Robot was the first show of a new season.
But it was far more than that because it was the first show that Tom Baker, who was taking over as the Doctor And indeed with the new season, Philip Hinchcliffe was going to take over as producer.
PHILIP HINCHCLIFFE: I was working in ATVas a script editor and I'd become an associate producer.
Barry was moving on and also, unbeknown to me, nobody wanted to take on the poisoned chalice of this programme, because within the BBC they all knew it was a hot potato.
Philip was, you know I can't remember how old he was, but he was relatively young at that stage, and was brought in to try and give a new angle, a more youthful approach.
I then followed Barry around like a dog basically.
And he was fantastic.
I mean, he was great.
I stayed for another couple of months, or maybe even longer than that, sort of trailing behind Philip so that if he ever had any questions or anything like that about the show, I could tell him.
Both he and Terrance were terrific.
I think they were concerned that their baby was passing over into somebody else's hands.
So, obviously, they wanted to make sure that I kind of got it, as it were.
I was about to go back into the freelance world after a long period of salaried employment.
You know, a regular paycheck from the BBC.
My first thought was to fix myself up with a job in order to give me a start into the self-employed state again, you see.
He invented what I didn't know it was invented at the time.
He said, ''You do know it's a tradition that when a script editor ''leaves a series, he always writes a show ''for the new series that's coming up.
'' I said, ''Oh, is that right?
'' They clearly put their stamp on the show, and it was very clear what they were doing, where they were coming from and the rationale behind it.
All stacked up, if you know what I mean.
So I kind of picked up on that quite quickly.
And then I picked up on this slightly anarchic voice in the corner, you know, smoking his pipe, which was Bob Holmes, who was sort of coming from a slightly different perspective on it.
We did a series of serials, which is fairly unique in television.
And getting in five or six good serials, all good enough, all slightly different, all with new and interesting things in, in a show that's got a good reputation that you've got to live up to and don't want people saying it's started to go downhill again, is pretty grinding.
I think for quite a while I was not sorry to be rid of it and to pass it over to Bob.
I think it was in good hands with Bob.
HINCHCLIFFE: He was not an obsessive rewriter, Bob, at all.
He was a man who only felt he had to really get stuck in and restructure something and rewrite something if it had to really be brought up to scratch to be made to work.
DICKS: He said, ''You know, Terrance, people make a lot of fuss ''about the script editing, ''but I don't see that it's going to be so difficult.
'' He said, ''I know a lot of writers.
I'll get a few blokes in, ''we'll get some scripts.
It'll be all right, you know.
'' And I said, ''Good luck, Bob.
'' As I left him to it, you see.
And a few months later he would say, ''Oh, God, this is impossible! You know what's happened now?
''This has collapsed.
This isn't working.
These writers are useless.
'' So he got dropped into the same sort of maelstrom that I'd been.
I think it was in Time Warrior, even when we were filming, that Jon told me he was going to be leaving as the Doctor.
LETTS: Roger Delgado had been k*lled, Jo Grant had been replaced by Sarah Jane Smith.
And though he got on very well with Sarah, it was a change.
We weren't doing nearly so many UNIT stories, so the team of the Brigadier and the UNIT and Jon was breaking up, and so on and so on.
And, in addition, he said, ''I'm a bit worried.
I've been doing it for five years ''and people have stopped asking me to do other jobs.
'' He said, ''I'm afraid that when I do leave, I won't get offered any work.
'' And I think he felt his time had come when he would like to go, too.
He needed his team around him to support him.
He very much got to know people, and I don't think he really felt, at his age, he wanted everything to be new, and, of course, Barry was leaving.
So I let it be known, in the profession, with the agents and actors in general, that we were looking for a new Doctor.
And made my requirements very specific, which were that he should be a good actor to start with.
But more than that, he'd got to have a certain charisma, a certain thing that made you want to watch him, even if what was going on on the screen wasn't particularly interesting.
Or whatever, it didn't really matter, but something that was different from the ordinary run of humanity.
He would have made a very good Doctor, Graham Crowden.
He was in The Horns of Nimon, playing the chief villain.
