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Ghost Light (Doctor Who)
Encyclopedia
Pre-production
Working titles for this story included The Bestiary and Life-Cycle. As revealed in the production notes for the DVD release, the story was renamed Das Haus der tausend Schrecken (The House of a Thousand Frights/Horrors) upon translation into GermanGerman language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
.
The story evolved out of an earlier, rejected script entitled Lungbarrow. It was to be set on Gallifrey
Gallifrey
Gallifrey is a fictional planet in the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who and is the homeworld of the Doctor and the Time Lords...
in the Doctor's ancestral home and deal with the Doctor's past, but producer John Nathan-Turner felt that it revealed too much of the Doctor's origins. It was reworked to make both evolution and the idea of an ancient house central to the story. Marc Platt used elements of his original idea for his Virgin New Adventures
Virgin New Adventures
The Virgin New Adventures were a series of novels from Virgin Publishing based on the British science-fiction television series Doctor Who...
novel Lungbarrow
Lungbarrow
Lungbarrow is an original novel written by Marc Platt and based on the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who...
.
The working script was heavily edited, with a number of explanatory scenes ultimately being omitted. The result is a plot that, unusually for Doctor Who, generally needs to be viewed several times to be understood. In particular, the function of Josiah and Control is never clearly explained. The plot is only fully explained in the DVD special feature "Light in Dark Places." Even the cast and director of the story were confused by the script, and made repeated calls to Marc Platt for explanations.
Platt includes several allusions and references to late 19th and early 20th century literature. Among the most notable, Mrs Grose is named after the housekeeper in Henry James
Henry James
Henry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....
' short story The Turn of the Screw
The Turn of the Screw
The Turn of the Screw is a novella written by Henry James. Originally published in 1898, it is ostensibly a ghost story.Due to its ambiguous content, it became a favourite text of academics who subscribe to New Criticism. The novella has had differing interpretations, often mutually exclusive...
(1898). Control's desire to be "proper ladylike" is reminiscent of Eliza Doolittle from George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...
's play Pygmalion
Pygmalion (play)
Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts is a play by Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of...
(1912), particularly as Ace has her repeat a presumably mis-remembered version of the "Rain in Spain" rhyme from the play to improve her speech, and at one point the Doctor refers to Ace as "Eliza". When Control threatens to burn the invitation to Buckingham Palace Josiah boasts that he is "a man of property", referencing the first volume of John Galsworthy
John Galsworthy
John Galsworthy OM was an English novelist and playwright. Notable works include The Forsyte Saga and its sequels, A Modern Comedy and End of the Chapter...
's The Forsyte Saga
The Forsyte Saga
The Forsyte Saga is a series of three novels and two interludes published between 1906 and 1921 by John Galsworthy. They chronicle the vicissitudes of the leading members of an upper-middle-class British family, similar to Galsworthy's own...
. Redvers Fenn-Cooper makes several references to Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad was a Polish-born English novelist.Conrad is regarded as one of the great novelists in English, although he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties...
's novella Heart of Darkness
Heart of Darkness
Heart of Darkness is a novella written by Joseph Conrad. Before its 1903 publication, it appeared as a three-part series in Blackwood's Magazine. It was classified by the Modern Library website editors as one of the "100 best novels" and part of the Western canon.The story centres on Charles...
(1902) and also one to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle DL was a Scottish physician and writer, most noted for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, generally considered a milestone in the field of crime fiction, and for the adventures of Professor Challenger...
's novel The Lost World (1912), claiming that he had seen giant lizards in a swamp in Africa
Africa
Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...
and that Conan Doyle did not believe him. As the serial is set in 1883, it can be inferred that Fenn-Cooper's story becomes the inspiration for the fictional version of Conan Doyle's novel. There is no indication that Fenn-Cooper is quoting from or referring directly to the "later" works themselves. There are also many references to Lewis Carroll's Alice. Gwendolyn calls Ace Alice, the Doctors refers to the elevator ride as "[down] the rabbit hole" and when he tells Light that not all forms of life are catalogued he starts naming imaginary creatures such as dragons and griffins, and then goes on to mention "the bandersnatch
Bandersnatch
A Bandersnatch is a fictional creature from Lewis Carroll's 1872 novel Through the Looking-Glass and 1874 poem "The Hunting of the Snark". Although neither poem describes the appearance of a Bandersnatch in great detail, in "The Hunting of the Snark" it has a long neck and snapping jaws, and both...
ers, the slithy toves
Jabberwocky
"Jabberwocky" is a nonsense verse poem written by Lewis Carroll in his 1872 novel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, a sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland...
