The Myth of Fang Rock

Uncovering long-standing misapprehensions about the opening story of Doctor Who's fifteenth season.

by Paul Scoones

Working on production information subtitles for the Doctor Who: The Collection - Season 15 blu-ray set uncovered a curious fact about the origins of Horror of Fang Rock. The 1977 serial was a hastily written replacement for another story, but despite what many books and articles on the subject claim, the disruption caused by the substitution was in fact relatively minor.

The version of events that has appeared in print time and time again is that the first story made under new producer Graham Williams was The Witch Lords, a vampire tale written by Terrance Dicks, until that was cancelled at short notice at the behest of BBC management. That cancellation had a significant impact on production. The Invisible Enemy, due to have been recorded second, switched positions and was rushed into production as the first story. Studio bookings at the BBC’s Television Centre were lost forcing the production team to relocate to Birmingham to make Horror of Fang Rock, which had been written in time to be made second in production order.

The problem with this account is that it is largely incorrect. As the production documents show (or rather fail to show), this is not quite what happened.

The opening story was indeed planned to be a Terrance Dicks vampire story, but it wasn’t called The Witch Lords. Production documents consistently give the title as The Vampire Mutation. The Witch Lords appears to have been an early working title that was replaced by the time the scripts were commissioned. Dicks sometimes referred to the story by this name in interviews and it also appeared on a provisional Target books schedule. ¹

The Vampire Mutation was the second story in production order. Correspondingly the production was assigned the code 4V, though some early documents used the notation 4U. ² The code denoted a production slot, to facilitate the booking of crew and facilities. The alphabetical sequence corresponded to the order of production rather than broadcast. The Invisible Enemy, initially titled Invisible Invader, was coded 4T and was the first story made for the season. When Horror of Fang Rock replaced the vampire story, it inherited the 4V code.

Memos issued by Graham Williams show that on 17 November 1976, Derrick Goodwin was assigned to direct the first serial into production, commencing work on 31 January 1977, and Paddy Russell was hired two weeks later, on 29 November, for the second serial, commencing 14 March. Neither memo identifies the stories the directors would be working on though the typed memo for Russell has handwritten “4V”, possibly added later. Scripts for The Vampire Mutation and Invisible Invader were subsequently commissioned on 11 and 14 January 1977 respectively.

Terrance Dicks delivered the script for the first of four episodes on 25 January. At some point during the two weeks between this date and 7 February when the second episode script was due, work on the story was halted.

As Doctor Who producer Graham Williams related in an interview for InVision in 1990, after the script for the first episode was read by Head of Serials Graeme McDonald, he was asked to “please reconsider” proceeding with the story. ³ The reason for this directive was that the BBC was planning a drama adaptation of Bram Stoker’s classic novel Dracula to be broadcast at Christmas 1977 and McDonald didn’t want Doctor Who doing a story about vampires that might be perceived as sending up the high-profile production. ⁴

Curiously, Williams indicated in InVision that The Vampire Mutation was going to be made first and would have been directed by Derrick Goodwin. Due to the loss of the vampire story, The Invisible Enemy “had to be brought forward”, and that in doing so, “failed in the belief of matching the director to the script.” Williams said that he had wanted Goodwin “to do the first story because I felt he could bring a fresh eye to the old, traditional Gothic horror story”. Instead, Goodwin had to direct The Invisible Enemy, described by the producer as “the most technically complex Doctor Who there had ever been up to that point.” ⁵

Williams’ recollection of what occurred is contradicted by the paperwork prepared in 1977. Prior to the decision to stop work on The Vampire Mutation, bookings for the BBC’s Television Film Studios in Ealing had already been issued for that story, dated 20 January, with the documents bearing Paddy Russell’s name as director. Russell confirmed in a 1998 interview that she was initially hired to direct The Vampire Mutation and had the opportunity to read the abandoned script for the first episode. ⁶

If, as Williams claimed, his intention had been for Goodwin rather than Russell to direct the vampire story, this suggests that there might have been a mix-up in the bookings for the two directors.

Once Dicks was informed that he needed to stop working on The Vampire Mutation, he hastily devised a replacement idea prompted by script editor Robert Holmes’ suggestion to set it in a lighthouse. Dicks wrote the four scripts for Horror of Fang Rock during February and March, delivering them by 28 March in time to meet the originally scheduled production dates. The Vampire Mutation was not cancelled outright but held in reserve with the intent to reschedule it for a later season. This did not happen under Graham Williams’ watch, but incoming new producer John Nathan-Turner liked the script and commissioned a revised version from Dicks in December 1979. The story was screened in late 1980 as State of Decay.

While State of Decay was partly filmed on location at Burnham Beeches in Buckinghamshire, it appears that The Vampire Mutation was going to be made entirely in studio. The bookings for filming sequences for the story at Ealing mentioned above were for the first two weeks in May. This would have likely included the forest scenes. This arrangement was not uncommon; in recent years, Planet of Evil, The Brain of Morbius and The Face of Evil all featured ‘exterior’ sequences shot entirely within the confines of a studio. The first of the two weeks in May was used to shoot Horror of Fang Rock’s sequences on the rocks outside the lighthouse in studio at Ealing. This is clear and incontrovertible evidence that the production was not delayed or swapped with another story.

A booking for filming at Ealing also made with Derrick Goodwin’s name attached as director on 1 February, to be shot in late March. This was subsequently cancelled in favour of recording on video at Television Centre.

Horror of Fang Rock was unusual in that video recording took place in the BBC’s drama studio at Pebble Mill in Birmingham rather than at Television Centre in London. While no reason is provided for the change of venue in the production documents, there is nothing to indicate that it was a consequence of the change of story. The production of Horror of Fang Rock was not delayed, so it seems unlikely that the originally booked studio dates for 4V would have been lost or cancelled when the scripts, which in any case were still being written, changed. It is feasible to conclude that had The Vampire Mutation gone ahead as planned, it would have been made in Birmingham.

During February Graham Williams attended a planning meeting with Birmingham personnel to discuss technical requirements for recording at Pebble Mill. His detailed memo, dated 24 February, itemises the discussion points from this meeting and addresses the issues involved in mounting the production outside the usual London studios, but conveys no sense of an urgently arranged relocation.

