Doctor Who: 60 Years Of Secrets & Scandals
In celebration of the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who, this special full documentary takes an in-depth look behind-the-scenes of this cult sci-fi series, telling the untold stories of the longest-running British sci-fi drama series in the world. There are tales of stunts that went dangerously wrong and secrets of how the crew brought monsters to life, as well as revelations about how some storylines proved to be so scary the BBC were forced to re-edit some episodes.
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TVTranscript
00:00:00For generations, Doctor Who has entertained and petrified us.
00:00:05I was thinking, wow, a lot of people are being killed on this.
00:00:08I was terrified.
00:00:10But behind the scenes, it was a story of near fatal danger.
00:00:13All this water and broken glass just crashed out into the studio.
00:00:18And this is a chemical.
00:00:20And I was choking.
00:00:21Secret lives.
00:00:22Oh, you're two families.
00:00:24And abuse of power.
00:00:25He would ask a fan, you know, would you like to come up to my room?
00:00:29We'll reveal inappropriate outfits.
00:00:31I remember thinking it was quite fun.
00:00:33I remember Colin being quite disturbed by it all.
00:00:36Missing episodes.
00:00:37I believe they still exist somewhere in the world.
00:00:40And the truth about the Doctor's biggest enemy.
00:00:42Exterminate!
00:00:44Doctor Who was reviled at the BBC.
00:00:46And I'm not exaggerating.
00:00:47People just hated it.
00:00:48And they wanted to kill it.
00:00:50So get yourself behind the sofa.
00:00:53As we reveal the shocking secrets and scandals of Britain's favourite sci-fi show.
00:01:03It's November 1976.
00:01:06Punk is breaking into mainstream culture.
00:01:08Britain's economy is in tatters.
00:01:10Tom Baker is playing the Doctor in popular children's programme Doctor Who.
00:01:15And at 5 past 6 on a Saturday afternoon,
00:01:17the nation's children are about to be traumatised by a Doctor Who episode
00:01:21that was so shocking the BBC itself was forced to censor it.
00:01:25In The Deadly Assassin,
00:01:27Tom Baker's Doctor is framed for murdering the President of the Time Lords.
00:01:31I'm in trouble now.
00:01:35There is this sequence as a cliffhanger to one of the episodes
00:01:38where he is fighting and he is held under water.
00:01:43Finished.
00:01:46You're finished.
00:01:53The Doctor is being drowned underneath water
00:01:56and then they just cut to the credits.
00:01:58And as a child that stayed with you and you couldn't sort of get that out of your head.
00:02:02And you were left with that for a whole week until the next episode came along.
00:02:05It was very scary.
00:02:06And they hold on the cliffhanger for a whole week.
00:02:09Until the next episode came along.
00:02:11It was very scary.
00:02:12And they hold on the shot of him being held under water for quite a long time.
00:02:17And Mary Whitehouse actually flagged this up.
00:02:21Everyone's favourite moral crusader Mary Whitehouse
00:02:24had long been calling on the BBC to finance research
00:02:27into the effect of Doctor Who on young children.
00:02:30And once again, her typewriter was running red hot.
00:02:33It's one thing that we forget today is watching it on DVD, on Blu-ray.
00:02:37We think, oh yeah, we'll just see the next episode on.
00:02:39People had to wait a week then.
00:02:41In an interview 17 years later, Mary was still livid.
00:02:45I can see it still in my mind's eye.
00:02:48Doctor Who, drowning.
00:02:51The final shots of the programme
00:02:54with the image that was left in the mind of the child for a whole week.
00:02:58Even the BBC acknowledged the scene may have gone too far
00:03:02with an internal memo saying
00:03:04Mrs Whitehouse continues to pepper me
00:03:07but at first sight it would seem she has a point.
00:03:10They actually edited the master tape
00:03:12so when it was eventually repeated on the BBC
00:03:15they cut a lot of that out and it ends quite abruptly
00:03:19and you don't even see him under the water.
00:03:21Children had been hiding behind the sofa to watch Doctor Who
00:03:24since it began in 1963.
00:03:26And it turns out they had good reason.
00:03:28The first Doctor Who I ever remember watching
00:03:30was called Terror of the Autons.
00:03:32And terror was the right word for the title.
00:03:34It really did freak me out.
00:03:35Terror of the Autons contained a doll which came to life
00:03:38and strangled people,
00:03:40a daffodil which spat plastic film over people's mouths to suffocate them
00:03:44and a plastic chair which swallowed whoever sat in it.
00:03:47Most terrifying of all were the Autons themselves
00:03:50who even drew complaints from the actual police.
00:03:53I can't think why.
00:03:54So there's one episode where the doctor is arrested
00:03:57and he goes, I'm not sure if this is a genuine policeman.
00:04:00Excuse me officer, could I see your warrant card?
00:04:10The doctor knocks his face off
00:04:13and it's the blank Auton underneath.
00:04:16And of course the police are going,
00:04:17oh come on, we're trying to get kids to trust the police
00:04:20and you've just made police scary aliens.
00:04:22Unbelievably, Scotland Yard themselves contacted the BBC about the show.
00:04:27As producer Barry Letts recalled in a DVD commentary
00:04:30over these tense and controversial scenes.
00:04:33I had a letter after this episode went out from Scotland Yard
00:04:37saying we understand your desire to have sensational television programmes
00:04:43but we go to a lot of trouble to get the children not to be frightened of the police.
00:04:48Please don't do this sort of thing again.
00:04:511974's Planet of the Spiders,
00:04:53about a race of mutated spiders plotting to take over the universe.
00:04:57I am the queen.
00:05:00Led to claims by a psychiatrist in an academic journal
00:05:03that the story had fuelled a wave of arachnophobia in children.
00:05:07Snowflakes.
00:05:12This is Boris.
00:05:13Oh, okay, well, yeah, that thing would actually terrify a child.
00:05:16We'd had a number of these size spiders made, about 30 of them or so.
00:05:21They're a spider, what do you expect?
00:05:23Planet of the Spiders, the clue's in the name.
00:05:25So how are we going to make a spider less scary than a spider?
00:05:29I think, no, I think kids love spiders. Give them a good tarantula.
00:05:32By the mid-80s, the likes of Cannibal Holocaust
00:05:35were easily accessible for £1.50 from your local video shop.
00:05:39And Doctor Who decided to up the ante.
00:05:42Behind you!
00:05:52Resurrection of the Daleks was one of the most violent stories that I did.
00:05:57I do remember that some of the episodes where the Daleks
00:06:00were part of the storyline getting more and more violent.
00:06:03And some of them were, I was thinking,
00:06:05wow, a lot of people are being killed on this.
00:06:08In fact, Resurrection of the Daleks in 1984
00:06:11had a higher body count than The Terminator.
00:06:14Just a reminder, this is a children's programme we're talking about.
00:06:17It wasn't looking like that little TV series.
00:06:22It was sort of growing.
00:06:24At the time, we were opposite the A-team, which was full of violence.
00:06:29They had machine guns and were shooting bullets into people all the time.
00:06:33I think the producers had aspirations
00:06:36that it could become more serious science fiction.
00:06:39And I think that's why the level of violence crept up.
00:06:42The 1985 series finale, Revelation of the Daleks,
00:06:46even tackled the gritty topic of euthanasia
00:06:49through the medium of the deformed, disembodied head
00:06:52of a still sentient man who's about to be transformed into a Dalek.
00:06:56All at twenty past five in the afternoon.
00:06:59Kill me, child!
00:07:01I can't!
00:07:02It is our duty to eradicate all those
00:07:05who wish to pollute the purity of the Dalek race.
00:07:09If you ever love me, Natasha,
00:07:12kill me!
00:07:14Kill me!
00:07:16I think you could say Stengos' head in Revelation of the Daleks
00:07:19is probably one of the goriest things on screen in Doctor Who.
00:07:23And he's talking to his daughter and he starts becoming all Dalek-y
00:07:26because the Dalek is taking over.
00:07:28And so he says, please kill me!
00:07:30This is, you know, euthanasia as a plot line in an episode of Doctor Who.
00:07:35That's a very brave decision to make.
00:07:38On the other hand, it was immediately followed by Jim'll Fix It
00:07:41and Les Dennis' Laughter Show,
00:07:43so you could argue it set the tone pretty well.
00:07:46Coming up, we reveal how Doctor Who wasn't just scary,
00:07:50it was genuinely dangerous.
00:07:52Could you slap her? She's gone blue.
00:07:55And the visual effects and stunts which were literally death-defying.
00:07:59He realised that I was in trouble and he went straight over to the head
00:08:02and he pulled the whole thing off, ripped it up,
00:08:05and that practically saved my life.
00:08:12It's 1989 and the world is a dangerous place.
