Timeless Adventures (29 page)

In 1997, following the Paul McGann-starring TV movie (see below), the novel ranges were brought in-house by BBC Books and re-branded as the Past Doctor Adventures (76 books) and the Eighth Doctor Adventures (continuing the exploits of McGann’s TV movie character, and producing a further 73 books). The Eighth Doctor novels further developed the McGann portrayal and introduced several new companions and new complications for continuity. The arrival of the new TV series in 2005 saw the range of books reformatted to focus on stories featuring the new TV Doctors and characters (and dropping any complicated continuity). Once again, they were aimed at a younger audience, just as the original Target novels had been. The series of novels featuring adventures of past TV Doctors was dropped. The BBC range and those published after the arrival of the new TV series often used many of the same authors who had risen to prominence through the Virgin novels.

The post-Target
Doctor Who
novels showed that the series’ concept could thrive in a new medium. They allowed fans – who’d grown up watching the TV series, reviewing, lampooning and criticising it in fanzines and writing their own versions of it in fan fiction – to control the production of official, new
Doctor Who
adventures. Much more so than any other media fandom (even
Star Trek
),
Doctor Who
fans have been heavily involved in prolonging the life of the object of their obsession, ultimately becoming involved in its return to TV. Their work would interrogate and deconstruct the show, in non-fiction and fiction, taking it apart and rebuilding it in their own preferred format. It was an opportunity to (re)create the show they’d watched and the series they wished they’d seen (or hoped to see, with several writers attempting to explore what
Doctor Who
would be like on the big screen or with no budgetary limitations). Some would attempt to reproduce ‘traditional’
Doctor Who
stories (‘trad’ stories, like
The Visitation
), while others explored the more outré opportunities the series offered (‘oddball’ stories, like
The Happiness Patrol
). This ownership and control of the ongoing narrative by fans would lay the foundation for the triumphant return of
Doctor Who
to television.

Answering a letter in the
Radio Times
in November 1989, The BBC’s Head of Series and Serials Peter Cregeen had promised that the Corporation would ‘take
Doctor Who
through the 1990s’, while warning that ‘there may be a little longer between this series and the next than usual’. The series was simply resting, a bit like Monty Python’s famous parrot. This uncertainty about the show’s future, and the BBC’s commitment to it, prevented any effective organised fan outcry. It seems clear that, while they expected the show to take a break, the BBC honestly didn’t anticipate the series being off air for 16 years (apart from the one-off McGann TV movie).

In the dying days of the BBC series there had been interest from various parties interested in taking on
Doctor Who
as an independent production, the direction that much television drama was moving in during the early 1990s. Among those either contacting the BBC or simply expressing interest in
Doctor Who
were former scriptwriter Victor Pemberton, one-time series script editor Gerry Davis, Dalek creator Terry Nation (Nation and Davis were presented as a team who between them co-owned the rights to
Doctor Who’
s biggest monsters, the Daleks and the Cybermen), and even CBS Television in the US (thought an attractive option by Cregeen and fronted by
Doctor Who
fan and US TV producer Philip Segal). Also in development at this time (and regular fodder for increasingly speculative tabloid newspaper reports throughout the decade) was a big-screen
Doctor Who
feature film to be produced by Daltenreys (an organisation alternatively known as Coast to Coast and Green Light at various times). Speculation on the casting of a new Doctor for the proposed big-budget movie became a favourite game played by the tabloid newspapers throughout much of the 1990s, and one they found difficult to give up even when David Tennant had played the role for several years.

