Doctor Who [7]

That always reminds me of this-

Been reading up on the history of Who's inception.
Its a small miracle it got off the ground at all there was so much BBC opposition to it.

They got the pilot made, then the Head of Drama Sydney Newman rejected it, he ordered it reshot and wanted the Doctor to be more likeable and Susan to be less weirdly alien (the biggest mistake they made I think, her character is at its best and most intriguing when she is weird and alien and hard to read- unfortunately what Newman wanted was a teenage human girl for the audience to relate to).
So having had the first pilot rejected they got the green light to have a second go.
Unfortunately many of the sets, particularly the school and junkyard sets had been scrapped and had to be rebuilt, by a stroke of good fortune the TARDIS set survived, and as it was one of the main controversially expensive sets, had it been scrapped it is very likely Who would have never got a second pilot at all.
And then on the day they were shooting the new pilot they got a memo from one Donald Baverstock, Head of Programming which read-

'I am told that a first examination of your expenditure on the pilot and of your likely design and special effects requirements for the later episodes, particularly two, three and four, shows that you are likely to overspend your budget allocation by as much as £1600 and your allocation of man-hours by as much as 1200 per episode. These figures are arrived at by averaging the expenditure of £4000 on the spaceship over thirteen episodes. It also only allows for only £3000 to be spent on expensive space creatures and other special effects. It does not take account of all the extra costs involved in the operation of special effects in the studio.
Last week I agreed an additional £200 to your budget of £2300 for the first four episodes. This figure is now revealed to be totally unrealistic. The costs of these four will be more than £4000 each - and it will be even higher if the cost of the spaceship has to be averaged over four rather than thirteen episodes.
Such a costly serial is not one that I can afford for this space in the financial year. You should therefore not proceed any further with the production of more than four episodes.
In the meanwhile, that is for the next three weeks while I am away, you should marshal ideas and prepare suggestions for a new children's drama serial at a reliably economic price. There is a possibility that it will be wanted for transmission from soon after Week 1 of 1964.'

Fortunately for Who the series budget was just far enough ahead to pay for the Daleks, and when they hit the screens everything changed.

There is something suitable about the fact Who was under threat of the axe before it even got to peoples tv's.
To misquote an old quote- 'Who fans aren't paranoid, they know someones out to get them!'

Keeping up the 50th vibe- heres some bits from an interview with William Hartnell, and from an interview with his widow, Heather Hartnell, stating with the Doctor himself-


“I was so pleased to be offered Doctor Who. To me kids are the greatest audience – and the greatest critics – in the world.
It may seem like hindsight now, but I just knew that Doctor Who was going to be an enormous success. Don’t ask me how. Not everybody thought as I did. I was universally scoffed at for my initial faith in the series, but I believed in it. It was magical.
I got a phone call from my agent. He said, “I wouldn’t normally have suggested you work in children’s television, Bill, but there’s a sort of character part come up that I think you’d just love to play.
My agent said the part was that of an eccentric old grandfather- cum-professor type who travels in space and time. Well, I wasn’t that keen, but I agreed to meet the producer.
Then, the moment this brilliant young producer Miss Verity Lambert started telling me about Doctor Who, I was hooked. I remember telling her, “This is going to run for five years.” And look what’s happened.
We did ‘Doctor Who’ for forty-eight weeks a year but I loved it. I couldn’t go out into the street without a bunch of children following me, like the Pied Piper. People used to take it terribly seriously. I’d get letters from boys swotting for exams, asking me complicated questions about time ratios and the TARDIS. I couldn’t help them. A lot of the script writers used to make the Doctor use expressions like ‘centrifugal force’ but I refused. If it gets too technical, the children don’t understand and they lose interest. I saw the Doctor as a kind of lama, one of those long-lived old boys out in Tibet who might be anything up to eight hundred years old but only look seventy-five.
“Memories? There are so many. There was the occasion when I arrived at an air display in the TARDIS and the kids were convinced I had flown it there! On another occasion I went by limousine to open a local fete. When we got there the children just converged on the car cheering and shouting, their faces all lit up. I knew then just how much the Doctor really meant to them.””- William Hartnell



