Doctor Who: 50 things you didn't know
2015
Doctor Who: 50 things you didn't know
Matt Smith and David Tennant in The Day of the Doctor, the Doctor Who 50th anniversary episode Credit: BBC
17 September 2015 • 4:30pm
1. The Doctor lives longer in France
French audiences watching Doctor Who dubbed into their native tongue obviously can’t be expected to know the difference between Christopher Eccleston’s Lancashire vowels and David Tennant’s adopted southern accent – but isn’t there some metaphysical conundrum posed by having the same voice actor, David Manet, play them both? Perhaps realising this, Manet regenerated when Tennant did, and was replaced by Marc Weiss, who now brings mellifluous Francophonie to Matt Smith’s performance. Le fez c'est cool.
2. It took a few tries to get Matt Smith’s outfit right
Although they finally settled on a classic look of tweed jacket and bow tie – the latter apparently Smith’s idea as he was an admirer of Second Doctor Patrick Troughton, who wore one – other costumes were considered: a sharp businessman, a sort of Peter Pan/pirate and a Nineties waiter, all of them based around a slightly-too-small waistcoat.
3. Ridley Scott almost designed the Daleks
The future director of Alien, Blade Runner and Gladiator was working as a designer at the BBC in the early Sixties, and was the man originally assigned to the episode that introduced the Daleks. But when the time rolled round, Scott had left for Granada to train as a director, so the job fell to Raymond Cusick instead. Unlike his collaborator, the scriptwriter Terry Nation, Cusick didn’t get a share of the merchandising royalties when Dalekmania gripped Britain. On leaving the corporation in 1966, he got £100 and a Blue Peter badge.
4. Tom Baker’s long scarf was created by accident
According to legend, James Acheson, the series’ costume designer, is supposed to have provided several balls of yarn for a knitter to choose from while making a normal-sized scarf for the Doctor. Instead, she knitted the lot into one single, gigantic item, which Acheson, displaying the keen eye that would later win him three Oscars for costume design, decided to keep. It became an instant hit. ‘The crew sometimes used to stand on it and yell with laughter when I spun around,’ Baker later revealed.
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5. The Daleks were based on the Nazis...
…by their creator, Terry Nation, who suggested their call of ‘Exterminate!’, their obsession with forcible eugenics and their dedication to total conformity. The BBC designer Raymond Cusick, meanwhile, came up with the distinctive pepper-pot shape and the zapper with its sinister storm trooper salute. In The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1966) the Daleks roll into London and turn Britain’s stout inhabitants into mind-controlled, brainwiped ‘Robomen’ – a stark nod back to the once-real possibility of an Axis invasion of Britain.
6. But this didn’t stop them getting their own Christmas novelty record
7. Ron Moody regretted declining the role of the Doctor
Ron Moody , who played Fagin in Oliver! (1968), was the first choice to replace Patrick Troughton as the Third Doctor in 1969, but turned down the role, which went to Jon Pertwee instead. Moody later told friends how much he regretted the decision. (He did, much later, play the Duke of Wellington in a Doctor Who audio story.) Geoffrey Bayldon, who went on to play Catweazle, apparently had no such regrets – he turned down the chance to become both the First and Second Doctor.
8. Tom Baker joined a monastery at the age of 15
‘I was an affectionate boy in those days, and I was quite willing to show God some if that was what He fancied,’ Baker observed drily in his autobiography, Who on Earth is Tom Baker? ‘For a time it was all worthwhile just to be in a frock.’ But after eight years, the bloom was off the rose, as Baker relates in some hair-raising passages: vicious discipline, fumbling in the dark, chanting every morning. ‘Some mornings I suspected I could hear God tutting at the indignity of it all.’ He ended up polishing floors and washing pots until a visiting priest encouraged him to be honest about his loss of faith. Baker left the monastery after six years. ‘I felt full of optimism,’ he wrote, ‘full of hope that I could at last get out of God’s clutches, sign up with the Devil and get on the old primrose path to pleasure, even if it did lead to Hell.’
