Doctor Who - Documentary s07e15 Episode Script

1 NARRATOR: In 1989, Doctor Who didn't so much go out with a bang but with a whimper.
The BBC's attention was elsewhere, fighting Margaret Thatcher's attempts to scrap the licence fee.
She'd already demanded less violence, massive savings and that a quarter of the BBC's shows came from the independent sector.
A previous attempt to cancel Doctor Who had caused a lot of fuss.
This time, the BBC didn't even bother.
They were just a bit more sly about it.
They just basically didn't say anything, were very vague about it and then, you know, hoped that it would go away and it worked, really.
They never actually officially announced Doctor Who is cancelled.
It was just, as far as we were told, placed on hiatus.
And everyone kept promising, the BBC and Peter Cregeen and everyone were going, "Oh, there's definitely a future for Doctor Who on the BBC.
" SPILSBURY: A delay to the next season? A secure future? There were always question marks at the end.
And as you kind of know, there's always an implied answer with any headline which has got a question mark and you can tell actually it's the less exciting of the two options is always the answer.
As the editor, despite trying to get answers from BBC high-ups whenever we saw them, like Peter Cregeen, we were totally stymied and blocked from ever being told that Doctor Who was not going to come back.
Okay, all right, well, I can wait a year, if I need to.
And then a year becomes two years.
And, slowly but surely, it starts dawning on you that maybe people aren't telling you the entire truth.
So we were stuck with a licensed magazine that no longer really, effectively had a TV show to sell off.
Most magazines fold and die six to eight months after something has finished.
A year and a half, two years later, John is still putting out a four-weekly, 48-page, bit of colour, brilliant magazine.
And I come along and go, "Mmm.
Thanks.
" NARRATOR: So how did the news pages of Doctor Who Magazine cope? One hope was that the show would, like Red Dwarf, become a thriving independent production.
Several former producers expressed interest but their approaches got nowhere.
When you get these quotes about Doctor Who being a key brand and it's still got a future, you always had to see who those quotes were attributed to, for a start.
If it's sort of to "a source", you know, you think, "Well, I'm not sure I put much faith in that source "if you are not going to even say what it is.
" And the whole "what if" brigade suddenly existed.
"What if this person made the show? What if this person played the Doctor? "What if this independent production company" And you had production companies from Terry Nation and Jerry Davis and Victor Pemberton and Verity, I think, Cinema Verity were quite interested in doing it.
And there was Black Light, I remember at one point, for about three months really seemed to be A guy called Alan Jonns really looked like he was going somewhere with it.
They would be on the phone every so often, going, "Well, there's this.
There's this.
We've talked about this, "we've met with this person.
" Well, when you need to fill up a news page, that's absolute catnip.
I think to myself as I'm typing this stuff up, my brain is going, "This is really not fair because I know this is never going to go anywhere.
" But you still have to cover it, because if, at some point, Alan Jonns's Black Light company, or Dark Light or whatever they were called, had got the licence and they had suddenly made Doctor Who and I'd never given any coverage, I'd look very stupid.
NARRATOR: It was a time of despair for the Doctor Who news pages, until the surprise announcement that a local radio personality had been cast as the Doctor.
There were one or two slightly odder news stories that appeared, one of which was "Is this man the new Doctor Who?" David Burton, he had a car which I think said "The New Doctor Who" on it, which seemed to be his only the only claim he had.
I mean, I could put that on my car, couldn't I? RUSSELL: "They've made me the new Doctor Who, give me a car" The people that own this garage apparently gave him a car.
We never got to the bottom of it because we were never able to speak to David Burton.
If you can get David Burton to sit in front of a camera and tell us genuinely how he got to be Doctor Who and have that car, I would pay a hundred million dollars for that DVD.
I was doing a play called Lock Up Your Daughters and the director was a man, a very nice man called Paul Bernard.
He phoned me up and he said, "Look, I've got a proposition to make to you.
"I can't tell you too much about it, it's all very highly top secret, "but I'd like you to come up for a meeting with me in London.
" So it was the Grosvenor Hotel.
And it was just a sort of general chat and everything and then they started mentioning Doctor Who.
And I was saying, "Oh, Paul, what's all this about, then? "You know, is it a small part in Doctor Who or something?" And he said, "Oh, no, dear boy.
"We're looking at you playing the Doctor.
" He said, "Well, this is going to be done independently "and we shall film some episodes, which we'll then show to the BBC "and see what See how we go from there.
