first year. What stands out here is Brian Hodgson's unique sound design, from the whistling Chumblies to the planet's atmospheres, and the central performance from Stephanie Bidmead as Maaga, the human leader of the female clone Drahvins. The recently recovered episode 'Airlock' certainly highlights her work during a fantastic direct to camera monologue as she contemplates the death of the doomed planet she and her enemies, the Rills, are marooned on. It's a simple moral tale - don't judge others on appearances alone - but provides a neat twist to the traditional use of the monster in science fiction and the politics of cloning in Huxley's Brave New World.
Chronicle – The Realms of Gold (49:52)
A very welcome and engaging extra and not as dull as it sounds, John Julius Norwich’s superlative 1969 retelling of the story of the Spanish conquest of Mexico and the Aztecs also features music by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. A very informative watch.
Dr. Forever! – The Celestial Toyroom(22:36)
Another installment of this five-part series introduced by Ayesha Antoine, this time looking at Doctor Who toys. With original series producer Verity Lambert, new series creator Russell T Davies, writers Mark Gatiss, Rob Shearman, Paul Cornell and Joseph Lidster, BBC Worldwide product licensing executive Richard Hollis, product approval executive Dave Turbitt and ex- range editor Steve Cole, AudioGO commissioning editor Michael Stevens, Character Options’ Alasdair Dewar, DWM’s toy reviewer Jim Sangster and last, but by no means least, Doctor Who’s very own Winston Churchill, actor Ian McNiece.
It’s a Square World (7:23)
From 1963, the very first Doctor Who skit (as far as can be ascertained), with Clive Dunn in full First Doctor costume as a scientist demonstrating his new space rocket to Michael Bentine, resulting in Television Centre being launched into space! Features cameo appearances by Patrick Moore and Albert Steptoe.
A Whole Scene Going(4:33)
An excerpt from a recently recovered edition of the sixties music and arts programme, featuring a rare interview with director Gordon Flemyng and a behind the scenes look at filming of his movie Daleks’ Invasion Earth: 2150 AD at Shepperton in 1966.
Coming Soon
Ssssssssss! The Ice Warriors are on the march.
PDF Material 
Radio Times listings in Adobe PDF format for viewing on PC or Mac

Doctor Who: TheAztecs (Special Edition)
BBC Worldwide / Released 11 March 2013 / BBCDVD3689 / Cert: PG
4 episodes / Broadcast: 23 May to 13 June 1964 / Black and White / Running time: 98:57

To celebrate the centenary of legendary British actor Peter Cushing's birth, Signum Books will be publishing Peter Cushing - The Complete Memoirs in May. This compiles the previously published memoirs An Autobiography from 1986 and Past Forgetting: Memoirs of the Hammer Years, which followed in 1988, with The Peter Cushing Story - a 1955 memoir, originally serialised in the press, that has not been seen in nearly 60 years. Signum has also worked with the Cushing estate to include 100 rare and previously unseen stills from Cushing’s personal collection, including pictures and illustrations from his scrapbooks. Finally, there is also an 'as complete as possible' chronology of his stage, screen and radio appearances which includes some images of Cushing's endorsements in print advertising.

The book features a new foreword from Cushing's loyal secretary Joyce Broughton who was featured in the moving tribute to the actor on the recent Blu-ray release of The Curse of Frankenstein. She initially touches upon an element of Cushing's personality - 'his child-like nature' - which emerges, with increasing regularity, throughout the memoirs and is perhaps symbolised in his love of toys, games and making models. Affectionately known to her as 'Sir', she remained loyal during the devastating emotional after effects of the death of Cushing's wife Helen and looked after him when he was diagnosed with cancer. Actor, critic and film historian Jonathan Rigby also provides an effective, personal account of his admiration for Cushing in his own new introduction.

Like many of us who came to adore this quintessentially English of actors, Rigby was, and remains, a great fan and he vividly recollects his first post-graduate encounter with Cushing in Canterbury. He also regards those twin bastions of British horror, Cushing and his friend Christopher Lee, as 'without doubt the right men in the right place at the right time' while he sketches out a career in theatre and television that eventually brought 'Sir' through the front door of the Hammer house of horror in 1956. Rigby also traces Cushing's later progress through newspaper and magazine reviews and interviews and the great changes in his demeanour after the death of Helen, revealing a genuinely flawed human being we perhaps too readily obscure with his saintly reputation as the ‘the gentleman of horror’.

An Autobiography is certainly the book that offers the greater insight into Cushing's childhood and youthful struggle to become an actor, his subsequent marriage to Helen and his meteoric television career. There is a paucity of material about his film career from the mid 1950s onwards that he later attempted to make amends for in Past Forgetting which simultaneously creates a coda to the sad events of the first volume and dips back into his television and film experiences. 

'top marks in art: nil for everything else' 

1986's An Autobiography details, in a succinct but charming prose style, both an idyllic recollection of childhood  - as the subject of some gender confusion thanks to his mother Nellie, chewing bacon rind and worms in the back garden, driving go-carts to school and devising elaborate schemes to earn extra pocket money - and darker moments where childhood fears of the dark and death seem to prefigure his sensitivity and morbidity in later life, his vivid imagination perhaps a clue to some of the Guignol, grand or otherwise, from which he would later make his reputation.

After seeing a production of Peter Pan, Cushing acknowledges that a 'desire to remain ‘The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up’ rubbed itself off on me, which I think becomes self-evident as my story unfolds' and is a corollary to the acknowledged theatrical influence of his Uncle Bertie's 'artistic temperament', his Aunt Maude's escapades on the stage in South Africa and his grandfather Henry William Cushing's membership of Henry Irving's company. Ironically, the latter was a separation by small degree from Dracula author Bram Stoker who was manager of Irving's Lyceum Theatre.

The other relationship in childhood which provided Cushing with some much needed stability was the one with his brother David. David, rather than his father George, offered 'Brighteyes' fatherly counsel on the facts of life, taught him to ride bikes and drive cars, did his homework and collaborated with him in all sorts of imaginative derring-do inspired by Toms Mix and Merry. Cushing's athleticism in his acting roles was clearly a result of the various adolescent scrapes he put himself through during summers also dominated by collecting cigarette cards and birds' eggs.

His brusque father didn't know what was to become of a lad who got 'top marks in art: nil for everything else' and, though lauded for swimming and athletics, 'played the lead in nearly all the school productions'. Cushing also observes he had 'an ability to fall down a cliff without breaking my neck: and just for good measure, an appetite like several horses'. His dad, reluctantly appreciating his talent as an artist, managed to land him a job in the Drawing Office of the Surveyor’s Department at the Coulsdon and Purley Urban District Council and even though Cushing's childhood was over, his child-like view of the world and his skills as an artist never deserted him. 

He may have spent three years as nothing more than a 'glorified office boy' but he was already mapping out his ambitions. A succession of UDC activities - administering street numbering and collecting coins from public loos - only concealed his true calling, one fuelled with ventures to the West End on his day off to sneak past stage door staff 'to revel in that intoxicating atmosphere and heady odour - a combination of dust, size, distemper and grease paint; to stand on the stage in the set that was prepared for the next performance'.

The next performances for Cushing were in school plays and amateur theatricals as he feverishly bombarded adverts in The Stage with willing responses. Clearly a sensitive soul, his early failure to break into acting drove him to the cliff path above Orcombe Rocks where his intention to end it all was thwarted by the distracting antics of coastal birds. On the train journey back home, he read about scholarships at Guildhall School of Music and Drama and, thanks to his love of the natural world and his sheer determination, he was back on course.

It's hard now to reconcile the perfectly and precisely spoken Cushing with the one who auditioned in front of Allan Aynesworth. He declared of the young man's talents, or lack thereof, 'Take him away! His voice offends me!’ That Cushing was deadly serious about an acting career is hilariously recounted in his attempt to remedy his vocal incompetence. Marching across the North Downs enunciating a series of recommended vocal exercises of the 'How Now, Brown Cow?' variety, much to the chagrin of courting couples in the long grass, the actor-to-be was ordered to ‘put a sock in it’. However, after much practice, the Guildhall eventually accepted him.

