LAMBERT: The idea for the Web Planet was so very different from anything that we had made in Doctor Who up to that point.
MARTIN: This one was very exciting because it was a visual piece.
LAMBERT: I was very taken with the idea of having a planet full of what were really virtually insects.
MARTIN: We were fighting like anything for it not to be talking heads, for it to be a complete visualisation.
Richard Martin had directed the first Daleks serial with Chris Barry.
He was splendid, I think, for Doctor Who.
He was extremely imaginative himself.
I felt that this particular serial would be something that he would throw himself into with great enthusiasm, which he did.
To be honest to Verity, she sort of recognised that I was the right zany man for the right zany job.
The story itself, by Bill Strutton, for me, it was the first sort of real, creepy, science
-fiction story that we'd done.
LAMBERT: He probably had worked with Dennis Spooner on The Saint, though I suspect that Dennis probably introduced him.
Dennis, I felt very close to.
He was a very, kind of, ordinary guy.
He was immensely inventive and a wonderful writer.
Dennis Spooner and I immediately hit it off.
He was a very exciting and accessible man with a lot of ideas and a lot of humour.
He was very, very funny all the time.
And always trying to put in gags and jokes.
He was inventive and creative and he wanted the best for the series.
During all my travels, I don't think I've ever come across this.
It's a very dark story.
It was, in actual fact, rather grim.
I was very struck by the writing, by the lyricism of the writing.
The wall is not friendly.
We must break it! O'BRIEN: So they'd cut out the simile and go straight to the metaphor.
A silent wall.
We must make mouths in it with our weapons.
Then it will speak more light.
I mean, this is the most extraordinary poetic stuff.
Any references in the script, for example, the Animus and the Carsinome, would have come from Bill.
They would have been part of his vision.
The imagery of evil, of cancer, of this spider
-like thing at the centre of this horrible web, that people become cloaked in the idea of disease, of disease going right the way through a planet.
Even if a child of five, six or whoever is watching it cannot possibly get that reference, it feels right and it feels authentic.
Every creature who invades our domain comes only to prey on us.
There were not enough strands of drama to hold all the participants.
So Dennis and I invented the Grub People at the last minute.
Will you k*ll your own kind?
Listen, stranger you are both from that wilderness above ground.
I remember Verity coming to an early outside rehearsal and I don't think we'd had time to really explain our little addition to her.
She said, ''What are these people doing grunting?
''Who is this actor?
Why is he making all these strange noises?
'' It was an adventure story, character led.
You've got these Doctor Who people, but somehow the story wasn't really about them, it was actually about Prince Hilio.
-Who is this creature?
-Our ally.
-I do not trust her.
-You have no choice.
Barbara, who was a school teacher, should not just be a woman who just couldn't do anything.
And therefore, she had a brain as well as a.
And so there were times when she would, yes, be the person who saved the day.
I mean, in The Aztecs for example, she was the kind of central character of our people all the way through.
They were a very talented lot in the design department.
And I think the design department had thought carefully to give the people who had the wildest ideas, or the most visual aspects to us.
But we would get allocated by the main make
-up, the head of the make
-up department, really.
But if there were particular people that the director had worked with before, then they would ask, they would request if they could have that particular person.
John Wood was, in fact, allocated by the design department.
I sort of welcomed this programme because there was a lot more licence.
And I enjoyed it.
It was smashing.
The whole idea of it, you know, was very good indeed.
We could certainly not ask for what programme we wanted to work on.
Otherwise, I expect a lot of us would have probably wanted to work on Doctor Who.
It was quite a prestigious programme and very nice from a make
-up point of view because you could use your imagination and a bit of creativity.
A lot of designers, or many of them, enjoyed doing Doctor Who because they were, you know, able to be quite creative within a very imaginative format.
It was obvious by the time we met, after a quarter of an hour, that we were talking the same language.
His designs were wonderfully imaginative and creative.
And he did a lot on what may have seemed a lot of money to us, and doing Doctor Who, but was very little money really.
MARTIN: He would do the most wonderful, elaborate designs, which unleashed his imagination.
He was a good draftsman.
And then they would be put in for costing.
And the same great big blueprints would come back with this rubber stamp.
It was like a censor stamp.
And it just said O
-M
-I
-T.
''Omit.
Omit.
'' On all the detail.
All the detail.
