In March 2005, Christopher Eccleston’s Ninth Doctor told Billie Piper’s Rose Tyler to “Run!” and the UK was instantly hooked. Gallifrey’s most famous export subsequently became a fixture in UK TV schedules for the first time in 16 years.
But Russell T Davies’ acclaimed reboot wasn’t the first effort to return the legendary Time Lord to primetime. Nine years earlier, in May 1996, an unlikely alliance of broadcasters and TV executives from both sides of the Atlantic — including, for a moment, Steven Spielberg — briefly brought “Doctor Who” back to earth.
Their TV movie was pitched as a “backdoor pilot”, a one-off that could have paved the way for a new big-budget series. It famously failed in its objective, but — while it’s no classic — its legacy has lived far beyond that original 86-minute broadcast. Aside, of course, from a famously controversial aside about the Doctor being half human.
Despite “Who”‘s passionate fanbase, the corporation’s suits had little time for the show, and — after scheduling the British sci-fi institution in midweek against ITV’s ratings juggernaut “Coronation Street” — decided to pull the plug after the ironically titled “Survival” aired in December 1989.
But — perhaps appropriately for a show whose main character has the ability to regenerate — “Doctor Who” refused to die. Books, comics, fanzines, and conventions kept the flame alive, while some at the BBC (particularly within its commercial arm, then known as BBC Enterprises) recognized the brand’s money-making potential.
There was even talk of a standalone theatrical movie — one iteration, titled “Last of the Time Lords” (a name later recycled by Davies for the season 3 finale), considered Donald Sutherland for the lead role.
The people in charge of the BBC’s broadcast channels remained unenthusiastic, however, feeling the show was tired and needed a longer break. But Philip Segal, a young Hollywood TV executive who’d grown up in the UK and was a massive “Who” fan, sensed an opportunity, and — despite the BBC retaining the rights — tried to engineer a comeback.
Numerous scripts and ideas were batted around as Segal touted the Time Lord around Hollywood for over half a decade. The BBC favored the return of ever-popular Fourth Doctor Tom Baker (generally regarded as the best Doctor ever) in the lead role, while some treatments featured the Time Lord on a quest to find his lost father. Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment was involved for a while — a development that generated mass excitement in the UK press — before ultimately passing on the opportunity.
After numerous false starts, the project eventually became a co-production between BBC Television, BBC Worldwide (the rebranded BBC Enterprises), Universal Television, and the TV movie division of the Fox Network. Rather than a series, it would be a standalone TV movie with a considerably larger budget than “Doctor Who” had ever had before. A side deal was also bolted on so that — should the broadcast be successful in the States — it could also function as a “backdoor pilot” for a full-on, US-funded TV series.
The problem was that every one of the stakeholders had slightly different requirements. For example, while Segal was keen to maintain continuity with the original series, Fox wasn’t keen on the idea of a regeneration. The BBC was also sceptical about bringing Sylvester McCoy back as the Seventh Doctor, reasoning that his TARDIS tenure was one of the least popular in the show’s history. (History has since been much kinder to McCoy’s portrayal.)
“There were so many cooks there that it was impossible to bring it all together,” said writer Matthew Jacobs in “The Seven-Year Hitch” documentary released in 2010. “The trick is trying to keep your head while everyone about you is losing theirs. They’re all desperate because they’re worried that they’re putting millions and millions of dollars on the line.”
Then there was the question of who would play the Doctor, the casting of whom tends to attract as many column inches in the UK as the hunt for the next James Bond. The BBC was understandably keen to keep the Time Lord British (okay, Gallifreyan with a UK accent), and Tim Curry, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, and Billy Connolly were among the superstar names linked to the role. The powers-that-be ultimately gave the TARDIS keys to a then-36-year-old Paul McGann, best known for playing the “I” in “Withnail and I”.
