The Visitation (Doctor Who)

The Visitation is the fourth serial of the 19th season in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in four twice-weekly parts from 15–23 February 1982.

Plot

At the manor home of a 17th-century family, some unwelcome visitors arrive.

In the console room, the Doctor is talking with Adric about the events of their previous adventure on Deva Loka (Kinda). Meanwhile, Nyssa is helping Tegan pack, as they plan to land back at Heathrow shortly after she left to join the Doctor (in Logopolis). Tegan and Nyssa enter the console room to find that they have landed at Heathrow... just 300-some years early. Tegan is distressed and storms out of the TARDIS.

The four gather outside the TARDIS and immediately smell sulphur and head off to find the source. They are then attacked by villagers, but escape. In the confusion, Adric drops his homing device to find the TARDIS and the group is separated. Richard Mace, a highwayman and proclaimed thespian, encounters the group and takes them to safety inside a barn.

While questioning Mace, they find out that some kind of comet recently landed nearby. The Doctor knows it was no "comet" and takes immediate interest in the necklace Mace is wearing. It is actually a bracelet used for prisoner control. The group begins searching the barn and comes across several power packs, and since they are far more fragile than the necklace, it means there were survivors. And so they set off to the nearby manor of the person who owns the barn.

No one answers the front door, so the Doctor and Nyssa find a way in through a window. While searching the manor, they find more power packs, gunpowder, and a mark from a high-energy weapon. The Doctor also notices that there is a wall where there shouldn’t be one. And while he continues his investigation of the wall, Nyssa heads to the front door and lets the others in. But when they return to the wall, the Doctor is nowhere to be found. And as the four stand there trying to figure out where he’s gone, a figure shuts and locks the door behind them.

The Doctor then appears through the wall and explains it is a holographic energy barrier. The group walks through and joins the Doctor. Once in the cellar, they notice the place smells of soliton gas. Also in the cellar are several caged rats and the device emitting the soliton gas. While the five are searching the room, the figure from before, an android, sneaks up on them. It succeeds in “stunning” Tegan and Adric, while the Doctor, Nyssa and Mace are forced to retreat.

The survivor is a Terileptil fugitive and interrogates Tegan and Adric about the Doctor. Meanwhile, the Doctor and the others find the Terileptil’s ship near the manor while they plan on how to deal with the android: A sonic booster set up in the TARDIS might just deal with it. As they leave the ship, a group of villagers, all with the same device Mace found, approach them. They demand that the Doctor come with them, and when he refuses they attack. The three run back into the ship, now under siege by the villagers. The Doctor blasts open the rear hatch of the ship and the group escapes into the forest to find the TARDIS. The controlled villagers followed them at a distance.

Back in the manor, Tegan and Adric have been placed in a locked room. While Nyssa heads back to the TARDIS to work on the sonic booster, the Doctor and Mace decide to question the local miller - who appears to be able to come and go from the manor with ease. Tegan and Adric eventually escape from the room and head up into the manor proper. Adric succeeds in jumping out a window before Tegan is recaptured by the android. Unable to solicit any response from the controlled miller, the Doctor and Mace decide to join Nyssa in the TARDIS. However, just as they are leaving the mill, they are confronted by real villagers and are about to be killed for being “plague carriers”.

The Terileptil still needs the Doctor and sends the controlled Headman of the village in to stop them. The villagers then throw the Doctor and Mace into a room in the mill. At the manor, the Terileptil has placed one of the bracelets on Tegan. And back at the TARDIS, Adric arrives and assists Nyssa in setting up the sonic booster. The Doctor succeeds in disabling two of the bracelets and the Terileptil dispatches the android to retrieve them.

Minutes later, the android, in the guise of the Grim Reaper, bursts into the mill, frightens off the villagers, and takes the Doctor and Mace back to the manor where they find Tegan under the control of the bracelet. The Doctor encounters the Terileptil, but his offer to take him off Earth is rejected. The Terileptil instead plans to kill everyone on Earth and take the planet over. Mace is also equipped with a bracelet and the Doctor is thrown in a room where the Terileptil destroys his sonic screwdriver. The Terileptil brings in a cage with a rat and explains his plan: he is going to use genetically enhanced plague carried on the rats to devastate the population. The Terileptil leaves the room and the controlled Tegan prepares to open the cage.

The Doctor overcomes Mace and Tegan usings some spare power packs. The Terileptil leaves for his base in the nearby city and sends the android to take control of the TARDIS. The Doctor, Tegan, and Mace escape from the room and search the Terileptil’s lab to find it completely empty. Mace tells the Doctor that the nearby city the Terileptil was referring to was London. The android arrives at the TARDIS and is successfully dealt with by the sonic booster Nyssa finished. Adric and Nyssa then move the TARDIS to meet the Doctor and the others at the manor.

Using the TARDIS scanner, the Doctor locates the Terileptil in London. The TARDIS rematerializes there and the five enter the building. With the Terileptil leader are two other Terileptils who get the jump on the Doctor and Mace. They manage to stop them, but the Terileptil leader's weapon starts to overload and detonates. The resulting explosion destroys the building and starts a raging fire. Mace stays behind to fight the blaze as the Doctor, Tegan, Nyssa and Adric leave in the TARDIS.