We did build up a group of costume designers and make
-up supervisors, who would return, and who, again, enjoyed working on Doctor Who because they could be imaginative.
Daphne Dare, who did the costumes with me, was a very quiet person, very competent.
She had a quite sense of humour.
She didn't give much away.
She was a lovely, humorous, inventive person.
I can only say I had admiration for nearly everything that she did.
She did wonderful costumes, I thought.
She was brilliant at translating the idea of a butterfly, you know, into something that a human being could actually wear.
MARTIN: She would conceptualise it on paper.
And therefore one was able to see that and see how it would fit in with what we were doing.
She fitted in very well with Doctor Who.
And it was a very k*lling schedule because we did 48 weeks a year.
We produced a great deal of drama at a great speed.
Yeah, there was a lot of pressure in keeping the episodes coming on week after week after week.
You had to plan at least four of these productions before you went into studio on the first one.
Otherwise, you were in trouble.
In those days, we certainly didn't, on those old image orthicon cameras, didn't have any facility for a map box.
What I wanted was something which would give the other feel, photographically, definitely a strong photographic feel.
So we had, at some expense and some grumbling, map boxes made for the cameras.
And we got this half plate, photographically pure glass.
Then we slotted it in.
Then we buggered it up by covering it with Vaseline.
JARVIS: He also was sh**ting through mirrors sometimes.
There's a wonderful sequence which you think, ''How on earth did they get this high shot?
'' And in fact, they sh**t up through a mirror to get it.
I was completely staggered by first arriving and seeing this encapsulation of an idea, of this strange, dead, weird, hugely atmospheric planet.
And that strange emptiness of the first episode, when Bill and I stepped out onto the planet Vortis.
As far as the planet's surface, we didn't have much choice when it came to the flat parts of it because we still had the cameras and everything else to roll over those areas and therefore we couldn't put a lot of rubble down, or sand, or things like this.
But once you got off the floor onto a slope, then you could just do whatever you liked.
I mean, most of that scenery in the back there and everything was made up of sandbags full of sawdust.
And then all of that was covered in old scenic cloths.
DOCTOR: It's a pity we didn't bring a ladder with us.
It was a terrific shot, wasn't it, that pyramid?
It must have been filmed in some way that kept Bill and I small.
It's absolutely beautiful.
The Temple of Light would be based on much more of a traditional, ancient structure, such as those in Mexico for The Aztecs.
They're more familiar than anything else, I think.
Tombs which are in Babylonia and things like that.
The Carsinome.
Because these sets had to be stacked and stored, basically, we were still dealing with flattage.
You can't sort of dress anything which is so loosely, shall we say, a compound shape of nothingness because you'd never get it the same next time.
That sort of living thing, the pulsing thing, where you're never quite sure which is animal and which is vegetable.
That we never really achieved in the studio.
I didn't like the edges of the flattage which you could see and couldn't conceal.
I seem to remember that the pulsating net, the Animus effect, was something we did only at Ealing, in the film studio.
But it was simply impractical and impossible within the time span of doing the programmes to have the same sort of elaborate effects in the studio.
It was a come
-down, the studio set, to the things that John and I were originally hoping to do.
Because you wanted everything to be absolutely right and it was never absolutely right.
At the end, we were starting to crack it and starting to get the sort of imagery that we wanted.
We probably went to town on the last episode because we knew that we could actually dress that exactly as we wanted to, with all its elaboration, because it was never going to be reset again.
If it broke the next day, it would have done its thing.
From nowhere, this terrible sort of spout thing, like a snake, rose from the wall and fired at them.
The next shot was a marvellous shot of them covered in sort of cobweb.
It's a very fine sort of mixture of glue, like UHU or something which they.
It comes out of an air pressure g*n.
It spreads it and it will attach itself to everything.
Of course, you'd to be quite careful what that does to the skin if it's on for a long time.
We didn't only have one creature, we had Menoptra, we had Zarbis.
I don't know.
I can't even remember what the We had about four different creatures, all of which had to be made by the Costume Department.
We didn't see the finished Zarbi and Menoptra until we got into the studio.
So it was quite a surprise for us.
A big shock.
The costume of the Zarbi was based on, more or less, a suit of armour.
In many ways, because the operator had to lean forwards to give the effect of this ant moving as they do, we couldn't have his arms hanging out, so his arms were inside but operating these smaller feelers.
He was balanced by the protuberance at the back of him.
It all had to be strapped on.