Meanwhile, the US paymasters at Fox and Universal insisted on an American villain, so Eric Roberts was recruited to play the latest incarnation of the Doctor’s Time Lord nemesis, the Master. His portrayal arguably owes as much to “The Terminator” as his predecessors in the role. There was also an American companion, with Daphne Ashbrook (who’d appeared in a season 2 episode of “Deep Space Nine“) hired to play surgeon Dr Grace Holloway.
Although most of the show’s intended Stateside audience would have known little about “Doctor Who”, the TV movie goes big on Time Lord lore. It opens with an info-dense McGann voiceover, explaining how the Master (a bad ‘un) has used up his 13 lives and — after being sentenced for his many crimes on the Dalek homeworld of Skaro — has requested that the Doctor transport his remains to a final resting place on Gallifrey.
There are also deep cuts from the franchise mythology — the Eye of Harmony, the power source of the TARDIS, becomes a major plot point — as well as cameos for more familiar pieces of “Who” ephemera such as Jelly Babies, Tom Baker’s iconic scarf, and, for the first time since 1982’s “The Visitation”, the Sonic Screwdriver.
When we meet McCoy’s Doctor he’s indulging in some R&R in his famously bigger-on-the-inside time machine. Then the Master’s glutinous remains escape, causing the TARDIS to crash in 1999 San Francisco, where the Seventh Doctor is quickly gunned down by a criminal gang. His injuries facilitate his regeneration into the younger McGann model, via a lengthy hospital sequence in which the medical staff is appropriately flummoxed by his two hearts.
It’s worth contrasting this mythology-heavy approach to that of the Russell T Davies reboot nearly a decade later. Comeback episode “Rose” is told largely from the point of view of companion Rose Tyler, who asks all the questions we’d want to ask if we came face to face with a madman with a box. It wisely never assumes prior knowledge of the Doctor, and — with the Time War having removed the Time Lords and (very briefly) the Daleks from play — Davies was able to drip feed the show’s decades-old mythology over the course of several seasons.
But the 2005 comeback didn’t jettison everything, and with good reason. The production values of the Vancouver-shot TV movie were more ambitious than the original series, with an unashamed attempt at a Hollywood-style chase sequence, an orchestral score, and a reinvented gothic TARDIS that genuinely felt bigger on the inside. The Doctor, previously more-or-less asexual, was also now a brooding romantic lead who — controversially at the time — shared a couple of passionate kisses with Dr Holloway. All these elements would, in some shape or form, turn up in the later BBC reboot.
McGann was wholeheartedly embraced by the fandom, with the Eighth Doctor becoming a mainstay of books, comics, audio dramas, and conventions — he even got a belated chance to regenerate in the 50th anniversary short “Night of the Doctor”.
The unexpected plot point about the Time Lord being “half human on my mother’s side” — included at Segal’s insistence — was conveniently forgotten, but in all other respects the Eighth Doctor is as much a part of the show’s canon as any other. Indeed, while his reign lasted a little over an hour on screen, McGann was the incumbent TARDIS resident for nearly nine years, technically making him the longest serving of them all.
The TV movie attracted an impressive nine million viewers in the UK when it aired on BBC One on Saturday, May 27, but it was its disappointing performance on the other side of the Atlantic a fortnight earlier that determined its fate. The movie’s American backers decided not to proceed with a full-on TV show, leaving fans to wait even longer for the continuing adventures of their favorite Time Lord.
Watch On
Watching now, it’s clear this one-off was caught between two rival schools of thought: too much of a departure from the original show for British fans, too heavy on the mythology for newcomers on the other side of the Atlantic.
“I was disappointed that it wasn’t picked up,” the TV movie’s director, Geoffrey Sax, told Cultbox in 2011, ” because I was hoping that it would appeal to an American audience. But I think it probably needed to be a different kind of story to introduce a new audience to it. I think I assumed that people knew about the Doctor and what the rules were, so a lot of the American audience came away bemused and confused.”
If you’re in the UK, then you can watch the Doctor Who movie on BBC iPlayer. If you’re travelling abroad and still want to access it, you’ll need a VPN. You can also pick up the Blu-ray on Amazon.