9. The show employed the BBC’s first ever female producer
A story dramatised in Mark Gatiss’s BBC docudrama about the beginnings of the series, An Adventure in Space and Time . Verity Lambert was recruited to the BBC by its head of drama, Sydney Newman, with whom she had previously worked on ABC’s popular Armchair Theatre TV programme. Like Doctor Who, Armchair Theatre was filmed live, so Lambert was a past master at dealing with the kind of problems that shoots with no breaks can generate. At one stage during her tenure at ABC she had to keep the cameras pointed elsewhere after an actor collapsed and died on set, so the flapping TARDIS doors and forgotten cues of early Doctor Who held few terrors. Even so, Newman offered the gig to two producers before Lambert, but she was the one who accepted, notching up another stage in women’s advancement in the media. ‘I think the best thing I ever did on that was to find Verity Lambert,’ Newman said later.
10. Time Lords exist! Sort of...
Well, OK, they don’t really. But some people experience a rare form of synaesthesia – an involuntary crossover of sensory input – in which they are apparently able to perceive time. Those who experience the phenomenon often describe it as a circular formation, with years shading into one another and longer periods, such as decades, showing up in different colours. Dates, appointments and memories may have a ‘physical’ form and a place in the arrangement. Such time-space synaesthetes, as they’re known, can sometimes even perceive time as a ring encircling them. No word on the regeneration, though, and no one has come calling with a free Tardis. Yet.
11. And so does the Sonic Screwdriver. Again, sort of...
Like all good ideas in science fiction, the sonic screwdriver has long tempted scientists to re-create its functions in the real world. In 2012, a team from Dundee University announced that it had developed the first mechanism for lifting and turning objects using an ultrasound field, a device with numerous possible applications in science and surgery. Meanwhile, a group at Bristol University, has developed a thing called the sonotweezer to manipulate and move particles.
12. The Doctor’s regeneration was based on a bad acid trip
Doctor Who: acid trip?
Internal memos from the BBC’s original series, unearthed in 2010, describe the ‘metaphysical change’ of the Doctor’s regeneration as ‘an experience in which he relives some of the most unendurable moments of his long life, including the galactic war.’ (No doubt the writers of the John Hurt arc leapt in joy to read that.) ‘It is,’ continue the memos, ‘as if he had had the LSD drug and instead of experiencing the kicks, he has the hell and dank horror which can be its effect.’
13. Stephen Fry once wrote a script for the series. It was never used
And gosh, it’d be superb if it would kindly pop up on the internet someday. Fry’s script, written for the second series of Russell T Davies’s revived show, took as its base the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a medieval poem with deep roots in English and Celtic tradition. But Davies thought it was too complicated to run immediately, and Fry, apparently, never had time to make the necessary changes.
14. Torchwood is an anagram of Doctor Who, originally used as a code name
Mekhi Phifer, Eve Myles and John Barrowman in Torchwood Credit: BBC
When Russell T Davies was filming the first series of the revived Doctor Who in 2005, the anagram Torchwood was used to label the series tapes so that no information about their contents would leak out. When he was offered the opportunity to spin off a post-watershed series from the Who material, Davies was so fond of the anagram he decided to keep it.
15. Racial sensitivity has never been Who’s strong suit
The series’ first black character was problematic, to say the least. In 1967, black actor Roy Stewart was cast as a Cybermen helpmeet called Toberman, in Tomb of the Cybermen; in the script he was deaf, yet this detail was omitted from the final version. So what we ended up with is a largely mute, subservient black man – essentially, a slave. Then 10 years later, in the classic episode The Talons of Weng-Chieng, the Chinese characters were played largely by white actors in make-up, one of whom is given the line, ‘I understand that we all look alike.’ Oh dear.
16. Ryan Gosling cast Matt Smith in his directorial debut because of a single Who speech
Matt Smith and Ryan Gosling on the set of Lost River
According to Smith, the star of Drive was channel-hopping when he happened to stumble across the 11th Doctor giving his rousing extended speech in The Pandorica Opens (‘No plan, no backup, no weapons! Oh, and something else I don’t have: anything to lose!’). A suitably impressed Gosling quickly cast Smith in his directorial debut, Lost River – which, unfortunately, wasn't any good .