Leather straps with buckles to go around to this bit and that bit.
I was kind of happy with them.
I mean, they're good ants.
I thought they looked pretty damn good, actually.
WOOD: You can spot, actually, screws in the back of the neck of the Zarbi.
Which I thought was quite good! At least they could have been painted black so they didn't show up.
They were huge.
I mean, they were the size of a man up to about the middle of their stomach.
And then they went on up.
RUSSELL: Zarbi were really tricky things.
And they often nudged you out of the way and that sort of thing.
There were about five or six or seven Zarbis.
I had to find very good puppeteers.
These actors, they were all quite small.
John Scott Martin, Gerald Taylor.
You can actually see their little, their own black legs in tights as they scuttled about being giant ants.
They had to think in terms of insects.
And they then had to interpret that as puppeteers.
The Zarbis were very frightening.
Certainly when you read it I think they're very scary.
I remember there's a moment when Vicki sees the Zarbi for the first time.
That was really scary.
I mean, that made you jump.
Made me jump, anyway, when I watched it again.
And I can remember one of them, sort of teasing me, pinning me against the wall.
And I was absolutely panic
-stricken.
They were so realistic.
I do remember that Animus thing.
ANIMUS: to pluck from Earth its myriad techniques.
Pulsating evil at the centre of the story.
The set was rather wonderful, of the spider or whatever it was that was, you know, controlling all these things.
The Animus, ''her'', because it was a female character, was played by somebody that I already knew, Catherine Fleming.
And the reason I knew her was that she was a voice tutor at RADA, where I had been a student.
Come to me.
You filthy, great spider! And of course, she stood at a microphone at the side of the set with the script, and did all the lines, beautifully.
Yeah, the larvae g*n, basically it was like, just a trolley, which somebody had sat on and they scooped it around with their hands.
The top of it was, I think, made of fibreglass, painted.
The actual fringe part of it, was supposed to look like little legs.
They were made out of, like a foam.
I don't think they were so convincing, actually, having looked at it again.
I would discuss the effect about what he wanted to see coming out the end of this g*n.
The effects people would work that one out.
It tended goyou know, and that was it.
I'm sure nowadays it would be a lot bigger than that and more effective.
What I did with the Zarbi and the other little bug was what they would term as being the solid costumes.
That was the difference, or the difference of responsibility between what I did and what Wardrobe did.
They did the soft costumes.
RUSSELL: And the Menoptra were extremely beautiful.
I mean, I did wonder how on earth we were going to do it.
I certainly remember looking at lots of books of butterflies and insects and making drawings.
We made the Menoptra eyes by using a material from a milliner's shop because I knew that was kind of stiff material that would take a shape from a mould.
So that was made in a sort of approximation of a kind of a fly's eye.
It was kind of a rather wide mesh.
All this on your face, these strange sort of black gauzy goggles, that you could just about see through.
And your hugely masked black
-and
-white make
-up.
One always wanted the Menoptra to show their beautiful wings.
Well, very attentive viewers might have noticed that there were changes between what was filmed and what was actually done in the studio to the costumes and the headgear of the Menoptra.
We were experimenting with it at Ealing.
And being a single
-shot situation, we were able to, you know, put it back on again when it fell off.
In the studio recording, you'd have to be there all day in the costume, really.
Or most of the day.
And it might have just been that they were just impractical.
It certainly wasn't artistic progression.
I think it was probably artistic regression.
The bit that really doesn't sort of quite live up to the story was the Optera.
They looked a bit sort of comical.
And the leader, I wasn't myself quite sure that he had the right sound.
We know that from the roof comes hate! I mean, who's going to say which is the right sound for a grub?
But something about his voice, which was, I think, very guttural and dark, I didn't quite think was appropriate.
MARTIN: Some of the effects were jolly difficult to do, the tie's going to be melted by dipping into acid baths, these had to be done quite controllably.
Obviously, it wasn't an acid bath, it was something else.
I think the tie was finally made out of a fine polystyrene, something like that.
You've ruined it.
That was my Coal Hill school tie.
-You've just.
-Saved your life.
I never got that tie back, or the pen.
Crunch.
Doctor.
In the shell of one of the Menoptra.
WOOD: It was probably made of plaster.
It had to obviously crush when he put his foot in there.
It was good because we didn't make a great deal of it, but certainly, it stayed, I think, in your subconscious, this sort of, ''What's this, another strange animal?
