Sixty Things You Should Know Before Watching Doctor Who
0. Doctor Who was the brainchild of Mexican television producer Sydney Newman, who had been shopping the idea around a number of television stations in the United States before eventually selling it to the the BBC. Newman would go on to have a hugely successful career, creating a wide variety of popular programmes including the likes of Lost in Space, Quantum Leap, Primeval and The Sarah Jane Adventures.
0a. Mexican television producer Sydney Newman’s choice of producer for Doctor Who was Verity Lambert, whose son would go on to play Tarzan in the film Brownstrokes.
0b. The incidental music for the early episodes of Doctor Who was provided by French Avant Garde outfit Des Sons Soporifique, who spoke no English and merely sent the production office tapes of themselves snoring in unison.
1. “Doctor” is in fact Doctor Who’s middle name. His full name is actually The Doctor Who, which he frequently abbreviates to just The Doctor.
2. The curious and unique sound of the Doctor Who opening music was achieved when Ron Grainer’s assistant Delia Notts accidentally dropped the physical tape of the recorded theme in a glass of sherry, too close to the transmission of the very first episode for the musicians to re-record it.
3. Back in the 1960s, Doctor Who was broadcast live and a man called John Curator was paid to record the episodes for posterity. Unfortunately, several of the series’ producers decided Curator’s services weren’t worth the money they cost, and thus there are 69 episodes of black and white Doctor Who which were never recorded and are now officially ‘missing’.
4. Terry Nation arrived at the name of the most infamous creatures in the Doctor Who universe when he was stumped during a game of Scrabble. He ended up losing that game, but the five letters he was left with – A, H, L, S and T – have secured him a place in television history.
5. 1960s Doctor Who wasn’t actually broadcast in black and white, we just think it was because John Curator was colour blind and so only recorded the episodes using a monochrome VHS machine.
6. The Hammer Studios movie Six Million Years B.C. was originally going to be the third mid-1960s Doctor Who film, but the producers of the picture couldn’t come to an arrangement with the son of Tribe of Gum writer Anthony Coburn, and so went with an original script instead.
7. The character of Susan was originally conceived as a concubine for The Doctor Who, but when William Hartnell insisted upon playing the title character as a cantankerous old man, the series’ producers decided the actor wasn’t deserving of the canoodling they’d promised him, and so rewrote the character as his granddaughter instead. The 1960s was another country.
8. Ian and Barbara, meanwhile, were originally conceived a just the single schoolteacher character, but even after the producers had cast William Russell, TV bigwig Alvin Stardust insisted his new wife Jacqueline Hill be given a part in the forthcoming programme and thus the character of Barbara was devised.
9. Barbara was actually named for actress Babs Windsor, but actress Jacqueline Hill refused to do the smutty scenes the producers had in mind.
10. Carole Ann Ford left the series before her contract expired after becoming married.
11. Carole Ann Ford’s replacement was originally expected to be Jean Marsh, but Marsh was banned from extending her original single-story contract by her then-husband Jon Pertwee, who after watching a single episode of the series described it as the work of a ‘sham-sistered bum mender.’
12. Second The Doctor Who Patrick Troughton was originally cast to play the same characterisation of The Doctor Who as William Hartnell had been, but on the day of recording the changeover it was discovered that Hartnell’s wig wouldn’t fit Troughton’s head, and so a rapid rethink was required.
13. Patrick Troughton nearly had a heart attack on the set of his first story as The Doctor Who, Evil of the Daleks, when one of the Dalek props suddenly opened and its operator climbed out (Troughton hadn’t been aware that there were people inside them). The producers hastily wrote the Daleks out of the series for the rest of Troughton’s tenure and quickly devised the Cybermen as an alternative concept.
14. The character of Jamie came about when then-producer Wiles E. Coates mistakenly took The Beatles to be a Scottish band.
15. The Patrick Troughton era of Doctor Who was well known for its surfeit of scripts and writers, leading to several stories – The Faceless Ones, The Abominable Snowmen and The War Games among them – being written by ‘blind tag teams’, wherein one writer would script the odd numbered episodes before handing them over to another writer who would pen the even numbered episodes.
16. The cliffhanger to the fifth episode of The Web of Fear is a classic result of the ‘blind tag teams’ system, whereby the villain of the story offers to retire from the narrative for twenty-five minutes, giving Troughton’s The Doctor just enough time to work out a solution to the story’s dilemma before the end of the serial. “Get out of that!” Henry Lincoln famously wrote in pen and ink on the final page of the screenplay.
17. During the three years they worked together, Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines organised a competition to see which of them could collect the greater number of young ladies’ knickers. The competition only came to an end when Troughton discovered Hines in a department store one day during the recording of story The Faceless Ones, buying brand new pairs of knickers in breach of the rules of the game.
18. Patrick Troughton only decided to leave Doctor Who when he was offered the lucrative role of a priest in the film The Exorcist.
19. By 1969, Doctor Who’s popularity was so low, the BBC decided to ‘rest’ the series indefinitely, and only relented after Frazer Hines released a charity single called Where Is Doctor Who?
20. When production on the series started up again in 1970, it was discovered that the TARDIS prop had been ‘skipped’ as garbage and so the production team made a snap decision to throw out all of the scripts they had assembled, and commission a whole new set of stories set entirely on planet Earth.
