Miranda Richardson is the Doctor! (TV ATL)

“John [Nathan-Turner] wanted to resign from the show. Michael Grade stopped him. … Nobody wanted to do Doctor Who. The show was too much trouble."

"They [the BBC] were inimical to it, and they admit it now. I spoke to Michael Grade not too long ago. He says just didn't 'get' Doctor Who, they didn't know what they had on their hands. ... [JN-T] made it very hard for them to turn that show off. We know he made it hard; they actually couldn't! They had to lie about what they were doing and then have a second go at it!"[1]

"There had been a perfect storm as the hiatus, the production issues of Trial of a Time Lord, the death of Robert Holmes, the departure of Eric Saward and his interview with Starburst, and the demand for him to personally sack his leading man and friend. Already disgruntled with negative fan press and BBC politics, Nathan-Turner was pushed to breaking point. Despite all that it would have been unrealistic to expect him to stand up for Colin Baker. Doing that would have risked his career and even people with good office politics skills would have blanched at that."


"I know, because he told me, that it was a whim and once he'd started he had he couldn't stop. He'd waited quite a few days, mulling over whether to sack Colin, miserable as hell, and then just snapped. If he'd had just a minute to think before he phoned up Powell [Head of Drama], it wouldn't have happened."[2]


"And of course I was fired anyway! John made sure that I had work afterwards - he didn't have to do that but I think he felt guilty that he hadn't found another way."


"Nathan-Turner would go on to produce a series of Bergerac in 1987. In his memoirs, he cites "boredom" as his reasons for leaving. His final show was the 1989-1994 soap opera Play's The Thing, starring Colin Baker as the hapless theatre manager Dougie Smith."[3]


"Who's Producer"
"Clive Doig, the brain behind popular kid shows Jigsaw, Eureka, and Beat The Teacher, and groundbreaking deaf kid's show Vision On, has been made producer of Dr Who. This is not the first trip on the Tardis for Doig. In the very first series with William Hartnell, Doig was one of the vision mixers: responsible for which camera was filming during a scene."


"Mark Shivas was an old schoolfriend of mine and was Head of Series: I suggested that I should produce Doctor Who because John Nathan-Turner was leaving. I proposed a female lead as Doctor Who..."[4]


"DOC-HER WHO"
"Miranda Richardson Goes From Queen to Time Lord"


"In her first two years in the spotlight, she was sent script after script that featured dodgy and demonic female characters – "'a woman with a knife who's after guys' kind of shit," she says. At the same time she was offered Doctor Who, she was offered the Glenn Close role in Fatal Attraction, which could have made her name in Hollywood.

" "Clive Doig had seen me in Blackadderand he'd like how Queenie could both be so daffy and so dangerous, that was how he kept saying he wanted the Doctor to be," says Richardson. "Now here was a straight choice, I could be a quirky silly space hero or I could be be the evil bitch forever. That was a tough decision!" she laughs."


"Clive had just a few months in which to get everything done and I'm pretty sure that's why he grabbed me - female Doctor, female script editor, and who was available and knew the show? This happens to me just after I failed to sell a new script to Gems [6] and suddenly I'm a script editor! That happens on telly, not in telly! [laughs]"


"While Doig had made sure to find his star and script editor as soon as possible, Richardson was committed to filming Empire of the Sun and there was a good chance to overruns. It was assumed that Colin Baker would agree to film a regeneration story and that this would cover any shortages.

"Doig and Clegg's first port of call was Pip and Jane Baker - a husband-and-wife team who had proved they could deliver scripts fast - to create the first Seventh Doctor story, a Rani/Doctor clash called Strange Matter. Philip Martin was sought out for his unused script, Mission to Magnus, which would be used as the regeneration story; Clegg threw in her own used script, The Elite (feeling the Daleks would cement the female Doctor was 'real') and commissioned a new writer, Andrew Cartmel, to complete it; and Peter Hammond and Graham Williams were both contacted about Paradise 5 and The Nightmare Fair, respectively. New writer Stephen Wyatt sought out the new team and pitched a script that, while unused, allowed him to swiftly pitch Paradise Towers. [6]

"All of this was thrown into chaos when the Strange Matter scripts actually came in and when Colin Baker insulted Michael Grade in an interview with the Sun."

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[1] These excerpts are all real quotes from DWM interviews, up to "They had to lie" (which is a slight alteration).

[2] The "mulling it over" sentence is a rewrite of a real sentence from Russell's OTL interview. JN-T had indeed spent long days agonising about whether to fire Colin.

[3]Andrew Cartmell has said JN-T was offered Bergerac but turned it down - and was angry at being offered it. (This would probably have been in 1988 or thereabouts, which I'm fudging.) Theatre was both JN-T's background and a passion.

[4] Slight edit of a real quote (in the real one, "supposedly leaving" and another line about Mark Shivas). He really did propose a female lead.

[5] Real article and she really was offered Fatal Attraction. The second paragraph is all original

[6] Wyatt sought out JN-T before Cartmel was even hired and Cartmel's agent recommended him to JN-T. Both of these things will still happen with Doig. JN-T deliberately looked for writers unconnected to Saward, which isn't an issue here.

Oooooh...interesting...

A lady-person!? *Harumph*

Nicely researched. I will look forward to it.

“The story for Strange Matter was sound but the execution left a lot to be desired. You had dialogue like ‘earthling’ in 1987, they were using big thesaurus words in a way that felt pretentious, and there was this bizarre cliffhanger about the Wisdom of Solomon. King Solomon was on of the kidnapped geniuses … in the Bakers’ draft script the episode ends with the axe coming down on the baby and the Doctor and Mel weren’t even there. It needed serious work."[1][FONT=&quot][/FONT]


“When Doig learned the BBC would only pay for fourteen episodes – which would need to be divided into two four-parters and a six-parter to spread the budget[2] – he ran to Shivas to protest that it was unworkable. “You couldn’t do three stories a year and you certainly shouldn’t do a six-parter! I later became friends with Barry Letts and Terry Dicks from conventions and they agreed that six-parters were a terrible idea – and they’d done them!” Shivas agreed to push for a small budget increase so that the show could do five three-parters instead."[FONT=&quot][/FONT]


“Honestly this works better as a three-parter but I didn’t think that at the time.”
“What did you think?”
”Oh bugger me, more work!”
“[laughs] Same here!”


“”So in the same few days, I learned that Colin was out but Miranda still couldn’t do it and that I had to cut it to three episodes." Philip Martin pretends to cut his throat. Years later, he still sounds stunned at the challenge. “If she’d been available, I could have had the Doctor regenerate in the first scene but no Doctor? The glowing head I think was Clive’s idea and I knew it was silly at the time but since I couldn’t think of another way out…”[FONT=&quot][/FONT]


“· Colin Baker was fired from the role of the Doctor, and (understandably) refused to come back to do a regeneration scene in "Mission to Magnus". So instead, the Sixth Doctor was badly wounded – so badly that his regeneration stops working properly and he spends most of the story with a glowing face, a distorted voice, and two pillows where Colin’s belly was.”[3][FONT=&quot][/FONT]


“The Doctor was just going to regenerate into a woman and Time Lords can just do it; it had nothing to do with Magnus being an all-female planet. I see why fans think that but it never occurred to anyone – we were too busy trying to sort out the nuts and bolts!”[FONT=&quot][/FONT]
- Philip Martin, DWM #288


“”Sometimes we get things wrong and sometimes you get rejected, but Barbara was very rude to us. We did a rewrite as requested and then within a few days, we’re told it’s unusable and nobody will explain why. You don’t treat people like that."
” “I think she wanted to make her own mark and didn’t want other older writers,” adds Pip.”[FONT=&quot][/FONT]


“They were reluctant to listen to my suggestions and with everything that needed doing for the new format and Magnus, I didn’t have time to spend on getting Strange Matter up. Rejecting it would mean a rush to get a replacement script but it was a risk I felt I had to take. I’ll accept I could have handled it differently. However, going over my head to complain to Clive was intolerable.[4] I’d intended to talk to them for 1988 but after that, Doig agreed to block them."[FONT=&quot][/FONT]


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[1] Andrew Cartmel has said this about Strange Matter in OTL – including the Solomon story.

