1/20/2023 0 Comments Enter the warriors gate cover dvdIt’s an unsettling opening, with a restlessness conveyed by camera movement, reframing by zooms, and dissolves. At the end of the sequence, he visualises the Doctor’s TARDIS. As a Tharil, Biroc is a “time-sensitive”: he can visualise, and therefore find, a way through the timelines. We find the Tharils who are chained up as slaves, the less-than-enthusiastic human crew, and the captive Biroc who is being forced to navigate. It’s a sign of the richness of the serial that this essay will hardly move beyond the first four minutes of episode one…Īt the start of episode one we explore the privateer that is captained by Rorvik. Doctor Who provides many potential insights into spaces of television – from Saturday night-ness to its current place in the strategy of BBC Worldwide/BBC America – but Warriors’ Gate is particularly useful in foregrounding the production spaces in which Doctor Who operated. 6 As these and other pieces show, to the production spaces of television we can add the industrial or institutional spaces of television: how programmes take place within an industry whose practices, policies, regulation, schedules and so on help to shape their form, content and of course their very existence. These include the peerless, inspirational Andrew Pixley – who has played a leading role in the understanding of Doctor Who’s production history and wider television contexts – and Ian Potter, who provided an exemplary study of the impact of production methods, technologies and institutional practices on the (times and) spaces constructed by Doctor Who in his article on “world-building in Studio D and its legacy”. It adds valuably to the long-term work of several academics, and of Doctor Who fans and independent archive television scholars. 5 Spaces of Television has provided an excellent focus for discussion of the spaces in which drama is made, incorporating and foregrounding the testimony of people who make programmes. Spaces of Television is particularly concerned with the production spaces of television, how “the material spaces of production (in TV studios and on location) conditioned the aesthetic forms of programmes, and how fictional spaces represented on screen negotiated the opportunities and constraints of studio and exterior space, film and video technologies, and liveness and recording”. Its conferences, publications and website remind us that the range of methods we use to discuss programmes must keep in sight the contexts in which those programmes were made. I’m saying “spaces of television” to invoke the recent academic research project Spaces of Television. However, this essay is not a blow-by-blow production history but a discussion of Joyce’s direction: partly showing how Joyce’s approach helps to convey the serial’s ideas, but mainly showing how debates about the future of Doctor Who’s production methods and the spaces of television circulated around Warriors’ Gate. 2 I’ve researched this serial in the BBC Written Archives Centre production file on Warriors’ Gate and the archive of writer Stephen Gallagher that is held by Hull History Centre, 3 studying everything from multiple script drafts and notes on script meetings through to the specs for the set’s timber framed gimbal mirror and a list of supplementary payments for overtime and wig fittings (at productive moments in these archives it was of course difficult not to declare that “I’m finally getting something done!” 4 ). 1 The disagreements behind the scenes have been well documented, and are often discussed as a marker or consequence of the serial’s ambition. Warriors’ Gate was a visually inventive, conceptually ambitious and idiosyncratic Doctor Who serial, but also a fraught one for Paul Joyce, its director. Writer: Stephen Gallagher Producer: John Nathan-Turner Director: Paul Joyce
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