Doctor Who - Documentary s09e01 Episode Script

DALEK: Destroy all human resistance! Exterminate! Exterminate! The producers of Doctor Who, Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks, had decided to bring the Daleks back to the series for the first time since 1967.
The original plan was to bring them into the last story that was going out in 1972, which would have been a six-part story called "The Daleks in London.
" When we were wanting to have a Dalek story and Terry Nation couldn't do it because he was busy being a script editor himself on The Persuaders or something.
We went and had lunch with him, I think at Pinewood Studios or something like that, where he was making a film.
Pinewood or Shepperton.
And I remember that Sean Connery and Diane Cilento were sitting at the next table, you know, so I thought this is really the high life in the film world.
So he gave us permission to put the Daleks into another show.
And originally, the idea was we'd write a special Dalek show and I've got a feeling that Bob Sloman and I were going to write a story but it never came to anything.
Barry Letts had quite strong ideas that it was a good idea to have an audience-grabbing hook in the first story of the season.
So he pulled the Daleks forward into "Day of the Daleks".
Louis Marks came along with this idea which went through various titles, the earliest of which was "The Ghost Hunters".
This idea of people coming back from the future to try and change their past, which of course involved doing all sorts of time paradoxes and so on.
But it hadn't got the Daleks in it.
It had got these strange alien creatures which he didn't describe very much.
The future dictatorship had what was only ever thought of as monsters, alien monsters to act as their policemen to enforce their future terror.
And then, as this was accepted, Terrance Dicks introduced the idea of the Doctor travelling forward in time to this future dystopia as well.
And then Terrance said, "Well, why don't we put the Daleks into Louis' story?" We summoned poor old Louis and said, you know, "One or two small changes.
We want you to put the Daleks in.
" No, it wasn't too difficult, you see, because we'd got the Controller as a villain.
And it was simply a matter of making it clear that behind him there were greater villains.
No! No! NICHOLAS BRIGGS: I think it was really good that "Day of the Daleks"had the whole time paradox story.
It surprises me in a way that Doctor Who hadn't and still doesn't do that kind of thing very much.
Because one of the first things you say about Doctor Who is that it's about a guy who travels in time and space.
So you would think that writers would instantly think, "Ah, what can I do with time?" 22nd century, visiting the 20th.
A planned expedition through time to meet and kill an important politician.
Now, why? There are very good reasons why Doctor Who doesn't do time paradoxes very often.
Having written a time paradox in Doctor Who, I understand fully why it doesn't go there very often.
We weren't anxious to explore the effects of time travel, we were anxious to conceal and avoid them as much as possible.
Why didn't they go back to September the 12th, if that's where they want to be? You know, have another go.
If you have totally controllable time travel, you can't do the story.
Because if the Doctor gets into trouble, why doesn't he go back before he got into trouble and not do whatever caused the trouble? Now, that's the Blinovitch Limitation Effect.
Unless you are doing a very strict closed time loop, which they weren't doing, you fall into this trap of the grandfather paradox.
CORNELL: However, going there can produce some really, really tasty results.
A time paradox done well is cracking in terms of character, in terms of story.
And the thing that struck me, watching it again, was how sophisticated a time travel story this is, and how far ahead of the mundane Doctor Who.
This is a story that would probably be considered to be a little bit difficult to sell now.
You're trapped in a temporal paradox.
Styles didn't cause that explosion and start the wars.
You did it yourselves.
This is uncannily similar to what happens in Terminator, with the creation of Skynet, the malign force which blights the future.
And the resistance from that future coming back in time, only to find that their intervention has started this.
One doesn't know whether James Cameron had seen Who on PBS before he did his film.
But I gather Harlan Ellison got sued, probably.
I know Harlan, he was always very quick with a writ.
He probably sued at the drop of a hat.
Harlan Ellison came to an arrangement out of court over the similarities between that time paradox movie and his Outer Limits episode "Soldier".
Now, it must be said, Day of the Daleks does do something quite similar to "Soldier".
It was made after The Outer Limits.
But whether or not Louis Marks was aware of "Soldier" or whether or not this is part of that wonderful engagement with science fiction that the show starts to show under Terrance Dicks.