So, if the change of story wasn’t to blame, why did recording take place in Birmingham with all the logistical problems that the relocation entailed? Unfortunately, the documents do not offer an answer, but it is possible to make an educated guess. Horror of Fang Rock’s second recording block took place during the week of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee celebrations, with Jubilee Day itself, 7 June, being one of the three recording days that week. Studio space in London may have been reserved for coverage of the Jubilee, even if, in the event it appears not to have been used for this purpose. Another explanation is that Doctor Who was being used to test the limits of the drama production facilities at Pebble Mill. John Nathan-Turner, who was Production Unit Manager on Horror of Fang Rock, claimed that there was also a “political reason” behind the move to Birmingham, as it gave Pebble Mill the justification for upgrading their equipment and facilities. ⁷

On the Season 15 blu-ray, Louise Jameson says that the reason the story had to be made in Birmingham was because of a strike, but this notion is not supported by any of the available evidence.⁸

The Invisible Enemy was recorded first but broadcast second. The story was not rescheduled or rushed into production and, as the documents show, was recorded on its original studio dates scheduled before issues arose with The Vampire Mutation.

The reason why The Invisible Enemy rather than Horror of Fang Rock (or The Vampire Mutation) was made first is unclear, but this may have been due to studio allocation. If, as appears to be the case, the first story into production was always going to be made in London and the second in Birmingham, it made good sense for The Invisible Enemy with its anticipated exceptionally heavy special effects requirement, to benefit from the more technically equipped production facilities available in London.

There is no suggestion that The Invisible Enemy would however have opened the season in broadcast order. The absence of K-9 in Horror of Fang Rock would have been reasonably easy to accommodate with a simple line insertion explaining that the newly acquired robot dog will remain inside the TARDIS. The most reliable indicator of the production team’s intentions is the colour of Louise Jameson’s eyes. The actor had worn contact lenses during the previous season to make her naturally blue eyes look brown. Leela has blue eyes in The Invisible Enemy, with the eye colour alteration occurring in Horror of Fang Rock. Nothing in the documents, storyline or scripts for The Invisible Enemy indicates that Leela’s eyes were to change colour in that story. It seems likely that the change was originally due to occur in The Vampire Mutation.

How then did many accounts of the making of Horror of Fang Rock get these details so wrong? Working on the blu-ray production information text allows access to a wealth of production paperwork sourced from the BBC Written Archive at Caversham. Many of these documents are included as PDFs on the discs. Reference books and articles written in the years before access was granted to this invaluable resource were mainly based on anecdotal accounts and secondary sources.

The misapprehensions surrounding Horror of Fang Rock appear to originate with InVision. The fanzine had remarkable access to Graham Williams in the months preceding his untimely death in August 1990. The former producer provided the fanzine with extensive and candid recollections of his time working on Doctor Who. As previously observed, it was Williams who asserted in the publication that The Invisible Enemy was brought forward to occupy the slot vacated by The Vampire Mutation. In the absence of access to production documents, there would have been no cause to question Williams’ memories of what had occurred.

Issue 24 (1990) noted in its ‘Production’ feature that "the season's timetable had been knocked back several weeks by the cancellation of The Witch Lords, so the originally-established date for the director to join was scrapped as well”. The Invisible Enemy was brought forward to first in production order, but couldn’t occupy the same bookings and had to be fitted in. The London studio bookings for Horror of Fang Rock were lost, forcing a move to Birmingham. An interview with Terrance Dicks in the same issue again alleged that his vampire story was meant to be first into production and was rescheduled to second in production order. Notably this part was not in quotes, indicating that this particular piece of information may have been context added by the interviewer rather than from Dicks himself. ⁹

The Handbook: The Fourth Doctor (1992) referred to the story as The Witch Lords, with a working title of The Vampire Mutations, noting that the story “had to be dropped at virtually the last minute”, and “completely disrupted the production schedule”. The Invisible Enemy “had to be recorded first, and consequently ended up looking rather rushed”, and that Horror of Fang Rock had to be recorded in Birmingham as no studio space was available at Television Centre. This information can also be found in other books by the same authors including The Seventies (1994), three versions of The Television Companion (1998, 2003 and 2013), and the compilation editions of The Handbook (2005 and 2016). ¹⁰

The Doctors: 30 Years of Time Travel (1994) stated that “The studio space that had been booked for The Witch Lords had been lost”, and, as Television Centre’s studios were fully booked, “director Paddy Russell settled for” Pebble Mill in Birmingham.

The Doctor Who Yearbook 1996 (1995) discussed The Witch Lords “also known as The Vampire Mutation”, which “was vetoed at a late stage”, and that the season’s production order was changed to allow time for a replacement to be written and prepared for recording.

In the first part of his series of memoirs in Doctor Who Magazine issue 233 (1995), John Nathan-Turner claimed that The Invisible Enemy “was pulled forward in production due to the abandonment of a vampire yarn by Terrance Dicks.”

The Invisible Enemy Archive in Doctor Who Magazine issue 271 (1998) reported that the season’s second planned serial was brought forward to be made first because of the loss of the vampire story. The Archive for Horror of Fang Rock in issue 319 (2002) elaborated on this, claiming that Invisible Invader with the production code 4U, was moved to occupy The Vampire Mutation’s Ealing filming dates and the vampire story was brought forward. Plans then changed so that The Invisible Enemy was again first into production. These details are retained in the revised Archives text included in The Complete History volume 27 (2017).

Doctor Who Magazine’s The Complete Fourth Doctor Volume One (2004) noted, in the Take It To The Limit feature, that to replace The Vampire Mutation, The Invisible Enemy “was pulled forward into the first production slot of the season”.

The original set of production information text subtitles included on the Horror of Fang Rock DVD (2005) stated that while The Invisible Enemy was due to be recorded first, for a time it switched position with The Witch Lords, and and that The Invisible Enemy was moved back to first in production order when problems arose with The Witch Lords. This reshuffling meant that there was no longer studio space available at Television Centre.¹¹

About Time 4 (2005) claimed that “The second story of the season, The Invisible Enemy was produced first so that Fang Rock could be hurriedly prepared – which partially explains why so much of The Invisible Enemy looks half finished.” This information was omitted in the revised About Time 4 Volume 2 (2023).

As observed in Robert Holmes – A Life in Words (2013), The Vampire Mutation had been scheduled as the first story to be made, and when Dicks had to write a replacement, the production slot was instead given to what became The Invisible Enemy.

Space Helmet for a Cow (2015) noted that by the time Horror of Fang Rock was commissioned as a replacement for The Witch Lords, the serial had lost its production slot and had to be relocated to Birmingham.

