287 The Mind of Evil: Episode Five

EPISODE: The Mind of Evil: Episode Five
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 287
STORY NUMBER: 056
TRANSMITTED: Saturday 27 February 1971
WRITER: Don Houghton
DIRECTOR: Timothy Combe
SCRIPT EDITOR: Terrance Dicks
PRODUCER: Barry Letts
RATINGS: 7.6 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who - The Mind of Evil
EPISODE FORMAT: 16mm b&w film recording recoloured using chroma dot recovery

"Well, in the event, in the highly unlikely event of UNIT finding us before the missile's ready, you'd make a very useful hostage. Remember that!"

The machine teleports away from the Doctor to go to feed on the more evil minds of the prisoners. The Master forces the Doctor to build a device to restrain the machine. The Brigadier works out the prison was involved in the missile hijacking and, using a food delivery van as a trojan horse, storms the prison. Mailer takes Jo & the Doctor hostage, but Jo tries to distract him so the Doctor can escape. Seizing Jo, Mailer trains his gun on the Doctor and a shot rings out.....

Another big action sequence in this episode as UNIT troops storm the prison, and a surprisingly blood thirsty one too as casualties are suffered in some numbers by both sides. It's odd to see the Brigadier and co blazing away at other human beings rather than at monsters! The major location for this episode, and the whole story, is Dover Castle which doubles for Stangmoor Prison.

Before this episode we'd not seen more than the main gate but much more is revealed as UNIT infiltrate the prison:

Unfortunately the film recorded at the site on 27th October 1970 was found to have a scratched negative resulting in a remount 4 days later.

The location looks superb onscreen, a good choice from the production team.

We get to meet another of the Brigadier's deputies in this episode, the pretty useless Major Cosworth played by Patrick Godfrey who was Tor in The Savages.

Godfrey also appears as Grant in the Doomwatch episode The Human Time Bomb which aired 5 days before this episode did! He later appears in Edge of Darkness as Oakley in Breakthrough, Blott on the Landscape as Mr Bullett Finch and the film Clockwise as the Headmaster.

As we explained, in Terror of the Autons, in the British Army a Major outranks a Captain. So Cosworth, not seen before this story or indeed after it, outranks Captain Yates. Judging by his treatment from The Brigadier in this episode, I suspect Lethbridge-Stewart feels that Yates is the better soldier!

BRIGADIER: I know exactly where that missile is. Here.
COSWORTH: Stangmoor Prison, sir?
BRIGADIER: It all adds up. Benton saw a Black Maria when the missile was ambushed and I saw the Doctor and Miss Grant. I'm convinced the Master has taken over the prison to be used as a hideout for that missile.
COSWORTH: Then I assume we'll be taking the place, sir. I'll draw up an assault plan.
BRIGADIER: Major Cosworth? COSWORTH: Sir?
BRIGADIER: Have you seen Stangmoor Prison?
COSWORTH: No, sir.
BRIGADIER: Well, I've just been looking at it. It's an old fortress. You'd need an army to get in there.

A somewhat poor choice of words there from Lethbridge-Stewart given that the Brigadier *is* in The Army! I assume his sentiment is that he personally doesn't have that many troops available.

Cosgrove continues to be ever so slightly annoying during the briefing....

BRIGADIER: Now we shall, as you realise, be very considerably outnumbered. However, not all of our opponents will be armed and none of them will be trained soldiers.
COSWORTH: And, of course, we shall have surprise on our side.
BRIGADIER: Exactly. Any questions?
COSWORTH: No, sir.
BRIGADIER: Right, carry on.
COSWORTH: An excellent plan, if I may say so, sir. A very good chance of success.
BRIGADIER: Thank you, Major Cosworth. I'm very relieved to hear that!

Prop Spotting!

We've already seen the missile control panel in the Master's shed earlier in the story where it served as the control panel for the Keller Machine and it also appeared in the previous story, The Terror of the Autons, in the satellite dish control room. In real life this is a panel from the ICT 1300.

