“Horror of Fang Rock” is the first adventure of the fifteenth season of “Doctor Who” classic series which aired in 1977. It follows “The Talons of Weng-Chiang” and it’s a four parts adventure written by Terrance Dicks and directed by Paddy Russell.

The story

The Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) brings Leela (Louise Jameson) to England in the early twentieth century. The Tardis materializes on the island of Fang Rock, where there’s a lighthouse that’s malfunctioning. The Doctor decides to investigate, also because the Tardis seems to have got lost in the fog that has suddenly risen.

Upon their arrival, the Doctor and Leela find the corpse of one of the keepers of the lighthouse and the oldest of the other two is convinced that it’s the work of the Beast of Fang Rock, also because the fog looks really unnatural. The Doctor doesn’t believe the legend but a corpse and some other strange phenomena indicate that something unusual is going on, especially since the two surviving keepers say that something fell from the sky.

Extras

This DVD contains a fair amount of extras. There are typical contents such as production subtitles and a gallery of pictures from this adventure.

There are comments in the adventure alternative audio track by protagonist Louise Jameson, actor John Abbott and writer Terrance Dicks.

Terrance Dicks: Fact & Fiction. A 36-minute documentary on the career of Terrance Dicks, who has worked for several decades in television and with various tasks in “Doctor Who”. It’s an extra that can be interesting for the fans of the saga who are thus familiar with the name Terrance Dicks.

Paddy Russell – A Life in Television. Director Paddy Russell, the first woman to direct a “Doctor Who” adventure, talks about her career in television. Even more than the previous one, it looks like an extra interesting for the fans.

The Antique Doctor Who Show. A short film that is among the ones produced on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of “Doctor Who”.

There’s also a short “Easter egg” but it’s negligible.

Terrance Dicks had already proposed a vampire story a few years earlier but it hadn’t been approved. In agreement with script editor Robert Holmes, he wrote a very different one but this time the problems arrived from the BBC Head of Drama. A new adaptation of “Dracula” was about to air and a “Doctor Who” adventure in which there were vampires was seen as an interference. A new version of that story was produced only much later becoming “State of Decay“.

Given the situation, Terrance Dicks was asked to write a new script in a short time and script editor Robert Holmes suggested the idea of a story set in a lighthouse with just a few characters. This plot was inspired by the poem “Flannan Isle”, based on the true story of the mysterious disappearance of the crew of the lighthouse on Flannan Isle in 1900. Holmes also suggested to include a Rutan as the monster, being inspired by the adventure “The Time Warrior“, which he wrote when Terrance Dicks was the script editor, in which a Sontaran appears for the first time and there’s a reference to the never ending war of its species against the Rutans.

The production of “Horror of Fang Rock” was complex for various reasons. Due to the lack of space in the studios where “Doctor Who” was generally shot, the recording had to be moved to the studios of Pebble Mill in Birmingham where new equipment had to be installed. This adventure also had technical difficulties due to the curved lighthouse sets, which made the job more complicated.

Tom Baker didn’t help. That was in fact one of his bad mood periods and he hadn’t yet accepted the presence of Leela as the Doctor’s companion. The only positive note was that his relationship with Louise Jameson improved, so much that she accepted an extension of her contract. Her only demand was that she’d no longer wear the contact lenses that changed the color of her eyes, which she found painful. It’s for this reason that a justification for the change of the color of Leela’s eyes was included in the story.

The work was delayed by problems concerning the scenes that required the use of the Colour Separation Overlay (CSO) technique because the Birmingham crew weren’t used to using it and they always took a long time to set up the various elements of the pictures they had to put together.

Because of all those problems, at the end of the production of “Horror of Fang Rock” director Paddy Russell decided not to work in “Doctor Who” anymore, yet she managed to complete a good level job.

“Horror of Fang Rock” is a gothic horror tale of the kind that was more typical in previous seasons, when Philip Hinchcliffe was “Doctor Who” producer. It’s in fact a very atmospheric adventure in which a small group of people in an isolated place is the target of a creature that, according to the lighthouse keepers, has a supernatural origin.

Even the Doctor struggles to understand what’s happening and must also face the superstitious fears of the people he’s trying to protect. From this point of view it’s interesting to see the contrast with Leela, a savage who, traveling with the Doctor, has seen many things that for her are extraordinary which opened her mind so she no longer believes in magic.

The plot of “Horror of Fang Rock” is rather simple and straightforward but also contains some sophisticated elements. A yacht crashes on to Fang Rock due to the lighthouse malfunction and among the survivors there are an MP and a millionaire. Even in that small isolated environment, the relationships among the various characters are rather rigidly dictated by the social classes they belong to, creating a quite cynical portrait of the Victorian society in a period in which it was about to change profoundly.

Perhaps the tension on the set allowed to express a greater tension in the story, certainly the performances by the “Horror of Fang Rock” cast are mostly good, starting with those by Tom Baker and Louise Jameson. The mutual understanding between the Doctor and Leela gets stronger, as if to reflect the improvement in the relationship between the actors.

It’s a shame that the limited resources available to the production of the classic “Doctor Who” series didn’t allow the creation of a Rutan equal to the task. In a story in which tension is a basic element, the presence of an unconvincing monster is inevitably negative.

Despite that, “Horror of Fang Rock” is overall a really good adventure, especially for those who appreciate the gothic horror stories. The extras on the DVD, however, seem much more targeted to “Doctor Who” fans, for which this is a must-have DVD while for the others it’s a DVD worth buying when you find it at a bargain price.