“In a little while I'll be gone. The moment's already passed. Yeah, it's gone.”

The scripts for The Imps1 were commissioned on 17th October 1966 from William Emms, an Australian born schoolteacher and screenwriter then active in British television. Emms had written Galaxy 4 for the very end of Doctor Who’s second production block, and the serial had been transmitted in the late summer of 1965 to high viewing figures for the time of year. Emms delivered first drafts of all four episodes on Monday 31st October 1966, one day ahead of schedule. Ultimately, they would go unmade. “[Script Editor] Gerry Davis turned [it] down,” Emms said later, suggesting that it “would have been damn difficult to shoot, with Imps that could pass through walls.”2

None of those scripts, nor any synopses Emms wrote for them, exist at the BBC. But they got far closer to production than Emms perhaps accidentally implied, and it’s in the paperwork related to the pre-production the story went underwent before being spiked that we learn most of what we know about this unmade serial. This paperwork ended up, probably more by accident than anything else, in the folder devoted to the serial that was made in its place; your favourite and mine - The Underwater Menace.3

This folder, for production code GG, offers us a memo from appointed director Julia Smith to various design departments. It’s the 8th November and Smith still thinks it’s The Imps she’s going to end up making; she apologises that there are not yet final scripts to share with Sandra Reid (costume), Gillian James (make up) and Raymond London (sets), but says she does have “a very clear picture as to requirements” for their various departments. Smith anticipates that no costumes can come from stock so “every costume for this is going to have to be made” and this includes “Futuristic naval uniforms, unlike anything we have had before” and “Space suits - futuristic, not as commonly conceived nowadays”. She also expects the titular monsters to be produced by costume and make up working together. (Which was not an uncommon occurrence on 1960s Doctor Who.)

We also know from an earlier memo (30th November) that Smith wanted first dibs on one of the BBC’s few backprojection machines for the climax to Episode One and from an even earlier one (7th November) that she favoured Cyril Watkins out of the BBC lighting technicians available to be rostered onto her production. (Nice one, Cyril.)