It was a computer malfunction, sir! Your story alters by the second.
You endangered the tribute to the Nimon.
It was a computer malfunction, sir! -You know the penalty.
-No, sir.
I knew him as a very good actor, and he's proved it over and over again ever since.
And I had said to him, ''Well, I do think you should commit yourself ''to at least three years.
'' And he said, ''Well, in that case, I don't want to be considered.
'' He said, ''Because I ''If a lovely part came up at the National after a year, ''I'd want to be off and away.
'' Another one that I tried was Michael Bentine.
He would have made a lovely Doctor.
And we got very near to the casting of him, in our minds, but he said that he could only do the job if he had a big hand in writing the scripts.
And I said, ''Well, I'm sorry, Michael, but you couldn't.
'' And he said, ''Why not?
'' I said, ''Well, A, we don't do it like that.
''We get lot of different writers and so on.
''But,'' I said, ''you wouldn't have the time.
'' I'd got in the back of my mind that Fulton Mackay would make a good Doctor.
And he would be my fail-safe, and I thought he would be very good, but he wasn't quite what I wanted.
And then Bill Slater, who was at that time what you might call the executive producer of Doctor Who because he was the head of the serials department in the drama group, said to me, when I was discussing the whole thing with him, ''Have you ever heard of Tom Baker?
'' And I said, ''No.
'' I was desperately unhappy and out of work and, I think, not all that well.
And I didn't know what to do, in spite of having in the past worked at the National Theatre, had a certain flirtation with American movies, done some other things here and there, Play of the Month at the BBC.
But it was a very bad patch.
And I happened to write to Bill Slater, who was the head of series and serials.
And he said, ''Well, Tom is a very good actor.
''He played the Egyptian doctor for me ''in The Millionairess by George Bernard Shaw ''when I was directing Play for Today, and he was brilliant.
'' I'm a plutocrat of the plutocrats.
Well, that is a disease for which I do not prescribe.
The only known cure is a revolution.
But the mortality rate is high, and sometimes if it's the wrong sort of revolution, it intensifies the disease.
I can do nothing for you.
I must go back to my work.
Good morning.
I think Bill had suggested Liz Sladen, and he also suggested Tom.
And, I think, you know, let's give credit where credit's due.
Bill Slater had a real flair.
And within five minutes, I thought, ''This man would be a brilliant Doctor, ''if he can act.
'' I can't really take Bill's word for it, though I trust Bill's judgement.
So I said to him, ''Look, Tom, I don't know whether you can act or not.
'' It so happened that The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, the great Ray Harryhausen film, was just out.
And so, Barry Actually, I met him yesterday.
He said, ''So I went to the office.
''I think I might have the new Doctor Who.
'' ''Come on,'' he said, ''we're all going to the pictures.
'' So they all piled in a cab, on the taxpayers' expense.
And within minutes of Tom appearing on the screen, I knew I'd got my Doctor.
And the next thing, he rang up and offered me the part.
It was incredible.
HINCHCLIFFE: I think it was a brilliant idea, because he's so eccentric.
Tom's sort of weird, and you need to have an actor who's slightly larger then life and a bit, you know, somebody with charisma.
I know I came to Oxford to see him play Oscar Wilde, which he was playing about that time in one of the There were a couple of plays going around on the subject.
And he was very striking.
And I saw his performance and was lifted by the idea that this man was going to play the Doctor.
I remember when I got the part, I was so happy.
And as I was leaving, there's always a snag in these situations.
He said, ''There's just one proviso.
'' And my blood ran cold.
He said, ''Can you just not tell anybody for a fortnight ''while we get the publicity organised?
'' And so naturally I said I could, but it's very hard.
Even after the The big opening splash, he went back to work on a building site.
And I went to work on Thursday morning till about 1 2:00, and then went home and got washed and put this suit on that I'd stolen from some rep or other.
And so I went off.
And his fellow workers had read the Daily Express and the Mail and The Star and all the rest of it that morning, and said, ''Tom, is that really you?
'' And he said, ''Oh, yes.
