City of Death
City of Death is the second serial of the seventeenth season of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which depicts the adventures of a time-travelling humanoid alien known as the Doctor. It was produced by the BBC and first broadcast in four weekly parts between 29 September 1979 and 20 October 1979 on BBC1. The serial was written by "David Agnew" – a pseudonym for the combined work of David Fisher, Douglas Adams, and Graham Williams – and directed by Michael Hayes.
City of Death features the Fourth Doctor and his companion Romana. Set primarily in present day Paris, the plot concerns a scheme by Count Scarlioni, in reality an alien called Scaroth, to steal the Mona Lisa to finance experiments in time travel in the hope of averting the accident that killed the remainder of his race four hundred million years previously, which began the existence of life on the planet as well.
The original storyline devised by Fisher was heavily retooled by script editor Adams, aided by producer Williams. It was the first Doctor Who serial to film on location outside of the United Kingdom; the production team worked in Paris during April and May 1979; studio work was completed in June.
Broadcast during a strike that took ITV off the air, City of Death scored high ratings. The fourth episode was watched by over sixteen million viewers, the highest UK television audience ever attained by an episode of Doctor Who. Although retrospectively regarded as one of the best serials from the series' classic run, initial reception was mixed, with criticism of the humorous tone. In September 2009, it was ranked as readers' eighth favourite story in Doctor Who Magazine issue 413.
Plot
In Paris, 1979, the Doctor and Romana sense a time distortion. They observe the Countess Scarlioni using an alien device to scan the security systems housing Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa at the Louvre. The pair meet Inspector Duggan, who suspects the Countess to be involved in an art theft scheme with her husband, Count Scarlioni. Duggan joins the Doctor and Romana in investigating the Scarlioni mansion. There, they discover Dr. Kerensky's temporal experiments, the source of the distortions, and six exact copies of the Mona Lisa. The Doctor instructs Romana and Duggan to continue investigating while he returns to the TARDIS to visit Leonardo. The Count successfully steals the real painting and captures Romana and Duggan after the Doctor leaves. Learning that Romana is familiar with time, he kills Dr. Kerensky and forces Romana to continue the tests.The Doctor arrives at Leonardo's studio but is captured by another Scarlioni, who reveals he is really Scaroth, the last Jagaroth. His people arrived on Earth 400 million years ago, but the others died when their craft exploded, and his own body was fragmented across time. Collectively, Scaroth's fragments manipulated humanity to invent technology that will let him go back in time to stop the explosion. To finance his work, he employed Leonardo to create copies of the Mona Lisa to sell off after stealing the original. After Scaroth leaves, the Doctor escapes and writes "This is a fake" on the blank canvases before returning to the present.
Scaroth threatens to destroy Paris if Romana stops helping him. The Doctor tries to gain the Countess' help by showing Scaroth's true form, but Scaroth kills her. Romana completes the work and Scaroth uses it to travel to the past. The Doctor, Romana and Duggan follow him via the TARDIS, fearing that the ship's explosion created life on Earth, and if Scaroth should prevent it, humanity would not exist. Duggan knocks Scaroth out in time, returning the latter to the present, where he is discovered, unmasked, by his bodyguard. The ensuing fight sets the mansion ablaze, destroying Scaroth and the paintings save one marked copy. Duggan argues that they've lost an invaluable piece of art, but the Doctor assures him that the copy, still done by Leonardo's hand, will go unnoticed, and that art is worthless if its monetary value is all that matters before bidding him farewell.