By 1935, he had performed in two end-of-term plays and used this experience as leverage in continuing attempts to get paid employment in the theatre. It was actor-manager Bill Fraser who took pity on him and offered him a job as ASM at the Connaught Theatre in Worthing. Cushing's recollection of this 'audition' is sweetly self-deprecating and delightfully funny, delivered with aplomb. From there he regales us with tales of creating prop food for productions (sliced bananas and redcurrant jelly standing in for bacon rashers) that he would often tuck into at the end of performances before heading for bed and of his 'duties' at the Grand Theatre, Southampton, many of which were in fact time-honoured theatrical gags inflicted on a terribly innocent and gullible Cushing by a Cockney stage carpenter.

'Every Night Something Awful'

After gaining much experience in rep, he joined Harry Hanson's Court Players and met his lifelong friend Peter Gray. Gray was clearly another fatherly influence, gently steering the 25-year-old Cushing's education before war separated them and Cushing headed for Hollywood in January 1939 when his father presented him with a one-way ticket to America.

Gray, providing the introduction to Cushing's 1988 memoir Past Forgetting, recalls their first encounter on a train at Euston and sharing digs in Nottingham under the auspices of that now extinct creature, the theatrical landlady. He also gets the measure of Cushing's psyche, formed in early childhood, when he exclaims, 'in every good actor there is an element of Peter Pan, the boy who wouldn’t grow up – a fixation in that period of childhood when total suspension of disbelief in a fairy tale is possible and even natural'.

In New York, prior to Cushing's train journey to Los Angeles, Robert Morley's advice to him about breaking into Hollywood was, 'It’s very crowded, you know, dear boy. Why don’t you just go there for a holiday? Have you brought your bathing costume with you?’ However, 'plumb British' Peter Cushing hit the ground running. He gained an introduction via Larney Goodkind of Columbia Pictures to the studios of Edward Small Productions and found himself doubling for Louis Hayward on James Whale's production of The Man in the Iron Mask (1939).

Cushing's tales of his experience as a chancer who had neither acted on film before nor fenced with a sword and ridden a horse are, naturally, the very essence of the folklore surrounding the many ingenue British actors who suddenly found themselves doing what they long dreamed of during the golden age of Hollywood. And, for Cushing, that included demolishing the set in the process. He returns to the scene of the crime with more tales of his horsemanship in Past Forgetting and his love of westerns enshrined in the making of John Gilling's Fury at Smuggler's Bay in 1961.

His star seemed to be in the ascendant in California and he spent a memorable week on the Laurel and Hardy film A Chump at Oxford (1940), played cricket with Basil Rathbone, David Niven and Boris Karloff and was utterly star struck by Loretta Young. George Stevens screen tested and then offered him the part of Joe Shand in Vigil in the Night (1940), working with Carole Lombard. Despite living the Californian dream of endless rounds of tennis and dinner parties, Cushing became desperately homesick. Despite the likelihood of being groomed for stardom, he decided to return home via New York and Canada on a journey made more complicated by the war and its transport restrictions.

He tried to earn his fare home working first as a car park attendant, then as an illusionist's assistant, advertising toothpaste on the radio and, finally, sharing porridge and social security with actor John Ireland and his wife. After four months in summer stock, he was talent spotted by Theatre Associates for a Broadway production of The Seventh Trumpet. It was a short two week run curtailed by customary hostility from the Broadway critics.

Cushing's talents as an artist and model maker relieved the boredom of his night porter job at the YMCA and ushering at the local cinema as he planned his trip up to Nova Scotia. His artistic temperament came in handy when he was asked to paint half a dozen Japanese and Nazi flags for Powell and Pressburger's production of 49th Parallel (1941) but the downside was that his chambermaid nearly had him arrested as a spy when she saw the flags in his room. His wartime misadventures continued and he was almost frozen solid as a look-out on the homeward bound ship. Cushing prevailed and safely docked in Liverpool in March 1942. There is a palpable sense of relief in his observation when 'the sight of the grimy and bomb-scarred Royal Liver Building and Dock Board Offices held more magic for me than all the skyscrapers in the world, and I was filled with overwhelming joy as I walked down the gangplank and stood in England once again.'

Back home Cushing found work via Basil Dean's ENSA (troop entertainments affectionately known as 'Every Night Something Awful') and a touring production of Coward's Private Lives. A beautiful letter is reproduced at this juncture, a letter in which Helen Beck described meeting Cushing for the first time as she arrived to replace Sonia Dresdel in the lead role. Helen was a Russian immigrant, formerly of revue and rep companies, one time secretary to Jessie Matthews and the survivor of a terrible first marriage. Their relationship was sealed as Private Lives played in drill halls and aeroplane hangars to the sound of anti-aircraft guns and shells whizzing around their ears and when one evening Helen attempted several times to smash an unbreakable record over Cushing's head during a fight scene in the second act.

As Cushing observes, Helen's susceptibility to damp conditions offered a portent of what was to come and they were both invalided out of ENSA after the gruelling tour had taken its toll on them. In his introduction, Jonathan Rigby comments on the relationship in light of Cushing's guilt about straying outside of what was described as a 'spiritual union' with 'the physical element holding little importance.' Whatever Cushing's flaws were while conducting his marriage, his love for Helen was contained in these pages, and she also seemed to understand something of this particular aspect to the union too: 'I was spared to look after you... But you are a young man - I am eight years your senior. You must be free. I don’t want you to feel possessed. I shall always be there when you need me, for whatever reason.’

He and Helen spent the war years working in the West End, at the ‘Q’ Theatre in Chiswick, or touring in plays with very short or curtailed runs. Fate was not altogether kind on the Cushings. Helen endured a hysterectomy and still birth while Peter desperately sought work and looked after her. Touring also meant they could dodge the V1s and V2s now raining down on London and the South. After success in Edith Evans' revival of Sheridan's The Rivals in 1945, Peter spent nine months unemployed but he was ever one who would turn his hand to anything and a painted scarf he had given to Helen at Christmas led to getting paid for ten months as silk screen printer for a Macclesfield textile mill owner.

‘You are nearly 40, and a failure’

It was his refusal to put on an American accent for Larry Olivier in his production of Born Yesterday that endeared Cushing to him when he came to casting Osric for his 1948 film of Hamlet. Cushing's anecdotes offer a warm recollection of working with Olivier, false teeth and all and, by contrast, a vivid memory of sitting, freezing to death with Helen, in an unheated theatre box with the Oliviers and Noël Coward. He and Helen went on tour with Larry's company to Australia, presenting The School for Scandal, Richard III and Skin of Our Teeth to 'tumultuous applause'. Despite this, by 1950 Cushing and Helen were almost broke again and during a rehearsal for Olivier, Cushing broke down and, as a result, then spent six months recovering from said nervous breakdown. Again, great honesty about his sensitivity towards work and his relationship with Helen is what strikes the reader here.

It was Helen who insisted on going through the Radio Times to compile a list of television producers to whom he could write that rather astutely kicked off his television career. What's interesting here is how Helen shielded Cushing from some of the resentment from other actors at his success within Olivier's company. His insecurities are very prominent as he relates his perceived failure playing the lead character, Charles Appleby in JB Priestley’s Eden End when in fact he'd been an overnight success. However, his father did not help matters when, realising they needed financial help, Cushing approached him and was told, in no uncertain terms, ‘You are nearly 40, and a failure.’

Some smashing and very descriptive pages cover his stay in Manchester while understudying Robert Helpmann at the Opera House and his depressing search for a cafe open on Sundays before we get to the slow realisation of his impact on television audiences. This of course culminated with his landmark role as Winston Smith in Rudolph Cartier's adaptation of Nighteen Eighty-Four. His anecdote about the rather dopey pair of rats, provided by a rat catcher, and sacked for their poor performance in the terrifying torture scene is priceless but their more effective replacements, tame white rats dyed brown, helped seal his reputation as ‘The Horror Man of the BBC’.