Also in the shed we've another control panel, seen in first in the bunker in the Enemy of the World:

It later appears on the UNIT Plane in The Invasion:

The odd upright structure by the door was first seen in Doctor Who also in The Invasion where it's a Cyberman spaceship. It's turned up again in Spearhead from Space but since then it's blue boxes have become have grey.

More name dropping from The Doctor as he relates a tall tail of a previous occasion he was locked up:

DOCTOR: Huh. Did I ever tell you about the time I was in the Tower of London?
JO: No?
DOCTOR: No?
JO: No.
DOCTOR: Well, I shared a cell with a very strange chap called Raleigh.
JO: Raleigh?
DOCTOR: Yeah, Sir Walter Raleigh.
JO: Oh.
DOCTOR: He got into some trouble with Queen Elizabeth. Elizabeth the first, that is. He kept going on about this new vegetable of his he'd discovered, you see, called the potato. One day, he sat down, pointed a finger at me ....

As episode one of this story started, and the shot panned up the outside of the castle building, Liz & I turned to each other and both said three words to each other before collapsing in a fit of giggles:

Norman Stanley Fletcher......

Porridge has become such a definite work on the subject of prisons that it's hard to avoid mentioning it when talking about a show set in prison. Following a pilot, Prisoner and Escort, in the 1973 BBC series Seven of One which also spawned Open All Hours, three series and two Christmas specials were made by the BBC. Ronnie Barker is superb throughout ably backed up by Richard Beckinsdale.

Several of the rest of the substantial supporting cast have got Doctor Who form. We'll start with Fletcher's fellow prisoners: Tony Osoba, McLaren, is Lan in Destiny of the Daleks while the disgraced judge The Honourable Mr Justice Stephen Rawley is played by prominent actor Maurice Denham who is in the Twin Dilemma as Edgeworth. Incidentally the voice heard at the start of every Porridge episode sentencing Fletcher is Ronnie Barker himself! Brian Glover, Cyril Heslop, appears in Attack of the Cybermen as the crook Griffiths. Williams is Philip Madoc (Krotons, War Games, The Brain of Morbius & The Power of Kroll) while Jarvis is David Daker, Irongron in The Time Warrior & Captain Rigg in the Nightmare of Eden. Dentist Mr. Banyard is played by Eric Dodson who is The Headman in The Visitation. John Dair played Heavy Crusher in Porridge and an American in Time Flight. Doctor Who Supporting Artist Eric Kent is frequently seen as a Prisoner in Porridge.

Onto the staff: Fulton McKay, playing Mr Mackay, we saw recently as Dr Quinn in early episode of The Silurians while the Governor of Slade prison is played by Michael Barrington who is Sir Colin Thackaray Seeds of Doom. Slade has more than one Doctor seen on screen: one is Graham Crowden, Soldeed in Horns of the Nimon, while another is John Bennett, who plays General Finch in Invasion of the Dinosaurs and Li H'sen Chang in The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Visiting prison officer Mr Wainwright if played by Peter Jeffrey, the Pilot in The Macra Terror & Count Grendel in The Androids of Tara. Finally the Christmas Special The Desperate Hours is one of the best places to spot Pat Gorman outside Doctor Who as he plays the Prison Officer who wanders into the gents where Fletcher has stashed his illicit booze!

Two day after this episode was broadcast The Inquest, the 11th episode of Doomwatch Season Two, was shown on BBC1.

286 The Mind of Evil: Episode Four

EPISODE: The Mind of Evil: Episode Four
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 286
STORY NUMBER: 056
TRANSMITTED: Saturday 20 February 1971
WRITER: Don Houghton
DIRECTOR: Timothy Combe
SCRIPT EDITOR: Terrance Dicks
PRODUCER: Barry Letts
RATINGS: 7.4 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who - The Mind of Evil
EPISODE FORMAT: 16mm b&w film recording recoloured using chroma dot recovery

"You wanted to know how long I could hold out against that machine. Well, the answer is I can't. Nobody can."

