"What If... The BBC could have brought Doctor Who back in 1998?"

 

He's Back...?

As we saw in the first  part of this feature, in which we asked "What If... The TV Movie had been a success in the USA?", we established that even before the TV Movie had been broadcast on BBC1 in the UK on Bank Holiday Monday 27th May 1996, it was already clear that Fox would not be greenlighting any more Doctor Who. 

Unlike in North America, Doctor Who was very successful in the UK, earning 9.08 million viewers (15th for the week), but without a co-production partner, the BBC felt it was right back where it started, unable to make the show to the same standard on 50% of the cost of the TV Movie, so even though Universal's license for Doctor Who had been due to expire at the end of 1996 it was extended until December 31st, 1997 by the BBC in a bid to keep the relationship, and the show alive. 

It was a bid that failed; Universal's option ran out and with it the option on Paul McGann's 5 year contract was no longer binding. Whether or not Paul McGann would return to the role of the 8th Doctor would depend on whether the BBC (and probably more importantly McGann himself!) might want to negotiate a completely new contract should they decide to pursue new Doctor Who. 

Any series of Doctor Who that would be made after 1st January 1998 would have to be made either by the BBC alone, or with another, presumably American or possibly Canadian, co-funder away from Universal and Fox.

The UK ratings clearly showed an appetite for more Doctor Who (and arguably, for more Doctor Who starring Paul McGann), but audience feedback was clear that the American Co-Production was not entirely to the tastes of the UK audience, so whatever the next incarnation of the show might prove to be, it seemed likely that it would be a step removed from the Universal co-production of the TV Movie. 

When the rights reverted to the BBC, it did not in fact take long before serious thought was given within some quarters to producing the show in-house again, but a major stumbling block was soon hit when it was realised that the rights were in fact with BBC Films, and the show's return hit the brakes until Jane Tranter and Lorraine Heggessey decided that enough was enough and took the show off BBC Films in 2003.

But what if they, or someone else, had given BBC Films the same short shrift back in 1998 and got on with it? What if the BBC had begun producing new Doctor Who in 1998? When would it actually get made, who exactly would be producing it and writing it, when would it be broadcast and how might it fare? 

The Usual Suspects

Alan Yentob had been instrumental in securing the Universal co-production, having been Controller of BBC One for three years until 1996, when he was promoted again to become BBC Television's overall Director of Programmes. This appointment was only a brief one, however, before a re-organisation of the BBC's Executive Committee led to the creation of a new post, filled by Yentob, of Director of Drama, Entertainment and Children's. This placed Yentob in overall supervision of the BBC's output in these three genres across all media – radio, television and Internet - and was a post he occupied until June 2004. He was therefore well placed, and well inclined, to support and facilitate a return if control could be wrested from BBC Films. 

Peter Salmon took charge of BBC One in September 1997 in Yentob's old job of Controller of BBC One after Michael Jackson's sudden move to Channel 4 after just a year in charge. 

Jane Tranter moved to the BBC as Head of Drama Series in 1997, which led to her appointment as Controller of Drama Commissioning in 2000. 

Lorraine Heggessey took up this post of Head of Children's BBC in 1997, and was promoted to Director of Programmes and Deputy Chief Executive of the BBC's in-house production arm, BBC Production, responsible for supervising in-house output across all the various genres in 1999. She was in this role for little over a year however before she was promoted to Controller of BBC One, a post she took up on 1 November 2000. 

It was Peter Salmon who first approached Russell T Davies (producer of Dark Season and Queer As Folk, and author of the Doctor Who: The New Adventures novel Damaged Goods) about spearheading a new Doctor Who series, in late 1998, with the BBC's Drama Department Head of Development Patrick Spence meeting with Davies, only to be warned that the rights lay with BBC Films, and the idea went away until another meeting around 2000 or 2001 with then Head of Drama Commissioning Pippa Harris. [I would speculate that this may actually have been around 2000, as it was during the late 2001 press launch for Linda Green, a series to which Davies had contributed an episode, he met Jane Tranter for the first time, shortly before she went on maternity leave.] 

When Tranter returned from maternity leave, probably around early 2003, Mark Thompson had just vacated the post of Director of Television to be replaced by Jana Bennett so during this transitional period she and Lorraine Heggessey forged ahead, with Russell T Davies provisionally on board but not fully convinced until September of that year (2003) when the decision was made that the new show would be made in Cardiff by BBC Wales, under new Head of Drama for BBC Wales, Julie Gardner, who had previously worked with Davies as Development Producer at London Weekend Television where they had begun developing Casanova. 

