For the actors involved, filming Doctor Who isn't always fun and games...
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00:00 Whenever you watch behind-the-scenes stuff like Doctor Who Confidential,
00:03 filming Doctor Who seems like an absolute joy. But from terrible weather conditions to highly
00:08 uncomfortable monster costumes, the actors sometimes find it really difficult to get
00:13 certain shots in the can. And so, with that in mind, I'm Ellie with WhoCulture,
00:17 here with 10 Doctor Who Scenes Actors Hated Shooting.
00:21 Number 10. David Tennant Can't Master His Sadness
00:25 It's tempting to assume that, in emotional scenes, actors are just acting. And of course,
00:30 fundamentally they are, but sometimes these scenes can take just as much of a toll on the performer
00:36 as their character. Following his defeat in the Series 3 finale Last of the Time Lords,
00:41 the Master is shot dead by his wife Lucy, and out of spite, refuses to regenerate. We see the Doctor
00:47 plead with him to change his mind before cradling his lifeless body in his arms. It's one of the
00:52 best Doctor-Master moments ever, giving us a fascinating insight into their long and complex
00:58 relationship. But according to David Tennant, it was a pretty taxing scene to shoot. "It was tough,
01:03 this scene," he remarked on the episode's DVD commentary, adding that he never felt he quite
01:08 got it, and that the whole ordeal left him feeling quite depressed. Despite this initial
01:13 disappointment, Tennant was, on the whole, pleased with how the scene came out. So,
01:17 I guess the heartache was worth it in the end.
01:20 Number 9 - Louise Jameson's Contact Lenses
01:23 Louise Jameson's time on Doctor Who got off to a rocky start. Tom Baker, then well-established as
01:29 the Fourth Doctor, was somewhat unwelcoming to his new co-star, due in part to his objection
01:34 to Leela as a character on the grounds that she was too violent. If that wasn't bad enough,
01:39 the part required her to wear contact lenses, turning her naturally blue eyes brown. The lenses
01:44 were a source of much discomfort for Jameson, limiting her vision and irritating her eyes.
01:49 In one scene during her second story, "The Robots of Death," one of the lenses became
01:53 dislodged, leaving Leela with one brown eye and one blue. Fortunately, four stories into Leela's
01:59 run, there was a change of producer, with Graham Williams taking the reins from Philip Hinchcliffe.
02:04 Williams allowed her to finally stop wearing the lenses, though not without an in-universe
02:09 explanation. Hence why, at the end of Season 15 opener "Horror of Fang Rock," the Doctor
02:14 acknowledges that Leela's eyes have changed colour, apparently an example of pigmentation dispersal.
02:19 8. Simon Pegg and the Jagra Fess Gibberish
02:23 "It's just a matter of emphasis," the editor tells the Ninth Doctor and Rose in "The Long Game."
02:28 "The right word in the right broadcast, repeated often enough, can destabilise an economy,
02:33 invent an enemy, change a vote, or it can cause an actor to struggle with their lines."
02:37 That was the case for actor Simon Pegg, who had real problems with a particular phrase.
02:42 And you can probably guess what it was. Right, deep breath now.
02:46 The mighty Jagra Fess of the holy Hadrajassic Maxarodon foe. Good lord, no wonder he had trouble.
02:52 Pegg only had to speak the name of his character's boss once, but as shown on Doctor Who Confidential,
02:57 even this required multiple takes. "I was getting really tense," he recalled. "I could feel
03:02 everyone going, 'Come on, Simon, come on, you can do it, you can do it this time.'"
03:06 In the end, of course, he did manage to spit it out in full, receiving a rapturous round of applause
03:11 from the cast and crew, but only after lots of fumbled attempts.
03:14 Number 7. Kevin Lindsay is the suffering Sontaran
03:18 Doctor Who monster actors have always suffered for their art, but none more so than Kevin Lindsay.
03:24 Lindsay played the first-ever Sontaran, Links, in the Season 11 story "The Time Warrior,"
03:29 and his slimy performance is a big part of what made the creature such a success.
03:34 But behind the scenes, things were far from straightforward. With its combination of
03:38 prosthetics, helmet, and heavily padded fabric suit, the Sontaran costume was incredibly difficult
03:44 to wear and severely restricted Lindsay's breathing. This culminated in him collapsing
03:49 during the first studio block. As it happened, the Doctor Who team wasn't entirely culpable.