The Doctor is quickly overcome by the the Keller machine falling unconscious and causing the Master to restart his stopped heart. He is flung into a cell with Jo. The machine then attacks the Master but he locks it in the treatment room and barricades the door hoping to starve it of the negative emotions it feeds on. The Master has the prisoners hijack Unit's missile convoy seizing the Thunderbolt missile. Captain Yates pursues the missile on a motorcycle to a local hanger but is captured. The machine learns how to teleport itself and goes on a feeding frenzy round the prison and attacks Jo & the Doctor........

The Doctor's been subjected to the Keller Machine twice, nearly killing him the second time:

MASTER: Wake up! Wake up! Ah. Welcome back. Would it surprise you to know that one of your hearts stopped completely? You were within an inch of dying.
DOCTOR: You wanted. You wanted to know how long I could hold out against that machine. Well, the answer is I can't. Nobody can.
MASTER: Of course you can! If I can control it from that console, then so can you. And you must while I'm not here.
DOCTOR: No, no.
MASTER: Oh, come on, Doctor. We are both Time Lords.
DOCTOR: Be that as it may, I know the secret of that machine. Inside is a creature that feeds on the evil of the mind, and very soon it'll feed on yours.

The Doctor's prophecy comes true very quickly as the machine turns on The Master exposes that what the Master fears most is The Doctor!

It's not quite clear how the machine, or rather the creature inside it learns to teleport. If it could do it all along why hasn't it done so before now to escape from the Master? Or perhaps it's got something to do with the amount of negative emotions it's absorbed recently having boosted it's power levels somehow? Either way the wibbly wobbly teleport affect used will be instantly recognisable to anyone who's seen people leave the Liberator's teleport bay in Blake's 7.

The effect of the machine killing looks very odd. I suspect this might originally have looked quite similar to the energy effect seen in Ambassadors of Death and Terror of the Autons but hasn't survived being converted to Black and White terribly well. It looked odd when I first saw it in B&W off of UK Gold and on the VHS release and now looks even odder now it's been colour recovered on the DVD!

This episode is built around a location action sequence of the prisoners ambushing the missile which works really well.

The ambush sequence was recorded at Archers Court Road Whitfield, Kent on 28th October 1970.

On the 29th October 1970 filming took place at Alland Grange Manston Park, Kent which provides the location where the missile is stored for the next few episodes.

A sequence showing he convoy underway at Pineham Road was cut from the finished program, which was shot 30th October 1970 the same day as the location footage at RAF Swingate cut from episode 3. I know footage for episode 5 had to be reshot following a problem with a damaged negative: I wonder if the footage on this day was similarly affected?

Since the very first Doctor Who story the Doctor has spent a fair proportion of his time being flung into cells. In fact the second episode of the first story, the Cave of Skulls, is named after the very first place his imprisoned in. But actual Prisons? You don't see that many of them in Doctor Who. All his companions get locked up in the Conciergerie Prison in Paris but the Doctor stays free. We get an entire Prison Planet in the Dalek Masterplan episode 3, Devil's Planet, an idea that Terry Nation liked so much he reused it in the third episode of Blake's 7, Cygnus Alpha. A sixth season Troughton story, Dick Sharples' the Prison in Space, would have been set in a prison run by leather clad women, but the story was abandoned at a late stage. However later that same season Jamie gets thrown in a Military Prison during the War Games. The only proper prison in the entire series is in this story, but we'll see a prison with a single prisoner in the Sea Devils and one for malcontents on the moon in Frontier in Space. A Prison space ship gets seen in Stones of Blood and another prison in space would have appeared in another cancelled story, Shada.

As you can see we don't return to the subject much after Jon Pertwee's time as the Doctor..... and we'll look at a possible reason for that next episode!

Two day after this episode was broadcast The Human Time Bomb, the 10th episode of Doomwatch Season Two, was shown on BBC1.