It is revealed that the fire is at Pudding Lane, the location where the Great Fire of London started.

Continuity

The opening sequence in the TARDIS follows on directly from Kinda. Since The Visitation was filmed before Kinda, the cast had to act out their characters' responses to the events of Kinda based solely on the script.

The explosion of the Terileptil leader's weapon is the cause of the Great Fire of London. At the end of Pyramids of Mars the Doctor says that he doesn't want to be blamed for causing a fire as he had 'had enough of that in 1666'.

The Doctor's sonic screwdriver, first seen in the 1968 Second Doctor serial, Fury from the Deep, was destroyed by the Terileptil leader in this story. This was on the direction of producer John Nathan-Turner, who felt that the tool was too easy a way of solving the Doctor's problems. Nathan-Turner vetoed a scene at the end of the story where the Doctor would simply get a replacement from a room full of the devices in the TARDIS. This was the last time the sonic screwdriver was seen in the series until its next appearance in the 1996 Doctor Who television movie.

Production

The working titles for this story were The Invasion Of The Plague Men and Plague Rats. The Terileptil mask marks the first use of animatronics in the series.

Writer Eric Saward originally created the character of Richard Mace for several radio plays broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in the 1970s.^[2] In these, the character is still an eccentric actor, but the plays are set around the 1880s (Jack the Ripper is mentioned).

Although this was the fourth story aired this season, it was actually the second to be produced, after Four to Doomsday.

The budget for the story was £44,000 per 25 minute episode.

25 spools of videotape were used for the production, each one costing £100 each. They were 1 inch 'quad' videotapes. The 'quad' comesfromthe recording machine was has fourheads on it.

A Sony U-matic tape (which was slightly lower quality than the broadcast tapes used for studio recording) was used to playback pre-filmed location material onto a monitor in the Terileptil cavern.

Filming took place between 5th May-8th 1981. Rehearsals for the first block of studio material began on 11th May 1981. Rehearsals for all studio material for this story took place at Televison Rehearsal Rooms, Room 201, Victoria Road, Acton, near to the BBC Visual Effects workshop.

Approximately £37,000 was spent on set building (including transport and construction costs).

Sarah Sutton arrived at Television Centre on the first filming day to be 'made-up' by the make-up department and slip into her costume at 6.30am. The cast and extras all needed to arrive and be in make-up and costume and ready to leave on the production coach by 8.00am.

The coach arrived at the story's main location, The Tithe Barn on Hurley High Street, 25 minutes late. Peter Davison travelled to the location in his own car, a Brown Volkwagon Scirocco.

The scene of the Doctor and Richard Mace approaching the Manor House for the first time involved a lengthy dolly track for the camera to move along. During this complicated shot, nearby lawn mowers and planes from Heathrow were heard, resulting in three takes of this scene before it was deemed suitable.

Due to union rules of the tiem, the BBC had to provide the cast and crew with meal breaks every five hours. For this production the location caterers provided three main courses to choose from, a dessert and choices of coffee or tea.

One location shot taken was achieved viathe method known as Day-For-Night. This entailed fitting a filter to the camera so no overtime and night-time shootinbg had to take place.

For the destruction of the Android by the sonic booster built by Nyssa, the actor Peter Van Dissel stood in the doorway of the Tardis bedroom set and shuddered and started to collapse. After moving from the set, a replica, built by the Visual Effects department, was moved into the same position on the set. Although the sameonthe outside, it was hollow. It had olesinthe backs of the legs, arms and body so explosives charges can be inserted for it's destruction.

The charges were gunpowder wrapped in linen tape and fixed into the correct places by plasticine.

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Make-Up Supervisor Carolyn Perry researched the look of the period by visiting the Museum of English Rual Life at Reading University.

Peter Davison has stated that The Visitation is one of his three favourite serials from his time on the programme.^[3]

Three 'glass-shots' were produced for use in the serial. This is an old-style technique, in use in the motion picture business since it's earliest days. A large sheet of glass mounted in a frame was placed between the camera and the set of Pudding Lane, built for pre-filming at BBC Ealing Film studios. The glass had additional upper stories of buildings and a nighttime skyline painted on it. The actors and set behind would be seen through the uncovered piece of glass sheet.

The second 'glass-shot' was achieved on location. To create the site of the crashed Terileptil spacecraft, a small section of the craft, containing the doors and frame were constructed and erected on location. For the wide shots,the rest of the craft,theimpact area and piles of earth were painted onto glass and lined-up with the doors. A 'glass-shot' was achieved in the electronic studio to the represent the roof and rafters of a barn set, in the studio recording at BBC Television Centre, Wood Lane, London.

The ray of the Terileptil and Android guns were achieved by Video Effects designer Dave Jervis. By stopping the videotape at the precise moment the ray is supposed to fire, he couldline up where the rayis supposed to fire from and make contact with. A special inlay camera, mounted over a light box, creates the shot. Two manilla envelopes were placed on the lightbox, with a gap between them that corresponds with the area where the beam should appear from and end. A sheet of card between the envelopes is pulled is briefly pulled away when the Terileptil or Android fired their weapons. The early digital image manipulation device, Quantel, was used near the end of the story during the scenes of the Android's destruction to 'shake' the picture.