00:08:17A wave of revolutions is sweeping Eastern Europe.
00:08:20Diplomatic relations break down between Britain and Iran.
00:08:23And at television centre, the cast and crew of Doctor Who
00:08:27are filming the dramatic cliffhanger to episode two of Battlefield.
00:08:33I'm coming!
00:08:35I'm coming!
00:08:41Doctor!
00:08:42I'm in the tank and it's the end of episode moment
00:08:44where the water's all bubbling up
00:08:46and I know it's going to be a cliffhanger with, like, Doctor, Doctor!
00:08:50The incident that followed would become a notorious moment in BBC history.
00:08:55Somebody hadn't done the mathematics,
00:08:57which is how much stress that amount of water would put on the glass
00:09:01or the plexiglass or whatever it was.
00:09:03And all of a sudden I can feel this crack under my hands.
00:09:06This dramatic footage from the studio
00:09:09shows the terrifying accident unseen by viewers as it happened.
00:09:17Sylvester, my hero, shouted at the top of his voice
00:09:21outside the front of the tank.
00:09:28The visual effects guys reached down, pulled me out
00:09:31and I could see this surreal moment,
00:09:33which time kind of stretched, like they say it does,
00:09:37where the front of the tank bulged
00:09:39and all this water and broken glass just crashed out into the studio.
00:09:45The whole of the studio floor was covered in gallons of water.
00:09:48And I can remember being on my boom with rubber wheels.
00:09:51All of a sudden there being loads of people
00:09:53clinging onto my boom platform because of the insulation of the rubber.
00:09:56Sylvester's next heroic thing was to realise
00:09:59that electricity and water don't mix that well.
00:10:02So he shouted again at the top of his voice,
00:10:04Turn off the power!
00:10:06And somebody turned this big switch in the studio off.
00:10:10He saved my life.
00:10:11Yes, thanks to Sylvester McCoy's quick thinking,
00:10:14Sophie was saved from drowning
00:10:16and dozens of production crew narrowly avoided potential electrocution.
00:10:20But we can reveal that was far from the only dangerous situation
00:10:23the show's stars found themselves in.
00:10:26My character starts being on holiday in Lanzarote,
00:10:28so she's in shorts, bikini, all of that.
00:10:32We then went to film the next story in Poole, in Dorset,
00:10:38and that was November.
00:10:39And I'm wearing the same clothes.
00:10:43Doctor, look!
00:10:44What?
00:10:48Glass.
00:10:49Well, almost anyway. It's fused silica.
00:10:54I remember the cameraman saying to the production assistant,
00:11:00Could you slap her? She's gone blue.
00:11:03And so they would slap me
00:11:05to get a bit of colour back in my face to film each sequence.
00:11:09I think we had five days of filming.
00:11:12I think we were there from Monday to Friday.
00:11:14I got sent home early.
00:11:16By the time we got to Friday, I had no voice.
00:11:20My lungs were just wheezing.
00:11:23Once safely back home, Nicola paid a visit to her GP,
00:11:26who prescribed two weeks' rest and antibiotics for pneumonia.
00:11:31Like a pro, she was back in the studio the following Monday,
00:11:34but something wasn't quite right.
00:11:36When I took a bath, lumps of my flesh fell off my feet.
00:11:42At which point I went back to my doctor and I went,
00:11:45What's happening to my feet?
00:11:47And he went, You've got frostbite.
00:11:49And so then there's not a lot you can do with that.
00:11:52You just kind of wrap it up.
00:11:55Nowadays, everyone would sue, wouldn't you?
00:11:58When I joined Doctor Who,
00:12:00I signed a contract that said I would do my own stunts.
00:12:03Uh-oh, sounds ominous.
00:12:05We did a story called Enlightenment,
00:12:08and I had to throw myself off a ship into space,
00:12:12and the harness broke on impact.
00:12:15It was a little like jumping onto a brick wall
00:12:19with your legs apart from 20 foot.
00:12:22I could hardly walk for about two weeks afterwards.
00:12:27You might think playing a Cyberman was an easy and safe gig,
00:12:31but you needed balls of steel, like Mark wishes he had.
00:12:36The helmet would be put down on your head.
00:12:38It would be pressed up against your nose,
00:12:41and then there's a plate at the back to secure it,
00:12:45and this plate was screwed on.
00:12:47And as the screws went in, I was terrified.
00:12:51For some, it was all just too much.
00:12:53I do remember one person who really, I suppose, had a panic attack.
00:12:56I don't know if we called it that then.
00:12:58It was frightening to watch him,
00:13:00and he fell on the floor and he was scrambling about
00:13:03trying to get his helmet off.
00:13:05Of course, it couldn't be got off unless he was restrained,
00:13:07and the screwdriver was brought out,
00:13:10and eventually the helmet was taken off.
00:13:12Of course, he didn't come back the next day.
00:13:14One regular Cyberman was stuntman Stuart Fell.
00:13:17You probably recognise him.
00:13:19That's him as Alpha Centauri in The Curse of Peladon.
00:13:22Here he is as the terrifying Wirin Grub in The Ark in Space.
00:13:26That reminds me, I do need to buy some bubble wrap.
00:13:29And here he is as the truly grisly-looking Morbius
00:13:32from The Brain of Morbius.
00:13:34Stuart played a wide selection of monsters in Doctor Who over the years,
00:13:38but was playing a Cyberman in this exciting fight from The Five Doctors
00:13:41where Stuart's career nearly came to a very dramatic end.
00:13:46I'm the one that does all the dying for the Cybermen.
00:13:51I'd already had my arm blown off.
00:13:54They reset the shot and put a simulated smoke
00:13:58with a chemical on it for continuity.
00:14:02And it was very, very windy,
00:14:04and it was blowing this chemical smoke up my arm,
00:14:07and into the Cyberman's mask.
00:14:10And this is a chemical, you know.
00:14:12It's not just smoke.
00:14:14And I was choking.
00:14:15We were actually shooting it,
00:14:17and they thought that I was acting a dying Cyberman.
00:14:20I wasn't.
00:14:21I was trying to tell them that the smoke was getting up my arm,
00:14:25and I was choking.
00:14:27The visual effects man, he realised that I was in trouble,
00:14:31and he went straight over to the head,
00:14:33and he pulled the whole thing off, ripped it off.
00:14:36Didn't undo the bolts.
00:14:38And that practically saved my life.
00:14:40Talk about method acting.
00:14:42But at least the actors inside these claustrophobic
00:14:45and often dangerous costumes were all trained professionals,
00:14:48er, weren't they?
00:14:50In the Dominators episodes of Doctor Who,
00:14:53the little foot soldiers, the Quarks,
00:14:56they were operated by children.
00:14:58What?!
00:14:59Being inside there must have been extremely difficult
00:15:02because you had no arms and these terrible clunky feet.
00:15:07The main difficulty was that if they fell over,
00:15:11they couldn't get up again because they had no arms.
00:15:14So, er, they did fall over, er, quite often
00:15:19because they couldn't see where they were going.
00:15:21Because the box came out to here
00:15:23and their head was in a football anyway,
00:15:25so they couldn't look down and see any obstructions on the way.
00:15:30So, good luck to those kids. I hope they survived.
00:15:33Thank goodness for child labour, eh?
00:15:36But despite the technological advances of the 21st century,
00:15:39playing a monster in Doctor Who
00:15:41is still a pretty unpleasant and uncomfortable experience.
00:15:44In the Asylum of the Daleks, which was Matt Smith's episode,
00:15:47I was in the Parliament of the Daleks.
00:15:49It was very claustrophobic in those things.
00:15:51You know, it'd been about 10 or 11 hours in there.
00:15:54My elbows were rubbing against the fibreglass.
00:15:56I got burned.
00:15:57And you've got this periscope,
00:15:59and if you're not careful, if you stop looking far away
00:16:02and you start looking in here,
00:16:03you can get really claustrophobic and have a panic attack.
00:16:06And I think I did.
00:16:07And Matt Smith actually saw me struggling
00:16:09and getting more hot and sweaty,
00:16:10and he got everyone over to come and help me.
00:16:12He said, thanks, Matt Smith. Saved the day.
00:16:15But it wasn't the uncomfortable costumes which caused the Daleks
00:16:18to be at the heart of one of Doctor Who's biggest scandals.
00:16:23This is the legendary first appearance of the Daleks.
00:16:28Hang on. Where's the Dalek?
00:16:31Oh.
00:16:34That solo sink plunger, which is all you see in this episode
00:16:38because the props were still being built and weren't ready yet,
00:16:41would change Doctor Who forever and make one man a millionaire.
00:16:45Terry Nation was a disgruntled comedy writer
00:16:50who needed some cash after falling out with his main client,
00:16:53Tony Hancock.
