Trivia / Doctor Who S7 E3 "The Ambassadors of Death"

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• Creator Backlash:
  • David Whitaker didn’t like the story, mostly because it was actually written by Malcolm Hulke, who went uncredited for contractual reasons. This turned out to be Whitaker's final contribution to the series.
  • Terrance Dicks clearly didn't think too highly of the story either:
    One of the situations I inherited [as Doctor Who script editor] was "Ambassadors of Death" and the ongoing tangle with that. David Whitaker...had gone through four or five drafts and you come to a stage where you write so much it just gets worse. What was happening was that the need for the script was very urgent and I stormed into [producers] Peter [Bryant] and Derrick [Sherwin] and said, "Look, we've got five drafts of this. David's fed up with it, he doesn't know what to do. What we need to do is pay David in full and Mac [Hulke] and I will finish." And that's basically what we did. I made sure that David got a full script fee for all his episodes because he had been buggered about by the establishment and Mac and I took the bare bones of his story and almost did a "War Games"—wrote new scripts very quickly—and it shows. It had its moments though.
• Distanced from Current Events: The production text revealed that Reegan and his gang were originally Irish, but was changed after The Troubles began.
• What Could Have Been: David Whitaker shopped around the script (then called The Invaders from Mars) last season. When the main trio of Patrick Troughton, Frazer Hines, and Wendy Padbury left at the end of the sixth season, it was rewritten to provide for the show’s new style.
• Working Title: The Invaders From Mars, The Carriers Of Death and The Ambassadors.
• You Look Familiar:
  • Ronald Allen (Ralph Cornish) was one of the titular characters in "The Dominators".
  • Cyril Shaps (Lennox) was John Viner in "The Tomb of The Cybermen".
  • John Abineri (Carrington) played Van Lutyens in "Fury From The Deep".
  • William Dysart (Reegan) was Alexander McLaren in "The Highlanders".
  • A number of stunt performers are particularly clearly seen to die multiple times in the course of this story as soldiers or Mooks, sometimes in the same episode. In later stories they would get better at disguising the stunt performers, or at least not showing close-ups of their faces.
• Uncredited Role: Whitaker proved unavailable for rewrites, so the task was collaboratively taken up by Trevor Ray, Terrance Dicks, and Malcolm Hulke, all of whom went uncredited for contractual reasons (though Ray and Hulke would be credited on the DVD release). Ray handled the first episode, while Dicks and Hulke took on the rest, with the latter doing the majority of the work.

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