The final decade of Doctor Who’s original run saw an evolution in the construction and application of sets. Along the way, some of the rules of television production design were rewritten…

Feature by ALAN BARNES

Hey! Wow! Griff Rhys Jones and various scaff oldlounging youths in a Not the Nine o’Clock News spoof from 1982.

Boy George and Culture Club make their debut on the Top of the Pops scaff olding, performing Do You Really Want to Hurt Me? on the Thursday 23 September 1982 edition.

Warriors’ Gate cast members Kenneth Cope (Packard), David Kincaid (Lane), Harry Waters (Royce) and Freddie Earlle (Aldo) rehearse amid the exposed infrastructure of the privateer.

Exposed metal scaff olding was everywhere on television in the early 1980s. See, for instance, the raised tubing that the bored teenage audience of the unfondly remembered youth show Hey! Wow! used to lounge over… until the notorious edition in which the kids’ fidgety indiscipline caused the programme’s stripey jumper-wearing presenter to have a meltdown, and order “everybody off the scaff olding. Come on! Everybody off the scaff olding. There’s always someone who has to spoil it for everybody else, isn’t there?”

Admittedly, that ‘presenter’ was the comedian Griff Rhys Jones, in a parody of over-earnest young people’s programming seen in the final episode of the BBC2 sketch show Not the Nine o’Clock News (broadcast Friday 12 March 1982). It proves the point, though, that by 1982 such structures had become a ubiquitous feature of wannabe trendy, self-consciously edgy programming - most obviously in the studio sets for BBC1’s Thursday night chart music show Top of the Pops. Doctor Who invested heavily in exposed metal scaff olding throughout this period, too - as seen, for example, in Graeme Story’s split-level bridge set for the slavers’ privateer in Warriors’ Gate (1981).