00:16:54He wasn't keen on writing for a children's show at all,
00:16:57but having knocked out the script for his first story in a week,
00:17:00his creation, the Daleks, were instantly massive.
00:17:04Literally children in every playground across the country
00:17:07are mimicking them, are talking about them.
00:17:09It was an overnight sensation.
00:17:11Although the Daleks were an enemy,
00:17:13it was really the Daleks who saved Doctor Who.
00:17:16Without the Daleks, we would not have Doctor Who.
00:17:18We would not have Doctor Who now because they helped make the show
00:17:20the huge hit that it became.
00:17:22They come back for the Christmas of 1964,
00:17:25and it is a major event.
00:17:27It is so big that ITV, in response to it,
00:17:31put the Beatles on television at the same time,
00:17:34and Doctor Who gets bigger viewing figures than the Beatles do.
00:17:38For a very brief moment in late 1964,
00:17:42the Daleks are bigger than the Beatles.
00:17:44The pivotal story gripped audiences
00:17:46with its memorable and menacing imagery
00:17:48of the Daleks invading planet Earth.
00:17:51Supreme Command have given orders for London
00:17:56to be destroyed by firebombs.
00:18:02Dalek mania was gripping the nation.
00:18:05The BBC was just inundated with manufacturers
00:18:08of everything from toy cigarettes to suits,
00:18:11you know, so you could dress as a Dalek.
00:18:13I think at the peak there was something like 500 different product lines
00:18:17that were all bearing the name of the Daleks,
00:18:19and it was just an enormous merchandising opportunity.
00:18:24But what nobody at the BBC had paid much attention to
00:18:27was the greatest bit of agenting of all time
00:18:30by nation's agent, Beryl Virtue.
00:18:33When the contract comes to Associated London Scripts,
00:18:36the agency that he works for,
00:18:38she sees a clause in it that is to do with the owning of the rights
00:18:42to the script and the spin-offs that might happen,
00:18:47and she simply crosses it out, she crosses out the clause entirely.
00:18:50And so when all the manufacturers and all these toy companies
00:18:53and everybody else comes beating a path to the BBC's door saying,
00:18:56can we have the rights to the Daleks for our products,
00:19:00the BBC realises it probably doesn't actually own
00:19:03the intellectual copyright.
00:19:05Wait, so the BBC accidentally signed away all future rights to the Daleks
00:19:09by not noticing Beryl Virtue had crossed out a bit of the contract?
00:19:13So it agrees with Terry Nation, they will split this 50-50.
00:19:17And it is what makes Terry Nation a millionaire.
00:19:20Every single product that is made, he gets half the royalties for it.
00:19:24But unbelievably, even though he made millions off them,
00:19:28Terry Nation didn't actually come up with the Daleks' iconic design himself.
00:19:32The person who was given the brief to do the Daleks was Ray Cusack.
00:19:38He took over from another designer that was assigned
00:19:42to do the story with the Daleks, whose name is Ridley Scott,
00:19:46because he was a BBC designer at the time.
00:19:48Whatever happened to him?
00:19:50Raymond Cusack was a staff member on the BBC payroll,
00:19:54and this script, this brief, came into his office, landed on his desk,
00:19:59and he had to create something special from very little guidance.
00:20:04Terry Nation, in his script, says these creatures, non-humanoid,
00:20:09they glide across the floor like a Georgian dancer,
00:20:13which frankly tells you not a lot.
00:20:16And Ray had to interpret this.
00:20:18He had to think, what can I do to give this a life of its own?
00:20:21And he was the guy that was responsible for the visual look
00:20:25and the attitude and the iconic look of the Daleks that we all know today.
00:20:30And poor old Ray wasn't allowed to cash in
00:20:32on this moment of inspiration the same way.
00:20:35Terry Nation was effectively a freelancer,
00:20:39whereas Raymond, he was being paid a staff wage,
00:20:43so it wasn't up to Raymond to get royalties,
00:20:45because he'd done his job, thank you very much, let's move on,
00:20:48can you do another monster for us, please, Ray?
00:20:51Whereas Terry Nation was laughing.
00:20:53Throughout Doctor Who's history, Terry Nation, and later his estate,
00:20:57kept a firm grip on how the Daleks were used,
00:21:00as Russell T Davies and team found out
00:21:02when they were preparing to revive the series in the early noughties.
00:21:06By the time Doctor Who is revived in 2005,
00:21:10Terry Nation is already dead.
00:21:12His estate is represented by Roger Hancock,
00:21:16who is the younger brother of Tony Hancock,
00:21:19and he was prepared to play hardball
00:21:21when it came to negotiating with the BBC
00:21:23for the rights to have the Daleks in the new series,
00:21:26because he was perfectly aware
00:21:28that Doctor Who without the Daleks
00:21:30is like Sherlock Holmes without Doctor Watson,
00:21:33you simply can't do it.
00:21:35And so the newspapers were dominated for months
00:21:38with stories of the Daleks won't be in there,
00:21:41what a terrible shock this is,
00:21:43and this won't be the real Doctor Who.
00:21:45It was deadlock,
00:21:47and an episode was even briefly titled Absence of the Daleks.
00:21:52Impossible.
00:21:54Doctor!
00:21:59Exterminate!
00:22:01Exterminate!
00:22:03Exterminate!
00:22:06Thankfully, a settlement was reached,
00:22:08allowing this dramatic reveal
00:22:10of the return of the Doctor's most iconic and deadly enemy.
00:22:14I was so excited about Doctor Who coming back
00:22:17that when they said the Daleks aren't coming,
00:22:19I wasn't that bothered until I realised
00:22:21how much of an absence they would have been,
00:22:23because when they brought back one, very cleverly,
00:22:26they brought back one Dalek to go,
00:22:28you just need the one and it'll kill everybody.
00:22:31That story was so exciting that it made you go,
00:22:34God, can you imagine if that had been anything else?
00:22:36It wouldn't have been the same had it been anything else.
00:22:39Coming up, things are hotting up
00:22:41as we delve into the steamier side of Doctor Who.
00:22:44He was half naked to the waist and I was covered in green paint.
00:22:48And find out how one actress was forced
00:22:50to go to extraordinary lengths to keep the producers happy.
00:22:53I was pretending to be not only American, but also single.
00:23:05It's 1992.
00:23:07Madonna publishes a book called Sex.
00:23:09And over on Doctor Who,
00:23:11Colin Baker's Doctor is half naked in a cave with his assistant, Ace.
00:23:15Wait, what?
00:23:18Let the current ease your pain.
00:23:23Let its purity wash away the shadows.
00:23:27OK, this isn't Doctor Who.
00:23:29When the show got cancelled in 1989,
00:23:32clearly the fans wanted it to continue,
00:23:34so they started to make it themselves.
00:23:36And you've got these wonderful fan-made spin-offs.
00:23:39It was Bill Baggs and he had a company called BBV
00:23:42and he was doing fan videos.
00:23:45And so he asked if we'd like to do things like that and audio CDs.
00:23:51And we went, yeah, what the heck, we're going to have a laugh.
00:23:55Have you never been in love?
00:23:59Oh, no, not really, no.
00:24:01I've never really had time for it.
00:24:03I'm a wanderer, explorer.
00:24:05A time lord?
00:24:07Nah, nah, of course not.
00:24:09But these almost but not quite Doctor Who films
00:24:11featured original cast members
00:24:13and free from the need to appeal to a family audience,
00:24:16they sometimes veered into raunchier territory.
00:24:19Douse the flames.
00:24:23Douse the flames.
00:24:27I'm very impressed.
00:24:33I think we were probably relatively irresponsible
00:24:37about what we were doing.
00:24:39Colin Baker and I were filming in a cave in Wookie Hole
00:24:42and he was half naked to the waist
00:24:45and I was covered in green paint.
00:24:47So, yeah, we didn't really think about the audience.
00:24:50These fan-made videos were a thriving industry
00:24:53and pretty good value in terms of a quality cast.
00:24:56Here's eco-thriller The Air Zone Solution,
00:24:59starring not just one ex-doctor.
00:25:01There's Peter Davison.
00:25:03Who is it?
00:25:04It's me.
00:25:07Ooh, Sylvester McCoy as well.
00:25:10OK, Colin Baker, that's three.
00:25:12Help doesn't always come from expected places.
00:25:15No way, they've even got Pertwee in it.
00:25:18With the other fella.
00:25:19And, of course, the dutiful Colin Baker gets his kit off again,
00:25:23this time with Nicola Bryant.
00:25:29I remember thinking it was quite fun.
00:25:31I remember Colin being quite disturbed by it all
00:25:34and I remember being charged with the job of convincing Colin
00:25:38that this was all going to be all right.
00:25:40I don't know why I ended up with that job. I just did.