With no solid developments announced by the BBC during 1990, the eventual fan campaigns against cancellation (including letter writing, phone-ins and even threatened legal action) proved ineffective in securing the early return of the series. At the end of that year, the head of BBC Enterprises (then charged with looking after the show), James Arnold Baker, announced: ‘The property is an old one, it’s had its day and is no longer commercially viable.’ Enterprises rapidly repudiated this view, keen as they were to continue to exploit
Doctor Who
as a licensing property, even if there were no new episodes made. Terrance Dicks, script editor in the 1970s, explained the internal BBC confusion thus: ‘Never put down to conspiracy that which can be explained by incompetence.’ Later, BBC Drama Publicity spokesperson Alan Ayres stated that a decision had been taken to ‘rest the programme for an extended period so that when it returns it will be seen as a fresh, inventive and vibrant addition to the schedule, rather than a battle-weary Time Lord languishing in the backwaters of audience popularity.
Doctor Who
is too valuable a property for us to re-launch until we are absolutely confident of it as a major success once again.’ Fans saw these announcements, and the stories of on-again, off-again movies and proposed independent productions, as a series of delaying tactics by the BBC, who hoped that
Doctor Who
could be quietly forgotten. However, it turned out that Alan Ayres’ comments on the series’ potential were uncannily prescient.

The view of
Doctor Who
as ‘battle weary’ changed with the approach of the show’s thirtieth anniversary in 1993, when the BBC was suddenly keen to mark the occasion. BBC Radio 2 had already committed to a series of
Doctor Who
radio dramas starring Third Doctor Jon Pertwee, alongside Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier and Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith. Within BBC Home Video (part of Enterprises), there were
Doctor Who
supporters keen to explore the possibility of a straight-to-video newly made drama for the thirtieth anniversary. This led to the early stages of work on a show entitled
The Dark Dimension
, co-scripted by fan writer Adrian Rigelsford with Graeme Harper lined up to direct. The plan was to reunite several past
Doctor Who
leading actors, but with the main role reserved for Tom Baker. The project was reportedly cancelled when the other Doctor actors realised they would be playing supporting roles to Baker, although, later, Philip Segal, producer of the eventual 1996 TV movie, claimed he’d been instrumental in the abandonment of
The Dark Dimension
as he felt it would conflict with his in-preparation comeback for
Doctor Who
as a brand-new, US-focused production.

British-born Segal had been in touch with the BBC since 1989, and had carried his hopes of reviving
Doctor Who
through several jobs in the US, including periods working for CBS/Columbia, ABC and, finally, Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Productions. He’d overseen the launch of David Lynch’s
Twin Peaks
at ABC and helped develop SF TV shows
seaQuest DSV
and
Earth 2
at Amblin, which involved a co-production deal with Universal. His ability to drop Spielberg’s name into conversations with new Controller of BBC1 Alan Yentob (a
Doctor Who
supporter) led to new interest within the BBC about a US-led co-production (so much so that Yentob pulled a Nathan-Turner-style publicity stunt by popping up at the end of a thirtieth-anniversary documentary,
30 Years in the TARDIS
, and dropping tantalising hints that
Doctor Who
may have a definite future after all).

After years of on-and-off negotiations with the BBC, and alongside their own sporadic attempts at reviving the show, Philip Segal was the one who finally secured the rights to
Doctor Who
. Development work started in 1994. A co-production deal was set up between the BBC, Amblin and Universal while a script was written. The initial TV movie was being regarded as a showcase (‘back-door’ pilot) for any future TV series, while an outline of the proposed series (the ‘bible’) outlined characters and locations, as well as proposing key stories from the past that could be remade. By 1995, Amblin had dropped out (and Spielberg with it), but Segal had secured Fox as the US broadcaster for a proposed made-for-TV movie. Segal had also dropped earlier draft scripts that set out to give the series a new beginning, deciding instead to tie the proposed new series directly back to the original by featuring Seventh Doctor actor Sylvester McCoy in an opening regeneration sequence (despite worries that this might confuse US viewers new to the show’s concept). Matthew Jacobs (whose actor father had featured in the William Hartnell adventure
The Gunfighters
) was hired to write the script, and actor Paul McGann signed on as the Eighth Doctor (after an audition process that had involved Liam Cunningham, Tony Slattery, Mark McGann [Paul’s brother], John Sessions and Michael Crawford, among others). The director was Geoffrey Sax, whose previous experience of
Doctor Who
had been directing a sketch parody of the show called ‘Dr Eyes’ for 1970s sketch series
End of Part One
that had featured Jim Broadbent as the Doctor (he’d reappear in the part – briefly – in
The Curse of Fatal Death
for Comic Relief in 1999).

