This Planet Has Four Walls: How early Doctor Who narrative was influenced by techniques and technology to overcome the confines of studio recording

"The Dalek Invasion of Earth" (1965) marked a turning point in the series. Not only did it see the first change to the line-up of regular characters (Susan Foreman, played by Carole Ann Ford, left at the conclusion of the story) but it was the first to feature material filmed on location. Up until this point, all episodes had been filmed entirely within the confines of a studio. This paper will examine the relationships and effects between narratives, production techniques and technology in this studio-bound era; how the programme makers told stories that in terms of direction, reach, and geography, far outstripped the limiting four walls of the studio space. In addition, the paper will discuss how production techniques developed to allow creativity to flourish in order to escape the trappings of the studio. Techniques such as forced perspective, front and back projection, and lighting will be discussed, along with how they’ve been employed to assist the telling of the story in a number of Doctor Who episodes, including "An Unearthly Child", "The Daleks", "Marco Polo," and "The Keys of Marinus". The central question to be explored is the idea that there is an inverse relationship between television production technology, and the creativity and ambition of geography in the narratives. While one grows, the other dies. Whilst television has become more technically adept, what has been lost? On what levels has moving beyond the studio been to the detriment of the medium

Mechanization of program construction in Martin-Loef's theory of types

The constructive approach to the problem of program correctness dates to the late 1960’s. During the early 1970’s interest developed in the application of constructive logics to the derivation of provably correct programs. Martin-Loef's Theory of Types was devised as a formalisation of constructive mathematics. His theory also integrates the processes of program construction and verification within a single deductive system. This thesis is concerned with the application of Martin-Loef's theory to the task of program construction. In particular, the mechanisation of this task is investigated. We begin with a comparative study of current implementations of constructive type theory. The aim of the study is to assess the suitability of the implementations in the role of programming assistant. A proposal for a more effective programming assistant is presented. A principal difficulty in constructing correct programs is the problem of scale. Computer assistance plays an essential role in alleviating this problem. Experience in performing formal proof provides a better understanding of this problem and is, therefore, an important aid to the development of computer assistance. For this reason the formal derivation of a generalised table look-up function was undertaken. This exercise in program construction revealed that a disproportionate amount of the overall proof effort was taken up with proving negations. A proof of a negation has no computational content; it contributes only to the correctness of the synthesized program. With the aim of freeing the programmer from those proof obligations a decision method for negation was developed. This decision method exploits, and thereby demonstrates, the uniform structure of Martin-Loef's theory. This uniformity is further utilized in a scheme for automatically deriving primitive recursive functions. The scheme enables the formal introduction of definitions during the course of a proof which satisfy the constraints of primitive recursion

Reasoned modelling critics: turning failed proofs into modelling guidance

The activities of formal modelling and reasoning are closely related. But while the rigour of building formal models brings significant benefits, formal reasoning remains a major barrier to the wider acceptance of formalism within design. Here we propose reasoned modelling critics — an approach which aims to abstract away from the complexities of low-level proof obligations, and provide high-level modelling guidance to designers when proofs fail. Inspired by proof planning critics, the technique combines proof-failure analysis with modelling heuristics. Here, we present the details of our proposal, implement them in a prototype and outline future plans

'Conditions of time and space': a re-enactment experiment with the British TV series Doctor Who.

The aim of this thesis is to provide a contribution to knowledge in two areas. Firstly, it seeks to further our understanding of the historical conditions of British television drama production; in particular the constraining and liberating influences of production space on the role of the director, and their decision-making process to bring script to screen. Secondly, the work develops the concept of re-enactment as a practice-based augmentation for archive-based textual reconstruction. As such, the thesis offers deeper discussions on the human context missing from current historiographic approaches to broadcast research. The thesis develops a re-enactment methodology that, via practical realisation, allows researchers to gain insight into the production dynamics of a particular era in history to learn about ‘in the moment’ directing decision-making. This is applied to a practice based experiment that includes creating a simulation of 1960s production conditions in order to explore the following research question: how would the decision-making process of producing contemporary television drama be affected by the conditions of 1960s production space? I argue that contemporary location-based production is as constraining as the studio it purports to rise above, yet without the same possibilities for creative reaction to counteract the limitations that historical conditions allowed. As a flagship BBC series reflecting contemporary industry practice, Doctor Who is used as the vehicle for analysis. The experiment focuses on a historical re-enactment of a 2006 episode of Doctor Who, “Tooth and Claw”, written by series executive producer Russell T Davies. The re-enacted audio-visual text is provided on DVD along with artefacts that encapsulate the process of production, informing analysis and reflection