Horror of Fang Rock is the first serial of the 15th season of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in four weekly parts on BBC1 from 3 to 24 September 1977.
The four survivors are brought to the lighthouse: the bosun Harker; Colonel James Skinsale MP; the owner, Lord Palmerdale; and his secretary Adelaide Lessage.
[citation needed] Horror of Fang Rock was a late replacement for the scripts Terrance Dicks had originally submitted, a vampire-based tale entitled The Vampire Mutations, which was cancelled close to production as it was feared it could detract from the BBC's Count Dracula, a high-profile adaptation of Bram Stoker's classic novel Dracula, which was due for transmission close to when the serial would have aired.
Louise Jameson stops wearing her brown contact lenses at the end of this serial, with the sudden change in colour being explained as a pigment dispersal caused by looking directly into a bright explosion.
As mentioned in more than one DVD commentary Jameson had found the lenses painful to wear,[2] and made their removal a condition for her agreeing to play Leela for another season.
[3][4] Alan Rowe had previously played Dr. Evans and provided the voice from Space Control in The Moonbase (1967) as well as Edward of Wessex in The Time Warrior (1973–74) and later appeared as Garif in the serial Full Circle (1980).
Ralph Watson had previously played Captain Knight in The Web of Fear (1968) as well as Ettis in The Monster of Peladon (1974).
[2] Paul Cornell, Martin Day, and Keith Topping wrote of the serial in The Discontinuity Guide (1995), "A masterpiece, designed to do nothing more than scare kids, which it does very efficiently.
"[6] In The Television Companion (1998), David J. Howe and Stephen James Walker were also positive, describing it as "a tightly constructed drama that succeeds because of, rather than in spite of, its confined setting and limited cast".
Club's Christopher Bahn was critical of the pacing of the end of the story and the "often unconvincing" special effects, but considered the serial to be, despite some flaws, "a classic base-under-siege chiller".
[10] Writing for The Guardian in 2019, Toby Hadoke described it as "a claustrophobic masterpiece dripping with mordant humour and suspense".