DEBBIE CHALLIS: "Tomb of the Cybermen" is one of the most historical Doctor Whos.
CHRISTOPHER FRAYLING: The whole thing about the Cybermen is that they're dead and they need to be reanimated.
That's very like the sort of feeling of the burial chamber of King Tut.
It's about history and memory and the power of the past.
Permit me to present to you the most spectacular find since King Tutankhamun.
In November 1922, the archaeologist Howard Carter stumbled on the steps of an unfound tomb in the Valley of the Kings, in Egypt.
And he started digging and he realised it was a unrifled tomb.
Gentlemen, they are perfect! This is unique in archaeology.
The famous account by Howard Carter of what went through his mind when he opened the tomb of King Tut.
I mean, these are great words and they're worth remembering.
Okay, we're in November 1922 and he's punched a hole in the wall, the equivalent of the moment when the gate opens in "The Tomb of the Cybermen".
"At first I could see nothing, "the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flames to flicker.
"But presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, "details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist.
"Strange animals, statues and gold, everywhere the glint of gold.
"I was stuck dumb with amazement "and when Lord Carnarvon enquired anxiously, "'Can you see anything?
' it was all I could do to get out the words, "'Yes, wonderful things.
"' The whole public image of archaeology is based on the discovery of King Tut's tomb.
It had an impact on culture that's rather similar to the moon sh*t in the 1960s.
That kind of impact.
And because the newspapers were all Just after the First World w*r, which finished in 1918, newspapers were just waiting for an exciting story to cheer people up.
It was a mass media event that was unimaginable before then.
Yeah, it was the most famous piece of archaeology of all time.
Mercy, just look at this place.
"The Tomb of the Cybermen" is interesting, the geography of the tomb is very similar, actually, to King Tut's tomb, the basic difference is that the bodies are underground.
Whereas in King Tut's tomb, they were all on the same level.
You go into the antechamber, where you've got all these hieroglyphics on the wall and these images of the Cybermen, which are just like an Egyptian tomb.
You then turn right, into the revitalisation chamber, which has a mummy case in it, in "The Tomb of the Cybermen".
So turn right and you go into the burial chamber, just like King Tut.
Turn left and you go into the hallucination chamber and a booby trap.
And in ancient Egypt, they were a lot of booby Not actually in the tomb of Tut, there were no booby traps.
But I've been into tombs in the Valley of the Kings where you suddenly have You're walking along a corridor and there's a huge cavernous hole and if you don't look where you're going, you fall down the hole.
And it was to discourage robbers, tomb robbers, you know, in ancient times, who occasionally broke into royal tombs.
Obviously blowing up an archaeological site or the entrance to where you think an archaeological site is, is not normal archaeological practice, even by Howard Carter's time.
Man, you just blew yourself a pair of doors.
(PEOPLE CHEERING) Another thing that's really strange about these archaeologists is they don't really have cameras.
You don't see a camera until episode two or three, then suddenly you see the professor using a camera.
Flinders Petrie was a pioneer in the use of cameras in the late 19th century.
You'd have cameras, you'd be photographing, you'd be mapping.
Everything must be carefully measured and recorded.
There's this wonderful line from Viner, one of the team, who at the end of the first day in the tomb says, "I think I've got down all the details we require.
" I've recorded all the necessary details.
I suggest we all go back to the rocket.
I wish archaeology was like that.
You know, he's been in one room and he thinks he's got everything he needs to know, without even having explored the rest of the tomb.
It wasn't like that.
As I say, it took 10 years to clear the tomb of King Tut.
I love to see the experts at work, don't you?
It quite obvious in "The Tomb of the Cybermen" that at least two members of the party, or three if you count Toberman as well, aren't remotely interested in the artefacts.
They want to get to the Cybermen.
So they keep looking bored when anybody shows any academic interest in anything.
You can tell the baddies, 'cause they look bored when the archaeology takes places.
The hieroglyphics, I mean, the graphics, you know, some of them look like sort of zigzag art deco, sort of zigzags, like 1920s zigzags.
And some of them, the pictures of the Cybermen, sort of abstracted version of the Cybermen look like wall paintings from Egyptian tombs.