'' He's a quite extraordinary man, Tom.
He never reacts the way that you'd expect him to.
And, of course, I went to see the bank manager, when he found out I was in Doctor Who, it was incredible and he kissed me.
Rather passionately, I thought, for a bank manager.
And so I got some money out of the bank and had a little party for the men who'd been so kind to me.
DICKS: I was struck by this kind of wide-eyed, disarrayed, scatterbrained air about Tom.
I always used to say that if you said something to Tom like, ''Hello, it's a nice day.
'' He'd say, ''Is it?
''Is it?
Yes.
Yes, it is.
It's a wonderful day, isn't it?
'' You know, and he'd have this great eccentric enthusiasm.
He had that wonderful voice, which was one thing.
And then, when we started to meet and get to know, we found he had this extremely strong personality and great charm.
And then we started to discuss his character and how he was going to be dressed and everything.
You know, being a going-to-the-pub man, I wasn't a Doctor Who fan.
I'd seen Pat Troughton and always admired him.
I thought he was mischievous.
And so when I got the job, of course, I was taking over from someone who'd stamped very hard on it, but I didn't know about how hard he'd stamped on it because it meant not much to me.
So I thought, ''Well, I'll write him pretty wild and crazy, ''and if they don't like it, they can change it, calm him down, ''whatever, in subsequent serials.
'' And say, ''Well, yes, he used to be a bit of a loony.
'' In fact, I don't think he ever quite lost it.
Out of the discussions we had over a bottle of wine, I think it was only one, was, yes, he should be wild, he should be eccentric, he should be rather roughly dressed, rather then the controlled dandy that the Jon Pertwee Doctor was.
So I had to try and get a hold of it and do it my way.
But Barry Letts was very encouraging and And also, you see, it's not really an acting job.
When you play leading men in these kind of melodramas, it's not an acting job because, fundamentally, nothing is going to change.
You're going to win, you get the girl, or you b*at the villain, or you survive.
All these things are utterly predictable, so the trick is how, within all that predictability, can you be amusing or sudden.
Luckily, I think by the time I was seriously involved and doing the actual writing, I'd met Tom.
Not for long periods, but I'd met him in Barry's office when Barry was seeing him and seen him about, perhaps had a drink with him.
I was very sympathetic towards the character of Doctor Who, the character, the idea of a benevolent alien who wasn't quite right in Who didn't think he was out of sync with the way they thought on Earth, was, really, summed me up, really.
I mean, that's the way I am.
That's the way I was and that's the way I am.
So I never had to reach for it.
It was very easy for me to do.
I didn't always read the whole scripts, I read my bits, because I felt it would be prying otherwise.
Why should I know how it ends or what someone's doing behind closed doors?
That's why I was always able to hold the element of surprise.
I hope I'm revealing something about myself, because the part became my life because the character was me.
Just saying these lines that were written, but I was that character.
All my sympathies were with that character.
And most people went home at 5:30.
You know, they went home to their wives and children and came back the next day and they carried on making Doctor Who, whereas I never stopped being Doctor Who, so it was very exhausting.
Barry said, ''Look, he's your Doctor, really.
'' So he involved me in choosing what Tom was going to be wearing.
BAKER: That carelessness, that kind of, I hope, stylish carelessness goes down to Jim Acheson, who was subsequently an Oscar-winning designer.
We had time in those days to go and practise and put clothes on and arse around generally.
I loved Tom's costume as the Doctor from the minute I saw it.
I didn't know what he would be wearing.
And that tremendous bit of luck, the scarf.
The woman who knitted it was called Begonia Pope.
Don't know where he found her.
And he just sent this wool, and she used all the wool.
Absolutely every piece.
So it came back, and I don't know what the initial reaction was, but what a gift.
I was determined once we'd got it and made up one or two things in the story in order to utilise it.
You may remember where he used it to have something put on it and dragged it towards him.
Oh, I say! You haven't still got the bits, have you?
Maybe I could put it together again.
I'm really rather good at that sort of thing.
He had a great disregard for it.
I'm sure if I'd had a scarf as long as that It's like when a girl is not used to costume dressing and has a long You're always picking it up.