The TV movie was eventually shot in Vancouver, Canada in January 1996 with the addition of Eric Roberts (brother of Julia) as a new version of the Doctor’s arch-enemy, the Master. Also in the cast were Daphne Ashbrook as surgeon Grace Holloway and Yee Jee Tso as Chang Lee, the TV movie’s companion figures. Set in San Francisco, on the eve of the millennium, the Doctor battles the revived Master (following his own regeneration) for control of the Eye of Harmony (the black hole that seemingly powers the TARDIS), to save the Earth and prevent the Master absorbing the Doctor’s remaining lives.

The result was a garbled mix-and-match production that slavishly followed 1990s American television norms, while attempting (in Segal’s words) many ‘kisses to the past’ of
Doctor Who
that only hardcore fans would spot or care about. Opening with an info-dump voiceover from McGann, the film introduced Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh Doctor at the helm of a vastly redesigned TARDIS (the interior at least; it’s still a British police-box exterior), with no explanation offered for the dimensional contradiction between the tiny box shown flying through space and the vast, now gothic-inspired interior). An encounter with an armed gang after an emergency landing in San Francisco in 1999 sees McCoy’s Doctor mortally wounded, operated on by a confused Grace Holloway and then regenerated into McGann’s Eighth Doctor.

If nothing else, the 1996
Doctor Who
TV movie proved to many TV-industry sceptics and the BBC that the show could be produced using modern production techniques and appeal to an audience (it attracted over nine million viewers for its UK debut screening, more through the novelty factor as there’d been no new
Doctor Who
for seven years). In the US, the movie attracted 8.3 million viewers (only nine per cent of the available audience), opposite the final episode of venerable sitcom
Roseanne
.

Some of the TV movie’s thunder had been stolen by the death of Third Doctor actor Jon Pertwee in the week before transmission. The BBC tagged a dedication to Pertwee onto the UK transmission of the show (Russell T Davies paid similar tribute to
Doctor Who’
s original producer Verity Lambert on the credits of the 2007 Christmas special,
Voyage of the Damned
, following her death that November).

As well as reclaiming the novel range from Virgin, the BBC produced a range of tie-in material to the 1996 TV movie, with
Doctor Who
merchandise being re-branded using the TV movie’s logo (itself a reworking of the Jon Pertwee early-1970s logo). They were clearly hopeful that the one-off film would help launch a new TV series starring McGann, but the viewing figures were simply not enough for the American partners to proceed. As a result of the deal, though, the rights to
Doctor Who
were caught up with Universal for many years, hampering additional attempts by the BBC (and even the BBC’s film arm) to mount a revival of the show following the McGann TV movie.

It is ironic that Paul McGann’s introduction in the 1996 TV movie is in the form of a voiceover, as his role as the Doctor would develop in the audio field rather than on TV. Starting in 1999, a company called Big Finish began producing officially licensed audio adventures (issued on CD and later available as Internet downloads) of
Doctor Who
starring three of the four living original TV Doctors: Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy. Tom Baker consistently refused to take part (although he agreed to play the Doctor for BBC audio drama releases in 2009), while, from 2001, TV movie Eighth Doctor Paul McGann brought new depth to his character by featuring in an annual series of audio dramas (many of which were later transmitted on BBC7, giving them an extra seal of authenticity).

Big Finish continues to be a fan-driven (though professional profit-making) enterprise, reflecting its origins as a series of amateur, fan-produced audio tapes from the 1980s called Audio-Visuals. These unlicensed, home-produced audio tapes were the dramatic equivalents of fanzines (there were also non-fiction audiozines available), an outlet for fiction writers who wanted to dramatise their own version of
Doctor Who
. Many of those involved at the time, primarily Gary Russell and Nicholas Briggs, would go on to steer the Big Finish range (and have significant involvement in the TV
Doctor Who
when it returned from 2005). Of the fan-produced 1980s tapes, Russell said: ‘We were fans doing some stuff for a handful of people. We never advertised in professional magazines, we kept ourselves to ourselves. In doing so, we broke every copyright rule in the book. [John] Nathan-Turner was certainly aware of us, but he didn’t care. Why should he? We were no more [harm] than any other fan product.’