July 20, 2025

The Sontaran Experiment

“Experiment - make it your motto day and night. Experiment - and it will lead you to the light.”

At the end of 1989, and with exquisite timing, I went to my first ever Doctor Who fan event. The series had just, unbeknownst to the general public, and certainly to me, come to an end. The event was at Aston University on a weekend afternoon and me and a school friend who also liked Doctor Who were driven there by his Dad. It was like a prototype version of the kind of signings that happen every weekend somewhere in the country these days, with a couple of guests who answered questions and signed postcards, and a quiz. It was a fun afternoon. But it was also an occasion on which I made a staggering, life-changing discovery: That some people had pretty much all of existing Doctor Who on video tape.

I do not exaggerate when I say this idea was wholly inconceivable to me mere seconds before I was introduced to it and immediately accepted it as absolute fact. It had long seemed reasonable to me to assume that some people would have been recording Doctor Who from about 1982 onwards. My Grandad had a video recorder after about 1983, and it was only cost that had stopped me ‘recording to keep’ (as we termed it in our house) all Doctor Who from the moment I became old to conceive of that concept. ‘Recording to keep’ was something my Mom had done with Raiders of the Lost Ark when it was on on Christmas Day 1984, and I started doing it for Doctor Who from Time and the Rani onwards. Hypothetically then, someone might have Peter Davison stories on videotape and it’s possible my desire to meet other fans was prompted more by the desire to raid their video collections than find people to be friends with. I don’t recall.

But basically all of Doctor Who on video? What? How? What is this witchcraft? Part of this is about being 11 of course. The concept of a ‘grey market’ wasn’t really part of the syllabus in the average village junior school. At least pre-national curriculum. I had no idea that 1970s colour Doctor Who was more or less constantly repeated in Australia, despite more than half of one side of my family living there and I certainly didn’t know that some fans were (or had been) so close to the production office they’d borrow from its limited collection of research tapes and run off a copy for themselves while watching it. Such ideas were alien as well as completely mad. Some of them still seem a little mad.

It was my friend, not me, who plucked up the courage, after the revelatory moment, to ask if he could get copies of some stories he hadn’t seen. And the response was lukewarm, verging on positive. One person, older than us but by far less than it seemed at the time, he must in retrospect have been all of sixteen, said copying stories was “a laborious process that really took it out on the tape heads”¹ but given our enthusiasm he would copy us one tape each, if we sent him a tape to copy the episodes onto with a note saying what we wanted.

My own first ‘grey’ Doctor Who VHS will not be getting much coverage in these pages. Perhaps foolishly, I sent him an E180 and asked for a copy of Revelation of the Daleks. My reasoning, in so far as I remember it, was that I had loved it on transmission four years before, which was half a lifetime at my then current age, that I had no Colin Baker stories in my threadbare collection, and that it felt unlikely that any would be coming from BBC Video soon, if ever. (BBC Video had not yet committed to releasing all of extant Doctor Who on tape, even privately, and most of the releases were from the 1970s.)

The E180 arrived what seemed like an eternity after I’d sent it off, but was probably only something like six weeks. It was, in my memory, early spring. The guy who sent the tape back included a note in which he said he’d “…filled the end of the tape up with a few odd episodes. Enjoy!”. In practice this meant he’d let the tape with his own copy of Revelation of the Daleks run on, leaving me with three and three quarter episodes of The Trial of a Time Lord. Which was pretty fine and dandy with me. I’ve written about both those stories on The Long Way Round already so that’s the last we’ll hear of them this week. My schoolfriend though? He chose differently. He asked for the one story he wanted to see above all others, and no it’s not the one that’s at the headline of the article, actually. He wanted to see Genesis of the Daleks.

A few days after his tape arrived he, I and another, third friend who liked Doctor Who assembled at his house to watch it. But when the opening titles rolled, they were those for another story entirely. My friend, who had already watched his tape (and who could blame him) paused it and explained that he too had had a note saying our benefactor had “…filled the end of the tape up with a few odd episodes. Enjoy!” but in this case, there was a two part story before Genesis on the E240 he’d sent.²

A whole extra story! One that, unlike Genesis of the Daleks, I’d never really thought about. And I don’t mean “thought about seeing”. I mean “thought about at all”. I’d not even read the book. There had been a photograph in one of the few issues of Doctor Who Magazine I owned, which showed two men holding what looked like a weight lifting bar over another who was lying down. All three were in helmet less space suits, which I somehow didn’t parse as space suits and instead thought were sontaran costumes too.