[2] In OTL, JN-T dealt with this by splitting the 6-parter into an all-location 3-parter and all-studio 3-parter. Doig didn’t have the same history of JN-T and had more connections, so he isn’t going to think of doing that.

[3] Having a glowy-headed badly regenerated Doctor was actually an idea Russell T Davies had so DWM could regenerate 8 into 9 without having to vanish the strip companion between issues. (They decided not to show the regeneration)

[4] Cartmel dropped the script and the Bakers did indeed go over his head to JN-T. They don’t have the same ties to Doig.

"The TARDIS has been pulled off course and sent hurtling through time and space. When it finally stops, the Doctor is wounded – overloaded with time energies – and Mel is alone facing the culprits.

"The takeover of the TARDIS by the school bully from the class of the fourth millennium on Gallifrey is only the first of her problems. The evil Sil is at work on the planet Magnus, plotting a scheme against the all-female rulers that could wipe out most of the population; and unless Mel can save the Doctor, nobody will survive the worst and final threat…”[1]

"Half of the original story had to be cut. I probably should have cut Anzor out, he was supposed to drive a large part of the plot but he ends up just being the reason the Doctor has to regenerate. There could have been another way to do that. The Ice Warriors could have been in it from episode one instead of being the cliffhanger of episode two. You always think of these things too late to be any good!”


"Within five minutes, the TARDIS has landed in the 20th century. Mel is surrounded by enemies but instead of screaming, she’s trying to bluff Anzor and Sil out, she’s trying to convince the Magnii they’re being tricked, and trying to save the Doctor. She fails in the first two points but it’s a breath of fresh air to see her get to try (and Bonnie get to act!). … Miranda Richardson’s triumphant debut in Part 3 has rushed scripting but Richardson sells it. This Doctor doesn’t bluster.”


"I got really excited when I read Mission to Magnus, I had so much more to do! I realised later that was because Colin and Miranda weren’t around!”

"Columbo was our model – the way he seems to be a hapless twit and then ‘just one thing’ and it turns out he knew everything all along. So out I stumble, acting like a complete ditz and annoying the Ice Warriors and then: BANG.”


"The look is deliberate, she’s meant to look odd. We put her in French New Look clothes and then give her thick trainspotter glasses and frizzy hair to clash with it. The Doctor wants to be underestimated.”


"The Doctor has landed right in the middle of a warzone – a warzone where every soldier is young, bred and raised for intelligence and violence, fighting for the glory of the Elite.

"Hidden away in the Head’s Office, the Dalek behind it all is watching. The Doctor will have to match wits with her deadliest enemy but how can she fight her way through an army of children?”


"Barbara’s original pitch had these savages cast out because they weren’t clever enough. It was me who decided ‘let’s have them as a gang of teenage girls’ which tells you a lot more about my mind than I want you to know![2] So you get gangs versus posh kids in school uniforms and it’s the gang that’s the good guys. Doctor Who lends itself to subversive stories.”


" “It ended up being a lot sillier than I’d intended and I remember getting very annoyed about that.”

“Clive wanted the show to be more light-hearted and comedic.[3] But when it’s child soldiers and our Nazi stand-in…

“ “Yeah, it ends up being nastier! Once I cottoned on to that, the rewrites became really fun.””


“The Elite was not a story I was entirely happy with but didn’t have much of a choice. I know the fans love it but for me – and the bloody Mail as it turned out – this was far too close to the line. I told Barbara I didn’t want a rerun of this. ”


"She tried to give me another chance but Clive’s ideas and mine just didn’t mesh. And that’s fair enough, he was the boss and I was just one of the freelancers. Obviously I was a lot bitchier about it in 1987! Nothing in the press, I wanted to work at the BBC again, but if you got me drunk at Panopticon…”


"All of these over-the-phone scenes with the Daleks, the voice I heard during filming was Roy Skelton in the corner yelling in a Dalek voice. I corpsed so much I almost regenerated!”


"People are going to the holiday colony of Paradise 5 and never coming back home again. The Doctor’s curiosity is peaked. She and Mel must investigate, but stealthily – if the unseen enemy knows a Time Lord has arrived, things could spiral out of control.

"Mel goes undercover while the Doctor hides in the shadows. And in the golden trimmings and the happy smiles, something sinister is lurking. The Elohim are coming…”


“Richardson had been able to get some days off from Empire Of The Sun to film Magnus but had to fly back to finish the rest. The solution was to film Paradise 5 out of order – Hammond had already been asked to remove Doctor scenes just in case – so that a few key scenes could imply the Doctor was working in the background. Once again, Bonnie Langford got to do the lion’s share. Inadvertently, it also made the Seventh Doctor seem like a master chess player…”
- Trial of a TV Show: Doctor Who in 1984-88 by David Bishop

"She took down the Ice Warriors in ten minutes and organised the planet against the Daleks – now it turns out she doesn’t even have to be in the same room to mess you up.”


"And then bloody Paradise 5 meant I had to change my title! I went with Heavenly Heights to be snarky but the title ended up being Tower Of Death – very Hinchcliffe of me!”


" “I actually think the reason The Greatest Show was more successful was not so much that I wrote a better script, but because it was much, much better directed, designed, and acted. With Season 24 there was this sense we all were trying to turn a battleship 180 degrees and it was too much to ask to happen at any one time. Everything needed to be redone all at the same time.” [4]

“Tower did get left out because of the work needed on the other four scripts. Do you feel your script could have done with more attention?

“ “As a young man I’d have said ‘no, it’s perfect’.”

"The TARDIS has landed at Blackpool Pleasure Beach… because the Doctor quite fancies a holiday. The last thing she wants to find is a space-time vortex in the amusement park. Nor to find herself being stalked by a familiar Chinese Mandarin…

"If the Doctor loses this game, there’s no replay!”


“We knew Bonnie would be leaving at the end of the series so The Nightmare Fair was kept as the final story. It gave us a way to send her home and came with a potential new companion in Kevin.[5] In retrospect we shouldn’t have used the Toymaker since most of the audience had no idea who that was!”


“Kevin Stoney was just an average troublemaking kid from 80s Blackpool until his brother Geoff went missing. He risked it all to get his brother back and soon found himself not just skipping school but skipping time zones!”

“Doig and Clegg negotiated with Williams to have Kevin Stoney – requiring Williams to sign away all rights to the character[6]– come in as the new companion. Much like the original idea for Adric, Kevin was a smart but streetwise youth, an ‘Artful Dodger’ in space. Having him come from contemporary Earth would make him an obvious stand-in for the younger audience. … In a deliberate attempt to attract more young viewers, Doig looked to Grange Hill for the new companion’s actor.”
- A Brief History of Time Travel on The Nightmare Fair

“Lee MacDonald[7] was the best choice. We did get a few jokes – ‘Zammo was on so much drugs he thinks he’s on Doctor Who’ – but the drugs storyline on Grange Hill showed he had the range. ”


“To be honest, I wasn’t a fan of Doctor Who. I thought it was naff! I thought, okay, I’ll do one year for the money. Then I actually read the script and it’s pretty fun, and then I got even more scripts and now with Big Finish I still haven’t left! I’m trapped!”