00:25:43In the original series,
00:25:45the steamiest moment was a quick glimpse of John Pertwee in the shower.
00:25:48Who knew the Doctor had a Navy tattoo?
00:25:51There was supposedly this rule from one of the producers,
00:25:54John Nathan-Turner,
00:25:55that there wasn't to be any hanky-panky in the TARDIS
00:25:59and when you do look back at some of the stories now,
00:26:02things are so incredibly platonic,
00:26:06it's slightly unreal.
00:26:08And the cast felt this was for the best,
00:26:10as John Pertwee himself explained in this cheeky interview from 1995.
00:26:14The Doctor is not allowed to have any relationships, as you know.
00:26:18I mean, the Doctor's extremely elderly.
00:26:20How many years is he? 240 or something? With two hearts?
00:26:25And both of them would probably bang out.
00:26:29But all that was to change
00:26:30when the show returned for one night only in 1996.
00:26:34Having lost his memory,
00:26:35and up for it, Paul McGann celebrates its return by doing this.
00:26:39I know who I am!
00:26:46I am the Doctor!
00:26:49Good!
00:26:51And not everybody was happy about this unexpected turn of events.
00:26:55This was a time when Doctor Who didn't kiss anybody
00:26:57and I was very happy about that
00:26:58because then it meant when I didn't kiss anybody, I was in good company.
00:27:02When the Eighth Doctor snogged his companion, I thought,
00:27:05yeah, what's wrong with that?
00:27:07You had a young, sexy Doctor, why not?
00:27:09You wouldn't have been wanted to kiss by John Pertwee, would you?
00:27:12I'm very pleased for all the people who love Doctor Who kissing,
00:27:14but I'm fine.
00:27:16You can have it, fine, if that's how you want to live.
00:27:18And when the series was revived in 2005,
00:27:21the strict no-sex rule was quickly and enthusiastically scrapped.
00:27:26Well, of course, in modern Doctor Who, the Doctor kisses everyone.
00:27:28I'm surprised he hasn't kissed a Cyberman, frankly.
00:27:32Yes, the Doctor gets a lot more action these days,
00:27:34and to prove it, here's Christopher Eccleston kissing Billy Piper,
00:27:38David Tennant kissing Billy Piper,
00:27:40David Tennant kissing Kylie,
00:27:42Matt Smith kissing Alex Kingston,
00:27:45and let's not forget the racy official spin-off Torchwood.
00:27:48But even if the Doctor had to wait 33 years for his first on-screen snog,
00:27:52off-screen, it was a very different story.
00:27:54Lala Ward joined the show as the Doctor's assistant Romana in 1979.
00:27:59She soon entered a relationship with her co-star Tom Baker,
00:28:02and they were married the following year.
00:28:04Their marriage lasted a brief 16 months,
00:28:07and hints of their tumultuous relationship can be seen on-screen.
00:28:11Here they are, loved up in 1979's City of Death.
00:28:14Let's not be ostentatious.
00:28:16All right, let's fly then.
00:28:19That would look silly. We'll take the lift. Come on.
00:28:23And here they are, looking decidedly frosty in 1980's Warrior's Gate.
00:28:27Don't know what you're doing.
00:28:28I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just following intuition.
00:28:30By this point, they were reportedly being kept apart between scenes to avoid arguments.
00:28:35Ooh, that must have been fun.
00:28:37When it was published in 1997,
00:28:39Tom Baker's autobiography was one of the raciest Doctor Who books to date.
00:28:43It includes an eye-popping story where he,
00:28:46let's say, enjoys the company of a lady who is wearing his Doctor Who scarf.
00:28:50As she threw herself wantonly on the wide holiday inn bed,
00:28:53she growled, come on, Doctor, let's travel through space.
00:28:57But one of Tom's predecessors was less public about his indiscretions.
00:29:01The second Doctor, Patrick Croughton, lived a double life for decades,
00:29:05fathering three children with his girlfriend,
00:29:07while publicly maintaining he still lived with his wife and their three children.
00:29:12I first became aware of Patrick having two families.
00:29:16One day he gave me a lift home from rehearsals and he deviated.
00:29:21He said, I'm just going to pop in.
00:29:23And he went down this path, knocked on the door,
00:29:25and the lady came out and gave him a brown envelope.
00:29:27I said, who was that?
00:29:28He said, that's my wife.
00:29:29I went, and your wife?
00:29:30Well, who's that?
00:29:31He said, oh, that's my girlfriend.
00:29:33I'm living with her.
00:29:34So that's the first time I realised, oh, you have two families.
00:29:38Because it was quite quiet.
00:29:40He wouldn't boast about it at all.
00:29:42In fact, he kept all this so quiet that his own mother died
00:29:45believing he was still with his wife 24 years after he left her.
00:29:49If that sounds like Doctor Who could be a bit of a boys' club,
00:29:52you'd be right.
00:29:54The female performers often got a raw deal on and off camera.
00:29:58One companion you may not have heard of is April Walker.
00:30:01She won the part of Sarah Jane after a gruelling audition.
00:30:05But this is the Sarah Jane we know, played by actress Elizabeth Sladen.
00:30:10In an interview in 2020, April Walker spoke publicly for the first time
00:30:14about the shocking reason we never saw her in the role.
00:30:18The contract came, and I signed it, and I got the scripts,
00:30:23and I was measured for my costumes and all the rest.
00:30:26And then about ten days or a fortnight later,
00:30:29I got a phone call from Barry Letts to say,
00:30:33April, I don't know how to tell you this,
00:30:36but I'm afraid you're not going to be doing Doctor Who.
00:30:40And I said, why?
00:30:42He said, I'm afraid John says you're not right
00:30:47and he can't work with you in Doctor Who.
00:30:49So April had been vetoed by John Pertwee and was then sworn to secrecy.
00:30:53She later had roles in shows including The Two Ronnies...
00:30:57I'll have a martini, please.
00:30:59Shaken or stead?
00:31:01Both, please.
00:31:02...and Faulty Towers.
00:31:04I think there's a letter for me.
00:31:05What?
00:31:06There's a letter for me there.
00:31:07No, there isn't.
00:31:08Yes, to Ian Wilson.
00:31:10But as April calmly and candidly reveals,
00:31:13there's another shocking secret behind that.
00:31:15I did get paid because the contract was signed.
00:31:19But every time I worked for the BBC,
00:31:21the money that I earned from the other shows from the BBC
00:31:26were deducted from my Doctor Who money,
00:31:29which I suppose was fair.
00:31:30Cheeky sod.
00:31:32When Sophie Aldred joined the show,
00:31:34she was aware of the baggage that came with it.
00:31:36Before my Doctor Who experience,
00:31:39my main thoughts about Doctor Who girls,
00:31:42as they were called in those days,
00:31:45was that they screamed a lot,
00:31:47they wore quite revealing costumes for the dads,
00:31:52and very high heels and ran around in quarries,
00:31:55which always seemed to me a silly idea.
00:31:57And the producers knew exactly what they were doing.
00:31:59They might have started to think
00:32:01that how can we attract more people to watch the show?
00:32:05And what might attract men to watch the show?
00:32:09Pretty girls with not much clothes on.
00:32:12There was the character of Leela, played by Louise Jameson,
00:32:17who was very much for the dads.
00:32:19I think even my dad watched Doctor Who when Louise was on.
00:32:24She was wearing little more than a bit of chamois leather.
00:32:27And even if they weren't being poured into skin-tight jumpsuits
00:32:31like Zoe in The Mind Robber,
00:32:33they were doled out the most menial tasks,
00:32:35like Polly in The Moonbase.
00:32:37You found something!
00:32:39Oh, Polly, I only wish I had.
00:32:43Why not make some coffee to keep them all happy
00:32:45while I think of something?
00:32:47All right.
00:32:49But perhaps the worst indignities
00:32:51were suffered by Nicola Bryant as Perry,
00:32:53and unbelievably her wardrobe was only the start of it.
00:32:57Shorts, bikini top, little shirt,
00:33:00and it's like she never got to put proper clothes on
00:33:04for what felt like the rest of that season.
00:33:07I was really stuck in some terribly 80s sexist crap, really,
00:33:13most of the time.
00:33:14Producer John Nathan-Turner
00:33:16intended for Perry to be a sex object
00:33:18right from her very first press photo call.
00:33:21John Nathan-Turner called me a few days beforehand and said,
00:33:24do you have any clingy tops?
00:33:26I said, well, not a lot, really.
00:33:28I've got, like, one disco boob tube, which was not really...
00:33:32I guess those were all the rage at the time.
00:33:34And he said, well, what's your clingiest thing?
00:33:36Well, leotards from dance.
00:33:39And he said, well, bring some leotards.
00:33:41And do you have any short skirts?
