Doctor Who (23 page)

17

The Wilderness Years

“Only the madman can see the way clearly through the tangled forest.”

—The Seventh Doctor, from “Ghost Light” (1989)

 

Many classic
Doctor Who
fans referred to the period after the program's cancellation as the Wilderness Years, in which they groped through metaphorical forests for any sign that the Doctor would return.

Before the cancellation, Disney considered making an offer to purchase the franchise in the early 1980s, but this never went far. Starting in 1987, the BBC was negotiating a
Doctor Who
movie deal with a consortium of investors working through the Daltenreys company, founded by George Dugdale, John Humphreys, and Peter Litton. Daltenreys created a smaller production company called Coast to Coast, later renamed Green Light, that would film the movie and, if it proved successful, two sequels.

Similar to the 1965 Peter Cushing movies, the theatrical release would exist outside the TV program's continuity. Mark Ezra wrote the screenplay, which Johnny Byrne, who had written television stories for the Fourth and Fifth Doctors, edited.

In 1989, three weeks before the
Doctor Who
TV program filmed its final studio scene, Philip Segal at Columbia Pictures, contacted the BBC. Born in Essex, Segal was a longtime fan of the show and wanted to develop a new US television version. BBC Worldwide feared a new TV show could draw attention away from their upcoming movie, particularly if not handled properly. In 1992, the BBC told Segal that it was too soon to bring back the program.

Moving to Amblin Entertainment, Segal got permission from Steven Spielberg to pursue relaunching
Doctor Who.
With Spielberg's name attached, negotiations with the BBC began. Segal recruited help from Peter Wagg, producer of the successful TV series
Max Headroom.

Movies That Might Have Been

Several discussions covered who might play the Doctor in the Green Light film, including John Cleese, Tim Curry, Rutger Hauer, Dudley Moore, Alan Rickman, and Donald Sutherland. The initial script has the Doctor in an asylum, suffering from amnesia. He befriends a seventeen-year-old girl named Millie who helps him escape. The Doctor returns to his TARDIS, which gets stuck in the shape of a police box. Entering the ship, he regains his memories of Gallifrey, ruled by Time Lords and their agents, temporal heroes known as Time Rangers. A villain named Varnax has attacked Gallifrey with an army, leaving the Doctor the only apparent survivor.

Byrne overhauled the story, now called
Doctor Who: Last of the Time Lords.
Millie became Lotte Wellins, the asylum slid back into the nineteenth century, and now the Doctor was on a quest to find his father. Later rewrites renamed the Time Rangers as the Time Battalion and introduced a Time Lady named Zilla, a former lover of the hero. Lotte was later changed to a human-Gallifreyan hybrid who fell in love with the Doctor. Different versions of the script also involved Pog, a hairy Latin-speaking creature that inhabited the TARDIS's interior garden. (Yes, you read that correctly.)

None of the stories generated much interest, so Byrne presented a new outline under the title
Doctor Who: The Movie.
He wrote a couple of versions, each featuring the Doctor as an old man who teams up with a young version of himself (named “Theo” in one script) to defeat a great evil. The two versions of the Doctor would meet a young woman who would be attracted to both of them, creating a strange romantic triangle that was only resolved when she met a third version of the hero.

As before, Byrne's story didn't generate enough interest to pursue.

Dimensions in Time

The BBC started running reruns of
Doctor Who
on BBC Two in 1992 thanks to Alan Yentob, station controller since 1987. While BBC One is aimed at mainstream audiences, BBC Two is styled to deliver slightly more highbrow and niche entertainment, and BBC Three aims for edgier, “innovative” entertainment.

A supporter of science fiction programming, Yentob wanted the BBC to take more pride in the series rather than treating it as something to forget. “I was always an enthusiast of the early [
Doctor Who
] and believed that it did have potential,” Yentob explained in the documentary
The Seven Year Hitch.
He said he received “almost daily correspondence” from fans hoping he could help bring back the show.

When Yentob later took over as BBC One controller in 1993, he spoke freely to reporters and fans that he was open to new
Doctor Who
productions, though he had no plans yet. That same year, BBC Worldwide began production of a feature-length thirtieth anniversary special to be released directly to video.