'' You have two for rehearsals, one standby, one for the actual televised shot, and another standby for that, so say you've got five.
You might remember this.
This was used by Barbara to k*ll the Animus.
In actuality, this is a microphone container, which was designed in the '30s.
Our friend here has suggested that the creature goes along with your party.
And I was thanking the Doctor for his faith in our Isop
-tope.
-That's a very good idea, Doctor.
-Hm?
William Hartnell, I think he always tended to be a bit grumpy because he had a difficult part.
Bill Hartnell was, in my opinion, because I cast him, absolutely the perfect Doctor Who because he combined being quite aggressive and unpredictable with being very kind and gentle and quite touching.
Working with Bill Hartnell was something we were all quite nervous about, initially, because one of the things we had to do every week was put on his wig.
And it always had to be kept very carefully and he had to have it on a block and he wanted to see that it was exactly right.
Bill was a bit excitable at times, he was up and down, he was.
You know, he didn't feel this or he didn't feel that, or whatever it was.
I mean, like lots of actors.
Billy had that very rare gift in an actor of repressed fury.
He was an angry man and he managed to channel his anger into creativity.
He used to, in a sense, upset himself a bit with things that he didn't like or he couldn't quite get what he wanted to get.
But it was with this anger, this sort of divine discontent, I suppose you could call it, which made him very watchable.
We Menoptra were having a joke amongst ourselves about perhaps the slight preposterousness of what we were having to do, and he suddenly said to me, ''Come on, boy.
Now, come on, get on with it.
'' Very crossly, you know.
In other words, and it's a good lesson for a young actor, ''Take the work seriously.
'' Bill could always surprise you as another actor.
He did me, anyway, many times.
Yes, well, I.
I didn't want to.
This is not merely a decorative object.
He had a lot of bitterness about his life as an actor because he felt he had something really very big inside him to give.
And he'd spent his life playing little sergeant majors, horrible little snarling sergeant majors.
He had a tiny part, the first time I ever saw him, in a film called Sporting Life.
And it was magic.
And for Bill, this was the part of a lifetime.
He knew he was wonderful in it.
He knew he was doing something absolutely new that nobody had ever seen before.
He didn't work for 1 8 months after making that film.
The first thing I ever said to Billy, I said, ''You in Sporting Life, you can almost forget the rest of the film, I will never forget you.
'' So, Doctor Who for him was a lifeline and he grasped the end of that lifeline and he climbed up it and he knew, that for him, this was going to be the wonderful part of his life.
You could have treated him with kid gloves, but underneath he had a.
I think he had a good heart.
O'BRIEN: I could laugh him out of anything.
And that's what I did.
I spent as much energy doing that as I did acting.
I remember the usual wind down in the bar afterwards and Billy was furious.
And he said, ''Where's the head of programme?
'' I said, ''Billy, it's 1 0:1 5.
I don't think we're going to see anybody.
'' He says, ''Well, I want to see him.
I want to see him now,'' he said, ''because this is too good to miss.
I want to work again.
'' He said, ''I need to work again.
'' Some fury erupted, you know.
We got a gin and tonic down him and by that time, we calmed him down.
But it was this wonderful thing of an old man whoit was his last job, and a very good job he did, saying that he needed to work again.
It's eternally the actor, isn't it?
What should we do?
Well what would have happened if the Spearhead had been successful?
Jackie Hill was just lovely, just so sweet.
She was really nice to work with.
I thought she was always wonderful.
She was a very graceful, beautiful person to be with.
O'BRIEN: She was incredibly kind to me, as Russell was.
They did take on a kind of parental role.
I thought she just had a kind of wonderful reality, a real quality of believability as a school teacher.
She was always truthful and made everything believable, extraordinarily believable.
She was a very beautiful woman, very statuesque.
I loved just to look at her.
She emanated a sort of regality.
I would've loved to have worked with her on many other things, you know, I can see her in serious drama and it's my loss that I never did.
When she was left alone and that strange scene where suddenly her arm sort of moved and starts to take over and lead her out, it was wonderful, I thought.
Absolutely wonderful.
(SHRILL BEEPING)
And quite gripping to watch her do that.
LAMBERT: All the cast, all got on very well together, which was essential, really.
And Russell and Jackie were quite, sort of, on an even keel most of the time.
And Bill did go up and down a bit, but it was great to have that kind of solidarity.
