TV Gold

TV Zone magazine interview by Jane Killick

Nina Thomas
A Regal Character

Jon Pertwee’s Doctor returns to Peladon after a fifty year absence to find the spirit of Aggedor has returned to terrorize the trisilicate mines in this month’s Doctor Who video release. The Monster of Peladon.
“We had quite a difficult script,” remembers Nina Thomas who played Queen Thalira. “We actually had to stop at various points and sort ourselves out on it because it was complex. It was one of those – “I can’t say that, he’s dead”, “no he’s not!, ‘yes he is!!’. The script was quite complicated, but we had a super director, poor old Lennie Mayne. He made for very relaxed working.”
Out to seize Peladon’s mineral wealth for themselves are the Ice Warriors. “They used to do things like betting each other that they couldn’t lie down and get up again because you actually couldn’t in that costume!”
Nina also remembers the outlandish costume which Gerald Taylor had to endure as Vega Nexos. “He had the most devastating costume with great whiskers sticking out all over his face,” she says. “I remember the day we were at Ealing studios, he’d only just got all this gear on and it was lunch break and we were all holding his whiskers open trying to get his lunch into him. I remember that one distinctly because I thought, ‘how cruel, this guy’s going to starve!’”
Another memorable character to have been cast in the story was Donald Gee who played Eckersley, the Ice Warriors’ human collaborator. “Donald Gee was wonderful at practical jokes and things, working out ways of sending up notes to the rehearsal room above on balloons. I can’t remember exactly, but it was ’how can we bombard us, but we couldn’t bombard them.”
Filming was far less relaxed and Nina’s final scenes were done in a bit of a hurry. “We were desperately short of time, running around like a loony with our PA, Marcia Wheeler, literally dragging me from one set to another,” she says. “I think it was Donald Gee chasing me and me chasing Marcia. I’d got this cloak on that felt like a bear and they’d got those deadly burners on the wall, torchere things. And we hadn’t realized, but by the time we’d gone from set to set, we were absolutely black from head to toe because they just chucked soot all over us.”
Nina’s most embarrassing memory, however, was causing Jon Pertwee to fall on the floor. “I remember Jon Pertwee had a bad back on that show and I didn’t do it a lot of good,” she admits. “I sat down on my chair at the tea party and lent backwards on my chair, and he did likewise and he’d got a stool! It frightened the life out of me because he rolled straight over backwards. His stunt double Terry just kind of picked him up and shook him – now what the physical trick was I don’t know, but he straightened his back. We could have had big damage there. I felt terribly responsible for that.”

The Masque of Mandragora

Alien forces cause problems for Fifteenth Century Italy

When Doctor Who first started, its brief (a product of 1960’s British morality) demanded that it provides education alongside entertainment, because children couldn’t enjoy themselves unless they were being taught at the same time, so it was believed. Because of this Science Fiction stories such as The Daleks and The Sensorites rubbed shoulders with historical escapades like The Reign of Terror and The Massacre of Saint Bartholemew’s Eve. Although statistics indicate that historicals were just as popular with viewers as their SF stablemates, somebody in charge couldn’t have liked them: The Highlanders, in 1966, was the last Doctor Who story not to feature any Fantasy aspects until Black Orchid, eighteen years later.
I really do loathe purely historical stories, however well-made. The Crusades might be period drama at its best, but the episode which survives bore me rigid. Doctor Who is a Science Fiction series – that’s why I watch it. If somebody wants to peer through a window into the past, watch Pride and Prejudice and imagine that the TARDIS is just round the back of Netherfield Hall. But the offshoot of the period piece, the pseudo-historical, is a different matter entirely. Daleks in Victorian England, Sontarans in the Middle Ages… the contrast between past and future – aliens in the past – definitely has me hooked, and by far the best example of this type of story is The Masque of Mandragora, first shown in 1976 and repeated on UK Gold.
Spearheading Season Fourteen, it begins with a piece of scene-setting that serves to re-establish some of the series’ fundamentals. The limitless interior of the TARDIS has always been a given, but after Troughton the Time machine had really been limited to the console room and nothing else. In The Masque of Mandragora, we have a glimpse of the endless roundelled corridors, and see the wood panelled secondary console room, a valiant but ultimately doomed attempt to be innovative. And then the villain is introduced: the Mandragora Helix, a force powerful enough to destroy the TARDIS.
While the Doctor and Sarah, their relationship now at its height, escape from the Helix’s domain, the main storyline kicks off in Fifteenth Century Italy, San Martino, marvellously recreated in William-Ellis’s Welsh folly, Portemeirion. Newly ascended Duke Giuliano must protect his position from the machinations of his uncle, Count Federico. Federico relies upon the counsel and the poisons of Hieronymous, the Court Astrologer to secure his own position by means of his doom-laden prophecies and unfortunate deaths. Typical Italian intrigue which would have been at home in the BBC’s own ill-fated series, The Borgias indeed, if the story is set in 1492, as the novelization suggests, the Borgia Pope Alexander VI has just been elected. But then the Mandragora Helix arrives on the scene; Hieronymous is secretly the leader of the fanatical cult of Demnos, and a willing host for the Helix. Energized by Heliz energy, the Brotherhood of Demnos prepares to rise against the established order and prevent the Renaissance. And if Mandragora succeeds, Mankind will become its slaves.
A fairly simple storyline, it’s true, but one that shines because of the care and attention that has been lavished upon it by everyone concerned. The sumptuous background – authentic Italian costumes, the false yet convincing location footage – is sufficient to absorb the totally over-the-top performances from Jon Laurimore as Count Federico and Norman Jones as Hieronymous. In a different Doctor Who story, they might be accused of hamming it up: here, it just seems right. Actually, it’s Tim Piggot-Smith who is a bit of a disappointment: the voice of a thousand Horizons, he’s so laid-back that his scenes are televisual Prozac. Hamming and laid back in the same story – thankfully, director Rodney Bennett conducts his cast and crew like an orchestra, so it all manages to come together and make something quite special.
The message that scriptwriter Louis Marks was trying to convey was the classic collision between science and superstition; Fifteenth Century Europe was a battle between the corrupt and rigid orthodoxy of the Catholic Church and the discoveries being made by scientists such as Galileo, and The Masque of Mandragora encapsulates that conflict perfectly. While Giuliano talks of Galileo’s telescope and pooh-poohs the Court Astrologer’s warnings of death. Hieronymous looks to the stars; ironically, the Mandragora Helix is from the stars, and its triumph would was away the tide of scientific discovery were the Brotherhood to succeed Marks has a PhD in the Italian Renaissance, and it shows; the detail included in the script and production on the script are obvious from the moment that the TARDIS arrives. Marco is Giuliano’s closest confidante, but he is ordered around without complaint like a servant, an alien society to us, but one which we must buy into. It is to Bennett’s credit that we do.
The climax is the Masque itself; based on the classic Horror film The Masque of the Red Death, the idea of the elite dancing the night away while death lurks outside is chilling, especially since the Brotherhood of Demnos are faceless, soulless antagonists without compassion. But we all know that the Doctor will finally succeed, and his success is based in science; draining the Helix’s power and saving the day, he shows that science is superior to superstition and ensures the Renaissance.
The Masque of Mandragora is somewhat underrated, following on from the classic Season Thirteen and lying in the shadow of later stories such as The Deadly Assassin. It definitely deserves re-evaluation.
At the end of the day, the Doctor has ensured that Mankind continues as it is supposed to. But he gives a warning: the Helix will be in the right place to attack the Earth at the end of the Twentieth Century. The Masque of Mandragora deserves a sequel.

Craig Hinton
Cult Times
Issue #2 November 1995