285 The Mind of Evil: Episode Three

EPISODE: The Mind of Evil: Episode Three
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 285
STORY NUMBER: 056
TRANSMITTED: Saturday 13 February 1971
WRITER: Don Houghton
DIRECTOR: Timothy Combe
SCRIPT EDITOR: Terrance Dicks
PRODUCER: Barry Letts
RATINGS: 7.5 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who - The Mind of Evil
EPISODE FORMAT: 16mm b&w film recording recoloured using chroma dot recovery

"Your UNIT friends are transporting their nuclear missile. I intend to take it away from them!"

The Doctor overpowers Chin-Lee removing the device that links her to the Keller machine and severing the Master's control over her, saving the life of the American delegate. Prison officers, with a little help from Jo Grant, regain control of the prison wing but when the Master, in the guise of Emil Keller, arrive he helps Mailer seize the entire prison. The Doctor is captured when he arrives to collect Jo and is chained to the Keller machine which subjects him to images of many of his foes.

Second episode out of three which has ended with the Doctor subjected to images from the Keller Machine! Visually it's very hard to work out what the Doctor is seeing here but the soundtrack makes it quite clear:

Dalek: Destroy! Exterminate! Annihilate! Destroy!

The first vague appearance of the Doctor's oldest foes during the Third Doctor's time on the program.

Come to think of it the episode that doesn't end with The Doctor being tortured by the machine has someone else, the US Senator, subjected to images from it instead!

FU PENG: That was one of the legendary monsters of my people.
DOCTOR: A collective hallucination, gentlemen, nothing more. Who's that?
BRIGADIER: Senator Alcott. Is he dead?
DOCTOR: No, but he's suffering from acute shock.
FU PENG: Sing-sen!
DOCTOR: Yes?
FU PENG: What is this?
DOCTOR: Well, it's a telepathic amplifier.
BRIGADIER: Is that what caused the hallucinations?
DOCTOR: No, not caused them. No, it merely picks up the impulses and projects them through Chin Lee's mind.
BRIGADIER: Impulses? From where?
DOCTOR: Well, unless I'm very much mistaken, from the Keller machine at Stangmoor prison.

FU PENG: Doctor, I've understood very little of what you have been saying. Please, explain more clearly.
DOCTOR: Wa ai, Peng-san. Wa ai. Chin Lee was being used by someone who was trying to drive this world into war.
FU PENG: You will find this person and punish him?
DOCTOR: Yes, I will if I can.
FU PENG: Then I leave matters to you. I must go to my Embassy.
DOCTOR: Hang ahn, Peng-san.
FU PENG: Din gon ba bi lu, Sing-sen.
DOCTOR: May God go with you also.

And with one bound the peace conference is all but gone from the story, which effectively exposes it as some padding to stretch the rest of the story out to 6 episodes. It's a shame because, although he's only on screen twice and both times very briefly, Kristopher Kum does a cracking job as the Chinese delegate Fu Peng and his interaction with the Doctor is a joy to watch!

The Peace Conference is now reduced to being a target for the missile that the Master hopes to steal:

MASTER: Your UNIT friends are transporting their nuclear missile. I intend to take it away from them.
DOCTOR: Well, it's a lunatic scheme. Still, that's only to be expected.
MASTER: Oh, come, Doctor, how can I possibly fail? I launch the missile and wipe out the peace conference, the world is at war.
DOCTOR: I see.

As it is, the conference's presence in the story is quite useful as it helps set the international tone for the third Doctor's stay on Earth which is a theme we'll return to in the Day of the Daleks as UNIT acts as security for another peace conference.

While we're on the subject of padding: why do the guards regain control of the prison wing only to loose it again mere minutes later? Yes it gets the Master in to fix the Keller Machine but why not have him there from before the prison is initially seized. Odd. Liz remarked that Pertwee's performance at the end of the episode doesn't look like the Keller machine is subjecting him to his worst nightmares. Quite the contrary in fact by the way he's writhing around!

