The idea for the web planet was so very different from anything that we had made in Doctor Who
up to that point.
Well this one was very exciting because it was a visual piece.
I was very taken with the idea of having a planet full of what were really virtually
insects.
We were fighting like anything for it not to be talking heads, for it to be a complete
visualisation.
Richard Martin had directed the first Dalek serial with Chris Barrie.
He was splendid I think for Doctor Who. He was extremely imaginative himself.
I felt that this particular serial would be something that he would throw himself into
with great enthusiasm, which he did.
To be honest, a verity, she sort of recognised that I was the right zany man for the right
zany job.
The story itself by Bill Stratton, for me it was the first sort of real creepy science
fiction story that we'd done.
I probably had worked with Dennis Spooner on The Saint, so I suspect that Dennis probably
introduced him.
Dennis I felt very close to. He was a very kind of ordinary guy. He was immensely inventive
and a wonderful writer.
Dennis Spooner and I immediately hit it off. He was a very exciting and accessible man
with a lot of ideas and a lot of humour.
He was very, very funny all the time and always trying to put in gags and jokes.
He was inventive and creative and he wanted the best for the series.
It's a very dark story. It was in actual fact rather grim.
I was very struck by the writing, by the lyricism of the writing.
Break it!
So they cut out the simile and go straight to the metaphor.
A silent wall. We must make mouths in it with our weapons. Then it will speak more light.
I mean this is the most extraordinarily poetic stuff.
Any references in the script, for example the animos and the carcinome, would have come
from Bill. They would have been part of his vision.
The imagery of evil, of cancer, of this spider-like thing at the centre of this horrible web that
people become cloaked in. The idea of disease, of disease going right the way through a planet.
Even if a child of five, six or whoever is watching it cannot possibly get that reference,
it feels right and it feels authentic.
Every creature who invades our domain comes only to prey on us.
There were not enough strands of drama to hold all the participants.
So Dennis and I invented the grub people at the last minute.
Will you kill your own kind? This stranger? You are both from that wilderness above ground.
I remember Verity coming to an early outside rehearsal and I don't think we'd had time
to really explain our little addition to her. She said, what are these people doing grunting?
Who is this actor? Why is he making all these strange noises?
It was an adventure story, character led. You've got these Doctor Who people but somehow
the story wasn't really about them. It was actually about Prince Helio.
Who is this creature? Our ally.
I do not trust her. You have no choice.
Barbara who was a school teacher should not just be a woman who just couldn't do anything
and therefore she had a brain as well as anything.
And so there were times when she would, yes, be the person who saved the day.
I mean in the Aztecs for example she was the kind of central character of our people all
the way through.
They were a very talented lot in the design department and I think the design department
had thought carefully to give the people who had the wildest ideas or the most visual aspects
to us.
But we would get allocated by the main make-up, the head of the make-up department really.
But if there were particular people that the director had worked with before then they
would ask, they would request if they could have that particular person.
John Wood was in fact allocated by the design department.
I sort of welcomed this programme because there was a lot more licence and I enjoyed
it. It was smashing. The whole idea of it was very good indeed.
We could certainly not ask for what programme we wanted to work on otherwise I expect a
lot of us would have probably wanted to work on Doctor Who because it was quite a prestigious
programme and very nice from a make-up point of view because you could use your imagination
and a bit of creativity.
A lot of designers, or many of them, enjoyed doing Doctor Who because they were able to
be quite creative within a very imaginative format.
It was obvious by the time we met, after a quarter of an hour, that we were talking the
same language.
His designs were wonderfully imaginative and creative and he did a lot on what may have
seemed a lot of money to us and doing Doctor Who but was very little money really.
He would do the most wonderful, elaborate designs which unleashed his imagination and
he was a good draughtsman.
And then they would be put in for costing and the same great big blueprints would come
back with this rubber stamp. It was like a censor stamp and it just said,
O-M-I-T. Omit. Omit. Omit. On all the detail. All the detail.
We did build up a group of costume designers and make-up supervisors who would return and
who again enjoyed working on Doctor Who because they could be imaginative.
