LogFAQs > #897049187

WhiskeyDisk posted...

I get the feeling that just about all the BBC productions of that era were one and done scenes anyway.

That was definitely the case with earlier Doctor Who - actors from the show have pointed out that it was at least partly due to budget, but also because in England, there was always a sort of impression that TV should be a literal translation of stage acting, just being filmed for a larger audience. And since stage performance involved learning all of your lines and doing an entire scene in a single take, that's how most early BBC filming was done. It wasn't until later that they started to take to the idea of being able to shoot shows out of order or have multiple takes make up a single scene.

That's also why you notice William Hartnell seems to flub his lines a lot (because they'd never do retakes), though at least part of that is him deliberately acting dottering because he's an old eccentric lunatic of a man (you can see him acting much more smoothly in the episode where he plays his own evil doppelganger - a lot of the confused mannerisms he has as the Doctor are completely gone).

The actors also mentioned that, if you were in a scene and you screwed up badly enough that you REALLY wanted to do a retake, they would basically start vociferously swearing immediately after the mistake, to make the scene completely unusable and force a retake. Because no one would let you do retakes otherwise.


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