03:54 In fact, Lindsay had unwittingly been suffering from a heart condition all along, and the costume
03:59 had exacerbated this. Remarkably, though, this bad experience didn't put Lindsay off the show.
04:05 On the contrary, he returned to play Steyr in the following year's "The Sontaran Experiment,"
04:10 though the decision for Steyr to go without his helmet for most of the serial made things
04:14 somewhat easier. Tragically, Lindsay would die from a heart condition just a few months later.
04:19 Looking back, it's incredible that he was able to bring Links and Steyr to life so convincingly,
04:24 while in so much discomfort. What a legend.
04:27 Number 6. Freema Agyeman goes for a dip
04:30 Life as a Doctor Who companion is rarely glamorous, but when Freema Agyeman returned
04:34 as Martha Jones in Series 4, she was quite literally thrown in at the deep end.
04:39 First, there was the scene of Martha getting cloned in the Sontaran stratagem, for which
04:43 Agyeman had to submerge herself into a vat of green gloop. As you'd imagine,
04:47 it was far from a pleasant experience. "It was tepid and it was very slimy,"
04:52 she recalled to Doctor Who Confidential. "As I went under and came up, I breathed in and out
04:56 at the wrong time, and it was all going up my nose. And in that particular scene where I'm
05:00 sitting up, I'm just swallowing profusely because I thought I was going to gag."
05:03 Nevertheless, Agyeman was able to hold it together well enough for the sequence to be completed in
05:08 one take. But this wasn't the end of her ordeal. The following story, the Doctor's daughter,
05:13 once again required her to get immersed, this time in a quagmire on the planet Messaline,
05:18 in reality, a coal mine west of Cardiff. On this occasion, she was at least allowed
05:23 to wear a wetsuit. No wonder Martha declined the Doctor's offer of more TARDIS trips.
05:28 5. Lanzarote is no holiday for Hermione Norris
05:32 The volcanic rock formations of Lanzarote provided a striking backdrop to series 8's Kill the Moon.
05:38 But not everyone was over the moon to be there. Temperatures stuck at around 40 degrees for the
05:43 duration of the shoot, and to make matters worse, the episode's lunar setting dictated
05:48 that the actors wear some form of spacesuit. Peter Capaldi, Jenna Coleman, and Ellis George
05:53 got off fairly lightly, wearing loose fabric suits of the type first seen in The Impossible
05:58 Planet and The Satan Pit. But the other characters were actual proper astronauts
06:02 and needed bulkier costumes to match. This resulted in much discomfort and even panic
06:07 attacks for Lundvik actor Hermione Norris. As she recalled to The Mirror,
06:11 "It was one of the hardest jobs I've ever done. It was incredibly heavy,
06:14 you couldn't get the visor on or off by yourself, and I couldn't help but panic when it was down.
06:19 The sun on your visor was like having your head stuffed in a greenhouse."
06:22 Shooting on the real-life moon would have been much easier, but by the sound of it,
06:26 Lanzarote came pretty close.
06:28 4. Tom Baker's Director Dispute
06:31 Appropriately enough for a story with "Nightmare" in the title,
06:34 Nightmare of Eden wasn't exactly an easy ride. Early Doctor Who was filmed in story order and
06:40 rehearsed as such, but by the time of Nightmare of Eden, material was instead being shot out of
06:45 sequence, with scenes grouped by set and location instead. So you can imagine how well it went down
06:50 when Nightmare of Eden director Alan Bromley, who had previously helmed The Time Warrior,
06:55 suggested that the serial be filmed in sequence. On that point, he was persuaded to change his mind,
07:00 but in every other regard, he remained set in his ways, ignoring advice given to him by his crew
07:06 and exerting excessive control over the cast. This led to backlash from multiple individuals,
07:11 including none other than the Doctor himself, Tom Baker.
07:15 As tensions increased, Bromley switched to a more hands-off approach, conducting rehearsals
07:19 from the confines of the studio gallery rather than from the studio floor. This prompted Baker,
07:25 a force to be reckoned with at the best of times, to remark, "Is that a director up in the gallery,
07:29 or just a commentator?" Bromley eventually quit the production, and when shooting was done,
07:34 the crew was presented with custom-made t-shirts reading, "I'm relieved the nightmare is over."
