The Return of the Daleks had been such a success that I thought it might be a good idea to look around and see if we could bring back other favourite monsters of the past.
And the obvious candidate was the Cyberman.
When I joined the programme, this first season had been plotted in advance, really, by Bob and Barry.
Because there was going to be a new Doctor, they didn't know who the new Doctor was going to be, I think they played for safety and said, "Let's bring back some old favourites.
" I don't think the Cyberman had appeared at all in Jon Pertwee's era, but they were very popular monsters with the children.
They had been very successful in several series, several Cybermen stories in black and white.
But this was the first one in this new era of colour.
It was Barry who had commissioned the scripts.
It was Barry that had set the whole thing up.
And I think Philip at this stage was just easing his way into the production.
He was very keen, very eager, he had a lot of experience.
Not as a producer, not on that side, but on the writing side as a script editor for Granada, I think it was.
It was just the producing that he didn't know about.
So, he trailed me for some weeks.
I was really getting to grips with the whole apparatus of how do you work the BBC system.
You know, to actually produce a series for six months of the year.
And then when he took over, I stayed around and I trailed him in effect.
I sat behind and watched what he was doing.
He scored my card on the personnel, you know, who were the directors, who were the production people that really were reliable and good.
You know, we went around as a twosome while Bob was sort of beavering away in the backroom trying to get the scripts in.
If he didn't know something, he'd quietly ask me or if I noticed that he was running himself into trouble I'd have a quiet word with him.
It was never very obvious, you know.
Barry's role was very important to me and to how successful I became on the show.
I don't know much about Gerry Davis, but I guess he must've been a stalwart, you know, perhaps in the pre-Barry era which Bob probably still had links with.
He was obviously a prime candidate because he had written Cybermen stories when they were first on the screen in the black and white days.
And he'd been the script editor of Doctor Who and a very good one, too.
Here was I, inheriting a set of stories that I hadn't commissioned.
Grateful in one respect that that work had been done, but obviously I was concerned about how it was all going to turn out.
There was an approach in the script that worried me more than anything.
And I guess it was that Gerry Davis obviously was writing for the show, you know, quite a few years before when probably it was pitched, a little bit more as a children's show.
I don't think there was anything fundamentally wrong with the basic plot.
It was a jolly good story premise.
It could be a story premise they could do today in a Doctor Who, but it would be handled differently.
I think, as we said at the time to the writer, he hadn't sort of developed it enough with enough sub-plots and perhaps hadn't parcelled out the action in the right balance between Sarah, and the Doctor, and the new companion.
In the end, these sorts of things, the Doctor's got to be the man who solves it all at the end in episode four.
I don't think in the early drafts, he was doing that.
All the scripts were sitting on my desk when I walked into the office, the completed scripts.
I felt the scripts needed even more work and I gather, quite a lot of work had gone into it.
Bob and I sat back.
I thought, "My, God.
He's right about that.
Yeah.
"Yeah, well, you know, we really must do something.
" The mining sub-plot must've been there somewhere, but there was obviously this idea of, "Let's open that up a bit more, " which I think was a good idea.
In the later episodes, three and four, I felt the Doctor wasn't in enough jeopardy, there wasn't enough thr*at.
If you like, the script didn't up the ante enough, you know.
So, I remember, I think coming up with the idea of, "Well, if there's gonna be bombs and things like that, you know, "why don't we have them strapped to the Doctor?
" You know, sort of, he's gonna get blown up.
Careful, careful.
I might explode.
We more or less nodded the script through.
I mean, to then go back to Gerry Davis and say, "Oh, right.
We now want you to write a complete extra section.
" It wouldn't have been fair.
So Bob went off and did the work.
But I think he was very pressured for time.
One of the most expensive items in any show is the scenery.
Enormously expensive.
Now The Sontaran Experiment was all on location.
It's quite unusual.
They thought, "Well, we'll do this new all location show, "but that's gonna use up quite a lot of our filming allocations.
"So, what we've got to do is a couple of studio based shows.
" BRIANT: Barry very cleverly said, "We'll pull the Cyberman story forward "in terms of recording from its place as number four or five in transmission.
"We'll record it early, so we can keep the Ark In Space set "to use in the Cybermen story.
" HINCHCLIFFE: They thought, "Well, we'll build one big set.
"It's a studio based show but it'll be a hell of a set.
"But we'll amortize the cost over two stories, so" That again was a strategic decision taken by Bob and Barry.
Three or four months before I picked up these Cybermen scripts to direct, I'd taken my family to Wookey Hole, which is run by Madame Tussauds.
We'd gone around and done the tour and everything else.
And when I picked up these scripts and was going, "Where on earth are we gonna do the planet Voga?
" And you just went, "Well, of course, here are real caves.
"We can go into real caves.
" I think they're probably one of the best real caves in the country.
