Production
| Episode | Broadcast date | Run time | Viewership |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Part One" | 3 September 1977 (1977-09-03) | 24:10 | 6.8 |
| "Part Two" | 10 September 1977 (1977-09-10) | 24:10 | 7.1 |
| "Part Three" | 17 September 1977 (1977-09-17) | 23:12 | 9.8 |
| "Part Four" | 24 September 1977 (1977-09-24) | 23:49 | 9.9 |
Working titles for this story included The Monster of Fang Rock and The Beast of Fang Rock. Horror of Fang Rock was a late replacement for the scripts Terrance Dicks had originally submitted, a vampire-based tale entitled The Vampire Mutations, which was cancelled close to production as it was feared it could detract from the BBC's Count Dracula a high-profile adaptation of Bram Stoker's classic novel Dracula, which was due for transmission close to when the serial would have aired. A re-written version did, however, eventually see production in 1980 as State of Decay, part of the eighteenth season of Doctor Who.
The serial is the only one of the original series to have been produced at BBC studios outside of London. Engineering work at those studios meant that it was made at the Pebble Mill Studios of BBC Birmingham instead. According to the DVD commentary supplied by Louise Jameson, John Abbott and Terrance Dicks, a scene in Part Three was crucial to the behind-the-scenes relationship between Jameson and co-star Tom Baker. In one scene, he consistently came in ahead of his cue, thereby upstaging her. On the grounds that this move was "not what they had rehearsed" she insisted on three successive retakes until he came in at the rehearsed time. This eventually won his respect. From that point forward, she claims their working relationship was much smoother.
Read more about this topic: Horror Of Fang Rock
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.”
—Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“Constant revolutionizing of production ... distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)