Alternative Soundtracks – Spearhead From Space

For the benefit of anyone who may have accidentally strayed into my little corner of The Verv and is actually trying to follow these posts, I suddenly thought of something last night which I should have included in yesterday’s post. I didn’t make it clear that all of these alternative soundtracks were ad-libbed, i.e. we didn’t work from scripts or even have an inkling of how the stories would progress. The only thing we would work out before we started is which of us would play each part, and even then sometimes we’d forget about a character who’d appear later on in a story, a situation which was solved by simply by pot luck, i.e. the first person to speak carrying on with it! Anyway, I just had a feeling that maybe you’d thought we planned each one before we recorded them, but we didn’t. Sometimes it showed in certain stories where there’d be prolonged periods of un-funny nonsense, but there were also – if I may be so bold - moments of genius from both of us, many of which were in Spearhead, so on with the fun!

Spearhead from Space is one of the most consistently funny as far as our alternative versions of Doctor Who stories are concerned. The woman at the Radar station at the very beginning of the story became Delia Smith, as she bore a very slight resemblance to the famous cook and so we felt we ought to play on this. The opening scenes at UNIT HQ where we first meet Liz Shaw were expertly handled by Andrew, particularly as he was doing both the Brig’s voice and hers, resulting in him talking to himself for several minutes. The Brig introduces himself by saying, ‘I’m Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart – you’re pleased to meet me!’ and the general gist of the conversation after that revolves around the fact that Liz doesn’t think much of the name ‘UNIT’ and that she could have come up with a much better name for the organisation. Then there was the straight-laced Doctor Henderson who, in the hospital corridor scene where we see the cleaner vacuuming the carpet, proceeds to pick up the receiver on the wall mounted telephone and say the words, ‘Hello, is that the telephone?’ We also had Liz Shaw as a very boring nymphomaniac scientist (work that one out), and the newly regenerated Doctor remarking to the passing nurse in the hospital car park scene, ‘Nice bush!’ as she walks past a potted shrub.

Poor General Scobie can only emit the words, ‘……needs some finishing touches’ as this was the only line of his that I could remember from the original dialogue. I deliberately made a point of him addressing the Brig as ‘Brigadier Stewart’ all the time (he only did this once in the original script), and then actually going on to say ‘I’m going to deliberately miss out part of your name!’ Then we had Hibbert and Channing as some sort of strange comedy double-act, with Channing unable to say anything comprehensible throughout the entire story, and Hibbert asking everyone if they liked his tie. Our version of Spearhead from Space also showed off UNIT as the highly efficient and successful world-class organisation that it is, when one of the soldiers has to requisition a new kettle from their headquarters in Geneva simply because it has run out of water.

In the sequence where Liz and the Doctor are at Madame Tussaude’s in London, they are standing next to some of the wax dummies and examining a watch worn by one the mannequins. Liz says something to the Doctor – the exact dialogue escapes me at the moment – but unfortunately one of his hands at that point is just in front of her groin area. Andrew therefore decided that her next line would be, ‘Doctor, get your hand off my *%$£’ Now I’m no prude but I can’t actually bring myself to print the word he used, but suffice to say that it’s a rather crude description of female genitalia. Naturally, in our drunken state this proved to be exceptionally funny and we were both still laughing a few minutes later. Lastly, I couldn’t help myself at the end of the story by spluttering ‘Aunt Sally!’ in my bestest Worzel voice as Jon Pertwee hams his way through the ‘Nestene-tries-to-strangle-the-Doctor’ scene.

Whilst I’m on the subject of Spearhead from Space, I must mention the fact that Andrew made a point of trying to include all the original sound effects in all the alternative soundtracks we did, and Spearhead was his pièce de résistance. He had a real knack for accurately re-creating the authentic sounds using only his voice, and in this story it was the Auton gun noise (including the sound of their hands dropping down to reveal the built-in gun), and also the instantly recognisable stock BBC sound effect of someone smashing a window, a noise which is heard aplenty when the Autons smash their way out of the department store at the end of the story. A further anomaly occurred when Andrew decided to sing some of the authentic incidental music during the scene where Channing attempts to kidnap the Doctor from Ashbridge Hospital, and I then decided to deliberately turn up the sound on the TV to drown him out. We were both stunned when I did this as it revealed that he happened to be singing the music at precisely the same point as it was on the original soundtrack. It’s funny what alcohol does sometimes.

Next Episode: The Three Doctors