21. Jon Pertwee became the new The Doctor Who in 1970, after losing a bet with his then-girlfriend Jean Marsh during a drunken Christmas party in 1969.
22. Incoming Doctor Who producer Barry Letraset was a devout Buddhist and penned a script called The Time Master in which it would be revealed that The Doctor Who was in fact a reincarnation of Buddha. BBC executives vetoed the idea.
23. Letraset instead decided to introduce a twin brother for The Doctor Who, named The Master Who, who could become a time-travelling Buddha in a mooted spin-off series called Touchward. Script editor Terrance Dicks, meanwhile, had other ideas and rewrote the character as the Doctor’s evil parallel self, albeit retaining the name. Much to Letraset’s dismay.
24. Barry Letraset and Terrance Dicks never spoke again. Although they did retain a working relationship thanks to contractual reasons, until the end of the 1970s.
24a. In 1974, Jon Pertwee and his then-girlfriend Jean Marsh broke up, and he was able to finally quit Doctor Who, a series he had hated working on for the past five years.
25. Barry Letraset’s last act as outgoing Doctor Who producer, was to cast incoming fourth The Doctor Who Tom Baker, after remembering the actor from a meeting they had had while Baker had been doing some DIY at previous Doctor Who producer Sherwin Allen’s flat above the Napa Thai Massage parlour in Faulkner St, Manchester.
26. Tom Baker hated any kind of physical activity, and so incoming Doctor Who producer Philip Hitchlift cast Ian Marter to do Baker’s walking scenes. Thanks to a misunderstanding, outgoing story editor Terrance Dicks accidentally gave Marter lines to say, and so the character of Harry Sullivan was born.
27. Tom Baker’s first series as The Doctor Who was plagued by a writer’s strike, and so all five of its stories were filmed using unproduced scripts from the 1960s, including ones by John Lucarotti and Gerry Davis, and Terry Nation’s original Dalek origins story. None of these scripts were deemed worth making at the time, and so Season 12 is generally thought of as a nadir for the programme.
28. Tom Baker had a habit of trying to sleep with the actresses who played his companions, often proposing marriage as a way of wooing them. Eventually Lalla Ward called his bluff.
28a. Ward divorced Baker less than a year later, after an anonymous source sent Ward an envelope stuffed with photographs of Louise Jameson in costume as Leela. The envelope was marked only with the phrase "The Magic of Reality."
29. Tom Baker’s relationship with companion actor Matthew Waterhouse was so strained, Baker eventually resorted to administering Waterhouse a slow-acting poison, although it took Waterhouse (who periodically threw up on work days, thus ridding his body of much of the poison’s potency) some eighteen months to finally perish, ultimately collapsing on set at the end of recording on the story Earthshock.
30. Thanks to his dyslexia, Tom Baker ultimately spent seven years playing The Doctor Who, after misreading his contract and telling each incoming producer he had “another” three years to complete on the programme before he would be able to leave. Finally new producer Jonathan Turn contacted the BBC’s contracts department to get to the bottom of Baker’s longevity, and after discovering the truth promptly sacked him on the spot before insisting he then stay on for one more year after Turn was unable to find a replacement.
31. BBC executives gave Jonathan Turn the job of new Doctor Who producer in 1980, after somewhat ironically misreading the word “literal” as “literate” on his CV.
31a. Turn’s first order of business as new Doctor Who producer was to get the show moved from its prestigious Saturday evening broadcast slot, to what television executives ironically described as The One Show slot, in the mistaken belief that this was somehow a promotion (Turn was obsessed with promotion). After Doctor Who left the BBC later in the decade, executives had no option but to commission a programme actually called The One Show, as no other producer would allow their programme to be broadcast to such small audiences.
31b. No one knows why Peter Howell’s version of the Doctor Who theme music was in the wrong key. Later on, however, Howell sold his personal record player on eBay, although the successful bidder had to subsequently return it because it was playing everything at 52 rpm.
32. When casting around for the fifth The Doctor Who, after misunderstanding the precise nature of the term “rejuvenation”, Jonathan Turn eventually settled on schoolboy Peter Davidson.
33. Davidson was too young to play The Doctor Who without a chaperone, and so governess Janet Fielding was drafted in to look after him on set. Thanks to yet another misunderstanding from producer Jonathan Turn, Fielding was given lines and asked to play them in an Australian accent, despite having been born and raised in Austerlands in Lancashire. Eventually she was taken on full-time as new companion Tiger Jojo-something, much to the chagrin of all the other regular cast members who couldn’t stand her.
34. Falling viewing figures led BBC executives to plan a twentieth anniversary bash for the series at the Bath Arms at Horningham in Warminster, the filming location for the beloved 1972 Doctor Who serial The Devils. However, when over a hundred fans turned up to attend the event, the organisers had to quickly move to a nearby larger, alternative venue.
35. Noted playwright Harold Pinter and celebrated singer Kate Bush collaborated on a script for fifth The Doctor Who Peter Davidson (under an assumed name formed by combining elements of their grandparents’ names, Scott Glen and Sylvester McCoy), but due to the excessive amount the production would have cost, the story was shelved for two years, only to resurface in 1985.
