The Doctor and Jo take the TARDIS on a test flight. They arrive on a cargo ship, the SS Bernice, that appears to be crossing the Indian Ocean in 1926 but is in fact trapped inside a miniscope”, a banned peepshow of miniaturised life-forms”, on the planet Inter Minor.
They enter another section of the scope but find themselves confronted by ferocious Drashigs. The Doctor eventually breaks out of the scope and returns to full size. The device is owned by a pairof Lurman entertainers, Vorg and Shirna, who hope to make a quick profit from Inter Minor’s hitherto reclusive natives.
NOTES
Working titles for this story included Peepshow.
This story was recorded as part of the production block for the previous season but deliberately held over for Season Ten: this was to enable Barry Letts to direct the production, since his role as producer would have made it difficult to do so at the start of a production block (as he had found out with Terror of the Autons).
The titles for Carnival of Monsters were prepared, like Frontier in Space with a new arrangement of the theme music performed by Paddy Kingsland on a synthesizer.
Known as the “Delaware” arrangement (the BBC Radiophonic Workshop was based on Delaware Road), it proved unpopular with BBC executives, so the original Delia Derbyshire theme was restored, and only appears on an uncorrected version of episode two that was shipped to Australia in error. This, which also featured a few extra scenes, was used in the 1995 release. (The opening and closing title sequence versions of the theme has been included as an extra on the DVD release of the story. The original 2m 30sec theatrical release of this music was wiped many years ago.)
Ian Marter went on to play Harry with Fourth DoctorTom Baker
The ship used was the RFA Robert Dundas which had been decommissioned and was scrapped very shortly after filming.
