283 The Mind of Evil: Episode One

EPISODE: The Mind of Evil: Episode One
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 283
STORY NUMBER: 056
TRANSMITTED: Saturday 30 January 1971
WRITER: Don Houghton
DIRECTOR: Timothy Combe
SCRIPT EDITOR: Terrance Dicks
PRODUCER: Barry Letts
RATINGS: 6.1 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who - The Mind of Evil
EPISODE FORMAT: 16mm b&w film recording recoloured manually

"UNIT, sir, was set up to deal with new and unusual menaces to mankind. And in my view, this machine of yours is just that!"

The Doctor & Jo go to see a demonstration of the Keller machine process at Stangmoor Prison. Prisoner Barnham is connected to the machine which drains his evil impulses storing them within the machine. Unit is overseeing security at a peace conference where Captain Chin-Lee reports some documents have been stolen their delegate. After leaving Unit she is seen burning them in a local park. Later she phones Unit reporting the Chinese delegate has been murdered. A medical student watching the Keller process demonstration is found dead in the room with the machine looking like he's been killed by rats. Professor Kettering, who is responsible for the machine, is found dead in the same room soon after appearing to have drowned. The Doctor examines the machine and finds himself surrounded by fire.

Ah Mind of Evil. Don Houghton, the writer of Inferno, is back so I've got high hopes for this. My memory of it was good, but it's been a few years since I last saw it, probably not since the DVD came out. When I watched it for the Episode a Day blog, it was the first time my wife Liz had seen it. Unfortunately the experience didn't go well for her as she takes issue with the "draining of evil impulses" concept of the Keller Machine

KETTERING: Professor Emil Keller, the inventor of this process, discovered that anti-social behaviour was governed by certain negative or evil impulses. Now this machine, the Keller machine, extracts these impulses and leaves a rational, well-balanced individual.
DOCTOR: It doesn't.
JO: What?
KETTERING: May I be permitted to continue?
DOCTOR: Oh, yes. Yes, please do.
KETTERING: Thank you. The condemned man is placed here after being tranquillised, with his head under this dome. A series of probes are attached to his skull so as to connect with the neural circuits. The extraction process is controlled here. The negative impulses are stored in that reservoir box there.
DOCTOR: Where do they go after that?
KETTERING: Nowhere, sir. I repeat, they are stored in the box.
DOCTOR: Which is now full of these negative or evil impulses.
KETTERING: Not full. The indicator registers only sixty five percent at this time. The machine has been used very successfully in Switzerland. A hundred and twelve cases have been processed to date and today we shall witness the one hundred and thirteenth.

She then takes offence at Mike Yates referring to Chin-Lee as a "dolly bird".

CHIN LEE: I must warn you that this puts the success of the peace conference in grave jeopardy. We suspect the imperialist Americans of this crime.
BRIGADIER: Naturally. I assure you that every effort will be made to locate the missing papers and to punish whoever is responsible.
CHIN LEE: Any further trouble and our delegation will withdraw from this conference.
BRIGADIER: More trouble.
YATES: Mmm, pity. She's quite a dolly.

Is this the only time we see Mike take an interest in a woman? He was envisaged as a potential love interest for Jo but ignores her most of the time!

The episode is a bit odd, there's two separate threads to it, the machine in Stranmoor Prison and the Peace Conference which seem to be completely unrelated till a chance remark made by the Governor:

DOCTOR: Tell me, how long has this machine been installed?
GOVERNOR: Nearly a year. Emil Keller came over from Switzerland to supervise the installation.
DOCTOR: I see. Did he have an assistant?
GOVERNOR: Mmm hmm. A rather attractive Chinese girl.

Playing Captain Chin Lee is Pik Sen Lim making her only Doctor Who appearance. She's the wife of writer Don Houghton and helped Jon Pertwee with his Hokkian Chinese dialogue in the scenes in episodes 2 & 3. You can also see her in The Professionals as Chai Ling in Take Away and in Psychoville as the Old Japanese Lady in the Halloween Special.