36. Thanks to an incident of double booking on behalf of Peter Davidson’s agent, Davidson was unable to see out his tenure as The Doctor Who and ended up leaving the series before his third season was completed, in order to play the part of Alfie ‘Buttons’ Moon in Chester-Le-Street’s 1984 Christmas panto production of Cinderella, alongside ex-guest actor Liza Goddard in the eponymous role.
36a. With four weeks to fill to complete the series, and no Peter Davidson available to play The Doctor Who, Jonathan Turn did what only a good producer would do. Or rather, we all wish he had.
37. During the 1984 Christmas panto season, Doctor Who producer Jonathan Turn was invited to the wedding of ex-guest actor Liza Goddard, whereat he was met by a rather glum looking Colin Brakes, ex-boyfriend of Goddard and another ex-guest actor in the series – one who had, in fact, attempted to kill off previous incumbent Peter Davidson during his guest appearance on the show. Jonathan Turn was thereby struck with a terrific wheeze…
38. Upon being told Jonathan Turn’s plan for the sixth The Doctor Who, of starting the character as a villain and gradually turning him back towards a more virtuous path, script editor Eric Shitwad (whose job it would be to implement such a plan) refused in no uncertain terms. An agreement was eventually reached whereby Shitwad would write approximately half of every script, with guest writers coming in to pen the bits which had The Doctor Who in them. To this day, Turn and Shitwad have never again spoken, despite contractually being obliged to work together for another several years.
39. In fact, Shitwad holds such a grudge against the BBC, television executives in general, Doctor Who fans in particular and anyone who owns a television set at all, he has sustained a voluntary vow of silence ever since, and hasn’t spoken a civil word to anyone since 1986.
40. 1985 was also the year the BBC appointed Michael de Grade as its new attorney general, whereupon the series was given a fresh boost of cash and its producers told to take eighteen months off in order to attend American conventions and promote the programme, such that upon its return the following year it would look the best it ever had and appeal to audiences the size of which it had never experienced.
41. In an attempt to get the dads watching Doctor Who, producer Jonathan Turn cast buxom Nicola Brant as new barely dressed companion Purple Brown. Embarrassed at the amount of cleavage she was required to show, Brant played the part entirely with an American accent in the hope this would put her elderly relatives off from recognising her on their television screens.
42. Colin Brakes eventually left the role of The Doctor Who under something of a cloud, after falling over on the TARDIS set and injuring himself so badly the producers of the show were forced to bring in a hasty replacement without undergoing a rigorous enough casting process.
42a. Colin Brakes once placed second in a poll to decide Who Was the Best The Sixth The Doctor Who.
42b. Sylvester McCoy once placed first in a poll to decide Who Was the Best The Sixth The Doctor Who.
43. The original plan when it came time to cast the seventh The Doctor Who, was to give the part to Bonnie Langford, who could save the production team money by singing a new arrangement of the theme music. However, Langford wasn’t available on the day that sixth The Doctor Who Colin Brakes had his infamous on-set accident, so Sylvester McCoy was quickly poached from the studio next door where he was reading The Hobbit for a series of thirty-seven editions of Jackanory.
44. After the untimely departure of script editor Eric Shitwad (who was poached by a German production company in order to adapt a series of Ian Rankin novels for their Sunday afternoon ‘sleuths’ slot), Jonathan Turn appointed Pip and Kins Baker as his replacement. Their tenure lasted precisely four weeks and they were hastily sacked after turning in Time and the Rani as their first story.
45. Bonnie Langford departed production soon thereafter, heading off to take a role in glitzy new soap Eldorado. Tree-Fu Todd actor Sophie Aldred applied for the role as her replacement, under the mistaken belief it was a voice-only role, Aldred’s only previous experience of Doctor Who having been an episode of The Sun Makers from 1977, in which The Doctor Who’s companion had been robot dog K9.
46. Sophie Aldred and Sylvester McCoy soon hit it off, after discovering they’d been born twenty years apart from one another.
47. The seventh The Doctor Who story Ghost Light infamously came about after Eric Shitwad famously broke into the Doctor Who production office and shredded the following day’s scripts, too close to the start of filming for replacement copies to be printed off.
48. The original run of Doctor Who came to an end in 1988, exactly twenty-five years after it had begun, when Steven Spielberg bought the rights to continue making the programme as an American series, renaming it seaQuest DW and casting Liev Schreiber in the leading role.
49. As early as 1993 the BBC had such a success with thirtieth anniversary story The Dimensions in Time, they quickly drew up plans to bring Doctor Who back to the BBC.
50. This would eventually happen in November of 1999, with the broadcast of a pilot for a proposed new series entitled The Web of Caves. The BBC wouldn’t take the project any further, however, after realising they would be left with Mark Gatiss in charge of the programme.
51. Instead, Doctor Who was reimagined as a radio series, Barry Letraset’s The Ghosts of N-Space being written and produced as its first story. However, BBC executives deemed it “too crap” to be broadcast to the public, and created audio publishing company Big Philip so as to quietly offload it on only the most fervent among the series’ fanbase.
52. A second attempt at reimagining Doctor Who for television screens came to a premature halt after the BBC accidentally contracted rubbish writer Steven Moffat to write the revival story The Curse of Foetal Death.
53. As the new millennium dawned, BBC executives discovered that an American pilot episode starring Paul McGann had been produced and transmitted some four years earlier, tying up the rights situation for another half a decade. BBC attorney general Paul O’Grady later confessed on Room 101, “Nobody bothered to tell me.”
