This article was originally published in issue 54 of IN VISION: the Making of a Television Drama Series, November 1994
We all like to put the best gloss on bad memories, but some of the assertions in Paul Joyce's interview (IN VISION issue 50) go way beyond the selective re-interpretation of history and are just plain wrong. I can't let this stuff lie on the record unchallenged. Fans of the show look to this magazine for definitive factual detail. It'll be a media resource in years to come.
So if someone's going to say that the sum total of my contribution to WARRIORS' GATE was a twenty-page outline and a "rather simplistic etching of the characters", we'd better nail such disinformation right now. It's either that, or make some lawyers rich. Here, for the record and in detail, are the genesis and development of this particular WHO. The facts first. Opinions will follow.
The germ of the idea that was then called THE DREAM TIME hadn't originally been a story for DOCTOR WHO at all. It was one of a number of notions that I'd been playing around with as possible conclusions to the trilogy of SF radio serials that I'd begun in 1978 with THE LAST ROSE OF SUMMER. Typed on a single side of paper, it contained little in terms of plot that would survive unchanged. But there were some key images that set the agenda for what would follow. It featured a being who escaped and was pursued from the bridge of a ship to a wasteland planet, home of a lost civilisation where stood an isolated room equipped to receive visitors. The finale involved a hall-of-mirrors battle through a series of gateways that formed an interchange between parallel worlds, and the alien pursuers" ship destroyed by the rebounding of its own firepower as a gateway closed before it.
I had a meeting with Chris Bidmead, at his invitation, late in 1979. Within a few days of this I'd worked up a five-page narrative from the Dream Time idea, and I put this in as a submission. At this stage there was no E-space, no K9, and given that I didn't know how far ahead we were looking I referred not to Romana but to "the Doctor's current assistant". Adric was not, as yet, a part of the show. But many of the specifics that were to give shape to the piece were fixed right here; the slave ship for time-sensitives, the dusty castle in a strange void, the mirrors and the timewinds, the initial hijacking of the TARDIS, the final mass escape.
We met again at the end of January 1980 and talked through some of the linking ideas that were to run through each story in the season, and on February 5th I wrote back with a number of supplementary suggestions. From this, we struck a deal. For £200 I'd produce a full outline complete with episode structures, developed characters and fully-described scenes. If that played, we'd go to scripts. If not, I'd keep the money and we'd call it quits.
I completed and delivered 25 pages of detailed scene breakdown on March 25th. Adric was in, E-space was in, the departures of Romana and K9 were in. Each episode was summarised in eight pages of numbered scenes, with episode climaxes in place. The contract to proceed was signed on April 29th; I was to get £900 per episode, minus the £200 already paid over. The delivery deadline for the first draft was June 7th. The scripts were turned in ahead of deadline and the feedback from both Chris and JNT was incorporated into the second draft, a much more substantial set of scripts that was delivered in early July.
The director came on board at this stage. To an office with an empty desk and only an outline on it? Hardly. I have his script notes, routed through the production office and dated July 25th, with scene numbering that clearly shows that they refer to the second draft. This draft was not, need I point out, anything that you could mistake for a 20-page outline; by now it was closer to two hundred pages. His notes were the standard kind of responses; brief queries, comments, suggestions for expansions.
Time was getting tight by now. We were heading for a September 6th read-through date but preproduction had to begin sooner. Because I was based in the north-west and working out my notice at Granada (the CHIMERA advance being my launchpad for turning freelance), and because E-mail and the fax machine were a long way from being in common use, material for the third draft mostly had to be dictated down the phone in a series of late-evening calls to Chris at his home. There was a reason for this odd timing. Chris had a sideline as a computer journalist which I understand he's pursued more extensively since, and he had an early-model wordprocessor on test loan at his flat. He edited all the WHO scripts on this, and as I read down the changes I could hear the keys rattling as he typed the new stuff in. I have the material from those phone sessions still; my rough notes as I drafted the ideas, and the neater passages of dialogue and action copied ready for dictation.
But we still weren't there.
Those scripts were, I suppose, a persuasive read. Certainly the feedback I get from the bootleg copies that seem to be in circulation would suggest so. But in form and in detail, let me be the first to concede that you couldn't take them onto the studio floor as they stood.