I mean, they're very extensive.
So I went, "Wookey Hole.
That's where to go.
" I don't know whether I managed to argue the case for some more filming days.
But we did come up with a bit more filming than we originally had expected on that show.
One of the things directors do when they're planning a film sh**t is that they go to the location and write down their planning.
And particularly on a low budget production like a Doctor Who, where you've gotta do things You can only afford to light one area at a time.
And I went to the manager and said, "I need to spend three or four hours "in the caves just doing my planning.
Can I do it during the afternoon?
" He said, "Would you mind doing it in the evening after we close?
" I said, "Well, yeah.
Yeah.
" He said, "6:00, you can come in and you can stay there till 10:00 or 11:00.
"And I'll leave some lights on.
I'm going to lock you in there.
"But when you come to the backdoor, "there's a bell on the backdoor so you'll be able to get out.
"But, we'll lock the place up totally, make it secure "and you'll be absolutely fine in there.
" So, 6.
00 in the evening, the last of the tourists went around.
And I went down into the main cavern and wandered around doing my planning.
And after a couple of hours I heard somebody walking down from the locked entrance, the secure locked entrance, coming down that way.
And a guy came down with a wetsuit carrying an air t*nk.
And a helmet with a light on it.
And he walked on around and went around to a cave where there is a very deep pond.
There is a very deep lake that leads to the underground water systems of the caves.
I left.
Walked up to the back entrance.
Rang the bell.
And the manager came and let me out.
And he said, "How'd it get on?
" I said, "Fine.
" "You let somebody in?
Somebody walked in.
" And he said, "What do you mean somebody walked in?
" And he said, "No.
Nobody's been in.
That's secure.
It's locked.
"I can see it.
It's locked.
It's not open.
" He said, "What was he like?
" I said, "Well, he was wearing a Sub-Aqua suit.
"He had a helmet and he was carrying an air t*nk.
" And he said, "No, no.
" He said, "Four months ago, "a diver exploring one of our wells, d*ed.
"Drowned in there.
A young guy.
"And there have Other people seem to have seen him there.
"He doesn't like being disturbed.
" And I went, "Oh, fine.
Yeah, come on, you know.
" Okay.
So, we start filming three weeks later, and there is a witch at one of the entrances to Wookey Hole.
And she's described by the tour guides as a witch.
It's a marvellous stalagmite, standing up.
Really huge and it does have, sort of, physical characteristics and it looks great and it's overlooking this pond where I was going to have the Vogans running about in their little motorboats.
We're filming away, and the electricians, for a joke, put a black drape around the Witch, stalagmite, to make it look like that, and they stick a broomstick thing in her hand and they put a little hat on her and everybody has a jolly good laugh.
One and a half hours later, the second electrician falls off a rock for no apparent reason and breaks his leg and is taken to hospital.
Two hours later after that, Liz, who is meant to drive this little boat from just one side of the lake to the other gets in the little boat.
It goes totally out of control.
She can't stop it.
She can't do anything with it at all.
And it drives her towards a very sloping roof where it is going to crunch her head, and then drag her down underneath into the thing Underneath into one of the deep wells.
She wisely, just as she's approaching the roof, throws herself off it into the water.
And Terry, the stunt man, dives in and rescues her.
And Terry, then ends up in a hospital being thoroughly ill.
Now, probably this has nothing to do with dressing the witch up, has nothing to do with somebody who d*ed in it earlier, but there certainly was some sort of happening while we were there in Wookey Hole.
And nobody was disrespectful to any stalagmite witches after that.
The cameraman I had, Elmer Cossey, is an absolutely brilliant cameraman.
And I was very concerned because some of the cave systems are very, very extensive and just go off into blackness.
And Elmer is a brilliant lighting cameraman.
He would give depths to it and everything else.
It is tradition to cast very tall men to be in the costumes and then the helmet is somewhat The head is somewhat taller than the guy.
And the caves in many areas are somewhat lower.
And at one stage, I thought I was going to be faced with the agony of having my Cybermen on all fours crawling head down through the caves.
There are some heavily disguised constructed sh*ts in there for enabling the Cybermen to move around.
I was pleased to be doing a Cybermen story.
I just felt, you've got the same problem a little bit with Cybermen as you had with Sea Devils, for example, that you've only got three or four of them.
And they're meant to be taking over the universe.
That's a fundamental problem with costumes or designs which are too expensive that you can't have 20.
Which is what you really need.
Which, today, you can have 20 or 200.
You know, in the new series, you see these armies of Cybermen coming at you.
CGI and the doubling up of the numbers, you know it would have been nice for those writers, who conceived Cybermen, who were ahead of their time.
It was a wonderful notion of a cyborg kind of creature.
Very good sci-fi, sort of, concept.
For them to have actually seen how well it could be realised when you finally had all the technology to do it, would've been terrific, I think.
