Location shooting for Season 10 was complicated by the need to film the series on land, in the sea and from the air….

By JONATHAN HELM

Jon Pertwee (as the Doctor) and Bernard Horsfall (as Taron) on location for Planet of the Daleks. This filming took place at Beachfields Quarry on 2 and 3 January 1973.

Location filming for the Drashig world scenes in Carnival of Monsters took place at Tillingham Marshes on 30 May 1972.

F ilmingDoctor Who on location in the early 1970s was a complex and expensive business. More staff were needed than in the recording studio, and additional support services such as transport and catering had to be paid for.

Doctor Who’s budget could only stretch to approximately one day’s worth of filming per episode. Rather than spreading the filming allowance evenly across each episode, producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks allocated extra filming days to the serials they felt would benefit most from exterior location work. This meant that one story in each production block had to be recorded primarily in studio at Television Centre, with just one or two filming days, either on location or at the BBC’s film studio in Ealing.

Finding suitable filming locations was a joint effort; after an initial planning session with the director, the production assistant would travel to various potential locations over a period of several days. The assistant would take a series of photographs, which the director would then use to assess the suitability of each proposed location.

Producer Barry Letts also directed Carnival of Monsters and took a more hands-on approach to the location recces. The serial was allocated two days of filming at Tillingham Marshes in Essex for the swampland sequences featuring the Drashigs. “I remember going on a recce to find the place all by myself,” Letts told Doctor Who Magazine in 1985. “It was private land and the farmer who owned it told me I could find my way out of the marshes by using white guiding sticks dotted around the area. He told me if I didn’t use the sticks, I’d get sucked in. We were also warned that, once the tide comes in, it did so at about 40 miles an hour, so we had to plan our filming very carefully!”