He actually just didn't bother with it.
If it got in his way, he got cross.
But I never wanted to tamper or discuss the character with other people.
I just felt, ''Leave it alone.
'' If the fans like it very much and the directors say, ''I like that,'' and Barry Letts was pleased I so admired Barry, he was so scrupulous, and yet trusted me enough to allow me to be idiotically mischievous.
One of the things all the Doctors have to do, you see, is go from being eccentric and strange to suddenly very serious and dramatic and convincing.
And they've all been good at it in their ways.
Patrick was very good at it, you see, he could go from being a complete clown and then dominate the scene.
So could Jon and so could Tom.
It was marvellous to then become, from a very, very depressed man in his late 30s who wondered if, perhaps, you know, anything was going to happen, to become a children's hero.
Which is, to me anyway, the very tops to be a children's hero to a whole generation, really.
Bob Holmes, who was taking over as script editor, who had been pretty much my chief writer on Doctor Who, said, ''I think I'd like a story about a robot.
'' So, that was what the whole thing started with, just the idea of a story about a robot.
I think Robot was definitely a King Kong story, just as I always thought that The Brain of Morbius was a Frankenstein story.
'Cause if you remember in King Kong, however badly the ape behaves, you're always on its side and sorry for it, you see.
And I wanted that effect with the robot, you know.
And, of course, I completely I mean, it's either a rip-off or an homage, depending how you look at it.
There's more to it than that, because all the way through, from the very first time that Sarah becomes aware of the robot, there's a relationship between them.
I think it's actually scientific nonsense that a machine does develop emotions like that.
But, of course, with something which is human-based in shape, you can very easily give that impression, you know.
The symbol of our movement, the creature whose intelligence and power make him a fitting emblem for our scientific new order.
(CROWD GASPING) That is the reveal also in the theatre that happens to King Kong.
He is revealed in a theatre.
And so it's a very close parallel, really.
We see the robot in his relationship with his creator.
His father, if you like, which has got a certain Oedipal tinge to it.
(WAILS) I have k*lled the one who created me.
All that stuff about the prime directive is a direct pinch from the Three Laws of Robotics.
Prime directive.
What is your prime directive?
I must serve humanity and never harm it.
Again, that's an homage or a rip-off, depending on how you look at it! Anybody who writes a robot story is kind of in debt to Asimov.
I think it grew naturally out of the story that scientists should be the main villain.
Miss Smith and Professor Kettlewell have just gone off to try to get into one of their meetings.
Kettlewell?
You let Sarah go off somewhere with Kettlewell?
But as I pointed out, he had noble motives.
He wanted to save the ecology, and so he was doing bad things for a good reason.
And he did have a change of heart.
Feminism was very much in the air at the time, and had been for some time, which is why we had made Sarah Jane Smith an independent journalist.
A rather feisty journalist rather than the Doctor's screaming assistant.
And it gave me that rather nice scene where Miss Winters and her assistant comes along, and Sarah goes up and greets the wrong one, and makes a sort of male chauvinist's assumption.
So that was just a bit of fun.
Hello.
You know, it's awfully good of you to allow this visit, Director.
I hadn't expected male chauvinist attitudes from you, Miss Smith.
I'm sorry?
I'm the Director, Hilda Winters.
Miss Winters' character is one of the earlier signs of feminism.
And it's very interesting that Miss Winters is shown in a very key position, and that I'm a little subservient creep.
-Get away from that keyboard.
-You won't sh**t, Brigadier.
Maybe he won't, but I will.
Move away! There was a sort of, you know, the female of the species is more deadly than the male kind of thing.
That was quite fun to do.
Yeah, it's really, really good because girls fight in a different way.
Chris Barry worked on The Daemons and that worked brilliantly, and on The Mutants and, in general, he was one of our good directors, and I was very pleased to ask him to do Robot.
GALLACCIO: Very, very energetic character.
Highly excitable.
I mean, he was fun to work with, Chris.
Incredibly demanding.
I'm not sure whether Chris had any sort of army background, but it had a feeling of barking out orders and expecting to be obeyed.
