The New Doctor! A Doctor Who Alternate History Story

Part 23 - John Peel, Production Crew, Interview, 1997

The big blowout? Oh, I wasn't there for that. It's a shame, I would have paid money to be there. I heard all about it though. We all heard all about it. Five minutes after, John Garvey was phoning around, and he's going 'Holy shit! You won't believe what just went down!'

Well, that was it. Me with a two year old and a baby, a 'special night' with the Missus, but I was out the door with my hat and scarf and down to the pub. We all were. We all wanted the details.

Part of it, if it was as bad as John was letting on, we might not have a job in the morning, it sounded that bad.

Part of it was just ... gossip.

I'll give them credit. They patched it up. So anyway, the Vormics were out. Sontarans were in. Just like that.

How did I feel about that?

We fucking celebrated!

Let me tell you about the Vormics. BAD IDEA. Look, here's the thing. It just wasn't working. Great idea on paper, no question, terrific in the script. The production drawings, the artwork, wonderful.

But there's a difference between words on a page, or drawings on paper, and an actual prop or costume. Many a time, there's a slip between cup and lip, you know. Sometimes what seems like a good idea turns out to be pretty tosh when you build it.

What we had were basically insects. Well, that's hard shell all over. It's not like you just nip down to Marks and Spence and say 'I'll have a beetle suit, if you please.' We basically had to design it as a series of plates, so we had to build molds and construct all these fiberglass plates that were all supposed to fit together, of course, they never did properly.

Headpieces. That was a pain all by itself. The actors couldn't breath out of them. One fellow, asthmatic, just about collapsed. Couldn't see out of them. The mouth parts didn't work right. Eventually we just locked it in place, but the bottom off, and then fixed up a separate jaw piece. The idea was that the lower jaw actually was free, it fit on the actor's own jaw, and we had a bungee cord around his head to keep it tight. Then the rest of the headpiece was on, and the actor could move his jaw independently. It worked about half well - didn't look great, but not too bad.

And the idea was that the costumes would be designed with non-human proportions. Basically, to hide the fact that there was a person inside them. Well, we tried stilts and we tried extensions, and we tried all sorts of covers. Again, terrific idea, but we just couldn't carry it off right. We had the actors bent over in the suits, contorted. They were suffering.

So then we were trying to work it with Rod puppets, for some of what they needed. So we were at this mixture of rod puppets and actors in suits, it was hard to get them to mesh up.

Bottom line is that it wasn't coming off. It just wasn't. We were trying all these things, and the results were hit and miss at best. At best mind you. More misses than hits, a lot more. The deadlines were coming up, closer and closer. I think delivery was a week away. I remember, working on the Vormics, I used to get on my knees and thank god every time I heard of a fuck up on Vienna, 1913 - because it meant I'd have another day to try and get the Vormics right.

We never had more than three - working prototypes you know, not so much camera ready - in a pinch, but meant to test out. Script called for thirty camera ready and wearable. We were up against it.

And the sets, the sets weren't working right.

You want to know about the sets?

Not my department, but I'll tell you. It's another part of what went wrong with the Vormics.

Okay, originally, we had a lady named Sara Fielding in the art department. Bit of a lesbian, not that there's anything wrong with that. Her job was the set design for the Vormics.