17. Terry Pratchett had (mostly) gone off Doctor Who
It is 'ludicrous and breaks most of the laws of narrative', commented Terry Pratchett the late author of the Discworld books in a humorously impassioned blog post from 2010. Particularly the later stuff. The Doctor has been transformed into a deus ex machina, fully equipped not with a scientific solution but with ‘speed, fast talking and what appears to be that wonderful element ‘makeitupasyougoalongeum’’. But, Pratchett reluctantly concluded, he’d keep watching, even if the Doctor 'is now becoming God, given that the position is vacant. Perhaps they should start transmitting the programme on Sundays.’
18. This man was responsible for the most terrifying audition in Who history
Credit: Richard Saker/REX
The late, great, fearsomely alternative actor-director Ken Campbell (a nine-hour adaptation of Illuminatus!, a 22-hour performance of The Warp) was asked to read for the part, but was pipped to the post by his old protégé Sylvester McCoy. John Higgs takes up the story in his brilliant book The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds : ‘Campbell auditioned by performing a speech on the nature of time modelled on Alan Moore ’s Dr Manhattan character [from Watchmen], wearing a long coat, sleeveless cartoon T-shirt and wide-brimmed hat.’ He also left a frightening message on the producer’s answering machine, which turned out to be a recording of his personal mantra. McCoy got the part. As he told Higgs, the producer’s rationale ‘was that he thought Ken would frighten the children, and I think he was right.’
19. Doctor Who has changed the English language
Over the years, the Oxford English Dictionary has made space between its august e-covers for several Whoisms. ‘Dalek’ (now sometimes ‘used allusively’, the OED informs us) was the first one; it’s a word Terry Nation claimed to have made up on the spot, only later discovering that it meant ‘far-off’ in Serbo-Croat. ‘Tardis’ also has an entry, which explains with majestic sobriety the acronym from Time and Relative Dimensions in Space before embarking on an exhaustive definition of the word’s extended significations: ‘A thing which has a larger capacity than its outward appearance suggests; a building, etc, that is larger on the inside than it appears on the outside; b) a thing seemingly from another time (past or future)’.
It has sometimes been argued that the Cybermen (first appearance 1966) gave the world the ‘cyber-‘ prefix to denote futuristic technology, though OED doesn’t buy that, dating cybernetics from 1948 (‘the theory or study of communication and control in living organisms or machines’) and cyborg (cybernetic+organism) from 1960. Poor Cybermat, it tried so hard.
The series also gifted to the British language in perpetuo the phrase ‘hiding behind the sofa’ as an expression of TV-induced fear. Whoever coined it, the formula is now inextricably linked to the Doctor (and the appearance of the Daleks), lending its name to a book of celebrity recollections of the series as well as a fallback headline for hacks everywhere. Even Prince Andrew has admitted to hiding from the Daleks behind the soft furnishings as a child in Windsor Castle.
20. Brian Cox isn’t the first to explore the science of Doctor Who
Judith Merril, with fellow author Michael Moorcock Credit: REX
We too enjoyed Brian Cox’s lecture on how everything you’ve seen in Doctor Who might really work – time travel, alien contact, Einstein-Rosen bridges, sonic screwdrivers, the Eye of Harmony, oh just keep waving your hands and we’ll believe anything – but he’s not the first boffin to explore the complex science of the Whoniverse. That honour belongs to the American science fiction author Judith Merril, who popped up during the Seventies and Eighties at the end of Doctor Who episodes, dressed like a member of the Jedi Order and calling herself the UnDoctor. Merril would interview scientists and thinkers on the topics raised in the episode, or just offer her own haunting philosophical observations, perhaps not always ideally fitted to the show’s audience. ‘The great leap into space,’ she commented drily at the end of one episode. ‘Well, I know it’s not very fashionable to say this nowadays, but that still really turns me on.’ Beat that, Cox.