" They wanted an older Doctor Who, that sort of slightly eccentric, mad scientist, professor style.
And they also had the idea of bringing back two assistants instead of one, but they were twins, and in the programme they were called Heart and Diamond.
The feeling was that a lot of the children of the '90s would not remember the old police boxes, so they decided to morph the Tardis as well, if you like, into a red telephone box with blacked-out windows.
So that probably would have upset a few people, I think.
Well, we certainly did a couple of Two full kind of episodes, anyway, I mean, you know, at least I would say, I mean, I was My contract was for three months.
Initial contract was for three months.
And I think the whole thing got axed.
We were just told suddenly, "Sorry, it's not going ahead anymore.
" They'd already spent, obviously, quite a lot of money, you know, and I think it's all been destroyed and wiped and things like that.
And so there were no photographs, nothing.
And we weren't allowed to We all had to sign a confidentiality agreement, anyway.
And scripts as well, we were only ever given sides.
We were only given for the next day's filming and then they were taken back.
As soon as you'd finished, they were taken back straight away.
But since those times I've never put it on my CV, I've never Hardly ever spoken about it to anybody at all, you know, because it's one of those things, if it's not screened then there's no point in mentioning it, really.
NARRATOR: So who gave him that car? I got a car from a local company, yes, they It was along with me, and I think there was a Surrey cricketer, there was a female television presenter at the time.
We were all given cars as a sponsorship kind of deal.
All they needed me to do was to attend just a couple of events here and there, school fetes and things like that.
And yes, you'd be used to having photographs taken.
Um, I was horrified when I got mine because they had actually written on the side "The New Doctor Who" and, within 48 hours, that was removed.
NARRATOR: Hot on David Burton's heels, Doctor Who Magazine reported on plans for a day of action, where fans were urged to write and phone the BBC demanding a new series politely.
We were encouraged to write polite letters to Peter Cregeen's office.
Had to be polite of course, because, you know, being rude never gets you anywhere.
And I got a very nice reply back from Peter Cregeen's office, all about "We want it to be a triumphant, vibrant addition "to the BBC schedules "rather than a battle-weary Time Lord languishing "in the backwaters of audience popularity.
" And if I've quoted that precisely, that's from memory but There was a day of action where we were encouraged to phone the BBC.
And I believe I did phone, I think I phoned up once and I don't think I actually managed to get through.
Um, and to be honest, you know, I was probably a bit worried about using my parents' phone and how much it was going to cost so I think I probably gave up after that point.
FREEMAN: The aggressive fans, they made themselves heard and they were incredibly vociferous about what they felt about Doctor Who.
And I think that you get to a point where if somebody is shouting at you, after a while you start saying, "Well, no, I'm not going to do what you say.
" There were, of course, then reports in Doctor Who Magazine a month or two later saying that some of the calls the BBC had received had been abusive.
And again, that's not going to get you anywhere, is it? FREEMAN: And when high-up producers and executives at the BBC are presented with what I was told at one time was a golden statue of a bottom for being so stupid as to cancel Doctor Who, then that I think just sort of like made them even more entrenched in their opinion that they shouldn't bring Doctor Who back.
NARRATOR: The next year, Doctor Who Magazine carried a pronouncement from senior fans.
"Words have failed, so hence the need for deeds.
" It was, in effect, a declaration of war.
Doctor Who fans had decided to sue the BBC.
And I remember at the time just thinking, "Oh, dear God.
" Fandom shot itself in the foot quite magnificently at that point.
Suddenly we really did become the nutters.
It gave the BBC on a plate exactly what they needed to say, "This is a programme with a very small audience, "with a very loony audience "who have zero grip on reality and the way the world works.
" I think it's amazing, to be honest, that this was not only reported on, but almost kind of encouraged in Doctor Who Magazine that fans should join in in this.
One of the things we did with the BBC Worldwide's tacit approval, although it was never put in writing, was start to challenge and be bit more aggressive about saying, "When is Doctor Who coming back?" And they tended to turn a blind eye to our, for example, shall we say, perhaps, "created campaigns" to indicate that there was a huge pressure from fans to bring it back.
Again as a As a 14-year-old, I probably thought that maybe this would actually make a difference.
NARRATOR: AT this time, BBC Enterprises released a very successful video of Douglas Adams's unfinished story Shada.
Tom Baker returned to record linking material and offered Enterprises a coup for Doctor Who's approaching 30th anniversary.