I think it's far more likely that Cameron was actually fishing from the same pool as the writers of Day of the Daleks were fishing from.
It's actually quite a common time-travel story from the '50s, from the '40s and the '50s.
And so, the thing is that television and cinema science fiction always lags about 30 to 40 years behind, where literary science fiction is and I know Cameron actually read quite a lot of science fiction.
So it's one of those fallacies that people have that people must be influenced by the same medium that they're working in rather than, actually, what is far more likely, is that he nicked all his ideas from science fiction books.
Which is perfectly valid, and I agree that people should be able to nick as many ideas from science fiction books as they can.
I know certainly I do.
How the guerrillas were seen, I think in our terms it was not political, it was dramatic.
Because it's effective, you see.
You present them as bad guys.
You know, they just arrive and they're threatening people and they're mysterious, they're obviously up to no good.
We started apparently as one thing and we had a journey to go.
And that has always been the most important thing to me, that there is a journey.
Because quite a few scripts, you have to make that journey for yourself.
But it was there, provided for us very much.
The time has come for your execution.
Execution? Shura.
But he hasn't done anything! He's a scientist.
At the beginning of the show, of course, one automatically assumes, as Jo did, that these were the ones that were in the wrong, these guerrillas were there fighting for all the wrong reasons and that we had to protect against them.
But that happens so often, doesn't it, that when you're, you know, when you're forced into a position which most of us have never been forced into, actually having to fight underground.
Now, then, turn off that machine.
She was there to do something, and she was prepared to kill Styles.
But Doctor Who was not prepared to kill him later on.
You are asking me to commit murder! No, we're asking you to kill one man and prevent millions more dying.
So you have the two mentalities.
She's been trained to get rid of, for the right reason.
But, you know, does the end justify the means? It's in that script, isn't it? The aspects of, obviously, the guerrillas and you know, we had all the Palestin There was an awful lot tied up with what was really happening then.
And I think, you know, they've given you some nice little sort of clues to that without actually saying, "Well, that's what it's all about.
" But that's definitely there.
I think politically how people looked on it in the '70s I mean, the IRA were going strong about that time.
And I think to most people, you know, a terrorist was a terrorist, as it were.
Unless of course you happened to be a keen Irish IRA supporter, in which case they were heroic freedom fighters.
But basically it was just I think our reasons were just to have the bad guys turn into the good guys.
Because that's an interesting dramatic twist.
What I remember about Paul Bernard, the director, is that he was very opinionated.
He would never listen to If you made a suggestion to him, he would say, "No, the reason I did that was so and so, you know, and I was right.
" He hadn't worked a lot with actors.
He came from design and cameras and editing, that side of making television.
BARRY: Paul's approach to directing was very practical because we had an awful lot to get through.
Because for the time, you know, there was a lot of location work and he didn't come and take your head between his hands and do a Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward sort of, "I think you ought to this.
" He just relied on having picked somebody to do the job and let them get on with it, really.
In the scene where Shura explodes the bomb and blows the Daleks up, it's theatre workshop stuff, you know, you kind of When you're working on something, you have a moment to go into it.
You know, you try to get in a little method acting and all this stuff.
And when they said "action" on that scene, you know, I was just getting into the part to do this, and the director, who was Paul Bernard, he says, "Stop! What are you doing?" I said, "I'm just approaching the part.
" He said, "Just say the lines.
" (CHUCKLES) He's looking at his watch, you know.
At the time, it was a bit uncomfortable, but really, it was the crude awakening that you've just got to get on and do it.
They don't give you time to go into things and do much.
You know, you do that, stop.
Then you're off into the next section over there and you doing the next bit, so from that, it was fascinating.
You see? She trusts me implicitly.
He let the actors be far too theatrical.
The chap playing the Controller of the future, who was working with the Daleks, was giving a stage performance.
He wasn't giving a television performance at all.
Who knows? I may have helped to exterminate you! And it's purely because of his style of performance.
And to a certain extent, that applies to practically everybody, except people who are natural screen actors, like Anna Barry.
And some of the others, of course.
I can remember asking him One of the last lines, when the guerrilla who sacrifices himself is being blown up.
And I thought the line, "Not this, this is going to be "Not this time.
" And I tried to tell him that this should be This was a significant line, you know.
