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 the second serial of the 11th season of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in six weekly parts from 12th January to 16th February 1974.

The Doctor and Sarah arrive in 1970s London to find that the city has been evacuated, due to the mysterious appearance of dinosaurs. The monsters are being brought to the present by a disaffected scientist, using a time machine nicknamed the Timescoop, as part of a plan to revert London to a utopian pre-technological age. The plan calls for Central London to be depopulated prior to being moved back through time, so that only an elite group (who will re-found the human race in the remote past, along more ethical lines) will make the trip. This plan, known as Operation Golden Age, is secretly being supported by key personnel within the British Government - and even within the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, which is ostensibly combatting the menace.

This is the second serial to feature the journalist Sarah Jane Smith as the Doctor's travelling companion, and the penultimate appearance by UNIT regular Capt Mike Yates.

Synopsis

The Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith arrive in a deserted London plagued by looters and lawlessness, where UNIT is assisting in maintaining martial law. The regular army, headed by General Finch, has evacuated the entire city and issued a command that all looters will be shot. The Doctor and Sarah are arrested on suspicion of looting, but are rescued by Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart who is heading the UNIT operation, and the Doctor begins to combat the monsters which have necessitated the evacuation. Dinosaurs are appearing all over the city, causing havoc, but no one can account for their sudden appearances and disappearances.

The Government has relocated to Harrogate, and the Army has undertaken an orderly evacuation of London's population and is trying to maintain law and order in the evacuated zone. The dinosaurs, of various types – Pterodactyl, Stegosaurus, and Tyrannosaurus Rex – are being used as terror weapons to compel the authorities to evacuate the city. The Doctor encounters a Stegosaurus moments before it disappears. He also encounters a medieval peasant from the reign of King Richard the Lionheart. Each disappears in a time eddy, and he begins to suspect that someone is tampering with time, deliberately bringing the dinosaurs to London with the intent of causing the chaos.

In a hidden laboratory, a scientist named Professor Whitaker is operating the secret Timescoop technology. He is being aided by Captain Mike Yates from UNIT, who is recovering from a nervous breakdown caused by events depicted in The Green Death. Mike feels the Doctor would help with Operation Golden Age, but Whitaker is unconvinced and orders Yates to sabotage the device the Doctor is building to capture a dinosaur. This imperils the Doctor, when he unexpectedly encounters a Tyrannosaurus Rex, but the creature is nevertheless captured. However, General Finch - also part of the conspiracy - secretly frees it.

Sarah Jane meets with Sir Charles Grover, an ecologist MP who is the Minister with Special Responsibilities, the only member of the Government to have remained in London. She is kidnapped by him, and when she awakes is astounded to find herself on a vast spaceship en route for another planet. The passengers and crew are all minor celebrities who support the ecology movement and want to start new lives based on the movement's political agenda. They are en route for New Earth, a planet where mankind can begin again, closer to nature. The spacecraft is one of a fleet carrying hundreds of people to this new world, and they condemn Sarah to be re-educated into thinking the way they do.

The Doctor searches London for the energy emissions of the Timescoop, in his new vehicle, the Whomobile. Beneath Trafalgar Square tube station he discovers the base used by Whitaker, but is forced away when a pterodactyl is set on him. When he returns, with the Brigadier, all signs of occupation have been hidden. Operation Golden Age is revealed to be a broad conspiracy including Whitaker, Yates, Grover and Finch as its co-ordinators. They have emptied London, so that the chosen people on the "spacecraft" (actually, a dummy ship concealed in a bunker under Central London) will be the only people within the area Timescooped back into the past, to begin the human race anew, without pollution and over-population. Whitaker has discovered how to reverse time, so that none of humanity, save for the chosen elite, will ever have existed.

Finch tries to discredit the Doctor, who will not support the plan; but the Doctor realises that Yates is the traitor within UNIT. Sergeant Benton lets the Doctor escape, and when he is recaptured the Brigadier asserts his authority to take the Doctor into UNIT custody rather than the regular Army’s. Meanwhile, Sarah escapes from the fake spaceship, but is apprehended by Finch. Even so, her escape alerts the passengers to the deception.

Finch and Yates reveal their plans to the Doctor, Benton and the Brigadier. The Doctor and the Brigadier thereupon confront Grover and Whitaker, and, simultaneously, the duped environmentalists from the fake spacecraft arrive and demand an explanation. In the ensuing fight, Whitaker and Grover are the only ones transported back through time to the Golden Age which they had sought to create.

Back at UNIT HQ, the crisis is over but there are still problems to deal with. Finch will be court martialled, but Mike Yates is to be given extended sick leave and offered the chance to resign quietly. The Doctor reflects that Grover's motivations in wanting to fight pollution and environmental degradation were honourable, but that he took the scheme too far in endangering all of mankind and all of its civilisations. He decides it is time for a holiday, and offers to take Sarah Jane to the holiday planet, 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.

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	Chroma dot colour recovery
"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

• Working titles for this story included Bridgehead from Space and Timescoop.
• The story title of the first episode was contracted to Invasion in the opening title sequence, in an attempt to conceal the central plot device of dinosaurs. However, this was undermined by the BBC listings magazine Radio Times, which gave the full title. Confusion of this episode with the identically-named 1968 serial 'Invasion', in BBC documentation, was long thought to have led to the 1974 episode being wiped in error.
• In the novelisation, adapted by Malcolm Hulke from his own scripts, no reference is made to the "Whomobile" (which was a prop contributed to the production at a late stage by actor Jon Pertwee). In the novel, the Doctor uses a military motor bike with electronic scanning equipment attached, as in the original scripts.
• Malcolm Hulke protested against the use of the title Invasion of the Dinosaurs, preferring the original working title of Timescoop, and felt the contraction for the first episode was silly, especially because the Radio Times listing used the full title. In a response letter after transmission script editor 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 fact, BBC Enterprises issued specific instructions to wipe all six episodes of Invasion of the Dinosaurs, named as such, 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 were listed as existing in the BBC library.
• The surviving film recording of Episode 1 is the only telerecording of a Season 11 episode known to exist; this is probably due to the long standing practice within BBC Enterprises of making a film print for overseas sales purposes prior to wiping any master tape.
• A black-and-white film print exists of the filmed sequences for Episode 1. This includes one scene of a scared scavenger stealing money from a dead milkman's satchel that was omitted from the broadcast version; this would have formed part of the deserted London montage. Black-and-white prints were used for practice by BBC film editors, in deciding where to make cuts, before cutting the master colour negatives.
• Colour 35mm film sequences from Episode 5 also exist.
• The first edit of Episode 3, without sound effects or incidental music on the soundtrack (known within the BBC as a "71 edit"), also exists.

Cast notes

• John Bennett would later return to Doctor Who as Li H'sen Chang in The Talons of Weng-Chiang.
• Peter Miles also appeared in Doctor Who in other roles in Doctor Who and the Silurians and Genesis of the Daleks, and in the radio serial Paradise of Death.
• 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 younger viewers of the show complained that the Tyrannosaurus Rex was actually an Allosaurus.

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 was released on DVD in the UK on 9 January 2012 alongside the 1975 Tom Baker story The Android Invasion, together forming the U.N.I.T Files box set. The DVD features 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.

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 artefacts/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.

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