00:33:43I was sort of running around one of the parks
00:33:46and being photographed barefoot in these outfits,
00:33:50running with an American flag.
00:33:52The American flag was there because,
00:33:54to boost the show's profile in the US,
00:33:56Perry was the first American companion.
00:33:59But having successfully fooled the producers
00:34:01with her American accent at the audition,
00:34:03the very British Nicola had no idea
00:34:05that she would be forced to spend years living a lie.
00:34:08I had to spend the whole of my three years in Doctor Who
00:34:12with an American accent.
00:34:14That's canteen and conventions.
00:34:17I just thought, this is what I have to do.
00:34:20I was worried that, like, aunts and uncles
00:34:23might ring up, like, BBC Breakfast in time and say,
00:34:27she's not American, that's my niece.
00:34:29Here's Nicola cheerfully skirting the issue
00:34:32on Breakfast Time with Nick Ross.
00:34:34Never done anything, not since I've left drama school.
00:34:37I'm intrigued at your accent, incidentally,
00:34:39which has a twang of American in it.
00:34:41Are you American?
00:34:42Well, I have dual nationality.
00:34:44I've been sort of long-distance commuter for a long time.
00:34:48To say it was tricky having to be American all the time
00:34:51is an understatement.
00:34:52But you handle stress a bit better, I think,
00:34:54when you're younger.
00:34:56And to keep the boys interested,
00:34:58there was yet another fiction that she had to sustain.
00:35:01I was pretending to be not only American, but also single.
00:35:05It was the producer, John Nathan-Turner,
00:35:08who said, oh, I don't want you to be married.
00:35:11And, you know, these things that, as an adult now,
00:35:15I would go, what?
00:35:17I just was very, OK, this is what you have to do
00:35:20if you want to be an actor.
00:35:22I was always trying to redirect the questions
00:35:26that the press would ask me.
00:35:27Like, they'd say, you know, what's your boyfriend's name?
00:35:31And I'd sort of tweak it and say things like,
00:35:33well, if you're asking me if there's someone special in my life,
00:35:37yes, there is.
00:35:39But another Doctor Who actress
00:35:41tackled the lad mag market on her own terms.
00:35:44Katie Manning played feisty companion Joe Grant
00:35:47from 1971 to 73.
00:35:49Thankfully, a series of more proactive
00:35:52and appropriately dressed companions
00:35:54even culminated in the show's first female Doctor in 2017,
00:35:58just 54 years after the show began.
00:36:01Though not without controversy.
00:36:03It has alienated a large section of fans
00:36:08having a female, which is a bit sad.
00:36:11And it's really in the sort of age group,
00:36:14the sort of 50-, 60-year-old men
00:36:17who are particularly worried by it for some reason.
00:36:20I think they just see this definitely should be a man's job.
00:36:24I was thrilled when Jodie was cast.
00:36:26It was about time.
00:36:28Coming up, extreme fans.
00:36:31And a gentleman passed out
00:36:33at the bottom of the escalator
00:36:36from the sheer, I don't know what you call it,
00:36:39excitement of seeing me.
00:36:42And the dark side of the show's most notorious producer.
00:36:46He shouldn't have been having any kind of relationship with fans
00:36:50because that's not appropriate for the producer of a BBC programme.
00:36:59It's 1983 and tensions are running high.
00:37:02The US Embassy in Beirut is bombed.
00:37:04Shergar is kidnapped.
00:37:06And in Wiltshire, a storm is brewing
00:37:08at the biggest Doctor Who convention ever.
00:37:12Longleat 83 was such a huge event.
00:37:15It was the Woodstock of Doctor Who.
00:37:17More like the Woodstock 99 of Doctor Who.
00:37:21It was the first Doctor Who convention organised by the BBC.
00:37:26It wasn't an unmitigated disaster.
00:37:28It was just a bit of a disaster.
00:37:31Far more people turned up than the BBC were expecting,
00:37:35which is a good thing,
00:37:37except for the fact that there were massive queues.
00:37:40The BBC had planned for 20,000 fans
00:37:43and 60,000 showed up to celebrate the show's 20th anniversary.
00:37:47But those who braved the queues could look at original props,
00:37:50watch old episodes and meet the cast and crew,
00:37:53including the show's producer, John Nathan-Turner.
00:37:56John Nathan-Turner was a frustrated actor and a showman.
00:37:59And I think what he found in fandom was a ready audience
00:38:02who were going to applaud his every decision, he thought, at the beginning.
00:38:06And so it was a very addictive environment to go to conventions
00:38:09and to meet fans because they were saying what he wanted to hear.
00:38:12Unlike his predecessors,
00:38:13Nathan-Turner was proactive about engaging with the fans,
00:38:16but at long late he was in for a shock.
00:38:19In 1983, at the big celebration of the show's 20th anniversary,
00:38:23John met a group of British fans at this huge convention.
00:38:27Good morning! Good morning!
00:38:29You can do better than that. Good morning! Good morning!
00:38:32And they started to tell him in no uncertain terms
00:38:35where they thought he was going wrong.
00:38:38And John was incandescent.
00:38:40He thought, who are you to tell me, the producer of Doctor Who?
00:38:43One of them said to him, you're the producer of Doctor Who now,
00:38:46but you're just the caretaker.
00:38:47It's the show we're bothered about
00:38:49and we don't like what you're doing with it.
00:38:51This might sound extreme,
00:38:52but Doctor Who fans have always been a breed apart.
00:38:55It seems like no sooner there was a Doctor Who,
00:38:58there were Doctor Who fans.
00:39:01There is a possessiveness with fans and Doctor Who,
00:39:05especially older fans like myself.
00:39:07There's a love-hate relationship going on
00:39:10because they tend to slag off the very thing that they love
00:39:14and yet they keep buzzing around it.
00:39:16So they don't say, oh, that's no good anymore
00:39:18and go off and do something else.
00:39:20They keep coming back to it, so they still love it.
00:39:22A fan community can be a wonderful, wonderful thing,
00:39:25but so can a car, but you can still run somebody over with it.
00:39:29Drama in the Doctor Who community was nothing new.
00:39:32Eight years earlier, Keith Miller,
00:39:34teenage president of the official Doctor Who fan club,
00:39:37visited the BBC to interview then-producer Philip Hinchcliffe.
00:39:40Talk soon turned to a rival organisation
00:39:43and you'll never believe who was in charge.
00:39:46I would think that a lot of the letters from people
00:39:48who know a lot about the programme are probably your members,
00:39:50I think, or else members of the other fandom.
00:39:54There's Peter Capaldi and people like that.
00:39:56Wait, what? THE Peter Capaldi?
00:39:59Back in the 70s, Peter Capaldi was involved in Doctor Who fandom
00:40:03and sort of mounted a kind of soft coup to get control.
00:40:07Yes, decades before he played the Doctor,
00:40:09a teenage Peter Capaldi was such a huge fan,
00:40:12he not only set up his own fan club,
00:40:15but lobbied the production team to recognise his club as the official one.
00:40:19Everyone involved with Doctor Who quickly learns the same lesson.
00:40:23The fans know everything.
00:40:25What is so extraordinary about all the fans,
00:40:28the wonderful fans, so enthusiastic about the shows,
00:40:32and they know everything about every story.
00:40:35Even if you freeze up when you're being asked a question,
00:40:39they will have the answer.
00:40:41They say, oh, no, Margot, you're wrong.
00:40:44It was so-and-so.
00:40:46Oh, yes, you have to say, of course it was.
00:40:49Sometimes this could be pretty useful.
00:40:51For example, if you've forgotten which way round the TARDIS is meant to spin.
00:40:54There was no real establishment of actually which way the TARDIS spun.
00:40:59Clockwise or anticlockwise.
00:41:03So we had to phone up the Doctor Who Appreciation Society.
00:41:06OK, I did that once.
00:41:08Which way does the TARDIS spin?
00:41:10Should you wish to meet a Doctor Who fan,
00:41:12there's no better place than at a Doctor Who convention.
00:41:15A Doctor Who convention is quite mad.
00:41:17I mean, you've got people dressed as doctors, and costumes,
00:41:20and villains, and Daleks of all shapes and sizes.
00:41:23And, of course, then you've got the celebrities, the actual actors,
00:41:26and usually some of the production company there as well.
00:41:30There was one convention I remember particularly.
00:41:33We were going down this really long escalator,
00:41:36and a gentleman passed out at the bottom of the escalator
00:41:41from the sheer, I don't know what you call it, excitement of seeing me.
00:41:47And I was like, what?
00:41:49And then, of course, you've got this sense of slight impending doom
00:41:52because you've got to step over the body at the bottom
00:41:56because no-one had moved him.
00:41:58The audience have also amassed impressive collections
00:42:00of original Doctor Who props
00:42:02to the bafflement of the people who actually made them.