54. The 1990s also saw a series of brand new fiction books being published under the Doctor Who banner, but most fans agree they’re better off left unmentioned. Even the ones by Paul Callwall.
55. BBC executives decided to resurrect Doctor Who in 2005, after hearing Shane Richie was interested in playing the title character.
56. Producer Russel T. David’s time in charge of Doctor Who started badly when he lost the rights to use the Daleks, initially replacing the metal pepper pots with his childhood heroes Bill and Ben. The BBC finally negotiated an annual appearance fee for Terry Nation’s creations after it was discovered that Nicholas Pegg and Barnaby Edwards couldn’t fit in the flowerpot men costumes. Although they had a really good try. A really good try.
57. Producer Russel T David’s first choice for his second The Doctor Who, Jason Connery (who had previously appeared in the series during the Peter Davidson era), was vetoed by BBC executives after they discovered how little he wanted in the way of remuneration for playing the part. An exasperated David was heard instructing his replacement, “Just play it with those funny S’s like James Bond always used to!”
57a. The first companion of the revived Doctor Who would be played by pop singer Billie Pipes, whose most famous song was called Bunny to the He and who got the job because she was married to Radio 2 presenter Chris Evans, who had provided vehicles for the show back in the 1970s.
58. Producer Russel T. David became infamous for only casting actresses he had the hots for in leading roles, once asking new companion Kylie Minogue if she’d “like to do the locomotion” with him. She refused, however, and in a fit of pique he killed her character off after just the one story.
59. Producer Russel T. David later admitted to being a sexual obsessive, and confessed to having written the series Casanova as an experiment in how to do Doctor Who as a programme about a time travelling Romeo shagging his way across all of time and space. David later created a spin-off series called TouchWood which would deal with exactly these subjects through its lead character Captain Jack-the-lad.
60. Producer Russel T. David’s time in charge of Doctor Who ultimately came to a premature end after a series of sex scandals involving his regular actors.
61. After his false start with The Curse of Foetal Death, rubbish writer Steven Moffat finally became head producer on Doctor Who after the BBC failed to find anybody else who would be willing to take on the job.
62. Rubbish writer Steven Moffat’s stories famously fail to make any sense even if you watch them with a map in one hand and a calculator in the other.
63. Rubbish writer Steven Moffat’s first The Doctor Who was played by inexperienced footballer turned actor Matt Smith, who had crossed paths with Moffat when he’d played the eponymous foetus in Moffat’s debut Doctor Who story The Curse of Foetal Death.
64. When Matt Smith departed the series prematurely after someone in the production office forgot to renew his contract, rubbish writer Steven Moffat flounced off to his native Scotland, loudly proclaiming to a BBC Worldwide Showcase in Liverpool that he was going to “erase England from Doctor Who!”
65. Casting only in Scotland meant a much smaller gene pool was now available to play the series regulars, leading to brother and sister duo Peter Capaldi and Michelle Gomez being offered the roles of new The Doctor Who and his arch enemy The Missy. In order to save money, the BBC sacked and then reinstated Capaldi after each of his broadcast series, offering him reduced pay every time they forced him to come back.
66. Rubbish writer Steven Moffat later brought equally rubbish writer Peter Harness onto the series, in order to write a remake of The Curse of Foetal Death called Kill the Moon.
67. After their last choice candidate, rubbish writer Steven Moffat left the series, BBC executives were really stumped as to who they could get to be the next showrunner on Doctor Who.
68. Incoming ‘writer’ Christopher Chibnall had only one request, that his new The Doctor Who not be Scottish. He eventually settled on one of the cast members of his previous production, Fatchurch, but unfortunately his secretary sent the offer to the wrong one.
69. Incoming ‘writer’ Christopher Chibnall decided to take Doctor Who back to basics with his first series in charge, returning the programme to the ethos that had served it so well in 1963. Thus there was to be no ongoing storyline, except for the developing lesbian love affair between the new The Doctor Who and her companion Jazz.
70. Incoming ‘writer’ Christopher Chibnall also moved the series to Sunday evenings, in an attempt to stir up interest among the ageing viewers of Countryfile and Antiques Roadshow, in the developing lesbian love affair between the new The Doctor Who and her companion Jazz.
71. Incoming ‘writer’ Christopher Chibnall eventually decided against consummating the developing lesbian love affair between the new The Doctor Who and her companion Jazz, instead deciding to bring the new The Doctor Who’s tenure to a climax by including a three-way scene involving the new The Doctor Who, the new The Doctor Who and the new The Doctor Who, which would prominently feature the new The Sonic Screwdriver.
72. The BBC eventually decided enough of no sex was enough, and promptly brought Russel T. David back to the show, in the hope that he might bring some titillation back to the TARDIS. David was encouraged to cast his new The Doctor Who from among the actors ‘performing’ in teen sex comedy The Sex Education. It’s not for nothing the new The Doctor Who’s nickname is David “Ten-Inch” Tenant.
72a. Russel T. David’s first order of business upon resuming the Doctor Who producer’s job, was to recast Davros as a fit, healthy, robust, gay black man.
