The Two Doctors

INTRODUCTION

In 1985, Patrick Troughton made his final appearance onscreen as the time travelling hero, the Doctor, in the BBC series Doctor Who. It was his third return visit since his original departure in 1969, following 1973's The Three Doctors, a celebration of the programme's tenth anniversary, and 1983's The Five Doctors, which was a celebration of twenty years of Doctor Who. However, his appearance in 1985's The Two Doctors was not to celebrate any anniversaries. It was simply because he and Frazer Hines, who played his erstwhile companion Jamie McCrimmon, had enjoyed their previous return visit so much that they wanted to do it again.

Of course, in The Two Doctors, Troughton would be playing the Doctor alongside the flamboyant Colin Baker, the current incarnation of the Time Lord, who had only joined the series the previous year, and was still something of a newcomer to the role. Also, much had changed about the series, even in the two year interim since The Five Doctors, leaving it sometimes quite unrecognisable as the education based family entertainment programme it had once been.

The purpose of this book is to explore what happened in the creation and broadcast of The Two Doctors. To see what really happened behind the scenes, and to try and understand what made the story so distinctive. Through long interviews with the cast and crew who worked on it, a clear picture has emerged as to what is was like to make The Two Doctors, and indeed what it was like to make a BBC drama programme during the nineteen eighties.

So why not take a wander down memory lane, to an era where the Doctor wore a tasteless coat, had a voluptuous American companion, and was about to find himself in a lot of trouble - himself in the form of a cosmic hobo, with a recorder, some jelly babies and a Scottish companion in a kilt......

CREATION

The genesis of The Two Doctors came as early as 1983, when the Doctor Who production team, namely producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Eric Saward, were in the process of devising a one off extravaganza celebrating the programme's twentieth anniversary which was to feature old friends, old enemies and all five Doctors.

An early script suggestion by popular writer Robert Holmes for the story was The Six Doctors, which involved the Cybermen kidnapping the Doctor, and searching for his symbiotic nuclei - the part of a Time Lord's genetic structure that permits him to travel safely through time. The Cybermen were then to attempt to augment themselves with the nuclei to give themselves the power of unlimited time travel. However, Holmes felt he was being pressured too much by the production team, and that he could not do justice to the story in the short time that he had to complete a script. For this reason, he was replaced by Terrance Dicks, who disregarded the whole idea, dismissing it as "too complex for the Who audience" and wrote a completely different script entitled The Five Doctors.

Another reason for not using this script came to light in a recent interview with Peter Davison, who at the time had been playing the Doctor for a little under two years:

"It was far too confusing, to be absolutely honest. Bob had come up with this radical new idea about time travel, and it really wouldn't have fitted at all. Also, I couldn't pronounce the word 'symb....', ah,... 'symbee'...., er....whatever that bloody word is. I much preferred Terrance's plan involving Gallifrey and the dark tower."

The idea remained unused, and began to gather dust in the Doctor Who office, and most concerned forgot all about it, thinking that it would never work within the confines of a children's programme, particularly while Peter Davison remained in the title role.

But by 1985, Doctor Who had changed. A new actor, former Brothers star Colin Baker, had taken on the role of the good Doctor, and the show had taken on a new, more adult direction. Also, the length of each episode had changed from twenty five minutes, to forty five minutes, theoretically allowing more complex plots for the stories. It was when Patrick Troughton called the Doctor Who office that Robert Holmes' script was remembered, and The Two Doctors slowly began to take shape. However, Troughton's telephone call initially caused terrible problems, as the show's then script editor Eric Saward recalls:

"We got this telephone call from Pat Troughton in the summer of 1984, saying he had enjoyed doing The Five Doctors so much that he wanted to come back as the Doctor and make a whole new series. He kept babbling on about how the fans loved him, and it became clear that he thought he really was the Doctor. Now this is quite a common affliction for actors playing the Doctor, because William Hartnell and Tom Baker thought the same thing about themselves, but we really didn't want to deal with it. Eventually, we had to tell Pat that he could come back for just one story, but it would be the equivalent of one of the old six-parters. He seemed quite content with this."

Troughton was not entirely happy with the decision to just make one story, and furthermore he did not quite understand the implications of working on the show, as his long time friend and fellow actor Nicholas Courtney remembers:

"Pat was crying down the phone to me, saying that the BBC hated him and that he only could get them to make one Doctor Who story, instead of a series. I had to explain to him that he would not be the only Doctor in the programme, that Colin Baker would also be appearing, and all these things. I expected him to go supernova, but fortunately, it turns out that him and Colin already knew each other, and were firm friends, so that really poured oil on the troubled waters, as it were."

