OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 302
STORY NUMBER: 059
TRANSMITTED: Saturday 12 June 1971
WRITER: "Guy Leopold" (pseudonym for Robert Sloman and Barry Letts)
DIRECTOR: Christopher Barry
SCRIPT EDITOR: Terrance Dicks
PRODUCER: Barry Letts
RATINGS: 8.1 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who - The Dæmons
EPISODE FORMAT: 625 video
"You would dare to harm the great Wizard Qui Quae Quod?"
A slightly concussed Jo makes her was to the cavern under the church. The Master with the Dæmon Azal asking for power but Azal demands to speak with the Doctor too. Yates finds Jo gone and follows her. The Doctor briefs Unit on the machine and instructs them how to use it to breach the barrier so they can bring it to the village. Mike finds Jo in the cavern but they are trapped as the coven members return. Benton & Miss Hawthorne watch the villagers starting their Maypole dance as the Doctor arrives, is captured by the Morris Men and entangled in the ropes of the Maypole. Miss Hawthorne claims he is a wizard and with a little help from Benton's sharp shooting skills plus Bessie's new remote control convinces them allowing the Doctor to be freed. Jo interrupt the Master's ceremony to save the chicken they're going to sacrifice as the goat legged, horned & bearded Azal appears.
The confrontation between the Doctor & the villagers aside this episode feels like it's treading water a bit postponing the final encounter with Azal.
AZAL: I shall appear but once more, so be warned. There is danger. My race destroys its failures. Remember Atlantis.Azal claims to have destroyed Atlantis.... well we saw the sunken Atlantis city destroyed in The Underwater Menace so from this we can only assume he means the original sinking ..... however come back this time next year for more on this matter.!
MASTER: Yes, but surely I
AZAL: Be silent! I am the last of the Daemons. This planet smells to me of failure. It may be that I shall destroy it. You still wish me to come once more?
MASTER: I do.
AZAL: Very well. Now go!
We do get what a "Reverse the polarity" from the Doctor, soon to be given it's one and only airing as the third Doctor's supposed catch phrase. There's some great interaction between Benton & Miss Hawthorne here too.
I know Jo's just had a knock on the head falling from Bessie but ....
JO: Where am I? The cavern. I must get to the cavern!Where's that come from???? She heard is Hawthorne briefly mention "elementals in the cavern" at the end of episode 2 but it didn't come up at all during episode 3 and certainly wasn't mentioned in Bessie just before she was thrown out! Having just come round don't you think her first thought would be "is the Doctor OK?" No. She charges off by herself into danger into a place that she's barely heard of and is just fortunate that Mike happens to be going there too!
The fourth episode of The Dæmons is the only one that exists on it's original 625 line colour video tape. The rest of the episodes were found at BBC Enterprises as Black & White film prints then recovered from the USA as off air 525 line NTSC domestic colour recordings. In 1992 the higher definition black & white film prints were married to the the colour signal from the US videos to producer a higher definition colour copy. See The Restoration Team Website for more details. This led to the same technique being applied to several other Pertwee stories and the development of several other technical processes which have improved the quality of DVDs for Doctor Who fans.
Two actors make their Doctor Who debuts in this story Alec Linstead is playing Sgt. Osgood and will return as Arnold Jellicoe in Robot, and Arthur Stengos in Revelation of the Daleks. You can see him in The Sweeney as the Optician in Trust Red and The Professionals as the Doctor in Stopover. His character is generally accepted to be the father of the new series character of the same surname.
Playing Azal is Stephen Thorne. Originally it was planned that Thorne would just be the physical body of Azal and that Anthony Jackson, who played Fred Mumford in the first few series of Rentaghost, was going to voice Azal. For whatever reason this plan was changed after Jackson recorded his dialogue and Thorne returns, being very loud again, as Omega in The Three Doctors, an Ogron in Frontier in Space and Eldrad in The Hand of Fear. He became a great friend of Nicholas Courtney and would sign Courtney's nomination for the Equity council every year. You can him in the BBC Radio version of Lord of the Rings as Treebeard. You can hear him interviewed in Toby Hadoke's Who Round #191. When Stephen Thorne died in 2019 Toby Hadoke wrote his obituary for the Guardian.
