Trivia / Doctor Who

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Trivia items

A-D

• Accidental Downer Ending: Skillfully Averting this trope was the main reason John-Nathan Turner soundly vetoed the original final cliffhanger for "Trial of a Time Lord", which entailed The Doctor and The Valeyard last being seen falling into The Matrix locked in combat. Turner knew that such a spectacle would give Michael Grade the reason to cancel the show, as it looked like a final ending, even if that wasn't intended.
• Acting for Two:
  • William Hartnell plays both the First Doctor and the Abbot of Amboise in "The Massacre".
  • Patrick Troughton plays both the Second Doctor and the evil Salamander in "The Enemy of the World".
  • In "Inferno", almost every actor in the cast plays two characters - one character in the normal world, and their parallel world counterpart. Most memorably, Nicholas Courtney played the Brigadier's evil fascist counterpart "The Brigade Leader". The only major exceptions are Jon Pertwee himself, since there is no Doctor in the parallel world, and Christopher Benjamin, who plays Sir Keith Gold in the normal world, since his parallel world counterpart is already dead when the Doctor arrives there.
  • Mary Tamm plays four roles in "The Androids of Tara": Romana, Princess Strella and their respective android doubles.
  • Tom Baker plays both the Fourth Doctor and Meglos in "Meglos".
  • Sarah Sutton plays both Nyssa and Ann Talbot in "Black Orchid"
  • David Tennant portrays both his usual Tenth Doctor character and a duplicate in "Journey's End".
  • In "The End of Time", everyone on Earth (with a few exceptions) turns into John Simm's Master.
  • A popular trope with the Eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith) was this incarnation meeting himself and even interacting with earlier and later versions of himself on occasion.
  • Jenna Coleman arguably portrayed more different individual characters — all aspects of companion Clara Oswald, or someone impersonating her — than anyone else in the show's history.
  • Nicholas Briggs voices both the Daleks and the Cybermen.
    • While they usually managed at least two actors to voice the various Daleks and Cybermen (and in the 70s and 80s the actors in the Cybermen costumes did the voice themselves), there were several times that Peter Hawkins, Roy Skelton or Michael Wisher had to do all the voices solo.
  • Both Ricky and Mickey are played by Noel Clarke.
• Acting in the Dark:
  • Tom Baker held himself to this. He only read and learned his lines in his scripts, because he viewed his role as to react to events in the way the Doctor would (and, with his usual thought processes, felt that knowing anything about what other characters were doing in the story was "invasive"). You'd be hard-pressed to say this made his acting any more naturalistic, as would be the usual intention for this technique — but it certainly helped Tom Baker stay in character. It also led to him interrupting and stepping on the lines of the guest cast due to a genuine unawareness of when he was supposed to say his line, although since the Fourth Doctor is a scene-stealing Attention Whore Insufferable Genius it usually works.
  • Colin Baker was not told whether the events of "Mindwarp", which are presented as evidence in Season 23's overarching courtroom trial, really happened or were tampered into incriminating lies... and neither were any other crew member, as the only person who knew, script editor Eric Saward, ragequit the show following Hostility on the Set with producer John Nathan-Turner by the time production began. Having no idea how the Story Arc would proceed, Baker chose to perform the story as if it were false.
  • Alex Kingston was the only person aside from Steven Moffat that knew the extent of River Song's arc and the events which occurred in it before the readthroughs. In her debut story "Silence in the Library"/"Forest of the Dead", David Tennant had no idea what was going on and was forced to come up with own ideas as to who the Doctor believed River Song to be. He famously said he acted under the assumption that the Doctor believed River was an older, gender-bent incarnation of his because even though that made no sense, it was the most logical thing he could think of. Similarly, Matt Smith (The Eleventh Doctor), Karen Gillan (Amy), and Arthur Darvill (Rory) were completely unaware and were given the heads-up only when filming was about to happen for the scene in which River's identity was revealed in "A Good Man Goes to War".
  • Peter Capaldi had no idea he was going to meet the First Doctor, revived by David Bradley, in the cliffhanger of "The Doctor Falls".
• Actor-Inspired Element: Most, if not all, the Doctors have had at least some input into their costume design and their Doctor's idiosyncrasies.