It should be hit a bit by the actor.
Oh, no, not this time.
This time is going to be different.
Took no notice whatsoever, you know, and it's just a kind of murmur, "Not this time.
" It's thrown away.
But then again, directors are all tricky and awkward characters, anyway, in my experience.
Including Barry, actually.
When I was producing the classic serial, he was directing for me and I had quite a lot of trouble with Barry.
The Ogrons, the look of them was really designed by Paul Bernard, the director.
And their name, the Ogrons, was mine.
I mean, I suggested it, to a certain extent, as a joke, because I thought they looked like ogres.
And then everybody said, "Ogre? Oh, yes.
Ogrons, that's a good thing.
" (CHUCKLES) So they became the Ogrons.
JOHN FRIEDLANDER: Make-up asked me if I could teach them how to make moulds and cast latex.
We had some make-up ladies come up to our workshop and I was teaching them how to use this.
The Doctor Who team were there at the same time talking about Ogrons.
So I said, "Well, let's make some Ogron masks.
" I modelled up a head, quite on spec.
And just to teach.
And they thought, "Oh, this was a good idea.
Well, these are our Ogron masks.
" So the Ogron mask was born, and that was the first mask I made for Doctor Who.
Your report? We found and destroyed the enemy.
One of my favourite lines in "Day Of the Daleks" is when the two Ogrons report back to the Controller, and one of them talks stiffly in an Ogron way.
And the other one when asked, "Were there any complications?" just goes No complications.
And I think that's because he's actually thought, "Do I have to do what the other guy does?" So he kind of quickly zooms past it.
I love that line.
A friend of mine wanted to name a fanzine after that line.
Just one of those little odd moments in Doctor Who that we've seen a million times and we love because it's silly.
The Ogrons, led by the lovely Rick Lester, had all obviously gone to the School of Ministry of Funny Runs.
The main Ogron, you know, he had a reasonable sized head.
But the bit Ogrons that came after were huge.
And Make-up had to cut the masks at the back, slit them up the back and stick them together with tape.
And, of course, then we added hair to them, which disguised the splits.
They looked much better with fuller hair, too.
But they didn't fit very well.
We must follow them into the 20th-century time zone! The peace conference must be destroyed! All those lovely Daleks, especially the very animated Daleks, one.
(LAUGHS) Well, though we did have three perfect Dalek gentlemen.
The Daleks were three, um, quite"short" is the word gentlemen, you know.
You had to be small and you sat inside.
And it was on wheels, but you pushed it along with your feet.
And with your hands you had to work the gun, the syringer and all that and move the head around a bit.
So it looked as though, you know, it was moving and then you had the voice coming from someone else.
And they were lovely, but they were very much a law unto themselves.
They used to take their heads off and play poker.
There was actually gold and two blue ones.
And John Scott Martin was the gold one.
I think he was in on every one and I was just the blue one.
John was really the boss, I think, and if he said something we would go along with him, basically.
The Doctor is an enemy of the Daleks! He must be found and exterminated! My favourite thing about them was that in those days the studio doors were fairly primitive and had bars at the bottom, you know, those steel bars.
So a Dalek would go, "Exterminate! (HICCUPING) "Exterminate! Exterminate!" as they went over the doors, you know.
So the whole thing was delightfully Toytown, in a way.
When we finished filming, sometimes we were left there because we were forgotten.
And there was always a conflict between Props and the Costume people.
Costume said it was Props and Props said it was Costume.
And so, we were stuck there 'cause we couldn't get the top off.
When we did this one, Jon, myself, his wife Ingeborg, my boyfriend then, Rod, we'd all been on holiday to their house in Ibiza.
So this was the beginning of this particular new season and so we were all in very jolly spirits.
Yes.
Yes, that's a most good-humoured wine.
A touch sardonic perhaps, but not cynical.
Being a connoisseur of wine and food was certainly good for Jon Pertwee.
So therefore, I think for Jon's Doctor.
He had got this slightly dandyish personality.
He did love good wines and food and so on and so on.
I went to his house once for a meal with my wife and met Inge, his wife.
And we had a lovely meal, with different wines for different courses and that sort of thing.
I say, you really ought to try this Gorgonzola cheese, it's absolutely delicious.