The show's return was announced when an interview with Lorraine Heggessey was published in The Daily Telegraph on Friday 23rd September 2003, in which Heggessey also revealed that the "six part" series would be broadcast on Saturday nights, but was unlikely to appear before 2005 [due to RTD's commitments to Red Productions tying him up until January 2004]. In fact the decision that the series would move to 13 episodes came in the first official meeting between Tranter, Davies and Gardner in early September 2003. The decision to broadcast on Saturday nights was partly due to the success that American import Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman had enjoyed there, and Davies has always cited Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a big influence on the style and story arc structure of the series. 

But what if someone had made that breakthrough earlier, or more, if BBC Films hadn't hogged the rights after Universal's option expired, and the path was clear for BBC Drama to be lying in wait to take advantage right away on 1st January 1998? 

Russell Television Davies

Russell T Davies was a BBC staff producer working for the children's department at BBC Manchester, running the summertime activity show Why Don't You?. He had gained some television writing experience, but his real ambition was to write television drama.

To this end, he wrote an on-spec script for the first episode of Dark Season and used the BBC's internal mail system to send it directly to the Head of Children's Programmes, Anna Home, who, duly impressed and with a hole in the schedule (caused by Tony Robinson's decision to take a break from producing Maid Marian and Her Merry Men) for late 1991, commissioned him to write the remaining episodes of the serial. 

While he was writing Dark Season and Century Falls, Davies sought freelance projects elsewhere, which led him to Granada Television, where he edited scripts for the ITV children's medical drama Children's Ward. By 1992, he had been promoted to producer and oversaw an increase in discussion of larger contemporary issues (for example in 1993, he wrote a script featuring a teenage boy who had been infected with HIV via a blood transfusion, which challenged the prevalent assumption that only gay people contracted HIV). Although he left the role of producer in 1994, he continued to write for the series on occasion, and was requested to write the 100th episode of the series, which aired in October 1996. Instead of celebrating the milestone, he wrote a script about a recently emerging threat: paedophiles in online chat-rooms. The episode was about an X-Files fan who was drawn in by a paedophile's offer of a rare magazine. In the dénouement of the episode, the child recounts the tale of his near abduction and describes his attacker as "just a man like any other man." The episode earned Davies his first BAFTA award: the 1997 Children's BAFTA for Best Drama. 

In 1994, Davies quit all of his producing jobs, and was offered a scriptwriting role on the late-night soap opera Revelations, created by him, Tony Wood, and Brian B. Thompson. The series was a tongue-in-cheek deconstruction of organised religion, and featured his first overtly homosexual character: a lesbian vicar. 

Davies let his contract with Granada expire and pitched a new early-evening soap opera to Channel 4, RU, with its creator Bill Moffat, Sandra Hastie, a producer on Moffat's previous series Press Gang, and co-writer Paul Cornell.  Although the slot was eventually taken by Hollyoaks, he and Cornell mutually benefited from the pitch: Davies introduced Cornell to the Children's Ward producers and established contact with Moffat's son Steven, and Cornell introduced Davies to Virgin Publishing. 

Davies wrote one Doctor Who Virgin New Adventures novel, Damaged Goods, which includes several themes that Davies would intersperse in his later works, including a family called "Tyler".


Davies continued to propose dramas to Channel 4, including Springhill, an apocalyptic soap-opera co-created by his colleagues Frank Cottrell Boyce and Paul Abbott that aired simultaneously on Sky One and Channel 4 in 1996–1997.  

Davies's next project was The Grand, a period soap drama set in a Manchester hotel during the interwar period. After the original writer abandoned the series, Granada approached him to write the entire show. His scripts for the first series reflect the pessimism of the period but the show was renewed for a second series despite the first's dark tone.

The second series had a lighter tone and greater emphasis on character development. After its cancellation in September 1997, Davies started to develop a series for Channel 4 which reflected the "hedonistic lifestyle" of the gay quarter of Manchester he was leaving behind, completing the first draft for the series première in February 1998 of the series that would eventually become Queer as Folk, and was transmitted in early 1999.