His second volume of autobiography, Past Forgetting, includes a welcome return visit to this period with witty stories about the days of live television including Wilfred Lawson's ad-libbing, burning sets, missing revolvers and the AFM's need to cut the sound on broadcasts when nerve racked performers stopped dead and line prompts were required. A series of comic memos between Cushing and Peter Ustinov as they made The Moment of Truth at the BBC in 1955, again with Cartier, is one of the highlights of this volume. Cushing, in time honoured fashion, also drops in some wonderfully amusing nuggets about many of the grand dames of the theatre, including Edith Evans and Athene Seyler. A story about Seyler's billing for a touring production of Weep for the Spring is a treat.

A change of agent, to John Redway, paved the way to Hammer Films who had been knocking on Cushing's door for some time prior to their offer of the starring role in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957). The rest is horror cinema history but Cushing offers a few morsels about his first meeting with Christopher Lee, the now well known story about his contribution to the climax of Dracula (1958) and consulting his local doctor about Frankenstein's operations who greeted his calls with: ‘So glad it’s you – you’re not ill – you just want to know how to remove a brain or a heart or something, is that it? Get the sherry out – I’ll be round after surgery and give you a few tips.’

Those wanting a fuller exploration of his memories of working at Hammer and his ascendency to box office stardom will be more satisfied by Past Forgetting. In it he returns to their Bray studios and the Berkshire countryside to wax lyrical on The Curse of Frankenstein, The Mummy (1959) and his first foray into Holmes with The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959) where he felt an attempt to depict the size of the hound, using a miniature set and child actors, was reduced to 'three small boys dressed up as if playing a game of charades, foggy toy scenery with a wet, hungry dog in the middle, contentedly wolfing a bone.'

Always in the background in An Autobiography is his concern for Helen's health and, while there is a travelogue that covers some of his filming for Hammer and other film studios in Spain, Switzerland and Israel and he recounts the arrival of his faithful secretary Joyce Broughton, the focus inevitably shifts towards Helen's eventual and tragic decline. Cancelling his filming on Hammer's Blood From the Mummy's Tomb in 1971, Cushing brought his terminally ill wife home, from her hospital stay, to nurse her in her final days. The final chapter is a heart rending expression of grief, a grief that stayed with Cushing until his own death in 1994. 

Past Forgetting was a welcome coda and yet Cushing's desire to be reunited with his late wife dominated much of his life and career from 1971 onwards and he contemplated, via poisoning or electrocution, a hastening on of the process such was the depth of his abandonment. Helen was, after all, his most powerful of confidantes and bolstered his confidence in times of professional doubt and his only salve was to plunge into a period of continuous work, making 32 films in the space of a decade.

He contemplates a running list of his memorable movie deaths, including his demise in 1974's Madhouse 'by falling into a glass tank full of poisonous spiders, following a titanic ding-dong with the old rascal' Vincent Price and being 'blown to smithereens by those two intrepid young lads, Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill, who managed to blow up my little pied-à-terre' in a little B movie called Star Wars (1977). He also considers the moral imperative behind characters such as Baron Frankenstein and reflects on his friendship with Christopher Lee and working with the likes of Alan Ladd and Sammy Davis Jnr.

There was also great comfort in new friendships, such as the ones he established with Kevin and Freddie Francis. It was the death of Helen that informed his highly regarded performance in the role of the old recluse Arthur Grimsdyke in the Amicus portmanteau horror film Tales from the Crypt (1972) directed by Freddie Francis. In 1975 he worked on The Ghoul, produced by Kevin and again directed by Freddie, and describes how he empathised with the lead character's emotional state and, by using a photograph of Helen, found true motivation for the role.

The sadness was dispelled by his rather amusing take on the 'The 12 Days of Christmas' which he sent to his good friend Peter Gray and a return to the stage, after an absence of ten years, to play in Henry James's The Heiress at the Horseshoe Theatre in Basingstoke. Talk of the theatre prompts a recollection of his work on the 1943 stage version of War and Peace, 'a mammoth 32-scene production that lasted nearly four hours', as well as some amusing anecdotes and bons mots from designers and actors alike. Acting, he understood, often took him beyond the call of duty, be that learning magic, how to play snooker, ride a camel or dance with Eric and Ernie.

Past Forgetting's epilogue reveals his survival, despite the odds, from cancer and concludes the volume with a heartfelt tribute to Joyce and Bernard Broughton, who nursed him through his illness, and a sense that life continued for the much loved actor, one inspired by 'my belovèd wife who was, is, and ever will be, the light of my life' and filled with acting, painting and public appearances. For those who have only just discovered the inestimable talents of Peter Cushing, The Complete Memoirs is a moving, funny, revealing and self-effacing introduction to a very special, much missed actor. For his many longtime fans there is still much pleasure in revisiting the memoirs, reading and seeing the rarer material now included here.

Peter Cushing: The Complete Memoirs
New foreword by Joyce Broughton
New introduction by Jonathan Rigby
Published by Signum Books 7 May 2013
Hardback ISBN: 9780956653482
360 pages and 100 colour and black-and-white photos


I am indebted to The UK Peter Cushing Appreciation Society for their incredible collection of images and no copyright infringement is intended in the reproduction of some of those images.

By the time he made The House in Nightmare Park in 1972, Frankie Howerd was again enjoying a period of sustained success in film and television after another of what Barry Cryer often referred to as Howerd's 'series of comebacks' from the unpredictable highs and lows of several disappointing projects he undertook in the late 1960s.

It was when, in 1967, his representation at Associated London Scripts (ALS) underwent a significant change that an unexpected partnership with The Bee Gees foundered and he suffered a thwarted attempt to play on Broadway. ALS had been formed by Eric Sykes and Spike Milligan, Galton and Simpson, Howerd and his agent Stanley Dale. By 1955, writers such as Terry Nation, Johnny Speight, John Antrobus, Barry Took and Dick Vosburgh had joined the expanding team and they had a secretary, one Beryl Vertue.

Beryl, now highly regarded as a major British television and film producer, recalls, 'I started off in this funny old office and I did the switchboard... they had everything ancient where you'd put things in holes - you know, like a 1920s movie. I made loads of tea, up and down, everywhere. Typed the scripts, typed the Goon Show scripts and answered loads of fan mail.' (1)

Robert Stigwood, the Australian music impresario, merged The Robert Stigwood Organisation with Associated London Scripts in 1967 and Beryl, now managing Howerd, became company director and went on to steer several film versions of hit television comedies developed via ALS's own off-shoot, Associated London Films. At first, Howerd found himself working with one of Stigwood's clients, The Bee Gees, on a one-off television special, produced by David Frost for Thames in 1968, Frankie Howerd Meets The Bee Gees and later, on one of the strangest films of all their careers, Cucumber Castle (1970). When it came to filming this on location at Stigwood's country mansion in 1969, Robin Gibb had already split from The Bee Gees. The resulting film, which also featured Lulu, Spike Milligan, Vincent Price and Eleanor Bron is often regarded as something of a bizarre and embarrassing indulgence.

the cowardly hero aligned with the pomposity of a ham actor...

For Howerd, it was also sheer hostility that greeted Galton and Simpson's play The Wind in the Sassafras trees when it arrived in Boston after a sell-out success during a limited run in Coventry. Rewritten, cut and rewritten again, then retitled as Rockefeller and the Red Indians, it limped on to a New York opening and, after being given the last rites by notorious New York critic Clive Barnes, sadly lasted only four performances before closing in October 1968.

Yet, even as Frankie steamed home from New York on RMS Queen Elisabeth, the BBC's Head of Comedy Michael Mills had been inspired enough by a trip to the ruins of Pompeii and memories of Howerd's triumph in the West End production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum to commission a Comedy Playhouse script for him.