“Writer Simon Furman was determined to have TV villains the Ice Warriors in the story but as the show had already laid claim, he switched to the Sontarans (which required payment to creator Bob Holmes’ estate). "My first two Who strip stories had obeyed the unwritten directive 'thou shalt not use established villains straight out of the gate,'" he recalls, "but with my third story, the first to feature the Seventh Doctor in strip form, I felt a grade A Who villain was called for. The Sontarans also allowed me to play with the same ‘war without end’ theme as Transformers.
“One of the big twists was that the female ‘Doctor’ that turns up is not Miranda Richardson – and turns out to be a hired assassin in disguise, working for the Sontarans. “That just felt like a nice twist to keep everyone off guard. I wanted to use Luj as the new strip companion but [editor] Richard Starkings turned it down. Every chance I’ve had, I’ve tried bringing her back!””[8]


“Marvel UK were very keen to bring outside elements into the Who strip and they did that twice, once with a couple of characters called The Sleeze Brothers and once with a character called Death’s Head… Marvel wanted to spin these off into their own series”[9]

“By the time I was writing the Death’s Head story, Miranda Richardson’s Doctor had been on the telly and I could get more of a feel for her. So the Doctor ends up tricking Death’s Head into sorting out a problem for her that just happens to be in the same year Dragon’s Claws took place. This new Doctor started to feel dangerous.”


---

[1] This and others are partially based on the real Virgin (and Big Finish) blurbs for the Missing Stories. Changes are made to reflect TTL’s production issues

[2] Andrew Cartmel came up with the girl gang in Paradise Towers and said pretty much the same thing about his mind re girl gangs. Give him a story with violent kids, he’d have put the gangs in.

[3] Doig has said he’d have aimed for a comedic, lighter series when interviewed by DWM.

[4] Adaptation of real comments to Cartmel

[5] Langford would still want to leave in TTL (as she doesn’t want to be tied down to one role) and The Nightmare Fair would be a logical way to get her out. Kevin is a real character from The Nightmare Fair.

[6] Ian Briggs signed away all rights to Ace and it would’ve happened here too

[7] Here, I’m taking some liberties but there’s only so many youth actors from 1987 people will have potentially heard of and that I can actually look up! (MacDonald had indeed had a meaty role as Zammo on Grange Hill.)

[8] Partially adapted from Furman’s real comments to Freeman; in OTL, the Ice Warriors were used. Luj is a real Furman character and the fake Doctor twist was really used, but in a later strip for Hulk Comic

[9] Real-world quote.

[FONT=&quot]“[/FONT][FONT=&quot]The BBC once again decided to shift Doctor Who out of its Saturday teatime slot for Season Twenty-Four and back to weekdays as had been the case throughout the early Eighties. Unlike that period, however, the programme would be broadcast just once a week (specifically, on Mondays) and at a much later time, infamously putting it up against ITV's soap opera powerhouse Coronation Street[/FONT][FONT=&quot]."[1][/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot]“I don’t believe Corrie’s a problem. If you want to see fantasy and adventure, you won’t be watching Corrie!"[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot]“Mark [Shivas] was apologetic and agreed to take it up, but in the end we were stuck with Corrie. I was promised that they’d think about it the next year and apparently they still thought it was a good idea. Now I knew that management found Doctor Who a bit sad and embarrassing but this just seemed perverse: we were not being allowed to course correct."[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot]“Doctor Who was still using a multi-camera studio setup instead of single camera. No other drama [/FONT][FONT=&quot]of its type was anywhere close to being produced in that sort of way[/FONT][FONT=&quot]. This is how poorly regarded the show was. Clive Doig couldn’t get that changed until 1988! When a man with his stature and connections took a year to get it changed, what hope would JN-T have?"[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]
"Mission To Magnus opened with 5.1m viewers and would slowly drop to 4.9m.[3] The Elite, able to promote the Daleks and the first proper appearance of the Seventh Doctor, would open with 5.8m[4], dip to 5.6m and then bounce back to 5.7. … The Nightmare Fair would climb 500,000 to 5.9m before rapidly dropping down to 5.6m[5] on the strength of MacDonald.[/FONT]
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“On average, most of Season 24 had been above 5m viewers and nothing after Magnus had gone below 5.2m. This was a marked improvement on Trial of a Time Lord but unfortunately was not back to pre-hiatus levels."[/FONT]


[FONT=&quot]“WE ASK: HAS A FEMALE DOCTOR KILLED THE SHOW?"[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]- The Sun[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot]“We had better scripts and a new production team and a Doctor who didn’t dress in the dark, so why wasn’t everything gumdrops and ponies? It must be because Miranda Richardson was a change too far! It was nothing to do with budget or the BBC or that the public still didn’t trust the show or bloody Corrie, nope, it’s all the woman. All that was needed was for her to regenerate again and all the problems would go away!"[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot]“That got really annoying, when you’re trying to do your job and everyone’s doing their job the best they can and the people who claim to be fans…"[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot]“People forget it wasn’t just the fans, I got people suggesting this at Television Centre as well. The media kept asking. A lot of the fans were defending the idea and defending Richarson and defending the show."[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot]“We did a survey for the magazine and we did find a lot of people disliked the change. It was, uh, over 60% of the younger boys, they were complaining. But most of them were still watching the show and buying the magazine anyway!"[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot]“I thought it was quite interesting to write but around, oh, 1989 Marvel starts wanting to have Doctor Who strips in Hulk Comic, of all places[6], and they didn’t want the Seventh Doctor because it was a ‘boy’s comic’. So we ended up writing about older Doctors but then it could only be older Doctors who had video releases in case kids didn’t know who they were and it all got very silly!"[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot]“Ratings had gone up and stabilised. It wasn’t great but this was a foundation. If the BBC of the time had been interested, the show could have built off that."[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot]“I got a lot of letters from schoolgirls[7] who loved how I rallied the Krangs or stopped the Ice Warriors or saved Zammo, and they wanted to study harder at school because they wanted to be as smart as the Doctor. At the end of the day, one of those letters mattered more for me than ten bad reviews.”[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot][1] Real-world summary (though in the real world it’s for Time and the Rani). These decisions were made high up and it’s very unlikely the show could have escaped it, no matter who the producer was.[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot][2] This is mostly what Moffat said about the real camera set-up. Doig will have enough pull to get it changed but not until after S24 has finished filming[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot][3] The real ratings opening for Time and the Rani. It really did climb back to 4.9m for the final episode but that’s after the middle had sunk quite badly. In TTL, ratings stay better cos it’s not bloody Time And the Rani.[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot][4] Ratings did go up to this level on the second episode of Remembrance (up from ep1’s) and actually higher for Delta and the Bannermen ep1. [/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot][5] “Zammo from Grange Hill” being in the show would likely get it another PR push and ratings bounce from people who hadn’t been watching the show. Once they start, a bunch of them are going to leave after one ep. [/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot][6] In real life, Marvel UK put 7th Doctor strips in Hulk Comic (seriously). Hulk was aimed at younger kids and a fear of a “girlie” strip putting young boys off would have been present.[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot][7] You’d seen an increase in the number of young girls once Lee MacDonald’s in it (Grange Hill had a large female audience). Most of the fanmail will be from young girls who already watch the show though – while not the largest segment, other actresses have talked about fan mail from young girls (Lalla Ward wearing her school uniform in City of Death so girls watching[8] would feel better about theirs)[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot][8] And then she got letters from the dads watching [/FONT]

[FONT=&amp]“With luck, the show will run another twenty five years!"[/FONT][FONT=&quot][/FONT]
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“It had been clear that the show needed a new crop of writers and equally clear that the only way to get suitable new writers would be to seek out new, inexperienced people from the BBC Script Unit. Some would be unusable. Clegg received a “rather marvellous, creative” pitch called The Happiness Patrol “which was very avante-garde and theatrical but it would have been impossible to sell to a teatime family audience.”[1] More luck was found with Malcolm Kohll, Ben Aaronovitch, and Rona Munro."[FONT=&quot][/FONT]
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“Ben’s Knightfall script was a revelation. It wasn’t useable but it was clear that this was a major talent, someone who could be of great use on Doctor Who. So, of course, I lost his phone number! I had to call every Aaronovitch in the phone book [2] … We came away with two stories, Transit – since turned into a very good book – and Storm Over Avalon. The latter was picked due to Clive’s tastes. Sci-fi high fantasy is certainly lighter than cyberpunk! [3]”[FONT=&quot][/FONT]



“Clive, I want to use the Brigadier! ‘That’s a brilliant idea!’ Clive, I want to kill the Brigadier! ‘Piss off, you’re not doing that on the anniversary show!’ And it’s a good thing he said that because I would have bottled out on killing him on the final draft! [laughs]”[FONT=&quot][/FONT]




The Brigadier: “Ah, you must be the Doctor’s new companion.”
The Doctor: “[pause] Yes.”[FONT=&quot][/FONT]
- Storm Over Avalon



“And then I spent ten minutes tricking him for no plot reason whatsoever but it was hilarious to play! Poor Nick seemed really confused!”[FONT=&quot][/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]- [/FONT]Miranda Richardson, [FONT=&amp]DWM [/FONT][FONT=&amp]#217[/FONT]



“ “I remember all these notes for Delta from Clive, always worried that we were getting too dark – and I wanted it to get dark, I was trying to set up this Magical Mystery Tour feeling and then kick its legs out.”

