Invasion of the Dinosaurs

071 – Invasion of the Dinosaurs
Doctor Who serial
The Doctor and the UNIT team investigate Operation Golden Age
Cast
Doctor Jon Pertwee (Third Doctor)
Companion Elisabeth Sladen (Sarah Jane Smith)
Others Nicholas Courtney — Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart Richard Franklin — Captain Mike Yates John Levene — Sergeant Benton Noel Johnson — Sir Charles Grover Peter Miles — Professor Whittaker Martin Jarvis — Butler John Bennett — General Finch Terence Wilton — Mark Carmen Silvera — Ruth Brian Badcoe — Adam Ben Aris — Lieutenant Shears Dave Carter — Sgt Duffy Martin Taylor — Corporal Norton George Bryson — Private Ogden John Caesar — R/T Soldier Pat Gorman — UNIT Corporal Colin Bell — Private Bryson Timothy Craven — Robinson Trevor Lawrence — Lodge Terry Walsh — Looter Gordon Reid — Phillips James Marcus — Peasant
Production
Writer	Malcolm Hulke
Director	Paddy Russell
Script editor	Terrance Dicks (and Robert Holmes, uncredited)
Producer	Barry Letts
Executive producer(s)	None
Production code	WWW
Series	Season 11
Length	6 episodes, 25 minutes each
Originally broadcast	12 January–16 February 1974
Chronology
← Preceded by Followed by → The Time Warrior Death to the Daleks

Invasion of the Dinosaurs is a serial in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in six weekly parts from 12 January to 16 February 1974.

Synopsis

The Doctor and Sarah arrive in 1970s London to find that it has been evacuated, due to the mysterious appearance of dinosaurs. It turns out that the dinosaurs are being brought to London via a time machine in order to further a plan to revert London to a pre-technological level.

Plot

The Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith arrive in a deserted London plagued by looters and lawlessness where UNIT is assisting with maintaining martial law. The regular army, headed by General Finch, has evacuated the entire city and issues a command that any looters in London will be shot on sight. The Doctor and Sarah are soon arrested on suspicion of being looters themselves but are identified from the photographs by Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, who is heading up the UNIT operation, and arranges that the pair are freed to help combat the monsters that have necessitated the evacuation of London. Dinosaurs have started appearing all over the city – but that is not all, as the Doctor comes across a medieval peasant from the days of King Richard, who disappears in a time eddy. It seems the dinosaurs have been present for several months, but nobody can account for their sudden appearance or the havoc they are causing. The British Government has been relocated to Harrogate during the crisis, and the army has taken charge to ensure an orderly evacuation and to try and maintain some sort of control in the city. The dinosaur appearances are various – pterodactyls, Stegosaurus, Tyrannosaurus Rex – but the creatures seem to vanish as mysteriously as they appear.

The Doctor ventures out around the city with a UNIT escort, hoping to learn more of the curious phenomenon, and they encounter a Stegosaurus moments before it disappears. He starts to suspect someone is deliberately bringing the dinosaurs to London – and in a hidden laboratory a pair of scientists, Butler and Professor Whitaker, are shown operating the Timescoop technology that is making the situation possible. They are being aided by Captain Mike Yates from UNIT, who is revealed to be recovering from a nervous breakdown caused by the events depicted in The Green Death. Mike feels the Doctor could help them achieve Operation Golden Age, but Whitaker is unconvinced, and tells Mike to sabotage the stun gun, which the Doctor is building for use on the dinosaurs. He does this, imperilling the Doctor when he encounters a Tyrannosaurus Rex, but the situation is saved and the creature is stunned and captured. Hours later, however, General Finch sets it free, evidently part of the conspiracy too.

Sarah Jane has meanwhile set off to gather her own evidence and meets with Sir Charles Grover, an ecologist MP who is acting as Minister with Special Responsibilities in London. She is drugged by him and when she wakes up is astounded to find herself on a vast spaceship. The crew include Mark, Adam and Ruth, all famed British minor celebrities who have adopted new aliases and lives. They tell her they en route for a New Earth where mankind can begin again, closer to nature. They left Earth three months earlier and the ship is one of a fleet that is carrying over two hundred people to a new life. Sarah is committed to the re-education programme to enable her to think like them.

The Doctor now focuses on more searches of London using his new vehicle, the Whomobile, as transport. Under Trafalgar Square tube station he finds the base used by Whitaker and Butler, but is scared away when they use a pterodactyl to defend their lair. When he returns with the Brigadier, the signs of occupation have been removed. Operation Golden Age is revealed to be a broad conspiracy containing Whitaker, Butler, Yates, Grover and Finch as its core co-ordinators. They have emptied London to enable it to revert to a more natural state, after which the people on the spaceships (in reality they are in vast bunkers and not in space at all) will be allowed out and enabled to repopulate a clean and free planet. Whitaker also works out how to reverse time, so that soon none of humanity apart from their own chosen specimens will ever have existed.