Daphne Dare who did the costumes with me was a very quiet person, very competent. She had
a quiet sense of humour. She didn't give much away.
She was a lovely, humorous, inventive person. I can only say I had admiration for nearly
everything that she did. She did wonderful costumes, I thought.
She was brilliant at translating the idea of a butterfly into something that a human
being could actually wear.
She would conceptualise it on paper and therefore one was able to see that and see how it would
fit in with what we were doing. She fitted in very well with Doctor Who.
And it was a very killing schedule because we did 48 weeks a year.
We produced a great deal of drama at a great speed.
Yeah, there was a lot of pressure on keeping episodes coming on week after week after week.
You had to plan at least four of these productions before you went into the studio on the first
one. Otherwise you were in trouble.
In those days, we certainly didn't, those old image orthicon cameras didn't have any
facility for a matte box. What I wanted was something which would give the other feel
photographically, definitely a strong photographic feel.
So we had, at some expense and some grumbling, matte boxes made for the cameras and we got
this half plate, photographically pure glass. And then we slotted it, then we bucketed it
up by covering it with Vaseline.
He also was shooting through a mirror sometimes. There's a wonderful sequence which you think,
how on earth did they get this high shot? And in fact, they shoot up through a mirror
to get it.
I was completely staggered by first arriving and seeing this encapsulation of an idea of
this strange, dead, weird, hugely atmospheric planet.
And that strange emptiness of the first episode when Bill and I stepped out onto the planet
Vortis.
As far as the planet's surface, we didn't have much choice when it came to the flat
parts of it because we still had the cameras and everything else to roll over those areas
and therefore we couldn't put a lot of rubble down or sand or things like this.
But once you got off the floor onto a slope, then you could just do whatever you liked.
I mean, most of that scenery at the back there and everything was made up of sandbags full
of sawdust and then all of that was covered in old scenic cloths.
It was a terrific shot, wasn't it, that pyramid? It must have been filmed in some way that
kept Bill and I small.
Oh, it's absolutely beautiful.
The Temple of Light would be based on much more of a traditional ancient structures such
as those in Mexico for the Aztecs.
They're more familiar than anything else, I think. Tombs which are in Babylonia and
things like that.
The castle dome, because these sets had to be struck and stored, basically you were still
dealing with flatage. You can't sort of dress anything which is sort of loosely, shall we
say, a compound shape of nothingness because you'd never get it the same next time.
That sort of living thing, the pulsing thing, where you're never quite sure which is animal
and which is vegetable, that we never really achieved in the studio.
I didn't like the edges of the flatage which you could see and you couldn't conceal.
I seem to remember that the pulsating net, the animus effect, was something we did only
at Ealing in the film studio. That it was simply impractical and impossible within the
time span of doing the programs to have the same sort of elaborate effects in the studio.
It was a comedown, the studio set, to the things that John and I were originally hoping
to do.
Because he wanted everything to be absolutely right and it was never absolutely right.
At the end we were starting to crack it and starting to get the sort of imagery that we
wanted.
We probably went to town on the last episode because we knew that we could actually dress
that exactly as we wanted with all its elaboration because it was never going to be reset again.
If it broke the next day, it would have done its thing.
From nowhere, this terrible sort of spout thing like a snake rose from the wall and
fired at them.
The next shot was a marvellous shot of them covered in sort of cobweb.
It's a very fine sort of mixture of glue like Yoo-Hoo or something which they, it comes
out of an air pressure gun and it spreads it and it goes, it will just attach itself
to everything.
Of course you have to be quite careful what that does to the skin if it's on for a long
time.
We didn't only have one creature, we had Minoptra, we had Zarbis. I can't even remember what
they are, I think there were about four different creatures, all of whom which had to be made
by the costume department.
We didn't see the finished Zarbi and Minoptra until we got into the studio so it was quite
a surprise for us, a big shock.
The costume of Zarbi was based on more or less a suit of armour. In many ways because
the operator had to lean forward to give you the effect of this ant moving as they do,
we couldn't have his arms hanging out so his arms were inside but operating these smaller
feelers, he was balanced by the protuberance at the back of him but it all had to be strapped
on, leather straps with buckles to go around this bit and that bit.