Many of these publications appear to echo the same erroneous information. It seems probable that InVision was the source referenced by these other publications.

Perhaps the most unfortunate thing about the prolonged misapprehensions surrounding the story is that in making the claim that there was a significant delay in production because of the vampire story cancellation, it underplays the extent of Terrance Dicks’ achievement. Dicks often said of Horror of Fang Rock that he had written it as a hasty replacement. “I’m good in a crisis - if things go wrong, I can buckle down and sort things out…”, he once asserted. ¹²

The most remarkable fact of the matter is that Dicks wrote a replacement set of scripts from scratch in such a short space of time that the production team had them in hand to proceed on the initially scheduled production dates.

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With grateful thanks to Peter Anghelides, Jeremy Bentham, Richard Bignell, David Brunt, Chris Chapman, Marcus Hearn, David J. Howe, Andrew Pixley, James Cooray Smith, Stephen James Walker and Martin Wiggins for their feedback.

Doctor Who: The Collection – Season 15 Blu-ray is available now, including newly created production information text subtitles for Horror of Fang Rock written by Paul Scoones.

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1 The International Science Fiction Yearbook (1978), featured a release schedule of Target Doctor Who books, noting the following for March 1978: Mar Terrance Dicks Dr Who and the Vampire Mutation, Dr Who and the Witchlords, (Target). The first of these titles was likely a replacement for the second. Doctor Who and the Horror of Fang Rock occupied the same slot in the schedule, indicating that Dicks delivered the novelisation within the timeframe for the story it replaced. ^↩

2 The practice of using “U” was discontinued at this point, having been used in previous cycles (U, UU and UUU), because of the risk of misreading it as V, particularly on handwritten documents. This misinterpretation may account for why “4U” can be found on some items of paperwork relating to serial 4V. ^↩

3 ‘Armageddon Peddler’, an interview with Graham Williams, InVision issue 26, p.8. ^↩

4 Count Dracula, written by Gerald Savory, directed by Philip Saville, and produced by Morris Barry, was broadcast on BBC Two on 22 December 1977. This was three months after the final episode of Horror of Fang Rock screened. ^↩

5 InVision issue 26, p.9. ^↩

6 Interview with Paddy Russell by Peter Griffiths in Doctor Who Magazine issue 266 (dated 1 July 1998), p.31. ^↩

7 John Nathan-Turner interview, InVision issue 27, October 1990, p.14. ^↩

8 Louise Jameson made this claim on three separate features, all newly produced for the blu-ray set: Behind the Sofa: Horror of Fang Rock (at 06:30), Inside the Lighthouse - Making Horror of Fang Rock (at 01:30) and Louise Jameson In Conversation (at 40:29). ^↩

9 Peter Anghelides, the co-editor of InVision, considers that this part does not read as if it paraphrased something Dicks said, and believes it was more likely added as context for the interview. ^↩

10 The authors intend to correct the record regarding these details in forthcoming editions. ^↩

11 The relevant section of info text appears on the DVD in Part Three, from 12:44 to 14:21. ^↩

12 Interview with Terrance Dicks by Peter Griffiths in Doctor Who Magazine issue 272 (dated 16 December 1998), p.8. ^↩

Roger Noel Cook

I'm saddened to learn that Roger Noel Cook, the regular writer on the Doctor Who comic strip in TV Comic from 1966 to 1970, has died. 

I encountered Roger when I was researching my book, The Comic Strip Companion 1964-1979, a guide to the Doctor Who stories from TV Comic.

We made contact through Barracudas guitarist and songwriter Robin Wills, who had interviewed Roger on his blog in February 2009. Roger was talking about his music career but made a passing reference to having written Doctor Who, so this had to be the same man whose name frequently appeared in recently obtained BBC correspondence files concerning the comic strip. Having been alerted in February 2010 to the existence of the interview by fellow researcher Richard Bignell, I contacted Wills, who kindly forwarded my request on to Cook. Roger got in touch, and we struck up a regular correspondence via email.

Looking back through the emails from February and March 2010 when we were writing back and forth nearly every day, I’m most struck by how enthusiastically “Roger the Dodger” or “The Madman from Marbella”, but usually just “Rog”, responded to my many questions about his work. His memories were hazy, which was understandable given that four decades had passed since he’d stopped writing for TV Comic in 1970. He told me that, “My recollections are hopelessly scattered”, but he was keen to provide whatever details he could recall. He hadn’t kept copies of his work, so I sent him scans of the comic strips from TV Comic. He enjoyed seeing these, revisiting them for the first time since their original publication. He was astonished too when I reunited him with copies of his letters and synopses from the correspondence files held by the BBC.

One of Roger Noel Cook's letters to Roy Williams at BBC Enterprises, dated 10 December 1969. He was delighted to see this again, observing, "Not many writers would refer to themselves as 'The Idiot'! ... That's my signature, like a spider on drugs."

One of the most interesting things I learned from Rog was that he was just 19 years old when he was hired by TV Publications (later Polystyle), who had offered him “a very attractive deal”. This meant that when we were corresponding, he was only in his mid-60s. He was fulsome in his praise for artist John Canning (who started illustrating the strip around the same time Rog began writing it). He shared with me his impressions of what it was like to work for TV Comic. He described the staff as “church going Christians” and as such didn’t feel as if he fitted in – “I must’ve slipped through the net” - but nevertheless considered them “lovely people to work with”, pointing out the stark contrast with his later lucrative career as a publisher of porn videos and magazines.

As Rog pointed out, Doctor Who was just one of many regular weekly strips he worked on in the latter half of the 1960s. TV Comic did not include creator credits, so it was a revelation to discover that Rog had been the regular writer on Tom & Jerry, Popeye, Beetle Bailey, Orlando and Ken Dodd’s Diddymen, amongst others. He was phenomenally prolific, estimating that he wrote on average about 20 scripts a week, half for TV Comic and half written freelance for IPC. “All my scripts were written at enormous speed,” Roger told me. “I would be embarrassed to write anything at that speed now. I would just write what was in my head at the time. I didn't plot and I didn't re-write. I just wrote ‘em as they came to me.”

One of Roger Noel Cook's many Doctor Who strips (TV Comic issue 864 cover dated 6 July 1968).

He was proud of the fact that he earned so much from his work that he was able to purchase an E-type Jag, inspired by John Canning who owned a brand-new Mark 10 Jag. Rog had a life-long passion for cars, and told me all about his impressive collection of Bentleys. He was excited to be working with his son, an award-winning animator, on launching an online Formula 1 car racing game with David Coulthard as a backer.

