The Termination of Time!

Our second fan-vid story was called The Termination of Time, and all the ‘actors’ from our original production remained, with the exception of Michelle who was absent for reasons that I can’t recall. We named the two characters played by David and Stephen ‘McCullogh’ and ‘Glynn’, paying homage to two of the BBC series’ incidental music composers. This time we were again using a hired video camera, and again shared all the camerawork, but whereas The Terror Zone lasted about 10 minutes in total, our second story was made up of three 10 minute episodes. We ingeniously managed to manipulate all the scenes which featured every character so that various camera angles were used to give the impression that we were all there (the camera operator even saying his or her lines whilst recording), even though one of us was always out of shot behind the video camera. Each time the camera operator needed to be seen, we would alter the shot and another cast member would take over filming for a couple of lines. We now also had the luxury of an audio dubbing facility, although most of the ‘incidental music’ was still played live. It was only where we needed to re-dub dialogue that we used the audio-dub function on the camera, as we often fluffed lines without bothering to do another take, or we realised afterwards that the dialogue didn’t make sense and were not able to venture back to locations to re-shoot.

The second story’s titles featured some interesting experiments with video-feedback, and these were combined with a cut-out paper logo and a tiny photograph of yours truly. Unfortunately, as I had just returned from a holiday abroad and was quite tanned, the photograph made me look like Mowgli from Disney’s Jungle Book. Our first two adventures featured a model Police Box, and a TARDIS control room in Andrew’s bedroom, complete with a flat home-made drawing of the console stuck on the wall surrounded by paper plates! It all looks hilarious now but strangely enough seemed quite a feat at the time. Incidentally, the model TARDIS was a cardboard kit available in book form which was widely available at the time, but some of the press-out panels from the book which were folded and slotted together to make the model were almost purple in colour rather than blue, so we christened it the MAUVIS, a terribly witty play on words, you must agree.

A couple of specific memories of filming this story come to mind. One Sunday morning we were filming in Andrew’s parents’ back garden, and we were about to shoot an important scene where my Doctor was to shout at McCullough and Glynn for reasons that escape me now. I was poised to unleash my anger at them both, and to be honest quite looking forward to attempting to inject some realism into our production, when I noticed their next door neighbour lurking just over the fence. Their neighbours at the time were two old dears, the husband of whom was called Eric and was an extremely nosy Victor Meldrew type who never seemed to have anything better to do than eavesdrop on everyone else. His presence completely threw me at this point, and I ended up almost whispering my lines with not much enthusiasm so as to not embarrass myself in front of him. Looking back now, I really should have ignored him and got on with the job properly, but my spineless frame of mind at the time meant that it was not to be. On the other hand, it may have been just as well that he was there so the world would not be subjected to my somewhat limited ability as an actor.

Next Episode: The Termination of Time (Part Two)!