05x07 - Cold Fusion

Episode transcripts for the TV show, "Doctor Who Documentary".*
Post Reply

05x07 - Cold Fusion

Post by bunniefuu »

The producer, Innes Lloyd, and the team, they wanted to create another monster to really rival the Cybermen and the Daleks, et cetera.

He wanted to be up here.

And what do they come up with?

(LAUGHS) The Ice Warriors.

When I got the script and read it, it was clearly going to be a absolutely bugger of a thing to do.

Doctor Who had a reputation for doing very ambitious things on very small budgets, but this seemed to be rather more ambitious than most of them.

Look out! Avalanche! I think everyone was slightly fazed by how we were going to do it and whether we could achieve it.

I could swear there's something inside.

A giant among prehistoric men.

(WHISPERING MENACINGLY) Why are they afraid?

Proper Ice Warrior, isn't he, sir?

Well, I actually heard of "The Ice Warriors" from my agent.

She rang me and she said to me, "What do you feel like playing an Ice Warrior?

" So I said, "What the hell is an Ice Warrior?

" She said, "Well, I don't know.

" I said, "That leaves a lot of clues here.

"You don't know and I don't know.

" She said, "Well, you'll have to find out about it.

" I said, "Okay, we'll wait and see.

" (LAUGHING) I was pleased when Sonny Caldinez came on board, because he'd played Kemel the Turk, directed by Derek Martinus in Deborah's first story.

CALDINEZ: I worked with Derek Martinus on "The Evil of the Daleks" and we got on so well at that time, that he thought he would use me again because of my size, because I was rather a big fellow, you know what I mean?

(LAUGHS) Because at six foot, what, nearly five, and weighing nearly, what, 250 to 260 pounds, which is a lot of man.

A giant among prehistoric men.

You see the kind of armour he's got on?

Yes, that's rather strange.

We were not like a team as such, we were like family.

He just sometimes used to come up behind me and just, for a laugh, pick me up, and I'm going, "What are you doing, Sonny?

"Put me down.

What are you doing?

" You know, it's just in the breaks and coffee.

He was always there, though.

Always there for me.

We went to get the measurements for the Ice Warriors costume and when I got there, I saw what it was like, I thought to myself, "Damn it, this thing is grotesque.

" They brought out this big fibreglass chest piece and a fibreglass back piece with big rubber gauntlets as hands and rubber boots right up to the groin, so I'm looking at this and I'm thinking to myself, "How are they going to fit this chest on me, "this fibreglass chest on me?

" The guy comes over with a screwdriver and a spanner.

(LAUGHING) I'm looking, "Hello, what have we got there?

" So he bolted up the top over my shoulders, then he got between my legs with the screwdriver! I said, "Hey, "be careful where you're putting those screws.

" (LAUGHS) Fairly early on, I was aware that Bernard Bresslaw was going to be an Ice Warrior, and Bernard was a well

-known name.

Back in 1967, Dad had just started doing the Carry Ons, really, he'd done three by then, I think, and he was currently filming Carry On Doctor at the same time as the Doctor Who series was being filmed.

He was a well

-established figure I think by then, and, uh, I like to think well

-loved, but who knows?

That's for other people to say.

And I must say, we all thought, "Bernie, yeah, he's very tall, "but he's known for comedy.

" (IMITATING BRESSLAW) "Uh, you know, "how are we going to get this big Ice Warrior?

" "Just a minute, Doctor.

I don't think you can do that.

" I was slightly curious as to why Derek Martinus had actually put him into the serial because firstly, you were never going to see his face and frankly, Varga could have been played by anybody.

It's nice to have a name and it perhaps It helps the viewing figures and Derek Martinus probably wanted to use him.

I saw no reason to use him whatsoever, frankly.

Reading the script, clearly, the great challenge was creating an Arctic waste.

Getting a mountain of ice into Lime Grove Studios, particularly, is absolutely impossible.

I mean, luckily, Derek Martinus, the director, was very amenable to this idea of moving the filming anyway to Ealing, which did give more space.