00:42:05These things are made for one appearance on a screen.
00:42:08So when somebody says to you,
00:42:10hey, that's good, I'll give you £50,000 for that,
00:42:12you think, what?
00:42:13You know, this is ridiculous.
00:42:15This is stuff we used to throw away in the skit.
00:42:18I think I paid £185 for a TARDIS roundel in 1996,
00:42:22which is like tuppence these days.
00:42:24They go for, like, a grand, two grand.
00:42:27I bought part of a Dalek for roughly about a grand in 1997, 1998.
00:42:32I have a Cyberman from Earthshock.
00:42:34I think if I'm truthful, I probably have spent about £14,000.
00:42:38That's one for...
00:42:41They've acquired this value,
00:42:43hey, I own a small part of this particular programme,
00:42:48Doctor Who or otherwise,
00:42:50and it is a bit galling at times.
00:42:52I have it insured, of course, on my household insurance,
00:42:55but it's under special artefacts,
00:42:57as if it's a piece of art, you know, like an investment.
00:43:00You can't tell them, really, that you've got a Cyberman from Earthshock.
00:43:03They'll be like, excuse me?
00:43:05In this hilarious on-the-nose sketch from 1999,
00:43:08David Walliams and Mark Gatiss play obsessive Doctor Who fans
00:43:12who kidnap Fifth Doctor Peter Davison.
00:43:15Excuse my friend Mark Peter Davison.
00:43:18He's a little bit of a fan.
00:43:20Enthusiast in Mourning Undead, Peter.
00:43:23Don't ask him about Doctor Who!
00:43:27Everybody asks him about Doctor Who.
00:43:30He's going to think you're a right nutcase!
00:43:33Ask him about his theatre work
00:43:36or about composing the theme to Button Moon.
00:43:39You might think this is over the top,
00:43:41but in 2004, several reports claimed fans had emailed
00:43:45actual death threats to BBC staff
00:43:47because they were unhappy with the show's new logo.
00:43:50But in the 80s, there was no email or social media,
00:43:53so fans had to vent their frustration with the show via their own magazines.
00:43:57Doctor Who fanzines in those days were a bit like Twitter 30 years early.
00:44:03And would you tell any television professional
00:44:05to lock themselves in a room with Twitter
00:44:07and try to please all of the voices?
00:44:10And public enemy number one was John Nathan-Turner.
00:44:13I have this abiding memory of John getting the fanzines,
00:44:17locking himself in his office and reading every word of them
00:44:21and sort of being more and more depressed.
00:44:24The only way to handle this is just not to look at these things,
00:44:28just to not read it, not read your own publicity,
00:44:31which is a lesson that John never learned.
00:44:33By 1986, fans were even being invited on the telly to slag the programme off,
00:44:38as in this toe-curling encounter
00:44:40between members of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society
00:44:43and writers Pip and Jane Baker.
00:44:45I thought a lot of you Doctor Who fans liked to have traditional stories.
00:44:49It would be nice to have something totally different from the norm, though,
00:44:52just for a change.
00:44:53I mean, the last episode was admittedly much better than the previous four,
00:44:58but I still felt that that story was fairly boring.
00:45:03You're getting a real hard time, Pip and Jane.
00:45:06I'm normally here to stick up for the viewers,
00:45:08but I feel a bit sorry for you.
00:45:10This guy, by the way, is Chris Chibnall,
00:45:12who went on to have an amazing telly career as the writer of Broadchurch.
00:45:16He was also the showrunner on Doctor Who from 2017 to 2022.
00:45:20The boot's on the other foot now, Chris!
00:45:22And it was gritted teeth all round when John Nathan-Turner called into the show.
00:45:26What would you like to ask the producer to do with the new series?
00:45:31Graham?
00:45:32A lot more stories that begin with a beginning, have a middle and have an end.
00:45:38Ooh! Can you promise that, John?
00:45:40Well, I think that's what we've been giving the public in recent years,
00:45:44but we'll certainly take on board the points.
00:45:47The problem with courting fandom is that it's all very well
00:45:52while it's going the way they want it to go,
00:45:54but as soon as you start to do things on the show that they don't approve of
00:45:58or they don't like, they're going to tell you,
00:46:00and they'll tell you in no uncertain terms,
00:46:02and that's what happened with John Nathan-Turner.
00:46:04He didn't like it one bit.
00:46:07But there was a darker side
00:46:08to John Nathan-Turner's involvement with the fans.
00:46:11Richard Marson's 2013 biography alleged that the producer
00:46:15had pursued inappropriate relationships with young male fans.
00:46:19John was a party animal,
00:46:21and I think particularly when he'd had a few drinks
00:46:23and when he was sort of in a social environment,
00:46:25he just didn't see the distinctions that should be there,
00:46:28so he would ask a fan, you know, would you like to come up to my room?
00:46:33The book alleges that fans were sometimes plied with alcohol
00:46:36by Nathan-Turner and his partner Gary Downey,
00:46:39who also worked on the show.
00:46:41Downey would scout conventions for doable barkers,
00:46:44their term for attractive male fans.
00:46:48I reflect about that so much because I think it's easy to say,
00:46:53you know, in the BBC bar with a few drinks and all the rest of it,
00:46:56was it just, you know, a bit of banter, a bit of this?
00:46:59But a lot of these people are quite vulnerable.
00:47:01We're talking about teenagers,
00:47:03and it was absolutely not OK for him as a BBC producer
00:47:07to be, you know, trying it on with them.
00:47:09A long-term smoker and heavy drinker,
00:47:12John Nathan-Turner died aged 54 in 2002.
00:47:16I didn't find any evidence that John Nathan-Turner
00:47:19had sexual relations with anyone
00:47:22who was younger than now the legal age of consent,
00:47:25but he shouldn't have been having any kind of relationship with fans
00:47:30because that's not appropriate for the producer of a BBC programme,
00:47:34and he was using his status as a BBC producer.
00:47:37There was a power imbalance,
00:47:39and I think that he should have been aware of that
00:47:42and he shouldn't have behaved like that.
00:47:44Coming up, chaos on the set of Doctor Who's first ever episode.
00:47:48Everything that could have possibly gone wrong happened.
00:47:51And the shocking story of how the BBC destroyed hundreds of episodes.
00:47:56It's extraordinary where Doctor Who missing episodes crop up.
00:48:03It's 1963, and the establishment is on the back foot.
00:48:07The Beatles are at number one and starting a musical revolution.
00:48:11Martin Luther King has a dream,
00:48:13and ITV is snapping at the BBC's heels.
00:48:16To shake things up, the BBC poached their rival's head of drama,
00:48:20Sidney Newman, and less than six months later, he created Doctor Who.
00:48:24The arrival of this flamboyant Canadian ruffled a lot of feathers,
00:48:28and the 28-year-old producer he hired for his new show
00:48:31was not your usual BBC type either.
00:48:33Verity Lambert, she was the producer that Sidney appointed.
00:48:38Verity was one of the first ever female producers at the BBC
00:48:42and in British television,
00:48:44and the pressure on her shoulders must have been immense.
00:48:48Completing our trio of telly trailblazers
00:48:51was 25-year-old director Warris Hussain.
00:48:54I was the very first South Asian to be involved in directing in drama,
00:49:00not just Doctor Who, but anything.
00:49:02Verity Lambert, she being the first female,
00:49:05and me being first South Asian.
00:49:07We formed a kind of partnership.
00:49:09What was Sidney being a Canadian?
00:49:11I said, we're the three musketeers, we're fighting the system.
00:49:15And we were.
00:49:17Warris is the man who said action
00:49:19on the very first episode of Doctor Who, twice.
00:49:22Everything went wrong the day we were shooting.
00:49:25The doors would not open properly, the prop men were not coordinating.
00:49:32One of the actors got their heels stuck in the doorway
00:49:35as he tried to enter a room.
00:49:37Everything that could have possibly gone wrong happened.
00:49:40Perhaps.
00:49:41But it can't be!
00:49:43This is the unbroadcast pilot episode of Doctor Who,
00:49:46complete with flapping and banging TARDIS doors.
00:49:49Sidney Newman was not impressed.
00:49:51Sidney took us out to dinner and said,
00:49:53look, by all reason, I should be firing you,
00:49:56but I'm not going to do it, Warris.
00:49:58We're going to do it again.
00:50:00And I must say, the first episode, as we re-shot it,
00:50:03and it's now available, turned out to be very, very good.
00:50:07We learned from our mistakes.
00:50:09Second time lucky.
00:50:11And a few weeks later, Warris was back to direct his second story,
00:50:14where the Doctor joins Marco Polo on his epic journey across China.
00:50:18Look at the lavish sets and costumes.
00:50:20I bet you want to see it, right?