He was a creature of his time.
He was a kind of Edwardian gent in the '70s, which is really common, if you look at Department S and all those kind of programmes like that.
And he was a connoisseur and a bon vivant and in the tradition of heroes of that period.
And so we wrote it into his character, even though I think possibly the earlier Doctor Whos weren't very keen on alcohol and so on.
But then, if the shape of your nose is going to change, maybe your tastes change as well when you regenerate.
I know that sometimes he would refuse a drink, but that might have been Barry trying not to push the booze too much, considering there were young people in the audience.
But I would have been all in favour, you know, of the Doctor downing a large brandy and soda or something from time to time.
Each Doctor has to be seen on their own terms.
And the moment you start saying, "Right, we're going to put this meta-continuity onto them" on some ridiculous little detail, like whether they drink alcohol or not, then it's just insane.
Of course Pertwee drank alcohol.
We've never really investigated how much alcohol affects Time Lords.
You know.
They could have taken that further, couldn't they? With the guys bursting in, or the Ogrons bursting in and the Doctor is just sort of, he's had far too much red wine and doesn't really care.
That could have been quite good.
We had always made it a rule Well, I'd always made it a rule, I don't know about the earlier Doctors, that he would only use force or use violence in defence or in defence of somebody else.
And I've got a feeling that in the original script the Ogron was sort of attacking him.
I noticed the scene where the Doctor shoots down an Ogron without being very directly menaced and I think that was quite simply a mistake.
Possibly on the part of the director, I would like to think, who would be in charge of that kind of action.
But normally, the policy would be that if an Ogron was bearing down on him or Jo with malevolent intent, the Doctor might, under provocation, shoot him.
But to casually shoot someone down to get them out of the way, when I saw it, when I watched it again, I thought, "That is un-Doctorish, you know, that's a mistake.
" When Paul shot it, the way he shot it, the Ogron apparently had done nothing, poor thing.
And he just got zapped for no particular reason.
But it was necessary for the story, so we had to keep it in.
I remember everyone liked the location, it was quite interesting, it's quite a famous old house, isn't it? And it was fun, the place itself had a bit of atmosphere.
Bit of a mood about it.
You can imagine things went on there.
Probably why they well chose it.
I got the feeling that the house, I could have been wrong, the house wasn't occupied.
So it had a rather strange feeling that was right for there being a conference there.
The interesting thing as well is that you're doing things in sections and bits, not necessarily what's first may come last, etcetera.
So, in your mind you're trying to knit these things together.
You know, in plays and theatre and that, at least you've got a sequence, A to Z.
You follow that line through.
But in this, you're doing this, "Where does that fit?" Of course, you don't really know till it's all put together.
But it was a good location.
When they were firing at us and the bombs and things going up, I can remember them, being in the Dalek, wondering what was going on and they were going off around me and that.
It put the wind up me a bit, actually.
And I do remember coming, and I saw it on the programme, I got to the doors to open the doors to get into the house.
But I know that he had to stop there because the Dalek obviously couldn't open the doors.
The tunnel was shorter than what it looked like on the programme.
In fact, I can remember we were quite squashed in there with the Daleks and the Ogrons because we had to have at least two with each Dalek.
So you had about six, seven, eight, nine people in there.
But we managed it and it looked quite effective on the telly.
ZV6 to Eagle.
WINSTON: Ogrons appeared under the bridge and came up and I think I was injured there.
You think about it before you're going to do it and, as I say, it's humorous in a sense.
And then you do it and you kind of consider afterwards, but I wasn't sure about the fall, but I was doing a bit of kung-fu at the time and I could see I could help the fall by throwing myself down.
It's fun afterwards, watching it.
Jon, of course, rode his tricycle, which you couldn't get him off.
He loved that tricycle.
He wanted to take it home.
It was for the kids Kids.
It was for him.
The trike chase, this vehicle which just happened to be standing parked outside when the Doctor needed it.
Well, it was simply an opportunity to give Jon to drive some Jon was passionate about cars, planes, speedboats, hovercrafts.
He just loved anything mechanical transport.
And if he came across anything that he thoroughly enjoyed using, he'd suggest to us we put it into the programme.
And the trike that he got on to try and get away from the Ogrons was one of these.