Shooting for this story took place from the 19th to 30th April 1971. The majority of the location filming for this story takes place in Aldbourne in Wiltshire. Almost all the locations surround the village green
Aldbourne's St Michaels Village Church forms a central part in this story, with the Master posing as it's vicar, but great care is taken not to show inside the church itself, with the cult's actions taking place in a cavern bellow it. In this instance the chosen location works wonders with the Aldbourne Village Church being located slightly up hill at the north end of the village green.
We've previously seen a church in The Smugglers, and the Awakening will later ape The Dæmons by doing a story set in an English Churches Village with the church as it's centrepiece that is then destroyed at the story's climax. The Doctor *nearly* enters a church for a funeral in Remembrance of the Daleks, but instead choose to makes his exit at this point, while the Curse of Fenric again features something buried in a church.
To the western side of the village green lies The Blue Boar, which serves as the location for The Cloven Hoof pub in the story.
The south side of the green is where the Maypole is placed:
This also the direction from which the Morris Dancers emerge: The dancers in this episode are a real Morris Dancing team, The Headington Quarry Men who are still going to this day!
To the north-west of the green is Crooked Corner were most of the house shots in this story were filmed.
Problems were encountered during the location filming on the morning of 23rd April when the cast & crew awoke at their Marlborough Hotel to discover snow had fallen overnight.
The filming that day was at the Airfield by Durrells farm, now known as Ramsbury Airfield, and traces of the snow plus water on the ground left as it melted can be seen in the UNIT Mobile HQ and heat barrier sequence shot there that day.
Four days later the filming crew were back at a different location the same site for the scenes of Jon Pertwee being shot at on a motorbike and there's no trace of any snow then!
The close proximity of the major locations coupled with the story's popularity in the 70s & 80s, led to it being a popular destination for Doctor Who fans. Indeed a pilgrimage to Aldbourne was for many years considered a rite of passage in fandom. (Train to Swindon, short walk to the bus station then a 46 or 48 bus to the village). I've been twice and the last time I went I took a group of friends there and we accidentally gate crashed a Doctor Who convention being held there!
Regular readers will know that I'm a Transformers fan. Every so often a group of us from The TMUK Forum have a bit of a meet up, and the last few years we've gathered in Swindon where I live. In 2011 we decided to go to Aldbourne for the afternoon. So following an excellent lunch at Bottelinos in Swindon we took the bus over to Aldbourne intending to spend an afternoon wandering round the village & church and then a few drinks in The Blue Boar.
The first sign of trouble with this plan occurred when we got off the bus and looked up the road to see a crowd of people outside the pub. So we wandered up to the green and spotted a number of people milling around there..... including a couple we recognised. An older gentleman wearing a hat looked familiar: I turned to Burns and said "Isn't that Chris Barry who directed the Daemons?" Sure enough it was. Seeing Bok sitting on the green and then Bessie driving round confirmed that we had gatecrashed a Doctor Who event that we knew nothing about. Now I knew that the 40th anniversary of the filming of the Daemons was imminent, but hadn't seen that there was anything on!
We then encountered Katy Manning wandering the green, John Levene & Richard Franklin signing autographs in school hall and numerous other members of the cast. We didn't get anywhere near the pub - apparently a beer festival was underway at the same time - which is a shame because apparently the great Terrance Dicks was ensconced within and of all the people involved in Doctor Who he's someone I really want to meet.
The event was organised by Fantom Films and the complete guest list was
Katy Manning (Jo Grant)I've got some photos of us at Aldbourne on My Flickr account while Chuck Foster, of the Doctor Who News Page has some photos on his Facebook page
Richard Franklin (Captain Mike Yates)
John Levene (Sergeant Benton)
Damaris Hayman (Miss Hawthorne)
Stephen Thorne (Azal)
Alec Linstead (Sergeant Osgood)
John Owens (Thorpe)
David Simeon (Alistair Fergus - TV Journalist)
James Snell (Garvin the Verger)
Christopher Barry (Director)
Terrance Dicks (Script Editor)
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