In my imaginings, their thin human necks in wide collars meant The Sontaran Experiment of the title that flashed up unexpectedly that morning was about an experiment to turn humans into Sontarans. Makes sense, right? Or at least it did to me, which is why I spent much of my first viewing of this story anticipating something to happen that was, in fact, never going to happen. Which, if nothing else, is probably good training for like as a Doctor Who fan. Certainly in the sixteen years that followed the viewing of this particular.

Beyond that, I remember little of my first viewing of The Sontaran Experiment. Perhaps because it was steamrollered by watching Genesis of the Daleks immediately after, perhaps because I was impatient to get to Genesis of the Daleks immediately after and watched now. Even now, very little of The Sontaran Experiment triggers memories. Isn’t that odd? Or at least unusual for me.

Fortunately there’s much in the story to enjoy in 2025. Noticeably the effortless, perfect chemistry between the three leads. This is all the more remarkable considering that this is only the second story where the three of them worked together, and the first without them surrounded by UNIT regulars from another era. There’s something extraordinary about the way that Tom Baker, Elisabeth Sladen and Ian Marter all seemingly act in different registers, almost as if they’re in different productions entirely, and yet nevertheless gel as a unit. They’re like a comedy group picked for contrast and chemistry. Or S Club 7. There’s something magical in how they respond to each other; we get the impression of very different people who nevertheless like each other very much, rather than a clash of styles.

Perhaps the three were bound together by the unusual nature of this production, shot entirely on location and entirely on video for the first time in Doctor Who’s history. Everyone piled into the same hotel near the wildy, windy moor (in this case, Dartmoor) and heading out into the lashing rain every morning to record some Doctor Who for an audience who’d never seen two of them act in it. It must have felt a huge endeavour for all three. Sink or swim. In sand if not water.

It was Philip Hinchcliffe’s first solo outing as a producer too, and a baptism of fire for him as well when (and in an oft-told anecdote) Baker slipped on wet rocks during recording, fell and loudly broke a bone. And that started screaming. Stretchered away from shooting in enormous pain, he feared for his job and Hinchcliffe for their show. The crew pressed on with the rest of the day, entirely incommunicado, hoping for good news when the reached that distant location hotel.

They arrived, and depending on who tells the story and when, either shortly before Baker strolled in, or to find him already propping up the bar. Diagnosed with a miraculously clean break of his collarbone, bandaged up and cleared to return to work the next day provided he didn’t exert himself too much, Baker delighted in telling everyone how the Doctor’s doctor had explained that a collarbone was agony to break, but healed very quickly and with minimal visible bandaging.

It’s an event that has been smoothed into anecdote over decades, like rock worn away by the elements, but we should take a moment to imagine about just how close the Tom Baker era of Doctor Who may have come to not happening. With only four episodes in the can, and Baker an unknown, Hinchcliffe must, on that sodden Tor, contemplated the possibility he would be instructed to pause production on the season that was just weeks old, and reshoot much of Robot, had Baker done himself a greater injury that would have put him out of work for months.

We can’t, of course. Imagine it I mean. It’s an actually inconceivable idea. More so even than the idea of having all of Doctor Who on tape in 1989. Just.

Hinchcliffe’s memories of the story also contain a much happier occasion; he gleefully recalls, fifty years on, rushing full pelt up the hill to congratulate Elisabeth Sladen on something she had done on camera, so bowled over was he by it. That run was necessary because he as in a monitor van thanks to the “portable” videotape cameras of 1974 being unfeasibly vast; accompanied by a mobile studio the size of a small car, which for various reasons to do with electrical interference needed to be really quite far away from the camera itself.

I like to think that it was the moment where Sarah fronts out the sontaran experimenter, Field Major Styre; he tells her “You are a mistake and must be eliminated, according to my data, you should not exist.” and while she knows he’s actually right on this point, that she is from Earth but not the Earth of the time they’re standing on, there’s something about Styre’s refusal to believe that Sontaran military reports could be wrong that clearly grinds her gears. She scornfully tells him how silly his reliance on this authority is, even thought he’s terrifying and bloody murderous. Sladen aces it. She aces everything in this one.