“The death of all the space tourists was a hard one to get through.

“ “And thank you for going to bat for me on that. It was rather like The Elite in the end, it’s all zany and colourful on the surface and then it’s got this nasty hard edge under it. Everyone thinks this is what the Seventh Doctor era is about, dark fists in neon gloves and this master chess player and I don’t think we planned any of it!””[FONT=&quot][/FONT]


“Oh, I loathed Delta and the Bannermen at the time! I’m still a spotty herbert wanting to be taken seriously and they have me dancing at Butlins! … The stuff with Sara [Griffiths, who played Ray] was great though. Kevin got to pull! And the audience knows, and Kevin knows really but is trying to pretend, that this isn’t going to work because he’s not gonna stay in the fifties and she’s not gonna leave. It was some good stuff.”[FONT=&quot][/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]- [/FONT]Lee MacDonald, DWM #302



“Rona, I’ll be honest, was because it was embarrassing to have a female Doctor and an all-male writing team! I went looking for a good, new female writer and here she was.”[FONT=&quot][/FONT]
- Barbara Clegg, DVD feature for Survival


“I’d been watching the show since I was two but it was down south and I was in Scotland and they surely had all these other, better writers to work with. And then I get this letter from Barbara… The Nightmare Fair hadn’t aired yet but once I knew the companion came from modern-day Earth, that was that, I had to ask for the Nightmare script so I could tie Survival to it.”[FONT=&quot][/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]- [/FONT]Rona Munro, DWM #189


“That was another fun one. Suddenly Kevin’s brother is back and we’ve got some friends he never talked about before and I get to do some monster acting. And then so does Miranda! Oh god, she put the contacts in and we’ve rehearsed and then it’s action and Miranda suddenly turns into this savage thing and I almost wet myself.”[FONT=&quot][/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]- [/FONT]Lee MacDonald, DWM #302


[FONT=&amp] [/FONT]
“With the proven Stephen Wyatt to fill up the ranks with The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, this left only the series opener. For the 25th anniversary, Doig wanted to bring back a major monster and since the Daleks had been done it was logical to use the Cybermen. This story would require a seasoned professional. Philip Martin was briefly considered but they decided to go with Chris Boucher, then script editing Bergerac[4], instead."[FONT=&quot][/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]- [/FONT]Trial of a TV Show: Doctor Who in 1984-88 by David Bishop


[FONT=&amp] [/FONT]
“Join the Cybermen was my excuse to write about stuff I wanted to write about – resentment between old and new money, poverty breeding violence, atheism, a character I liked from Blake’s 7[5] – and I slapped some Cybermen into it! I did try to do something new with them though. Slum dwellers choosing to become Cybermen out of desperation, that just seemed logical. The Cybermen want to convert people? That’s where people go in the real world to find converts.”[FONT=&quot][/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]- [/FONT]Chris Boucher, DWM #187


--

[1] Cartmel ran with Happiness Patrol anyway but Cartmel is a younger, more radical, less experienced man. Another script editor would have said “no”.

[2] This actually happened to Cartmel!

[3] Transit and Battlefield (here using its working title) were Aaronovitch’s first pitches. Storm was pushed back for the Daleks but here, the Daleks already appeared last year.

[4] As he did in OTL.

[FONT=&quot][5] These would all be things Boucher reuses for PDA’s and the Kaldor City audios.[/FONT]

This is a very interesting concept. It's a shame to bypass McCoy (one of my favorite Doctors) and I'm not sure a female Doctor would last only because the BBC/Grade was so determined to get rid of it somehow.

What would this do for Miranda Richardson's career? By the early 90s in OTL she was starting a run of high-profile films (Enchanted April, Damage, Tom & Viv) for which she was nominated for Oscars/Golden Globes/BAFTAs. Making her "The Doctor" might butterfly that kind of career away and she would become another Peter Davison, a respected, but low-on-the-marquee theater/TV actor known mostly in Britain.

jb3 said:

What would this do for Miranda Richardson's career? By the early 90s in OTL she was starting a run of high-profile films (Enchanted April, Damage, Tom & Viv) for which she was nominated for Oscars/Golden Globes/BAFTAs.

Click to expand...

Good question - if she hadn't done Empire Of The Sun in 1987 I'd say she's going to be butterflied but the sad thing is* that this means the foreign audiences know her as someone from Empire, so Doctor Who may be just a curious blip. "Doctor Who? What's that?" will be the US response, or "Was she the one that played Jane?".

* Well, not sad for her

[FONT=&amp]“We were getting a lot of criticism from some of the older fans, complaining we were too jokey and lightweight[1] and there was the complaints of the cast thrown into that. Miranda had been in Dance With A Stranger and Empire Of The Sun, she’d won awards, and you still had people complaining she was being lightweight! This was really a complaint about change. The show had to adapt to keep running and I think Barbara and the rest of us were doing that. We just weren’t allowed to succeed."[/FONT]


[The Doctor stares into the mirror, cats-eyes and fangs showing. She shakes with concentration.]
The Doctor: Control. I must keep control.
- Survival


“The second year was definitely my favourite. Lee and I start getting a lot more meat. It’s still a lot of comedy work but there’s this sense I’m playing everyone, and these moments of pure rage with Jean [Marsh, Morgaine] and Don [Henderson, Gavrok] and the poor extras in the Cybermen costumes, and everything with Survival… No, I don’t accept that the show was tired or slapdash. This was management.”
[FONT=&amp]- [/FONT]Miranda Richardson, [FONT=&amp]DWM [/FONT][FONT=&amp]#217[/FONT]


“After a brief spike to 6m viewers for Join The Cybermen Part One, the series held between 5.4 to 5.7m viewers for the rest of the series. Many in the fan press – and Clive Doig, privately – believed the show could have done better if it hadn’t been running opposite Coronation Street."


“It’s a source of pride that I was there right at the end.”
[FONT=&amp]- [/FONT]Nicholas Courtney, [FONT=&amp]A Soldier in Time [/FONT][FONT=&amp]memoirs[/FONT]


“We never knew – and neither did John and Eric – whether we were coming back or not, so we took ‘wait and see’ at face value and started to plan the next series. At the last minute, Clive came in and told me that Mark had called him in for a quiet word … I had the time to slap a voiceover and a montage[2] onto Storm so it could at least have some weight. That was it. We could have ended the show with some of the cast driving off to the pub and leaving Lee and Nick Courtney doing some gardening. Management just didn’t care enough to let us do a proper sendoff.

