Shooting - Day 2

Friday 13 March 2015

My second day on set and the hours had returned to normal, so I had to be there by 7:30am prompt.

The scenes we shot today were from episode 2 and all involved the Doctor so we had Peter Capaldi on set with us for most of the day. He was a lovely chap, who always smiled and said hello to us (the Daleks) when he passed us, either on set, or if we were off set on a break.

First of all, we shot the scene where the Daleks are anticipating the arrival of Davros in the control room, but when the door opens it is revealed that it is the Doctor sat in Davros’s wheelchair. The Doctor then enters the room and zooms about, suggesting they play dodgems. He also says one of my favourite lines about Davros: “He only has one arm. How far can he go crawling in a circle?” (Edit: I note that this line was actually cut from the finished episode, along with a couple of others he said) The Daleks then attempt to exterminate him. One thing to note here is that Davros’s chair is operated by a little joystick, in much the same way that an electric wheelchair works. This made some of the other Dalek operators jealous that we still had to operate our Daleks using casters and our feet!

In the afternoon we continued with the same scene. Davros’s wheelchair had a forcefield that prevented the Doctor from being exterminated, so he then pulled out a Dalek gun and began demanding that the Daleks return Clara Oswald to him. The Supreme observes that Clara is dead, which obviously makes the Doctor angry. At that point, Davros appears on all of the display screens in the room and points out that the Doctor has already had dealings with his head of Security, Colony Sarff (a chap in make-up who I saw for the briefest of moments on his way to a night-shoot), at which point Davros’s chair activates a security protocol that the 1^st Assistant Director described as “snakes” engulfing the Doctor. The Daleks then close in on him.

The final scene we shot was actually the scene that came before everything else we’d already shot that day. It was the Daleks reacting to what they thought was Davros leaving the infirmary and heading for the control room. There was a flashing blob on the circular display screens that we (the Daleks) could see was heading towards us.

On this day, I got my Doctor Who Series 9 BBC Wales Crew fleece.

Also, for anyone who likes the show, I saw quite a few of the actors from Casualty in the canteen on this day. During my time at the BBC there was a football match between the crew of Doctor Who and the crew of Casualty. Doctor Who won, incidentally.