The approach from Peter Salmon, via Patrick Spence, therefore came at a point in Davies' career when he had plenty of writing experience under his belt and was sought after within the industry, but perhaps did not yet have the security and clout that the success of Queer as Folk would bring. With Alan Yentob and Peter Salmon effectively occupying the positions that Jane Tranter and Lorraine Heggessesy did in the crucial 2001-03 period that led to Doctor Who's real-world return, our "What if..."s start to add up: 

What if the rights were available, and Yentob & Salmon successfully recruited RTD in late 1998, signing him up to start work January 1999? "Doctor Who 2000" could have been a real prospect.

But hold on...

For Tranter and Heggessesy, the decision was not so much to bring back Doctor Who as to specifically make "Russell T. Davies' Doctor Who". 

But had RTD said no, or been unavailable, or simply not the go-to candidate, who else might have been in the frame?

Rise of the Moff

Bill Moffat, was a head teacher at Thorn Primary School in Johnstone, Renfrewshire, and when the school was used for Harry Secombe's Highway in the late 1980s, he mentioned to the producers that he had an idea for a television series about a school newspaper. The producers asked for a sample script, to which Bill Moffat agreed on condition his son write it. This, of course, was, and still is, Steven Moffat. 

The resulting series was titled Press Gang, and ran for five series on ITV between 1989 and 1993, with Moffat writing all forty-three episodes. The programme won a BAFTA award in its second series.

During production of the second series of Press Gang, Moffat was experiencing an unhappy personal life as a result of the break-up of his first marriage. The producer was secretly phoning his friends at home to check on his state. By 1990, Moffat had written two series of Press Gang, but the programme's high cost along with organisational changes at backers Central Independent Television cast its future in doubt.  Moffat developed Chalk, a sitcom set in a school that eventually aired in 1997, and Joking Apart (a somewhat semi-autobiographical show about a sitcom writer whose wife leaves him). He wrote three episodes of Murder Most Horrid, an anthology series of comedic tales starring Dawn French, "Overkill" (1994) "Dying Live" (1996) and "Elvis, Jesus and Zack" (1999).

 Moffat met television producer Sue Vertue at the Edinburgh Television Festival in 1996. After production wrapped on Chalk in 1997, Moffat announced to the cast that he was marrying Vertue. Sue Vertue had been working for Tiger Aspect, and they left their respective production companies to join Hartswood Films, run by Beryl Vertue, Sue's mother. Beryl Vertue OBE, is an English television producer, media executive, and former agent - for, amongst others,  Spike Milligan, Eric Sykes, Johnny Speight, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson and one Terry Nation, for whom she famously negotiated to partially keep his rights to his Daleks.


Steven Moffat, therefore, would have been in a very strong position himself to contribute to a new Doctor Who series in '98/'99, and indeed Moffat famously withdrew from early development meetings with Big Finish around that period when it transpired that (at that stage) they could not pursue new adventures with current Doctor Paul McGann, so it seems this could have been attractive to him at a time when he had a well established and garlanded career. If Russell T. Davies had declined or been unavailable, could Moffat have been the obvious 2nd choice for the BBC?

Who else?

Matthew Graham, later the co-creator of the BBC/Kudos Film and Television science fiction series Life on Mars, began his career writing for the soap opera EastEnders and the children's drama Byker Grove, both for BBC One. In the 1990s, he wrote for the popular BBC Two drama series This Life, and created and wrote the post-apocalyptic drama serial The Last Train (1999) for ITV. He has also written episodes for Spooks and Hustle, and the Doctor Who episodes "Fear Her", and "The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People".  He was rumoured to have made a Doctor Who pitch around the time we're looking at, though possibly more likely to have been in the 2000 scenario when Russell T. Davies spoke to Pippa Harris. He doesn't seem to have been a likely showrunner in '98/'99  but could well have been in the frame to write an episode. 

Mark Gatiss is a member of the sketch comedy team The League of Gentlemen (along with fellow performers Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton and co-writer Jeremy Dyson). The League of Gentlemen began as a stage act in 1995, which won the Perrier Award at Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1997. In the same year the show transferred to BBC Radio 4 as On the Town with the League of Gentlemen, and later arrived on television on BBC Two in 1999. 

The television programme earned Gatiss and his colleagues a British Academy Television Award, a Royal Television Society Award and the prestigious Golden Rose of Montreux. Gatiss and at least two of his League colleagues were behind another pitch to bring Doctor Who back, but again it seems more likely this would have been in the 2000 timeframe than '98, i.e. with the acclaim of the League's first TV series under their belts. 