I was introduced to Roslyn De Winter, a rather strict Movement and Speech Coach, but also actress.
And she, in fact, worked with the actors in rehearsal, in terms of their movement and how they pitched their voices.
Heron, do you still intend to go to the Crater of Needles?
Yes, I do.
She had a sort of voice that you didn't know whether it was masculine or feminine.
JARVIS: She said, ''First of all, we're going to have to move like insects.
'' I think we had looked at pictures of butterflies.
It was all very Royal Shakespeare.
And we held our little.
Our hands like that because we were going to have black gloves.
She was very, very keen on the mouth and we looked at this gash of mouth that the butterfly had.
And I remember complaining, I said, ''This is ridiculous.
We can't be noble if we have to talk with our mouth like that.
''You know, it's just not right.
'' She just said, ''You're not very comfortable in this part.
'' And she worked very well with Martin Jarvis, who was an absolutely straight actor.
I'd first seen him in the West End somewhere.
The person who absolutely struck me was an actor I discover is called Jolyon Booth.
Our legends of it only begin when it was already thinking itself into the crannies of Vortis and the minds of the Zarbi, spreading its web.
A kind of Robert Rietti kind of actor, with a wonderful voice, beautiful, mellifluous voice.
A lyrical way of speaking.
He does one speech as Prapillus, which is like Prospero's final speech in The Tempest.
being slowly unwoven by the silence of time and their entrances long forgotten by our species.
But our gods have not forgotten us, Barbara.
This was indeed deliverance.
And it's a deeply felt and beautifully spoken piece of acting.
And then the charming, handsome, William Russell.
He recognised the apprehension of a young actor, starting in television, and he'd always, you know, ''Hello, Martin.
'' I mean, he would call me by my name.
William Russell called me Martin! ''Are you going to have a coffee?
'' ''Oh, yes, come on.
'' Fantastic.
Excerpts that could not be contained in the studio were always pre
-filmed and they would have been done at Ealing Studios.
And we were able, John and I, to be much more elaborate there than in the television studios.
I think it was about three weeks before we went into the studio when we went down to Ealing, and there was this lovely moonscape.
And there was a wonderful man called Inky.
And he had, it seemed a noose, in one hand and some sort of shackly things, leather shackle things in the other, and I thought, ''He looks like Albert Pierrepoint, the hangman.
'' We brought him in early because it had to have a harness underneath, so we had to adapt for that.
I then realised that he was from the Kirby's Flying Ballet Company.
You have to rely on Inky, who is really like your counterweight, he pulls you up there.
Inky came along and whisked them off the ground.
Whisked them off the 20
-foot pedestal and flew them.
Some of the most dramatic flights were never recorded because we were running for our lives.
I do remember our excellent director, Richard Martin, choreographing these.
I was determined to swoop with them.
I wasn't going to have a ground
-based camera so I demanded a big one, the biggest crane I could get at the time.
This was at one end of the studio and this was swooping about and they were swooping about and we had some very interesting balletic moments, some of which, most of which were never recorded on film.
And I was, you know, all day in this Kirby stuff.
What is in the centre of the web?
-Do you know?
-No.
The energy that we put into those evening performances was the energy which you put into a live performance on stage.
This particular production was done at Riverside Studios at Hammersmith.
The whole thing was a hell of a push to squeeze it into the studios.
The thing about them, too, was the ceiling heights were very low.
I think they were only about 1 6 foot, which was nothing.
We could have always done with another two miles of set.
You'd wait for the sets to come out of a previous production at Riverside Studios, about 1 2:00.
You then go in at 1 2:00 at night, you work right through the night.
You were allocated two hours to record the whole half
-hour show in.
We absolutely could not have done it.
If we had tried to do it perfectly within the time, we would have got 1 0 minutes recorded.
We would have what would be called an ''overrun'', which involved, first of all, asking the crew if they were willing to do it, which sometimes they were not particularly happy about.
The Web Planet was a very technical episode and camera breakages were obviously one of the things that would hold us up.
On this particular series, I think we had three overruns.
And one of 40 minutes, which would have been very, very expensive.
I would be rushing down to see what was happening because the studio, although it had a glass panel in the control room, you were meant to be able to see what was happening.
But you could never see what was happening and people said, ''We're in a bit of a mess down here.
''A Zarbi's just fallen into a Menoptra,'' or something.
