19 MAY – 23 JUNE
THE GREEN DEATH
There’s trouble down the pit at Llanfairfach when some fellow turns up “bright green, apparently – and dead!”
By ALAN BARNES
Green Giants
The first generation to view The Green Death recalled it ever after as ‘the one with the maggots’ – in which the Doctor and Jo encountered giant grubs spawned by the “filthy by-products” of the chemical industry.
The legend is true: some of the monsters seen on screen were indeed inflated condoms – but only those shown in the ‘slag heap’ scenes in the later episodes. Most of the maggots in the earlier ‘coal mine’ sequences were real specimens wriggling in green gelatinous hand cleaner, overlaid with CSO shots of the Doctor and Jo. Others were practical puppets – some furnished with entirely un-maggoty weasels’ jaws, including the trio that menaced the pair at the end of the second episode. The former were viscerally revolting; the latter, actually terrifying.