MUSIC
Verity came to me and said,
''Look, we're in a stick, the scripts for the next series aren't ready,
''and I've talked to Terry Nation
''and he thinks we can do one more thing on the Daleks
''and it'll be a chase through time.''
And I said, ''Oh, for goodness sake, you know, we can't do it,
''we can't afford to do it.''
And she said, ''Richard, do it for me.''
HE LAUGHS
''Just do it for me.''
So we got a scribbled outline from Terry,
who was never the most punctilious of scriptwriters,
and Dennis Spooner, a lovely man and a friend of mine,
came over with this outline and we thrashed it together
until he said, ''OK, Richard, I've got enough,
''I can go away and write this now.''
And he would go away and pound the typewriter, and my golly...
And we were always, even right from the word go,
we were short of time to perfect the scripts,
and we went into rehearsal sometimes with, you know, only half a script.
Wait a minute, wait a minute. I've got an idea.
Let's have a look at the TARDIS magnet.
Billy was very tired on the chase.
Probably so was I. We were all not giving 100%.
And yet I can remember him totally...
I think Sid Newman had come up and damned us
with a bit of weak praise in the bar afterwards and said,
''I hope you're not losing it, I watched a bit of this,
''keep up the good work.''
And this was enough to trigger William Hartnell.
And he went into a rage over his gin and tonic.
And he ended up by saying,
''It's all right for you, it's all right for you, it's all right for you,
''young people, I want to work again, I want to work again!''
I mean, for a man in his, what, 60s, he was in his 60s, you know,
when most people think of retiring,
he was still wanting to do it and get it right,
and he was so furious, so angry, that we hadn't been able to get it right.
He was all for going back and doing it again correctly.
The fact that the studio was locked and barred and everyone had gone home,
there would be no... He wouldn't have taken that in.
He was only half aware of the complexities of multiple camera.
Only half aware.
What he was mainly doing was trying to get his own performance right,
which was a job for him.
You never know, over that sand dune,
there might be a city or a space station or anything.
Sounds just like me, you know,
always wants to know what's on the other side of the hill.
Maureen managed to sustain it.
She was enchanting and managed to have that sort of bright,
''Hey, I can get out of this'' feel.
But the others, I think, suffered
and had to wander about all too small assets,
which were largely comprising of hessian covered with a couple of bags of sand,
which doesn't really make up the moon, you know.
And even when we went to Canberra Sands, you know,
we tried to make it look mysterious
by putting these atrophied gargoyles into the middle distance.
We were only half successful.
For Hal Bennett and Ian Thompson,
I gave them the roughest deal of the whole lot.
They were the fishmen at the beginning.
If you try to create somebody who's half pisgah and half human,
you need all the help you can get, and you need money.
And Mary Husband, who's a very fine costume woman,
you know, she had to just stick a couple of tea cozies on their head,
and we stuck these ears on and sort of gilled them.
But the costumes were awful.
They looked like rather tatty, bad ballet costumes.
We'd given up.
I won't go into details, but if you look below the waist,
you'll see they're just a pair of old tights.
They started to do sort of pisgah movements,
and we developed a certain ballet of them.
But I could have gone much further, you know.
I could have...
But we couldn't. We couldn't because they had a certain job to do,
and it would have become too strange, I felt.
Maybe I could have and should have done,
but at the time, I dropped them both in it, I'm afraid,
and they looked stupid, and I'm ashamed that they look stupid,
because they're good actors.
Oh, I think I most enjoyed the sequences of The Murray Celeste.
And we spent our money on that, and we did it at Ealing,
and we built the back end of The Murray Celeste.
Not quite accurately, but it wasn't bad,
and it cost a great deal of money to do that,
and to plunge half a dozen very good actors,
and they were making it for real.
So the Daleks, which was quite difficult,
getting the Daleks onto the deck, letting them move about the deck,
but their fear and their horror, and them plunging into the water,
I thought was wonderful, and we managed to create that
with some alacrity, but I'm afraid the studio stuff,
which simply hadn't got the money.
