Planet of the Giants

"Doctor Who and the Big People", "The Four Parter", "Doctor Who and the Giant Four Parter"

"The One with Irwin Allen" (USA), "Size Matters" (France)

Doctor Who and his friends become smaller than they used to be and foil a pesticide plot which must've been intended for another show.

*** - In keeping with the plot, this four part story was shrunk down to three episodes

"One day, this theme of harmful pesticides won't seem like cranky nonsense" (the author, quoted in the Radio Times)

"Do you know why I'm a success, Mr Farrow? Because I've never allowed the word "pants" to exist"

The sink set was actually the bath from William Hartnell's executive dressing room.

The first draft of this story washed up on a beach in Cromer having been written aboard a ship which sank shortly afterwards. This was passed to Louis Marks who fleshed it out to six episodes.

The second of Marx’s drafts was eight episodes long and contained a subplot involving dinosaurs and whales.

The third draft was pruned back to seven episodes, losing the episode set entirely in a block of Swiss cheese.

The fourth draft was only five episodes long, losing the dinosaurs but gaining a mechanical pussy. Cat.

The final draft was back up to six episodes and included half of the cheese episode, losing the whales, gaining one of the dinosaurs and mentioning but not showing the mechanical pussy.

These six episodes were edited down to two parts for transmission.

A third episode, made entirely from outtakes, was produced for the staff Christmas party but ended up being transmitted by accident.

Si Hunt

"I was once travelling on an omnibus that had been hired by a "Doctor Who" seminar to take people around sites of interest in London. Two of the proles sat near me seemed to have astonishingly little interest in the guide's description of the section of pavement that Patrick Troughton used to walk along when exercising his dogs, Philips and Samsung. I craned my neck subtly to hear their conversation and one of them said "Of course, Doctor Who did 'Land of the Giants' a couple of years before Irwin Allen." Well, I had to act. I picked up the microphone and addressed the two proles with my usual cutting wit. "Don't be pathetically stupid" I said to them, the rest of the tour party and much of the postal district we were travelling through at the time, "as everyone knows, Story J aired one thousand four hundred and twenty two days before the premiere of Land of the Giants. Now kindly pay more attention to my tour or I'll ask that you both be arrested." Sadly, the coach party paid more attention to me than the police did and I was the one who ended up with a note on my file for wasting police time. What is this country coming to? Some days I wonder if the Daily Mail is right."

Plagerism

Space Pressure Control device