He saw these trikes 'cause they were very new in those days.
MANNING: Originally, nobody had seen anything like this before.
They were used in China, they had just been created in China to use in the rice paddies, which makes sense, if you actually look at them.
And of course, they weren't made to have somebody, a pillion on the back.
And of course, my little short legs.
I'm like this.
But Jon and I, being of course, great motorcycle buffs, I as a passenger, he as the actual driver of the beast, we were well practised because you have to actually lean your weight exactly, because otherwise it's going to tip up.
So weight had to be managed very well.
LETTS: But of course they only went about three miles an hour.
Anybody could have just walked after them and caught them.
And we had to have the Ogrons walking very, very slowly.
They still caught him in the end but it was really rather silly.
And we had the best time and we disappeared for far too long and got into an awful lot of trouble, but hey, when you get a toy like that to play with, go figure.
So you went back into our time to kill Styles before he could carry out his plan? Right, we've been fighting the Daleks for years.
But it was hopeless.
Eventually we must lose.
So we thought, "What else can we do?" Exposition is always tricky.
You should always put it in episode two.
I don't think nowadays you would get so long as that scene in episode four where Valentine and myself and Jon actually talked it through, you know, what was happening.
Any of your people still in our time zone? No.
Well, Shura.
He left just to send a message and we never saw nor heard from him again.
I always feel that if you show a lot of strange things happening, the public are unsatisfied, the viewers are unsatisfied if you don't eventually explain them.
You went back to change history.
But you didn't change anything, you became a part of it.
LETTS: If you're going to have an explanation of what's going on, it shouldn't happen in the last episode.
The last episode should be bang, bang, bang, get on with it, explain everything in terms of action and in the long run, everything goes right.
Or doesn't go right for particular people.
In this case, we had these long expositional scenes in episode four.
I don't think they had any choice, they had to explain how the time loop worked.
Now, you can say, "Oh, well, you've got to go back "and you should have had like some kind of demonstration of a time loop.
" But I'm not sure where I would have put it in a four-part structure.
Because then you wouldn't have had anything, you know, of substance happening in episode four.
So, yes, it's unfortunate.
And could you have put it somewhere else? Probably.
But do I hold it against them? Not particularly.
It is undeniable that the Daleks were invading the Earth with an army of three, but that's all we had.
You see them coming across the lawn with a big, wide shot and three Daleks and you can see their casters and the Ogrons walking along going, "What do you want us to do? "Shoot people? Or no, we'll just stand here and get shot at.
" The whole thing wasn't really directed with a flair for action sequences.
I quite like the battles at the end.
I mean, the fact that nobody follows anything resembling military procedure or tactics or anything, as far as I can tell, is just very '70s.
That's how people had fights in the '70s.
I just remember that.
Every action series would have soldiers whose main stand would be to stand in plain view of the enemy shooting, not move, until someone disintegrated them.
And since both sides were doing it, it gives this curious kind of 19th-century aspect to battles in Doctor Who.
The fact that there were just the three of them on that shot gave away the secret, and that was foolishness.
But I think probably the director thought, "I've got these things on wheels that don't move very fast.
"So they've got to go slowly "so the blokes who are with them have to go slowly.
" I mean, it just looked like they were going to lose.
One of the things you learn as a director I mean, if you don't learn it for yourself you learn it by watching other people's films and so on, is how you can build up a scene with individual shots.
You can have three Daleks producing what appears to be an army of Daleks if you do some quick cutting of Daleks in different positions, different shots, different types of shot, doing different things.
Daleks are meant to move fast and the Ogrons could have been jumping out of places.
It could have been great, they would have needed at least twice as much money and at least twice as much time to do it, so - Where are the delegates? - Where is the man Styles? "Day of the Daleks" turned out to be one of the most popular stories that we ever did.
It topped the 10-million mark, I mean, nowadays if you top 10 million you'd hit the headlines in the papers.
We would've realised as the ratings came in that the show was going to be a great success.
And we would look at the ratings every week and 10 was fantastic, so we would have been highly delighted at the time.
I think a lot of it must be attributed to the return of the Daleks after a fairly long time.
But then again, it was our idea to put the Daleks in, so we deserve the credit.