00:50:22Well, tough. You can't.
00:50:25One of the real scandals of Doctor Who is that so much of it's missing.
00:50:29In the 1960s and 70s,
00:50:31there just wasn't the value attached to retaining TV shows.
00:50:34In those days, it was expensive to keep things,
00:50:37and unless there was going to be another use for it,
00:50:39the attitude was, well, let's get rid of it.
00:50:42It was BBC policy to wipe programmes after broadcast,
00:50:45to reuse the tapes.
00:50:47Heartbreakingly, very little of Warris Hussain's TV work still exists,
00:50:51Doctor Who or otherwise.
00:50:53It's absolutely tragic, because the subsequent dramas I directed,
00:50:57in those days there were serious plays called The Wednesday Play,
00:51:01they've all been wiped.
00:51:03Many of Fraser Hines' Doctor Who episodes,
00:51:06where he starred alongside Patrick Troughton,
00:51:08no longer exist either.
00:51:10BBC2 showed a story, one of Billy Hartnell's, one of mine, or Patrick,
00:51:15and I said, oh, I hope they show some more,
00:51:17and somebody at BBC said,
00:51:19no, I think that's the only story you've got.
00:51:22They've been wiped. It's just been got rid of.
00:51:24Which is a pity.
00:51:26Ian Levine is a superfan who also helped the production team out
00:51:29when they had questions about Doctor Who history.
00:51:32He visited the BBC archives in 1977,
00:51:35and was horrified by what he saw.
00:51:37We walked in there, and in the room full of film cans,
00:51:39there on the floor was a big pile of silver film cans,
00:51:42taped up with white gaffer tape,
00:51:44and a big red stamp on them saying,
00:51:46withdrawn, deaccessioned and junked.
00:51:48The guy said that was his job tomorrow to put them into the skip.
00:51:52Thanks to some quick thinking from Ian,
00:51:54the very first Dalek story was rescued from the skip.
00:51:57But 152 episodes were still officially missing,
00:52:00and with home video on the way,
00:52:02a worldwide hunt was on to get them back.
00:52:05It's extraordinary where Doctor Who missing episodes crop up.
00:52:08Some are found in kind of deserted buildings,
00:52:11buildings the BBC may have used down the back of a filing cabinet.
00:52:14Some have been found in Africa or Hong Kong,
00:52:17you know, places which bought Doctor Who,
00:52:19and didn't, as they were supposed to do,
00:52:21destroy them when they'd shown them.
00:52:23Over the decades, a steady stream of missing episodes
00:52:26have been returned to the BBC,
00:52:28and every discovery is a cause for celebration among fans.
00:52:31I've been at the birth of both of my children,
00:52:34but I've never been more excited than I was
00:52:37when I found out the Web of Fear was back in the BBC archives.
00:52:40I mean, that's a slight exaggeration.
00:52:44Four episodes of the Web of Fear,
00:52:46in which a gang of Yeti attack the London Underground,
00:52:49were found in Nigeria in 2013.
00:52:51A fifth was also found, but mysteriously went missing again,
00:52:54en route back to the BBC.
00:52:56In the same batch was The Enemy of the World,
00:52:59where Patrick Troughton's doctor is mistaken for his Mexican doppelganger,
00:53:02complete with outrageous accent.
00:53:04My dear Federer, you don't suppose
00:53:07that I intend to make your swindling public, huh?
00:53:10This spectacular story, Tomb of the Cybermen,
00:53:13was found in its entirety in Hong Kong in 1991.
00:53:17This was such a significant discovery,
00:53:19that when it was released on video the following year,
00:53:22it even outsold Silence of the Lambs.
00:53:25There are 97 episodes still officially missing,
00:53:28and there's a whole cottage industry of people looking for them.
00:53:31One of them is former companion Mark Strickson,
00:53:34who quit acting in the 90s to become a documentary producer.
00:53:38I was making a film about chimps in Sierra Leone,
00:53:41just after the Civil War, and we were one of the first crews in.
00:53:45And I realised that there was a television station.
00:53:49And so I thought, I'll go and search for the missing Doctor Who tapes.
00:53:53It was quite exciting.
00:53:55They definitely had some Doctor Who tapes,
00:53:57but they didn't have the missing tapes.
00:53:59They were there, somewhere in those thousands of tapes they had stored.
00:54:03Rumours persist that there are two episodes being held
00:54:06by private collectors who are refusing to return them to the BBC.
00:54:10But hope remains that there are more discoveries to be made.
00:54:14Those are completed shows that have disappeared,
00:54:16and I believe they still exist somewhere in the world.
00:54:19I still entertain the idea that there are missing episodes out there.
00:54:24I mean, I'd love it to find them all.
00:54:26Top of everybody's wish list is episode four of The Tenth Planet,
00:54:30the Doctor's first battle with the Cybermen.
00:54:32But thanks to Blue Peter,
00:54:34who borrowed the episode to use a clip before it was wiped,
00:54:37we can still enjoy this, the show's most gobsmacking cliffhanger to date.
00:54:42At the end of the episode, the Doctor collapses
00:54:44and regenerates into another actor for the very first time.
00:54:57I think the genius of the change of lead actors in Doctor Who
00:55:01is that rather than just do it like James Bond,
00:55:03where you just change the actor and, you know, the audience goes along with it,
00:55:06it became part of the narrative.
00:55:08You actually saw the transformation happen,
00:55:10and that was, A, very thrilling,
00:55:12but, B, it also kind of gave the show an endless lease of new life.
00:55:17William Hartnell left the show due to failing health,
00:55:20but recasting the lead was a massive gamble that could have backfired.
00:55:24The pressure on Hartnell's replacement, Patrick Troughton, was immense.
00:55:27Peter Davison, Colin Baker, they all say,
00:55:30if it wasn't for Patrick, we wouldn't be here now,
00:55:33because he was the first regeneration,
00:55:35and if it hadn't worked, BBC would have pulled the plug on that.
00:55:38But as we can reveal, Troughton had some shocking ideas
00:55:41for how he'd play the part,
00:55:43as he later outlined in this astonishing Pebble Mill interview.
00:55:46My original idea was to black up
00:55:51and wear a big turban and brass earrings
00:55:54and a big grey beard and do it like the Arabian Nights.
00:55:58Thankfully, the BBC ignored him
00:56:00to the relief of Doctor Who cosplayers everywhere.
00:56:03And Patrick wasn't the only one with some dubious ideas
00:56:06about how to play the role.
00:56:08Brian Blessed has claimed in multiple interviews
00:56:10that he was also offered the role of the second Doctor.
00:56:13I said, well, his name is Who,
00:56:15which is not an English name at all, it's from the Far East.
00:56:18So I'd like to play him like Charlie Chan and make him Chinese.
00:56:21Well, the offer disappeared very quickly after that,
00:56:24as they obviously thought they were dealing with a total maniac.
00:56:27Having wisely avoided a blackface and yellowface second Doctor,
00:56:31the BBC were on to a winner.
00:56:33Thanks to regeneration, the show could last forever.
00:56:36At least that was the theory.
00:56:38Coming up, Doctor Who faces the decade from Hell.
00:56:41First call I got was from the press.
00:56:43How did I feel about the death of Doctor Who?
00:56:46And we reveal the worst charity single of all time.
00:56:49Who have we got? We've got some of Buck's fizz.
00:56:58It's 1985. Live Aid takes place at Wembley.
00:57:01The wreckage of the Titanic is found.
00:57:03And Doctor Who star Nicola Bryant
00:57:05is about to receive a bombshell phone call from a journalist.
00:57:08I'd literally just walked into my little flat
00:57:11and the phone was ringing.
00:57:13First call I got was from the press.
00:57:15How did I feel about the death of Doctor Who?
00:57:18I thought they meant something had happened to Colin.
00:57:21So I immediately hung up and was really distressed.
00:57:25And then the phone went again. It was my agent.
00:57:27And I was just sobbing on the phone to him, saying,
00:57:30Colin's dead! I don't know what happened to me poor Marion!
00:57:33And I was just in a terrible way.
00:57:35And he said, no, no, no, no, Colin's fine. The show's dead.
00:57:39Doctor Who had been cancelled.
00:57:41Doctor Who had been cancelled.
00:57:43And one man was responsible for the decision to pull the plug.
00:57:46Michael Grade.
00:57:47Michael Grade.
00:57:48Michael Grade.
00:57:49Michael Grade wasn't happy with the show.
00:57:51I don't think the viewing figures were as good as he probably wanted.
00:57:55And so very sadly it did get cancelled.
00:57:58Michael Grade was another BBC outsider,
00:58:00having spent eight years at LWT and two in Hollywood.
00:58:04Rumours swirled as to why he cancelled the show,
00:58:07including that he wanted to free up money for the new soap EastEnders.