We had a big Dalek in the chase.
This was the feeling in the chase
that we had lost the initial impact of the Daleks,
and in the studio I was very limited.
I was mostly using ordinary portrait cameras.
I was not allowed to do my usual thing
of using cranes and creeper cameras
to give greater photographic dynamic to them,
and we didn't do a lot of zooming in and zooming out,
because there was so much in the studio,
so carelessly you'd have gone off the set.
There's one shot in the chase which I'd hoped great things for,
because I was always worried that there was only four Daleks.
To get them to be multiplied now, a simple thing,
you know, you just hand it over to the electronic wizardry.
Then it was really, really hard work.
So I thought, oh, I know what I'll do.
I'll have them issue the final command, kill, destroy, whatever it was,
and zap out round the corner and bully these poor little boys
to come round at great speed and go round again,
so we would kind of do, you know, round and round the circle.
But I think we only did it about three times,
and the fourth one fell over trying to get round,
and we had to stop recording, so you didn't, and it was very obvious.
Peter Purvey's wonderful.
I cast him as that little part right at the beginning,
fairly near the beginning, at the top of the Empire State Building
as a deep southerner, and he was wonderful.
And the moment Verity saw it, she said,
who is that actor? I think he's wonderful.
They just left!
And she said, well, when we get rid of him at the end,
we need somebody to take over.
I said, you can't use him at the end as well as the beginning.
You real?
And she simply said, why not?
If you've got an actor of that calibre, use him.
Success! Paramount success!
It is impossible to distinguish from the original!
We found Edmund Warwick who looked sufficiently alike,
and you could see the difference.
But he wasn't a bad doppelganger, and he had to have a fight, of course.
And Billy is, you know, he'll go for a fight.
He learned his business during the war, making training films.
One training film, he was asked to taxi on with a Spitfire,
and they gave him quarter of an hour instruction,
and said, there's the thing, I want you to taxi into that hangar.
Go! Action!
He taxied into the hangar and straight out the other side
through the curtains, smashing up the Spitfire.
So he won't stop, and when we were doing those fights,
it was quite dangerous for that other actor,
because Billy was competent, and he would really go for it.
He wouldn't pull his punches.
If you didn't know where not to put your hand,
you lost your fingers with Billy.
I'm not a health and safety director,
so I tend to go for it, and as a young man, even more so.
It was a dangerous, dangerous thing to do,
but Billy copes with it, and he was a tough old man.
He wouldn't have said, don't do that.
He'd have gone for it and said, ow, afterwards.
We had enormous fun working on film
with the Mechanoid and the Dalek battle.
I always like working on film.
It enables you to cut where you want to cut, not where you have to cut.
We were allowed to destroy one with amyl acetate,
which was made specially for us out of thin plastic,
so we squirted amyl acetate on it and it melted,
and then we pumped smoke into it.
I was looking at it the other day, and I still regret
some of the whams and bams that we cut in.
Hopefully we made it look fairly convincing and fairly nasty,
but one could have been nastier.
One could have torn a few Daleks apart if one had had the money.
I mean, I would love to have Daleks split down the middle.
The most we had was the damn things breaking apart there,
which was very obviously a weakness, and looked cheap when it happened.
When the Dalek fell over the side of the Marie Celeste, it broke there,
and you could see there was nothing inside. I think it was a shame.
If we knew it was going to break there,
we should have had the globule Dalek inside.
Of course, Verity was very much against ever showing anything inside,
but when that happened, it showed that it was empty, which reduced it.
Whereas if you'd had it torn apart, actually its guts spilt out,
enormous complex electrodes spilling out onto the floor,
that would have been quite fun.
But we didn't do badly for...
Well, maybe some self-congratulatory men, we should have done better.
But that bit of filming I was quite happy with.
Being the director for Doctor Who, it was a baptism of blood.
But I enjoyed the blood.