Paul Cornell's professional writing career began in 1990 when he was a winner in a young writers' competition and his entry, Kingdom Come, was produced and screened on BBC Two. Soon after, he wrote Timewyrm: Revelation, a novel for the Virgin New Adventures series of Doctor Who novels. Timewyrm: Revelation was a reworking of a serialised fan fiction piece Cornell had penned previously for the fanzine Queen Bat. Several other Doctor Who novels followed, including the award-winning Human Nature (May 1995).

Cornell then began working for Granada Television, where he wrote for the popular children's medical drama Children's Ward and created his own children's series Wavelength for Yorkshire Television, which ran for two series. He made the crossover to working in adult television full-time in 1996, when he was one of the main contributors to Granada's supernatural soap opera Springhill, which ran for two years on Sky One and later on Channel 4. In '98/'99, Cornell would have been known to Russell T Davies from his work on Springhill and Children's Ward.

An established theatrical playwright, Rob Shearman has worked with Alan Ayckbourn, had a play produced by Francis Ford Coppola, and has received several international awards for his work in theatre. 

Award-winning plays include Fool to Yourself, which premiered at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in 1997, and which won the inaugural Sophie Winter Memorial Trust Award, 'Easy Laughter', (Sunday Times Playwriting Award), 'Coupling', (World Drama Trust Award), 'Binary Dreamers', (Guinness Award for Theatre Ingenuity, in association with the Royal National Theatre). In 1993 he was made resident dramatist at the Northcott Theatre in Exeter, the youngest playwright to be honoured by the Arts Council in this way, and for them he wrote a series of plays, including his controversial comic fable about God living in suburbia, 'Breaking Bread Together', which later was revived in London. His association with his mentor, Alan Ayckbourn, has been particularly fruitful, with 'White Lies', 'About Colin', and 'Knights in Plastic Armour' proving especially popular.

His association with Doctor Who began with a play written for BBV Audios, Punchline, in which Sylvester McCoy played the Dominie, a disguised version of the Seventh Doctor. This was penned under the pseudonym "Jeremy Leadbetter" (the name of a character from the popular BBC sitcom The Good Life). Several audio plays for Big Finish followed, The Holy Terror (November 2000), The Chimes of Midnight (February 2002) and Jubilee (January 2003)  all winning best audio drama in the Doctor Who Magazine polls of their respective years. 

The real significance here is that it seems highly unlikely that Shearman would have any involvement with any television version of Doctor Who until he at least had a couple of Big Finish plays under his belt, and had no connection to Cornell (via Born and Bred) till 2002). 


This means that lynchpin episode of 2005, Dalek, would not exist in any recognisable form, based, as it was on Shearman's own Jubilee (2003). For this episode to exist in any way, shape or form in 1998/9, our showrunner has to think up the concept of the lone, imprisoned Dalek, as their own original idea, which seems unlikely. Although, is it entirely necessary? Sacrilegious as it may sound, do we need Dalek to get to Bad Wolf's shock reveal of a hidden Dalek army?

Landscape Portrait

Before we pick our team, it's probably worth a look at what other sci-fi/fantasy tinged dramas the BBC was actually happy enough to broadcast during the 1990s. As noted, the American import Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman had fared well in the Saturday evening slot that had traditionally been Doctor Who's home in the '60s and '70s, and this slot had also been kind to Crime Traveller, and Jonathan Creek as noted above, as well as Bugs and later (after the '98/'99 period we're looking at) a remake of Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased), produced by Working Title Television, starring Vic Reeves as Hopkirk (again in a white suit) and Bob Mortimer as Randall, Emilia Fox as Jeannie, and Tom Baker as Wyvern. 2 series were made, the first in 1999 (broadcast in 2000) and the second in 2001. The show was produced by Charlie Higson, who also directed some episodes. Writers for the show include Gareth Roberts, Mark Gatiss & Jeremy Dyson, Paul Whitehouse, and Higson.

It's worth noting that Working Title Television, a division of Working Title Films is owned by NBC Universal, and therefore unlikely to have sought to produce any new version of Doctor Who after Universal relinquishing the rights as of 1st January 1998 for them to return in-house. Indeed there doesn't seem to be any suggestion at all that the BBC even considered farming Who out to any independent production company, perhaps feeling that their fingers had been singed by the TV Movie.

Anthony Horowitz OBE is a prolific English novelist and screenwriter specialising in mystery and suspense. He has written extensively for television, contributing numerous scripts to ITV's Agatha Christie's Poirot and Midsomer Murders. He was the creator and principal writer of the ITV series Foyle's War, Collision and Injustice.

