Invasion of the Dinosaurs, simply titled Invasion in Part One, is the second serial of the 11th season of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in six weekly parts on BBC1 from 12 January to 16 February 1974.
Set in London, the serial involves Member of Parliament (MP) Sir Charles Grover (Noel Johnson) and General Finch (John Bennett) conspiring to roll the Earth back in time to the "golden age" when it was untouched by humanity. This is the last story from the Pertwee era to contain an episode that was colourised from a black-and-white telerecording after the original colour version was irretrievably lost.
Plot
The Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith return to London from their previous adventure, to find the city is deserted following the sudden appearance of dinosaurs. After seeing some dinosaurs suddenly disappear, the Doctor suspects someone is deliberately tampering with time, and decides to investigate what is causing the temporal phenomenon. Discovering the British army is controlling the streets during the current situation, led by General Finch, the pair are initially arrested, before Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart finds them and brings them to UNIT's operation center, reuniting with Sergeant Benton and Captain Mike Yates. Once there, the Doctor and Sarah learn that UNIT is working to contain the situation, after Finch and Sir Charles Grover, a British MP, ordered the evacuation of London when the dinosaurs began appearing.
As the Doctor works to assist Lethbridge-Stewart, Sarah decides to conduct her own investigation, but is taken hostage by Grover and knocked out. When she recovers, she finds herself within a vast spaceship crewed by other humans. The crew, who she discovers to be environmentalists, explain that they have fled Earth due to a major environment disaster from overpopulation and pollution, and are heading to a distant Earth-like planet so that humanity can start over again. Sarah, however, does not believe them, suspecting something is wrong with the ship, leading the crew to forcefully attempt to re-educate her to their way of thinking, oversee by Grover.
Unknown to her, Grover is working with a scientist, Professor Whitaker, who developed a new form of technology called a Timescoop - a device that can transport objects from another time period to the present, and which can also be used to reverse time. Whitaker, seeking to create a new "Golden Age" because of humanity's appalling actions caused by greed, received help from Grover and Finch, who support his idea. The group were responsible for the dinosaurs appearing across London in order to empty out the city, and hid a group of environmentalists underground within a dummy spaceship, intending for them to restart humanity after the Timescoop erases humans and everything they built outside of London. Suspecting UNIT would prevent them, the men recruited Yates, who had become disillusioned and agreed to assist them.
Yates eventually reveals his involvement in the situation to the Doctor, Benton and Lethbridge-Stewart, intending to hold them back as they begin to suspect the truth. The Doctor, however manages to overpower him, while Benton is forced to subdue Finch when he arrives to stop UNIT calling for reinforcements. At the same time, Sarah manages to escape the misinformed environmentalists, and reveals they are being deceived by stating the ship is fake and they are within a bunker. The group soon confront Grover over his deception, when he comes to check on them.
The Doctor, Benton and Lethbridge-Stewart soon locate the bunker, where they arrive to confront Grover and Whitaker, along with Sarah and the duped environmentalists. With no choice, the Timescoop is activated, causing everyone to be slowed down; however, the Doctor, less effected due to being a Time Lord, switches it off and reverses the polarity of it. Grover, unaware of this, reactivates the machine against Whitaker's warnings, causing both men and the device into the past. in the aftermath, Finch is arrested and court martialled, Yates is put on sick leave and allowed to resign quietly, while the Doctor convinces Sarah to stay with him for further adventures.
Production
Working titles for this story included Bridgehead from Space and Timescoop.[1] The story title of the first episode was contracted to Invasion in the opening title sequence, in an attempt to conceal the central plot device of dinosaurs. However, this was undermined by the BBC listings magazine Radio Times, which carried a picture of a dinosaur in the listing for episode one.[2]
Malcolm Hulke protested against the use of the title Invasion of the Dinosaurs, preferring the original working title of Timescoop,[3] and felt the contraction for the first episode was silly, especially because the Radio Times gave the game away. In a response letter after transmission, script editor Terrance Dicks pointed out that all the titles used for the project had originated in the Doctor Who production office. He agreed that the contraction to Invasion was a decision he now regretted but noted that "Radio Times are a law unto themselves".[2]
In the novelisation, adapted by Malcolm Hulke from his own scripts, no reference is made to the "Whomobile" (which was a prop contributed to the production at a late stage by actor Jon Pertwee). In the novel, the Doctor uses a military motorbike with electronic scanning equipment attached, as in the original scripts.