First of all, you can design things, if you like, in bigger chunks.

Everything has to be made outside, whether in the television studio's workshops or in outside contractors' workshops, and then it's got to be cut up and moved and brought into the studio.

With Lime Grove, it has to be in very small pieces, otherwise they can't get it in.

At Ealing, at least, you can get it into bigger pieces, and clearly we needed big pieces.

There were ice tunnels to be made The Ice Warriors are enormous and everything had to be on a large scale.

When I arrived at Ealing, the sets were extraordinary.

Help me, please! I was used to quite smallish sets, but these ones went on and on and on.

They were huge.

When I saw it, it did look like the North Pole or whatever, you know?

It looked extremely cold.

Though it wasn't cold, but you felt cold, you know?

Personally, I think it worked reasonably well and I was quite satisfied at the time.

It was good.

For the budget they had to work on, it was super.

The first scene that we shot, it was quite fun, actually, because the Tardis landed, of course, but slipped over on its side.

And so we had to crawl out of the doors.

Pat said, "Let's have a lot of fun with this," and Frazer said, "Yes, let's go for it.

" And I said, "What are you going to do?

"Warn me beforehand.

" Because they always played jokes on me, et cetera.

They said, "No, don't you worry, don't you worry.

Just stay there.

"We'll do all the fun bits.

" I thought, "That's charming.

Thank you very much.

" Anyway, we did the take and they got out of the Tardis and I think Frazer stood on Pat's hand.



- What is it?



- You're on my hand! I don't know what else happened, and I knocked my head or whatever.

And we ended up adlibbing right the way through and laughing a lot.

But Doctor, look! Yes, that's not ice, that's plastic.

Yes, and see how smooth it is, and curved.

Yes.

It's a It's a dome.

DOCTOR: A protective dome.

When the Doctor and his companions arrive at the dome, there they are outside what is supposed to be a sort of massive city.

And we have I think a sliding door that went up in this particular way.

And beyond that, of course, is a city.

Or not, as the case may be.

I don't think it was back projection.

I think it was just a photograph of a city, and there's no depth to it at all.

And, in fact, they could only walk about two paces and they had to quickly cut off.

Because otherwise Well, there was nothing else you could do.

There's no budget for building cities.

I don't think there was a budget for even a sort of vast model shot.

So, no, it didn't work.

I think I only did two days of filming at Ealing.

It was that one.

And then, um, with Peter Sallis, when I was on the sledge, you know, and he was sort of dragging me.

We were told that, you know, you're lying there and this bear comes towards you.

I think in the script it was originally a polar bear.

(BEAR GROWLING) So, the idea was to have a real bear, but it had to be a brown bear.

I didn't mind that because the chances are that if it was an arctic waste, it was a fairly new arctic waste because the glaciers had been advancing.

And there would have been a brown bear anyway.

Keep very still.

The bear, which you could imagine would be, I don't know, 9 feet tall?

Anything like that.

It was a little baby bear from London Zoo, who was ever so cute.

It did wonders for the scale of the sets, of course, because it made the sets look enormous but it didn't do much for the bear.

(LAUGHING) Of course, Peter and Frazer came back and looked at the footage of the bear and they went, "Oh, it's so cute.

"We've got to be frightened of that, haven't we?

"

- He's sizing us up.



- Can you not run for it?

It looked quite like the honey bear, you know?

He wasn't a big, lumbering bear.

Quick, get me out of here! I'll tackle him! Get a hold of yourself, man!

- He's charging now!

- Quick, he's nearly on us! And when you see it, it's very funny.

(CHUCKLES) It's very funny.

It's a cute baby bear.

You sure you're all right?

Well, he's clawed me, that's all.

Now we'd better get away, quick.

He won't be any friendlier when he wakes up.

WATLING: The first time I saw an Ice Warrior, the costume of, with a man inside, I thought, "He's absolutely enormous.

" He went on and on.

And I'm only 5 foot.

