It’s in The Can!

The other major failure of the production was the ambient noise during the location filming. Although Peter’s video camera had the facility to use radio microphones whilst recording, we didn’t have any external units so had to make do with the integral microphone on the camera. It was good quality equipment, but only had a limited range and unfortunately didn’t prevent any extraneous noise from penetrating the soundtrack. The four days that were spent filming on location were particularly windy, and consequently a lot of the dialogue was obliterated. We did re-dub the dialogue for a few of the scenes, but by this time Andrew’s brothers’ voices had broken so it all started to sound very odd.

The end titles for The Tamaras Crisis were created from a still shot of outer space from one of the Star Trek films which we then ‘digitised’ for effect, and then just ran a simple computer generated scrolling caption sequence over the still for the actual credits. Unfortunately the software programme was rather limited which resulted in some of the credits ending up in the wrong size font; a glitch which we just could not repair, and it also took an eternity for the credits to scroll up the screen. This meant that the re-mixed version of the Peter Howell theme lasted for around four minutes and about six choruses. Of course, being huge fans of the title music Andrew and I loved this but anyone else watching it was soon yawning between episodes and urging for it to be wound forward. This, of course, could also be said for the entire story……….

Editing the whole production together took far longer than the filming itself; in fact it took several months to complete as we only had a few evenings a week to devote to it. As this was the first opportunity that Peter Clancy had to really utilise all the editing gear he’d bought, he got a bit carried away with himself and had begun to edit bits together without our blessing, including a couple of fades-to-black which we hurriedly asked him to remove. I’m sure I’d have probably been the same had I been in his situation; he was like a kid in a sweetshop who didn’t know what to do first. Once again, incidental music was chosen by Andrew from the various BBC Doctor Who records and tapes which we had between us, though for The Tamaras Crisis we had some additional original pieces which Andrew wrote and performed himself. All in all, The Tamaras Crisis had cost us a lot of time and money but was a very rewarding experience, one which I’d love to do all over again. Perhaps Mr Russell T Davis would care to employ our services for the next series?

Next Episode: Looking Back