“Even now, that still burns.”
[FONT=&amp]- [/FONT]Barbara Clegg, [FONT=&amp]DWM [/FONT][FONT=&amp]#226[/FONT]


[FONT=&amp]“For years, fandom was blaming John Nathan-Turner or Clive Doig or Barbara Clegg or Colin, Miranda, Lee and Bonnie, anyone really who’d been involved since Peter Davison regenerated. It was nasty."[/FONT]


[FONT=&amp]“I don’t really like to talk about that part of fandom. It hurt, I’ll just say that."[/FONT]



“Miranda Richardson had agreed to stay on for a final year and Lee MacDonald with her. Intending to regenerate her before the series ended – in case Season 26 itself wasn’t renewed – there were plans for a regeneration story, tentatively involving Daleks, to be written by Stephen Wyatt. Ben Aaronovitch’s Transit would be the first ‘Eighth Doctor’ story and a rematch with Sil was also considered."
- Doctor Who and the Lost Stories by Paul Cornell & Marc Topping


[FONT=&amp]“After the show was cancelled, I had to distance myself from it a bit to find more work. I was still proud of my work but you can’t get tied down to one performance, and I believe I did lose out on some BBC work because of Who. There was Blackadder, but mainly I was doing Channel 4 or films abroad [3] until The Crying Game."[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]- [/FONT][FONT=&amp]Miranda Richardson, DWM #217[/FONT]


[FONT=&amp]“The weirdest bit of Mike And Angelo is that Tyler Butterworth regenerated into me! Now I was a Time Lord too! [4] … I’d actually lost touch with Miranda until Big Finish[5]. You do lose touch with good friends in this job and she did end up in a different place to me. It was good bragging rights though."[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]- Lee MacDonald, DWM #302[/FONT]


[FONT=&amp]“It slowly dawned on us that with the show gone, the comic strip was the only place with original Doctor Who fiction. … Myself and Richard decided to court some of the younger TV writers[6] and Andrew Cartmel seemed to be waiting for us!"[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]- [/FONT][FONT=&amp]John Freeman, Stripped For Action[/FONT]


[FONT=&amp]“The arrogance of youth! To my mind, this was a chance to show why I’d been right and Clive had been wrong – this was my version of Doctor Who. I sent in this big pitch and some of the ideas I’d been planning to get done on the show … They held me until issue 150[7] because comics are all about the big round numbers and then it was all go."[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]- [/FONT][FONT=&amp]Andrew Cartmel, Stripped For Action[/FONT]


[FONT=&amp]---[/FONT]

[1] This bit is from what Kohll actually said in an interview. If fans complained about the real S24, they’ll still complain in TTL’s 25.

[2] The show never did know if it was coming back and in OTL, the final speech in Survival was slapped on when the penny dropped. Sadly in OTL, nobody nicely filled in JN-T.

[3] In OTL, Miranda Richardson did several one-off prestige dramas and a miniseries called Die Kinder for the BBC as well as a few foreign films & British films. Here, she’s coming off two years in a typecast role on a show the BBC’s going “eh” over. Channel 4 is less established & hungrier than ITV and more likely to go “hell yeah we’ll cast her if the Beeb doesn’t want her”. Assume she has enough work to still get into the Crying auditions but none of it the sort of big stuff you'd bring up in an interview.

[4] Lee MacDonald left acting after Grange Hill but with Doctor Who backing him, he can wrangle another job. Mike And Angelo (a CITV show about a friendly alien) really did replace actors in 1989 by regenerating.

[5] Big Finish are very good at getting actors, some of them big names. If Miranda Richardson had been in the show then it's possible she'd agree to do some audios (as Paul McGann has).

[6] This is what happened in OTL too.

[FONT=&quot][[FONT=&quot]7[/FONT]] What he doesn’t say is that this is also so DWM can pimp the Sleeze Brothers in Follow That TARDIS!. Marvel UK wants you to buy their other comics![/FONT]

A fascinating story! Of course, some Whovians abroad might seek out Miranda's other works as a result.

An interesting timeline. You honestly had me wondering whether the show would survive or not. My recollection of the wilderness years is dulled at this point, but was OTL fandom opinion so utterly divided as it seems ITTL over why it got cancelled? That said, this "dark fists in neon gloves" reputation of the Seventh Doctor seems to suggests the Richardson Era gets a warmer reception as time goes by.

If there's still an eventual revival, I expect pressure for a(nother) female Doctor will be much more palpable ITTL.

Lavanya Six said:

My recollection of the wilderness years is dulled at this point, but was OTL fandom opinion so utterly divided as it seems ITTL over why it got cancelled?

Click to expand...

In OTL, most of it got dumped on JN-T because he was producer for the entire 80s and the most public, fan accessible producer they'd had, and the first one to have his head scriptwriter (Saward) vent his spleen in the press; and he'd done some stupid things like the Sixth Doctor's technicoloured dreamcoat which were clearly him, while some of the good things he did (hiring new writers and giving guys like Cartmel a lot of freedom) aren't so obvious. ITTL, there's no one obvious scapegoat. But someone has to be to blame!

“And as the unnamed thing begins to stalk the mansion and the captions warn us that something else is there too, “feeding on rage and spite and saying – ‘it’s okay’”, Raine cracks the safe and finds inside…

[panel scan of a splash page of the Doctor reading a Real Ghostbusters comic – “What kept you?”]." [1][FONT=&quot][/FONT]



“Raine is the daughter of a gangster turned straight and he’s sent her to all these Swiss finishing schools to make her into a proper upper-class lady. She’s having none of it, she’s more interested in hanging with his old crim friends and learning the tricks of the trade. And that makes her very useful for the Doctor. The entire party turns out to be a way to draw Raine out – the mansion turns out to be the Doctor’s own house.[2]"
- Andrew Cartmel, Stripped For Action



“This was the first time the Doctor had sought out a companion. That was probably a bigger deal than the fact Doctor Who was continuing."
- Paul Cornell, Stripped For Action


“The Doctor reveals that the Hitchers can only hitch rides in certain bodies, ones that are filled with potential aggression, anger or rage, and it soon becomes clear that Mrs Lacy is ideal: Ella married Mrs Lacy’s son, dragged him down, mixed her blood with his, which Mrs Lacy thinks is racially wrong. " [3][FONT=&quot][/FONT]
- Altered Vistas


“Cartmel’s run was cutting the humour and bright colours out of the Seventh Doctor’s show and laying bare the sneaky, nasty heart of it, and then pumping more of the real world into it. So I liked it! I know a lot of other fans did not but this was now the only game in town."
- Ben Aaronovitch, Doctor Who Magazine #201


“I’d seen some of the strips you were running at the time [of The Ultimate Adventure stage show] and I was thinking, blimey! If that’s what fans went, how are they going to take the show?! We haven’t even got Miranda!"
- Colin Baker, DWM #325


“Raine won’t be able to hack the Dalek’s systems without a distraction but the Doctor’s already arranged that – and twenty minutes earlier, the Doctor has found Abslom Daak."
- Altered Vistas


“Starkings thought there wasn’t anything left to do with Daak but kill him.[4] So I killed him. In a way that meant we never saw his body – so isn’t a surprise that shortly after he left… [laughs]"
- Andrew Cartmel, Stripped For Action



“The Doctor is a terror in these comics. She still jokes but without Miranda Richardson’s voice, they feel fake – and the artists routinely draw her glasses as blank, eyeless shields. All you’re left with is the dark fist.”[FONT=&quot][/FONT]
- Time and Sequential Art In Space, at Sequart.org


“Oh, the influence of Cartmel on the New Adventures is incalculable. A lot of our writers were reading his work, I’d read some of it – Virgin ended up reprinting his whole run because Marvel, for whatever reason, didn’t want to do it. [5] This was a Doctor that could work in adult fiction. I tried to commission him for the first NA but he wasn’t available.”
- Peter Darvil-Evans, DWM #305


“ ‘Hi, Cartmel says I should get you to write the first New Adventure, do you want money to write?’ And I say ‘yes and I have this story called Transit ready to go!’ [6]. Then I just need to name it something else. ‘Timewyrm… worms… worms and trains… tunnels… Wyrmtunnel!’"
- Ben Aaronovitch, DWM #201


“If Cartmel’s DWM strips had shocked trad fans, Wyrmtunnel was their Satan. A grimy, gonzo cyberpunk story with sex, violence, and swearing..."[FONT=&quot][/FONT]


“I would’ve toned down the swearing if I’d written a second draft but, y’know, people have sex in real life.[7] The Doctor’s not having sex with Kevin, that would have been really sick."
- Ben Aaronovitch, DWM #201


