WEBVTT

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MUSIC

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Verity came to me and said,

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''Look, we're in a stick, the scripts for the next series aren't ready,

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''and I've talked to Terry Nation

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''and he thinks we can do one more thing on the Daleks

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''and it'll be a chase through time.''

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And I said, ''Oh, for goodness sake, you know, we can't do it,

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''we can't afford to do it.''

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And she said, ''Richard, do it for me.''

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HE LAUGHS

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''Just do it for me.''

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So we got a scribbled outline from Terry,

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who was never the most punctilious of scriptwriters,

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and Dennis Spooner, a lovely man and a friend of mine,

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came over with this outline and we thrashed it together

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until he said, ''OK, Richard, I've got enough,

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''I can go away and write this now.''

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And he would go away and pound the typewriter, and my golly...

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And we were always, even right from the word go,

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we were short of time to perfect the scripts,

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and we went into rehearsal sometimes with, you know, only half a script.

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Wait a minute, wait a minute. I've got an idea.

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Let's have a look at the TARDIS magnet.

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Billy was very tired on the chase.

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Probably so was I. We were all not giving 100%.

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And yet I can remember him totally...

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I think Sid Newman had come up and damned us

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with a bit of weak praise in the bar afterwards and said,

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''I hope you're not losing it, I watched a bit of this,

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''keep up the good work.''

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And this was enough to trigger William Hartnell.

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And he went into a rage over his gin and tonic.

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And he ended up by saying,

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''It's all right for you, it's all right for you, it's all right for you,

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''young people, I want to work again, I want to work again!''

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I mean, for a man in his, what, 60s, he was in his 60s, you know,

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when most people think of retiring,

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he was still wanting to do it and get it right,

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and he was so furious, so angry, that we hadn't been able to get it right.

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He was all for going back and doing it again correctly.

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The fact that the studio was locked and barred and everyone had gone home,

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there would be no... He wouldn't have taken that in.

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He was only half aware of the complexities of multiple camera.

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Only half aware.

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What he was mainly doing was trying to get his own performance right,

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which was a job for him.

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You never know, over that sand dune,

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there might be a city or a space station or anything.

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Sounds just like me, you know,

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always wants to know what's on the other side of the hill.

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Maureen managed to sustain it.

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She was enchanting and managed to have that sort of bright,

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''Hey, I can get out of this'' feel.

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But the others, I think, suffered

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and had to wander about all too small assets,

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which were largely comprising of hessian covered with a couple of bags of sand,

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which doesn't really make up the moon, you know.

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And even when we went to Canberra Sands, you know,

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we tried to make it look mysterious

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by putting these atrophied gargoyles into the middle distance.

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We were only half successful.

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For Hal Bennett and Ian Thompson,

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I gave them the roughest deal of the whole lot.

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They were the fishmen at the beginning.

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If you try to create somebody who's half pisgah and half human,

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you need all the help you can get, and you need money.

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And Mary Husband, who's a very fine costume woman,

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you know, she had to just stick a couple of tea cozies on their head,

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and we stuck these ears on and sort of gilled them.

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But the costumes were awful.

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They looked like rather tatty, bad ballet costumes.

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We'd given up.

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I won't go into details, but if you look below the waist,

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you'll see they're just a pair of old tights.

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They started to do sort of pisgah movements,

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and we developed a certain ballet of them.

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But I could have gone much further, you know.

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I could have...

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But we couldn't. We couldn't because they had a certain job to do,

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and it would have become too strange, I felt.

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Maybe I could have and should have done,

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but at the time, I dropped them both in it, I'm afraid,

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and they looked stupid, and I'm ashamed that they look stupid,

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because they're good actors.

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Oh, I think I most enjoyed the sequences of The Murray Celeste.

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And we spent our money on that, and we did it at Ealing,

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and we built the back end of The Murray Celeste.

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Not quite accurately, but it wasn't bad,

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and it cost a great deal of money to do that,

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and to plunge half a dozen very good actors,

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and they were making it for real.

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So the Daleks, which was quite difficult,

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getting the Daleks onto the deck, letting them move about the deck,

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but their fear and their horror, and them plunging into the water,

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I thought was wonderful, and we managed to create that

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with some alacrity, but I'm afraid the studio stuff,

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which simply hadn't got the money.