But very, I mean A wonderful mind, actually.
He was incredibly imaginative.
I mean, some of the ones he directed I thought were actually rather good.
You know the mood of the day is how Christopher walks in through the door that day.
He really could be a bit tetchy at times.
So, you know, you just But that's the way he works.
It's not personal.
BAKER: He put in scenes like the skipping scene.
Terrance hadn't written the costume changeover, Chris Barry devised that with Jim Acheson.
He directed me several times.
We got on well.
And he gave me my head as well.
I liked his energy and everything like that.
But, of course, he was treading in the dark as I was.
And he saw, I suppose, that it was okay.
What an odd coincidence at a time like this.
Director, this is Doctor Sullivan from the Ministry.
Ian was a very good actor.
I was very pleased to cast him in Carnival of Monsters as the first mate of the ship.
And later on, when we wanted somebody for Harry Sullivan, I thought of Ian and cast him.
I thought Ian had a sort of nice, clipped naval officer approach.
Slightly thick.
The character, I mean, not Ian.
LETTS: The thing was that when the story was being written first, we didn't know who was going to play the Doctor.
It could have been a very old man.
The idea was that we would have a companion who, when necessary, could be the tough guy and have a fight.
Then, of course, Tom came along and he could have coped with anything.
So Harry, as a character, was rather redundant.
But that really didn't matter because Ian Marter was such a good actor and such a good personality.
Ian was never grey.
Ian was either very up or very down, or very frustrated.
It was always a ''very'' before what Ian was.
Tom and Ian had a relationship.
They'd got to know each other.
I was very close to him, very fond of him.
How could you not be?
And, of course, utterly devoted to Elisabeth, who laughed at my jokes and was as keen on movies as I used to be.
So, I had a really lovely ease with Tom.
Not that that's in anyway to denigrate Jon or the way he worked.
But it was closer to my way of feeling more comfortable.
I adore Elisabeth.
And in her own discreet way, I suspect that she adores me, yeah.
I could be mistaken, though.
Aren't you forgetting that in science, as in morality, the end never justifies the means?
-What are we going to do with them?
-k*ll them of course.
-No, no -They're far too dangerous to us.
Couldn't we lock them up?
And have them escape?
It's too late to be squeamish, Professor.
By the time I started to do this particular part, I was no longer a juve, I'd lost my hair and I was being cast as quite a serious number of villains, actually.
And I was very pleased that I wasn't being shown as a goodie-goodie, but that I was being recognised as a snidey character.
Professor Kettlewell, how nice to see you again so soon.
LINSTEAD: I particularly enjoyed working with Patricia Maynard.
I thought she was totally charming.
BAKER: She read my hand once.
She read my palm, yes.
Simply terrifying.
She went absolutely as white as a sheet.
She never told me what she saw.
Miss Winters was a feminist, a fascist, incredibly powerful, quite cruel, in fact, very cruel.
Although she was such a horrid character, it was fun to play that.
It's good playing nasty people, 'cause you can get it out of your system.
So you can be all the things that you aren't normally in life or you wouldn't allow yourself to be.
This girl is an intruder and a spy.
She must not leave here alive.
Destroy her.
I just loved ranting.
That was one of the highlights for me, stomping up and down in my jackboots.
I mean, I actually had leather boots, a costume, leather gloves, horn-rimmed glasses, the full bit.
And it was wonderful to be able to let rip.
I mean, you really couldn't go over the top.
I mean, you couldn't go far enough with it.
You could just be as outrageous as you wanted.
It was great fun.
And as you know, my friends, tonight is a culmination of many years of work and planning.
A brilliant and audacious scheme is about to come to its climax.
It was tongue in cheek.
But it was great fun, and I loved doing it.
LINSTEAD: One very exciting thing was that Teddy Burnham was in the film.
It was nice to be able to talk to an actor that I really respected over the years, you know.
I think he's impeccable.
It's what Christopher Barry's very good at as well.
So much is in the casting.
He casts very, very well.
Ed Burnham.