I was kind of happy with them, I mean they're good ants, they're good ants.
I thought they looked pretty damn good actually.
You can spot actually screws in the back of the neck of the Zarbi which I thought was
quite good. At least they could have been painted black so they didn't show up.
They were huge, I mean they were the size of a man up to about the middle of their stomach
and then they went on up.
Zarbi were really tricky things and they often nudged you out of the way and that sort of
thing.
There were about five or six or seven Zarbis.
I had to find very good puppeteers.
These actors, they were all quite small, John Scott Martin, Gerald Taylor. You could actually
see their own black legs in tights as they scuttled about being giant ants.
They had to think in terms of insects and they then had to interpret that as puppeteers.
The Zarbis were very frightening. Certainly when you read it, I think they are very scary.
I remember there's a moment when Vicky sees the Zarbi for the first time and it was really
scary. I mean that made you jump, made me jump anyway when I watched it again.
And I can remember one of them sort of teasing me, pinning me against a wall and I was absolutely
panic stricken. They were so realistic.
I do remember that animus thing.
To pluck from earth its myriad techniques.
Pulsating evil at the centre of the story.
The set was rather wonderful of the spider or whatever it was that was controlling all
these things.
The animus, her, because it was a female character, was played by somebody that I already knew,
Catherine Fleming. And the reason I knew her was that she was a voice tutor at RADA where
I had been a student.
Come to me.
You filthy creature.
Come to me. You filthy great spider.
And of course she stood at a microphone at the side of the set with a script and did
all the lines beautifully.
He had a lava gun. Basically it was like a trolley which somebody sat on and they scooped
it round with their hands. The top of it was I think made of fibreglass, painted. The actual
fringe part of it was supposed to look like little legs and everything. They were made
out of like a foam.
I don't think they were so convincing actually having looked at it again.
I would discuss the effect, what he wanted to see coming out the end of this gun. The
effects people would work that one out.
It would tend to go, you know, and that was it. I'm sure nowadays it would be a lot bigger
than that and more effective.
What I did with the zombie and the other little bug was what they would term as being the
solid costumes. That was the difference or the difference of responsibility between what
I did and what Wardrobe did. They did the soft costumes.
And the Monoptera were extremely beautiful. I mean I did wonder how on earth we were going
to do it.
I certainly remember looking at lots of books of butterflies and insects and making drawings.
We made the Monoptera eyes by using material from a milliner's shop because I knew that
it was kind of stiff material that would take a shape from a mould. That was made in a sort
of approximation of a kind of fly's eyes so it was kind of rather wide mesh.
All this on your face, these strange sort of black gauzy goggles that you could just
about see through and your hugely masked black and white make-up.
One always wanted the Monoptera to show their beautiful wings.
Our very attentive viewers might have noticed that there were changes between what was filmed
and what was actually done in the studio to the costumes and the headgear of the Monoptera.
We were experimenting with it at Ealing and being a single shot situation we were able
to put it back on again when it fell off.
In the studio recording you'd have to be there all day in the costume really or most of the
day and it might have just been that they were just impractical.
It certainly wasn't artistic regression. I think it was probably artistic regression.
The bit that really doesn't sort of quite live up to the story was the Optera. They
looked a bit sort of comical and the leader, I wasn't myself quite sure that he had the
right sound.
We know that from the roof comes hate.
I mean who's going to get say which is the right sound for a grub but something about
his voice which was I think very guttural and dark I didn't quite think was appropriate.
Some of the effects were jolly difficult to do.
Ties that were going to be melted by dipping into acid baths. These had to be done quite
controlledly. Obviously it wasn't an acid bath. There was something else I think was
a molestation. The tie was finally made out of very fine polystyrene or something like
that.
You've ruined it. That was my Coal Hill School tie. You just saved your life.
I never got the tie back or the pen. Crunch.
In the shell of one of the Monoptera.
It probably made of plaster. It had to obviously crush when he put his foot in there.
It was good because we didn't make a great deal of it. But certainly it stayed I think
in your subconscious. The sort of what's it is another strange animal.
