The Awakening (Doctor Who) - Production

Production

The working titles of this story were War Game and Poltergeist. Pringle had submitted this story in the mid-1970s to then-script editor Robert Holmes as a four-part story entitled War Game. In the 1980s he resubmitted his story (as well as a different four-parter, The Darkness, possibly featuring the Daleks) to script editor Eric Saward. Realizing the story did not have enough impact for four episodes, it was later pared down to two, renamed Poltergeist and then finally The Awakening. John Nathan-Turner liked the character of Will Chandler a great deal and seriously considered keeping him on as a companion. However, it was eventually concluded that Chandler's childlike character would quickly wear thin and lacked any clear path of development, so Nathan-Turner dropped the idea.

The story featured extensive location shooting and studio work. Two villages are used to portray Little Hodcombe: Shapwick in Dorset and Martin in Hampshire. Saward wanted to add a TARDIS sequence with Tegan and Kamelion, utilising the robot prop and played in chameleonic form by Peter Davison and Mark Strickson. However, this scene was cut from the transmitted episode for timing reasons. The recovery of an early edit of episode one on video (in the personal archive of late producer John Nathan-Turner) means that this element, previously thought lost, was included on the DVD release of the serial. A small part of the scene has appeared in the documentary Kamelion: Metal Man which featured on the DVD release of The King's Demons.

The master tape for Part One was found to have some scratch damage when the 1984 compilation version was being mastered; no protection copy was made at that time so the original tx master continued to deteriorate. The tape was checked in the early 1990s and the scratch damage found to be far more intrusive than it had been in 1984; fortunately, the original film sequences were kept and using these, the compilation copy and the reprise from part 2, in 1997 the Doctor Who Restoration Team were able to make a repaired master copy. This was used for the VHS release.

This was officially the final story of the series to consist of two 25-minute episodes. All two-parters since then have been 45 minutes long per episode, including most of season 22 and several stories of the revived series. The Ultimate Foe, the concluding segment of The Trial of a Time Lord, is numbered on screen as Parts Thirteen and Fourteen of the latter title; furthermore, they share the same BBC production code, 7C, with the preceding four-part story arc, Terror of the Vervoids, even though they have their own separate novelisation and feature compilation.

The production designer for this story, Barry Newbery, had worked on Doctor Who intermittently ever since its very first story. After completing Awakening, Newbery took early retirement from the BBC, making this story his last professional effort.