With Troughton signed up to star in one of the stories of the 1985 season, Eric Saward turned to a man of great experience, Robert Holmes, to write it, which was when the unused script for The Six Doctors was remembered, dusted off and read again by Eric Saward. "It was a bit patchy" admits Saward, "But there were some really amusing bits in it, so I told Bob to go and write a new story, but to base it on The Six Doctors."

While Saward and Holmes discussed ideas for the script, producer John Nathan-Turner was looking at the budget allocated to the story with director Peter Moffat, to see if there was enough to finance an overseas location. The use of foreign climes had proved very successful in the stories City of Death, Arc of Infinity, and Planet of Fire, which had been filmed in Paris, Amsterdam, and Lanzarote respectively. The two men established that with some crafty budgeting here and there, it could be done, without affecting the production values of the following story, Timelash. Nathan-Turner then instructed Robert Holmes to include a foreign location in his script. Peter Moffat recalls how Holmes went a little bit too far:

"Doctor Who was by this point in time very popular in America , so Robert Holmes set his story in New Orleans. John hit the roof when he found out, and began shouting about the cost of it all. Bob couldn't see the problem - he was an artist, not a businessman."

A compromise was eventually reached, when a BBC journalist working in Seville contacted the Who office, saying that cheap plane tickets in Spain could be utilised as working holidays for BBC programmes, and that Doctor Who was an ideal choice. John Nathan-Turner agreed, and the location was duly changed to Seville. This was a problem for Robert Holmes, who had already written a first draft of the story, which had the working title The Kraglon Inheritance, in which a race of aliens were planning to kidnap the Doctor and take him to New Orleans. In an interview for Doctor Who Magazine, Robert Holmes explained the original thoughts behind this idea:

"I had written the script to be set in New Orleans, not Seville. I couldn't think of any reason why aliens should visit New Orleans. I recalled it was a jazz place, but not even I could envisage a race of aliens obsessed with jazz . Then I remembered that New Orleans is the culinary centre of America, with lots of restaurants. So I invented the Androgums, who are obsessed with food - an anagram of gourmand. They went to New Orleans for the food. They stayed in the script however when it shifted to Seville because I couldn't think of anything else."

However, the Androgums were not the only alien race to appear in the story. As the story was something of a celebration, John Nathan-Turner wanted another, more familiar monster to appear in the series. Originally, he suggested Kroll, the giant octopus creature from The Power of Kroll, but later changed his mind to the Sontarans, who had last appeared in The Invasion of Time. Holmes duly wrote another draft featuring the Sontarans, this time with the title The Androgum Inheritance. As the script began to take shape, Peter Moffat began looking at casting the story:

"Apart from Colin, Pat and Nicola Bryant, I had a pretty clean slate to work on. The biggest problem was, who was going to be Pat's companion. We asked Debbie Watling, Frazer Hines, and Nicholas Courtney, but Debbie dropped out when she found out she would be working with Colin Baker, as they had fallen out several years earlier and had not spoken since. Eventually, I plumped for Frazer, who was very well known at the time for playing Joe Sugden in Emmerdale Farm."

Nicholas Courtney was very displeased by this decision, calling it "jobs for the boys", but Frazer Hines feels that Moffat had chosen the best man for the job:

"Nick Courtney is a bitter man, isn't he? I mean, he was in The Five Doctors from the start, but I was just a ghost who appeared for five minutes! Also, he only starred with Pat a couple of times, yet I was the longest standing companion of all time. Courtney can put it in a bag and stuff it, for all I care."

Jacqueline Pearce and John Stratton were chosen to play the Androgum characters, Chessene and Shockeye, while Doctor Who veteran Laurence Payne readily agreed to play the perverted scientist, Dastari. However, it was the character of Oscar Botcherby that caused the most casting problems. "Quite honestly, it was all a cock-up" remembers Peter Moffat. "Botcherby was this dreadful unemployed actor figure, who was cowardly and very bland. Every actor I asked wouldn't touch it with a barge pole."

Eventually, the role of Botcherby went to James Saxon, a relatively unknown theatre actor. Now a director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Saxon explains exactly why he took the role:

"Now, I know that everyone hates Botcherby. The fans, the critics, even the actors who were asked to play him. I don't honestly know why. From the moment I read the script, I knew that I loved him. I could identify with him, laugh with him, cry with him, and when I got to his sad death towards the end, a little part of me died too. I told Peter Moffat that I would do it for nothing, and donate my fee to charity."

To be continued...

8th February 2004