The most famous member of the guest cast in this frst episode is Michael Sheard playing the Prison Doctor Dr. Summers, his second Doctor Who role after Rhos in the Ark. He look rather different without his moustache, I think this is the only time I've ever seen him clean shaven! He returns in Pyramids of Mars as Laurence Scarman, Invisible Enemy as Station Supervisor Lowe, Castrovalva as Mergrave and finally, with more than a little bit of an in-joke nod to his role as teacher Mr Bronson in Grange Hill, in Remembrance of the Daleks as the Headmaster. If you don't know who from any of these then you'll have seen him as Admiral Ozzel in The Empire Strikes Back. He plays Hitler five times including the The Tomorrow People story Hitler's Last Secret and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. He was in our favourite Adam Adamant Lives! D for Destruction as the Major, which features Second Doctor Patrick Troughton and a load of Power Station Control Panels, The Sweeney as Mr. Penketh in Hit and Run, Space: 1999 as Dr. Darwin King in the superb Dragon's Domain, The Professionals as Merton in When the Heat Cools Off, Blake's 7 as Klegg in Powerplay and Raiders of the Lost Ark as a U-Boat Captain.

Simon Lack, who was Professor Kettering in episode 1, later returns as Zadek in The Androids of Tara. He's also plays Andrew Seton in the Doomwatch episode In the Dark which airs between episodes 3 & 4 of this story.

The Prison Governor is played by Raymond Westwell. I do wonder about writer Don Houghton's television viewing while watching this episode:

GOVERNOR: Ah, Doctor Summers. Any news for us?
SUMMERS: I've got the post mortem report.
KETTERING:: Well?
SUMMERS: The deceased's name was Arthur Linwood, a medical student in his final year.
DOCTOR: Yes, yes, yes, but what did he die of?
SUMMERS: Heart failure.
KETTERING: Watching the process was too much for him.
SUMMERS: But he didn't have a weak heart, Mister Kettering.
DOCTOR: Anything in his medical history?
SUMMERS: Yes, I called his hospital. He suffered from a fear of certain animals.
DOCTOR: Oh, which ones?
SUMMERS: Well, apparently, in the laboratory he was absolutely terrified of
DOCTOR: Rats?
SUMMERS: Yes.�
DOCTOR: Tell me, these marks on his face on his face and neck, these bites and scratches, could they have been caused by rats?
SUMMERS: Certainly they could, yes.
GOVERNOR: But there are no rats in this room. There's none in the entire prison.
SUMMERS: Yet all the indications are that he was attacked by a hoard of them, and the shock killed him.
KETTERING: You must be mistaken.
DOCTOR: But Linwood is dead.
KETTERING: Because of heart failure!
DOCTOR: No, Professor Kettering, because of this machine.

Did he see the Doomwatch episode Tomorrow The Rat the previous year?

When I watched this episode for the episode A Day Blog I said:

I'm watching this episode on video as a black & white telerecording.

Mind of Evil is the only Doctor Who story recorded in colour that no colour episodes exist from in any form, though there is a brief clip from a later episode in colour. This first episode is unique amongst the b&w telerecordings of colour episodes, at least of the ones that no longer exist in colour, in that the process to record the episodes was applied correctly. The colour on a TV screen is made up of tiny red, green & blue dots combined together. Just pointing a B&W camera at a TV screen to record an episode captures these dots in the picture which can occasionally cause interference. Here the correct filter to screen out the dots was used which renders useless the Chroma Dot Colour Recovery Process, invented by BBC Engineer James Insell and used to colour Ambassadors of Death.

So for this episode only the services of YouTube colourist Babelcolour aka Stuart Humphryes were pressed into action. As the Restoration Team Website describes Key Frames were manually coloured with computer software being used to interpolate the colour on the intervening frames. Personally I think they've done a great job: this episode looks amazing now!

Two day after this episode was broadcast Flight into Yesterday, the 7th episode of Doomwatch Season Two, was shown on BBC1.