  • The First Doctor's Character Tic of Accidental Misnaming was inspired by William Hartnell's difficulty remembering the name "Ian Chesterton" in rehearsal. Since it fit the Doctor's detached and absent-minded personality perfectly, and because William Russell was able to make the cast and crew crack up by ad-libbing around them, it was agreed it would become one of his most memorable quirks. (Some fans believe that the manglings of "Chesterton" in the series itself are all genuine flubs, but a quick look at the script proves this is not the case.)
  • Patrick Troughton played the recorder himself, and always carried his recorder with him. This quirk was ported straight into the character of his Doctor. The Second Doctor's Social Expertise also stemmed from Troughton, an intuitive people-watcher who loved reading social dynamics — this impressed Gerry Davis enough that he insisted Troughton play the Doctor like that.
  • Jon Pertwee was a gadgets and cars aficionado, and asked if these could be incorporated into his character, along with a moment or two of "charm". Suffice to say his Doctor became the closest to James Bond. He also came up with his look. The story goes that he didn't have a costume ready for his photocall, so he went to his attic and raided a trunk containing his father's clothes and a cloak that belonged to his grandfather. The dashing Victorian dandy look was just what they production team was looking for.
  • Tom Baker came up with the Fourth Doctor offering Sarah Jane jelly babies and they ran with it. ^note While Baker may have been a big fan of Jelly babies, they were first seen in possession of the Second Doctor, who offered one to the Brigadier the second time they showed up. The fact that Tom Baker's favourite jelly babies were the orange ones was eventually written into the character in "The Invasion of Time". Also, the Attention Whore characteristics written into the character from Season 15 onward were added in when the crew realised they weren't able to stop Tom Baker hamming it up for attention any more.
  • Peter Davison suggested his cricket outfit, as he was a fan of the sport. John Nathan-Turner reportedly got the idea to cast Davison after seeing a photo of him at a charity cricket match from the set of All Creatures Great And Small.
  • It was Colin Baker's idea for the Sixth Doctor to wear a cat badge. He also suggested that he have an extensive vocabulary as a way of encouraging children to look up new words. (Averted hard with the notoriously garish coat, though, which Colin hated as much as almost everyone else did.)
  • The Seventh Doctor's hat actually belonged to Sylvester McCoy. Plus, a lot of McCoy's performance artist background bled into the character, such as playing the spoons, physical comedy, etc.
  • Sophie Aldred contributed to the design of Ace's badge-bedecked jacket, and some of the badges are from her own collection, the most famous being a Blue Peter badge she was awarded as a child for an experiment in home rocketry.
  • Christopher Eccleston suggested that his Doctor wear a leather jacket, as he wanted a less showy costume than before.
  • David Tennant came up with the Tenth Doctor's trenchcoat, having seen Jamie Oliver wear one on a talk show. He also insisted on wearing Converse trainers instead of the boots the production team had in mind for him. The Doctor's glasses were also his idea.
  • Steven Moffat conceptualised Matt Smith's Eleventh Doctor with a piratical theme and personality, so when Smith asked to wear a bowtie and to have a dotty and professorial personality, Moffat rejected it out of hand, calling it a "cartoon idea" of what the Doctor was like. However, Smith eventually persuaded Moffat to give this persona a spin, and Moffat realised it worked perfectly and wrote the scripts to suit.
  • Twelfth Doctor:
    • The Doctor's much more abrasive and grumpy personality in Series 8 was due to Capaldi's insistence, as he wanted to play a more detached and alien Doctor similar to the First Doctor, whom he had watched while growing up.
    • According to a Reddit AMA with the writer of "Mummy on the Orient Express", a scene where the Twelfth Doctor offers a cigar case to someone he's interrogating only to reveal it's full of jelly babies was Peter Capaldi's idea.
    • Capaldi's past as the guitarist of a punk band (with Craig Ferguson!) was also added to the series, with the Doctor playing guitar in many Series 9 episodes.
    • He also helped design his costume so that it would be easier for cosplayers to replicate.
  • Jodie Whittaker collaborated with costume designer Ray Holman on designing her costume; during their first meeting about it, Whittaker got completely distracted by the colour of the wallpaper behind them, told Holman she absolutely loved that colour, and it ended up becoming the colour for the Thirteenth Doctor's trousers. It was largely inspired by an old photo of an androgynously dressed woman that Jodie felt an immediate attachment to.
    
    She suggested Thirteen's first words of "Oh, brilliant!", as it really is something she says a lot herself. She also stated prior to her first full series that she'd try to fit in another expression she often uses, "Ace!"^note Funnily enough, this was already something of a catchphrase for the companion named Ace, much to the confusion of anyone unfamiliar with the saying.