“Then I have to explain where Raine was and why Kevin was back, so along comes a story that has Raine dropped back home ready to be called on when needed and Kevin is picked up from Blackpool – and the Doctor says nothing happened, honest! Looking on it now, that was a bad idea. The Doctor looked cruel."
- Andrew Cartmel, Stripped For Action


“I did read the first lot of ‘em, see what ‘I’ was up to. And I didn’t understand half the plot so it was a lot like the show! … Didn’t the Doctor have another companion in one that I didn’t know about? [Raine in Warhead] That was odd. But I got a good end in Love and War, that was cool."
- Lee MacDonald, DWM #196


“There were people who wanted to scrap Kevin altogether [8] and I wasn’t sure about that, but Paul [Cornell] did a really good pitch with the idea which took the Doctor’s manipulations to their extreme and then had it go wrong. That puts her in a very interesting new direction and the books needed that. You have to keep being new and introducing new elements.”
- Peter Darvil-Evans, DWM #305


“With Kevin dead, the ‘future history’ arc of the books focused on a shellshocked, confused Doctor having to relearn how to manipulate her enemies. For the first time, the authors could get truly into her head. … That was when word came down that the BBC were working on something."[FONT=&quot][/FONT]


“For a whole generation of Americans, Miranda Richardson was the Doctor … With The Crying Game getting rave reviews, the Sci-Fi Channel saw an opportunity and bought the rights for all the Richardson stories for a late December release.[9]”
- Blog Bechdel


“I actually got embarrassed about that. I thought it would hurt my chances. Then, I started getting annoyed that people in Hollywood saw it as this ‘quaint’ thing I did before ‘proper’ work.”
[FONT=&amp]- [/FONT]Miranda Richardson, [FONT=&amp]DWM [/FONT][FONT=&amp]#217[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot] [/FONT]

“While BBC Enterprises kept chasing the ghost of a US movie deal, Television Centre was happy to leave the show alone. That all changed when the Sci-Fi Channel in the US started to ask for more.”
- Doctor Who and the Warring Companies by David Bishop


“That was bloody chaos. Suddenly I had to put the brakes on everything until we knew exactly what was going on.”
- Peter Darvil-Evans, DWM #305


“Andrew was leaving the strip to work on the Genesis 92 line [10] and we were running strips by Scott Gray and Dan Abnett – and then word comes down that we need to stop. And I tell the BBC, we’re just starting to run Emperor of the Daleks! We can’t stop!"
- John Freeman, Stripped For Action


“BBC Enterprises had wanted to do a 30th anniversary video since September 1992 and had continued to work on this even after BBC1 Controller Jonathan Powell objected. Powell was angry that Enterprises were attempting to make any original material at all, as this was interfering with BBC TV’s patch [11] … [Enterprises manager] Greenwood felt vindicated when Sci-Fi Channel began asking for more original Who material. Enterprises were in a position to deliver.”
- Doctor Who and the Warring Companies by David Bishop


“The plan was a direct-to-video movie that could be split into a four-part drama for US broadcast … When Alan Yentob, the new Controller of BBC One found out[12], a turf war began.”
- Time/Space Visualiser #44, Inside The Dark Dimension


“The Dark Dimension was to star Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor alongside Miranda Richardson’s Seventh.[13] A draft without Miranda was underway before writing halted … “It was going to feature an Eighth Doctor,” remembers Adrian Rigelsford. “The attack on the Doctor’s timeline was going to regenerate her into a new actress. It had to be an actress because the Sci-Fi Channel were expecting Richardson and we would’ve needed something to distract them.”"
- Doctor Who and the Lost Stories by Paul Cornell & Marc Topping


“It really pissed me off. I’d been called in to work on this and then everything stops … This was about territory. Both of them [Greenwood and Yentob] wanted to be able to say they’d brought Doctor Who back but now proper money was involved, they wanted their patch to be responsible. They didn’t want to cooperate. This dragged on for weeks.”
- Graeme Harper, DWM #380


“And then these notes come in saying I need to regenerate the Doctor at the end and then others saying no scratch that and then others saying this will be the last Seventh Doctor so can I rewrite the end and then others saying – [throws hands up] AAARRRRGGG"
- Paul Cornell, Stripped For Action


--

[1] The safecracking companion finding the Doctor waiting for her is pretty much all they had planned for her first story in S27. The Real Ghostbusters was Marvel UK’s biggest seller in the late 80s and early 90s, and not their first sneaky cameo in another comic http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Susan_Hoffman#Assistants

[2] The Doctor having a house on Earth is a real Cartmel invention

[3] Direct quote about Cartmel’s first Who comic from OTL, which in OTL was a year later, had Ace, and introduced nobody

[4] According to John Freeman, this is what he actually thought

[5] This happened in OTL with several DWM stories

[6] Tenth NA in OTL but here, he was ready to use it for a 1989 story

[7] More or less his real response

[8]True for Ace as well – having a book-only companion was a big thing

[9] The same month The Crying Game gets its US release

[10] Marvel UK’s big relaunch

[11] This all really happened and, of course, in OTL there’s no Sci-Fi demands

[12] He did in OTL as well but that led to him buddying up to give Enterprises more cash

[13] The Dark Dimension is notorious for giving Tom the lion’s share but ITTL, the Seventh Doctor would be mandated.

“Sir John Birt was focusing on a major restructuring of the BBC and had no interest in a conflict over a show that, when he joined the corporation, was seen as a dying irrelevance. This dragged out the Yentob-Greenwood war … In late March, to try and force the issue, Enterprises began assembling a production crew”
- Doctor Who and the Warring Companies by David Bishop


“Joining Graeme Harper as provisional director was Tony Harding (the designer of K9) as visual effects designer and Alan Hawkshawe for music. A team of designers from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop were hired to design proof-of-concept Cybermen.[1]”
- Time/Space Visualiser #44, Inside The Dark Dimension


“ “We had no idea what was going on,” said Kay Koplovitz, the USA Network CEO at the time. “I had a meeting with the Sci-Fi people about why this was taking so long and they thought it was a budget thing, but they had these faxes through of Jim Henson designs. ‘Jim Henson’s boys are gonna be on it!’ And that was what we understood was happened. That’s what we were gonna buy.””
- Doctor Who and the Warring Companies by David Bishop


“I’m sitting in meetings with no script, no staff, and no money, all we have is these drawings of Cybermen. It was like those stories of Hitler sending in armies he doesn’t bloody have!”
- Graeme Harper, DWM #380


“Yentob’s lot did ask if I could draft an outline for a new Doctor Who[2], but I’d heard from Barry [Letts] – he was working with the BBC on those radio plays at the time – about all the palaver. I wasn’t stepping into that!”
- Terrence Dicks, DWM #237


“I made an outline and they didn’t like it. So it goes!"
- Ben Aaronovitch, DWM #201


“Joking Apart was lancing all my emotional boils at the time and I was thinking of the next series – and Press Gang is ending at the same time, so I was thinking I might want some extra work too. And then my agent says that the Controller of BBC1 himself has a pitch … Later, Russell [T Davies] told me he’d been approach first because of Century Falls [3] and he’d have bloody done it if he wasn’t under contract with Children’s Ward. Sorry Russ!"
- Steven Moffat, DWM #250


“Apparently Yentob really liked Joking Apart."
- Steven Moffat, DWM #402


“Birt finally paid attention when the USA Network went over Enterprises’ head and called him. Heads would roll.”
- Doctor Who and the Warring Companies by David Bishop


“With Greenwood sacked, the project was finished.”
- Time/Space Visualiser #44, Inside The Dark Dimension


“Insiders have told us that Yentob only just avoided extermination.”
- Private Eye for April 1993


“This left BBC One with an expected Who story in November that would have Graeme Harper directing and the Creature Shop making monsters.”
- Doctor Who and the Warring Companies by David Bishop


“ ‘So Steven,’ they ask me, ‘could your story have Cybermen and Daleks in it?’ But my story was about – ‘Cybermen and Daleks, Steven.’"
- Steven Moffat, DWM #250