Tom Baker was recording the links for the old VHS release of Shada and said, "Would it help get the programme back on the TV if I came back?" And the BBC decided it would be a worth making a special, um, a special for the 30th anniversary, because they knew they could sell it.
I was approached to be the director of this and it was going to be a feature film, only to be released on DVD.
Or Or cassette, probably, in those days.
NARRATOR: The writer assigned to the project was rather surprised at the original brief for the straight-to-video special.
A gang of schoolkids who realised that the environment was screwed, the ozone layer was depleting and they found Tom Baker lying in a gutter.
And they thought he was the Doctor.
So he pretended to be the Doctor and took on the scarf, took on the hat and became a spokesman to try and get people to become eco-friendly.
That was the idea.
NARRATOR: Instead, BBC Enterprises started to develop an ambitious thriller for the Fourth Doctor, code-named "The Environment Roadshow".
It was going to be Tom Baker as the main Doctor but all the remaining Doctors that were alive were all invited to be a part of it, because there was an aspect of it which was going back to them to get advice.
Tom Baker made the suggestion and said, "Surely we should have the other Doctors in here somewhere.
" And that was at quite a late stage, so they were grafted in.
The first time it became apparent that some of the other Doctors weren't that happy with the script or the way their characters were being treated was when Graeme Harper phoned Colin Baker and Colin really didn't want to get involved.
HARPER: Which was a shame, 'cause it was going to be, I thought, quite an extraordinary story.
Story of "The Dark Dimension", in the far future, the world's destroyed, the Seventh Doctor is dead.
And then he has a Viking funeral.
Pushed out into a lake, Tardis burning and him.
The key to saving the world is the Fourth Doctor, who's still alive in our current time.
Then we introduce Ace and she's being haunted by flashbacks she doesn't understand.
We see Cybermen, we see Yeti, we see Daleks.
But she's got no idea what they are.
The centre part of the story involved the Brigadier and Ace basically getting lost in time.
They end up meeting Doctor number six and Doctor number five before the Fourth Doctor rescues them.
The whole story ended with a swordfight, a duel for the Earth.
And the Doctor won.
Everything is set back on its right timeline and the Seventh Doctor and Ace wandered off, just as they did at the end of "Survival".
And it also was going to have Rik Mayall as the main villain in the story, which I think at that time would have been A, a hoot and a real coup.
He had worked it out that he would play it like David Bowie did in The Man Who Fell to Earth.
HARPER: Alan Yentob got wind of this being made and said, "I'm going to invest so many hundreds of thousands of pounds into this, "because I'd like that, the rights to show that on BBC1.
"I think that's a smashing event.
" So it was going to get a television airing.
Originally, and all along up till that point, it was going to be a straight-to-video project.
And it was tailored to suit the audience.
BBC Enterprises knew there was a core buying public of about 80,000 who would grab that videotape.
Now we were being told if 12 million people watched, expectations were higher.
When we started "The Dark Dimension", it was a straight-to-video project, the budget was about £500,000.
As it progressed and evolved and became a BBC Drama co-production, we couldn't make it as a guerrilla film unit shooting it on Digibeta.
It had to have more polished special effects.
As a direct result, the budget ended up at 1.
2 million.
And the BBC Enterprise department also were thinking this could also be a short, general release in the cinemas.
So there was a nice, interesting And I've always wanted to make a film and this was probably going to be my only movie I'll ever make.
NARRATOR: Finally, "The Dark Dimension" was announced, very briefly.
It was very, very exciting for a whole issue.
We had finally said, "Doctor Who is back.
" SPILSBURY: The cover of the issue says, "All the latest about Doctor Who's return" and then you read inside the magazine and it says, "It's been cancelled.
" RUSSELL: In those days, you sent your covers to press so far in advance.
The very last thing I ever did as an editor and sent to press was "Gallifrey Guardian", and of course the news came through.
"God, no, kill it, kill it.
You can't do that, it's not happening.
" And I was like, I've got a cover that's gone to print that I can do nothing about.
So, suddenly it was all happening and then just as suddenly it was all not happening.
NARRATOR: Shortly before filming began, "The Dark Dimension" died.
I think I realised we were in serious trouble when people started walking off the production.
Uh, the production designer just looked at it, said we wouldn't get it done in the time because financing was slow in coming through.
I was contracted for the shoot and for the preparation.
I worked on it for five weeks and then it folded.
And as to the ins and outs of exactly what happened, we'll probably never know precisely.
NARRATOR: What had killed "The Dark Dimension"so suddenly? I think Amblin Films, Spielberg's company, were interested in buying the rights.