“I will always remember that first telephone call. Terry (William Hartnell’s son-in-law and agent) phoned me up from London saying that he was coming down to the cottage because he had this most incredible script that he wanted Bill to read and tell him about. ‘I don’t know what he’s going to say, but it’s for a children’s serial’. I was a little taken aback and asked if it was a tough guy part. ‘No, it’s an old man with long white hair, an old professor who’s a bit round the bend’. Well, I said ‘Bill will love it’, but Terry still remained a little apprehensive. Anyway, he turned up that evening with the script. Bill took it and sat in absolute silence, reading it through from beginning to end, and eventually said ‘My goodness, I want this part!’. He saw immediately that there was something so different about the whole idea, and once he had got the part he loved it from the very beginning.
“I was so pleased that more or less the last thing that he was able to do should be something that has lasted and lasted throughout the years. He put a lot of himself into it, because Bill has always been the sort of person that didn’t suffer fools gladly and that came out very strongly in the character of the Doctor. Bill, of course, always adored children. I think he should have had a family of about six, instead of one daughter.
His one regret was that the programme was in black and white, because of the costumes, they were so colourful. Like all actors, he loved dressing up and it seemed such a shame that the viewers couldn’t see all those wonderful sets and costumes in all their glory.
“I’ll always remember he opened a big annual fete at Pembury Hospital in about ’64, ’65, and a great friend of his had a lovely pre-1914 war car, a real veteran. Anyway, this friend drove the car into Tunbridge Wells where he met Bill, who had changed into his Doctor’s costume complete with wig, stick and cape that the BBC had lent him. Bob pulled up in this open tourer and Bill got in front and I in the back, and off we set for the hospital. By the time we had gone three odd miles to the fete, there was a stream of kids and cars and bicycles behind us. It was fantastic. We went into the grounds of the hospital and everybody went absolutely mad. They made more money that day than they had ever donebefore or since on their open days.
When the time came for Bill to leave the show, purely because of his ill health, it broke his heart. Having told the press that it was going to run for five years, he was determined to play it for five years.
With Patrick Troughton taking over the show, we were delighted, because Bill had suggested him for the part and he was number one choice of the namese that came up. We’d known Pat for years, he’s a darling person. But after a time, Bill stopped watching it, because it upset him emotionally.
He hardly saw any of Jon Pertwee’s stories, but was tickled pink to think that the show had gone on and when he did ‘The Three Doctors’ he glowed again as if it had taken ten years off his illness.
“My most precious possession is a tiny little solid gold TARDIS that Bill had made. He designed it himself and went to a top London jeweller, and had it made on a gold chain complete with a tiny, green emerald for the light. It’s my most precious possession because I know it is the only one in the world.”

In rather timely fashion the BBC have just released some pics promoting Gatiss' drama about Who's beginning-

David Bradley and Claudia Grant as the Doctor and Susan-





Jemma Powell and Jamie Glover as Jacqueline Hill and William Russel (the original Companions)



Sascha Dhawan and Jessica Raine as Waris Hussein (Director of the first episode) and Varity Lambert (trailblazing Producer of Who)



And Brian Cox as Sydney Newman (Head of Drama)



And lastly Karen Gillan, just to wind up Figgs  

that ship has sailed

'The BBC have announced that they will be broadcasting a trailer to celebrate 50 years of Doctor Who. It will go out on BBC One at 8.20pm on Saturday 19 October just after Strictly Come Dancing and just before Atlantis. The announcement was made along with artwork featuring all eleven Doctors.'- Gallifrey Base

Hell!
I wanted to go to the cinema today.....


Now I've got to stay at home and wait for the trailer

Not quite sure what it will be, the wording is interesting- 'a trailer to celebrate 50 years of Doctor Who' which doesnt exactly sound like a trailer for the 50th episode itself so much as for the last 50 years, but then a thing about the last 50 shouldnt count as a 'trailer' as its already happened.  

The trailer thingy- a sort of teaser trailer I suppose-

ok, it's good, that I went to the cinema after all...
didn't miss that much in my opinion

Well I wasnt expecting a lot of what is basically just a tv spot, and its definitely not the trailer for the 50th, as that was footage from the episode (at least what they showed at Comic-con was).
So way I see it is this is just a nice little bonus thing, and for the dedicated internet Whovian its a pause button joy of spot the references.

oooooh i like

OOOO that was very cool!  

Roll on Nov23rd! Im already stocking the buckie up for it   

its gonna be awesome.  

I hope we are not in danger of overhyping it and having to high expectations of a single episode of tv....nah     

I'm more intrigued then excited about the Special, Moffat by his own admission has been lying his arse off for months, the teases on Paul Mcgann's twitter feed grow ever more hopeful (Would love to see him get a cameo), and I can't help but wonder if he will pull a Clara on Capaldi, I'm not sure I can wait a year for season 8.

'pulling a Clara'
do you mean make him boring?

Ha ha, no. I meant sneaking in a cameo of Capaldi as the 12th Doctor in the 50th Aniversary before Smith's regeneration, though of course that would detract from Smith's last episodes.

Personally I have found most of the companions boring anyway, at least with Clara we won't have a stupid love story stretched out to tedium *Rose*.

Thats dangerous talk in ear shot of Mrs Figg!  

Second only to liking Amy  

malickfan wrote:Ha ha, no. I meant sneaking in a cameo of Capaldi as the 12th Doctor in the 50th Aniversary before Smith's regeneration, though of course that would detract from Smith's last episodes.

Personally I have found most of the companions boring anyway, at least with Clara we won't have a stupid love story stretched out to tedium *Rose*.

OI! watch it buster   nobody disses Rose on my watch. But i'll let you off with a warning. the next stage is stinging nettles down the undercrackers. or wet towel thwacked on the shins.

How many classic Who references did you spot?

More stills from Gatiss's docudrama-







Those gold pillars in the TARDIS are the genuine article. They went back to the prop company that originally made them to ask them if they could remake them, only to discover they still had them in storage!

Pettytyrant101 wrote:

this is brilliant! I would never have spotted all of them!!!  

Another break down of the trailer including some things the previous one missed-