The series's producer, Barry Letts, was very disappointed with the realisation of the dinosaurs, and stated in a 2004 interview that this was the story he would most like to remake with modern technology.[6]
All episodes of this story except Part One exist on original format PAL colour master tapes, with the first episode only existing as a monochrome 16mm film print, but has since been recolourised.[7][8] It was returned to the BBC by Ian Levine in June 1983 after being retained by him for two years for use as a bargaining chip, in case another, more valuable, missing episode showed up.[9] A short clip from the end of Episode One, depicting the Doctor and Sarah Jane in the back of a Land Rover to be taken to the detention centre when the Land Rover encounters a tyrannosaurus rex, still survives in its original 625-line format, having been used as reprise at the beginning of Episode Two.[10][11]
There is a long-standing fan myth that the tape of Part One was erased by mistake, having been confused with an episode of the Patrick Troughton serial The Invasion.[12] In fact, BBC Enterprises issued specific instructions to wipe all six episodes of Invasion of the Dinosaurs, named as such, in August 1974, just six months after the story's transmission; for reasons unknown, however, only Part One was actually wiped. Stickers on the cans for the remaining episodes 2–6 indicate that they were returned from BBC Wales, which was transmitting Season 11 in a different timeslot on Sunday. As far as the BBC was concerned, the story had been wiped in its entirety; researchers for the 1977 BBC documentary Whose Doctor Who found that none of the episodes were listed as existing in the BBC Film Library, despite the fact that episodes 2–6 were actually at the possession of the BBC engineering department (they would be merged together into the BBC Film and Videotape Library in 1978).[13]
A black-and-white film print exists of the filmed sequences for Part One. This includes one scene of a scared scavenger stealing money from a dead milkman's satchel that was omitted from the broadcast version; this would have formed part of the deserted London montage. Black-and-white prints were used for practice by BBC film editors, in deciding where to make cuts, before cutting the master colour negatives. The surviving film recording of Episode 1 is the only tele-recording of a Season 11 episode held in the archives; this is probably due to the longstanding practice within BBC Enterprises of making a film print for overseas sales purposes prior to wiping any master tape. Colour 35mm film sequences from Part Five also exist, as does the initial edit of Part Three, without sound effects or incidental music on the soundtrack (known within the BBC as a "71 edit").
Chroma dot colour recovery and Manual recolourisation hybrid
2
"Part Two"
24:43
19January1974(1974-01-19)
10.1
PAL 2" colour videotape
3
"Part Three"
23:26
26January1974(1974-01-26)
11.0
PAL 2" colour videotape
4
"Part Four"
23:33
2February1974(1974-02-02)
9.0
PAL 2" colour videotape
5
"Part Five"
24:30
9February1974(1974-02-09)
9.0
PAL 2" colour videotape
6
"Part Six"
25:34
16February1974(1974-02-16)
7.5
PAL 2" colour videotape
After the episodes were broadcast, many younger viewers of the show complained that the Tyrannosaurus rex was actually an Allosaurus.[19]
The story was repeated in 1999 on BBC Choice as part of a series of programmes themed around dinosaurs.[20]
In The Discontinuity Guide (1995), Paul Cornell, Martin Day, and Keith Topping noted that "the special effects are woeful" and there was some padding, but the story "has many redeeming features, most notably the sombre location footage in the first episode".[21]David J. Howe and Stephen James Walker, in their analysis in Doctor Who: The Television Companion, felt that unfortunately the "awfulness of the dinosaur scenes tends to overshadow the excellence of Paddy Russell's direction of the rest of the story and the high quality of the performances by the assembled cast". Though they were favourable towards the plot, they noted that "the story is poorly paced and contains a tremendous amount of padding".[22]
In 2010, Mark Braxton of Radio Times awarded it three stars out of five, describing it as "a roaringly good script" and he also praised the casting, but he criticised the dinosaurs as "dire" and questioned the "grand plan" which "raises all sorts of questions about how the new, jump-suited generation of mankind was smuggled aboard the fake spaceship, or how a big, nuclear-generator-powered underground base could be built unnoticed".[2]DVD Talk's John Sinnott gave the story four out of five stars. Aside from the dinosaurs, he felt that the rest was "very good" with "a good amount of suspense, some nice twists", and also highlighted how the villains were "people who basically had the right ideas but that they took it way too far".[23]SFX reviewer Ian Berriman wrote that the serial was "crammed with unlikely plot turns ... but that just makes it all the more entertaining". He noted that it was problematic to have several cliffhangers rely on the appearance of the dinosaurs due to their poor realisation, but praised Sarah's competence and involvement with the plot.[24]
A novelisation of this serial, written by Malcolm Hulke, was published by Target Books in February 1976 as Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion. In 1993 it was reprinted with the title Doctor Who – Invasion of the Dinosaurs, and different cover art. The novelisation features a prologue about the dinosaurs and ends with the Doctor consulting the Book of Ezekiel to determine the final fate of the Golden Age time travellers. An unabridged reading of the novelisation by actor Martin Jarvis was released on CD in November 2007 by BBC Audiobooks.[25]
Home media
This was the final complete story to be released by BBC Worldwide on VHS, in 2003.
The story was released on DVD in the UK on 9 January 2012 alongside the 1975 Tom Baker story The Android Invasion, together forming the U.N.I.T Files box set.[26] The DVD features a restored black-and-white version of Episode 1 as the default and also a 'best-endeavours' attempt at colour recovery of this episode as a branched-extra feature.[7] This serial was also released as part of the Doctor Who DVD Files in Issue 121 on 21 August 2013.
In contrast to other wiped colour episodes from the Pertwee era where the missing colour information had been inadvertently recorded on the surviving black and white film copies as a sequence of visual artefacts/dots or chroma dots, in the case of Part One of this story this information was found to be incomplete, and only the red and green colour signal information was recoverable, requiring the missing blue signal information to be obtained via other means.
The new colour version of Part One featured on the DVD thus employs approximated blue colour information, and although the outcome is not up to normal DVD quality, it gives an impression of what the episode would have looked like when originally broadcast.[8]
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