07:39 Bromley presumably did not receive one.
07:42 3. Matt Smith Feels the Wrath of River Song
07:45 In The Impossible Astronaut, we see an astronaut, eventually revealed to be River Song,
07:50 kill the Doctor. But this fate was nothing compared to the pain that River inflicted
07:54 on the Doctor just a few scenes later. Having just watched the Doctor die,
07:58 only for him to appear seemingly alive, all Amy and Rory can do is watch on in shock.
08:03 River, on the other hand, takes a more no-nonsense approach, greeting her husband with a slap
08:09 in the mug. The way the slap was shot, with the Doctor's reaction captured front-on in close-up,
08:14 made it impossible to fake, and because multiple takes were required, it had to be staged
08:18 multiple times. A far from enjoyable experience for Mr. Matt Smith.
08:23 "We had to do it so many times that he was starting to get really red-cheeked,"
08:27 Alex Kingston told Doctor Who Confidential. "And I could see him starting to get cross with me as
08:31 well. I felt so bad. But at the same time, I just thought, 'Well, I've got to do it again. I'm
08:36 sorry.'" It wasn't the first time the Doctor has been slapped. There are some really good
08:40 YouTube compilations, for anyone wondering. And it certainly wouldn't be the last. But
08:45 thankfully for the recipients, this unexpected trend seems to have died off a bit in recent years.
08:50 A Cheater Person Goes AWOL
08:53 Survival, the final serial of classic Who, has a title with many meanings.
08:58 It evokes the idea of survival of the fittest, a key theme throughout the story. It also,
09:03 rather neatly, alludes to the show's own struggle to keep going, though by accident
09:07 rather than by design. And given that the serial was shot at the height of summer in temperatures
09:12 of up to 43 degrees Celsius, which officially makes it hotter than Lanzarote or the moon,
09:17 Survival also serves as an apt description of the serial's production.
09:21 The story was filmed entirely on location, with Warmwell Quarry,
09:25 since described by Sylvester McCoy as the "deserts of Dorset" standing in for the cheater world.
09:30 "It was just like doing a spaghetti western," McCoy recalled. "It was incredibly hot and all
09:35 these girls playing cheater people had to be dressed up in catsuits and all this fur stuff.
09:39 It was just too hot for them." Most of the cast and crew persevered,
09:43 but for one Cheater Person actor, it was all too much. According to McCoy, she suddenly freaked
09:48 out and ripped all her clothes off and was last seen running for the train. And to be honest,
09:52 who can really blame her? The Beast From The East Derails The Witchfinders
09:57 The Series 11 cast and crew had to contend with some of the wildest weather in Doctor Who history.
10:03 The first two episodes to go before the cameras, The Woman Who Fell to Earth and It Takes You Away,
10:08 were shot over November and December 2017, one of the coldest times of the year.
10:13 At the other end of the scale, The Ghost Monument and Rosa featured extensive location filming in
10:18 South Africa in the middle of a drought. "We'd all agreed that because we were so cold filming
10:22 the first episode, we wouldn't moan when we got to South Africa," Mandip Gill recalled in the
10:26 Series 11 premiere. But the most challenging shoot of the series was, by far, The Witchfinders.
10:31 By sheer coincidence, the episode's filming dates, late February/early March 2018,
10:36 coincided almost exactly with the dreaded Beast From The East, one of the worst storms to hit
10:41 the UK in recent years. Speaking to Doctor Who magazine, Tosin Cole described the episode as
10:47 "the hardest thing I've ever filmed in my life." Meanwhile, Jodie Whittaker, who had been thankful
10:52 for her relatively light Doctor costume in South Africa, found herself shooting the dunking
10:56 sequences jacketless and at sub-zero temperatures. On the plus side, this windy, rainy aesthetic
11:02 neatly complemented The Witchfinders' bleak subject matter. Not that the actors would care.
11:07 And that concludes our list. If you can think of any other examples, then please do let us know
11:11 in the comments below. And while you're there, don't forget to like and subscribe, and tap that
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11:23 @ellielittlechild. I've been Ellie with WhoCulture, and in the words of River Song herself, goodbye,