His emails conveyed so much energy and enthusiasm. They were unfiltered streams of consciousness. He’d answer my questions about the Doctor Who strip as best he could, but would often go off on tangents taking in what he’d been up to that week (“Played tennis in the rain yesterday… lost to 16 year olds”); observations about his life in Marbella (his neighbours, he informed me, included “premier league soccer stars who can barely communicate, Saudi Princes, Russian oil magnates, gangsters and stockbrokers who wrecked the globe's financial system...”), and observations about his time in the music and porn industry (“I wasn't offensive until I started to edit Men Only and Club International. Then I learned how to upset people - the establishment and just about everyone everywhere except a few million readers every month.”)

Roger Noel Cook with one of his prized Bentleys, at his villa in Marbella.

Our lively, informal correspondence was a welcome distraction for me as at the time my mother was hospitalized with terminal cancer. I didn’t share this with Rog until after she’d passed away in April 2010, and then only to explain why I’d been late in replying to his last email. I was touched by his sympathetic message of condolence, sharing that he’d lost his own mother just a year earlier.

I reconnected with Rog in late 2012 to let him know that The Comic Strip Companion had been published. He read my book and thought it was “an amazing piece of work of entertainment history”, which is a wonderful endorsement from the man responsible for creating so many of the stories I’d written about in that volume.

Rog was excited to share with me that he was planning to make a movie adaptation of his graphic novel called The Devil’s Detail, with Richard Senior attached as director (Senior had recently directed the Doctor Who story Let’s Kill Hitler) and the then-current Doctor Matt Smith approached to star in it. I don’t think this got anywhere, but his passion for the project was plainly evident.

The last time we exchanged emails was in April 2018. Rog’s name had come up in something I was researching, and I wanted to check a minor detail with him. Typically, his enthusiastic reply was peppered with fascinating observations and anecdotes about his career.

Read John Freeman's tribute to Roger Noel Cook on Down the Tubes.

Excavating Battlefield

Doctor Who: The Collection - Season 26 blu-ray set was released in January 2020. I was commissioned to write the production information text for the season's opening story, Battlefield.

Battlefield was my eleventh set of production info text, and the third for ‘The Collection’ blu-ray boxed sets. My previous blu-ray work included Earthshock and The Trial of a Time Lord. The latter was a collaboration with another writer on all 14 episodes that consumed a great deal of time throughout the first quarter of 2019. Following that experience, I welcomed the prospect of working on a story with fewer episodes and comparatively untroubled production development. I’m grateful that I’ve been able to continue to do this work without having to venture beyond my home in Auckland, New Zealand.

Battlefield holds a special place in my memories. I first saw the story one Saturday afternoon in early October 1989 in the company of a small group of fan friends. An off-air VHS recording of all four episodes had arrived that morning via airmail from the UK (ten days after it was broadcast). During the preceding two years I had been watching VHS recordings of Doctor Who that had yet to screen in New Zealand but always by borrowing the tapes from friends after they had already watched them. Battlefield marked the first time that all of us watched Doctor Who for the first time together.

Whereas the last time I’d seen Battlefield was in 2008 when it was released on DVD. In early April 2019 when I started work on Battlefield, I hadn’t watched the story in over a decade. I was therefore coming to it with relatively fresh eyes. On my first run through in preparation for writing the info text, I made notes on anything I spotted that might be worth covering in the subtitles.

The story is loaded with references to Arthurian legends of course, which would all need to be explained, but there are also numerous call-backs to the series’ own mythology with the return of UNIT, Bessie, and Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart.

While I needed to explain the numerous bits of Arthurian lore that crop up in Battlefield, I didn’t want to spend more time than was necessary on researching this complex topic, especially given the relatively limited space available to me in the info text. My university degree in the 1980s had included a paper on early English history which gave me a basic understanding of the subject, but I needed to read up on the details. 

There are many contradictory versions of the legends of Arthur. Battlefield doesn’t follow one text but rather borrows bits and pieces from a wide variety of different sources. I was delighted to find in the stacks at my local library a copy of The New Arthurian Encyclopedia, edited by Norris J. Lacy, which documents the origins of the various fragments of the legend, helpfully arranged by topic. This was invaluable as Battlefield scriptwriter Ben Aaronovitch was on record as having used Lacy’s book for research. The library’s copy was a revised and updated edition from the 1990s. Curiously, one of the additions is a write-up about Battlefield in a section about the depiction of Arthurian legend in television series. (The authors seem to have been unaware that one of Aaronovitch’s sources was close to home.)

The New Arthurian Encyclopedia, edited by Norris J. Lacy (1996).

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During my initial watch-through something that caught my attention was a scene in the first episode where Elizabeth Rowlinson (played by June Bland) is sitting in the bar of the Gore Crow hotel reading a book written in braille. Thanks to the improved picture definition, it was possible to make out sections of the braille text. My expectation was that it was just a random publication that the BBC happened to have in their prop stores. What was the book? I couldn’t find anything about Battlefield that answered this question. The script’s directions simply note that Elizabeth is reading ‘a braille book’.

Despite being able to make out parts of the braille text I didn’t have any success trying to decipher it using translation websites. I then sent an email to the Blind Foundation of New Zealand asking for help. I promptly received a reply from Maria Stevens, the Foundation’s Accessible Formats Manager. Maria examined the screenshots I sent her and was able to interpret a few short fragmentary phrases from the text (for example: “…high in a stone of marble…”; “… this, he blessed him and said, …”). These were enough to positively identify the text. Remarkably, it wasn't just some random braille book but Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D'Arthur and had therefore been specially selected to fit the story’s subject. It’s the discovery of brand new, hitherto undocumented facts like this that is for me the single most exciting aspect of the job.

Elizabeth Rowlinson (June Bland) reads the opening sentences of Book IV, Chapter VIII  of Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur.

Having researched many 1980s episodes there was something slightly poignant about getting to write about the last on-screen appearance of the 1983-89 version of the TARDIS console room. In doing so, I got to debunk a commonly repeated misconception about this scene. It is often suggested in articles about the story that the room is in darkness to help disguise the fact that the usually rigid walls have been replaced with a cloth cyclorama, but in fact this lighting effect is specified in the script.