00:58:10But maybe it was all much simpler than that,
00:58:13as he explained with brutally flippant clarity in this Room 101 appearance.
00:58:17So why did you cancel the show?
00:58:19I thought it was rubbish.
00:58:22I thought it was pathetic.
00:58:24I mean, I'd seen Star Wars.
00:58:27And I'd seen Close Encounters and E.T.
00:58:30And then I had to watch these cardboard things
00:58:34probably clonking across the floor,
00:58:37trying to scare kids, you know, you just sit and laugh at it.
00:58:40The fans were shell-shocked.
00:58:42I was devastated.
00:58:43I'm not ashamed to go,
00:58:45it was awful and probably the worst moment of my life.
00:58:47And if anybody watching that thinks I'm sad, that's fine.
00:58:50John Nathan-Turner's relationship with the fan community had already soured.
00:58:54Now he was at war with his bosses as well.
00:58:57But he was determined not to let the show slip away quietly.
00:59:00John Nathan-Turner, who had very good contacts in Fleet Street
00:59:04because of all his publicity talent,
00:59:06he just was picking up the phone and he was pulling the strings
00:59:09and keeping these stories going.
00:59:11Save Doctor Who.
00:59:12You know, he did whatever he could.
00:59:14John Nathan-Turner stirred up a tabloid storm
00:59:17and his primary accomplice was Ian Levine,
00:59:19who was pictured in the papers,
00:59:21smashing his TV in disgust at the BBC's decision.
00:59:25Ian was also a legendary DJ and music producer
00:59:28and went on to work with Take That.
00:59:30His two worlds were about to collide in spectacular fashion.
00:59:34Doctor in Distress is the charity single
00:59:38that they made to try and save Doctor Who.
00:59:41I mean, it's an example of how Doctor Who fans react to things,
00:59:45to be fair, is somebody goes,
00:59:47you know that dreadful famine in Ethiopia?
00:59:49You know how all those people got together and did a record
00:59:52to raise money for that marvellous cause that touched us all?
00:59:55My favourite programme's been cancelled.
00:59:57Shall we do the same, cos it's kind of the equivalent?
01:00:00Doctor in Distress
01:00:04Bring it back now, we won't miss this
01:00:07And here it is.
01:00:09Just three months after Band-Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas,
01:00:12this absolute banger features show stars Colin Baker
01:00:15and Nicola Bryant alongside...
01:00:17..some other people.
01:00:19Who did they get for Band-Aid?
01:00:21We've got Bono and George Michael and Sting.
01:00:25Who have we got? We've got some of Buck's fizz.
01:00:28And a man from the Moody Blues.
01:00:30Brilliant.
01:00:32Producer Ian Levine has mixed feelings about it now.
01:00:35It was the worst, worst, worst charity record of all time.
01:00:39I hate everything to do with it.
01:00:42I cringe with embarrassment.
01:00:44It's a stain on my career.
01:00:46But as well as the slightly motley array of singers,
01:00:49there was surprisingly high-calibre talent behind the scenes.
01:00:52The music was made by Hans Zimmer.
01:00:54He's talking about me being embarrassed, Hans Zimmer.
01:00:57The Lion King, Gladiator and all the Batman films.
01:01:00I mean, how many films has Hans Zimmer won awards for?
01:01:03He's the greatest film composer of all time.
01:01:05Needless to say, the record did not trouble the charts.
01:01:08You don't hear that record played on the radio so often these days,
01:01:11do you? It doesn't come around on those gold stations.
01:01:14You know, I won a Brit Award for Best Single in 1992
01:01:17and I had to suffer doctor distress on my CV.
01:01:20And even if the record was a flop,
01:01:22BBC buses were still rattled by the backlash.
01:01:26The first man, known as Michael Grade,
01:01:30has achieved a mighty victory for our cause.
01:01:34That's right, you've got a serious PR crisis on your hands
01:01:37when there's a Cyberman wisecracking about the controller of BBC One on Wogan.
01:01:42And then the BBC has to do this frantic backpedalling
01:01:44where it says, actually, no, no, no, the programme's just being rested.
01:01:47It's only going to be rested.
01:01:49So 18 months later, the show was back.
01:01:52But the BBC had another nasty surprise in store.
01:01:55At the end of that series, John was told,
01:01:57you've got to sack your leading man, you've got to get rid of Colin Baker.
01:02:01Colin Baker was completely blindsided,
01:02:04as he later admitted in this 1994 documentary.
01:02:07He rang me up and said, I've got some good news and some bad news.
01:02:10I said, oh, well, let's have the good news first.
01:02:12He said, well, the series is going again next year.
01:02:14I said, oh, great, bad news.
01:02:17I'd been asked to recast the part of the Doctor,
01:02:20which was somewhat of a blow.
01:02:27Understandably upset about being fired,
01:02:30Colin Baker refused to participate
01:02:32in filming the traditional regeneration sequence,
01:02:35resulting in this rather businesslike changeover.
01:02:39Which, as this fascinating behind-the-scenes footage shows,
01:02:43was achieved via the high-tech solution
01:02:46of putting his successor, Sylvester McCoy, in a blonde curly wig.
01:02:50Doctor Who had survived another year, but the end was in sight.
01:02:54Joining the show for its final years was script editor Andrew Cartmel.
01:02:59Doctor Who was reviled at the BBC, and I'm not exaggerating,
01:03:02people just hated it and they wanted to kill it.
01:03:04And I always think of that Monty Python skit about
01:03:07somebody comes back and says, where have you been?
01:03:09I've been burying the cat for three hours.
01:03:11It kept struggling, and that was what was happening with Doctor Who.
01:03:14They kept trying to bury it, but it kept struggling and it wouldn't die.
01:03:17The BBC finally made their move in 1989.
01:03:21Kind of.
01:03:22There was never an official announcement
01:03:24that Doctor Who was being cancelled for good.
01:03:26And I think the reason for that was they didn't want a repeat
01:03:29of all the protests and the fuss.
01:03:31People often ask me, when did you find out the show was cancelled?
01:03:34The answer is never.
01:03:35Because it's like if you ghost your girlfriend,
01:03:37you don't tell her that you spit up,
01:03:39you just never call her back and take her calls, and it was like that.
01:03:42The BBC decided to kill the show, sneakily and slowly,
01:03:46via the dark art of scheduling.
01:03:48They scheduled it to death.
01:03:50They put it opposite Coronation Street.
01:03:52It was doing OK.
01:03:53I mean, opposite Coronation Street, to get four or five million wasn't bad.
01:03:57But, you know, you could easily use that as a stick to beat the show
01:04:00and say, oh, it's only getting four million,
01:04:02whereas four years ago it was getting eight million.
01:04:04Well, you moved it away from that slot.
01:04:06Of course it's only getting four million.
01:04:08It's up against Coronation Street.
01:04:10I picked up the phone, and it was Sylvester.
01:04:12And he said, ah, Sophie, he said, are you sitting down?
01:04:15And I sat down on the desk, I said, I am now.
01:04:18And he said, Doctor Who's not coming back next year.
01:04:21And it was really sad.
01:04:24But the story doesn't end there, of course.
01:04:26In 2005, the show made a glorious return,
01:04:29and this time it was superfans like Russell T Davies,
01:04:32Stephen Moffat, David Tennant, and Peter Capaldi calling the shots.
01:04:37And with the 14th Doctor about to make his debut,
01:04:40it's been a bumpy ride through time and space
01:04:43for programme makers and fans alike.
01:04:48I think the crucial thing about Doctor Who
01:04:51is you've got a format that can last forever.
01:04:54I'm grateful for the fact that I'm a part of history,
01:04:57but I still regard it all as a bit of a strange experience.
01:05:01For six decades, Doctor Who has entertained us,
01:05:04thrilled us, and terrified us,
01:05:06and has survived against all the odds.
01:05:08Doctor Who has taken me to New Zealand, Australia,
01:05:12America, and Cleethorpes.
01:05:15So it's been really, really great.
01:05:17It was a complete and utter shock and delight.
01:05:21The show has faced scandal both inside and outside the TARDIS,
01:05:25and with each regeneration,
01:05:27there's a new universe of secrets to discover.
01:05:29It created this family of people who love the show,
01:05:33and that has just gone on and on and on.
01:05:36It's quite amazing.
01:05:37There were some terrible things going on,
01:05:39and yet it was also a fabulous time.
01:05:44Revealing how the royal family celebrate the festive season,
01:05:48Sandringham, the King at Christmas,
01:05:50is brand new next Saturday at 8.25.
01:05:52And remembering one of London's most devastating disasters,
01:05:56the year the Thames flooded, is brand new at 9 tomorrow.
01:06:00Next tonight, the most shocking moments of the 80s.