I know Doctor Who timelines are very common, and maybe even this scenario's been done, but I thought of it and went 'why not?'
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Doctor Who was a British science-fiction series that ran on BBC One from 1963 to 1969, created by Canadian producer Sydney Newman, who earlier created
The Avengers, but mostly run independently from him. It ran for 253 episodes, with stories produced in serial formats of varying number of episodes per serial.
The series’ title character, Doctor Who, was a mysterious and greatly intelligent man who appeared to be either some kind of alien or a scientist from far in humanity’s future. He travelled through space and time in a spaceship entitled the TARDIS, which was disguised as a police box, a form of communication used by the police during the 1960s. The series saw a large number of actors who served as companions to Doctor Who, though none remained with the Doctor for the whole show.
Doctor Who was played by Geoffrey Bayldon, who was initially reluctant to take on the part due to his concern that he was becoming typecast as playing old men, but with the enticing possibility of a 52-week run, he spoke with the series’ producer Verity Lambert and successfully convinced her to revise Doctor Who’s characterisation to make him a character who seemed old and eccentric rather than actually being old.
The series developed a large cult following during the 1960s, helped by its use of monsters (despite Newman’s protestations about doing so, ironically) that captured the audience’s imaginations. The most popular of these, the Daleks, proved so popular with the public that the merchandising boom around them led to a phenomenon nicknamed ‘Dalekmania’, and featured in two feature films adapting the first two stories of the TV series in which they appeared (1965’s
Doctor Who and the Daleks and 1966’s
Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150AD; both of these starred Peter Cushing as Doctor Who instead of Bayldon). Their creator, Terry Nation, withdrew the rights for the series to use them after 1967, eventually managing to create his own series with them,
Daleks (1970-74).
Other monsters that became popular with the public included the Cybermen, a race of future humans who replaced their bodies with cybernetic components; the Yeti, which were cybernetic replicas of the famous cryptid creatures; and the Ice Warriors, reptilian inhabitants of a post-ice age Mars. These did not achieve the same popularity as the Daleks, but nonetheless proved popular and memorable to fans.
The series’ viewing figures were extremely high in its early years, but during the latter half of the 1960s they started to decline significantly. This, combined with the offer of the leading role in ITV’s
Catweazle (1970-71), led Bayldon to choose to leave the series at the end of its sixth season, and so the BBC chose to end the series.
The final story of the programme, The War Games, was a ten-parter in which Doctor Who and his companions Jamie (Frazer Hines, the actor to feature in the most episodes after Bayldon) and Zoe (Wendy Padbury) had to seek the support of the Time Lords, Doctor Who’s own people; it is left ambiguous if they are an alien race or merely a rank in a human society Doctor Who comes from. The Time Lords sentence the final story’s main antagonist, the War Lord, to be erased from existence, and while the Doctor provides a defence for his actions (including stealing the TARDIS and intervening in time), the episode- and the series- ends with the Time Lords’ verdict and Doctor Who’s sentence unknown.
Doctor Who is widely looked back on as one of the most influential British television series of the 1960s, and as a classic example of 60s sci-fi often compared to contemporaries like
The Prisoner and
Star Trek. It also retained a considerable place in pop culture in Britain and the Commonwealth, continuing to be sold to Commonwealth countries until the mid-1970s.
Unfortunately, as sales of the series started to dry up, many episodes were wiped by BBC archivists, though fans started to learn of this as the BBC’s policy on archiving became more preservationist and fought to prevent episodes being junked. As of 2021, 147 of the 253 episodes produced survive in the BBC’s archives, including all of the first story (generally known as ‘The Tribe of Gum’ by fans; the early series of the show had individual titles for each episode, with their collective titles subject to fan conjecture) and all of the last story.
Since the 1970s, several missing episodes have been recovered, though parts of the debut stories of the Cybermen, Yeti and Ice Warriors are all missing and several stories have no episodes surviving at all. Despite this, BBC home video sales of the series proved very lucrative as the market took off during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and for the series’ 30th anniversary in 1993, a documentary was produced covering the series’ run with notable focus on its missing episodes.
The series is sometimes said to have been disproportionately influential for its relatively short run, particularly due to many creators involved with the series going on to greater success, including its first producer, Verity Lambert, who was the first woman producer at the BBC and would have such a large career she was awarded an OBE for services to British television; later producer Innes Lloyd, who collaborated with Alan Bennett on several productions; series writer Terry Nation, as mentioned, would create three further TV series,
Daleks, Survivors and
Blake’s 7; and of course Bayldon would enjoy a prolific career as a character actor. When Bayldon died in May 2017, fans attended his memorial service dressed as Doctor Who and monsters from the series.