In between writing novels, Horowitz turned his attention to legendary characters, working with Richard Carpenter on the Robin of Sherwood television series, writing five episodes of the third season. He also novelised three of Carpenter's episodes as a children's book under the title Robin Sherwood: The Hooded Man (1986). In addition, he created Crossbow (1987), a half-hour action adventure series loosely based on William Tell. Horowitz began writing for television in the 1980s, contributing to the children's anthology series Dramarama, and also writing for the popular fantasy series Robin of Sherwood. His association with murder mysteries began with the adaptation of several Hercule Poirot stories for ITV's popular Agatha Christie's Poirot series during the 1990s.  

Often his work has a comic edge, such as with the comic murder anthology Murder Most Horrid (1991) From 1997, he wrote the majority of the episodes in the early series of Midsomer Murders, so although his work on Robin of Sherwood and Crime Traveller would be decent calling cards to the BBC, he may have been too preoccupied with Midsomer Murders to act as showrunner, though found time to write a single script if asked.


Crime Traveller (1997) was a science fiction detective television series produced by Carnival Films for the BBC based on the premise of using time travel for the purpose of solving crimes. Horowitz not only created the series but also wrote every episode. He got the idea while writing an episode of Poirot. Despite having over eight million viewers on a regular basis, Crime Traveller was not renewed after its first series, because according to Horowitz, "The show wasn't exactly cut. There was a chasm at the BBC, created by the arrival of a new Head of Drama and our run ended at that time. There was no-one around to commission a new series...and so it just didn't happen." The final episode of the series was followed the next week by the first episode of Jonathan Creek, which became a popular long-running crime series.

Jonathan Creek is a British mystery crime drama series produced by the BBC and written by David Renwick. It stars Alan Davies as the title character, who works as a creative consultant to a stage magician while also solving seemingly supernatural mysteries through his talent for logical deduction and understanding of illusions. The series ran semi-regularly from 1997 to 2004, broadcasting for four series and two Christmas specials, initially co-starring Caroline Quentin as Creek's collaborator, writer Maddie Magellan. 

On beginning his comedy career, David Renwick worked in a team with writing partner Andrew Marshall, the pair of them providing material to popular sketch shows such as The Two Ronnies and Not the Nine O'Clock News during the late '70s and early '80s. One of the most celebrated sketches he wrote for the former was a parody of the BBC quiz programme Mastermind, where a "Charlie Smithers" chose to answer questions on the specialist subject "Answering the question before last." In the '80s they also wrote for the sketch show Alexei Sayle's Stuff and Spike Milligan's There's a Lot of It About. 

In 1982 they penned the comedy drama serial Whoops Apocalypse for LWT, followed in 1986 by Hot Metal. Renwick began writing solo in 1990 when he created the sitcom One Foot in the Grave, and was therefore a writer with some considerable pedigree, whose quirky Jonathan Creek may have put him on the BBC's radar for Doctor Who.

Bugs was produced for the BBC by the independent production company Carnival Films, and ran for four series from April 1995 to August 1999, mixture of action/adventure and science-fiction, involving a team of specialist independent crime-fighting technology experts, who faced a variety of threats based around computers and other modern technology, with a reliance on fast-paced plots, technical gadgetry, stunts and explosions, and was devised by Carnival boss Brian Eastman and producer Stuart Doughty with input from veteran writer-producer Brian Clemens, who had previously worked on The Avengers. 

Clemens described Bugs as "an Avengers for the 1990s". Other notable series writers included Colin Brake and Stephen Gallagher. Two episodes ("Bugged Wheat" and "Hollow Man"), were written by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, who went on to create the series Smallville. 

Not really relevant in the scheme of our time frame, but perhaps notable in terms of its personnel, format and fate is the later Strange, produced by the independent production company Big Bear Productions for the BBC, which followed a one-hour pilot episode screened in March 2002, with a series of six one-hour episodes broadcast in the summer of 2003. The supernatural storyline involved a defrocked priest's mission to destroy demons. Broadcast on Saturday nights, the series was hampered by frequent timeslot changes (its regular time slot was around 9pm, but its final two episodes were pushed past 10pm), the long gap between the pilot and the series and the BBC's decision not to repeat the pilot before the series aired. The viewing figures were low, and a second series was not commissioned. It should be noted however, that this was clearly a post-watershed programme, and never in a timeslot that would have suited Who. 

