FEATURE BY MARCUS HEARN
Many of the stories relating to the arduous location recording of The Sontaran Experiment (1975) have passed into Doctor Who legend, but relatively little has been said about the ruthlessly efficient robot that accompanies Field Major Styre (Kevin Lindsay) on his sadistic reconnaissance of a future Earth.
Bob Baker and Dave Martin’s original script for the story was entitled The Destructors and featured a robot that floated above its victims. In 2006, producer Philip Hinchcliffe explained why this would have been impossible. “Even if we’d wanted to do it with CSO we couldn’t have done, because we didn’t have a studio component for this story – it was all shot and finished on location. And we had no post-production, so it had to work.”