The Doctor, Romana and K9 travel to another universe where nothing is quite what it seems…

Feature by ALAN BARNES

Exploring the hidden depths of Doctor Who’s greatest stories…

The Doctor (Tom Baker) and K9 watch…

… as Marshmen emerge from the river.

Kate Bush’s video for Breathing was, like Full Circle (1980), partly recorded on location in Black Park in Buckinghamshire.

At the beginning of the 1980s, Buckinghamshire’s Black Park had long been a familiar sight to cinemagoers of a ghoulish bent, having provided the backdrop for ghastly goingson in numerous Hammer horror films – among them The Curse of the Werewolf (1961), Dracula Prince of Darkness (1966) and Vampire Circus (1972, featuring Lalla Ward).

In 1980, however, the park was visited by something as uncanny and strange as any Hammer monster: the singer-songwriter Kate Bush, seen wading – with members of her band, all in matching overalls – from the waters of its great lake in the apocalyptic video for her single Breathing (see www.katebush.com/video/breathing – beginning at 04m 23s). “We had scuba suits on underneath these overalls, it was February and it was freezing”, guitarist Brian Bath told Bush’s biographer Graeme Thomson.

Five months later, Full Circle’s Marshmen – played by actors wearing cunningly concealed wetsuits, too – were filmed emerging from the very same lake for a cliffhanger every bit the equal of the Dalek rising out of the Thames in The Dalek Invasion of Earth: World’s End (1964) or the eponymous amphibians staggering out of the surf in the third episode of The Sea Devils (1972). It’s not known whether or not director Peter Grimwade, or any of his team, had taken note of the Breathing video (shown on the 1 May edition of Top of the Pops) when the location was chosen… but it seems rather more plausible than the once-popular but long-since-debunked fan theory that Kate B herself wrote the next season’s Kinda under a pseudonym.

Where else have I seen…?

James Bree (Nefred) had been the Security Chief in The War Games (1969); he’d go on to play the Keeper of the Matrix in The Trial of a Time Lord (1986). Significantly, though, he’d appeared as broker’s man Bill in Full Circle producer John Nathan-Turner’s one-nightonly Drury Lane presentation of Cinderella in 1973, and as Mr Plenderleith in All Creatures Great and Small: Out of Practice (1978), an episode unit-managed by Nathan-Turner.

Alan Rowe (Garif) had also featured in Doctor Who before: as both Dr Evans and the Voice from Space Control in The Moonbase (1967), as Edward of Wessex in The Time Warrior (1973-74), and finally as Skinsale in Horror of Fang Rock (1977) – a serial that both Nathan-Turner and Full Circle director Peter Grimwade had worked on, as unit manager and production assistant respectively.

Richard Willis (Varsh) had played Guy Brassington in the first series of the cement-family saga Flesh and Blood (1980), another show unit-managed by Nathan- Turner. He later married June Page (Keara) and, later still, Kate O’Mara (the Rani in The Mark of the Rani/Time and the Rani/ Dimensions in Time, 1985/87/93).

Matthew Waterhouse as Adric, a young mathematical genius.

Full Circle is memorable, too, for introducing a new companion, Adric – publicised as a “cosmic Artful Dodger” but so much more than that. In Part Four, the Doctor scolds Adric for stealing the image translator from a scientist’s microscope – but, noted the authors of the academic study Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text (Macmillan, 1983), “the Doctor himself had started his career as a time traveller by stealing the Tardis [sic].” The original intention, they claimed, was to present a “careful repetition” of the Doctor’s own backstory in Adric’s, whose “desire was to escape from a world… as riddled with bureaucratic procedure as the Doctor’s own rejected world of Gallifrey.”

Which explains why, in the Adric character document prepared by producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Christopher H Bidmead on 30 January 1980, the boy hailed from “a planet we’ll call YERFILLAG” – ie, ‘Gallifrey’ backwards. Hence the on-screen suggestion that Adric’s planet occupies the same space-time co-ordinates as Gallifrey, albeit in the ‘negative’ universe of E-Space. Hence, also, why Adric’s name anagrammatised the surname of quantum physicist Paul Dirac (1902-84), whose work underpins modern theories of antimatter.

In Full Circle, Adric is something fascinating: a young-alt Doctor. The pity is that the idea wasn’t followed through in subsequent stories. But then again: when the Doctor eventually took Adric into N-Space, perhaps he did something terrible – and deprived E-Space of Adric, his parallel universe self…?

Essential INFO

Matthew Waterhouse with Andrew Smith, the writer of Full Circle, on the laboratory set.

The first in a trilogy of serials set in the universe of E-Space began life as The Planet That Slept, the latest in a number of storylines that several Doctor Who script editors had received, with interest, from teenage fan Andrew Smith. Newly arrived Christopher H Bidmead was sufficiently impressed to commission a first episode script on 25 February 1980, then a further three episodes on 31 March.

Smith was required to introduce new companion Adric (whose second adventure, State of Decay, would be recorded first, in May), incorporating elements previously outlined by Bidmead and producer John Nathan-Turner: “ADRIC is fifteen, small for his age, wirey [sic] and strong, with short straight black hair. His dominating elder brother, AFRUS, is the leader of a juvenile street gang…” Under Afrus’ tuition, Adric had learned to lie and steal… and he’d stow away in the TARDIS after his brother sacrificed himself to save the Doctor and companion Romana.

Under the eye of new director Peter Grimwade, previously a production assistant on six 1970s serials, location scenes were filmed at Black Park between 23 and 25 July. Episodes of the BBC’s Blake’s 7 and the Gerry Andersonproduced Space: 1999 had been part-filmed there, too – among the latter, by strange coincidence, a story called The Full Circle (1975). The same location would later feature in both The Visitation (1982) and the ‘creation of’ drama An Adventure in Space and Time (2013).

Studio recordings were divided into two blocks – broadly, TARDIS, Starliner lower deck section and cave scenes in the first, between 7 and 8 August; then everything else (including a remount of two cave scenes) between 21 and 23 August.

Full Circle, as the serial was retitled, ranked 143rd (out of 241) in DWM’s ‘First 50 Years’ poll of 2014.

Director Peter Grimwade; the Space: 1999 episode The Full Circle was also filmed at Black Park.