72b. Russell T David also promised fans “We’ll be doing stories we’ve never done before on the series. For instance, in Wild Blue Yonder the TARDIS will arrive on a space bus where an invisible alien causes one of the supporting cast to repeat everything the Doctor says – just before he says it! Only this time, Donna will be along for the ride – marvellous!”
0a. Mexican television producer Sydney Newman’s choice of producer for Doctor Who was Verity Lambert, whose son would go on to play Tarzan in the film Brownstrokes.
0b. The incidental music for the early episodes of Doctor Who was provided by French Avant Garde outfit Des Sons Soporifique, who spoke no English and merely sent the production office tapes of themselves snoring in unison.
1. “Doctor” is in fact Doctor Who’s middle name. His full name is actually The Doctor Who, which he frequently abbreviates to just The Doctor.
2. The curious and unique sound of the Doctor Who opening music was achieved when Ron Grainer’s assistant Delia Notts accidentally dropped the physical tape of the recorded theme in a glass of sherry, too close to the transmission of the very first episode for the musicians to re-record it.
3. Back in the 1960s, Doctor Who was broadcast live and a man called John Curator was paid to record the episodes for posterity. Unfortunately, several of the series’ producers decided Curator’s services weren’t worth the money they cost, and thus there are 69 episodes of black and white Doctor Who which were never recorded and are now officially ‘missing’.
4. Terry Nation arrived at the name of the most infamous creatures in the Doctor Who universe when he was stumped during a game of Scrabble. He ended up losing that game, but the five letters he was left with – A, H, L, S and T – have secured him a place in television history.
5. 1960s Doctor Who wasn’t actually broadcast in black and white, we just think it was because John Curator was colour blind and so only recorded the episodes using a monochrome VHS machine.
6. The Hammer Studios movie Six Million Years B.C. was originally going to be the third mid-1960s Doctor Who film, but the producers of the picture couldn’t come to an arrangement with the son of Tribe of Gum writer Anthony Coburn, and so went with an original script instead.
7. The character of Susan was originally conceived as a concubine for The Doctor Who, but when William Hartnell insisted upon playing the title character as a cantankerous old man, the series’ producers decided the actor wasn’t deserving of the canoodling they’d promised him, and so rewrote the character as his granddaughter instead. The 1960s was another country.
8. Ian and Barbara, meanwhile, were originally conceived a just the single schoolteacher character, but even after the producers had cast William Russell, TV bigwig Alvin Stardust insisted his new wife Jacqueline Hill be given a part in the forthcoming programme and thus the character of Barbara was devised.
9. Barbara was actually named for actress Babs Windsor, but actress Jacqueline Hill refused to do the smutty scenes the producers had in mind.
10. Carole Ann Ford left the series before her contract expired after becoming married.
11. Carole Ann Ford’s replacement was originally expected to be Jean Marsh, but Marsh was banned from extending her original single-story contract by her then-husband Jon Pertwee, who after watching a single episode of the series described it as the work of a ‘sham-sistered bum mender.’
12. Second The Doctor Who Patrick Troughton was originally cast to play the same characterisation of The Doctor Who as William Hartnell had been, but on the day of recording the changeover it was discovered that Hartnell’s wig wouldn’t fit Troughton’s head, and so a rapid rethink was required.
13. Patrick Troughton nearly had a heart attack on the set of his first story as The Doctor Who, Evil of the Daleks, when one of the Dalek props suddenly opened and its operator climbed out (Troughton hadn’t been aware that there were people inside them). The producers hastily wrote the Daleks out of the series for the rest of Troughton’s tenure and quickly devised the Cybermen as an alternative concept.
14. The character of Jamie came about when then-producer Wiles E. Coates mistakenly took The Beatles to be a Scottish band.
15. The Patrick Troughton era of Doctor Who was well known for its surfeit of scripts and writers, leading to several stories – The Faceless Ones, The Abominable Snowmen and The War Games among them – being written by ‘blind tag teams’, wherein one writer would script the odd numbered episodes before handing them over to another writer who would pen the even numbered episodes.
16. The cliffhanger to the fifth episode of The Web of Fear is a classic result of the ‘blind tag teams’ system, whereby the villain of the story offers to retire from the narrative for twenty-five minutes, giving Troughton’s The Doctor just enough time to work out a solution to the story’s dilemma before the end of the serial. “Get out of that!” Henry Lincoln famously wrote in pen and ink on the final page of the screenplay.
17. During the three years they worked together, Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines organised a competition to see which of them could collect the greater number of young ladies’ knickers. The competition only came to an end when Troughton discovered Hines in a department store one day during the recording of story The Faceless Ones, buying brand new pairs of knickers in breach of the rules of the game.
18. Patrick Troughton only decided to leave Doctor Who when he was offered the lucrative role of a priest in the film The Exorcist.
19. By 1969, Doctor Who’s popularity was so low, the BBC decided to ‘rest’ the series indefinitely, and only relented after Frazer Hines released a charity single called Where Is Doctor Who?
20. When production on the series started up again in 1970, it was discovered that the TARDIS prop had been ‘skipped’ as garbage and so the production team made a snap decision to throw out all of the scripts they had assembled, and commission a whole new set of stories set entirely on planet Earth.
21. Jon Pertwee became the new The Doctor Who in 1970, after losing a bet with his then-girlfriend Jean Marsh during a drunken Christmas party in 1969.