In earlier drafts of the script, Peter Warmsly is accompanied by a large, slobbering dog. The animal, written out before production commenced, was called Cerebus. At first glance, the name looked to be a typographical error. In Greek mythology, the dog ‘Cerberus’ guards the entrance to the underworld, whereas ‘Cerebus’ is an aardvark from the titular comic strip. If this was a typographical error it was a remarkably consistent one, as the name remained the same throughout the scripts. I decided that as with other instances in the story (Avallion for Avalon, for example), the name was likely intended as a variation on a commonly accepted spelling. Curiously, Marc Platt’s novelisation reinstates the dog and names him Cerberus, so perhaps it was a misspelling after all.

Another head-scratching moment comes when the Doctor orders a drink of water from the hotel bar. There’s an unscripted moment of business when Sylvester McCoy holds up his glass and scrutinizes its contents before taking a drink. My initial interpretation was that it is a response to a line earlier in the same scene about the hotel’s beer getting an entry in the CAMRA guide. McCoy is making a visual joke out of treating the water with the same level of appraisal that might be accorded to Arthur’s Ale. My editor suggested an entirely different take on this, however, proposing that it was instead a topical reference to concerns over contamination of drinking water which was a major issue in 1989. Fortunately, there was enough time on screen at this point to offer both explanations.

The Doctor scrutinizes his drink.

A criticism frequently levelled at the story is the sequence where the armoured Ancelyn is blown straight up in the air by a grenade and crashes through the wall of the hotel’s barn. This looks absurd, but an examination of the scripts reveals that this would have made sense if the script directions had been followed. As written, the knights including Ancelyn were envisioned as wearing technologically advanced armour, perhaps not unlike that of Iron Man. On screen the knights are instead dressed in traditional medieval-style armour. If Ancelyn had been wearing powered armour that gave him the ability to fly, then the oft-mocked sequence makes a great deal more sense. A remnant of this original intention makes it into the finished story’s dialogue when Ace asks, “Is it an android?” when first sighting Ancelyn in his armour.

The knight Ancelyn (Marcus Gilbert) in his decidedly not technologically-advanced-looking armour.

Another example of a lack of attention paid to script directions comes in the sequence when Mordred (Christopher Bowen) conducts the ritual to summon Morgaine (Jean Marsh) from another dimension. He lights up an eight-sided shape on the ground. This was meant to have been an octagram, an eight-pointed star sometimes used to invoke magic. Due to an apparent misreading, the shape was instead realised as an octagon!

Octagram, not octagon!

Part of the brief for the info text is to cover the career highlights of key cast members. Researching the cast for this story yielded some interesting details, such as the fact that two of its actors later auditioned for the role of the Eighth Doctor, and another went on to a prestigious directing career working on such programmes as Luther, Being Human, and Fear the Walking Dead. It was a sobering moment while researching the career of Dorota Rae, the Polish actress who plays the UNIT helicopter pilot Lavel, to discover that she had died mere months earlier.

Whenever the opportunity presents itself, I like to slip a mention of New Zealand into the subtitles. Obviously, there needs to be a justifiable, legitimate reason for doing so. Battlefield is the third story in which I’ve managed to do this. According to the script, Ace was to have disparagingly referred to the Brigadier as “Colonel Blimp”, which allowed me to explain that the 1930s cartoon character was the creation of New Zealander David Low, for London’s Evening Standard.

The Doctor’s speech about the horrors of nuclear war presented an opportunity to do something creative with the subtitles. The scene features shots of a countdown display showing the seconds remaining until destruction. In an early edit of the recorded material, McCoy's speech was reduced in length, removing around 13 seconds. The cut meant however that the counter was no longer in synch. 

Watching the clock!

The production documentation shows that this had not escaped the attention of producer John Nathan-Turner, who wrote to director Michael Kerrigan advising that this was something that needed to be fixed. “Whenever we have countdowns on Doctor Who, our younger viewers tend to count with the clock,” Nathan-Turner wrote. “If the little horrors are counting then they should reach number 1 at the same time as our visuals.” Kerrigan fixed this by replacing the shots of the counter. Inspired by Nathan-Turner’s words, my subtitles invite viewers to count along. Is the countdown timed correctly though? Try it and find out!

An earlier version of this article was first published in issue 510 of Celestial Toyroom, the fanzine of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society.

About a Book

This piece originally appeared in Behind the Sofa: Celebrity Memories of Doctor Who. I wrote it shortly after my Mum, Janet Elayne Scoones, died on 6 April 2010. I've republished it here to mark the tenth anniversary of her passing. Miss you, Mum.

It is 1975.

I’m seven years old, sitting on the step that connects the living room at the front of our house to the passage at the rear. Mum comes over and says that she has a book for me.

It is a Doctor Who book, with a man, a dinosaur, a terrifying-looking lizard man and an exploding volcano on the cover.

I know a bit about Doctor Who. It is a mysterious and scary television programme I’ve recently seen for the first time. Mum likes Doctor Who. She grew up watching the show. It’s okay to be scared when Doctor Who is on because she watches with me.

Mum bought the book for herself but after reading thought I might like it. I’ve never read a book this long before. There are some pictures to help explain things, but most pages just have words and the writing looks tiny.

On the back of the book Mum has neatly crossed out a single word with a black felt-tipped pen: 

“… Tyrannosaurus rex, the biggest, most savage mammal which ever trod the earth!” 

Whoever wrote that got it wrong, Mum tells me. Dinosaurs were not mammals. 

Mum thinks I should try reading the book by myself. If Mum thinks I can do it, I must be able to.

I start reading, trying to finish a chapter a day. I take the book to school. I read it during lunchtime in the classroom on a rainy day while eating peanut butter sandwiches. The story is enthralling and terrifying in equal measure.

The bit with Morka watching Fur Under Nose, Frock Coat and Silver Buttons is odd and unfathomable. Major Barker and Masters getting sick and succumbing to a deadly virus is terrifying. I read the book through again, several times.

Soon after, I discover that my local library has other Doctor Who books. I read them all. I’m well and truly hooked.

It is 2010.

I’m 42 years old, standing in front of a group of mourners who have gathered to remember and farewell Mum.

I speak of how Mum inspired me to set out on the journey that led to where I am now. My life-long fascination with Doctor Who has led to professional work associated with the series. I am a freelance writer, working for the BBC on production notes subtitles for the DVDs and writing a book about the comic strips.

It all started with my Mum and a book called Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters.

