Further Filming Fun!

On the first day of filming at Cooper’s Sunblinds at Hampton Court, I drove over to my grandparent’s flat in Southfields to collect the keys to the workshop and returned to Morden from where we then proceeded in convoy down the A3. On arrival at the premises, it quickly became apparent that my grandfather had given me the wrong set of keys, and so I had to zoom back up the A3 to Southfields to swap them for the correct set.

This took an hour or so out of our already restricted filming time, and consequently tempers began to fray from the more senior members of the cast and crew at our seemingly infinite lack of preparation and organisation. However, we completed all the necessary scenes at the workshop in the allotted time, and aside from the jarring differences in the set layout and the sound acoustics between the wooden floor of the workshop and

Andrew’s carpeted bedroom, it was a successful day. It was only the following day whilst viewing the ‘rushes’ that we realised that in one particular TARDIS scene recorded at Hampton Court, Peter ‘Jim Royle’ Clancy had neglected to position the camera correctly resulting in a very noticeable gap between the top of the scenery and the top of the picture. The problem was eventually solved by using a black electronic mask to manually cover the offending area, which thankfully when viewed on a black or dark grey television gives the impression that the top of the picture is in fact the top of the screen! I also remember being paranoid that the coloured water inside the various tubes and containers in the Rani’s laboratory set were going to start leaking onto the floor of the workshop; we had to suspend the tubes from the ceiling to stop the water running out of them.

A small piece of footage featuring myself in a head-and-shoulders shot as an extra minor character had to be pre-recorded, which was then to be played back on a monitor on set in a scene in which I was also playing my main character in the story. Even though in the finished scene the image of my face on the screen was a lot smaller than the faces of the other characters, Linda Clancy was convinced when she watched the story that the shot was achieved by somebody standing behind a piece of scenery with a screen-sized whole cut out of it! Not only had she not realised that the image on the screen was pre-recorded and played back live through a monitor, she also hadn’t realised that it was me and that I couldn’t possibly have been playing two parts at the same time!

We also discovered suddenly half way through filming that Linda had accidentally thrown away the coat that we had been using for the Doctor’s costume, but fortunately we managed to find a similar looking jacket to use for the remainder of the story, even if it was about eight inches shorter. I never became angry with her over this, as after all it was purely accidental on her part and she had been extremely patient with us. As Andrew was again playing Ian Lethbridge-Stewart, we thought it was best echo his involvement with UNIT in his costume. Whereas previously he’d worn a suit adorned with cardboard UNIT badges attached with safety pins, this time we decided that he should wear an army surplus camouflage jacket, particularly as there were various scenes during the story where he had to hide amongst some undergrowth in a forest. We purchased the jacket from Millets in Sutton for the princely sum of £30, which made it probably the most expensive single item bought for the production. Such was Andrew’s annoyance at this outrageous expense that he was determined to get his money’s worth out of it, even going to the lengths of wearing it to work complete with jeans, trainers and a briefcase!

Next Episode: On Location!