Doctor Who season 12 – the debut series for Tom Baker in the iconic role of the Fourth Doctor – recently came out on Blu-ray at last.
His opening season saw adventures with Sontarans, Daleks, Davros and the Cybermen along with companions Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) and Harry Sullivan (Ian Marter).
The new box set revisits these classic stories from the mid-’70s and tells the behind-the-scenes story which, as you will see below, makes for a gruesome affair.
So settle down for a witch’s curse, multiple hospitalisations, Tom Baker nearly being recast and the near-death of a much-loved actor…
STRIKE!
The ’70s were full of industrial action at the BBC which resulted in the delay and even cancellation of shows.
Baker’s first story, ‘Robot’, met a slight hitch due to industrial action (thanks to “scene shifters”) but, otherwise, all was well. Similarly, with ‘The Ark In Space’, a postal dispute hampered the script submission process which was already suffering due to extensive rewrites. Again, nothing Doctor Who couldn’t handle.
The curse, as we are about to discover, was just about to hit.
“For a split second after I fell, I knew something had happened…”
The first bonafide production of the new Fourth Doctor era was ‘The Sontaran Experiment’ when new producer Phillip Hinchcliffe took over from Barry Letts, who had overseen ‘Robot’ and would continue to keep an eye on his successor for a few more episodes.
Filming on the two-part story featuring the return of the potato-headed aliens took place solely on location – the blasted heath of Dartmoor doubling for a future uninhabitable Earth, burnt out by solar flares.
It was a damp, soggy and cold shoot according to the stars – who included Tom Baker as the Doctor, Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith and Ian Marter as Harry Sullivan – with pot holes proving to be problematic for members of the crew who weren’t paying attention. A planned on-set explosion also caused a visit from the local constabulary.
If only the rest of the production’s problems could have been so trivial.
While filming a more action-based scene, Baker got too physical with a Sontaran and ended up on the rocky ground. Sladen, who was in the scene, said, “I heard this snap – well, crack!”
Baker, remembering the moment for a documentary on the new season 12 box set, recalled, “For a split second after I fell, I knew something had happened, I didn’t know what. It was just this terrible stunning fall.
“I couldn’t move and everyone was horrified.”
Immediately the cast and crew were worrying why Tom wasn’t getting up. “Everyone realised Tom was in trouble,” commented Sladen. The actor was whisked off in an ambulance leaving new boy Hinchcliffe panicked and apprehensive. He said: “I suppose what ran through my mind was, ‘Oh God, this is virtually the first day of filming and my leading man, I’m losing him for the whole story if not the whole series!’ You just couldn’t imagine how you’d deal with it if it was really, really serious.”
Production designer Roger Murray-Leach followed the show’s new star to hospital in Newton Abbot and recalls Tom’s understandable concern: “The person who panicked was Tom. This was his third or fourth day on set and he could see his career as Doctor Who going up in smoke.”
Baker concurred: “The anxiety I felt was the show would go on without me! That made me very tense indeed. I really thought it might be damaging to me.”
With no mobile phones and no contact with the production team out on Dartmoor, rumours ran rife on set, with some even believing that Tom would be completely replaced.
Thankfully Tom had only cracked his collar bone. He returned to the hotel where the cast and crew were staying, eager to please and assure them their leading man was in fine health, and, by all accounts, made a typically Tom Baker entrance into the bar, ordered a gin and tonic and began to play darts with his good arm.
Eagle-eyed Whovians will spot, at various points in ‘The Sontaran Experiment’, the use of stand-in Terry Walsh, who doubled for Tom more than expected and the use of the Doctor’s iconic scarf to hide the shoulder injury. By the time they’d got to studio filming on the next story, all was fine.
Sadly, Australian actor Kevin Lindsay – the man beneath the Sontarans – was suffering from respiratory problems during the shoot. Elisabeth Sladen later spoke about her concern, noting he was “quite ill”.
Just six weeks after the transmission of ‘The Sontaran Experiment’, Kevin died from a heart condition aged just 51 years old.
“She was dragged towards a sloping roof that was going to crush her head…”
‘Revenge of the Cybermen’ is notable for being the very first Doctor Who story available on home video (released in 1983). Despite the quality of the actual story itself, that’s the one the BBC plumped for.
It’s also notable for nearly killing one of its stars, Elisabeth Sladen.
Again on location, this time at Wookey Hole caves in Somerset, the production team would stumble into life-threatening situations just months after the obstacles of ‘The Sontaran Experiment’.
The problems began even before the shoot took place.
Director Michael E Briant was left by the cave’s management to wander around Wookey Hole so that he could he plan filming on the four-part story. This was after the day’s tourists had enjoyed their underground fun, from around 6pm until 10pm.
Briant was told that after he had come in, the entrance would be locked and he would be the only inhabitant in the mighty cave system.
A few hours into his recce and the director heard someone coming down from the locked entrance – it was a young man wearing a wetsuit and helmet with a light on it, carrying an air tank. According to Briant, the man went to a deep pond which leads to an underground water system.
After he left, Briant commented to the caves’ manager about the person that had come in, to which he was told no one had been in. The director described the man with the sub aqua suit to the manager and discovered that four months previously, a young diver went exploring in the caves and drowned.
“Other people seemed to have seen him there. He doesn’t like being disturbed,” an incredulous Briant was told.
When the cast and crew arrived, Tom Baker recalls the atmosphere as “spooky” whilst production designer Roger Murray-Leach remembers “lots of negative feeling” with skeletons and bones being found there and lots of rumours about what the caves were used for (real answer: cheesemaking). All this before a single scene had been filmed.
Visitors to Wookey Hole will be familiar with the infamous witch, a stalagmite that is said to be a witch transformed to stone. For a joke, electricians on the shoot of ‘Revenge of the Cybermen’ put a drape around the “witch”, put a hat on it and stuck a broomstick beside it. Cave lols.
90 mins later: an electrician fell off a rock for no apparent reason and broke his leg.
Two hours later and a much more serious incident took place.
In one scene, Elisabeth Sladen’s character, Sarah Jane Smith, was required to drive a boat from one side of a lake to the other. No problem, you might think.
But when Sladen got into the boat it reportedly spun completely out of control and shot off of at some speed. Director Briant recalled: “She couldn’t stop it, she couldn’t do anything with it all,” whilst Murray-Leach commented: “She was dragged towards a sloping roof that was going to crush her head and then drag her down into one of the deep wells.”
The fall to these deep wells was hundreds and hundreds of feet, a fall that would have undoubtedly resulted in the actress’ death.
Whilst watching the story with Tom Baker and Phillip Hinchcliffe on a special feature included in the Doctor Who Season 12 box set, Sladen’s daughter Sadie Miller said: “She saw this big black hole thinking, ‘This isn’t where I’m supposed to be going, it doesn’t look good!’
She was very afraid of water anyway. I don’t think she liked being in the boat, even.”
Sladen wisely threw herself into the water before she was injured and Baker’s stand-in helped out. Baker recalls: “Terry Walsh, who absolutely adored Elisabeth, he was watching, and as soon as Lis went over he jumped in and saved her life. Nobody could have stopped her if she’d gone down there.”
Terry, for his troubles, ended up “thoroughly ill” in hospital.
Michael E Briant sums up their experience: “There was certainly some sort of happening while we were there and nobody was disrespectful after that.”
In the end, despite their production troubles, Tom Baker’s first season was a remarkable success with viewing figures through the roof, a growing, fervent fan base, and a collection of stories still revered to this day as classics.
Doctor Who: The Collection – Season 12 is available to buy now.
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