Originally published in Behind the Sofa: Celebrity Memories of Doctor Who, edited by Steve Berry (Matador, 2012, reissued by Gollancz, 2013).

Unearthing Earthshock

Doctor Who: The Collection - Season 19 blu-ray set was released in December 2018. I was commissioned to write the production information text for the season's penultimate story, Earthshock.

Eight minutes into the second episode of Earthshock, there’s a continuity error hidden in plain sight. It’s initially on screen for just four seconds and reappears in four even shorter shots over the next half-minute. Blink and you might miss it.

The Cybermen have remotely-activated their bomb hidden in the caves on Earth. The Doctor is inside the TARDIS frantically working to block the signal to prevent the bomb’s detonation. The tension mounts as the action cuts back and forth between the TARDIS, the Cybermen and the bomb.

But wait - there’s something not quite right about that bomb. Perched on top of the device is the magnetic clamp device from the TARDIS toolkit. An item that the Doctor is seen fixing to the top of the bomb just after the nine-minute mark. A full minute after it is first seen sitting on top of the bomb!

The Cyber bomb, with the Doctor's magnetic clamp in place on top.

Later, the Doctor places the clamp on the bomb.

I’ve viewed Earthshock a lot over the past three and a half decades. I think it’s one of Peter Davison’s best stories. Each time I've watched, the mistake with the bomb has completely passed me by. As it undoubtedly did for the production crew at the time and has subsequently done for countless viewers. I checked reference books, magazines and websites that contain lists of such things, and not one of them makes a mention of this error.

I only noticed it because I was paying exceptionally close attention to the story. I was making notes for the production information text commentary (or ‘info text’) I wrote for the Season 19 blu-ray set in 2018.

Info text is just one of the many special features included on the ‘classic’ series Doctor Who blu-rays, and the DVDs before them. The text appears on screen as subtitles, but rather than transcribed dialogue it provides a commentary about the story’s production. The text points out pertinent, specific details about moments in the episodes as they appear, as well as general information about how, when and where the story was made.

With all of the entertaining special features on the wonderful new blu-ray sets, the info text tends to get a bit overlooked. Which is a shame, because this feature delivers a lot of interesting new information that you won't find elsewhere.

In some cases, the text that originally appeared on the DVDs has undergone only minor revisions for the blu-ray collections, but certain stories have been given brand new info text subtitles. The Season 19 blu-ray has new info text for three stories: Four to Doomsday, Black Orchid and Earthshock. I was commissioned to write the text for the Cyberman story.

I previously worked on the Doctor Who DVDs, writing info text for eight stories released in the latter half of the range. I mainly covered 1980s stories. I’m particularly interested in this decade of Doctor Who as a researcher and as a fan of the series. When the DVD range wound down around 2013, I thought that I’d written my last lot of info text. I was surprised and delighted to be invited back to work on the blu-rays.

I approached Earthshock with a little trepidation. It had been five years since I’d last written a set of info text, and I had to re-familiarise myself with what was involved in the process. I was aware too that the story didn’t appear to have gone through any significant alterations during its development. I’d never before worked on a story with such a close match between what appears in the rehearsal scripts and on-screen. There were no early script drafts or major rewrites, and no deleted scenes. Such material offers a wealth of detail to discuss in the info text. Part of the challenge I faced with Earthshock was to find other aspects to discuss in the subtitles.

The work involves viewing the story with fresh eyes. I work using timecoded copies of the episodes in order to specify the exact moment a subtitle appears and disappears on screen. Because of the precision involved in placing subtitles around shot changes, my preferred approach (which I must add isn’t necessarily that used by other info text writers), is to start with a slow, close watch through each episode noting down the exact timecode (measured in 25ths of a second), when each new shot commences. Earthshock has an exceptional number of these per episode, ranging between 167 shots (for Part One) and 245 shots (for Part Two). It takes me most of a day to work through a single episode. I’m not just noting down timecodes. I also use this slow-time viewing to annotate a copy of the script with any observations that I think are worthy of inclusion in the info text. The benefit to this stop-start scrutiny is that otherwise overlooked details, such as the aforementioned continuity error with the bomb, tend to spring into focus.

It was while doing this slow watch-through that I noticed an error with the life form scanner that appears in Part One. While Lieutenant Scott and his party are exploring the caves, on the surface Walters is tasked with monitoring their progress. Each individual is represented by a dot of light, which winks out when that person is killed. When first seen, the screen shows a cluster of 13 dots, representing Professor Kyle, Lieutenant Scott and eleven troopers. Over the course of the episode smaller groups split off and are picked off by the androids, so the display changes accordingly. There are however a couple of shots of the scanner where the dots don’t correspond to the number of troopers. The number drops by two when there is no reason in the story for this change, and afterwards the scanner screen is once again displaying the correct number of dots.

Count the dots... there ought to be 11 in the cluster at the top right of the picture, but only 9 are displayed.

Those dots, when displaying correctly, are an accurate reflection of how many troopers are present in the story. By comparing various items of production paperwork, I was able to determine that there are 14 in total. Unusually for this era of Doctor Who, it’s an evenly balanced group, with an equal number of men and women. The cast lists initially caused some confusion, as they included six credited and 11 uncredited performers playing the troopers, making a total of 17. The reason for this became clear when I discovered that three of the walk-ons had to be replaced during production.

The troopers wear name tags on their uniforms but in all but a few cases, we don’t get a clear enough look at these tags to see make out the names. Most of the group never take their helmets off so it’s difficult to tell them apart. Some are named in the credits, and others are identified in dialogue, but a few remained nameless. Thanks to a scene breakdown document that lists the characters involved in each scene, however, I was able to put names to all of the troopers. New Fact! The non-speaking female trooper who goes to the freighter is called Austin.

Trooper Austin (left) played by Nikki Dunsford, seen here with Lieutenant Scott (James Warwick).

On the subject of unnamed characters, what about the Captain, memorably played by Beryl Reid. What’s her name? She's called Briggs in the script and on the closing credits, but that name never appears in the story itself. There’s evidence too that the story's writer Eric Saward might have had another name in mind for the Captain. At one point in Part Two, a scripted direction intended for Briggs instead refers to her as ‘Stien’. It seems likely that in the original version of the script this was the Captain’s name and this solitary mention was overlooked in revisions. Saward clearly liked the name enough to reuse it in Resurrection of the Daleks. In Part Three, there’s also evidence that the Captain may have originally been male, as the Cyber Lieutenant says ‘his’ rather than ‘hers’, a mistake in the script that wasn’t picked up on during production.