Originally called
Lost in the Dark Dimension,
the special was set to feature Tom Baker as the lead Doctor, since he had been the most popular, with the Brigadier and Ace at this side. In the story, Ace has no memory of her time with the Doctor and it's discovered that a villain has changed history, preventing the hero's regeneration into his fifth self. After meeting the notably older version of the Fourth Doctor who inhabits this new timeline, Lethbridge-Stewart and Ace travel through time and space to restore the past. Although they win, Alex Stewart, the Brig's son and Ace's lover, sadly dies.

Set to direct was Graeme Harper, still praised for his work on the Fifth Doctor's swan song “The Caves of Androzani.” The character Professor Hawkspur was to be played by Brian Blessed or David Bowie. Yentob developed an interest in
Lost in the Dark Dimension
and arranged for the film to have a bigger budget than planned. He also intended to air the special on BBC One rather than sending it straight to video.

The BBC gave Philip Segal a copy of the script, asking if he would have a problem with the release. Segal insisted that the special would mire the property in the past rather than allowing his own new take on the series to take flight. “I read the script, and it was awful,” Segal said during
The Seven Year Hitch.
“It was going to muddy the waters and confuse people especially because we were so close to delivering our [series] bible and our script.”

Although Graeme Harper defended it as a “superb story,” others shared Segal's opinion. According to several, the script relied too heavily on Tom
Baker's Doctor as the lead, making the other Doctors seem inconsequential. To continue negotiations with Segal, the BBC shut down
Lost in the Dark Dimension.
Instead, the thirtieth anniversary was celebrated with a fifteen-minute adventure divided into two mini-episodes called “Dimensions in Time,” released as segments of the Children in Need charity broadcast. Part One ran on November 26, 1993, with Part Two transmitted the next day. The simplistic story had the Fourth Doctor summoning his other incarnations and several companions to hunt down the Rani.

Some still defend “Dimensions in Time” as a fun, simple romp not to be taken seriously. Others criticize it as a lost opportunity to do something really special. Although none of the Doctors occupy the same scene, “Dimensions in Time” so far remains the only instance in which Tom Baker and Sylvester McCoy participated in an on-screen multi-Doctor team-up (not counting pre-recorded footage of them being used) and is the one time Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and the Sixth Doctor appear on-screen together.

Things Fall Apart

Meanwhile, Green Light was having difficulty making progress and the rights reverted to BBC Worldwide. A new contract was written that stipulated a progress deadline of April 6, 1994. To make sure they didn't lose the project again, Green Light joined forces with Lumiere Productions, a French-owned company with interests in Britain. The deal cost $31 million.

In 1993, some confused Amblin Entertainment's proposed TV series with the Green Light film and reported that Spielberg was directing a theatrical
Doctor Who
movie. According to Daltenreys founder John Humphreys, these reports spawned fear that Spielberg's efforts for a new series would undermine viewer interest in their film. Lumiere Productions left the project.

Green Light pushed forward, commissioning a new script from screenwriter Denny Martin Flinn, who, along with Nicholas Meyer, wrote the screenplay for
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
An avid
Doctor Who
fan, Flinn took inspiration from “The Five Doctors” and the Key to Time
season. He wanted to use the Master as the main villain, but the BBC asked him not to do so.

Flinn's story involves the Doctor, a Time Lord adventurer who learned sword fighting from Zorro. After saving Shakespeare from being killed by a bearded man in a pub, the Doctor is in his TARDIS with K-9 (mute in this story). The Doctor later recruits Aman, a man from Egypt in 2500 BC, and Amelia Earhart, called “Amy” throughout most of the story. Twice in the story, the Doctor and Amy must kiss to thwart their enemy's schemes.

As the adventure continues, the Doctor crosses paths with a former friend who is now an enemy, a Time Lord called the Mandrake, known on Earth as Vlad the Impaler. With his army of headless henchmen, the Mandrake wishes to collect the hidden segments of the Key to Time, the final piece of which lies hidden at a 1960s concert performance of British rock group The Who.