Just under.

Well, these must have been about 6'8".

Something like that.

They were enormous.

These were enormous guys.

I knew that Bernard Bresslaw was going to be cast as one.

So, everyone had to be more or less his height.

And I looked at them, they looked at me, and we started laughing.

After one of them said to me, "Believe it or not, you look just like I do.

" I said, "Shut up!" (LAUGHS) You look at them and then you look at the scale of the set you've made, you think, "Have I got this right?

" Are they going to be walking around sort of Toytown?

So there's this horrible moment when you think, "Bugger, have I got it right?

" (LAUGHS) When you film on the set with all the lights on, for maybe two or three hours, when we were finished filming, and you take the boots off, you could have filled a bucket of water.

Because that was the sweat that was falling into the legs.

When they took the head off, or the costume off, the stink (LAUGHS) I can't say that, can I?

The smell! It was just absolutely ghastly.

We all went, "Oh, dear! Run!" I could swear there's something inside.



- Oh, not another mastodon.



- Well, look for yourself, sir.

The first time you see the Ice Warrior, he's encased in ice, which is difficult.

As I remember it, we tried a number of things but it was something simple like a sheet of Perspex with frost sprayed on it, because obviously you've got to wipe it and make it clear again.

And then all was revealed.

When we filmed at Ealing, Bernard Bresslaw was meant to be playing the chief of the Ice Warriors but he was doing Carry On something or other, I can't remember what it was.

And somebody else turned up, which made almost no difference at all.

Well, if he gets too difficult, you can always set your warrior on him, eh, sir?

And the part that Bernard would have played, was the part I took over and played.

So I played the part for Bernard in that area.

When I decided to chase Deborah Watling through the ice caverns, so to speak, it was difficult because of the size of the feet I had in this costume.

So every time she ran round a corner, one foot went forward and the other foot was dragging or hooking on to the (CHUCKLES) How do you call it?

The ice.

WATLING: Oh, dear Sonny.

He did try.

ever so hard! (CHUCKLES) But he bumped into various parts of the cave, which was made of polystyrene.

Of course, if you bang into polystyrene, you know what happens, it wobbles.

So you've got to go back and do it again and that became a bit of a bore.

CALDINEZ: And I just couldn't get to her.

So they had to slow her down for me to catch her! Even if they slowed her down, I still couldn't catch her because of these big feet.

(LAUGHS) It was like skis on the bottom of my feet.

But they got round that as time went by and she had to slow right down for me to catch her, which I did.

(LAUGHS) And after the take, he said, "Was that all right?

" And I said, "No.

"You've demolished the cave, practically.

" It was just unbelievable.

At the end of the filming in Ealing, clearly there were problems with the Ice Warriors costumes.

There were a lot of discussions about what to do about it.

CALDINEZ: The head piece actually was very large at Ealing Studios.

And you could only see front.

You couldn't see, you know, because of the size of the head.

DAVIES: They had to be made lighter, they had to be made, I think, easier to turn the head.

They had to find some method of attaching a g*n or whatever.

And they had to make them easier to see through.

Anyhow, when we got back to the studios to do anything, we turned up with these beautiful smaller heads.

And the mouthpiece was fantastic because it looked like a mouth.

And when you spoke, your lips moved the mouthpiece like it was the animal speaking.

It was good.

Very, very good indeed.

(CHUCKLES) And then we went into the rehearsal room.

And there was Peter Barkworth playing Leader Clent.

Why has the ioniser been allowed to deteriorate to danger levels?

Peter was a man with an enormous sense of humour.

And in rehearsals, he was always doing strange things.

He was sort of I wouldn't say a method actor, but he was very disciplined.

And he knew his character straight away and what he wanted to do with it.

Prepare the ioniser and wait.

Now, a complete data check, please, Miss Garrett.

I mean, he really went for it with the sort of stick and the limp and the excitable gestures.

To me, he always looked as if he was about to burst into laughter every time he spoke.

Well, how do you feel about all this, Walters?