All six episodes of the series were written by Andrew Marshall, a scriptwriter primarily known for his comedy work, much of which was with David Renwick. It was directed by Joe Ahearne, who had previously been responsible for both writing and directing the World Productions vampire serial Ultraviolet for Channel 4, with special effects make-up by Millennium FX (digital effects by No Strings Attached, who provided digital FX for the Yorkshre TV produced My Parents are Aliens for ITV's children's programming.)

Ultraviolet was written and directed by Joe Ahearne, starred Jack Davenport, Susannah Harker, Idris Elba and Philip Quast, was produced by World Productions for Channel 4, and broadcast 15th September 1998  to 20th October 1998. Its production would almost certainly rule Joe Ahearne out of any involvement with Doctor Who any earlier than October 1998. 

Who's in Charge

So what can we speculate based on all of the above? 

The Doctor
Still Paul McGann, as dictated by Yentob and Salmon. It's too soon to recast after the still recent TV Movie, which in this scenario is being viewed as a UK success and demonstrating an appetite for more Doctor Who, starring Paul McGann. 

The Showrunner
Perhaps unexpectedly, it's still Russell T. Davies. The BBC courted him on more than two occasions, very much with the intention of Doctor Who being run by a single creative guiding hand in the mould of an American-style 'showrunner'; everyone involved at any time in bringing Doctor Who back between 1996 and 2005 were committed to the 'auteur' vision of how the show would be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern age, and whatever the pedigree of the aforementioned candidates, Davies was the only one that the BBC ever really considered.  For our purposes, the BBC grab him at the beginning of 1998, not the end, already aware of his work up to and including The Grand, and early on into his work on Queer As Folk, which he writes alongside Doctor Who and can still happen, perhaps just slightly later. 

The Producer
Easy one this, and only one candidate I'm even willing to consider. Jumping ship from Jonathan Creek after its 2nd season, it's a fond welcome home to Verity Lambert.

The Writers
The list of writers for the series reads like this:

Russell T. Davies... and that's it.  The BBC want an auteur for a 6 part series. There's no thought to any other writers at least for this first year. 

The Companion

With Russell T. Davies writing, the Doctor's new companion is still going to be Rose Tyler, but who's going to play her now? If we just look at Our Mutual Friend, made in 1997 and broadcast in early 1998, we have both Keeley Hawes and Anna Friel at the same age in 1998 that Billie Piper was in 2004, so perhaps one of them is our Rose Tyler.  I'd looked at Jane Danson, 2 years younger than Hawes and Friel, as she would have been known to RTD through both Children's Ward and then very recently, The Grand. However she was committed to Coronation Street (as Leanne Battersby) from mid 1997 and was therefore unavailable. I'd love to hear everyone else's suggestions though, so tweet me your ideas? Who could have been the right sort of age, at the right point of their career, and available in early to mid 1998? 

The Competition

The Moment of Truth was a game show hosted by Cilla Black produced by LWT and broadcast at 7pm on ITV from Saturday 5th September 1998 to 29th September 2001. It launched to 6.93m viewers, against the 6-part Lenny Henry stand-up tour & sketch show Lenny Goes to Town, with the next 5 episodes rating 7.65m, 6.47m, 7.06m, 9.17m and 8.74m  on 10th October 1998. (As an aside, Lenny's series featured guest appearances by 3 of the League of Gentlemen: Mark Gatiss - 3 episodes, Reece Shearsmith - 1 episode and Steve Pemberton - 1 episode.) 

Cilla's show was following the waning Gladiators, now in its 7th season, and itself opposite Jim Davidson's Generation Game. Season seven also began on 5th September 1998, and saw the show have a major overhaul. 2 new male Gladiators joined the team and 3 new games were introduced, although all 3 flopped with viewers. As well as the new new games, 3 of the most established and popular events had rule changes. Despite the changes, viewers saw it as too little too late and viewing figures continued to drop, with the series axed in early 1999. 

On BBC1, Noel's House Party began it's 8th and final season on 17th October, taking the 7pm slot over from Lenny Henry. Later evenings on BBC One showed the National Lottery Draw and Casualty, going strong and launching its season 13 opener at 20:10 on 5th September to 11.23m viewers. 