".
In the dinner scene, the Doctor asks rhetorically, "Who was it said Earthmen never invite their ancestors round to dinner?" This refers to Douglas Adams
Douglas Adams
Douglas Noel Adams was an English writer and dramatist. He is best known as the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which started life in 1978 as a BBC radio comedy before developing into a "trilogy" of five books that sold over 15 million copies in his lifetime, a television...
' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction comedy series created by Douglas Adams. Originally a radio comedy broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1978, it was later adapted to other formats, and over several years it gradually became an international multi-media phenomenon...
– Adams had worked as a script editor on Doctor Who for one season of Fourth Doctor
Fourth Doctor
The Fourth Doctor is the fourth incarnation of the protagonist of the long-running BBC British television science-fiction series Doctor Who....
episodes, and wrote or co-wrote three stories in which he got away with several references to his other works. The Doctor makes a reference to the Fourth Doctor serial The Talons of Weng Chiang, which also took place in Victorian England, and quotes the Beatles ("It's been a hard day's night
A Hard Day's Night (song)
"A Hard Day's Night" is a song by the English rock band The Beatles. Written by John Lennon, and credited to Lennon–McCartney, it was released on the movie soundtrack of the same name in 1964...
").
Production
- Ghost Light was the last serial of the series ever produced, with the last recorded sequence being the final scene between Mrs Pritchard and Gwendoline. It was not, however, the last to be screened — both The Curse of FenricThe Curse of FenricThe Curse of Fenric is a serial in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in four weekly parts from 25 October to 15 November 1989...
and SurvivalSurvival (Doctor Who)-Writing:Writer Rona Munro approached script editor Andrew Cartmel at a BBC scriptwriting workshop and said that she'd "kill to write for Doctor Who." The story Munro developed incorporated themes including the morals of hunting...
, produced beforehand, followed it in transmission order. - This story is the first in what some have termed the "Ace Trilogy", a three-story arc that explores the turbulent personal history of the Doctor's companion, Ace. Such detailed exploration of a companion's earlier life was unusual in the original series, although it has become one of the main features of the new series. These three stories also linked to some extent by the concept of evolution, which features strongly in this story and Survival, and to a much lesser extent in The Curse of Fenric.
In print
A novelisation of this serial, written by Marc PlattMarc Platt
Marc Platt is a British writer. He is most known for his work with the BBC science fiction television series Doctor Who.After studying catering at a technical college, Platt worked first for Trust House Forte, and then in administration for the BBC...
, was published by Target Books
Target Books
Target Books was a British publishing imprint, established in 1973 by Universal-Tandem Publishing Co Ltd, a paperback publishing company. The imprint was established as a children's imprint to complement the adult Tandem imprint, and became well known for their highly successful range of...
in September 1990.
VHS, DVD and CD releases
- This story was released on VHSVHSThe Video Home System is a consumer-level analog recording videocassette standard developed by Victor Company of Japan ....
in May 1994. - A DVD release followed in September 2004, with many extended and deleted scenes included as bonus features. However, unlike the situation with The Curse of FenricThe Curse of FenricThe Curse of Fenric is a serial in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in four weekly parts from 25 October to 15 November 1989...
, these scenes no longer existed in broadcast quality and were sourced from VHS copies, some with burned-in on-screen timecodes. This made an extended edit, as had been prepared for the Fenric DVD release the previous year, impossible.
Soundtrack release
The soundtrack album for this serial was released on Silva Screen Records in 1993Track listing
- The Madhouse
- Goobledorf
- Uncharted Territory
- Heart of the Interior
- Enter Josiah
- Indoor Lightning
- Nimrod Observed
- Time to Emerge
- Burnt Toast
- Ace's Adventures Underground
- Where is Mamma?
- Loss of Control
- The Way to the Zoo
- The Memory Teller
- Lighting the Touchpaper
- Homo Victorianus Ineptus
- Out of the Shadows
- Light Enlightened
- Tropic of Perivale
- Tricks of the LIght
- Judgement in Stone
- Requiem
- Passing Thoughts