21. The Twelfth Doctor was a teenage superfan
Credit: BBC
Peter Capaldi’s casting as the Doctor must have been all the sweeter for an actor who set his sights on Whovian world domination aged 14. According to the book The Official Doctor Who Fan Club Volume One (!) the teenage Capaldi, already a vigorous writer of letters to the BBC and the Radio Times, was incensed at being passed over for the presidency of the show’s fan club after a rival, the 13-year-old Keith Miller, got the gig instead. Sarah Newman, the Doctor Who producer’s secretary, became so cross at the subsequent deluge of Capaldi letters that she wrote to Miller: ‘I think he’s the end and I wish the Daleks or someone would exterminate him.’ Presumably, all is now forgiven.
22. Delia Derbyshire received no royalties for her work on the Doctor Who score
Composer Delia Derbyshire
Delia Derbyshire (1937-2001) is a fascinating figure in the annals of British electronic music, now namechecked as an influence by the likes of Aphex Twin and the Chemical Brothers, but the BBC was reluctant to reward her extraordinary talent. After studying maths and music at Cambridge, she began working for the BBC in 1960, graduating to the nascent Radiophonic Workshop in 1962. There, she brought musique concrète techniques to an unassuming score by the composer Ron Grainer, who had sent over a simple bassline and melody with vague scribbles on it like ‘wind bubble’ and ‘cloud’. Derbyshire sampled a single plucked string on analogue tape and adjusted its pitch and speed for each note of the melody, backing it up with an oscillator bassline and keyboard swoops. ‘Did I write that?’ Grainer is said to have asked upon hearing the piece. ‘Most of it,’ she replied.
Grainer attempted to persuade the BBC to give Derbyshire a half cut of royalties from the theme, but the corporation, which preferred to keep its ‘technical’ staffers anonymous, refused. (See also the case of the Daleks designer, Ray Cusick.) Derbyshire eventually quit the BBC for the wider horizons of avant-garde music and electronic psychedelia, before retiring from music altogether.
23. And she would have loved this clip of the theme being played on eight floppy drives:
24. The Beatles briefly made Who rock
In the 1965 Daleks story The Chase, the crew of the Tardis are shown ‘rocking out’ to a clip of the Fab Four performing Ticket to Ride on Top of the Pops. A traveller from the future remarks that she’s heard of The Beatles, but didn’t realise they sang ‘classical music’, Thanks to a BBC archive purge, this is only surviving footage of the band on Top of the Pops. As related nuggets, Peter Capaldi once played George Harrison in a 1985 NBC TV drama called John and Yoko: a Love Story. John Lennon was played by Mark McGann, the brother of Eighth Doctor Paul McGann. Christopher Eccleston also once played Lennon in the 2010 TV drama Lennon Naked.
25. The Doctor once advertised computers
Back when BBC properties were allowed to be used for commercial gain, Tom Baker and Lalla Ward – then a real-life couple – used their sexual energy to hawk the decidedly unsexy Prime range of microcomputers. Made in 1980, they can now be seen on the DVD release of Destiny of the Daleks and on YouTube.
26. The original TARDIS key was designed by Jon Pertwee
Prior to 1973, the key to the Tardis looked much like an ordinary Yale key. In fact, it was an ordinary Yale key. Jon Pertwee, however, wanted something fancier, so helped to create the copper, spade-like key that made its first appearance in The Time Warrior. The design has been used as the Tardis key template ever since.
27. Sylvester McCoy never stood a chance
The BBC’s internal research on McCoy’s debut as the Time Lord, in 1987, revealed that 30 per cent of audiences liked ‘nothing’ about his first series, and that he received a ‘personal summary index figure’ of 46 – much less than the ‘only moderately popular’ Colin Baker and almost half that of Bergerac’s Jim Nettles. Bonnie Langford, playing his assistant Mel, fared even worse. The report noted that ‘56 per cent of respondents who answered a questionnaire on the Paradise Towers story wished she had been eaten’.
28. But he was quite the trouper
As the departed Colin Baker declined to film a regeneration scene, the incumbent McCoy had to play both his part and the part of his predecessor – with the aid of a blond curly wig.