Finch tries to frame and discredit the Doctor, whom he knows will not support their plans, and the Doctor soon twigs that an over-zealous Yates is the UNIT mole. Sergeant Benton lets the Doctor escape, for which Finch threatens a court martial. The Doctor uses his freedom to track down more monsters, but when he is recaptured the Brigadier asserts his authority and takes the Doctor into UNIT custody rather than the regular army’s.

Sarah has meanwhile escaped from the fake spaceship having learnt its true nature, but is apprehended by Finch, who tracks her down and returns her to Whitaker’s custody. While she is away Mark works out that the ship is a fake too and exposes this to the other passengers, but he is not believed. When Sarah is returned to the ship she and Mark use the fake airlock to convince Ruth and the others of the depth of the deception

Shortly afterward Finch and Yates reveal their hands to the Doctor, Benton and the Brigadier, and reveal the nature of their plans. The Doctor and the Brigadier get away once more and head back to the base, evading dinosaurs en route, where they confront Grover and Whitaker. The duped environmentalists from the fake spaceship also appear, along with Sarah, and demand an explanation. In the ensuing fight Whitaker and Grover are transported back through the Timescoop to the Golden Age they sought to bring to modern Britain.

Back at UNIT HQ, the Brigadier confirms to the Doctor that the crisis is over, but there are still some human casualties to deal with. Finch will face a court martial while Yates is being offered the chance to resign and given extended sick leave. The Doctor reflects that people like Grover may have had good motivations in wanting to fight pollution and environmental degradation, but they took their schemes too far and endangered all mankind and its civilisation. He decides it is time for a holiday and offers to take Sarah Jane to the holiday planet of Florana.

Continuity

• Sarah Jane Smith refers to her encounter with real dinosaurs in a conversation with Rose Tyler during the episode "School Reunion". The Seventh Doctor also mentions the events of this story to Ace in The Happiness Patrol.
• A clip on the website of The Sarah Jane Adventures refers to the events of this story as having been explained as mass hallucinations caused by a contaminated water supply.
• An alternative version of the events of this serial is mentioned in the Big Finish Doctor Who Unbound audio play Sympathy for the Devil.
• Some time has elapsed since The Time Warrior as Sarah Jane Smith has been issued UNIT credentials (she had carried a temporary pass in her aunt Lavinia's name in The Time Warrior) and is well-known to UNIT staff, including Sergeant Benton and Captain Yates, neither of whom appeared in the preceding serial.

Production

Serial details by episode

Episode	Broadcast date	Run time	Viewership (in millions)	Archive
"Part One"	12 January 1974 (1974-01-12)	25:29	11.0	16mm black and white engineering print
"Part Two"	19 January 1974 (1974-01-19)	24:43	10.1	PAL 2" colour videotape
"Part Three"	26 January 1974 (1974-01-26)	23:26	11.0	PAL 2" colour videotape
"Part Four"	2 February 1974 (1974-02-02)	23:33	9.0	PAL 2" colour videotape
"Part Five"	9 February 1974 (1974-02-09)	24:30	9.0	PAL 2" colour videotape
"Part Six"	16 February 1974 (1974-02-16)	25:34	7.5	PAL 2" colour videotape
[1][2][3]

• Working titles for this story included Bridgehead from Space and Timescoop.
• The first episode has the story title contracted to Invasion in an attempt to conceal the central plot device. However this was undermined by the BBC listings magazine Radio Times who gave the full story title. See: Terrance Dicks pointed out that all the titles used for the project had originated in the Doctor Who production office. He agreed that the contraction to Invasion was a decision he now regretted but noted that "Radio Times are a law unto themselves".
• Locations used in London included: Westminster Bridge, Whitehall, Trafalgar Square, Haymarket, Covent Garden, Southall and Wimbledon Common

Missing Episodes & Archive

• All episodes of this story bar episode 1 exist on their original PAL colour master tapes, with the first episode only existing as a monochrome 16mm film print. There is a longstanding fan myth that the tape of episode 1 was erased by mistake, having been confused with an episode of the Patrick Troughton serial The Invasion. In reality, BBC Enterprises issued instructions to wipe all six episodes of Invasion of the Dinosaurs in August 1974, just six months after the story's transmission; for reasons unknown, however, only episode 1 was actually junked. As far as the BBC was concerned, the story had been wiped in its entirety; researchers for the 1976 documentary Whose Doctor Who found that none of the episodes was listed as existing in the BBC library.^[4]
• The surviving film recording of Episode 1 is the only telerecording of a Season 11 episode known to exist.
• A black-and-white film print exists of the film sequences from part one. This includes one scene of a scared scavenger stealing money from a dead milkman's satchel omitted from the transmitted version, this would have been part of the deserted London montage. The black-and-white prints were used as practice for the film editor to make cuts before they cut the colour negatives.
• Colour 35mm film sequences from Episode five also exist.
• Episode 3's first edit (also known in the BBC as a 71 edit) also exists, without sound effects or music on the soundtrack.