22. Incoming Doctor Who producer Barry Letraset was a devout Buddhist and penned a script called The Time Master in which it would be revealed that The Doctor Who was in fact a reincarnation of Buddha. BBC executives vetoed the idea.
23. Letraset instead decided to introduce a twin brother for The Doctor Who, named The Master Who, who could become a time-travelling Buddha in a mooted spin-off series called Touchward. Script editor Terrance Dicks, meanwhile, had other ideas and rewrote the character as the Doctor’s evil parallel self, albeit retaining the name. Much to Letraset’s dismay.
24. Barry Letraset and Terrance Dicks never spoke again. Although they did retain a working relationship thanks to contractual reasons, until the end of the 1970s.
24a. In 1974, Jon Pertwee and his then-girlfriend Jean Marsh broke up, and he was able to finally quit Doctor Who, a series he had hated working on for the past five years.
25. Barry Letraset’s last act as outgoing Doctor Who producer, was to cast incoming fourth The Doctor Who Tom Baker, after remembering the actor from a meeting they had had while Baker had been doing some DIY at previous Doctor Who producer Sherwin Allen’s flat above the Napa Thai Massage parlour in Faulkner St, Manchester.
26. Tom Baker hated any kind of physical activity, and so incoming Doctor Who producer Philip Hitchlift cast Ian Marter to do Baker’s walking scenes. Thanks to a misunderstanding, outgoing story editor Terrance Dicks accidentally gave Marter lines to say, and so the character of Harry Sullivan was born.
27. Tom Baker’s first series as The Doctor Who was plagued by a writer’s strike, and so all five of its stories were filmed using unproduced scripts from the 1960s, including ones by John Lucarotti and Gerry Davis, and Terry Nation’s original Dalek origins story. None of these scripts were deemed worth making at the time, and so Season 12 is generally thought of as a nadir for the programme.
28. Tom Baker had a habit of trying to sleep with the actresses who played his companions, often proposing marriage as a way of wooing them. Eventually Lalla Ward called his bluff.
28a. Ward divorced Baker less than a year later, after an anonymous source sent Ward an envelope stuffed with photographs of Louise Jameson in costume as Leela. The envelope was marked only with the phrase "The Magic of Reality."
29. Tom Baker’s relationship with companion actor Matthew Waterhouse was so strained, Baker eventually resorted to administering Waterhouse a slow-acting poison, although it took Waterhouse (who periodically threw up on work days, thus ridding his body of much of the poison’s potency) some eighteen months to finally perish, ultimately collapsing on set at the end of recording on the story Earthshock.
30. Thanks to his dyslexia, Tom Baker ultimately spent seven years playing The Doctor Who, after misreading his contract and telling each incoming producer he had “another” three years to complete on the programme before he would be able to leave. Finally new producer Jonathan Turn contacted the BBC’s contracts department to get to the bottom of Baker’s longevity, and after discovering the truth promptly sacked him on the spot before insisting he then stay on for one more year after Turn was unable to find a replacement.
31. BBC executives gave Jonathan Turn the job of new Doctor Who producer in 1980, after somewhat ironically misreading the word “literal” as “literate” on his CV.
31a. Turn’s first order of business as new Doctor Who producer was to get the show moved from its prestigious Saturday evening broadcast slot, to what television executives ironically described as The One Show slot, in the mistaken belief that this was somehow a promotion (Turn was obsessed with promotion). After Doctor Who left the BBC later in the decade, executives had no option but to commission a programme actually called The One Show, as no other producer would allow their programme to be broadcast to such small audiences.
31b. No one knows why Peter Howell’s version of the Doctor Who theme music was in the wrong key. Later on, however, Howell sold his personal record player on eBay, although the successful bidder had to subsequently return it because it was playing everything at 52 rpm.
32. When casting around for the fifth The Doctor Who, after misunderstanding the precise nature of the term “rejuvenation”, Jonathan Turn eventually settled on schoolboy Peter Davidson.
33. Davidson was too young to play The Doctor Who without a chaperone, and so governess Janet Fielding was drafted in to look after him on set. Thanks to yet another misunderstanding from producer Jonathan Turn, Fielding was given lines and asked to play them in an Australian accent, despite having been born and raised in Austerlands in Lancashire. Eventually she was taken on full-time as new companion Tiger Jojo-something, much to the chagrin of all the other regular cast members who couldn’t stand her.
34. Falling viewing figures led BBC executives to plan a twentieth anniversary bash for the series at the Bath Arms at Horningham in Warminster, the filming location for the beloved 1972 Doctor Who serial The Devils. However, when over a hundred fans turned up to attend the event, the organisers had to quickly move to a nearby larger, alternative venue.
35. Noted playwright Harold Pinter and celebrated singer Kate Bush collaborated on a script for fifth The Doctor Who Peter Davidson (under an assumed name formed by combining elements of their grandparents’ names, Scott Glen and Sylvester McCoy), but due to the excessive amount the production would have cost, the story was shelved for two years, only to resurface in 1985.
36. Thanks to an incident of double booking on behalf of Peter Davidson’s agent, Davidson was unable to see out his tenure as The Doctor Who and ended up leaving the series before his third season was completed, in order to play the part of Alfie ‘Buttons’ Moon in Chester-Le-Street’s 1984 Christmas panto production of Cinderella, alongside ex-guest actor Liza Goddard in the eponymous role.