Production
Conception and writing
Writer David Fisher had contributed two scripts to Doctor Whos sixteenth season – The Stones of Blood and The Androids of Tara – and was asked by producer Graham Williams for further story ideas. Fisher submitted two proposals; the first of these became The Creature from the Pit while the other, The Gamble with Time, concerned a plot to rig the casinos in Las Vegas to finance time travel experiments. Williams asked Fisher to rework The Gamble With Time as a spoof of Bulldog Drummond, a fictional adventurer from the 1920s. Fisher's draft script centered around Scarlioni, a member of the Sephiroth race, who had accidentally become fractured in time. The script was mainly set in the year 1928 with the Doctor and Romana, aided by Drummond-esque detective "Pug" Farquharson, on the trail of the stolen Mona Lisa, pursuing Scarlioni from Paris to Monte Carlo where his partner, the Baroness Heidi, is using time travel technology to cheat at roulette at the casino to fund Scarlioni's time travel experiments. Other settings included Paris in 1979, Leonardo da Vinci's studio in the year 1508, and prehistoric Earth. At this point, production unit manager John Nathan-Turner had worked out that the production team could afford to film on location in Paris with a stripped-down crew. This necessitated a rewrite to Fisher's scripts to move the action to Paris and, for cost reasons, to drop the 1920s setting. The Doctor's robotic dog companion K9 also had to be removed from the script as the cost of bringing the robot dog and his operators to Paris was prohibitive.However, Fisher was going through a divorce, and his personal situation meant that he was unable to perform the rewrites. This meant that script editor Douglas Adams, aided by Graham Williams, had to perform a complete rewrite of the story over the course of a weekend. According to Adams, Graham Williams "took me back to his place, locked me in his study and hosed me down with whisky and black coffee for a few days, and there was the script". The revised script, now titled The Curse of the Sephiroth, was credited to "David Agnew", a standard pseudonym used by the BBC and which had been previously used on Doctor Who for the season fifteen serial The Invasion of Time. The serial was subsequently retitled City of Death on 8 May 1979. Adams would later reuse elements of City of Death, along with the unfinished Doctor Who serial Shada, in his novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.
In Part One, Lalla Ward as Romana makes a throwaway reference to a great art gallery called the Braxiatel Collection; the Virgin New Adventures novel series would later expand on this, introducing the character Irving Braxiatel, a Time Lord. Braxiatel also appears in the Bernice Summerfield series of novels and audio dramas and in the Gallifrey series of audio dramas which starred Ward as Romana.
Casting
was a well-established character actor who had previously appeared as Richard the Lionheart in The Crusade. He was reluctant to don the Jagaroth mask as he felt the mask would impede his performance. As a result, he is doubled by Richard Sheekey in those scenes. Tom Chadbon was cast as Duggan on account of his resemblance to the Franco-Belgian comics hero Tintin. Peter Halliday had previously appeared in several Doctor Who serials including The Invasion and Doctor Who and the Silurians.Douglas Adams knew John Cleese and Eleanor Bron through his connections with Monty Python and the Footlights. On learning that both would be working in BBC Television Centre on the day the art gallery scenes were to be recorded, he persuaded them to make a cameo appearance in a short scene written for "two Englishmen". Cleese and Bron agreed on the condition that there be no pre-publicity regarding their appearance; Cleese wanted them to be credited as "Helen Swanetsky" and "Kim Bread" but the BBC declined. Cleese liked the name "Kim Bread" and used it in later projects. During recording, Cleese and Baker also recorded two short comedy skits for the BBC Christmas tape.
Filming
City of Death director Michael Hayes had previously directed The Androids of Tara and The Armageddon Factor. He also had experience filming in Paris, having worked there on adaptations of Maigret and other Georges Simenon stories for the BBC. Location filming took place in Paris between 30 April 1979 and 3 May 1979. It proved a difficult shoot as the dates coincided with the May Day holiday period, which meant that many of the locations chosen for filming were closed, necessitating considerable improvisation on the part of the cast and crew. Model filming was conducted at Bray Studios between 8 May 1979 and 10 May 1979. These concentrated on the shots of the Jagaroth spacecraft taking off from the prehistoric Earth and were overseen by Ian Scoones, a veteran of Thunderbirds. Following rehearsals, production moved to BBC Television Centre where the remaining scenes were recorded in two blocks; the first between 21 May 1979 and 22 May 1979 and second between 3 June 1979 and 5 June 1979.Tom Baker found filming in Paris to be very different from what he was used to in the UK where crowds would gather to watch the filming and meet the stars. Doctor Who was not shown in France at the time and so the cast and crew were largely ignored. Lalla Ward found City of Death the most challenging Doctor Who serial she worked on but was pleased with the outcome, saying, "We had to film loads of scenes in the rain and cold... there was no glamour in it at all... it was different from the ordinary stories too and I like the finished result". Seeing her costumes as an important part in creating the role of Romana, Ward clashed with costume designer Doreen James, rejecting the silver catsuit James had designed for her for the story. Ward came up with the idea for the schoolgirl costume she wore in conjunction with Baker, recalling, "I thought it would be fun to wear something that little girls probably hated wearing because it might cheer them up... I didn't bank on the fact that I'd also get loads of letters from their fathers saying 'Cor! School uniform!'".