The story also included a cameo by Tom Baker as a past incarnation and a scene where the Doctor and his friends become incapacitated after drinking wine laced with LSD. After Amy dies, the Doctor goes back to the fight with Shakespeare, and the bearded man (the Mandrake) dies in the pub fight by falling on his own knife, negating everything that happened afterward.

With the exception of the Doctor taking LSD, the BBC approved of the bizarre story. But Green Light wanted to start shooting scenes of the film's version of the First Doctor in advance and asked Flinn to expand the flashbacks of his life. Several rewrites followed, with one version calling for Tom Baker to play himself, now running a shop in San Francisco that sold “Crystals and Other Spiritual Paraphernalia.”

With a completed script, Green Light secured Leonard Nimoy as director, fewer than two months before the BBC deadline. Segal still saw the Green Light film as an obstacle in his negotiations with the BBC, though, and believed that hiring Nimoy amounted to a publicity stunt. In later interviews, Segal revealed that he called Nimoy himself and shared this belief, prompting the director to opt out of the project soon afterward.

On April 6, 1994, the deadline passed, and film rights reverted back to BBC Worldwide. According to Daltenreys, the affair cost the company $775,000. The
Otago Daily Times
quoted John Illsley, bassist of British rock
group Dire Straits and an investor in Daltenreys, as saying, “When they started talking to Spielberg, it totally pulled the rug out from under us.”

Despite his efforts, Segal's deal with the BBC fell through. He went on to work on Amblin's TV series
SeaQuest DSV,
which aired from 1993 to 1996. During this time, Alan Yentob and others from the BBC arrived on the set of
SeaQuest DSV
and requested a tour. Segal acted as Yentob's personal tour guide, taking the opportunity to plead his case to helm a new
Doctor Who
series. In 1994, Segal and Yentob made a deal to develop a new BBC–Amblin Entertainment coproduction of a show that would reimagine the character.

The Reboot Doctor

Universal Television funded the US side of this coproduction and had Segal hire writer John Leekley to develop the series bible, a reference document establishing details on character, background, location, series premise, and so on. Leekley was familiar with
Doctor Who
and keenly wanted to delve into Time Lord society and history. Michael Wearing, head of Serials at the BBC, assigned executive producer Jo Wright to the project.

Wright explained to
The Seven Year Hitch:
“One of the reasons they put me on it was to be the keeper of the keys, as far as the BBC was concerned. . . . Are they going to want an American Doctor? Are they going to change everything?”

Segal didn't care for Jo Wright checking his work, so she mostly communicated with Alan Yentob, who saw her as “a real champion of the project.” Segal later remarked that Jo Wright was indeed a “consummate professional” and admitted he had been difficult with her. With Segal's aid, Leekley outlined a two-hour pilot followed by thirteen self-contained hour-long episodes. Leekley wrote the series bible as if it were the personal journal of Cardinal Borusa. Like the movie scripts, the vision for the new show, to be titled
The Chronicles of Doctor Who?
or simply
Doctor Who?
, underwent a few revisions.

According to the bible, the Doctor is an adventurous and occasionally reckless Time Lord who is raised alongside the Master by the villain's grandfather Cardinal Borusa, a descendant of the great Time Lord Rassilon.
After the Master is made the royal leader of Gallifrey, the Doctor is revealed to be his half-brother, the product of a union between the lost Time Lord Ulysses and a woman from the planet Earth. Seeing the Doctor as a threat to his power, the Master sends forth his deadly minions the Daleks (now with metal casings that expand into spider-like legs). Escaping with his life and hoping to find his father, the Doctor steals an old TARDIS, but he isn't going to travel alone. The recently deceased Borusa transfers his spirit into the time rotor's power crystals. The TARDIS is now a living ship, and Borusa can appear before the Doctor as a hologram. They launch forth through space and time.

The series bible then describes the Doctor's subsequent adventures. It describes the hero as a ruggedly handsome man who smokes cigars and wears a long duster with many pockets and buckles. A later version of the pilot script makes mention of his piercing blue eyes, a sign of his human heritage since all Gallifreyans have dark eyes. This detail riffs on the fact that all the actors who'd played the Doctor had blue eyes (until David Tennant). Though glad to fight evil where he finds it, the Doctor is mainly searching for clues leading to his father.