Some of the scenery originated from other productions, including 'Dawson Watch and 'The Impressario'. At this time the BBC had large stores for Scenery, Prop, Costumes and Effects.

Electronic Studio Recording took place in Studio 3, BBC Television Centre, Wood Lane, Shepherd's Bush, London. Television Centre would be the regular studio home of the show (apart from location-only stories and those affected by strikes and asbestos removal) until the original series demise in 1989. The studio roughlymeasured 100 by 70 feet and would have multiple sets in place at one time. 200 Studio lights were used to light the multiplesets needed in the studio recordings. The studio recordings took place over five days beginning on 20th May 1981, with two scenes in the stables for episode two being shot first. The following nine scenes recorded were for episode three. Studio recordings were completed by 10pm. This was the regular finishing time atthisperiod,dueto strong union rules forbidding unscheduled overruns. Any overrun would have to be arranged with every single cast and crew member. If production reached 10 pm and recording was not completed the studio lights would be switched off and not switched on again unless agreement was reached with all parties. One minuteofstudio overrun was charged as fifteen minutes studio time.

Future award-winning costume designer Odile Dicks Mireaux was the BBC staff member allocated to this production. She allocated two-thirds of her costume budget

to creating the three Terileptils and the Android, reasoning that the 17 other characters that needed costumingcould come from the BBC's own costume department stock or any costumiers. after visiting others, suitable costumeswere foundin the stores of Berman's And Nathan's and the National Theatre. The Android was designed in a week.

Despite having access to the BBC facilities department, which had lists of buildings which had owners who would hire their properties for TV and film work, nothing on file was the right size to depict the Manor House needed, and more importantly, within a 30 mile drive of Television Centre. This was to make sure that all locations were within the 30 mile limit allowed before location filming would be classed as overnight stays, which would then costly for the production. Production Manager Roz Parker found a suitable location in Hurley, near Maidenhead.

The other locations found were Black Park, next to Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire,

Broadcast and reception

The story was repeated on BBC1 across four consecutive evenings from 15–18 August 1983, achieving viewing figures of 4.3, 4.6, 3.6 and 4.8 million viewers respectively.^[7]

At the time of original broadcast, the series as a whole was getting watched in 39 countries worldwide, with around 88 million viewers abroad and an average of 10 million in the domestic market.

Paul Cornell, Martin Day, and Keith Topping gave a favourable review of the serial in The Discontinuity Guide (1995), writing, "A good, hearty action romp, crisply written and engaging, although critics might say that it's too straight-forward. There's only one proper character (Richard Mace), which gives Peter Davison and Michael Robbins the space to turn in a pair of lovely performances. The end result is a stylish slice of pseudo-historical nonsense."^[8] In The Television Companion (1998), David J. Howe and Stephen James Walker called The Visitation "a very enjoyable story, and one of the highlights of the season". They praised the location filming, but noted a weakness was "Matthew Waterhouse's peculiar performance as Adric".^[9] In 2012, Patrick Mulkern of Radio Times said that the story was "pedestrian in places, [but] Saward does execute one or two dramatic flourishes". He said that Davison was growing into the role and the companions given something to do despite being "variable", and was mixed towards the design of the Terileptils.^[10] Reviewing the special edition DVD release for SFX, Nick Setchfield gave The Visitation three and a half out of five stars. He noted that it was a "throwback" and "built on capture-escape-capture storytelling, but it's brimful of oaky, shadowy 17th century atmosphere".^[11]

Commercial releases

In print

Doctor Who and the Visitation

Author	Eric Saward
Series	Doctor Who book: Target novelisations
Release number	69
Publisher	Target Books
Publication date	19 August 1982
ISBN	0-426-20135-3

A novelisation of this serial, written by Eric Saward, was published by Target Books in August 1982. Its cover was originally to be painted like the other Target Doctor Who novels, but an objection by Peter Davison's agent resulted in a photographic cover being used instead. This was the only Peter Davison story to have its novelisation titled as Doctor Who and the... in its original edition. An unabridged recording of the Target novelisation was released in 2012, read by Matthew Waterhouse .^[12]

A behind-the-scenes book following the production process of the story was printed by Andre Deutsch Limited in 1982.Text by Alan Road, illustrations by Richard Farley.

Home media

The Visitation was released on a VHS double pack with Black Orchid in July 1994. It was released on DVD in the United Kingdom on 19 January 2004, and used material from the 16 mm film prints, which still exist in the BBC Archives. A special edition of the story with additional features was released on DVD on 6 May 2013.

References

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Fifth Doctor

• The Visitation at BBC Online
• The Visitation at Doctor Who: A Brief History of Time (Travel)
• The Visitation at the Doctor Who Reference Guide

Reviews

• The Visitation reviews at Outpost Gallifrey
• The Visitation reviews at The Doctor Who Ratings Guide

Target novelisation

• On Target — The Visitation