29. The Doctor’s last anniversary special wasn’t exactly a success
The Doctor lands in Albert Square. What could possibly go wrong? To celebrate the series’ 30th anniversary, the BBC assembled the four remaining Doctors (Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy) and had them battling The Rani alongside the cast of EastEnders. In 3D! With aged future versions of Pauline Fowler and Kathy Beale, a hilarious mistaken identity joke involving Dr Legg, and ripe dialogue such as ‘Pickled in time... Like gherkins in a jar!’, only the fact that it was for Children in Need makes this just about excusable. Still, everybody seems to have had fun making it:
30. Time Lords need to eat too
Doctor Who has inspired many an odd item – but few as a left-field as a cookbook. Chris-Rachael Oseland’s Dining with the Doctor: The Unauthorized Whovian Cookbook contains a recipe for each episode of the series since the 2005 reboot and no fewer than 18 ‘adult beverages’. Other recipes include ‘Open Faced Dalek Ironsides’, ‘Cinnamon Pull Apart a Crack in the Wall’ and ‘Chicken and Ood Soup’.
31. The writers' imaginations are even wilder than you think
Colin’s Baker’s debut Who episode, The Twin Dilemma, is commonly dismissed by Who fans as one of the worst ever. But scriptwriter Anthony Steven claimed to have had an excellent excuse: his typewriter exploded as he was writing it.
32. Tom Baker has mixed feelings about New Zealand
Although he reportedly turned down the role of Gandalf in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films because he didn’t want to spend months on end in New Zealand, the fourth Doctor visited Auckland in 1997 for another reason. Amazingly, Baker – plus the Tardis, plus a facsimile of the Who theme – was allowed by the BBC to appear as the Time Lord in advertisements for a retirement fund that can ‘shape the future’.
33. Knitting Doctor Who characters could land you in hot water
The BBC is notoriously protective of its products and doesn’t take kindly to unofficial merchandising – as one keen viewer found out in 2008. The fan, who went by the screen name of Mazzmatazz, committed the grave error of posting intricate knitting patterns of Doctor Who characters on his/her web page. They were duly sent a cease-and-desist notice from the Corporation, who warned against the use of ‘trade marks and copyright owned by the BBC’. The offending pages were taken down and the website no longer exists.
34. Daleks are collectors’ items
The Doctor Who auction
Since making their appearance in the second ever Doctor Who episode, the Daleks have become icons. And if you had had a spare £20,400 lying around in 2009, you could have got your hands one the only remaining 1963 Dalek (one of a set of four, together costing £1,000 to build), which was sold by auction house Bonhams as part of a large Doctor Who sale. A blue shirt worn by David Tennant went for £1,200.
35. Watching every episode doesn’t have to take 50 years
Had you been in Sydney at the end of September, you would have had the chance to see all 798 Doctor Who episodes distilled into a one-hour show. Or at least, that was the aim of the writer and star, Pat Magee . In the style of the highly successful off-Broadway One Man Star Wars Trilogy, Magee – along with two men and a woman – set about recreating all the series’ action, ‘Dimensions in Time’ aside.
36. Michael Jackson almost played the Doctor
Credit: Rex
Hollywood has never known what on Earth to do with Doctor Who, so has mostly left him alone. But in the Eighties, according to the book Now on the Big Screen: The Unofficial and Unauthorized Guide to Doctor Who at the Cinema, Paramount Pictures considered making a Who film with the Moonwalker-era Michael Jackson. Their second choice? Bill Cosby. But stranger things have almost happened: in 2003, Robbie Williams was approached by the BBC to voice an animated Doctor Who story, Scream of the Shalka. ‘We all sat around wondering, ‘Is this a good idea? Is this a crazy idea?’’ said producer Muirinn Lane Kelly. Williams was sadly unavailable; the part went to Richard E Grant.
