#infotext

Infotext: Because “The War Games” takes place in so many different environments, it called for careful sound design. Take the time to listen and you’ll notice how each setting has its own distinctive background sound: the crump of the First World War guns, the crickets in the American barn, the insistent electronic chumbling of the War Room. Here the oscillating chirrup of the landing bay slowly gives way to the low hum of the travel machine.

Infotext: In the past few episodes, the authors have been laying down clues about the aliens’ travel machines. We keep being reminded of how similar they are to the Doctor’s Tardis. The machines are bigger inside than out, and they travel by dematerialising. To our eyes the control mechanisms may look nothing like the familiar hexagonal Tardis console, but the Doctor has just said that the two system designs are only “slightly different”. And now we learn that the machines’ interior dimensions can be manipulated. Many 1969 viewers would have remembered what happened in “The Wheel in Space” when the Tardis malfunctioned: the spacious control room vanished, replaced by the cramped interior of an ordinary police box.

Infotext: Christopher Barry asked the villagers to boo the Master as he goes, but the children liked him so much that they wanted to cheer instead.

Infotext: It was a very heavy cloak, and John Levene was unexpectedly floored by its weight.

Infotext: After this episode was first shown, the BBC received some complaints about the next shot. How dare they blow up a lovely country church for the sake of a Saturday-night adventure story! The effects team took it as a compliment on the authenticity of their two-foot-wide 2D photographic enlargement…

Infotext: Coming up is an example of that ham-fistedness which arose by serendipity in the studio. Katy Manning was extremely myopic, so she relied on thorough rehearsals to establish her precise movements. But in the rehearsal room they didn’t have the gubbins on the workbench, so in the studio, keeping to the rehearsed moves, Katy found herself doing this. [puts hand through Doctor’s machine] On the first camera rehearsal, she demolished the equipment as her hand went through.

Infotext: The Daleks had to wait fourteen months before they returned to Doctor Who, but in the interim they staged some successful invasions of other BBC series.

(Doctor Who often changed its own history to suit current needs and preconceptions. Nobody really minded until the 1980s.)