The unnamed Captain Briggs (Beryl Reid), or should that be Captain Stien?

The scripts also helped to get to the bottom of an anecdote concerning a familiar Doctor Who catch-phrase that first crops up in Earthshock. The Doctor’s “Brave heart, Tegan” interested me because in a 1984 interview for Doctor Who Magazine, Eric Saward claimed that “Brave heart” was something spontaneously ad-libbed by Peter Davison during the recording of the scene. The memory clearly cheats, as the line’s already present in the rehearsal script, prepared before the cast began work on the story!

Another Tegan-related phrase, “I’m just a mouth on legs”, stumped me. According to various sources, including most recently the Doctor Who – The Complete History partwork, this phrase was included in the story after an American fan had used it to describe Tegan. This struck me as unlikely given that fandom had only recently seen Tegan on screen for the first time when Earthshock was written. I checked with a number of people who were likely to be in the know, including Janet Fielding herself, but no one knew the answer. The info text must be as accurate as possible so, as I was unable to verify this particular claim, you won’t find it in the subtitles.

Researching info text can be an eye-opening experience. I go into each story thinking I already know it well, but after a close rewatch, and reading through the scripts and the production paperwork, I realise that I’ve learned so much more. The most enjoyable aspect of my work on the info text is getting to point out fresh discoveries to viewers. There’s a lot about Earthshock I haven’t touched on here, so pop in the blu-ray, turn on the info text and find out more!

This article was first published in issue 498 of Celestial Toyroom, the fanzine of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society.

Rescuing the Lion (Archived Interview from 2001)

Last week I celebrated the 20th anniversary of the discovery of the film print of The Lion, an episode of Doctor Who from 1965 that was among the series' missing episodes until Neil Lambess and I found it still existed in January 1999.

In revisiting some of the material associated with the find, I noticed that one of the interviews I did many years ago about the discovery disappeared off the internet at some point. The website that hosted the interview, Whoniversity.co.uk, is no longer active, but I was able to retrieve the interview I did in 2001 using the Wayback Machine.

I'm no longer in contact with the writer of the interview, Mark Parmerter, but I trust he won't mind me preserving the interview here.

Rescuing The Lion 

Written by Mark Parmerter 

May, 2001

Many Doctor Who fans may be hesitant to admit the fact, but be honest: who hasn't fantasized at least once about being the next to discover the whereabouts of a missing episode and successfully returning it to the BBC and fans around the world? For two New Zealand Doctor Who fans, this fantasy became reality in January of 1999 when Paul Scoones and Neil Lambess located the otherwise missing first episode of a 4-part William Hartnell adventure first broadcast on BBC-1 on March 27, 1965. The dramatic story of how The Crusade, Episode One: The Lion was rescued and loaned to the BBC for copying purposes is related in great detail in an article written by Paul Scoones for the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club; here in this article, however, Scoones has kindly agreed to further discuss The Lion's rescue, highlighting his initial reactions to the find, remarking upon the worldwide attention generated by the discovery, and speculating upon the possibility of future missing episode returns.

Very early in 1999, Scoones was contacted by fellow New Zealand Doctor Who fan Neil Lambess, who asked Paul to bring his video camera and join him in a visit to private film collector Bruce Grenville. Acting on a lead, Lambess had reason to believe that The Lion was included in Grenville's 16mm film collection. Scoones explains that prior to this event, "I had spent a great deal of time over the last 12 years researching Doctor Who screenings on New Zealand television (we were the first country outside the UK to screen the series), and I knew from what myself and other NZ researchers had found that most Doctor Who film prints in NZ had either been exported or destroyed many years ago, so I didn't hold out much hope of ever finding anything. Neil Lambess had always clung to the belief - long before The Lion was found - that there were missing episodes here. He still hasn't given up searching."

When Paul and Neil sat down with Grenville, who was unaware of The Lion's rarity having bought it cheap at a film collectors fair, they watched the 16mm film print in question and knew immediately that they were viewing a genuine missing episode. Paul's first thoughts during these exciting moments? "My first thoughts were along the lines of "Oh my goodness - what are we going to do?" I think when I was sitting there watching the episode that first time what was running through my head was how to get it back to the BBC. At that time we weren't sure if Grenville would even loan it out. I was really worried that he might very well decide to hoard it away, and the only copy anyone would ever get to see would be my handi-cam version recorded off the screen. Fortunately, that wasn't the case." After contacting Steve Roberts of the BBC's unofficial Doctor Who Restoration Team, negotiations were underway with Grenville for the BBC to borrow the film print for copying, and news of the discovery literally spread around the globe.

The Season Two historical adventure The Crusade has always been highly regarded and praised. In Peter Haining's twentieth anniversary book Doctor Who - A Celebration (1983), Jeremy Bentham writes "Director Douglas Camfield pulled off a considerable coup with this story. Armed with what he considered to be the finest script he has ever worked with, he managed to persuade big-name actor Julian Glover to play the part of King Richard I - Richard the Lionheart. The grand confrontation between Glover, as Richard, and up-and-coming actress Jean Marsh as Joanna made for one of the finest moments of television drama ever witnessed in Doctor Who." In the Doctor Who Handbook - The First Doctor, authors Howe, Stammers and Walker exclaim "David Whitaker's scripts are brilliant, Douglas Camfield's direction immaculate and Barry Newbery's sets superb. William Hartnell...turns in one of his best ever performances as the Doctor." And upon its discovery, Gary Russell proclaimed in Doctor Who Magazine #275 that The Lion "Is an example of historically detailed Doctor Who at its very best, with charm, wit, style and conviction."

Scoones admits he was quite surprised at the time by the worldwide attention which The Lion generated. "It was a surprise, yes. For a few days, it was like what I imagine it must be to be a minor celebrity. My phone rang constantly with local and overseas TV stations all wanting an interview, and I was on both television news channels here in NZ, as well as the story appearing on the front page of the newspaper. The media attention was remarkable."

Even more remarkable is the colorful history behind the film print of The Lion. Research has revealed that this particular film print somehow managed to survive near-burial at a Wellington rubbish tip in 1975, thereby passing from one New Zealand film collector to another for the next quarter century, persevering through owners ignorant of its worth and poor storage conditions. As Scoones illustrates, "It is a remarkable story. Its survival is a combination of good luck and dedication on the part of the film collectors who originally rescued it from the dump. What's worrying, however, is that until 1999, no one whose hands the film passed through had any awareness that the film was in any way rare or valuable. Hopefully, due to the high media exposure its recovery received, film collectors are now aware to look out for Doctor Who film prints."