You have two for rehearsals. One standby. One for the actual televised television shot
and another standby for that. So you say you've got five. You might remember this. This was
used by Barbara to kill the animus. In actuality this is a microphone container which was designed
in the 30s.
Her friend here suggested that the creature goes along with your party.
And I was thanking the doctor for his faith in our isopropyl.
That's a very good idea doctor.
William Hartnell. I think he was tended to be a bit grumpy because he had a difficult
part.
Bill Hartnell was in my opinion because I cast him absolutely the perfect Doctor Who
because he combined being quite aggressive and unpredictable with being very kind and
gentle and quite touching.
Working with Bill Hartnell was something we were all quite nervous about initially because
one of the things we had to do every week was put on his wig and it always had to be
kept very carefully and he had to have it on a block and he wanted to see that it was
exactly right.
Bill was a bit excitable at times. He was up and down. He was you know he didn't feel
this or he didn't feel that or whatever it was. I mean like lots of actors.
Billy had that very rare gift in an actor of repressed fury. He was an angry man and
he managed to channel his anger into creativity.
He used to in a sense upset himself a bit with things that he didn't like or he couldn't
quite get what he wanted to get.
But it was with this anger, this sort of divine discontent I suppose you could call it, which
made him very watchable.
We monopter were having a joke amongst ourselves about perhaps the slight preposterousness
of what we were having to do and he suddenly said to me, come on boy, come on boy, come
on get on with it. Very crusty and you know and in other words, it's a good lesson for
a young actor, take the work seriously.
Bill could always surprise you as another actor. He did me anyway, many times.
Yes, well I didn't want to... This is not merely a decorative object.
He had a lot of bitterness about his life as an actor because he felt he had something
really very big inside him to give and he'd spent his life playing little sergeant majors,
horrible little snarling sergeant majors.
He had a tiny part, first time I ever saw him in a film called Sporting Life and it
was magic.
And for Bill, this was the part of a lifetime. He knew he was wonderful in it. He knew he
was doing something absolutely new that nobody had ever seen before. He didn't work for 18
months after making that film.
The first thing I ever said to Bill was, you in Sporting Life, you can almost forget the
rest of the film, I will never forget you.
So Doctor Who for him was a lifeline and he grasped the end of that lifeline and he climbed
up it and he knew that for him this was going to be the wonderful part of his life.
You could have treated him with kid gloves but underneath he had a good heart.
I could laugh him out of anything and that's what I did and I spent as much energy doing
that as I did acting.
I remember the usual wind down in the bar afterwards and Billy was furious and he said,
where's the head of programme?
Where's the head of programme?
I said, Billy, it's 10.15, I don't think in fact we're going to see anybody.
He says, well, I want to see him. I want to see him now.
He said, because this is too good to miss. I want to work again.
He said, I need to work again.
Sudden fury erupted.
Did you know we got a gin and tonic down him and by that time we'd calmed him down but
it was this wonderful thing of an old man whose, it was his last job and a very good
job he did, saying that he needed to work again.
It's eternally the actor, isn't it?
What should we do?
Well, what would have happened if the spearhead had been successful?
Jackie Hill was just lovely. She was just so sweet. She was really nice to work with.
I thought she was always wonderful. She's a very graceful, beautiful person to be with.
She was incredibly kind to me, as Russell was. They did take on a kind of parental role.
I thought she just had a kind of wonderful reality, a real quality of believability as
a schoolteacher.
She was always truthful and made everything believable, extraordinarily believable.
She was a very beautiful woman, very statuesque. I loved just to look at her. She emanated
a sort of regality. I would have loved to have worked with her on many other things.
You know, I can see her in serious drama, and it's my loss that I never did.
When she was left alone, and that strange scene where suddenly her arms sort of move
and starts to take over and lead her out, it was wonderful, I thought, absolutely wonderful.
And quite gripping to watch her do that.
All the cast all got on very well together, which was essential, really. And Russ and
Jackie were on an even keel most of the time. And Bill did go up and down a bit, so it was
great to have that kind of real solidarity.
I was introduced to Rosalinda Winter, a rather strict movement and speech coach, but also
actress.
And she, in fact, worked with the actors in rehearsal in terms of their movement and how
they pitched their voices.