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We had a big Dalek in the chase.

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This was the feeling in the chase

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that we had lost the initial impact of the Daleks,

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and in the studio I was very limited.

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I was mostly using ordinary portrait cameras.

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I was not allowed to do my usual thing

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of using cranes and creeper cameras

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to give greater photographic dynamic to them,

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and we didn't do a lot of zooming in and zooming out,

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because there was so much in the studio,

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so carelessly you'd have gone off the set.

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There's one shot in the chase which I'd hoped great things for,

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because I was always worried that there was only four Daleks.

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To get them to be multiplied now, a simple thing,

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you know, you just hand it over to the electronic wizardry.

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Then it was really, really hard work.

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So I thought, oh, I know what I'll do.

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I'll have them issue the final command, kill, destroy, whatever it was,

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and zap out round the corner and bully these poor little boys

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to come round at great speed and go round again,

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so we would kind of do, you know, round and round the circle.

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But I think we only did it about three times,

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and the fourth one fell over trying to get round,

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and we had to stop recording, so you didn't, and it was very obvious.

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Peter Purvey's wonderful.

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I cast him as that little part right at the beginning,

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fairly near the beginning, at the top of the Empire State Building

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as a deep southerner, and he was wonderful.

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And the moment Verity saw it, she said,

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who is that actor? I think he's wonderful.

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They just left!

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And she said, well, when we get rid of him at the end,

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we need somebody to take over.

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I said, you can't use him at the end as well as the beginning.

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You real?

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And she simply said, why not?

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If you've got an actor of that calibre, use him.

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Success! Paramount success!

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It is impossible to distinguish from the original!

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We found Edmund Warwick who looked sufficiently alike,

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and you could see the difference.

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But he wasn't a bad doppelganger, and he had to have a fight, of course.

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And Billy is, you know, he'll go for a fight.

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He learned his business during the war, making training films.

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One training film, he was asked to taxi on with a Spitfire,

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and they gave him quarter of an hour instruction,

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and said, there's the thing, I want you to taxi into that hangar.

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Go! Action!

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He taxied into the hangar and straight out the other side

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through the curtains, smashing up the Spitfire.

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So he won't stop, and when we were doing those fights,

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it was quite dangerous for that other actor,

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because Billy was competent, and he would really go for it.

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He wouldn't pull his punches.

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If you didn't know where not to put your hand,

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you lost your fingers with Billy.

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I'm not a health and safety director,

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so I tend to go for it, and as a young man, even more so.

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It was a dangerous, dangerous thing to do,

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but Billy copes with it, and he was a tough old man.

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He wouldn't have said, don't do that.

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He'd have gone for it and said, ow, afterwards.

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We had enormous fun working on film

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with the Mechanoid and the Dalek battle.

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I always like working on film.

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It enables you to cut where you want to cut, not where you have to cut.

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We were allowed to destroy one with amyl acetate,

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which was made specially for us out of thin plastic,

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so we squirted amyl acetate on it and it melted,

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and then we pumped smoke into it.

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I was looking at it the other day, and I still regret

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some of the whams and bams that we cut in.

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Hopefully we made it look fairly convincing and fairly nasty,

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but one could have been nastier.

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One could have torn a few Daleks apart if one had had the money.

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I mean, I would love to have Daleks split down the middle.

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The most we had was the damn things breaking apart there,

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which was very obviously a weakness, and looked cheap when it happened.

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When the Dalek fell over the side of the Marie Celeste, it broke there,

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and you could see there was nothing inside. I think it was a shame.

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If we knew it was going to break there,

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we should have had the globule Dalek inside.

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Of course, Verity was very much against ever showing anything inside,

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but when that happened, it showed that it was empty, which reduced it.

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Whereas if you'd had it torn apart, actually its guts spilt out,

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enormous complex electrodes spilling out onto the floor,

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that would have been quite fun.

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But we didn't do badly for...

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Well, maybe some self-congratulatory men, we should have done better.

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But that bit of filming I was quite happy with.

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Being the director for Doctor Who, it was a baptism of blood.

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But I enjoyed the blood.