37. The role comes with a certain amount of baggage
The second Doctor, Patrick Troughton, made the decision to quit the role after three years due to a fear of becoming typecast. At the time, this move was seen as so unusual and significant that leaving a series for this reason has become unofficially known as ‘the Troughton rule’. Later prospective Doctors shied away from taking the role due to pre-emptive fears of typecasting: Benedict Cumberbatch said no because he didn’t like the idea of ‘being on school lunch boxes’, and Bill Nighy also turned down the role but, out of courtesy, would not say when. However, outgoing Doctor Matt Smith claims to have no fear of typecasting, saying, ‘If people want to typecast me they can, I can sit and have me egg sandwich and not really give a damn about it.’
38. Just ask Christopher Eccleston
The Ninth Doctor left the series abruptly, after just one season, for reasons that always seemed murky. But the actor reportedly made his feelings a little clearer in 2011, during an acting workshop at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. According to the BadWilf blog, when asked why he left the role Eccleston replied: ‘I left Doctor Who because I could not get along with the senior people. I left because of politics. I did not see eye-to-eye with them. I didn’t agree with the way things were being run. I didn’t like the culture that had grown up around the series.’
39. The daughter of the fifth doctor starred as the 10th doctor’s daughter – and then married him
When David Tennant filmed the episode ‘The Doctor’s Daughter’, he didn’t realise his daughter would later become his wife. Tennant went on to marry Georgia Moffett, who played the episode’s eponymous title role, in 2011. However, although Moffett became the Doctor’s wife, she remained the Doctor’s daughter biologically, since her father is Peter Davison , who played the fifth Doctor from 1981 to 1984.
40. The sound of the Tardis was created on the cheap, with a bunch of keys
Necessity was the mother of invention in the early days of Doctor Who, and so it was that the distinctive sound of the Tardis materialising came to be invented using house keys. Brian Hodgson of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop dragged the keys across the bass strings of an old piano, and played the resulting sound backwards.
41. Priests are Whovians too
In 2007, St Paul’s Church, Cardiff held a Doctor Who-themed service to draw young people into the church. Father Dean Atkins, a youth officer with the Diocese of Llandaff, drew parallels between Our Lord and the Time Lord: ‘The figure of Doctor Who is somebody who comes to save the world, almost a Messiah figure,’ he said. ‘Christ is a kind of cosmic figure as well if you like, somebody who does not travel through time but all eternity is found in him.’ At a conference organised by evangelical organisation the Church Army in 2008, vicars were urged to use examples from the programme in their sermons; sessions included ‘Meaningful Monsters: Daleks through the decades’.
42. The ‘Time Lady’ debate has raged since the beginning of time
Sydney Newman wanted to save Doctor Who’s dwindling viewing figures in the Eighties by introducing a ‘time lady’. Criticising the direction taken by the show, Newman wrote an angry letter to Michael Grade stating that it had become ‘socially valueless, escapist schlock’. He said that he did not want to create a typical Hollywood heroine, as a character ‘with no flaws is a bore’. However, Grade rejected his advice. Fifth Doctor Peter Davison also dismissed the idea of a female Doctor: ‘It’s not as if you would have a female James Bond’.
43. Elisabeth Sladen wasn’t originally supposed to play Sarah Jane Smith
Jon Pertwee and Elisabeth Sladen Credit: REX
The actress April Walker was originally cast in the role of Sarah Jane Smith, the third Doctor’s companion. She was given a contract and began rehearsals with Jon Pertwee, but it soon became apparent that the pair did not have the necessary chemistry and were an odd physical pairing. Elisabeth Sladen received the role after a recommendation from a BBC producer, and a successful meeting with Pertwee in which he stood behind her and gave producer Barry Letts the thumbs up.
44. Michael Grade is mistakenly hated by Doctor Who fans
Many fans place the blame for Doctor Who’s demise in the Eighties heavily on Michael Grade’s shoulders. It’s no secret that the man who was BBC One’s Controller from 1984 to 1986 wasn’t a fan of the show (he called it ‘rubbish’ and ‘pathetic’), and he did suspend the series in 1986 and dismiss Colin Baker (who he described as ‘absolutely God-awful’ in the role). However, it was actually Jonathan Powell who cancelled Doctor Who in 1989; by then Michael Grade was controller of Channel 4. When the series was successfully revived in 2005, Grade wrote a letter congratulating the BBC on the triumph, ending with, ‘PS never dreamed I would ever write this. Must be going soft!’.