36a. With four weeks to fill to complete the series, and no Peter Davidson available to play The Doctor Who, Jonathan Turn did what only a good producer would do. Or rather, we all wish he had.
37. During the 1984 Christmas panto season, Doctor Who producer Jonathan Turn was invited to the wedding of ex-guest actor Liza Goddard, whereat he was met by a rather glum looking Colin Brakes, ex-boyfriend of Goddard and another ex-guest actor in the series – one who had, in fact, attempted to kill off previous incumbent Peter Davidson during his guest appearance on the show. Jonathan Turn was thereby struck with a terrific wheeze…
38. Upon being told Jonathan Turn’s plan for the sixth The Doctor Who, of starting the character as a villain and gradually turning him back towards a more virtuous path, script editor Eric Shitwad (whose job it would be to implement such a plan) refused in no uncertain terms. An agreement was eventually reached whereby Shitwad would write approximately half of every script, with guest writers coming in to pen the bits which had The Doctor Who in them. To this day, Turn and Shitwad have never again spoken, despite contractually being obliged to work together for another several years.
39. In fact, Shitwad holds such a grudge against the BBC, television executives in general, Doctor Who fans in particular and anyone who owns a television set at all, he has sustained a voluntary vow of silence ever since, and hasn’t spoken a civil word to anyone since 1986.
40. 1985 was also the year the BBC appointed Michael de Grade as its new attorney general, whereupon the series was given a fresh boost of cash and its producers told to take eighteen months off in order to attend American conventions and promote the programme, such that upon its return the following year it would look the best it ever had and appeal to audiences the size of which it had never experienced.
41. In an attempt to get the dads watching Doctor Who, producer Jonathan Turn cast buxom Nicola Brant as new barely dressed companion Purple Brown. Embarrassed at the amount of cleavage she was required to show, Brant played the part entirely with an American accent in the hope this would put her elderly relatives off from recognising her on their television screens.
42. Colin Brakes eventually left the role of The Doctor Who under something of a cloud, after falling over on the TARDIS set and injuring himself so badly the producers of the show were forced to bring in a hasty replacement without undergoing a rigorous enough casting process.
42a. Colin Brakes once placed second in a poll to decide Who Was the Best The Sixth The Doctor Who.
42b. Sylvester McCoy once placed first in a poll to decide Who Was the Best The Sixth The Doctor Who.
43. The original plan when it came time to cast the seventh The Doctor Who, was to give the part to Bonnie Langford, who could save the production team money by singing a new arrangement of the theme music. However, Langford wasn’t available on the day that sixth The Doctor Who Colin Brakes had his infamous on-set accident, so Sylvester McCoy was quickly poached from the studio next door where he was reading The Hobbit for a series of thirty-seven editions of Jackanory.
44. After the untimely departure of script editor Eric Shitwad (who was poached by a German production company in order to adapt a series of Ian Rankin novels for their Sunday afternoon ‘sleuths’ slot), Jonathan Turn appointed Pip and Kins Baker as his replacement. Their tenure lasted precisely four weeks and they were hastily sacked after turning in Time and the Rani as their first story.
45. Bonnie Langford departed production soon thereafter, heading off to take a role in glitzy new soap Eldorado. Tree-Fu Todd actor Sophie Aldred applied for the role as her replacement, under the mistaken belief it was a voice-only role, Aldred’s only previous experience of Doctor Who having been an episode of The Sun Makers from 1977, in which The Doctor Who’s companion had been robot dog K9.
46. Sophie Aldred and Sylvester McCoy soon hit it off, after discovering they’d been born twenty years apart from one another.
47. The seventh The Doctor Who story Ghost Light infamously came about after Eric Shitwad famously broke into the Doctor Who production office and shredded the following day’s scripts, too close to the start of filming for replacement copies to be printed off.
48. The original run of Doctor Who came to an end in 1988, exactly twenty-five years after it had begun, when Steven Spielberg bought the rights to continue making the programme as an American series, renaming it seaQuest DW and casting Liev Schreiber in the leading role.
49. As early as 1993 the BBC had such a success with thirtieth anniversary story The Dimensions in Time, they quickly drew up plans to bring Doctor Who back to the BBC.
50. This would eventually happen in November of 1999, with the broadcast of a pilot for a proposed new series entitled The Web of Caves. The BBC wouldn’t take the project any further, however, after realising they would be left with Mark Gatiss in charge of the programme.
51. Instead, Doctor Who was reimagined as a radio series, Barry Letraset’s The Ghosts of N-Space being written and produced as its first story. However, BBC executives deemed it “too crap” to be broadcast to the public, and created audio publishing company Big Philip so as to quietly offload it on only the most fervent among the series’ fanbase.
52. A second attempt at reimagining Doctor Who for television screens came to a premature halt after the BBC accidentally contracted rubbish writer Steven Moffat to write the revival story The Curse of Foetal Death.
53. As the new millennium dawned, BBC executives discovered that an American pilot episode starring Paul McGann had been produced and transmitted some four years earlier, tying up the rights situation for another half a decade. BBC attorney general Paul O’Grady later confessed on Room 101, “Nobody bothered to tell me.”
54. The 1990s also saw a series of brand new fiction books being published under the Doctor Who banner, but most fans agree they’re better off left unmentioned. Even the ones by Paul Callwall.
