At the end of the recording day the sets would be removed as the next day another production or programme would need the space. But as the recording time for each story was strictly limited this caused numerous delays and was very unpopular with the BBC technical staff.Įach Doctor Who story was allocated a number of studio sessions and all the material for the story had to be completed within that timescale. Joyce’s preferred way of working was to shoot scenes a couple of times and then assemble everything in post-production. Joyce had hoped to direct this story in a filmic style but the reality was that this simply wasn’t achievable at this point in Doctor Who’s history. Like Gallagher, Paul Joyce was also very inexperienced in television terms, with only a single Play for Today on his cv. Whilst Steve Gallagher was initially aghast at the treatment of his scripts he was later to appreciate the reasons for Bidmead’s ruthless rewrites and he would be better prepared when he came to write Terminus a few years later. Along the way he included some ideas and concepts of his own, such as the I Ching. Bidmead, with some input from Joyce, set about the task of distilling Gallagher’s scripts into something workable. Gallagher had plenty of ideas but had no experience in television script-writing, but he had previously written radio plays and also had just seen his first novel published.īidmead was later to comment that Gallagher’s draft scripts did read like a novel, as they included many unnecessary descriptive passages. Bidmead was keen to get new writers onto the show and Steve Gallagher seemed to fit the bill. For some, particularly director Paul Joyce, it was a bruising experience as he came up against inflexible BBC bureaucracy. The inexperience of key members of the creative team is definitely a reason for this – as they didn’t necessarily know the rules then they didn’t realise when they broke them. If the previous story, State of Decay, could be said to depict Doctor Who at its most traditional, then Warriors’ Gate is certainly a trip into the unknown.
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