Aaron, do you still intend to go to the crater of needles?
Yes, I do.
She had a sort of voice that you didn't know whether it was masculine or feminine.
She said, well, now, first of all, we're going to have to move like insects. I think we had
looked at pictures of butterflies. It was all very Royal Shakespeare, in fact. And we
held our little hands like that because we were going to have black gloves. And she was
very, very keen on the mouth. And we looked at this sort of gash of mouth that the butterflies
had.
And I remember complaining. I said, it's ridiculous. We can't be noble. We're going to have to
talk with our mouth like that. You know, it's just not right. Well, I think that's the main
reason she said, you're not very comfortable in this part.
And she worked very well with Martin Jarvis, who was, you know, an absolutely straight
actor. I'd first seen him in the West End somewhere.
The person who absolutely struck me was an actor I discovered. He's called Jolion Booth.
The legends of it only begin when it was already thinking itself into the crannies of Vortis
and the minds of the Zarbi, spreading its web.
Kind of Robert Rietty kind of actor with a wonderful voice, beautiful, mellifluous voice,
a lyrical way of speaking. He does one speech as Propelius, which is like Prospero's final
speech in The Tempest.
Being slowly unwoven by the silence of time and their entrances long forgotten by our
species. But our gods have not forgotten us, Habana. This was indeed deliverance.
And it's a deeply felt and beautifully spoken piece of acting.
And then the charming, handsome William Russell. He recognised the apprehension of a young
actor starting in television. And he'd always, you know, hi Martin. I mean, even to call
me by my name, William Russell said, call me Martin. Are you going to have a coffee?
Oh, yes. Come on in. You know, fantastic.
Excerpts that could not be contained in the studio were always pre-filmed and that they
would have been done at Ealing Studios.
And we were able, John and I, to be much more elaborate there than in the television studios.
I think it was about three weeks before we went into the studio when we went down to
Ealing and there was this lovely moonscape and there was a wonderful man called Inky.
And he had, it seemed, a noose in one hand and some sort of shackley things, leather
shackle things in the other. And I thought, he looks like Albert Pierpont, the hangman.
We brought him in early because he had to have harness underneath. So we had to adapt
for that.
I then realised that he was from the Kirby's Flying Ballet Company. You have to rely on
Inky who is really like your counterweight. He pulls you up there.
He came along and whisked them off the ground, whisked them off the 20 foot pedestal and
flew them. Some of the most dramatic flights were never recorded because we were running
for our lives.
I do remember our excellent director Richard Martin choreographing these.
I was determined to swoop with them. I wasn't going to have a sort of a ground-based camera
so I demanded a big bill, the biggest crane I could get at the time. And this was one
end of the studio and this was swooping about and they were swooping about and we had some
very interesting balletic moments, some of which, most of which were never recorded on
film. And I was, you know, I was all day in this Kirby stuff.
What is in the centre of the web? Do you know?
The energy that we put into those evening performances was the energy which you put
into a live performance on stage.
This particular production was done at Riverside Studios at Hammersmith.
The whole thing was a hell of a push to squeeze it into the studios.
The thing about them too was the ceiling heights were very low. I think they were only about
16 foot, which was nothing.
We could have always done with another two miles of set.
You wait for the sets to come out on the previous production at Riverside Studios about 12 o'clock.
You then go in at 12 o'clock at night. You work right through the night.
You were allocated two hours to record the whole half hour show in.
We absolutely could not have done it if we had tried to do it perfectly within the time.
We would have got 10 minutes recorded.
We would have what would be called an overrun, which involved, first of all, asking the crew
if they were willing to do it, which sometimes they were not particularly happy about.
The web planning was a very technical episode and camera breakages were obviously one of
the things that would hold us up.
On this particular series, I think we had three overruns and one of 40 minutes, which
would have been very, very expensive.
I would be rushing down to see what was happening because the studio, although it had a glass
panel, the control room, you were meant to be able to see what was happening in the studio.
You could never see what was happening in the studio.
When people said, we're in a bit of a mess down here, you know, a zombie has just fallen
into a monopter or something, you had to go down and sort it out yourself.
