Just one episode of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle survives - the very odd The Mystery of Cader Ifan, which I saw for the first time last week at Kaleidoscope's "The Play's the Thing" event in Birmingham. But Mark Jones' comprehensive study details production of the series, based on Hawkesworth's extensive archive at the BFI, paperwork in the BBC's Written Archives Centre, press reports from the time and interviews with cast and crew. It offers a wealth of detail and insight, with plenty of photographs, clippings and illustrations from the original stories helping to conjure a vivid sense of what has been lost.
As Jones explains, for rights reasons the series had only a limited release overseas, which means there is perilously little chance of copies of the missing episodes ever being found. Doctor Who fans can torture ourselves with the promise that some of the missing 97 episodes might yet be out there, somewhere. There's endless discussion of the various possible leads and of which episodes we'd most want returned - the Missing Episodes podcast is very good on this - which makes me fidgety with stress. It's almost refreshing to start from the basis that stuff has gone for good.
Among the fascinating things here is the influence of other anthologies of old stories, notably Granada's Saki (1962), Maupassant (1963) and The Liars (1966), in which the original sources were reworked so that characters would recur through the run. The BBC's head of serials, Gerald Savory, who'd worked on some of these series, advised Hawkesworth to do the same (pp. 17-19). We then seen the problems this caused for production, with clashing schedules for filming and rehearsals.
Some practicalities are surprising: on The Lift, it turned out to be easier to film in Paris than in Blackpool. And how extraordinary to see the viewing figures for a "successful" series on BBC Two of the time: an audience of 450,000 watched The Willow House School on 26 February 1967 (p. 154); just 250,000 watched The Mystery of Cader Ifan on 12 March (p. 194). Eleven of the 13 episodes were repeated on BBC One between August 1967 and June 1968, in a mixed up order that played havoc with the continuity of the recurring characters. It would be interesting to know the viewing figures, those these don't appear to survive.
Other things struck me because of overlaps with my own bits of research. In romantic episode The Chemistry of Love, one of the recurring characters, Tom Crabbe (Keith Buckley) goes to a posh reception disguised as the vice-principal of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, one Anton Mikhailovich Asimov. This character is not in Doyle's original story, "A Physiologist's Wife", so is an invention of Hawkesworth and the name of the invented scientist is striking. At the time that the title of the TV episode was changed (2 November 1966, p. 90), production was under way on a Doctor Who story that directly referenced the work of science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov: in Episodes 2 and 3 of The Power of the Daleks, the scientist Lesterson speaks of the Daleks having "positronic" brains. (In Episode 5 of The Evil of the Daleks (1967), positronic brains containing the "human factor" are added to three Daleks.)
Isaac Asimov was a well known figure, with several of his works adapted for British television: "Little Lost Robot" shown as part of Out of this World (1962), The Caves of Steel adapted for Story Parade (1964) and six stories adapted for Out of the Unknown (1965-69, four of them prior to the broadcast of The Chemistry of Love. Why would both Doctor Who and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle connect themselves to Asimov at roughly the same time? My guess is that both were in response to his epic Foundation novels winning the Hugo Award for Best All-Time Series at the Tricon world science-fiction convention in the first week of September 1966. Foundation was originally a series of short stories that the author then reworked, which may have appealed to Hawkesworth doing something with Doyle.
There's another connection to The Evil of the Daleks, in that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle filmed at Grims Dyke house on 20 January 1967 (p. 171), three months before the Daleks were there; I've added the details to my list of filming at Grims Dyke. There are further connections between Doctor Who and this Doyle series simply because several cast and crew worked on both. Richard Martin, interviewed by Jones on 12 July 2022, recalls using vaseline on "special fronts to the camera" (p. 57) to achieve a ghostly effect on the mummy seen in Lot 249, having pioneered this technique - to resistance from the crew, he says - on Doctor Who (for the strange atmosphere of planet Vortis in The Web Planet). Martin also recalls his working methods:
"I was always fairly well pressed to do the camera script in time. ... I used to go in my study at home and would consume most of a bottle of whisky. I'd be up to four o'clock in the morning, and maybe just have a little bit of rest before having to go in and deliver this script. The real problem was trying to get enough rehearsal time. I'm a rehearsal addict. I love seeing what the actors do with the script and capturing what they do correctly." (p. 57)
In assessing these lost episodes, Jones asks how closely they kept to Doyle's original stories, how effective they were as drama and in conjuring an atmosphere, and how sharply we should feel their loss. My sense is that he'd most like to see the spooky episodes returned. But if we're playing the game of which of thee lost stories I'd most like to see, I'm haunted by The Croxley Master.
Medical student (and recurring character) Philip Hardacre is a medical student, forced to work for the pompous, lazy Dr Lichfield as the only means to pay his own university fees. Then Philip learns of a boxer pulling out of a forthcoming fight. Encouraged by surgery maid Mary, Philip agrees to take the man's place and go 20 rounds against the "Croxley Master" for a prize of £100.
This "master" is the tough and dishonest Silver Craggs. Against all odds, and by fighting fairly, Philip knocks out his opponent. Whereupon Craggs' mistress, Anastasia, played by brilliant Alethea Charlton,
"storms into the ring and lands Philip a tremendous blow on the jaw which fells him to the boards. As Mary and Anastasia start fighting, the two heroes of the fight are forgotten, lying side by side, unconscious on the canvas." (p. 69)
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