“Jane Horrocks Cast As New Time Lady."
- Daily Mirror


“I got the job because someone, somewhere, was very drunk."
- Jane Horrocks, DWM #201


“We’d just finished filming the next Ab Fab and there’s a knock on my door, and would I like to play Miranda Richardson. Playing Bubbles had told them I could play the Doctor, someone quirky and odd and funny. Also I was available at the time and oh god, were they desperate."
- Jane Horrocks, Dread Chaos DVD feature on The End Of Time


“You know how redrafts get done before filming?"
- Steven Moffat, DWM #250


“New dialogue was showing up on the day and new stage directions and the props were coming on set half-made, it was all right to the wire. The show was made like this in the Sixties but this was not the Sixties. Nobody was used to it. Three times, we almost had a fight on set!”
- Graeme Harper, DWM #380


“Enterprises are ready and willing to help promote the show made by evil stinking Judases. Rumours that they’re badmouthing it to the USA Network are entirely unfounded. They’re making sure everyone knows Yentob is an honourable man.”
- Private Eye for September 1993


“While nobody from the BBC is yet willing to talk on the record, it is clear that Enterprises were only willing to do the bare minimum for Doctor Who and The End of Time. The Sci-Fi Channel became worried to the point, Koplovitz tells me, of wondering if they should pull out of the deal. “It’s not until late on that they told us Miranda Richardson was out and someone we’d never heard of was in, and it was more Richardson stories we wanted. Sci-Fi’s marketing had to be rethought.””
- Doctor Who and the Warring Companies by David Bishop


“The best story, the best, is when a Dalek broke down during filming and we had to carry on. All you anoraks have noticed that by now but no matter how funny you think it is, it’s nothing compared to how funny it was not laughing as I go ‘you evil Dalek why are you Daleking’ over this stuck thing with the poor actor inside trying to remember this own lines. I almost regenerated."
- Jane Horrocks, DWM #262


“Let’s be honest, most of old Who was half-arsed and last minute too. End Of Time was part of a proud tradition of being second rate. [4] I’m glad I did it so I’ll never feel the desire to do it again!"
- Steven Moffat, DWM #250


“When things got mad on Dimensions in Time, I thought – ‘stop complaining, Harper and Moffat would dream of conditions like this!’ .”
- John Nathan-Turner, DWM #206


“The Cybermen are proper scary. When I heard ‘Jim Henson’ I thought of Kermit and then out comes the bogeyman..."
- Jane Horrocks, DWM #201


“When Sally and Geoff wake up, they see the Cybermen have always been there…

“How did the planet get conquered and why don’t they remember it? Their only guide is the Doctor – a mad woman with a magic box and mismatched clothes from the wrong times – who whisks them back to the Swinging Sixties to stop the invasion ever happening.

“All of which is bringing them into the Dalek’s trap…”
- Virgin novelisation of The End Of Time


“It was going to be 1963 but – well, the American audiences would’ve asked where all the hippies were.”
- Steven Moffat, DWM #250


“For once, the show is using time travel and using it to create an intricate puzzle box that demands you keep up… The two things that hold it down (aside from the budget but you’re watching a BBC sci-fi) is that the puzzle box ends up making little sense if you think about it[5], and that the Doctor is a chump in her own story.”
- AV Club review


“Sally is vivacious, smart, and quick with a pun. The Doctor is Jon Pertwee in drag with bad lines. And every other character knows it and will loudly comment on it.”
- Blog Bechdel


“The Doctor is silly. People would say so – and did, in the old episodes!”
- Steven Moffat, DWM #250


“With age comes looking at what you did and going [eats fist] arrrgg … You can tell that I was embarrassed that I loved Doctor Who. Here’s the Doctor, written as a daffy prat with silly technobabble and the companions going ‘ha ha, it’s a daffy prat with silly techobabble, aren’t we grown up to say so?’ It’s embarrassing to look at now. I’ happy with most everything else but oh god, I’m sorry Jane!"
- Steven Moffat, Time Can Be Written DVD feature on The End Of Time


“While reviews on both sides of the pond were mixed, over nine million people had tuned in for the first episode on BBC One [6] and just under eight million tuned in for the last. This would be more than enough to mandate more Doctor Who even without the Sci-Fi Channel. Their ratings dropped slightly from the Richardson run but this is arguably a sign of success, considering the US audience was tuning in to see what was effectively a completely different show with the same name … Unfortunately, bad blood remained within the BBC and with the USA Network. America was going to keep a closer eye on the next series.”
- Doctor Who and the Warring Companies by David Bishop


“The success of the show meant the death of the books. BBC Books argued that the corporation could do the line in-house – meaning, of course, that they felt there was money in it. May 1994 would see the New Adventures end with the aptly named No Future. [7]"[FONT=&quot][/FONT]


“I rewrote chunks of the book so I could get in everything that the BBC Books probably wouldn’t have – you have sex, violence, continuity porn, the Timewyrm’s back! The Brigadier was always in it but that ends up being a nice parallel to the other last Seventh Doctor story."[FONT=&quot][/FONT]
- Paul Cornell, DWM #305


“The only problem now was that with Moffat unwilling to come back, who was going to run the next series?"[FONT=&quot][/FONT]
- A Brief History of (Time) Travel


--

[1] All of them were hired OTL

[2] Terrence Dicks is the obvious choice for a Who story if you need one yesterday

[3] One of two RTD children’s shows with FSF content – and highly rated ones

[4] Moffat in the 90s, by his own admission, tried to be ‘too cool’ for his old fandom – he infamously said most of the old episodes were second-rate in a round table discussion with Cornell and others.

[5] Moffat likes time-twisting Who stories. Moffat circa 1993 is a less experienced writer, ITTL chucked into Who’s deep end and given no real time to doublecheck

[6] The ratings in 1996. It’s likely they’d start the same here

[FONT=&quot][7] In OTL, this comes out March.[/FONT]

“There were two problems – the first was that there was only one Eighth Doctor story to work with so nobody knew anything about her except that she’s from Lancashire, and the second was none of the BBC Books team knew anything about Doctor Who at all! They were very nice people but no idea what was going on. But they’d said they’d pay me so I duly sat down and hammered something out!"


“We weren’t allowed to have a companion because the show was going to do that. I found that liberating but I know some of the others found it a pain in the bum – too easy to the Doctor to slip into talking to herself!"


“All-Consuming Fire was a crossover between Sherlock Holmes and the Doctor, the two great minds teamed up against Lovecraft’s beasties.[1] But here’s the problem: it wasn’t too great minds anymore. It was one great mind and, well, a ditz. An in-character Eighth Doctor – from what we’d seen so far – would be too pompous an silly to work, so what I did, and what a bunch of others did, was to write her as the Third Doctor and hope nobody noticed. It’s a real shame."


“What do I do when I’m asked to write the first Eighth Doctor strip before seeing anything? I go ‘hmm, that’d be out in December… December, Christmas… Father Christmas… The Eighth Doctor fills in for Father Christmas…’ The Cartmel era was long gone! [laughs]"


“We had Scott Gray and Dan Abnett write some short stories the day they’d seen End Of Time and have different artists draw them at the same time. It was chaos. We got some good strips out of it but trying to coordinate them as not fun at all."


“Uninvited Guests is actually me writing the Seventh Doctor [2] and pretending it’s the Eighth. The one time nobody writes in to complain about non-canon and out of character, it’s when the Eighth Doctor kills a bunch of alien toffs!"


“The BBC came back to me again and this time with a bigger off, so I had a choice to make: I could either stay as a producer on Children’s Ward or I could take a demotion to work on a childhood favourite. Now the stupid thing to do would be the latter. It’s clearly stupid. It’s the sort of thing only a dumb young man would do."


“Davies agreed to work as head writer on the show in exchange for being made producer the following year. The format he inherited would be dictated by the Sci-Fi Channel in America, who wanted demands met in exchange for more money."