And I think BBC had to cease and desist or that deal wouldn't go through.
In my opinion, Philip Segal was certainly not in any way responsible for killing off "The Dark Dimension".
It fell apart due to its own circumstances and he is in no way guilty of being its murderer.
NARRATOR: The new Director General, John Birt, had thrown the BBC's finances into disarray.
In late 1992, he'd introduced a budgeting system called Producer Choice.
It was so confusing that flow charts were printed to explain the 14 steps necessary to get an invoice paid.
Could this background of financial chaos have helped kill "The Dark Dimension"? What went wrong was when the costings were gone over with a fine-tooth comb, it became clear that the investment of quarter of a million pounds that would've come from BBC Drama had been included as a profit as well as an investment.
So that figure was on the list of numbers twice.
Anybody could see that, at that point the whole thing became untenable.
It just wouldn't make any money.
But I'm afraid that moment is gone, for that film, which was a shame, 'cause it was going to be, I thought, quite an extraordinary story.
It was pretty gut-wrenching.
The worst thing you could ever do, I think, at that point was was to run a story saying, "Doctor Who cancelled again.
" Yeah, that That was probably the biggest disappointment of my teenage years.
NARRATOR: Throughout this period, one hope was that a planned Doctor Who movie would finally make it to the screen.
My response was always, "I will believe Doctor Who will come back "when they put film in the camera.
" And that applied not just to the show on TV but also to the countless rumours that there was going to be a Doctor Who film.
Because let's not forget, there were plans to do a Doctor Who film and those came to nothing as well.
Doctor Who was, I think, still in production at the time when Last of the Time Lords was first mooted and then the show got canned.
And so for a while, it was like, "Oh, so, Last of the Time Lords is the future of Doctor Who.
" And I think the coast-to-coast thing was quite exciting, uh, it was a quite interesting story idea, I remember.
But I think they ran out of steam.
If a Doctor Who film is going to have a chance to succeed, it needs to be when the whole thing is really on the up and is popular.
But then, why would you have a a film which is going to overshadow the TV series? Um, you know, because suddenly that makes the TV series seem smaller.
But then if the TV series isn't on, I think it's true, you know, then it's not so popular at that point, anyway.
HARPER: They were caught up, I think, with the whole politics of the BBC, and everyone going, "Oh, we don't know if we want to make you a movie, "'cause we might make a TVseries" and this stretched on and on.
They were frankly screwed over by the BBC.
I think they probably lost a lot of money, a lot of time and a lot of effort.
They did so much for that movie, to try and make Doctor Who look good on the big screen without ever shooting a roll of film, but they went to such lengths.
And I think the BBC probably strung them along quite a lot.
Um, with probably no real intention, by sort of the '90-'91 period of ever actually letting them make that movie.
You know, even now, the whole idea of a Doctor Who film, that still rumbles on.
I mean, I just don't think that I'll be careful about this, because who knows, maybe it will actually happen at some point, but personally, I don't think that, you know, the amount of money that you need, is it really even viable? I think if it was, it would've happened already.
It certainly wasn't going to happen in 1991, when, you know, kind of the programme's profile was at an all-time low.
NARRATOR: Having been twice burned, fandom was rather surprised to discover the 1996 TVmovie with Paul McGann actually happened.
By that stage, you had just become too cynical, you just sat there and went, "Yeah, whatever, "I will believe it when it's on the screen.
" And actually, when you look back, there's issues of DWM where they're reporting about what becomes the TV movie in sort of late 1995.
And I remember at the time sort of ignoring them all, because I thought, "Oh, we've heard all this before, "it's not going to happen.
" There are news stories about "Oh, Daleks are going to be in there "and they're going to exterminate Sylvester McCoy at the start.
" But I suspect that others felt, as I did, that this was all a load of nonsense.
And then very suddenly, I think the very end of '95, start of '96, they'd cast Paul McGann.
He was off to Vancouver.
It's being shot, it's going to be on telly in a few weeks.
And it was all very, very sudden.
I don't think it appealed very much to many people.
I mean, nothing against the actor, but I think, um, they had car chases and, you know, all that sort of American sort of stuff.
NARRATOR: After that came a period of silence.
I think after the Paul McGann movie came and went, that actually, it was a sort of real sea change then, because actually, I think we were done with daft rumours about the series coming back.
It had come back for a night and I think basically, everyone came to terms with the fact that the series, probably, that was it.
And I think everyone kind of went, "Oh, that's it, then.