Hopeful fans would like to believe that perhaps more missing Doctor Who material is waiting to be discovered elsewhere in New Zealand, either via film collectors or TV archives. Scoones cautiously believes "It's always possible that something will show up, but I think the news stories about The Lion's discovery which circulated the globe probably did more to raise awareness than any BBC orchestrated campaign could have ever done, and if there were episodes in private hands its likely we'd know about it by now. And I don't subscribe to the belief that there are selfish film collectors knowingly hoarding away missing episodes. I think that's a fan myth. I'd like to believe that sooner or later, human nature would prevail, and the owner of any missing material would come forward and allow the BBC to take a copy. There's far more prestige in being a generous benefactor than a secretive hoarder."

And as for the likelihood of lost episodes still residing in New Zealand's TV archives, Scoones reveals that "TVNZ's own archives have been thoroughly catalogued and we know from internal records that no missing episodes survive there. About a decade ago, Graham Howard gained permission to go through a Wellington film store of old television episodes, and although he found two film cans labeled with missing Doctor Who episodes (Marco Polo Episode 7 and The Moonbase Episode 3), the film cans had unfortunately been reused and no longer contained the original films. I think if there are any more missing episodes to be found, they'll be residing in as-yet uncatalogued television vaults somewhere else overseas."

Once owner Bruce Grenville realized the value of his missing episode film print, he announced plans to sell it at auction. Initially, his plan was to auction The Lion in September 1999, but this event was canceled due to a surprising lack of interest. A second attempt to sell the print at auction was successful, and the print was sold by Grenville to another New Zealand collector for US$850. This same collector then auctioned The Lion on eBay.com with the final price reaching an astonishing US$3150! However, the winning bidder never paid up, and The Lion was offered again on eBay between January 1-15, 2000 (almost a year to the day that the episode was found). 43 bids were received, and the final price at which the film was sold was US$1275. Neither the buyer or seller's identity was disclosed...

The story of The Lion's dramatic rescue did not end, however, with its discovery. That was just the beginning, as Scoones discovered once attempts were made to transfer the film print from New Zealand to the BBC. "I'd always believed that the BBC would be prepared and set up to smoothly handle the recovery of missing episodes, but the reality is surprisingly different. I spoke at length in an article for The Disused Yeti over the problems I had with receiving reimbursement for mailing costs and the debacle over the crediting of the people involved in the find. I was for a time very pissed off about the whole thing; not so much for myself, but for my friend Neil Lambess, who actually tracked down the episode in the first place, and received negligible recognition. His name appears nowhere on the UK packaging or credits of the video." And what was the BBC's response when Grenville announced his intention to auction the print off? "Incredibly, the BBC threatened legal action over his ownership of the print - how's that going to encourage people to come forward with missing episode prints? Sheer incompetence, really." The BBC later reversed course regarding its threatened legal action, but the damage had perhaps already been done.

One may assume that the BBC has since developed new policy for facilitating the return of missing episodes, but Scoones does not believe this to be the case: "I recently was contacted by a BBC producer searching for missing episodes of Dad's Army, who sadly informed me that nothing has changed and that there's a very real risk that members of the public who approach the BBC through their general phone lines about missing episodes would be turned away through ignorance. It's a sad situation, but the BBC is a huge corporation full of people who don't care about the wider picture and are only interested in their particular area. Any approach to the BBC about missing episodes - unless made through people who care, such as The Restoration Team - is likely to fall on deaf ears."

On a positive note, fandom may now enjoy another long-lost look at Doctor Who's prestigious past while hope has been renewed that further lost episodes may still exist somewhere, waiting to be found. Justifiably, Scoones feels great pride in his and Neil's contribution to fandom: "Whenever I come across a mention of the story or The Lion in particular, in articles or reference books, it always provokes a tingle down my spine, knowing that I helped to recover it. I'll never forget the night before I sent the film print off to the UK; it was a strange sensation to have the film print sitting on my desk at home and thinking how unique it was, and how many hundreds of fans around the world would just love to get their hands on it!"

Monty

Our much-loved cat Monty died today.

He joined Rochelle and me at the beginning of 2006 when he was just a six-week-old kitten who had never been away from the rest of his litter. When we went to pick him out he stood out from his tabby siblings because of his distinctive black and white tuxedo markings and his amusing half-moustache.

It was immediately apparent to us that this kitten had an adventurous nature. While we were still deciding whether to take him, he made the decision for us by making a bee-line for the front door even though he’d never been outside, as if to say, ‘What are you waiting for? Let’s go!’ The people we got him from had called him Sylvester, but we decided to name him Monty, short for Montgomery Horatio Scoones.

We got Monty as a companion for our other tuxedo cat, Chester, whom we’d had for many years. Chester was elderly and wasn’t expected to last much longer, but he hung in there, and the pair had two years together before Chester died in April 2008; coincidentally, ten years ago this month. In Chester’s absence, Monty soon asserted himself as the ‘alpha cat’ of our neighbourhood, and befriended or bested every other feline in the vicinity.

We later acquired two female kittens to keep Monty company but these free-spirited young cats were barely tolerated by him, and the threesome took quite some time to work out how to share the same house.

Monty had so much personality and was hugely affectionate. He would immediately rub up against most human visitors and demand to be petted, even complete strangers.

He loved to go for walks around the block. He never wore a collar or lead, he just happily trotted alongside us. When he got tired, he’d just flop down on the ground and was content to be carried the rest of the way.

Monty was a large, heavy cat with a corresponding appetite. His all-time favourite food was fresh beef heart. His hearing was keenly attuned to the exact sound made by the kitchen scissors as we cut the chunks of beef heart up for him. Even if he was roaming a neighbour’s property, he’d immediately come charging inside and demand to be fed. We had to be very careful never to use those scissors for anything else!

Over a year ago, Monty had surgery to remove cancer from the end of his nose. He initially seemed fine but complications later developed and our vet put him on medication. This kept him in good health for many months, but we were aware that he was on borrowed time.

His health rapidly declined in recent days and, after a particularly bad patch over the weekend, we realised with great sadness that it was time to let him go. We took him to the vet first thing this morning and he was peacefully put to sleep. We’ve buried him in a sunny patch in our garden alongside his old pal Chester.