This article was a particular challenge, because I haven’t
seen The Macra Terror, and had very little to go on. There’s a soundtrack,
telesnaps, a few clips, the camera scripts, a film shooting schedule and that’s about
it. Pretty much everything we know – everything we can know – has been inferred
from those documents.
Which meant I had to do what academics call ‘close reading’.
Going through the camera script and seeing what could be inferred. Because,
once you get the hang of reading them, you start to realise they contain more
information than you might realise. For instance, the director might have been
using a different typewriter to the script writer, so you can see which bits
the director added. Or, with Death to the
Daleks, I noticed that the script page numbers indicated that some scenes
had been cut, where they were and approximately how long they were. And so on.
The camera script of The
Macra Terror is unusually scruffy. Somebody has retyped ‘crabs’ over ‘insects’
throughout – well, nearly – rather than having the secretary re-type the script
again, suggesting that the decision to make the monsters crabs rather than
insects – or the realisation that the prop builders had built a giant crab
rather than a giant insect – came very late in the day, possibly even during
the week of rehearsals for the first episode.
But this scruffiness also meant I could guess at stuff which had been cut or changed from the preceding rehearsal scripts. (Annoyingly, the rehearsal scripts did exist in a private collection, after they were bought at an auction at a convention, but when I tried to track them down I found they had since been lost). But even so, I could see where stuff had been changed. For instance, if the first half of a page is blank and the dialogue begins half-way down, it’s pretty obvious that some stuff has been cut – maybe three or four lines.
Elsewhere, although dialogue was deleted, it was still clear
enough to infer what it was. For instance, here the Doctor ('Doctor Who') must be saying “Very
well. With me.”
While for another part I even reconstructed the dialogue,
finding the only letters in the typeface that would fit:
What else did I find out? Well, I suppose my other ‘revelation’
is that the character of Chicki might not have appeared in the first episode.
The only evidence that she did is that she is listed on the script’s Cast In
Order Of Appearance list (which would have been the source of the listings
given in the Radio Times and on the Programme-as-Broadcast sheet – so a
last-minute change in casting would not have been recorded, these are not
independent sources!). But what was interesting was there was no other mention
of the character in the script – you would normally expect them at least to be mentioned
in a camera shot. And there’s no sign of her on the soundtrack on in the
telesnaps.
(I am, however, pretty sure that a Chicki appeared in
Episode 4, even though – once again – the character is not mentioned in the
camera script apart from the Cast In Order Of Appearance list. This is partly because
the girl on the left in these telesnaps:
looks like the actress/singer Karol Keyes (aka Luan Peters) pictured here in 1966.
and because the girl on the right is Sunaa, seen here in episode 2:
What else did I find out? Well, I did my best to transcribe
the lyrics of the various songs, I found a likely source of inspiration for the
name ‘Macra’, and did some interesting research on ‘Potemkin villages’. Based
on the idea that the story was originally about ‘insect men’ I extrapolated
that it might have originally been a story about mutated miners taking control –
which would make more sense than the story as broadcast! – and would also have
tied in with another possible influence, the play Cities of the Plain by Alex Comfort (which in the end I decided was
too tenuous to include!).
And finally, I’m pretty sure the ‘white’ Macra that turns up
in episode 4 was a model, placed close to a porthole, rather than a full-size
prop. This is mainly because there wouldn’t have been time during the recording
to re-paint the single existing full-size prop, and the full-size prop wouldn’t
have been able to turn around like this:
But it’s also because the full-size prop was so large that, in other episodes, its position is given as part of the set floor-plan – it was so big that it couldn’t be moved to another set during the recording.
So there you go. And in the end, after going through the
scripts, soundtracks and telesnaps so closely – never mind line by line, it’s
letter by letter – I feel that although I haven’t seen The Macra Terror, I probably know as much about it as a viewer
looking up occasionally from their newspaper to see what all the screaming was
about in 1967.