”Doctor Who was a bit of a challenge for anybody, but it was classed as a lovely thing to be asked to do,” remembered designer Tom Yardley-Jones, who came to the BBC by a roundabout route. “I studied architecture in North Wales, then later moved to London, designing restaurants, banqueting rooms etc, earning fantastic money, and then went to Canada for six months. I came back wanting to do something completely different. I was really interested in film - I wanted to be a cameraman. Then I happened to see the BBC advertising for holiday relief designers.” Initially, Tom was on a temporary six-month contract. “They kept renewing, and after a year and a half they gave me a Top of the Pops to do as my first show, which was really scary.
In 1975, Tom found himself assisting designer Nigel Curzon (see page 34) on Terror of the Zygons, directed by Douglas Camfield. One of his first tasks on arrival at the West Sussex location was to paint a sign for the Fox Inn, in the fictional Scots village of Tulloch. “I went down, measured up the sign, did it, then one of the cameramen said, ‘Douglas, shouldn’t it read Tulloch with an h? It’s been spelt with a k!’ I said, ‘I’m sure it said Tullock in the script!’ We frantically checked and it said Tulloch, so we tried to dirty it down and hide it. That was before all the hassles in the studio…”
Those hassles stuck in Tom’s mind, just as they did in Nigel Curzon’s - the set erected off its marks, and the Zygon costumes too broad for the door. “Because we’d designed the doorways narrowed at the top and widened at the bottom, they couldn’t get through! All you could hear was the voice of one of these monsters going, ‘Douglas, I can’t get through this door!’ The director went berserk: ‘Can’t we reshape the doors so that the shoulders go through?’ That was a mammoth job. At least as an assistant, I didn’t have the total responsibility that poor old Nigel did. There was a very nasty scene between the design department and the director. Anyway, in the end, they had to walk sideways through those doors, and we overran till 10.30pm. Nigel, poor soul, was given a bad memo from the director, blaming him, but it wasn’t really a design problem. It stank a bit, that show.