 The BBC was therefore poised  to take advantage of Gladiators being on the ropes and Cilla's untested new show, and seemed to have wasted it on Lenny Goes to Town. Well no offence, Lenny, but hit the bench, your show can go out on a week night or wait till Noel gets cancelled in March. I'm sending on a super sub... 

It's 7.05pm on Saturday 5th September 1998 and Doctor Who is back, for a new 6 part series. 

Season 27

Our 6 part series will then, to a large degree, be very similar to what we got in 2005, with the main thrust of Russell T Davies' infamous pitch intact. 

We start with an 8th Doctor who's much more down and dirty than when we last saw him 2 years ago - in this gap, the Time War has happened, and is a darker, lonelier, spikier character; in look either more like he appears in The Night of the Doctor, or even more akin to his Dark Eyes appearance. Maybe McGann gets his leather jacket after all.

Unable to use the opulent and frankly huge TARDIS console set from the TV Movie we'd certainly have seen a new TARDIS interior - but how different might it have been? The beeb may in fact have bought the console prop from Universal at a knock down price, and then built a new, more modest console room around it. The Jules Verne library look may still have survived, although whether this would fit post-Time War is debatable. 

There's no Aliens of London - for one thing this is pre-WMD - and as mentioned earlier, no Dalek. With only 6 episodes, there's no room for the "Companion That Couldn't" storyline, so The Long Game falls by the way side. 

Father's Day is the key character point for Rose, so that stays, and although it's unlikely to be remotely the same (it's cut down to 1 part for one thing) The Empty Child - in the form it appears in RTD's pitch - remains. There's no space for Boomtown (and with no Slitheen, perhaps no point?), so there's a hell of a lot to cram into the now 1 part The Parting of the Ways - including Rose's return after being sent away by the Doctor actually being the 1st time she's been back with her family since Rose, so we've a vastly cut down role for Mickey, with Jackie never really meeting the Doctor except in the past (Father's Day). Captain Jack is still here, though, joining the TARDIS in The Empty Child and shooting Daleks in The Parting of the Ways. Do we still get Jack kissing the Doctor goodbye? Davies would certainly write it, but pre-Queer As Folk, and pre-the Sexual Offences Act 1999 lowering the homosexual age of consent to 16, would BBC bosses have had the conviction to support this? I rather suspect that they'd bottle it.

We've had the set-up that the Time-Lords were wiped out alongside the Daleks from mentions in Rose and the "chips" scene in the last moments of The End of the World. Naturally enough, there is no regeneration at the end of the series, so presumably we get the fake-jeopardy ending of the TARDIS scanner informing the Doctor that Rose is dying from her exposure to the time vortex...

The 6-part season shapes up like this.

1. Rose

2. The End of the World

3. The Unquiet Dead

4. Father's Day

5. The Empty Child

6. The Parting of the Ways

In the face of weak opposition as outlined above, following the 9.08m viewers gained by the TV Movie and with much stronger scripting and characterisation, provided the production values were marshalled wisely - and there's no reason to suspect they wouldn't be (plus CGI on UK TV was about to take an impressive leap forward in 1999 with Walking with Dinosaurs, so Doctor Who could have been an early adopter and taken viewers and critics by surprise on that front) - this series could have been hitting 10m viewers each week consistently, and easily been a success that went on and on in much the same way the 2005 revival has done. Having said that, a 6 episode season wouldn't set the international market alight, so a second series would almost certainly be longer, or at least the same length before a longer 3rd series (i.e. making series 1 & 2 a marketable package together). 

But look at what we've lost. Sure, we've got a proper era for the 8th Doctor, but in this scenario we're unlikely to get Christopher Eccleston as the 9th Doctor, Billie Piper, the episode Dalek, episodes written by Mark Gatiss, Rob Shearman, Paul Cornell and Steven Moffat, and there's fallout elsewhere - Big Finish are unlikely to keep their licence in this scenario, I think, but even if they do, there's no Paul McGann stories, so no Charley, C'rizz, Lucie, Tamsin, Molly (friends, companions...). Elsewhere, Queer as Folk, a ground-breaking series, is at best delayed, at worst never happens at all. Similarly Bob & Rose and The Second Coming. It seems unlikely that either Strange or the remake of Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) would happen, though in the case of the latter maybe a successful Doctor Who would convince the beeb this was a remake worth a punt. Bugs series 4 might have been kicked to the kerb, though. 

Maybe sometimes things work out for the best, and good things come to those who wait?

TTFN! K.
Coming Soon: Oblivion