This was written by Talbot Rothwell, a veteran of nineteen Carry On films, and was very loosely based on the the writings of Plautus, already used as the basis of A Funny Thing..., 'featuring conniving slaves who manage to extract their grateful masters from sticky situations, adopting various disguises and deceptions to win love or money'. (2)

The result was Up Pompeii! (BBC, 1969-70, 1975 and ITV, 1991) and Howerd liked the pilot script enough to commit, seeing in it a potential to develop the technique of directing asides to the audience, using it to play against the material, other cast members and the staging, that he'd been trying out since he worked with Sheila Hancock on Tons of Money in 1956. (3)

The huge success of Up Pompeii! paved the way for an Associated London Films adaptation, written by Sid Colin and directed by Bob Kellett which went into production at Elstree in Autumn 1970. This was followed in quick succession by more Colin and Kellett capers (with some help from Galton and Simpson) in Up the Chastity Belt, which was shot in the Spring of 1971 and had to be edited down to 90 minutes from an original three hour cut. A final film from the same team, the less effective Up the Front, was made in 1972. All were based on the formula established by Howerd in the BBC series, one he would rehash again for Sid Colin's Whoops Baghdad sitcom in 1973.

The House in Nightmare Park eschews much of this well-trodden path and its lack of inimitable Frankie asides to the camera is often used to unfairly dismiss the film. Rather it indulges in other facets of the Howerd act: the faux-heterosexual veneer of Howerd as a 'ladies' man', the cowardly hero aligned with the pomposity of a ham actor, where 'the essense of his screen persona is retained but not to the detriment of the plot and atmospheric setting' and it comes complete with 'lavatorial humour, sexual coyness, self-absorbed self-deception and ingrained cowardliness.' (4)

Shot in six weeks between November and December 1972, it was produced and written by longtime ALS members Terry Nation and Clive Exton. Nation was one of the busiest television and film script writers working at the time, having contributed, edited and produced a range of slick action adventure series including The Avengers (ABC, 1961-69), The Saint (ITC, 1962-69), The Baron (ITC, 1965-66) and The Persuaders (ITC, 1971). However, his roots were in comedy and at ALS in the 1950s he had provided over 200 radio scripts for Howerd, Terry Scott, Eric Sykes and Harry Worth. By the early 1960s, Tony Hancock asked him to contribute to his post-BBC television series for ATV and stage act. It was a row with Hancock that sent him in the direction of Doctor Who (BBC, 1963-89, 1996, 2005-) and his subsequent career as a writer of television high adventure and science fiction.

Exton had been equally prolific to this point, making 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 had 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), provided scripts for Play for Today (BBC, 1970-84), ITV Playhouse (1967-83), Doomwatch (BBC, 1970-72) and was also responsible for a number of screenplays, for Night Must Fall (1964), Entertaining Mr Sloane (1970) and Richard Fleischer's 10 Rillington Place (1971).

Nation and Exton's script indulged Howerd's own love for comedy-thrillers, offering a pastiche of Bob Hope vehicles The Cat and the Canary (1939) and The Ghost Breakers (1940), the Universal and Hammer versions of The Old Dark House (1932 and 1963 respectively) and Christie's And Then There Were None. The House in Nightmare Park offered Howerd a recycling of the familiar genre tropes of storm-lashed haunted houses where eclectic groups of strangers are invited for the reading of a will or an odd family harbours a terrible secret and its members are killed off, one by one, during the night by a mysterious assailant intent on revealing a hidden legacy.

The House in Nightmare Park certainly looks the part with set designer Maurice Carter's interiors, the distressed Victoriana suggesting the decline and fall of the British Empire in one fell swoop, occupying Pinewood and complimented by exteriors shot at Oakley Court, the Victorian Gothic house that adjoined Bray Studios. It was similarly used for many Hammer films including The Brides of Dracula (1960), the William Castle remake of The Old Dark House (1963), The Reptile (1966) and The Plague of the Zombies (1966) and director Freddie Francis extensively used both the exterior and interior of the house for his own comedy-thriller about a dysfunctional family Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly (1970). It would become 'The Frankenstein Place' in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975).

With this script presented to him, Howerd spent part of a trip to Los Angeles to woo Hollywood veteran and Neath-born Ray Milland and persuade him to co-star in the film. Milland did not need any persuasion, regarding Howerd as his 'favourite English comedian' and his cooperation was secured. Joining Milland were several highly regarded British character actors, including Hugh Burden, Kenneth Griffith, Ruth Dunning, Rosalie Crutchley and Aimée Delamain. They portray the highly dysfunctional Henderson clan who have machinations aplenty for poor Frankie's character, the ham actor Foster Twelvetrees. Stewart Henderson (Milland) invites Twelvetrees to give a recital at his country house and he soon finds himself trapped in a Gothic murder mystery as each of the Hendersons attempts to secure a diamond legacy left to the secret son of dead patriarch Victor Henderson. Twelvetrees is in fact the son and not only he is entitled to everything in Victor's will but he also has the clue to the location of the diamonds.

'Another two minutes and I might have cheapened meself.' 

Australian director Peter Sykes, a television trained documentarian, was also a Hammer alumnus and had just completed Demons of the Mind (1972) for them at Elstree during August and September of 1971. His visual flair permeates the film and it starts as it means to go on with Howerd clearly relishing his role as the purple prosed, gurning Twelvetrees in the opening scene. Sykes allowing his camera to drift through the bored and sleeping audience at Twelvetrees' recital to frame Milland's villainous Stewart Henderson wringing the life out of a white silk scarf and, outside the hall, proclaiming to his poker faced sister Jessica Henderson (Crutchley) 'It is he! Incredible!'

The ubiquitous coach man abandons Twelvetrees to his cry of 'I hope your whip shrivels' and there's a splendid mocking of the horror cliches as he is stopped short by screams and a flash of lightning that splendidly illuminates Oakley Court's crenelated facade. Once inside, he stumbles upon an empty house with a drawing room left in some upset. Sykes beautifully frames Howerd through the arm of a gramophone at one stage and then uses some lovely overhead shots before Twelvetrees meets Patel, the Indian servant (played by John Bennett back in the day when it still seemed acceptable for white actors to 'black up').

The excessive flatterer Stewart offers Twelvetrees a weclome drink ('I had a packet of crisps on the train. Perhaps something to rinse the bits out of my teeth') and there's a wonderful scene driven by some great physical comedy between Howerd and Milland as Twelvetrees is prevented at every turn to bring that welcoming glass to his lips. As Stewart also moves into frame to explain his conversion to the Hindu faith, Ian Wilson's gorgeous cinematography bathes Milland's face in a sickly yellow light before the camera prowls over a statue of the goddess of destruction, Kali. Howerd's little whine of exasperation as Twelvetrees is packed off to bed early without a drop is a perfect coda.

Sykes and Wilson contrast a wonderfully off-kilter shot of Stewart and Jessica bowing and incanting before Kali with Twelvetrees arranging his knick-knacks and silver framed self-portraits on his dresser ('not bad for thirty-two' he claims into the mirror) before following him, in a hand-held tracking shot, to the inevitable toilet gag. Howerd's chaste sexual persona is summed up by a delicious bit of innuendo as during a dream, brought on by crashing window shutters, he murmurs to 'Melanie' he's saving himself for Ms Right until a thumping at the door is heralded by, 'Oh, no Melanie. Oh, it's the knockers, Melanie.' Getting out of bed, he grumpily asserts, 'Another two minutes and I might have cheapened meself.'

The scene at breakfast is also another rather glorious piece of physical comedy. Here, we meet Stewart's intolerant, blustering brother Reggie (Burden) and a duel between him and Twelvetrees to claim the last sausage from the breakfast buffet is played wonderfully by both. Another joke about knockers is delivered with great aplomb by Howerd later on when, upon meeting Jessica outside feeding rabbits, Twelvetrees offers to stroke them (the rabbits, that is). Crutchley's expression of alarm is priceless and she tops this with a sinister bit of business, her tongue darting in and out as she takes the rabbits and feeds them to the snakes in a basement reptile house.

As the thick plottens, various family members attempt to bump off Twelvetrees as he discovers that he has inherited Victor's estate and the hidden diamonds. Aimée Delamain is marvellous as the rather unhinged, black veiled matriarch who attempts to plunge a cleaver into his skull as she serves him tea. 'What lovely soft hair you have', she purrs, stroking Howerd's wig, an in-joke which allows him some self-mockery, 'It does give me some trouble. What with it being so fine.' Stewart's plaintive plea to persuade Twelvetrees to stay is also a great little scene, spinning a sob story about an idyllic childhood and a caring mother.