Bet you didn't think you'd have ice monsters and things like that to deal with when you volunteered for the job, did you?

I used to watch him thinking, "He's worked on this.

"He really has worked on this one.

" And it did work, didn't it?

He was very rough, very proud.

And a leader, with the limp and the stick.

My senior scientist Penley is missing.

I think you have the capabilities to join us here in this great mission.

Will you help us?

Bernard Bresslaw was in the cast, of course.

This very tall man walked into the room.

We all went out and said, "Hello, how are you?

"How do you do?

" Et cetera.

And of course, Pat had worked with Bernard before and they were great mates and he just became, of course, another part of the family.

CALDINEZ: When Bernard saw the costume, at first he looked at it, and he thought to himself, "Nobody will know who's in the costume.

"It could be anybody in there.

" And I said, "That's right.

" And he said, "But they'll know it's me.

They'll know it's me.

" Being asked to create an alien creature is a great challenge to any actor.

You have to give thought to how to match the appearance that the designer has drawn of the creatures that subsequently became the Ice Warriors.

How to give that some kind of personality and some kind of impact.

And that was a challenge which I readily accepted and thoroughly enjoyed.

So he knew what he looked like in the show.

But we didn't.

And I think probably Patrick said when we got to the studio, "Oh, you could just sit in a chair, Bernard, and just read your lines there "because anybody could be in that.

"Michael Kilgarriff or whoever could be in that Ice Warrior costume.

" But Bernard being the actor, said, "No, I want to be in costume "and do the moves and all that.

" BRESSLAW: He knew he was going to be behind a lot of costume.

So there wouldn't necessarily be much of him that could be seen.

But I think he relished the challenge of doing something different.

I mean, he loved variety in what he did and this did present a bit of a challenge.

Particularly the ability to create something with the voice.

She has told them enough.

Bring her in.

It was Bernard's idea, actually, to have this reptilian sound because hissing wasn't in the scripts.

But Bernie worked it out and said to Derek at read

-through, "You know, as we're reptilian, I think we could speak like that.

" Why are they so interested in our engines?

He worked jolly hard on trying to create that, I think, and making sure it would be part of the character.

How can we help you?

I will tell you what I want and you will give it to me.

Dear Bernard, in the Ice Warriors costume.

Well, he had problems, just like Sonny did, and his eyes weren't very good at all, so he couldn't wear his glasses inside the costume.

And I had to guide him places.

And he used to bump into things, et cetera, et cetera.

But that was all part of it, being an Ice Warrior.

And you can't see.

You know, you can hear.

But you can't see.

So what do you do?

What do you do?

So I used to guide him everywhere, saying, "Come on, Bernie.

Come on, over here.

" BRESSLAW: At the time they were filming it, I was only six years old.

And it was all terribly glamorous as far as I was concerned, insofar as I could work it out.

I was a bit young for it in many ways.

But I do remember that we went along for the publicity sh*ts and saw him in the dressing room.

All I saw was this seven

-foot green monster, really.

And I have to say, I had to be persuaded that it was my dad.

But eventually, with the persuasion of my mother and recognition of my father's voice, we went and I was persuaded to go and do the photos with him.

My brother refused to be photographed with him until he took his mask off.

And so he stood hiding behind my mother until he took his mask off.

But it was great fun to do.

And, of course, insofar as one can be conscious of these things at six, it was great to be able to go into school and brag about it, really.

Oh, Doctor, it's just like my home.

I know! DAVIES: Once we got to the studio, clearly the main set, there is the Britannicus Base and how do you deal with that?

Do you have an entirely space

-age set?

But then, if this is England that's being overwhelmed by ice, why would it be space

-age?

So, going back to what one had heard about the w*r, that these code breakers were always working in Victorian mansions.

And all the amazing machinery was put into some sort of Victorian drawing room.

So the same sort of thinking went into the Britannicus Base.

There they were living in a country house, and inside was this wonderful, computerised, mad, white hell.