So, there's all those parallels.
Of course, when archaeologists were working in the early
- to mid
-19th century, they hadn't yet cracked the code.
So when they saw these Egyptians hieroglyphs, these ideograms, you know, these images on the wall, they had no idea what they meant.
When this Fourier series is complete, then there is no more to be done.
Yes, but why do it at all?
Really, Doctor.
For an archaeologist, you seem to be curiously lacking in curiosity.
The code gets cracked in the 19th century with the aid of the Rosetta stone, now kept in the British museum.
And suddenly, people could read these hieroglyphs for the first time.
C is cap function of Ah, that's it! 2F, not 2A.
- (WHIRRING)
- VICTORIA: The hatch! I've done it! I've done it! Some of the jewels that they found in the tomb of King Tut, as had been found in quite a lot of other pharaoh's tombs, are jewelled versions of scarab beetles, these large Egyptian beetles.
And that's where the Cybermats come from.
Great
-great
-grandsons of scarab beetles found in King Tut's tomb.
At the end of the episode, where one of the beetles gets out of the tomb, trailing the possibility that something more is going to happen, that's very King Tut.
Thank you, and whose money is paying for the hire of that rocket?
The King Tut expedition was funded by the Earl of Carnarvon, Lord Carnarvon, who was a very eccentric man indeed.
And he was determined to find an Egyptian tomb.
It was an obsession with him.
He was very interested in the occult and spiritualism.
And he sort of felt he was in touch with ancient Egypt, so he wanted to find this tomb.
The Brotherhood of Logicians is the greatest man intelligence ever assembled.
But that's not enough by itself.
We need power.
You think the Cybermen will help you?
Of course! I shall be their resurrector! I mean, what motivated them was they wanted to go down in history as the person whose name went on a big discovery.
So you do get eccentric kind of people who want that kind of immortality.
The most famous example of an organisation that funded archaeological expeditions with definitely sinister motives was the SS in n*zi Germany.
There was, in fact, a whole archaeological unit of the SS and they funded expeditions to try and prove their bizarre racial theories all over Europe and actually in Asia.
And it was all this idea of looking for the kind of lost Aryan race.
They've been asleep for a very, very long time, waiting for someone to revitalise them, that they can take over and conquer the Earth again.
Why did you submit yourself to freezing?
You don't have to answer that if you don't want to.
To survive.
Here are these creatures in their suspended animation, and they're frozen.
Now, why is frozen in the news in 1967?
Well, Walt Disney d*ed in the year before, 1966, and there was this rumour that was in all the newspapers at the time that he'd had his body frozen by a process called cryogenics and that he was in a state of suspended animation in a vault, deep
-frozen, waiting for a cure, in his case, for cancer.
And that when the cure came forward, he would then be unfrozen, reanimated and Uncle Walt would have the second coming.
CYBERMAN: To die is unnecessary.
You will be frozen and placed in our tombs until we are ready to use you.
The idea behind Cybermen is that bits of their bodies were removed, so their body tissue and various bits didn't grow older and deteriorate.
And in some ways that has similarities to the mummification of the body.
So they're the sort of undead, they're like mummies, actually, the Cybermen.
I mean, they're sort of dead bits of machinery that need to be revitalised.
CHALLIS: The idea behind mummification was that the body should be preserved, as much as possible, intact.
That's why they took the soft organs out and put them in canopic jars.
And some of the early designs of the Cybermen before "Tomb of the Cybermen" look far more like our popular perception of a mummy.
There's a parallel perhaps between the non
-emotional features of the Cybermen and the perhaps very stylised way that ancient Egyptian faces are shown.
Tutankhamun is very serene, stylised.
He's very expressionless.
The so
-called heretic pharaoh known as Akhenaton and possibly Tutankhamun as well, seemed to have very big bulbous heads, coming back.
They're quite famous for it.
It's probably some kind of genetic issue that they had.
And it does seem quite strange that the Cyber Controller has this massive bulbous head.
Perhaps that's too much, perhaps that's reading too much into it but certainly he has a very weird looking head, as does Akhenaton.
FRAYLING: Klieg, the bad guy, George Pastell.