You had to go down and sort it out yourself.
I think one of the worst things we would worry about is actors getting hot.
Because if they perspire, it looks bad and it does terrible things to the make
-up.
At 1 0:00, to ask a crew to work till 1 0:45 meant, it was quite something, you know.
I used to say, ''What I'm going to do, Richard, ''is I'll stay with you for your rehearsals ''and your dress rehearsals,'' and things like that, ''and then I'm going to Studio 3.
'' Now, Studio 3, there's only two studios at Riverside, Studio 3 was the Chancellor's public house.
Because there were no mobiles at that time, you'd come over, or send somebody over, we'd go over like a shot, see what's happened and put it right.
And some of the roughnesses were inevitable.
Because we were trying to push boundaries.
I mean, to fight with the Zarbis was not easy.
You didn't want to do any damage to the poor guy who was stooped over, acting.
He didn't have a very good view of anything.
You didn't want to show that you were being, in anyway, careful of the Zarbi.
You know, I rather sort of bow my head when I come to a fight.
I always think something, you know, is going to be awful on show.
Something like a fight will take a very long time to film because of the cuts.
And we had a great shortage of cuts.
Tape editing was quite complicated and time
-consuming, so that if you went into the studio, you were allowed, I think, I can't remember whether it was three or four edits in your entire programme.
Then when we went into the editing, of course, I had half a dozen sh*ts that I want to cut into one sequence to make it better.
We couldn't possibly have made it on only three or four edits, so there was usually seven or eight or 1 0 or.
I was always in trouble over that.
It was not electronic editing, it was physically cutting the tape.
Doctor Who was such that if anything worked, it would be kept in.
You certainly couldn't go and pick that bit up off the floor.
I did once, but not in BBC or Granada.
I'd say, ''Stick that bloody bit back again.
'' So, if I wrote a memo to Richard Martin saying I had taken the Animus web out of the shot because it didn't work, you can be sure that it didn't work.
(BEEPING)
I have to tell you that Verity Lambert was always stopping me from showing the nasty bits.
She was absolutely adamant and I'm sure, in retrospect, she was absolutely right.
We did have rather an unfortunate experience in one Doctor Who where Carole Ann Ford was ill and she picked up a pair of scissors and threatened, I think it was Barbara.
(GRIPPING INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC)
We got taken to task, quite rightly, by the Children's Department.
So when we had to show this vicious thing of the Zarbis using their mandibles to clip off the wings, we had to only just suggest it.
I suppose it was a metaphoric thing for children who pull wings off butterflies.
-The acid pools.
Get away!
-No! And equally the same with the incident with, I think, it was a female grub.
(SCREAMING)
We hoped by showing Ian's reaction that it was a brave and extraordinary thing for her to have done.
I almost made that up at the spur of the moment.
LAMBERT: I mean, I'm very thrilled that it got such high figures.
That it got 1 3 million is fantastic.
But, in retrospect, I'm not surprised because, again, there was nothing else like it on television.
The Web Planet was quite a difficult serial in the sense it was quite surreal.
MARTIN: Even after all our efforts, it remains naive.
But maybe some of its enduring capacity is because of the earnestness and the desire we had for it to be a myth, to actually hold seeds of a mythology rather than just a tatty telly programme.
By the end of my time with Doctor Who, I was deeply frustrated that we had not managed, in my eyes, to visualise it as strongly and as profoundly as it could and should be.
It is strangely amateurish
-looking, I have to say.
Thinking about it, I do think that it did have something special.
It was really innovative and it was trying to do something on a weekly basis that was quite ambitious, really.
When you think of how it was done and what facilities we had and everything else, it really was a very good achievement in many ways, with everybody.
I'm very struck by the costumes and the movement of the actors in those extraordinary costumes.
I think we did very well on The Web Planet considering the constraints of money.
And the fact that we were being hugely ambitious in what we were attempting to do.
Those lonely and amazing sh*ts of a planet at the beginning and the terrible sound of the Zarbi in your head, that was really the bit that I thought was very good.
I don't know how people will view The Web Planet today, but I think that in its time, it was quite ground
-breaking in terms of what we were attempting to do.
And because we took it seriously, people like Dennis Spooner and John, strove their utmost best to make it a creative and different piece of visual art.
From every point of view, from the design, the costumes, the whole way it was envisaged, and it was quite experimental and revolutionary and I'm very glad that we made it.