And if you put the two things together, it's quite fun.



- Seven two point four.



- Seven two point four?

That's bad.

Now, balance those gauges, Miss Henry.

DAVIES: The costumes were a surprise, I think, to everybody.

They were tight

-fitting, quite revealing and just a little not over the top but just a little quirky.

And a little surprising.

And perhaps more extreme than we had thought about at the beginning.

And then, of course, you saw Wendy Gifford in that wonderful I'm so glad we did our show in the '60s.

Because she looked fantastic.

And those lovely big eyes, you know I can't remember why we didn't all fall for her.

How will you get the information back to us?

Ah.

Now, I don't suppose you have a small radio transmitter?

I took one look at her and I thought, "My goodness, isn't that glamorous?

" She was very sort of short skirt, I think it was white PVC, all the costume was and her leggings and everything else and the wonderful high boots, et cetera.

You see how those lassies were dressed?

Yes, I did.

And trust you to think of something like that.

And there was me, 5 foot nothing with plus fours on, big socks and boots, a little jacket and a cloak round me.

And I thought, "Why can't I look like that?

"It's not fair.

I want to look just like that.

" Well, there you go.

It was one of those things.

It was my character, wasn't it?

Victoria, the prim little Victorian miss.

Can you see yourself dressed like that, then?



- VICTORIA: Jamie!

- Oh, I'm sorry.

It was just an idea.

We will now change the subject, please.

(MEN SCREAMING) CALDINEZ: They were going to k*ll me off in this.

So they said to me, "Sonny, you'll have to fall over.

" So I'm saying, "My God, which way do I fall here?

" Because I've got a big back, I've got a big front.

Now, I'm looking, which side is bigger?

(CHUCKLES) You know?

So, "Yeah, I'll fall forward.

" But when I hit the ground with the front, the front pushed back, straight into my groin.

And I went "Whoopee, doopee, do.

" (LAUGHING) They said, "What happened?

" I said, "I think I'll talk in a high voice from now on.

" Because it is very, very painful, I'll tell you! (DOCTOR WHO THEME) Watching it now, I'm rather surprised.

At the time, I was pretty depressed by it.

I thought it wouldn't come out well, didn't look very good.

The fact that it was low

-budget stuff actually just ruined it.

We really should never have attempted something like that.

But watching it now, I look at it and I think, "Actually, it doesn't look all that bad.

" I'm really quite surprised and I'm really quite convinced by some of it.

The impact "The Ice Warriors" had on the viewers was quite a strong one, actually.

Because people did come up to me and say, "I let my son watch this, 'The Ice Warriors', and he was terrified.

"But not quite as terrified as when he watched the Daleks.

" So, they didn't top the Daleks ever.

Never.

They really didn't.

But yet, they were scary in their own way.

We thought the Ice Warriors were very good as monsters.

And we thought, in our time, are we going to fight them again?

Of course we did, but Bernard wasn't available.

He was doing another Carry On film.

And they'd kind of upgraded the lead Ice Warrior to sort of having this big sort of tortoise thing on him.

And his helmet was more So he wasn't bolted into the costume.

So Bernard must have been furious.

"Why couldn't I have had that costume?

" So, poor old Bernard was the forerunner, and I'm sure he'd have loved to have come back because we did have fun.

When the wrap was called for the end of sh**ting of "Ice Warriors," when I took the headpiece off, I had tears in my eyes.

Because, of all the shows that I've done for BBC and ITV or whatever, it's the only set I worked on that I felt rather comfortable on.

It brought tears to my eyes, thinking that I was losing my family.

And when they called me back for the second lot, I said, "Right on, I'm back in there!" You know?

The reason why they called me back, I think, personally, is because my costume couldn't fit anybody else.

And in my costume, it had my name on it.

So everybody goes, "So, we better get Sonny back.

"He's the only guy who fits in that damn thing.

" (LAUGHS) And I came back! But when I came back, I looked at it and I thought to myself, "Oh, God, not again."
Post Reply