My lack of TV experience had led to their having dialogue like a radio play and stage directions with the density of novel description. TV scripts are, as anyone who's seen one will know, bare and schematic documents more akin to blueprints. Mine weren't. They were a control freak's manifesto for a production, with no space for anyone to manoeuvre.
They wouldn't even fit the format. Storywise they were sound enough to enthuse WH Allen to an increased page-count and extended print run for the novelisation; but that's another tale, told elsewhere. Chris explained that with just over a week to go he and Paul were going to edit my material down to suit the show's particular studio requirements.
This is where it gets complicated. But let's take one of the pieces of the script under contention and follow it through; specifically the first episode climax, to which it's now being claimed I didn't even make a contribution but which, as you'll see from what follows, barely deviated from its basic form almost from the very beginning.
I'd originally envisaged the episode ending with the escaped time-sensitive appearing to menace the Doctor and then walking right through him, like a ghost. This was how I'd shown it in the earliest, five-page outline. Chris had felt this wasn't strong enough and so, in my February letter to him, I'd described the Doctor finding a room with suits of dormant and damaged battle armour while following the footprints of the escaped Biroc. The head of one suit turns, unseen, as the Doctor passes, and then the entire creature jerks into life and brings a big axe to bear on its unsuspecting prey.
This version became fixed in the scene breakdown of March 25th and passed onward through the various drafts with no substantial alteration.
The BBC's production script of August 10th contains the Bidmead/Joyce revision. Despite simplification and condensation, one can see from the recurrence of key phrases (stiffly, as if for the first time in an age... a savage axelike weapon) where provenance lies. It's the same scene in shorthand, cruder but still capable of generating more or less the same result onscreen.
Is this 'co-authorship'? A screen composer would recognise it as something akin to 'Mickey-Mousing', following the action of an original, paraphrasing it, occasionally touching base and quoting it, some of the time going off altogether but always having to return before the structure starts to go.
There are passages from that final, rushed revision that bear little resemblance to the ones they replace. It was these excursions that were the source of my dismay when I received the rehearsal scripts in August, with a letter from Chris expressing regret that I hadn't been available to help 'knock the thing into shooting shape'. One such editorial addition can be seen in Figure 5; the silver 'time bombs' have been replaced by a manacle of dwarf star alloy which, despite its legendary density, the Doctor is able to tote around in his coat pocket. This is what was referred to at the time as 'adding in the science'. It's no secret now that I wasn't impressed by what I saw.
My attitude to WARRIORS' GATE has always been that it was an underachieving patchwork with flashes of delight and a haunting sense of a story beyond the story. Bear in mind that I can't experience it in the way of someone who comes to it with no foreknowledge. It would be easy now to lay claim to all the things that work and disown all the things that don't, but that would also be pointless; it doesn't, in any real sense, matter. Nobody's perception of my career now depends on this. I don't have a thing to prove.
But even after fifteen years I'm not about to have it said that I failed to deliver to contract, or took unearned credit, or was somehow marginal to the process of my own work's development.
The director is quoted as saying that he didn't push for the writing credit because that would have 'emasculated' me. A far better reason would have been that an editorial rehash wouldn't have had a hope in hell of passing Writers" Guild arbitration.
Let's check out one final assertion before we let it all pass into history where it belongs.
"The other thing that they'd never really seen done before," claims the issue 50 interview, "was the way I used black and white photographs. I had a notion that when they got to this particular place in the gateway, it would look something like Powys Castle. I thought that a way of playing with this idea of everything being real but unreal would be to have people in full colour moving through a black and white environment..."
Well, I'm sorry, but this is beyond a joke. The March outline, written three months before Paul joined the show, and every version of the script thereafter, all read as follows: The Doctor is... keyed-into a black-and-white still of a formal garden, Versailles-style; in the distance, the palatial house can be seen...
Hmm.
So now you know where such 'notions' come from. All you have to do is stare at the script for a while, and the notion will just pop into your head unannounced.
In April 1981, when it was all over, I sent a note to John Nathan-Turner telling of my unhappiness with the process. I expressed my concern about the problems we'd had, and my regrets about what I believed had been the effects on the final result.
His response? He bought TERMINUS.
© Stephen Gallagher 1994