I mean, you look at him when he came into rehearsal and that was Kettlewell.
He looked eccentric, he was eccentric, and was typecast, really.
I think he'll probably hate me for saying that, but anyway.
I liked Edward Burnham.
I don't know what I'd seen him in or whether I just saw his picture in Spotlight and thought he looked sufficiently eccentric.
I saw also that he was very small and I liked that about it.
I'm now devoting my life to alternative energy technologies.
Solar cells, heat from windmills, that sort of thing?
Yes, as you say, ''That sort of thing.
'' Of course, he was mad as a hatter, which I tried to indicate by the quantity of hair he had standing appropriately on end.
And I think when he came in to see me, he demonstrated his hair would come out like this.
''Look, I can look a mad professor.
'' He wasn't up to anything particularly nasty.
He was fascinated by what he was doing.
And I tried to indicate at one point in one scene that he had a real affection for the robot.
That it was, in a way, his child.
I've got him hidden, but he's very unstable.
I may not be able to control him.
We must keep him out of the hands of those Thinktank people, they've driven him almost insane.
Michael Kilgarriff was suitable to play the giant robot because of his height and his voice.
He was very well known to me as a radio actor because he had this wonderful voice.
Michael Kilgarriff, he was so funny, and sings and plays the piano, and there he was locked up in that bloody tin suit.
We got on very well indeed.
Yes, we went around together a bit.
I suppose the fascination of being the biggest and the smallest members of the troupe.
I'd done a lot of radio work, too, so they knew I could speak.
A lot of very tall actors can't necessarily speak.
They tend to be bruisers and ex-wrestlers.
I tried to speak, as I recall, quite flatly, without too much intonation, up and down.
Go! Go now or I will destroy you all! I did have my own mic for that.
And one was The poor, old robot, he did get quite emotional towards Liz Sladen.
Do not fear, Sarah.
You alone will be saved.
He wasn't evil.
He was really rather sad and pathetic.
MAYNARD: I mean, he is a big man, Michael, but it was huge.
If I'm perfectly honest, I suppose my first thought was, if I say the Tin Man, Wizard of Oz.
But having said that, on film it looked terrific.
LETTS: The robot itself was a magnificent piece of design.
Because the thing about design, especially designing a costume like that, is not only must it look good, but it's got to be operable, it's got to work.
It was definitely very uncomfortable for him, and very hot.
We were sh**ting in very hot sunshine up at Wood Norton.
No respite for him except between takes.
KILGARRIFF: It was very hot.
And, of course, you couldn't sit down in it.
And it took a long time to get it all together.
And weight, of course, too, it was a very heavy thing.
Made of aluminium, but still enormous.
I peered out through the throat, I think, or something like that, or the mouth, I can't recall exactly.
But it was enormous, and I couldn't see very well at all.
I could only really see straight ahead.
BARRY: This heavy metal outfit, like a suit of medieval amour only padded inside in places with foam rubber, which made it even more hot and sticky.
Poor man.
But he managed extraordinarily well to do what was wanted of him.
He could hear perfectly well in the suit, unless it was a very noisy battle scene or something, which there were.
He used his arms in quite an extraordinary number of ways, smashing a window and picking things up, and various other props which were essential to the action, including holding the disintegrator g*n at the end.
KILGARRIFF: And there were these huge segmented feet, which made it very difficult to walk, particularly on rough ground.
I seem to remember, more than once, falling over.
It was the foot that he would bump into something, or it just wouldn't clear the ground.
And if it didn't clear, he'd absolutely go over, flat.
I think there is a sh*t of me giving him a friendly push up the back to get him manoeuvred down an awkward slope somewhere.
KILGARRIFF: What happened then was, I tried to stand up get out of bed, and my legs collapsed.
My wife, of course, was very concerned and wanted to call the doctor.
I said, ''No, I think I'll recover.
'' And by lunch time, I was okay.
They made a little mock-up for the camera rehearsals, which was just laid across my shoulders with some aluminium foil on.
You know, so the lighting people could get that right.
That was a great help.
I had the same problem of making a robot grow to a giant size as I had on The Daemons with Azal, and I approached it in the same way.