" We had an Eighth Doctor, so even if he wasn't going to appear again, that was a real springboard for new comic strip adventures and new books and new audios.
RUSSELL: All these things were able to happen because, actually, the TVmovie had bombed.
I think if we'd had three or four years of an American version of Doctor Who, when eventually that got cancelled, which it would, because nothing in America lasts very long, that would have been the end of Doctor Who.
We wouldn't have been able to have that rebirth in 2005.
NARRATOR: BBC Worldwide, the new name for BBC Enterprises, originally had high hopes for Doctor Who.
But with the failure of the TVmovie, those ambitions fell on the shoulders of one man, Steve Cole.
People became less interested in it and Doctor Who began to be shunted between different departments.
We started off in Children's, but when it was clear that we were actually making adult books, it moved to the Sports, Motoring and Entertainment Group, SMEG, because that was where Red Dwarf was, and that was science fiction and obviously Doctor Who and Red Dwarf were the same because they were science fiction.
But then they didn't want it on their bottom line, either.
For a while It went into Factual for a time, which was interesting.
I was working out of the Factual department.
On top of the fiction and the non-fiction, there were also video releases that were going to come under my remit and also audio releases as well.
It was me.
And that was it.
If I went to the gents, nothing was happening in the world of Doctor Who.
It has to be said, not one person in Drama knew of the existence of any of this.
It's That's just a fact.
They didn't know there were any books, they wouldn't have known what Big Finish was.
It's like It would be nice to say that that kept the flame alive, the fan flame alive, that encouraged the BBC to make a new show.
I wish that was true, because that's a lovely, lovely story.
You did occasionally get people coming in, saying, "Well, Shada sold really well on video, "aren't there any more unfinished stories we can put out? "Could we make up an unfinished story to put out?" I'm thinking (LAUGHS) NARRATOR: Doctor Who pottered on into the twilight.
It seemed as though the show's 40th anniversary would be marked with little more than a cartoon and a coffee table book.
And then, something remarkable happened.
When it finally did sort of properly come back, we kind of knew it was real.
You know, we were more inclined Because actually, these kind of rumours had stopped, you know, for a long time.
We knew we were making it and it was all timed around a big press launch.
They said, "Lorraine Heggessey is speaking to The Telegraph.
" I don't know why it was The Telegraph.
But it was like everything was pinned down to that date.
"Don't mention it to anyone.
" We first heard at Doctor Who Magazine that Doctor Who might be coming back to television was It was I can tell you the exact date.
It was September the 17th, 2003.
I was phoned up by Clayton Hickman from Doctor Who Magazine, saying, "Is this true? Is it coming back?" But it was about It was literally about that halfway point.
The nine days between us hearing and it being announced.
Gary Russell's birthday party was about halfway through that point.
It was still about four or five days away from being announced but And then poor Gary.
I threw a big 40th birthday party and I now know, I've been told subsequently, I didn't know this at the time, I've been told subsequently that everybody Lots of people that were there knew that Doctor Who was coming back.
I had been running Big Finish for six years, five years at that point.
Everyone knew Doctor Who was coming back.
And everyone was like, "Oh, God, if Doctor Who comes back, "Big Finish is probably dead in the water.
" So there were lots of people apparently walking around going, "Don't tell Gary on his 40th birthday party "that Doctor Who's coming back 'cause it will really depress him.
" And that rumour was starting to spread round.
I remember David Tennant being at that party as well.
And I can't remember now whether David was one of the people who did know about it or didn't, but of course everyone was sort of talking in code, in a kind of "Do you know? No, nothing then.
" What obviously none of them realised was that at 2:00 in the afternoon, the first person virtually that walked through the door of my party was Alan Barnes, who was, you know, I'd worked with at Marvel and was a good mate, and we were working together at Big Finish.
And he turned round and said, "So, Doctor Who's coming back.
" In the BBC, it was starting to ripple outwards, you know, with all the different parts of it, word was starting to spread, but this was still the primitive days of the internet, I think.
It still wasn't quite leaked beforehand.
We quite I'm not sure I quite believe it now, to be honest.
I'm not sure I quite believed it then, but it was There was a sense that even if we didn't quite believe it was happening, we somehow knew it would, if that's not a contradiction.
After all Because it was Russell, I think.
Because we knew him.
Because somehow it all had the ring of truth to it in a way that all of those previous rumours that we'd all read in DWM over the years, none of them seemed to quite make sense.
And to be perfectly honest, I haven't actually seen any of the recent series.