Among the many highlights is the evening's entertainment as, about to give his recital, Twelvetrees trades some fantastic insults with Reggie: 'Performance? Where's his hurdy-gurdy then?' 'I left it at home. I didn't know there'd be monkey here to sit on top.' When Verity (Elizabeth MacLennan), Reggie's daughter, offers him a choice between amontillado or chablis to drink, he asks, 'I don't suppose you do a brown ale, do you?' After an argument with Reggie, Verity tearfully storms out and while Twelvetrees attempts to cheer her up with a bit of Dickens, she screams and faints after seeing a face at the window. Howerd and Burden keep the antagonism going when Reggie is horrified to find Twelvetrees over Verity's unconscious body. Howerd almost turns to camera to explain, 'I was just giving her me Little Nell' and then allows Burden to upstage him with, 'you filthy swine!'

The face at the window heralds a scenery chewing turn from Kenneth Griffith as Ernest Henderson and Ruth Dunning as his wife Aggie. The ailing Victor, mocked up using a dummy in a bedroom, is revealed to be dead. That horrific revelation, when Victor's dummy head falls on the floor to the shocked surprise of all and sundry, is topped with a great piece of visual comedy as Peter Sykes pans across the now empty bedroom and we see Twelvetrees taking huge gulps out of an oxygen supply and chucking a bottle of pills down his neck. Aggie and Ernest decide to bump off Twelvetrees with an injection of poison to his choppers and again, Griffith and Howerd provide more physical comedy as Ernest attempts to inject him. 'I'd rather go round gummy than go through all that!' concludes Twelvetrees.

'Oooooohhhh. Please make it a crusher not a biter.'

Things take a very bizarre turn when the family agree to recreate their Henderson's 'human marionettes' Dance of the Dolls for Twelvetrees. The Dance of the Dolls sequence is decidedly unsettling, almost like something that would be seen later in The League of Gentlemen, wherein each brother and sister is made up as a doll and performs jerky movements to a Gothic lullaby. Sykes gets the maximum visual impact from it, with his cinematographer Ian Wilson using lenses to distort the big close-ups. Composer Harry Robinson also subtly picks up on the song in his score, its refrain reappearing at certain instances later in the film.

Beyond this the film descends into a farcical runaround with Twelvetrees and his newly acquired Henderson relatives searching the house for the diamonds and doing each other in with knives, cleavers, axes, scythes and snake bites. This culminates with Twelvetrees following the clues to the reptile house and wading through a floor filled with snakes.

Howerd recalls that this scene was one of the hardest to accomplish and he assumed he would be filming with prop snakes. 'It's a bit more elaborate than that', Peter Sykes informed him. 'Just how elaborate is it?' replied Howerd. He ended up working for three days in a pit filled with dozens of real snakes, something he reflected upon in an interview with Michael Parkinson, 'For a while I felt quite close to the snakes. They weren't horrible creatures at all.' (5)

The traumatic scene in the snake house, full of Howerd's characteristic whining and sighing, is brought to a marvellous conclusion as Twelvetrees, bending over, spots a cobra preparing to strike behind him and cries, 'Oooooohhhh. Please make it a crusher not a biter.' Equally intense is Stewart's attack on Twelvetrees with an axe, Milland's performance reaching a suitably unhinged pitch as he takes an axe to the door just behind Howerd's head. Sykes stylishly films Stewart's pursuit with tilting camera angles, almost turning the image upside down, to underscore Stewart's unravelling, twisted psyche.

The film ends with a glorious coup de théâtre as Twelvetrees sees his remaining relatives off in the back of a horse drawn Black Maria and starts to look for the missing diamonds, allegedly buried in the meadow in front of the house. Sykes's camera pulls back from Twelvetrees digging in the grass and ascends into the air, leaving him as a tiny figure in the landscape, searching alone in a huge expanse. This grand sweep confirms that The House in Nightmare Park is a beautifully shot film, Sykes and Ian Wilson adding a visual polish to what is, to all intents and purposes, a generic comedy-thriller. It's a fun, gently amusing outing and Howerd's performance, while it never achieves the intimacy and banter to camera of his sit-coms or the stand-up work's connection with a live audience, shows he is an effective, engaging, funny leading man and an exemplary physical comedian.

(1) http://www.spikemilliganlegacy.com
(2) Laughterlog.com: http://laughterlog.com/2009/01/06/up-pompeii/
(3) Graham McCann, Frankie Howerd - Stand Up Comedian
(4) Robert Ross, The Complete Frankie Howerd
(5) Mick Middles, Frankie Howerd - The Illustrated Biography

About the transfer
Going back to the original elements has produced a very pleasing presentation. This is certainly the best I've ever seen the film. Colour is particularly well represented, particularly greens and reds, flesh tones look natural, detail is plentiful and contrast is reasonably strong. It's a clean transfer, occasionally betraying some white blobs of dirt and very minor picture instability.

Special features
Full frame version
The 1.33:1 'as filmed' transfer of the film. I'll let Network explain the rationale behind this and the 1.66:1 (not 1.75:1 indicated by the press release) version presented on this disc. Regarding Hollywood's adoption of widescreen: "British films – cash-strapped by comparison – invariably filmed in the old 1.33:1 ratio and then basically blanked off the top and bottom of the picture (either during the making of the prints or during actual projection) so as to give the optical illusion that these were, in-fact, widescreen films. Dependent upon what point a British film was made (and the equipment used to film it) the standard ratio could be 1.66, 1.75, 1.85 or 2.35:1 so you will notice that different films in the new range will display different amounts of picture area and black space. This is not a problem with either your equipment or the disc itself – it’s how the films were originally shown and how they should be seen now."
 
Why there are two versions on the disc: "As an added bonus, some films shot in 1.33:1 but exhibited in a widescreen format still exist as original 1.33 negatives. Where these are still available we have included the ‘as filmed’ version alongside the ‘as exhibited’ main feature. Because the full frame was never meant to be seen to its widest aperture these ‘as filmed’ versions – if you look hard enough – can showcase production elements and other crew-related action which was definitely not intended to be seen."

There is more detail at the top and bottom of the frame in 1.33:1, obviously, but I didn't feel that the cropped 1.66:1 transfer, the 'as projected' ratio being framed centrally, was detrimental to the enjoyment of the widescreen presentation even if it is perhaps a bit tight in places. In this instance, it's good to have both ratios available in my opinion.
Trailer (02:59)
Bill Mitchell provides the voice over to this UK trailer featuring 'superstar' Frankie Howerd.
TV Spot (mute) (00:29)
Music Suite (29:34)
Generous half hour of Harry Robinson's rather lovely score
Gallery
Eight colour images, including film posters, and that's yer lot. 
Original Press Brochure(PDF)
Rather nice 8 page brochure that covers the cast and crew members and some aspects of the production and includes some black and white stills and posters.

The House in Nightmare Park
Associated London Films - Extonation Productions - Anglo/EMI 
1973
Cert: PG / Released 8 April 2013
Network DVD / Region 2 / Total Running Time: approx. 91 min / Colour PAL / Feature Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1 and 1.66:1 / Feature Audio: Mono 2.0 / Catalogue No: 7953856

The British Film Collection
The House in Nightmare Park is part of Network's 'The British Film' Collection, an ambitious initiative to establish a strong umbrella brand for the films within its library and mark the company as the primary destination for vintage British films in the UK with film-loving members of the public. This new film brand will aim to educate, enthuse and inform film lovers about the incredibly diverse output from all the British film studios. Starting with titles under license from Studiocanal each film will benefit from the following:

 - New transfers
 - Presentation in the correct cinema aspect ratio
 - Slim-line space-saving packaging, encouraging film lovers to collect the whole range of films
 - Many titles will be available to view on ITunes and at the company’s in house Networkonair platform

Network will also be building a community by launching a dedicated social media destination for fans of the sub-label at facebook.com/TheBritishFilm. Along with a specific twitter presence at #TheBritishFilm it is hoped that these channels will engage, inform and create debate with members of the public interested in the collection. Some of the titles will also be available through its in house On Demand service which is currently being developed.