Cast:

Fernanda Marlowe appears as UNIT's Corporal Bell in this story and the next. Can't find anything else on her CV I've seen her in but her character is rare in Doctor Who appearing in more than one story without being a regular. Trying to find a decent picture of just her was really difficult and I had to resort to raiding the The Mind of Evil DVD photo gallery!

The main guest actor in this tale is William Marlowe, as Mailer, who later is seen as Lester in Revenge of the Cybermen. Despite identical surnames the two Marlowes were not married, contrary to just about every publication on Doctor Who I've ever read saying they were. At the time William Marlowe was married to Catherine Schell, later to find fame as Maya in Space: 1999. Then in 1979 he married Kismet Delgado, the widow of the actor playing The Master Roger Delgado. He appears in Out of This World, the ITV science fiction anthology series, as Bill May in Cold Equations. Like most of the rest of this series the episode no longer exists but the soundtrack is held by Kaleidoscope. He also appears in the 1975 BBC The Legend of Robin Hood as Sir Guy of Gisborne.

Hayden Jones, Mailer's henchman Vosper, had voiced the Autons in Terror of the Autons and would have played the phone engineer there too if this better role hadn't been offered him. He'd been in Out of This World appearing in the sole surviving episode Little Lost Robot where he plays Walensky. This episode is available on DVD. He was also in Out of this World's BBC successor Out of the Unknown voicing the robots in The Prophet, which is sadly missing. Said robots are later repainted white and used in the Doctor Who story The Mind Robber.

Neil McCarthy, Barnham, returns as Thawn in The Power of Kroll. He can also be seen in The Professionals as Sam Armitage in It's Only a Beautiful Picture, Clash of the Titans as Calibos and Time Bandits as the 2nd Robber.

Roy Purcell, Chief Prison Officer Powers, receives a promotion to the President of the Council of the Time Lords in The Three Doctors. You can see him in Doomwatch as Dr. Barton in Public Enemy and in The Professionals as Richardson in Kickback.

Eric Mason, playing Senior Prison Officer Green is also CPO Smedley in The Sea Devils. He appears in Fahrenheit 451 as a Male Nurse, The Sweeney as Kenny Jarvis in Abduction and Hot Fuzz as Bernard Cooper.

Then we have the rest of the Prison Officers. One of them is our old friend Dave Carter who Katy Manning takes great pleasure in pointing out on DVD commentaries every time she spots him! He's already been a Male Rebel in The Power of the Daleks, an IE guard in The Invasion, The Old Silurian plus other unidentified Silurians in The Silurians, Inferno as a Primord and Terror of the Autons as the Museum Attendant. He returns in The Mutants as a Skybase Guard, The Time Monster as a Roundhead Officer, Invasion of the Dinosaurs as Sergeant Duffy and The Android Invasion as Grierson. There's an Adam Adamant Lives! on his CV where he plays a Partygoer / Tourist in Death Has a Thousand Faces and an episode of The Tomorrow People, The Living Skins: Cold War where he's a Guard.

Another Prison Officer Bill Matthews was Davis the Silurians. He returns as a Draconian in Frontier in Space and an Extra in Planet of the Spiders. He was He was in Quatermass and the Pit as a Sightseer in The Halfmen, Man in Crowd in The Wild Hunt and a Sightseer in Hob, A for Andromeda as an Extra in The Murderer and an extra in the Doomwatch episode The Islanders.

IMDB says a third Prison Officer Martin Gordon can be seen in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story as Vane�.

This episode should have featured footage shot at RAF Swingate on 30th October 1970, but ended up cut from the final program for filming reasons..

Two day after this episode was broadcast In the Dark, the 9th episode of Doomwatch Season Two, was shown on BBC1. This episode features Second Doctor Patrick Troughton as McArthur.

