Trivia / Doctor Who S17 E2 "City of Death"

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• Actor-Inspired Element: Lalla Ward came up with Romana's schoolgirl outfit, completely unaware that there was a fetish for it.
  I thought it would be fun to wear something that little girls probably hated wearing because it might cheer them up...I didn't bank on the fact that I'd also get loads of letters from their fathers saying "Cor! School uniform!"
• Alan Smithee: "David Agnew" is a stock BBC pseudonym used when the real author can't be credited for some reason. Most of this story was the work of producer Graham Williams and script editor Douglas Adams rewriting David Fisher's original scripts when Fisher proved unavailable to do them himself; the final product resembled Fisher's work so little that he couldn't be credited, but BBC guidelines prohibited the show's producer or script editor from taking writing credits on their own show.
• Defictionalization: Prints of The Mona Lisa were once made available at a Tom Baker signing, signed "This is a fake — TOM BAKER".
• Hostility on the Set: Lalla Ward clashed with costume designer Doreen James over Romana's outfit. Tensions escalated when Ward blamed James for the disappearance of a pair of red shoes. James would quit after this story because of their cold relationship.
• No Adaptations Allowed: This is one of just four serials not to have a novelisation published by Target Books, as Douglas Adams was reluctant to let anyone else adapt his own work, but following the success of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy the money it would have cost to commission him was out of Target's price range. James Goss went on to write one for BBC Books after Adams died, following the success of a previous adaptation of the then-unfinished "Shada".
• Shoot the Money: The production team actually traveled to Paris for filming, making this the first time a Doctor Who story was shot outside of Britain. Most of the story was set in Paris anyway, but the director made sure to include gratuitous shots of the Doctor and Romana walking around Parisian locations in the first episode.
• Vacation, Dear Boy: This was the first time the series filmed overseas. The original plan was to recreate Paris in a studio, but then-unit manager John Nathan-Turner pointed out that it would cost about the same to actually film in Paris (provided several changes were made to the script). Douglas Adams wrote the script in the space of a weekend despite his famous Ridiculous Procrastinator personality, knowing that to do so meant he could go to Paris and get apocalyptically drunk.
  • Then, he was informed that there was only enough in the budget to send the bare minimum of people necessary, and so the script editor (him) would not be invited along for filming as was the usual practice. He and another Doctor Who director decided to go anyway on their own dime. Their plans to enlist Tom Baker into their pub-crawling were derailed when they found that the break-neck pace of filming had left him and Lalla Ward exhausted.
• Wag the Director: Lalla Ward rejected her original costume of a silver catsuit in favour of the schoolgirl outfit.
• What Could Have Been:
  • David Fisher's initial draft, called The Gamble with Time, was mainly set in the year 1928 with the Doctor and Romana, aided by Bulldog Drummond-esque detective "Pug" Farquharson, on the trail of the stolen Mona Lisa. Pursuing Scarlioni through Paris to Monte Carlo where his partner, the Baroness Heidi, is using time travel technology to cheat at a casino to fund Scarlioni's time travel experiments. The Doctor and Romana ultimately discover that Scarlioni is trying to journey back to prehistoric Earth and prevent the time bubble explosion in order to save his fellow Sephiroth, who are dying from an illness he believes is caused by radiation from the accident. However, the Doctor discovers that they actually died of the common cold, to which the Sephiroth have no immunity. Scarlioni agrees to let the time bubble accident happen, in order to spark the genesis of life on Earth.
  • Prior to that, the story was originally set in Las Vegas.
  • The story was originally going to start with a close-up of the Doctor and Romana which would pull back to reveal them standing high atop the Tower. This was abandoned when the special lens rented for the sequence from a Spanish firm could not be made to fit the BBC camera.
  • The artist who sketches Romana in the café was originally a much more prominent figure called Bourget, who is in league with Scarlioni.
  • Siân Phillips was offered the role of Countess Scarlioni.
• Working Title: The Gamble with Time, The Time of the Sephiroth and Curse of the Sephiroth.
• You Look Familiar: Julian Glover also played Richard the Lionheart. This has led to a bit of fanon that Richard the Lionheart was one of Scaroth's personas.

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