I think one of the worst things we would worry about is actors getting hot because if they
perspire, it looks bad and it does terrible things to the makeup.
At 10 o'clock to ask a crew to work till quarter to 11 meant it was quite something, you know.
I should say, what I'm going to do, Richard, is I'll stay with you for your rehearsals
and your dress rehearsals and things like that.
And then I'm going to studio three.
Now studio three, there's only two studios at Riverside, studio three was the Chancellor's
public house because there were no mobiles at that time.
You come over or send somebody over and we go over like a shot and see what's happened
and we have to put it right.
And some of the roughnesses were inevitable.
Because we were trying to push the boundaries.
I mean, to fight with the zombies was not easy.
You didn't want to do any damage to the poor guy who was stooped over acting, didn't have
a very good view of anything.
You didn't want to show that you were being in any way careful of the zombie.
You know, I rather sort of bow my head when I come to a fight.
I always think something, you know, is going to be awful on show.
Something like a fight will take a very long time to film because of the cuts.
And we had a great shortage of cuts.
Tape editing was quite complicated and time consuming.
So that if you went into the studio, you were allowed, I think, I can't remember whether
it was three or four edits in your entire program.
Then when we went into the editing, of course, I had half a dozen shots that I want to cut
into one sequence to make it better.
That we couldn't possibly have made it on only three or four edits.
So there was usually seven or eight or ten or, I mean, I was always in trouble over that.
It was not electronic editing.
It was physically cutting the tape.
Doctor Who was such that if anything worked, it would be kept in.
You certainly couldn't go and pick that bit up off the floor.
Actually, I did once, but not in BBC and for Renate.
I say, stick that bloody bit back again.
So if I wrote a memo to Richard Martin saying I had taken the animus web out of a shot because
it didn't work, you can be sure that it didn't work.
I have to tell you that Verity Lambert was always stopping me from showing the nasty
bits.
She was absolutely adamant and I'm sure in retrospect she was absolutely right.
We did have rather an unfortunate experience in One Doctor Who where Carol Ann Ford was
ill and she had picked, she picked up a pair of scissors and threatened, I think it was
Barbara.
We got taken to task quite rightly by the children's department.
So when we had to show this vicious thing of the Zarbis using their mandibles to clip
off the wings, we had to only just suggest it.
I suppose it was a sort of metaphoric thing for children who pull wings off butterflies.
And equally the same with the incident with the, I think it was a female grub.
We hoped by showing Ian's reaction that it was a brave and extraordinary thing for her
to have done.
I almost made that up at the spur of the moment.
I mean I'm very thrilled that it got such high figures, that it got, what was it, 13
million.
It's fantastic.
But in retrospect I'm not surprised because it, again, there was nothing else like it
on television.
The web planet was quite a difficult serial and in a sense it was quite surreal.
And after all our efforts it remains naive, but maybe some of its enduring capacity is
because of the earnestness and the desire we had for it to be a myth, to actually hold
the seeds of a mythology rather than just a tatty telly programme.
By the end of my time with Doctor Who I was deeply frustrated that we had not managed
in my eyes to visualise it as strongly and as profoundly as it could and should be.
It is strangely amateurish looking, I have to say.
Thinking about it I do think that it did have something special.
It was really innovative and it was trying to do something on a weekly basis that was
quite ambitious really.
When you think of how it was done and what facilities we had and everything else, it
really was a very good achievement in many ways with everybody.
I'm very struck by the costumes and the movement of the actors in those extraordinary costumes.
I think we did very well on the web planet considering the constraints of money and the
fact that we were being hugely ambitious in what we were attempting to do.
Those lonely and amazing shots of a planet at the beginning and the terrible sound of
the Zarbi in your head, that was really the bit that I thought was very good.
I don't know how people will view the web planet today but I think that in its time
it was quite groundbreaking in terms of what we were attempting to do.
And because we took it seriously, people like Dennis Spooner and John strove their utmost
best to make it a creative and different piece of visual art.
From every point of view, from the design, the costumes, the whole way it was envisaged.
And it was quite experimental and revolutionary and I'm very glad that we made it.
Thank you.
Thank you.