    
    Thirteen's TARDIS has a special dispenser for custard creams, Jodie's actual favourite biscuit. This one was actually put in by the set designers as a surprise for her.
    
    Jodie and the costume designer took a liking to a scarf the production designer had been given by his wife, and he let her wear it on the show.
  • This has also happened with a few of the actors to play The Master:
    • John Simm's Master wasn't intended to wear a Beard of Evil in the Series 10 finale (Simm having intentionally been cast because he didn't resemble any of the classic series Masters), but when he turned up with one for rehearsals, Moffat let it stick.
    • Sacha Dhawan, when asked for any ideas he had regarding what his Master should dress like, sent in a bunch of pictures of Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner.
• Ascended Fan Nickname: During the Steven Moffat era, fans started referring to the Doctor and companions as "Team TARDIS". During the subsequent Chris Chibnall era, the Thirteenth Doctor herself started using the term.
• Ascended Fanon:
  • As a long-time fan himself, Steven Moffat incorporated his own fan theories into the show, such as the reason why the Doctor never reveals his name being because there is some Dark Secret behind it. This plot point literally became a cliffhanger at the end of Series 6, where it's revealed that the reason the Silence want the Doctor dead is to prevent the Question from being answered.
    The Doctor: What Question?
    Dorium: The Question. The oldest one in the universe, hidden in plain sight! Doctor Who?!
  • He also incorporated his theory that the word "doctor" has come to mean "healer" (or something similar) throughout the universe because of the Doctor going around introducing himself as "Doctor" wherever he goes.
  • In the Comic Relief special The Curse of Fatal Death, the Doctor regenerates into a woman. In "The End of Time", the Eleventh Doctor feels his face and hair and freaks out, thinking he's regenerated into a woman. In "The Doctor's Wife", the Doctor mentions that a Time Lord known as the Corsair has had both male and female incarnations. In "The Night of the Doctor", the Sisterhood of Karn gives the Doctor the chance to control his next regeneration, part of the choices being a woman. Established character the Master, and later the General from "The Day of the Doctor", were shown regenerated into women, though the latter sort of threw a spanner into some of the headcanon by stating on screen that changing genders is not considered the norm and that Time Lords do have baseline genders. The Doctor officially regenerates into a woman with the Thirteenth Doctor.
  • In a more direct example, Sarah Dollard, writer of "Face the Raven", (as evidenced by her Tumblr) a supporter of the headcanon that Clara is bisexual, pretty much confirmed it in her episode. (This is debatable as all that occurs on screen is a continuation of a Running Gag from the first episode of the season; however, Dollard had originally planned a scene for the episode in which Clara and Jane would have met each other again.)
• Author's Saving Throw: Quite a few examples over the years:
  • At the end of "The Daleks" the Daleks are all killed off, which caused the writers a problem when they became an instant huge success. "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" has the Doctor speculate that he's gone back to a time before they all died. Later stories simply ignore it, with some Expanded Universe stories and much commentary on the show taking advantage of the "Daleks" Daleks' weaker powers and different personality to suggest that they were simply a splinter faction of the main Dalek civilisation, or surviving descendants of early experiments by Davros.
  • When Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes took over the show, they agreed that six part stories were unnecessary, finding them overlong and padded, so they reduced them to only one big six parter per season.
  • After the violent Sixth Doctor era the series tried this by becoming more light hearted. Audiences continued to drop, with the Doctor coming across as a goofy clown. So the stories became darker and the Doctor became more mysterious. Though the series was cancelled after another two seasons, those two seasons of the Seventh Doctor's era became a Cult Classic.
  • The treatment given Peri in "Trial of a Time Lord" can be considered an inverted "Author's Ruining Throw": in "Mindwarp" Peri has a spectacular death, having the brain of one of the villains transplanted into her (shaved) head before being gunned down by a horrified ally who liked her, King Yrcarnos, but several episodes later in the season finale this was cravenly undone as having been false evidence, with Peri having run off to be King Yrcarnos' queen instead. This was apparently intended to placate fans who would be upset at Peri's fate, but instead the retcon was decried by almost everyone, including Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant (who didn't even know this had been done to her character until long after the fact), and has been largely rejected by fans.