In the van with the neophyte producer was director Rodney Bennett, calling shots live and cutting in camera as if he were in a nice warm television studio but while freezing in the countryside instead. Maybe the discomfort both experienced added to the atmosphere of the story. Somehow, in somewhere as wide open as this, we feel claustrophobic. It’s Bennett’s use of point of view and over-the-shoulder shots, and angles where vegetation and outcrops of rocks obscure part of the landscape. It’s this, even more than the extreme simplicity of the plot, which means this two parter is the closest old money Doctor Who, perhaps any Doctor Who, has got to survival horror.

The Sontaran Experiment is not about turning humans into Sontarans. It’s about one Sontaran torturing a bunch of humans on an otherwise empty Earth, in order to see how easily they die. Some fan commentary has occasionally commented on the ostensible illogicality of the Sontarans trying to invade an empty Earth, but the point is covered in dialogue. Styre, notes in one of his field reports that “as we knew, the earth had not been repopulated. I have therefore carried out my instructions and lured a group of humans to the planet for testing” and the Doctor himself is clear that it’s “the whole galaxy” that the Sontarans are looking to invade, not Earth.

The rest of Earth’s galaxy, the story tells us, still teems with human life, it’s “Mother Earth” that’s empty. A side effect of the failure of those humans stored in The Ark in Space to revive on time. We also meet some examples of these non-terrestrial humans. That’s who Styre is experimenting upon. They’re all played by South African actors, which lends an authenticity that’s nevertheless not located into any specific analogy or allegory to their colonial pride and seething sarcasm about “Mother Earth”.

The story wouldn’t work half as well as it does without Kevin Lindsay as both “Styre and the Marshall” as his slightly odd seeming screen credit reads. (He plays two Sontarans, one of them on a screen only.) The voice and uniform are the same as in The Time Warrior, but the face and personality aren’t, even though the script seems to demand the former be. “Identical, yes. The same, no.” Styre pedantically corrects Sarah when she mistakes him for Linx. Presumably the production team relied on the audience’s memories being as faulty as Sarah Jane’s.

Incidentally, this is the point in all reviews of The Sontaran Experiment where someone says that Styre’s mask isn’t as good as Linx’s, but actually I prefer the revised look. The something-like-a-golem look, all cruel eyes and looking a little like he’s been carved from stone. That contrasts well with Linday’s physicality. He carries himself lightly and his loose limbed thuggishness as he swings that machete around is far more unnerving than anything else in the story; and it’s quite an unnerving story.

Styre’s final words “I should kill you all now, but first I have more important tasks to perform!” is straight up vanity from a weakened man who has lost a fight with someone he justifiably thinks of as a bohemian ponce. With a broken collarbone. It still seems odd to me that Harry isn’t sent in to duff up Styre while the Doctor sabotages his spacecraft. That seems the appropriate division of labour. You can’t guarantee that Harry will press the button properly and the whole plan might fail. (I don’t have a recording schedule handy but it also strikes me as a better fix for Tom’s broken collarbone problem than putting a wig on Terry Walsh. But maybe it was too late to try.)

With the unexpected addition of The Sontaran Experiment to my tally of Doctor Who stories not just seen but owned³ I had a clear run from The Ark in Space through to Terror of the Zygons. A linked series-within-a-series that could be watched in one massive go on a rainy Sunday if I really wanted to. (No one had invented box setting, so I didn’t know that was what I was doing.)

Pretty soon, though, this extraordinary thing, unimaginable even at the start of this article wasn’t enough. Collecting Doctor Who is the kind of appetite that grows in the being fed, and pretty soon me and my friends all felt we needed another snack, despite the dramatic increase in frequency of official BBC Video releases in 1990.

Despite the very clear statement from our friendly neighbourhood contact that this was a one off favour he’d done us, we plucked up the courage to write to him again, and ask if he could please, just please, maybe do us another tape each? Please. I’ve no idea why we thought that was a reasonable thing to do, other than that we were so young it was a technique that could still be applied to parents on occasion.

Yet here we were, the three of us, setting out on new adventures in videotape and out of order, like Doctor Who Sarah and Harry. A nice little experiment of our own.