The Bells of Saint John
BBC One HD
30 March 2013, 6.15pm

Steven Moffat's departure from Twitter seems to have inspired a rather bitter reflection about his experience on the World Wide Web of fear in The Bells of Saint John, the opening episode of the second half of Series 7 of Doctor Who. Apparently at producer Marcus Wilson's suggestion, he decided to return to the modern thriller format and set this re-introduction to Clara 'Oswin' Oswald (three versions and counting) in contemporary London. There's a dash of Partners in Crime and Smith and Jones by association and a brief nod to a post-Skyfall milieu as Clara and the Doctor dash through the capital to rescue those trapped in the alien wi-fi.

It also features several televisual hallmarks of modernity - the Shard (yet another in the long line of threatening London landmarks and the equivalent of The War Machines' Post Office Tower or Rose's London Eye) and scrolling on screen web code gibberish to suggest evil is but one click away. London and these visual representations of communication are stock in trade for Moffat's other day job, Sherlock. Cue lots of concerned people sitting at laptops or on smart phones at the mercy of a great hacking intelligence. However, this is window dressing to a darker vision of modernity at the centre of The Bells of Saint John.

'I don't know where I am'

The episode's rather indistinct moral panic about 'souls trapped in the wi-fi' is not virgin territory for Moffat when it comes to his obsessions with the interface between human and machine. Since The Empty Child he has often pondered on how technology can shape and alter human lives. Ask Madame de Pompadour about those strange clockwork men that kept chasing her round Versailles, for instance.

So, instead of nanogenes repairing bodies or a library's staff and visitors being downloaded and saved in a vast computer, we've got Richard E Grant and Celia Imrie uploading souls into a digital heaven provided by cloud computing and hacking people to make them change their minds, have brilliant flashes of intelligence or simply wet themselves in sheer terror.

It doesn't quite explain why these humans are harvested beyond feeding the Great Intelligence, returning from its appearance in The Snowmen, and a joke about cattle and Burger King. This is ironic considering the current fears about the food we shove in our own gobs but the story does pounce on a few worries about the ubiquity of media in the modern world. Quips about Twitter mask the alienation, a distorted sense of self and the moral panic which seems to go hand in hand with an incestuous mass media and entertainment as they provoke our anxieties about national identity, class and society.

It's also worth bearing in mind the raging cyber warfare now being conducted by the US, Russia and China as the 'democracy' of the internet is turned inwards and becomes a DDoS battle for control over internet infrastructures. Social control also seems to be on Moffat's agenda as Miss Kizlet, the chief exec of some nameless corporation, and her lackeys sift through thousands of surveillance cameras and images posted to the web to track down the TARDIS.

Here, the iPad wielding Celia Imrie, really splendid as Miss Kizlet, not only controls her minions by touch sensitive screen (and a cheeky inference suggests the summer riots of 2011 were created as such by media effect) but also despatches mobile humanoid servers to carry off the souls unfortunate enough to click onto the appropriate wi-fi link. These 'spoonheads' pop up as a variation on the Nodes in Silence in the Library and the head-twisting Smilers of The Beast Below and offer a brief frisson of terror during an episode which tends to focus on the re-introduction of Clara, Moffat's meme-turned-character.

The Bells of Saint John is more Proustian than usual in the Moffat scheme of things and yet there really isn't anything new in terms of ideas here. As well as the technophobia about the internet, wi-fi and cloud computing - something even Russell T Davies fastened onto as a contemporary fear with brainwashing bluetooth and monsters living in television transmissions - we get the ubiquitous use of doppelgangers, childhood regressions, repetitive memes and temporal side-trips.

Before the glamour of contemporary London, there's a time-hopping detour to a 13th Century Cumbrian monastery where the Doctor, the madman in a box turned mad monk, has been contemplating his encounters with the Woman Twice Dead (and is a dab hand at portrait painting, it seems) and receives one of those 'special' phone calls, the eponymous bells of the title.

This time it isn't a boy looking for his mummy, Churchill or an impossible astronaut on the blower, it's Clara calling a helpline provided by a mysterious woman in a shop (what's the bet it's River) when she finds someone's nicked her internet connection. This beautifully photographed sequence, as the Abbot and his monks contemplate the Doctor's madness and the Doctor takes a phone call from 2013 (the joke about 'it's 1207' and 'Am I phoning a different time zone?' is rather lovely), is a stylish juxtaposition to the glare of the modern world where the rest of the story unravels.  

The Proustian is evoked again when Clara uses a familiar mnemonic for her computer password and sets the Doctor's own alarm bells ringing, her 'run you clever boy and remember' meme becoming a remembrance of Claras past in brief flashbacks and partly captured in the Doctor's painting. The familiar and the domestic becomes uncanny, as it always does in Moffat's world, and 'spoonheads' acquire their appearance by cherry picking their victims' minds. Before long, one of them is standing on Clara's stairs.

For Clara, the 'active camouflage' of this intruder is depicted on the cover of a book she and the children are reading. Summer Falls is perhaps the youthful adventures of Williams, Pond and their Raggedy friend written by one Amelia Williams, the Doctor's mother-in-law and former companion, and it's the cover girl who arrives and responds in kind to Clara's enquiries. One suspects playground games will involve kids freaking each other out by repeating their friends' conversations or they will simply annoy their parents with cries of, 'I don't know where I am', this year's 'Hey, who turned out the lights' or 'Are you my mummy?'

From here, the Doctor deposits his sackcloth and ashes and sports a flashy new coat as he downloads the uploaded Clara (almost the Woman Thrice Dead once the 'spoonhead' gets her), now complete with conveniently grafted on computer skills. The chemistry between Matt Smith and Jenna-Louise Coleman is the glue holding the episode together even if characterisation often plunges to Disney movie-of-the-week levels. While bunging in lots of references to memory, remembering, identity, the companion's childhood (the episode's prelude on the web was as spectacularly obvious as it was predictable, sadly), Moffat returns to the well worn alignment of, and I'm loathe to use the words of a thousand press releases, the 'feisty female companion' and a sexually defensive Doctor.

... Moffat's usual one hour wash, spin cycle, rinse and repeat 

All this is trivially summarised in the 'snog box' moniker for the TARDIS and Clara's 'down boy' admonition, the cliches in an otherwise likeable on-screen rapport. The developing relationship is seen at its best in that dizzying interplay in the TARDIS as Clara, still clutching her cuppa, spirals through its doors, round the console room and out into the aisle of a passenger jet Celia Imrie's iPad has flung towards the street where she lives. Director Colm McCarthy pulls off a coup de théâtre with the shot of the plane scraping the rooftops.

Smith completely owns the role of the Doctor and is at his most expressively childlike in The Bells of Saint John. A highlight is the quiet moment where he finds the dry leaf in Clara's book of 101 Places to See and gives it a quick lick, tasting time gone by on his Time Lord taste buds. That leaf and that book are clearly significant and we are left to wonder what exactly happened to Clara at 16 and 23, the two ages missing from the crossed out list at the front of it.

It's also a scene that again takes place in a companion's bedroom, a visual parallel to Amelia's original encounter with the Doctor and the crack in the bedroom wall in The Eleventh Doctor and its resolution in The Big Bang. The sense that the Doctor is some kind of guardian angel is reinforced by the conversation they have after he waits below her bedroom window. It is a fine line though and one is often left with the impression that he's turned into a time-travelling stalker.

Naturally, it gets a bit bonkers with the Doctor wandering off to the garage to find his anti-grav motorcycle (I wonder if we'll see the garage in Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS in a few weeks time?) and there are echoes of Rose and the Tenth as he and Clara speed off across Westminster Bridge. One of the best in-jokes is Miss Kizlet's search for the iconic blue box, where 'Earl's Court was an embarrasment' offers a little nod to the actual police box still sitting outside said tube station. The cafe scenes also build the story's possession theme as customers and servers are subjected to a Matrix-like shift between their real personalities and Kizlet's domination of them, the uncanny emerging into the everyday again which culminates with the Doctor appearing as a 'spoonhead' to a terrified Clara.