285 The Mind of Evil: Episode Two

EPISODE: The Mind of Evil: Episode Two
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 284
STORY NUMBER: 056
TRANSMITTED: Saturday 06 February 1971
WRITER: Don Houghton
DIRECTOR: Timothy Combe
SCRIPT EDITOR: Terrance Dicks
PRODUCER: Barry Letts
RATINGS: 8.8 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who - The Mind of Evil
EPISODE FORMAT: 16mm b&w film recording recoloured using chroma dot recovery

"Things are going very badly at the peace conference. The Chinese delegate's dead and we think he's been murdered!"

The Doctor is saved by Jo Grant who enters the room breaking the machine's hold over him. Benton is following Chin-Lee in the street but collapses as she taps into the power of the Keller Machine. The Doctor is called back to London by the Brigadier but Jo remains behind where she befriends the recovering & changed Barnham. Meanwhile Unit, in addition to guarding the conference, is now responsible for the transportation and disposal of a Thunderbolt Nerve as missile. However their phone communications are being monitored by a phone engineer working opposite......the Master in disguise!

The Doctor & Brigadier meet with the new Chinese delegate who the Doctor befriends by speaking his own language. The Master meets with Chin-Lee and instructs her to kill the American delegate. The Doctor connects Chin-Lee with the Chinese assistant seen working with Emil Keller when he installed the machine at Stangmoor prison. At the prison a riot has broken out instigated by Mailer, the next prisoner due to be processed. The prisoners are seizing control of the prison with Jo trapped inside. Chin-Lee summons the American delegate to the rooms of the Chinese delegation where he is confronted by a Chinese dragon!

Oh look, it's the Master behind what's going on. What a surprise. Well it is this time perhaps, and well done for keeping him absent for an episode to conceal who it is. But you wonder about the wisdom of bringing their new villain back so soon after his debut. I suppose that would be ok if it wasn't for what happened in the next three stories....

But is it that soon? We return to a statement in the previous episode:

DOCTOR: Tell me, how long has this machine been installed?
GOVERNOR: Nearly a year. Emil Keller came over from Switzerland to supervise the installation.

If The Master is Keller, did he set this all up before Terror of the Autons or, with his Tardis immobilised by The Doctor in the previous story, has he done all this since?

How the Keller Machine kills is explained by The Doctor:

JO: You were right about Kettering. He did have a morbid fear of water.
DOCTOR: So he drowned in a perfectly dry room.
JO: Doctor, what did you see?
DOCTOR: Fire.
JO: But why should you?
DOCTOR: Well, some time ago, Jo, I witnessed a terrible catastrophe. A whole world just, just disappeared in flames. Well, this machine picked that memory out of my mind and used it to attack me.
JO: This fire you saw, it wasn't real.
DOCTOR: Neither was the water, nor the rats, yet Linwood is dead and so is Professor Kettering. We believe what our minds tell us to, Jo.

The events the Doctor is referring to take place in Inferno, the previous Doctor Who story written by Don Houghton.

Not content with having two strands to the story, the Keller Machine at the Prison, which does rather take a backseat here, and the peace conference, this episode also introduces a third strand:

YATES: Excuse me, sir. We're about ready for off, sir, if you'll just okay the movement order and route plans.
DOCTOR: Off for another little trip, Captain Yates?
YATES: Not exactly, Doctor. We're moving the Thunderbolt.
DOCTOR: The what?
YATES: The Thunderbolt. It's a nuclear powered missile with a warhead full of nerve gas.
DOCTOR: I thought they'd outlawed those things?
BRIGADIER: Oh yes, they have. This one's on its way to the naval dockyard. They're going to dump it at the bottom of the ocean.
DOCTOR: With the peace conference going on it's not the most tactful time to be trundling rockets about, is it?
BRIGADIER: I see you're taking Benton.
YATES: If it's okay with you, sir?
BRIGADIER: Oh, you're welcome to him. Just make sure he doesn't lose the missile for you.
YATES: Sir?
BRIGADIER: Well, he somehow managed to lose a Chinese girl in broad daylight.
DOCTOR: Chinese girl? What Chinese girl?
BRIGADIER: All right, Yates, carry on. Good luck.
YATES: Oh, thank you, sir.