“Thirteen episodes, okay. They want a story set in America, okay. Male companion, that’s specific but okay. They want an American companion – hang on a minute…"


“Partly, this is believed to be a gesture: after the debacles of 1993, the USA Network wanted to excerpt dominance over a ‘provincial’ company and its low-budget show. In part it was also due to fear that without Richardson, this ‘weird’ show would start bleeding American viewers unless it could be more like they expected.

“Russell T Davies immediately began pushing back."


“In the end, they agreed that there could be two companions and the American would show up later. So that’s Captain Jax, the half-alien swashbuckling gum-chewing space war hero because if they wanted American…![3]"


“Russell had liked A Kiss Before Dying [4] and I liked the idea of getting paid to be second-lead in a TV show, even if it meant moving to England for a few months. Later I talked to him and he admitted he’d just seen that film and grabbed names out of a hat and I guess Matt Dillon wasn’t answering his phone that day!"


“I wrote two stories to bookend it so I could have the main companion leave home at the start and come back at the end and it’d all nicely tie in. The Autons were first because everyone knows ‘the killer dummies’.[5] We got a really good setpiece out of that, the Doctor and Mickey trying to hide in a shop after dark. Give the little gits nightmares!"



“Even I got scared by that shop chase scene and I was doing it!"


“Some people said Mickey was a lot like Kevin because two lads from present-day council estates in England, everyone knows those guys are exactly the bloody same. Kevin’s all jack-the-lad, Mickey’s someone crushed into a little box by the world around him. The Doctor tells him he can be something. I specified that Mickey’s room would have half-finished engineering books; he always loses heart halfway. Then, in the TARDIS, we saw him reading again."


“Joining Russell T Davies on writing duties are Ben Aaronovitch, Paul Cornell, Rob Grant and Paul Naylor of Red Dwarf, Paul Abbott of Children’s Ward and Corrie, and Meera Syal, screenwriter of last year’s Bhaji on the Beach.”


“You might wonder why I’m hiring Abbott and Syal, who have no sci-fi experience. And the answer is they’re brilliant!”


“Davies’ “The Hidden Horrors” and “Damaged Goods” will open and close the series. Falling in between are Aaronovitch’s “Earth Aid”, Grant/Naylor’s “News Of The Worlds”, Syal’s “The Undying Raj”, Abbott’s “Life-Stealer”, and Cornell’s “Last Stand In Damnation”. All but the first episode are to be two-parters.”



“The idea of an intergalactic Rupert Murdoch was Russell’s idea and he asked us to run with it. The idea of Earth as a polluted dumping ground for the human race was ours but, of course, budget meant we couldn’t see most of Earth! It was a laugh having Mickey respond with horror and the Doctor not give a crap! [6]”
- Paul Naylor, Write All About It DVD feature


“I didn’t know anything about sci-fi at the time! It’s still not my comfort zone … Russell said he really wanted something involving Asian history and I knew the BBC could do period dramas well, so the dying day of the Raj was obvious. Now all I had to do was figure out the monster…”
- Meera Syal, DWM #276


“I suggested a vampire as a sneaky way of setting up Damaged Goods and not telling anyone."


“Trying to do a Star Trek pastiche on a BBC budget was a bad idea! Luckily nobody else noticed! I wanted to comment on charity politics and how food aid works and introduce my own iconic monster [the Metatraxi] but really, it’s all about that opening shot of the Doctor in Picard’s seat on the bridge.[7] … Getting to introduce Captain Jax was good too because now half the fans think I created him!”


“This is my first sci-fi ever, right, and they push me on to this set right out of the original Star Trek pretending to be new Star Trek and my stomach’s starting to sink and then on comes the bug things and holy crap. If the budget hadn’t all gone to the Creature Shop, it sure looked like it."


“Paul was a good friend and a great writer so I told him he could pitch anything – and he sends me this spec of Mickey finding out the Doctor had deliberately altered his life to turn him into a useful companion. Brilliant! Provocative! Utterly unusable! So now it’s just that Mickey is tricked into thinking that… Your letters page exploded when that cliffhanger came out, imagine if we’d really one it!”


“The Americans wanted something American and Russell specified a Western, because Spain is a lot cheaper than American. And then he asked if I wouldn’t mind using a Cyberman because those were expensive costumes and the BBC wanted to get the most out of them…”


“Last Stand Of Damnation is pitting the Doctor in a kill-or-die situation and seeing how she’ll react, and how her companions will react. We have to prove the Doctor’s pacifism is better than violence and you prove by testing.”


“Damaged Goods, controversial? Ah, it’s just a story about a woman selling her baby to another woman and then this alien thing starts killing a whole council estate … I was a lot darker in my work when I was younger because when you’re younger you think that’s mature. Now, Mickey and the Doctor end up saving most people and we don’t use a real drug to spread the N-Form’s power [8] but even so, I can accept it’s a bit too dark.

“The problem is that instead of that, half the fuss was because Jax was gay.[9] That was a brief scene! And yet people talked like they wanted us under Section 28!”



“DOCTOR HOMO
“BBC Sci-Fi Pushes Homosexuality On Kids”


“It was one line and a pretty vague line[10], I don’t see the fuss. Aliens are gay too.”


“I was surprised the BBC was letting that through, even though it was a few words and little kids wouldn’t get it. Then it turns out…”


“Better to beg forgiveness than ask permission.”
- Russell T Davies, Scandal Jax DVD feature


“Publicly, they were furious. Privately… a lot of people were still furious! But enough approved, or agreed in principle us poofs are just like normal people and couldn’t be too angry, that I got to keep my producer contract for the next series.”


“I’ve been on a show that got questions asked in Parliament!”
- Jane Horrocks, Scandal Jax DVD feature


“I thought the show was going too far with that scene but it was embarrassing to see it be raised in parliament. There was important work to be done, there’s the economy and crime and Bosnia and the peace process, and some of the backbench would rather complain about a TV show they didn’t like.”
- Tim Collins MP [11], Scandal Jax DVD feature


“And then the American broadcast got to it!”


--

[1] In OTL, this is a Seventh Doctor NA

[2] As it really as in OTL, under his “Warwick Gray” name

[3] “Captain Jax” (a full alien) was the original version of Captain Jack. In OTL, he’s not meant to be mega-American but here…

[4] A British-American co-production in 1991, in which he was a secondary character

[5] Russell T Davies is on record that he’d been thinking “Autons as first monster” for a hypothetical Who revival back in the 90s

[6] The Long Game was an idea RTD first had in the 80s, and junkyard-Earth is one Grant/Naylor could never get into Red Dwarf.

[7] The original idea for Earth Aid would have Ace as the Picard, as part of a Doctor scheme.

[8] It went a lot nastier in the original book

[9] Russell T Davis has been sneaking gay characters into his work for years and would try here too.

[10] 1994 is not 2005 and so Jax will be more subtle than Jack. But that won’t help

[FONT=&quot][11] Real-life Who fan and has appeared on DVD features for Earthshock. In 1994 he was working for Number 10’s Policy Unit[/FONT]

Given Jax seems to directly riff on Star Trek, I could see this scandal affecting the "no gays" issue within the Trek fandom in two ways — it either shames the show's writers into doing something sterner than The Outcast's clumsy metaphor, because here's a sci-fi show with an actually gay character on it, or the blowback serves as an excuse for why Trek doesn't dabble in gay rights in the latter-half of the 1990s.

Charles RB said:

[FONT=&quot][11] Real-life Who fan and has appeared on DVD features for Earthshock. In 1994 he was working for Number 10’s Policy Unit[/FONT]

Click to expand...

You've got an orphaned footnote here.

Whoops, forgot to give Collins the right footnote!

Trek is indeed going to come up.

I hope I'd still be watching here. Would Sci-Fi treat the Doctor like it treated him OTL? (Ignoring him in favor of their own productions.)

One other question- if the Creature Shop is involved, does that mean Nigel Plaskitt of the Creature Shop (AKA Unstoffe from "The Ribos Operation") will play a key role?