He's a Cypriot actor but he played the Egyptian baddie in the Hammer films, The Mummy, 1958, that did very well, so he got typecast, put him in a tarbush and he becomes an Egyptian bad guy.
So, The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb, 1962
-3, George Pastell.
Stranglers of Bombay, Hammer films, 1960, George Pastell.
The moment you get that actor in a film, it brings with it all those mummy movies about the curse of the Pharaohs, about King Tut, about reanimating the mummy, lumbering around like Christopher Lee.
So by casting George Pastell, you're hooking into all those memoires about the mummy.
Fifty pounds for the first man to open the doors.
There is the story that there was a curse over the door of the tomb, which said, in Egyptian hieroglyphics, "Death shall come on swift wings "to whoever disturbs the rest of the Pharaoh.
" Fiction.
There was an idea, in fact, there was this curse of Tutankhamun, that somehow by entering the threshold, by touching the tomb, by being present at this kind of r*pe of a tomb, which is very much how it was seen, that you were then cursed, which does have parallels with the electrified doorway.
People thought they were being punished by the ancient Pharaoh for trespassing into the tomb.
The thing about Carnarvon was that he was there at the famous opening of the door, when they realised they'd done it.
But the following spring Lord Carnarvon dies, bitten on the cheek by a mosquito, blood poisoning and so on.
Very strange things happened the night he d*ed.
The whole of Cairo's electricity supply blacks out.
All four grids.
The poor fellow who d*ed drained all the electricity out of his body.
Meanwhile, back at Highclere in England, near Newbury, the Carnarvons' pet dog, Suzie, a three
-legged terrier, dropped down dead on the spot, just the moment that Carnarvon d*ed.
People wanted to believe all this stuff and they wanted to believe it partly because in fiction, in adventure fiction and gothic fiction, there had been lots of stories about the curse of the mummy ever since Victorian times.
Bram Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars, Conan Doyle, the Sherlock Holmes man, who'd written two short stories about the curse of the mummy.
And they all piled in.
Sir Conan Doyle gave an interview saying, "Of course there's a curse of the pharaohs.
" It's not just the electrified doorway.
I mean, the death count in "Tomb of the Cybermen" was pretty high, actually.
It comes up throughout the episodes that this is not a place to be.
This is a sinister place and by even just stepping through there No, wait! Wait.
Nobody wants to stay there overnight.
I utterly refuse.
I will not spend the night on this planet.
I don't think we've got much choice.
But at least we can get out of this sinister building.
The theory now is that the air was so polluted in that tomb, they're breathing, in great excitement, this incredibly polluted air and they got lung complaints.
They got flu.
They got pneumonia.
And I think, I fear, I mean, I'd love to believe in the curse of the Pharaohs but I'm afraid it was probably to do with the polluted air that actually caused it.
Is he all right?
Finally, there's Kit Pedler.
Now, I met Kit Pedler a couple of times.
He was a fascinating combination of hard scientist and interested in the paranormal.
The sort of high tech aspects of the tomb and the ancient mummy aspect of the tomb is very Kit Pedler, I think.
And then Gerry Davis, who'd been the story editor of Doctor Who shaped, I think, Kit Pedler's thing of paranormal/normal, hard science/soft science, mumbo
-jumbo/real science.
These were things that fascinated him.
I think the series really bears the stamp of Kit Pedler's obsessions with that.
And that's what hooks it into King Tut.
I wish when I met Kit Pedler and sat there opposite him with a cup of coffee, that I'd talked about King Tut.
I'm convinced he knew all about it.
He said he knew about the pyramids because he brought those into his lectures.
Frozen forever.
All their evil locked away with them.
And so it must remain.
This tomb is 500 years old and yet people can't remember what the Cybermen were like.
But we're humans, we're not like you.
You will obey.
It's the idea about what do we remember about history?
And in 500 years' time, will we actually remember the Holocaust?
We will survive.
That's why for me, "Tomb of the Cybermen" is one of the most historical Doctor Whos I've seen because it's about history and memory and the power of the past.
I suppose most excavators would confess to a feeling of awe, almost embarrassment, when they break into a tomb, closed and sealed by pious hands so many centuries ago.