Cast notes

• John Bennett would later return to Doctor Who as Li H'sen Chang in The Talons of Weng-Chiang.
• Peter Miles has also appeared in Doctor Who in other roles in Doctor Who and the Silurians and Genesis of the Daleks.
• Martin Jarvis had earlier appeared as Hilio in The Web Planet and would later appear as the Governor of Varos in Vengeance on Varos.
• Carmen Silvera had previously appeared in The Celestial Toymaker.

Reception

After the episodes were broadcast, many children viewers of the show complained that the Tyrannosaurus Rex was actually an Allosaurus.^[5]

Doctor Who: The Television Companion (by Howe and Walker, BBC Publishing, 1998) quotes a contemporary review (from a fanzine) that describes the dinosaur special effects thus: "After escaping they [the Doctor and Sarah] came up against the first dinosaur and, oh dear, shades of Basil Brush! A glove puppet nervously skiing about London streets didn't exactly fill me with fright..."

In print

A novelisation of this serial, written by Malcolm Hulke, was published by Target Books in February 1976 as Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion. In 1993 it was reprinted with the title Doctor Who - Invasion of the Dinosaurs. The novelisation features a prologue about the dinosaurs and ends with the Doctor consulting the Book of Ezekiel to determine the final fate of the Golden Age time travellers. An unabridged reading of the novelisation by actor Martin Jarvis was released on CD in November 2007 by BBC Audiobooks.

Doctor Who book
Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion
Series	Target novelisations
Release number	22
Writer	Malcolm Hulke
Publisher	Target Books
Cover artist	Chris Achilleos
ISBN	0-426-10874-4
Release date	19 February 1976
Preceded by	'
Followed by	'

VHS and DVD release

This was the final complete story to be released by BBC Worldwide on VHS, in 2003.

The story is to be released on DVD in the UK on 9 January 2012 alongside the 1975 Tom Baker story The Android Invasion, together forming the UNIT box set. The DVD will feature a restored black-and-white version of Episode 1 as the default and also a 'best-endeavours' attempt at colour recovery of this episode as a branched-extra feature. ^[6]

In contrast to other wiped colour episodes from the Pertwee era where the missing colour information had been inadvertently recorded on the surviving black and white film copies as a sequence of visual artifacts/dots or chroma dots, in the case of Episode 1 of this story this information was found to be incomplete, and only the red and green colour signal information was recoverable, requiring the missing blue signal information to be obtained via other means.

The new colour version of Episode 1 featured on the DVD thus employs approximated blue colour information, and although the outcome is not up to normal DVD quality, it gives an impression of what the episode would have looked like when originally broadcast. ^[7]

References

1. ^ Shaun Lyon et al. (2007-03-31). "Invasion of the Dinosaurs". Outpost Gallifrey. http://gallifreyone.com/episode.php?id=www. Retrieved 2008-08-30. ^{[dead link]}
2. ^ "Invasion of the Dinosaurs". Doctor Who Reference Guide. http://www.drwhoguide.com/who_3w.htm. Retrieved 2008-08-30. 
3. ^ Sullivan, Shannon (2007-08-07). "Invasion of the Dinosaurs". A Brief History of Time Travel. http://www.shannonsullivan.com/drwho/serials/www.html. Retrieved 2008-08-30. 
4. ^ Molesworth, Richard Wiped! Doctor Who's Missing Episodes, Telos Publishing Ltd, Sept 2010
5. ^ "Doctor Who in the BBC"
6. ^ http://www.doctorwhonews.net/2011/08/dwn010911000112-double-invasion-due-in.html
7. ^ http://www.tvshowsondvd.com/news/Doctor-Invasion-of-the-Dinosaurs-and-Android-Invasion/15889

External links

• Invasion of the Dinosaurs at BBC Online
• Invasion of the Dinosaurs at Doctor Who: A Brief History Of Time (Travel)
• Invasion of the Dinosaurs at the Doctor Who Reference Guide

Fan reviews

• Invasion of the Dinosaurs reviews at Outpost Gallifrey
• Invasion of the Dinosaurs reviews at The Doctor Who Ratings Guide

Target novelisation

• Doctor Who and the Invasion of the Dinosaurs reviews at The Doctor Who Ratings Guide
• On Target — Doctor Who and the Invasion of the Dinosaurs