Quite early on, the costume designer gave me a bell, and Barry and Philip, I imagine, as well, and we all went up to costume department to look at the Cybermen suits to see whether they needed any alterations or what needed to happen.
And we walked in and were presented with these over-sized scuba costumes with kitchen utensils tied to them.
Back in the days of black and white, looked fine, and you could get away with it.
But, there was just no question of using them.
We would've been a true laughing stock had we used them.
So, unfortunately for Barry, who hadn't budgeted for new Cybermen, we just had to redesign them and just get back to the drawing board and make new Cybermen costumes.
I wanted each life-form to have its own set of weapons.
So, the guys in the space station were carrying Uzis, supplied to them by the Israeli armed forces.
The guys down in Wookey Hole, the Vogans were carrying flare g*ns, Very pistols or rocket launchers.
And I also said about the Cybermen, "What we're dealing with here are actually soldiers.
"But they're not human beings, so why would it not be built into them?
" And so the logical thing was to build it into their heads.
These, sort of, flashing ray-g*n type things on their helmet.
All that was rather unconvincing, I thought.
They just seemed like actors in rubber suits to me.
But they were obviously very, very popular like the Daleks.
There was something about their design and their kind of robotic quality that put the fear of God in little children.
And they were quite iconic, I suppose.
All resistance overcome.
The beacon is ours.
I wanted the Cybermen to have personalities, and I think for the first time, we had the one black Cyberman who was played by Christopher Robbie, the lead Cyberman.
So you could actually identify him.
Yes, leader.
BRIANT: I mean, Cyberland is a vast planet compared to Earth.
And there are some amazing accents from all over Cyberland.
Cyber bombs, the most compact and powerful expl*sive devices ever invented.
You get Cybermen from deep south, you can even get Cybermen from high north.
And they all speak little bit differently.
But that's the way it is in Cyberland.
That mention of Cybermen fills me with dread.
The Vogans were quite difficult to realise.
There was a vogue at that time for having half masks.
Somebody said to me, "We should try using half masks," 'cause you then retain the actors' It's the lips, with any masks that you create for a thing.
It's the mouth that doesn't work, and the eyes that doesn't work as well.
They all look the same and you didn't know who was who, so, you know, Michael had to sort of stick on moustaches and beards and God knows what so we understood who was who.
We have, perhaps, four hours to complete the Sky Striker.
-That's impossible.
-Four hours, Magrik! Or all our dreams are ended.
I based the concept of the Vogans on sort of Shakespearean-Roman empires.
I quite like the idea.
I don't know if you noticed, but they carry sort of batons and things.
I felt that the way they looked, the way they sounded, that whole element in the show was not working.
They were over-written.
They had sort of slightly bombastic style of talking.
If you refuse to answer you'll suffer.
And then I'll ask you again and then you will answer.
Do you understand?
The actors only made that worse in my view.
Not their fault, but, you know, this Shakespearean booming sort of acting.
Stand back from the f*ring button, Vorus.
There is as Magrik says another seven minutes.
I always like to surround myself with a majority of actors that I've worked with before and know and love and understand.
And they understand me and we have some sort of rapport.
So, because of the Vogan masks I felt I could do that with Kevin Stoney and with David Collings.
The b*mb head is being fitted now.
Too late, the Cybermen have already landed.
-What?
Have you betrayed -Oh, I tried to warn you! Once they're on the beacon I couldn't delay them any further.
Jeremy Wilkin did all that sort of evil stuff very, very well indeed and didn't have to work at it, of course.
You need to have the shades of personality that you're looking for self-evident.
And I was really pleased with all three of the Nerva crew.
The three of them made some slightly iffy stuff, iffy dialogue, work very well indeed.
I'm just following the orders I was given by Earth Centre.
KELLMAN: Operating the beacon to the last man.
If necessary, yes.
You're a civilian, Kellman, you wouldn't understand.
That is the skill of an actor to make slightly dodgy dialogue sound like it could be real, sound like it's real people talking.
-What are you going to do?
-Get back, he's got the plague.
This is the only way to deal with it.
-The man's sick, he needs treatment.
-There is no treatment.
All we can try to do is stop the infection spreading.
Sorry, gentlemen, I can't allow it.
It was a funny period while we were recording these shows and we could see Tom developing as the Doctor, but nobody else had seen him, the public hadn't seen him.
I don't know.
I can't find Doctor Who anywhere.
Anywhere at all.
-Who are you looking for?
-Doctor Who.
Have you seen him?
There was a general feeling amongst the production team that, you know, he was really going to be very, very good.
I didn't anticipate how popular he was going to become.
And almost from the very day that the first episode went out, Robot with Tom in it, there was this wonderful sort of public response of approbation for Tom.
It would have been impossible for Barry to foretell exactly how Tom will play the part or choose to play the part.
