Doctor Who releases have been blessed with an extraordinary amount of behind-the-scenes footage, particularly as you get into the 80s (presumably because fans on the scene were swift to squirrel everything to safety, since the Beeb itself was still chucking things away willy nilly at the time). Some releases include film trims, which play like some kind of art installation as you watch soundless, speckled film of scenes about to begin before they jump to the scene end, characters disappearing from frame in unintended jump cuts and light damage giving the whole thing a surreal sheen.
Or you can dive into the repeated takes of scenes themselves, usually represented by time-coded studio footage where retakes are necessitated by a forgotten line, a boom in shot, or very very occasionally because the director has time to request a slightly different version. Some of the later seasons now come with far more hours of raw material than of the episodes themselves; if you were so perversely inclined, you could cut together some stories almost entirely from alternate takes.
I’ll be honest, this is a bit hardcore for me, fascinated though I am by both Doctor Who and by television production. The reason is obvious: television production is a pretty boring process. Yes, you occasionally get to see Nicholas Courtney have a mini-tanty or Sylvester McCoy trip over a shrub, but more often you find yourself watching fifteen minutes of a static TARDIS sitting in a quarry because the second unit are waiting for the right light, or a lengthy close-up of the life draining out of an actor’s face while they wait for a special effect.
Sylvester McCoy’s regeneration scene is a different matter. Included as a stand-alone extra on The Collection: Season 24, it was the first thing I watched when mine arrived in the post, and I was glued to it.
Essentially, for the first time ever, this is a back-to-basics attempt to recreate the very first regeneration: a full frame high angle shot of the actor’s face mixed in with the new actor’s face with a bit of technical jiggery-pokery blurring the join – only, this time, it is not two different actors, but the same actor playing two different Doctors, so they are trying to line up the exact same face (though, because the first face is the wrong face, they hope to disguise it with the aforementioned jiggery-pokery and some eyebrow make-up).
Also, since 1966 they have somehow forgotten how to make this effect workable, because they have decided to do it with the camera at an absurd and unflattering from-the-chin angle completely zoomed into McCoy’s face. It’s partly the result of trying to do a single continuous shot from the moment Kate O’Mara enters the TARDIS, but once they’ve had three attempts at that fairly simple camera movement they’re stuck with it: the third take is the one and McCoy is told ‘just hold your position there Sylv’ while hands whip in to remove the last vestiges of the sixth Doctor and I, 35 years too late, scream at them to do another take and move the camera in rather than zoom, because whereas lining up two faces for a fairly wide-angle lens is a realistic proposition, lining up the same face while fully zoomed In requires an impossible level of precision. They assume that leaving McCoy lying there and whipping the wig off him will be fine, but an infinitesimal movement is enough to bring the faces wildly out of line, so by the time the make-up people have vigorously scrubbed the Colin Baker out of McCoy’s eyebrows they didn’t stand a chance.
What follows is a strange, mostly off-screen ballet of a production team trying to get two shots to line up, the frozen Colin-Baker-McCoy flashing up in double exposure every few seconds to remind us how impossible this task is, while McCoy is instructed to move his face this way or that and hands prod his face about in a futile attempt to try and help. As the technical car crash unfolds, there’s something hypnotic about the vulnerable figure of McCoy lying on the studio floor surrounded by this chaos. Eventually he gently suggests that if he could see what they were asking him to do he might have a better chance, which results in hasty agreement and a scurry to get a monitor into a position that he might be able to see. But for the most part he is impassive, professionally holding the same expression until they get the shot they need; it’s like a macrocosm of the turmoil he has let himself in for in the years ahead, both in the studio and beyond it. Poignantly, he begins the take dressed as the man who has just been a casualty of the same madness.
Next: ‘if you put one of everything along the bottom, I think your tips’ll go up…’
Talk To Rex 