The delicious encounter between Kizlet and the Doctor concludes with a gratifying twist as it turns out the Doctor has reprogrammed the 'spoonhead' which uploaded Clara at the rooftop cafe and sent it on a mission to to the Shard. Kizlet is uploaded and then tricked into ordering a full download of the Great Intelligence's digital abattoir. The Great Intelligence, it seems, deposits its human acquisitions in a kind of data cloud purgatory where its victims no longer seem to have a corporeal existence but instead remain conscious in a You Tube-like limbo. It's interesting to note, hoist by her own petard, Kizlet's regression to the state of a child as an extension of Moffat's signature about the disparate worlds of the child and the adult.

This seems to coincide with a vague religious theme, a metaphor for death and resurrection, implied by the title of the episode and its links to the poetic description 'the dark night of the soul' we often ascribe to some sort of spiritual crisis, which originated with the treatise of Saint John of the Cross. The order of monks featured at the start of the episode could also be a reference to the Order of Saint John and their moto 'For the Faith and in the Service of Humanity' seems highly appropriate for the Doctor's return to Earth to save mankind. Is Moffat also offering some veiled comment about our ignorance of such spirituality in the midst of our digitally determined and commercially shaped social lives? More than likely, it's just a simple observation about how nasty corporations reduce individuality to blocks of data, people becoming mere demographic units segmented by markets.

Like the rattling noise in Clara's washing machine this is Moffat's usual one hour wash, spin cycle, rinse and repeat enlivened only by glossy packaging with one eye on an international market keen on those iconic London landmarks, good performances and a distracting paciness that hurtles us from TARDIS to crashing jet plane to a motorcycle on a Shard. It plays as a slightly better version of Mark Gatiss's The Idiot's Lantern, its wit, use of spectacle and character chemistry, with Coleman properly breathing life into Clara, offering the highlights in a rather low key affair too keen on repeating rather than renewing aspects of the current showrunner's tenure.

The Rings of Akhaten
BBC One HD
6 April 2013, 6.15pm

This episode's writer Neil Cross has a bit of a mixed pedigree. On British television, he's currently lauded as the creator and writer of the award-winning Luther (2010-) and was former lead writer on two seasons of Spooks (2002-11) and in Hollywood he recently improved his science fiction cachet by rewriting a draft of Guillermo del Toro's forthcoming Pacific Rim and signing up to script the Sam Raimi adaptation of The Day of the Triffids. Cross has indicated his affection for Doctor Who and a long held desire to write for the series and Steven Moffat has generously provided him with two opportunities this year. The Rings of Akhaten is the second of two scripts but the first to be screened, with haunted house thriller Hide a fortnight away.

The clues to why it's worth sticking with this episode, despite some major flaws, are provided in the opening three and a half minutes. The flashback is fast becoming a common trope in the series, usually a way of embedding in a predilection for revealing memories, a character's past or underlining a bit of non-linearity in the story. However, here the Doctor's stalking of Clara's past posits him as an active witness to memory and of her parents' first meeting in 1981 if an ironic inclusion of The Specials 'Ghost Town' on the soundtrack and the Summer Special of the Beano are anything to go by.

'I don't believe in ghosts'

More flashbacks follow her birth and childhood and the terrible grief at the loss of her mother Ellie with a real sense that the Doctor is observing it all. It is also a way of connecting the extraordinary events that follow to Clara's domestic milieu on Earth, maintaining the thread of audience identification running through the series with more of those Proustian rushes of memory I discussed in the review of The Bells of Saint John.

For those of us thinking the prelude to The Bells of Saint John, wherein the Doctor chats to a young Clara on the playground swings, was a bit throwaway this rather makes you reconsider its status. The '101 Places to See' book is prominent again and has its own increasing significance as a memento mori during Clara's maturing into adulthood.

It is, symbolically, 'a remembrance of death'. A remembrance commencing with Clara's mum saving her dad Dave from a collision with a car after a leaf, that leaf, slaps him in the face. The leaf was described as 'page one' in The Bells of Saint John, the beginning of her story but also a reminder of fate, consequence and, later, of a life not lived (for both Clara and her mother).

The book clearly belonged to Ellie, her mum, and is a tragic reminder of her demise. We might assume the missing ages of 16 and 23 in its front pages have some bearing on this. It also suggests Clara is 24 when she meets the Doctor in The Bells of Saint John and, back in 2005 in this sequence, that's a 16 year-old Clara standing at the graveside with her father. This Clara then is herself a memento mori not only for her mother's days that never were but for the equally tragic and short-lived Oswin Oswald, the entertainments officer on board the Alaska and destined to be a Dalek, and the Victorian Clara who died fighting the Great Intelligence. The gravestone of her mother also reminds us of the flashforward in The Snowmen where present day Clara finds the gravestone of her 1892 namesake and defiantly says, 'I don't believe in ghosts.'

With that proposition in mind, it's interesting to see how this is reflected in Cross's story. The episode reminds me of The End of the World, very much following the pattern it established where the Doctor takes his companion to the far future or an alien world to demonstrate the wonders of the universe to a homebody now desperate to stretch their wings. Clara's interaction with her bizarre environment becomes a baptism of fire, a judgement of her worthiness as a companion. Note how she's clutching the '101 Places to See' book as she sits waiting for the Doctor's return (it figures heavily in the climax of the episode too), her bluff nonchalance of the previous episode transformed into a clear desire for him to take her away to see 'something awesome.'

This he does, introducing her to the ringed world Akhaten's alien pilgrimage of Panbabylonians, Lucanians and a Terraberserker of the Kodion Belt before dropping his bombshell about a previous visit with 'my granddaughter'. Strangely, the TARDIS seems unable to translate the various alien voices that greet her as per normal. Is this deliberate or just an oversight by the producers? The TARDIS does seem to have a strange reaction to Clara and this might be part of it.

The Festival of Offerings is compared by the Doctor to Pancake Tuesday which is, in the long run, not too far away from the theme of the episode, culminating in both the Doctor and Clara giving up their memories in an act of penitential unburdening, as it were. It's also symbolised in the barter system used on Akhaten, trading in objects of sentimental value, imbued with fond remembrance and full of history and stories, correlating to the leaf, the book of '101 Places to See' and to the Doctor himself. As Clara succinctly puts it, 'You pay. You're a thousand years old, you must have something you care about.' Does the Doctor have enough to care about left in him, we wonder?

Once they're involved in the religious ceremonies of the Sunsingers of Akhet, the episode shifts into an interesting exploration of alien creation myths and belief systems, of enduring faith in ancient gods and the rituals to contain and appease them. So, we also get a little of Gridlock and The Satan Pit thrown in for good measure in its treatment of mythology and religion. 'It's a nice story,' comments the Doctor of the seven worlds' belief that all life in the universe originated out of their ancient system.

The inference here is that Akhaten and Akhet are derivations of the ancient Egyptian Akhet, the name for the horizon or mountain of light where the sun rises and sets and Akhet Khufu,  the name for the Great Pyramid, a place associated with recreation and rebirth. Visually and symbolically, it all seems related and the ancient mummy with his elongated head, who wakes in the pyramid during the Sunsinger ceremony, also looks like a dessicated version of the pharaoh Akhenaten.

Recreation and rebirth lie at the heart of the episode too. The offerings of the Sunsingers are created in stories, myths, poems and songs and there's a very nice parallel developed between Clara and the girl Merry (Emilia Jones), the appropriately named Queen of Years, where in their first encounter the colourful spectacle of an alien environment gives way to something more claustrophobic and fearful.

'we don't walk away'

The Vigil, along with the mummy one of the better designed creatures in the episode, also make their introduction here and although they're creepy with their blank masks, slow movements and whispering voices, they're consigned to be another 'monster of the week' superfluously drafted in and, later, like the mummy in the ancient pyramid, they're all rather an empty threat, more or less window dressing for the climax of the story. 