Bob and I looked very closely at what Tom was doing during the recording of the Robot story.
And we could see this sort of slightly quirky look.
You know, he brought a sort of comedic quality, but also something special and eccentric.
Basically, you know, he was a natural.
-Trusty death.
Out! Out! -Doctor! -What?
-Come on.
The brief to the writers was twofold.
One sort of, you know, "This is what this actor's like, "this is what his strengths are.
"Let's give him some comedic and witty lines.
"He can really handle that.
And he's a bit eccentric.
" So, that was, sort of, his personality.
And then his role, if you like, was, "He's younger, he can do all the action stuff, "so let's put him right at the heart of all that.
" MAN 1: Camera A, 75 take one.
MAN 2: Action.
BRIANT: One of the scenes we had to do quite early on was the scene where William Marlowe and Tom jump down on top of Cybermen, I think it is.
Now.
BRIANT: I choreographed it in the way I would've done for Jon Pertwee and I decided to do exactly the same things with Tom.
And I go, "Right, okay, Tom, so do this.
"You jump down, you hold him and backhand him there and all this.
" And Tom went, "No".
He went absolutely He said, "No, no, no.
I don't do that.
The Doctor doesn't do that.
" And, so, watch them turning in pair.
-Okay?
As they walk up.
-Yes.
And then, wait for my signals really, as they're coming up, Tom.
-"Well, there they are.
" -Yeah.
So, as always happens we ended up with a compromise.
Mike Briant was a Production Manager who had done the director's course, or producer-director's course at the BBC.
You had to have a director who really could deliver the goods within a very short timeframe in the studio.
I did acquire it, I was never quite sure it was justified.
I acquired a reputation for being an action director.
Some directors just didn't want to go anywhere near Doctor Who.
It was too difficult basically.
So, there was only a handful of guys that you could use that were up to the job really.
Michael was one of them, he was enthusiastic.
He was quite determined.
In other words, you know, when he had his ideas and his views and he wanted to push them through as best he could.
He was extremely talented, I think, in A, getting a show through the studio on time.
And B, with the sort of exploiting what technical tricks there were available, mainly, CSO or overlay.
And he was one of the directors who really grabbed that tool.
The technical part of it was just fun.
I mean, for goodness sake.
I mean, if you're let loose with millions of pounds' worth of equipment and the opportunity, you'd go and talk to people and say, "How do I do this?
How do I make that happen?
" And they'd go, "You do that, that, and that.
" He was always was full of ideas and each time came up with something new.
Something which added to the script.
And all these little screens that you've got in this show, all that sort of gadgetry and techno-wizardry on the spaceship.
Not only was he able to do it, but he was able to get it together and control it and deliver it within the same sort of recording time as other directors, so that was a huge strength.
He probably was more of a technical director than an actor's director.
I don't know quite how much direction he gave, you know, on performance.
I always thought the trick was to cast the best possible actors you could.
The most intelligent actors, the brightest actors.
And let them bring things to it.
No good.
BRIANT: Dudley Simpson did such a brilliant job on Doctor Who.
I mean, he was just the resident composer.
But there is a time when you mustn't have the same person doing it week after week after week.
They get stale, they tend to repeat themselves.
It's not that Dudley was doing any of those things, but we wanted to forestall that happening.
We invited Carey Blyton.
HINCHCLIFFE: I just don't think he really understood how to score action.
I really got my knickers in the twist over the post production of this show because I felt that the Vogans, they all look bald and stupid.
You know, sort of, Mickey Mouse running around.
So, I thought, "God, this is not working at all.
" Normally in that situation, Dudley Simpson gets you out of the hole because you say to Dudley, "This bit's not working.
"Really, you've got to do something here.
You know, can you do this?
" So, Dudley often would change the mood of something and get you out of a hole if something wasn't working.
This music compounded the sort of Mickey Mouse quality.
It added to the problem rather than solving it.
So, I was pretty brutal really.
But Carey was a good sport and went along with it.
So, when we were doing a recording in combination with Radiophonics, I actually more or less got him to make music up there and then, deviating from what he had written.
It was almost like he had a crash course in, well, how do you score, you know, menace and suspense and action.
It just wasn't his natural forte.
(WHOOSHING) I think I'll just set the drift compensators.
We don't want it slipping through our fingers.
Watching the show 30-odd years later, the Story Department didn't quite get it right.
It was a show that was not quite absolutely in the state it should have been.
And so, the story was a bit uneven, and in places the production was uneven.
I think the Cybermen were difficult as horror figures to portray effectively.
I don't think I brought anything new to the way the Cybermen were.
And I don't think I made them special or different.
So I feel I failed in that area.
Looking at it again, I was really quite surprised by the technical presentation of the effects, like the plague effect, and all the small screens, all the consoles, all that sort of stuff.
All achieved within a studio.
I thought that held up really well, actually.