LETTS: The way it's done is with what the BBC always called colour-separation overlay, and what the rest of the world has always called chroma key.
The blue signal is used to key in a background, which can be played in, which can be either from another part of the studio, like we had in Gulliver in Lilliput to make the Lilliputians tiny, or it can be a location sh*t, or something like that.
CSO was a double-edged w*apon, really.
It gave one scope to expand the effects that one could achieve, but it had its limitations.
It took time to line up and prepare and get ready and light.
One never had time really to perfect it and so one was compromising far too often in its use.
And we used to experiment with different background colours.
Blue was generally the approved colour, but yellow was sometimes used and green was sometimes used.
The first time we tried that was in Planet of the Spiders.
And it had been quite a success.
Though it did turn the silver Whomobile golden when it flew in the sky, because that was reflecting the yellow screen behind.
And in the same way, when we had the robot against the yellow screen, he was reflecting bits of the yellow in his legs, for example.
BARRY: So, at times, bits of his leg just completely disappeared, rather laughingly.
I was hoping people were looking at the top, looking up at his head going up where it wasn't so noticeable.
But it's no doubt that that was a great weakness and that caused a lot of laughter among critics of what we were trying to do.
When we did the show, which is written on my heart, the dinosaur show.
Having model dinosaurs which were put into location sh*ts using the blue screen technique.
Because the backgrounds were sh*t on 1 6mm film, and the dinosaurs were in the studio on video cameras, it was very obvious that it was a trick.
Round about this time, they introduced the small video cameras and so when Robot came up, I said, ''Right, this is our chance.
'' The robot, when he was standing there, he was rigidly fixed to the ground.
Otherwise he'd have been slightly floating up and down all the time and it wouldn't have worked.
We used a location at Wood Norton, which is a BBC location, which was the engineering training establishment where all the video cameramen and the sound men and the technical people behind the scenes learnt their job.
SLADEN: It used to be a manor house, obviously, from the look of it.
Very grand.
A lot of technical facilities were there available, so if the OB unit broke down, they could repair it.
It was way away from anybody watching, we didn't have to pay for it and it was a very good location for the story.
Barry's idea was that is was something like a sort of army.
You know, it had a sort of slightly m*llitary feel to it.
And at that time, Wood Norton had all these huts.
SLADEN: I had to climb over this wall.
So I did a lot of my looking around, as I normally do, to make sure it was safe, got over the wall.
Christopher said, ''Cut,'' and he walked very slowly over to me.
''Elisabeth,'' he said.
I don't think he knew how to take He must have thought he had this fool on board.
He said, ''That was really nice, ''but could you do it so your face is in camera ''and not the other end?
'' When I reviewed the show recently, and in particular that last episode, I thought it stood up surprisingly well.
It's amazing what we did achieve through sheer cheek.
The weak point is probably the Action Man t*nk, which lumbers on briefly and gets stomped on, but that's not on screen very long.
You can pass over that in a charitable frame of mind.
Sometimes good television doesn't depend on money, it depends on imagination, and good people directing, casting and doing the job with talented people.
And then you're forgiven a great deal, I think, if sometimes something doesn't look quite on the money.
I can't really be very objective about it, but I laughed, I laughed a lot.
And we were talking about how we might do it differently now, or sh**t it in a different way.
But, you know, we're talking about nearly a half a century We're talking about 35 years ago, or something.
Tom still loves to tell the story of his instant rise to fame.
I mean, he'd done so much work before, but at the time before Who, he was, as he says, working on a building site.
BAKER: Two Saturdays.
One Saturday I was out with Robot, and the next Saturday was the second part of Robot.
And when I went into the local ale house in Notting Hill Gate, I was a star.
It was absolutely incredible.
There was no privacy any more, but who cares about the privacy of being poor?
Who cared about that kind of privacy?
When I was poor, I didn't want just privacy, I wanted to be famous and make money and be sexy.
-Doctor, you're being childish.
-Well, of course I am.
There's no point in being grown-up if you can't be childish sometimes.
Are you coming?