55. BBC executives decided to resurrect Doctor Who in 2005, after hearing Shane Richie was interested in playing the title character.
56. Producer Russel T. David’s time in charge of Doctor Who started badly when he lost the rights to use the Daleks, initially replacing the metal pepper pots with his childhood heroes Bill and Ben. The BBC finally negotiated an annual appearance fee for Terry Nation’s creations after it was discovered that Nicholas Pegg and Barnaby Edwards couldn’t fit in the flowerpot men costumes. Although they had a really good try. A really good try.
57. Producer Russel T David’s first choice for his second The Doctor Who, Jason Connery (who had previously appeared in the series during the Peter Davidson era), was vetoed by BBC executives after they discovered how little he wanted in the way of remuneration for playing the part. An exasperated David was heard instructing his replacement, “Just play it with those funny S’s like James Bond always used to!”
57a. The first companion of the revived Doctor Who would be played by pop singer Billie Pipes, whose most famous song was called Bunny to the He and who got the job because she was married to Radio 2 presenter Chris Evans, who had provided vehicles for the show back in the 1970s.
58. Producer Russel T. David became infamous for only casting actresses he had the hots for in leading roles, once asking new companion Kylie Minogue if she’d “like to do the locomotion” with him. She refused, however, and in a fit of pique he killed her character off after just the one story.
59. Producer Russel T. David later admitted to being a sexual obsessive, and confessed to having written the series Casanova as an experiment in how to do Doctor Who as a programme about a time travelling Romeo shagging his way across all of time and space. David later created a spin-off series called TouchWood which would deal with exactly these subjects through its lead character Captain Jack-the-lad.
60. Producer Russel T. David’s time in charge of Doctor Who ultimately came to a premature end after a series of sex scandals involving his regular actors.
61. After his false start with The Curse of Foetal Death, rubbish writer Steven Moffat finally became head producer on Doctor Who after the BBC failed to find anybody else who would be willing to take on the job.
62. Rubbish writer Steven Moffat’s stories famously fail to make any sense even if you watch them with a map in one hand and a calculator in the other.
63. Rubbish writer Steven Moffat’s first The Doctor Who was played by inexperienced footballer turned actor Matt Smith, who had crossed paths with Moffat when he’d played the eponymous foetus in Moffat’s debut Doctor Who story The Curse of Foetal Death.
64. When Matt Smith departed the series prematurely after someone in the production office forgot to renew his contract, rubbish writer Steven Moffat flounced off to his native Scotland, loudly proclaiming to a BBC Worldwide Showcase in Liverpool that he was going to “erase England from Doctor Who!”
65. Casting only in Scotland meant a much smaller gene pool was now available to play the series regulars, leading to brother and sister duo Peter Capaldi and Michelle Gomez being offered the roles of new The Doctor Who and his arch enemy The Missy. In order to save money, the BBC sacked and then reinstated Capaldi after each of his broadcast series, offering him reduced pay every time they forced him to come back.
66. Rubbish writer Steven Moffat later brought equally rubbish writer Peter Harness onto the series, in order to write a remake of The Curse of Foetal Death called Kill the Moon.
67. After their last choice candidate, rubbish writer Steven Moffat left the series, BBC executives were really stumped as to who they could get to be the next showrunner on Doctor Who.
68. Incoming ‘writer’ Christopher Chibnall had only one request, that his new The Doctor Who not be Scottish. He eventually settled on one of the cast members of his previous production, Fatchurch, but unfortunately his secretary sent the offer to the wrong one.
69. Incoming ‘writer’ Christopher Chibnall decided to take Doctor Who back to basics with his first series in charge, returning the programme to the ethos that had served it so well in 1963. Thus there was to be no ongoing storyline, except for the developing lesbian love affair between the new The Doctor Who and her companion Jazz.
70. Incoming ‘writer’ Christopher Chibnall also moved the series to Sunday evenings, in an attempt to stir up interest among the ageing viewers of Countryfile and Antiques Roadshow, in the developing lesbian love affair between the new The Doctor Who and her companion Jazz.
71. Incoming ‘writer’ Christopher Chibnall eventually decided against consummating the developing lesbian love affair between the new The Doctor Who and her companion Jazz, instead deciding to bring the new The Doctor Who’s tenure to a climax by including a three-way scene involving the new The Doctor Who, the new The Doctor Who and the new The Doctor Who, which would prominently feature the new The Sonic Screwdriver.
72. The BBC eventually decided enough of no sex was enough, and promptly brought Russel T. David back to the show, in the hope that he might bring some titillation back to the TARDIS. David was encouraged to cast his new The Doctor Who from among the actors ‘performing’ in teen sex comedy The Sex Education. It’s not for nothing the new The Doctor Who’s nickname is David “Ten-Inch” Tenant.
72a. Russel T. David’s first order of business upon resuming the Doctor Who producer’s job, was to recast Davros as a fit, healthy, robust, gay black man.
72b. Russell T David also promised fans “We’ll be doing stories we’ve never done before on the series. For instance, in Wild Blue Yonder the TARDIS will arrive on a space bus where an invisible alien causes one of the supporting cast to repeat everything the Doctor says – just before he says it! Only this time, Donna will be along for the ride – marvellous!”