45. The BBC fought the law for the right to make Tardis cookie jars
When the Time Lord took on the Metropolitan Police, there could be only one winner. And in 2002, after a six-year battle, the Patent Office declared that the exterior design of the Tardis could be patented by the BBC for use on Doctor Who-related merchandise. The Met had challenged the application on the grounds that the design belonged to them; after all, in a previous incarnation, Tardises had been seen on the streets of Britain masquerading as public police telephone boxes. Lawyers ruled that, given that the Met had stopped using the boxes in the Sixties, the design was now more closely associated with Doctor Who. Et voila: the Tardis dressing gown, the Tardis cookie jar, the Tardis soap dispenser and the Tardis UV Book Light, ‘so you can write secret notes to The Doctor’.
46. Douglas Adams was a Doctor Who writer in the Seventies
Adams, author of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books, was involved with the show in the late Seventies, writing a serial called The Pirate Planet and missing out on a second, Shada, only because of a strike. He is also supposed to have written a lot of the script for Destiny of the Daleks (1979). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the episodes that Adams supervised are well-known for bringing out the humorous – some might say demented – aspects of Tom Baker’s Time Lord.
47. Matt Smith is the youngest Doctor ever
Smith debuted in the role at the age of 27, making him the youngest actor to play the part. The Fifth Doctor, Peter Davison, was previously the youngest, beginning the role at the age of 29. William Hartnell has always held the title of the oldest Doctor, taking on the role at the age of 55. Peter Capaldi was also 55, albeit a few months younger than Hartnell.
48. Not everybody loves the Sonic Screwdriver
Credit: Rex
Ah, the Sonic Screwdriver, that most divisive object in the New Who arsenal. First introduced at the end of the Sixties, it was written out of the show in 1982 at the instruction of producer John Nathan-Turner . Along with several other members of the production crew, Nathan-Turner felt that giving the Doctor a device that let him unlock doors, weld metal, detonate explosives and fix machinery limited the writers’ dramatic options – so the old faithful got zapped by a Terileptil in The Visitation and the series soldiered on without it.
Russell T Davies revived the Sonic Screwdriver when he relaunched the series in 2005, since which time it has gone through several mechanical iterations, piling on the functionality like a Gallifreyan iPhone. Among other miracles, it can now fly the Tardis, heal the sick and wounded, unlock mobile phones for galactic roaming, serve as a GPS and MRI and start fires, leading the old-school hardliners of the series to complain that it’s little more than another deux ex machina in a show already full of them. In response, Davies and his successors invented a few arcane baffles to counter the screwdriver’s dominance: it won’t work on wood and it won’t unlock devices sealed with ‘deadlocks’, which, to judge by their sudden omnipresence, must be flying out of the doors at the temporal-galactic equivalent of Homebase. (The Doctor, we learnt in Silence in the Library, will one day manage an upgrade.)
49. The Daleks almost didn’t appear in the revived series due to a copyright dispute
When the series was revived in 2005, there was a very real chance that the Daleks themselves were going to be exterminated. The estate of Terry Nation (who was co-creator of the Daleks) owns their copyright, and to begin with they were unable to come to an agreement with the BBC with regards to editorial control. However, after a lengthy dispute in which the estate accused the BBC of trying to ‘ruin the brand of the Daleks’, the Daleks returned. Antony Wainer, the spokesman for the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, was relieved, saying, ‘Doctor Who without Daleks would be like Morecambe without Wise or Wimbledon without strawberries.’
50. Doctor Who really is a doctor
In 1967 serial The Moonbase, the Doctor (played by Patrick Troughton) spent some time in a sick bay. Upon being asked by his companion (Anneke Wills), ‘Listen, are you really a medical doctor?’ he replied, ‘Yes, I think I was once, Polly. I think I took a degree once in Glasgow. 1888 I think’.
This article was originally published in November 2013
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