Horror of Fang Rock
Horror of Fang Rock is a serial from the long-running and popular British science-fiction television series Doctor Who. Consisting of four episodes, it was the opening story of the programme's fifteenth season on air, and was originally transmitted in four twenty-five minute instalments on Saturday evenings from September 3 to September 24 1977, at 6.15pm on BBC ONE.
The serial was written by Terrance Dicks, who had worked on the programme as script editor from 1969 to 1974, and had penned three previous serials of his own for the programme, one uncredited. Horror of Fang Rock was in fact a late replacement for the scripts Dicks had originally submitted, a vampire-based tale entitled The Witch Lords, which was cancelled close to production as it was feared it could detract from the BBC's high-profile adaptation of Bram Stoker's classic novel Count Dracula, which was due for transmission at a similar time. A re-written version did, however, eventually see production in 1980 as State of Decay, part of the eighteenth season of Doctor Who.
Starring Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor and Louise Jameson as his companion Leela, the serial is notable for being the only one of the programme's original twenty-six year run to have been produced at BBC studios outside of London. Engineering work meant that it was made at the Pebble Mill Studios of BBC Birmingham instead. It was directed by Paddy Russell, and produced by Graham Williams, his first story as producer to air. The script editor was Robert Holmes.
Horror of Fang Rock was released on VHS by BBC Worldwide in 1998. It has also been regularly repeated on the satellite television station UK Gold since the early 1990s, and shown abroad in various countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. A showing of the story on the Chicago PBS station WTTW-TV Channel 11 in November 1987 gained particular notoriety when the broadcast was interrupted for eighty-eight seconds by a pirate television transmitter overriding the station's transmission signal to broadcast a video of himself in a mask being spanked. This incident has subsequently gained a degree of cult myth about it.