But this exchange enables The Doctor to find the link that ties the problems at the prison to the peace conference:

DOCTOR: Brigadier, what Chinese girl?!
BRIGADIER: Well, Captain Chin Lee, the General's aide. I thought she was implicated so I had her followed. Benton lost her.
DOCTOR: That's it then. That's the link.
BRIGADIER: What is?
DOCTOR: When Emil Keller installed his machine at Stangmoor prison, he had a Chinese girl with him as an assistant.
BRIGADIER: It could be coincidence.
DOCTOR: Coincidence, my foot. You'd better put out a general alert for that Chinese girl, Brigadier. She's got to be found and quick!

It does seem to be a somewhat tenuous connection though.....

The highlight of the episode for me is the scene where the Brigadier take The Doctor with him to see the new Chinese Delegate and the Brigadier ends up being completely sidelined!

BRIGADIER: Oh, Mister Fu Peng? I'm Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart of UNIT command. I'm in charge of all security arrangements. And this is our scientific advisor.
DOCTOR: (in Hokien) This unworthy person welcomes you and delights in your safe arrival.
FU PENG: (in Hokien) Thank you for your courtesy and welcome. It is I who am delighted to meet such a charming person in this barbaric country. (in English) It is rare to meet a westerner who knows my language.
DOCTOR: Oh, thank you. Actually I fear my Hokien is somewhat rusty.
FU PENG: On the contrary, it is excellent.
DOCTOR: Well, it's many years since I've had a chance to use it.
DOCTOR: I remember once having a conversation with Tse-Tung.
FU PENG: Tse-Tung? But that is the personal name of our chairman, Mao Tse-Tung.
DOCTOR: He himself gave me leave to use it.
BRIGADIER: Yes, if we could just discuss the immediate problem.
FU PENG: You will take some tea?
DOCTOR: Kam si ya.
FU PENG: Tang pei lai. Sing- sen.

Another bit of arch name dropping here as the Doctor claims to know Mao Tse Tung!

The new Chinese delegate Fu Peng is played by Kristopher Kum, a regular face in TV and films during the 60s and 60s. He was in the Sean Connery James Bond film You Only Live Twice as a Control Room Technician, five episode of Gangsters, late to have an influence on 1980s Doctor Who, as Mr. Yang, Revenge of the Pink Panther as a Chinese Businessman and The Professionals as a Minder in Need to Know.

His American opposite number Senator Alcott is played by Tommy Duggan. You can see him in Superman II as the Diner Owner

Heard, but no seen, in this episode is Laurence Harrington who provides the phone line voices. He can be seen in Space: 1999 where he's Jackson in Journey to Where and Stewart in The Dorcons. He's in The Sweeney episode Visiting Fireman as a Lawyer and appears in Jon Pertwee's Worzel Gummidge several times as Cyril.

The Master's Chauffeur is played by Francis Williams who later plays a Sedan Chair bearer in The Time Monster. However he was due to play an African Delegate at the peace conference in episode one of this story: He was filmed on location but the footage wasn't used. Was the intention for the delegate and the chauffeur o be the same character and The Master to have two members of the peace conference, him and Chin Lee, under his control?

The location used for the UNIT HQ in this story is number 24 Cornwall Gardens in Kensington - both Chin Lee and Benton are seen exiting the door at number 24. The Private Gardens outside are seen in both episodes 1 and 2.

Down the East end of Cornwell Gardens is Cornwall Gardens Walk, where Chin Lee ambushes Benton.

This location was also used in 1966's The War Machines and you can see how little the location has changed in the intervening 5 years.

In fact it's changed very little since: I visited the location in 2015, it's a short walk from Gloucester Road London Underground station!

Further location filming for the first two episodes was recorded at the Commonwealth Institute but cut from the final edit of the program. Two day after this episode was broadcast The Web of Fear, the 8th episode of Doomwatch Season Two, was shown on BBC1.