Director Farren Blackburn creates a great mood around the scenes between Clara and Merry, simply concentrating on character and having Clara understand the burden placed on a lost and confused child by relating her own childhood trauma of getting lost and being found again by her mother to Merry's predicament. Again this builds the back story for Clara, underscores the vital role of memory fueling Moffat's Doctor Who and particularly this episode where her mother's strength in difficult times is transformed into a maternal instinct seen here and with the Maitland children in last week's episode.

In Clara's journey to becoming the Doctor's companion and when she tries to shield Merry inside the TARDIS, she is confused as to why doesn't have access and is locked out. 'I don't think it likes me,' Clara observes, indicating she already sees the ship as a living thing. She hasn't earned the privilege of having her own front door key yet and the TARDIS may also be reluctant to let her in because she's potentially a dangerous temporal anomaly given her Woman Twice Dead status.

The sun worshippers of Akhaten feed their old god with lullabies to keep their 'grandfather' asleep, with generations of singers keeping the tradition alive as those in the audience offer up their mementos to him. As one grandfather to another, you get the feeling that the Doctor is seeing a mirror of himself in the ancient creature as much as Clara sees a version of herself in Merry, as the ancient trickster replacing his companions, becoming as mementos in order for him to continue.

The song from the stadium echoes many previous choral works composed for the series by Murray Gold and it's definitely a matter of personal taste as to how much you enjoy the 'songs' that dominate the middle and end of the episode. Much as they are a reflection of the themes in the episode, songs as markers of beginnings and endings, in the end they fail to convince simply because none of the rubber headed aliens in the audience actually look like they are singing. Another issue I have with Gold's scoring of this episode is his determination to fill any second of silence or calm with music. During some of the excellent character moments, where the acting is more reflective, his music performs inappropriate, horribly judged bombast in the background. 

When Merry gets carted off by a rather grumpy mummy (and after all that wailing, I don't blame it wanting to devour her) then the Doctor spells out his mission statement to Clara, 'we don't walk away'. She's clearly paying attention at this point as it's a mantra she will repeat in support of her rescue attempt towards the climax of the episode. To rescue Merry it also requires paying off Dor'een the big green monster with yet another memento mori, her mother's ring, to secure a space moped and travel to the pyramid. One assumes the barter system also provides the oxygen supply in outer space during the journey.

There's perhaps a nod back to the Doctor and Sarah breaking into Sutekh's prison in Pyramids of Mars as he and Clara open the pyramid to confront the angry mummy, another monster in the series with an appetite for souls and devouring children it seems. Here, the soul, as in The Bells of Saint John, is not some supernatural construct. It is the essence of us, our personalities, our memories and as the Doctor says 'everything that ever happened to us, people we loved, people we lost, people we found again against all the odds.' He talking as much about himself and Clara there.

To cut to the chase, the Doctor and Clara find themselves confronting an old god woken from slumber, one which has created its own origin myth out of sacrifice and that the Doctor counters with his description of an evolving universe to Merry, informing her she was born of unique atoms and star stuff rather than mythical gods and monsters and he quotes from Carroll's The Walrus and the Carpenter to perhaps suggest the old god merely mesmerises them into believing a nonsensical myth.

The old mummy turns out to be nothing more than an alarm clock for a planet sized devourer of worlds but its appearance allows Cross to restate the Doctor's policy on these matters: 'When we're holding on to something precious, we run, we run as fast as we can and we don't stop running until we are out from under the shadow.' Yes, Doctor Who. That running show.

Confronting what looks like the Eye of Sauron (Farren Blackburn emphasises this with a big closeup of the fiery eye reflected in Clara's own eye), the Doctor, like Gandalf, attempts to quench the god's fire. Unfortunately, this involves some more singing from Merry and a cloyingly sentimental singalong from the alien audience who probably should have scarpered by now. Even Matt Smith fails to dissipate the wailing and droning in the background and some of his ranting at this hungry 'god' is unconvincing, somewhat overplayed and rather ripe. Perhaps he's just trying to make himself heard over the din.

Naturally, Clara passes the test and doesn't walk away from the Doctor. While the Doctor's memories of the Time War and the death of the Time Lords, perhaps a final expunging of the guilt associated with another huge myth, are nothing but a mere Happy Meal for his opponent, it is Clara's memories of her mother, of a life never lived, a quantum memory of 'days that should have been but never were', which give old 'grandfather' a severe case of indigestion.

Cross's ideas are powerful and evocative and that leaf, 'the most important leaf in human history', is not only page one of Clara's life, a symbol of her unique origin just as Merry was regarded as unique to the universe by the Doctor, but it is also page one of Clara's journey with the Doctor, a life where you sacrifice something of yourself and you don't walk away. The creation of a new myth out of the old.

the 'epic' looks and feels underpowered...

With her performance Jenna-Louise Coleman steals the final scenes right from under Smith's nose and, looking back, she pretty much owns most of the episode and is rapidly becoming a major asset to the series. The final coda, back on Earth, has her confront the Doctor when she realises he was there watching at her mother's grave. To reiterate the nature of the story, Clara demands he not compare her with 'someone who died' and force her to 'compete with a ghost'. Again, she's very much alive and doesn't believe in that sort of thing. Even though the Doctor returns her mother's ring to placate her, he is still, like the rest of us, baffled by her mystery.

Clearly, as an element of Moffat's brief to 'write it like a movie poster. Let’s do big, huge mad ideas'The Rings of Akhaten is up there in the ambition stakes but succeeds and fails in equal measure. For example, it gladly wears many Star Wars references on its sleeve. This is both a restatement of the visual riffs to the film series that have cropped up recently and the notion of the 'epic' in the series which mixes wonderment with increasing juvenilsation.

The stadium full of alien visitors is perhaps a nod to the pod racing of The Phantom Menace, the bustling throngs of the market place a blatant steal of the Mos Eisley and cantina scenes from A New Hope and ditto the mopeds standing in for the speeder bikes from Return of the Jedi. However, the episode overreaches itself and the attempts to create this spectacular vernacular on a modest budget threaten to undermine the more intriguing narrative and character driven aspects of the episode. There are some disappointing set designs and visual effects littering the production and this comes as surprising from such acknowledged talents as designer Michael Pickwoad and effects company The Mill.

The CGI vistas of the rings and the pyramid and the silhouetted figure of the Doctor facing the fiery wrath of 'grandfather' are a signature of The Mill's ongoing efforts to bring scale to the series and they do look spectacular. However, their efforts to mix CGI backgrounds and live action often don't quite work. There aren't enough different angles and coverage to suggest that the stadium and the huge ring system occupy the same space. There is one single shot of the entire stadium and we never see it again. Several closer shots of the stadium are clearly a bunch of extras duplicated on a rather plain looking set to bump the numbers up.

Some of the moped shots suffer too, an example of unconvincing green screen effects and backgrounds being the occasional bête noire of current Doctor Who as much as poor yellow and blue CSO is used as the stick with which to beat classic Who. Cinema blockbusters have developed a fluidity in mixing live action and digital effects but some of the over ambitious work on The Rings of Akhaten is either too static or unconvincing.

Ironically, Euan Ferguson's recent attack in The Observer on the classic series of Doctor Who, praising The Bells of Saint John for its apparent triumph over the production values of the original series -  'slathered in cheap BBC foil or sporting a rubber ear-globule or some such', filled with poor acting on sets 'apparently made of tissue and spit, while making faintly electronic "woo" noises' - might be words he may care to revisit with The Rings of Akhaten. 

That this may be the first episode in Series 7 where the 'epic' looks and feels underpowered is again demonstrated by the budget savings raid on Neill Gorton's stockpile of said 'rubber ear-globules' for the cramped looking market place sequences, looking so retro you'd think you were actually watching something from 1977. I love Gorton's work on the series but this is not one of Millennium FX's finer moments as it's simply an exercise in bulking out scenes with some very inanimate rubber creatures. The mummy, the Vigil and Dor'een are far more successful.

It's oddly reassuring that even a new episode can fall short of the mark, its inadequacies sending us in search of its qualities as a story and efficacy in character development just as, and this is evident inEuan Ferguson's ignorance of its 50-year history, Doctor Who has always asked us to do since 1963.