1. Original story editor David Whitaker left the role on October 31st 1964 (at the culmination of production for The Dalek Invasion Of Earth). During his last month in the post, whilst being trailed by his successor Dennis Spooner, Whitaker wrote The Rescue, to help introduce new companion Vicki. If Whitaker thought he had left Doctor Who behind he was surely mistaken. As on November 1st 1964, the very first day Whitaker wasn't officially working for the show, Spooner assigned his first commission in the role of story editor by tasking Whitaker to write a new pure historical adventure for the series.
2. Whitaker was particularly interested in 12th century Palestine, during the time of the Third Crusade. In developing his storyline, he was inspired by two events which occurred in the autumn of 1191. The first was an attempt by King Richard I to arrange the marriage of his widowed sister, Joanna, to al-Adil Saif-ed-Din (known to the Europeans as “Saphadin”), the brother of Muslim ruler Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi (known as “Saladin”). Whitaker also made use of an incident in which a hunting party led by Richard was waylaid by Saracens outside Jaffa; Richard was spared captivity when William de Preux convinced the attackers that he was actually the King.
When Whitaker completed his script it was submitted with the title “The Saracen Hordes”.
3. The director assigned to the serial was Douglas Camfield. He had worked as a production assistant on some of Doctor Who's earliest serials, including both the pilot and broadcast versions of An Unearthly Child and Marco Polo. Hi directorial debut for the show came when he helmed the fourth episode of Planet Of Giants, which was eventually edited down to form half of the third televised episode (as we explained here). "The Saracen Hordes", which was now also being referred to as "The Lionheart", would be his first full serial as director. It proved to be a great success, with the finished adventure popular among viewers and critics alike, so Camfield was asked back to helm the final broadcast story of season two, The Time Meddler. He'd then go on to direct some of the most highly regarded Doctor Who adventures from the 1960s and 70s; The Daleks' Master Plan, The Web of Fear, The Invasion, Inferno, Terror of the Zygons, and The Seeds of Doom.
4. Verity Lambert, Dennis Spooner and Douglas Camfield, were all very impressed with Whittaker's script, especially the dialogue.
William Hartnell - notsomuch!
Hartnell felt that some dialogue implying an incestuous relationship between Richard and Joanna was inappropriate for Doctor Who's family audience. After protesting to the highest office, the offending material was removed.
5. Talking of Lady Joanna, the sister of Richard I, she was portrayed by Jean Marsh. Marsh returned to Doctor Who later that year as companion Sara Kingdom in the 12-part serial The Daleks' Master Plan (a role she later revived for various Big Finish audio adventures). That wasn't Marsh's last venture into the world of Who, as she also appeared in the 1989 Seventh Doctor adventure Battlefield as Morgana Le Fay. She alsomade an un-billed cameo appearance in the 2013 docudrama about Doctor Who, An Adventure in Space and Time.
Incidentally, prior to all this, Marsh had been married to future Doctor Who actor Jon Pertwee from 1955 until their divorce in 1960.
6. When it came to The Lionheart himself, amongst those considered for the part of Richard was Nicholas Courtney, who would of course later play the recurring role of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart.
On this occasion, Courtney lost out to Julian Glover. Glover would also return to the world of Who, this time in 1979 when he played the villain Scaroth, last of the Jagaroth, in one of Doctor Who's most popular serials, City of Death.
You may be more familiar with Richard Glover from some of his most famous big-screen roles, including the Imperial general Maximilian Veers in The Empire Strikes Back, the ruthless Greek villain Aristotle Kristatos in the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only and the deceptive American Nazi Walter Donovan in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
7. By the time studio recording began on March 5th 1865, the serial had been renamed The Crusade, and Whitaker's storyline had been structured to minimise Ian's involvement in the third episode, allowing William Russell to take a week's holiday (his only scene in that installment was prerecorded at this time).
Russell was also scheduled to film the scene where an army of ants crawls up Ian's arm. Russell refused to participate in this shot, and production assistant Viktors Ritelis agreed to double for him.
8. During taping of the previous serial, The Web Planet, William Russell had decided to leave the show at the end of his current contract, when season two's production block ended. It was around the time that The Crusade was in production that the show's producer Verity Lambert also decided she would leave Doctor Who at the end of the current recording block.
With original companion and Doctor's granddaughter Susan, played by Carole Ann-Ford, already having departed, original script-editor David Whitaker gone and the first associate producer Mervyn Pinfield having already moved on, this meant that things were changing quite rapidly both in-front of and behind the screens. More was to come too, but we'll get to that next time.
9. Copies of all the four episodes of The Crusade were believed lost in the BBC's mass deletion of episode recordings in the 1970s, with BBC Enterprises also deleting their copies. Fortunately, the BBC Film Library had retained a copy of episode three, titled "The Wheel of Fortune", that it had accidentally acquired. They also had on record that a copy of the opening installment, "The Lion", was also in their library, however it was discovered that it had been accidentally junked in 1972.
The Crusade was long thought to be one of the very few Doctor Who adventures for which no off-air soundtrack was known to exist, until copies were located in 1995. Then in 1999, a film copy of "The Lion" was discovered in a film collector's personal library in New Zealand. It had been sold to the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation in the 1960s, but not transmited, and somehow made its way into a private collection.
Today this still leaves episode two, "The Knight of Jaffa", and episode four, "The Warlords", missing, presumed wiped. The only snippet known to exist is a brief clip of the finale of episode four which appears at the start of the subsequent story, The Space Museum. It shows the time-travellers standing in period costume round the TARDIS console, literally frozen in time. Often these scenes were recreated for new adventures, but on this occasion it has been confirmed as a clip rather than a restaged scene by an off-camera cough on the soundtracks to both "The Warlords" and The Space Museum. This is the only known surviving footage from the final episode.
10. A different version of the final episode of the previous story The Web Planet featured a caption with "Next Week: The Space Museum" instead of "Next Week: The Lion." For many years this was believed it was because the story had not been distributed overseas through fear that it might cause offence.
It's not true though. The story was sold overseas in the 1960s, just not in the Middle East. The tag was put in place by BBC Enterprises in the 1970s when selling packages of Who episodes for overseas broadcast (indeed this alternative end tag was discovered on the version of The Web Planet recovered from Nigeria). As a complete print of The Crusade did not exist by this time, it was decided to skip the adventure entirely.
Next time, it's The Space Museum.
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