Feature by JONATHAN MORRIS
Tom Baker as the Doctor in The Creature from the Pit (1979).
It sounds like a Doctor Who director’s worst nightmare. It’s your first day in the studio and you have – very wisely – decided to get the time-consuming shots of the creature out of the way first. The lights are set and you cue the first run-through prior to recording. And then you watch on a monitor as the Doctor is confronted by something that can only be described as entirely inappropriate for Saturday teatime viewing. Interviewed for Doctor Who Magazine in 1991, Christopher Barry recalled that everyone in the studio gallery roared with laughter, with the producer, Graham Williams, saying very firmly: “We can’t have that.” But by this point there was nothing else to be done. In a memo to Head of Series and Serials Graeme MacDonald, Williams claimed that they’d had to abandon some planned action and reduce the screen-time of the creature to three shots, meaning that a “considerable part of the considerable cost of the operation ended up on the cutting room floor.”