  • The 1996 TV movie included a scene in which the Doctor says that he is half-human; this was widely disliked and subject to Fanon Discontinuity. To ameliorate this, without upsetting the fans who enjoy this interpretation (Eighth Doctor Adventures doubled down on making him half-human), Moffat has stated that the Doctor did indeed utter those words, very carefully not specifying whether they were true. After all, the Doctor lies. "Hell Bent", the Moffat-penned Series 9 finale, has Ashildr/Me ask the Doctor if he's half-human (it has to do with the possibility that he is The Hybrid), but he only asks her if it matters what he is by way of reply, and the conversation takes another path from there.
  • Though it may not have been intended this way, the reveal in "The Christmas Invasion", that in the first day after regeneration a Time Lord can perform drastic body alterations, has been seized on in Fanon as an explanation for Romana's notorious regeneration scene in "Destiny of the Daleks", where she appeared to waste several of them just to "try out" different looks.
  • In "The Impossible Planet"/"The Satan Pit", the Happiness in Slavery depiction of the Ood as a happy servitor race and the Doctor's acceptance of it as unproblematic were seen by many fans as gross breaches of the series' and the character's usual moral positions. Two years later the "Planet of the Ood" story returned to the same setting and revealed that the slave Ood were only happy because the evil humans had been lobotomising them, and that the Doctor only accepted their servitude because he was a bit preoccupied with a planet orbiting a black hole and Satan trying to kill them all... shut it.
  • The Daleks got a multicoloured upgrade in "Victory of the Daleks", and the bright, colourful Daleks were presented as what a Dalek would look like forevermore, the "New Dalek Paradigm," as they put it. It turned out even this Narm Charm-loving fanbase has its limits. So the next time a Dalek had to be a threat, it was a sorta petrified-looking run-down one with no trace of its original colour. Every Dalek appearance since then has had the old bronze Daleks as the vast majority if not the only design. The "New Dalek Paradigm" is apparently still around, but they're taking a backseat to their bronze immediate predecessor models.
    • A visit to the restored Dalek homeworld of Skaro showed Dalek variants from all across franchise history. The New Paradigm Daleks were not seen in any way, not even as background filler, letting us know they're as good as never having been. (This also constitutes a 'throw' to one problem people had with Asylum of the Daleks - in that episode, the past Dalek variants people got excited for were only seen briefly, in light so low it's hard to tell the old ones from the new. The Special Weapons Dalek, which really got the fandom excited, was especially blink-and-miss. Not so in the return to Skaro - the old Daleks get as much screentime as the current model, with the Special Weapons Dalek getting to be the one to yell "EXTERMINATE THE DOCTOR!" as they mobilized.)
  • After "The Pandorica Opens" / "The Big Bang", some fans pointed out that a Dalek begging River for mercy was out of character for them and an example of Moffat Character Shilling River. "The Magician's Apprentice" / "The Witch's Familiar" confirms that the Daleks do have a concept of mercy, and makes it a huge plot point. It's also later revealed that River supposedly killed the Doctor, which would give the Daleks a reason to be afraid of her.
  • In "The Crimson Horror", Ada Gillyflower's total lack of hesitation or regret in killing her abusive mother, the episode's main villain, may be a response to the hostile reaction of some fans to the ending of "The Idiot's Lantern", also written by Mark Gatiss, which was seen as arguing that people have a moral obligation to forgive their abusive parents.
  • In Matt Smith's last three episodes, Steven Moffat utilized disparate plot threads dating back to the earliest days of the revived series to negate the whole issue of the Doctor only having thirteen lives, in case the BBC felt like cancelling the series when the thirteenth actor left.
  • Clara's exit from the show is interpreted as a direct counterpoint to Donna's, which nulled her agency so the Doctor wouldn't have to watch another friend die. Here he tries to do it again but has the technique bounced back at him, so he's the one who forgets Clara as she gets to keep having her own badass adventures. In addition, it's a counterpoint to Rose's departure and Ten wrecking his next relationship with Martha because he couldn't get past it, as Twelve forgetting his key personal/emotional memories of her, but not the adventures they had leaves him far less likely to hold new companions to Clara's standard.
    • Her reappearance in "Twice Upon a Time" addresses complaints that "Hell Bent" retconned her death and its impact by confirming that she really did go back and die, in the end.
  • Also, many fans had begun to tire of the way all main companions' departures in the new series (save Martha) were a "tragically ripped away from each other, leaving both devastated" affair. This time it was Clara's choice and done in a way that leaves both characters on a positive And the Adventure Continues note.
  • There are some fans who have shown distaste for the Cybus Cybermen from "Rise of the Cybermen"/"The Age of Steel". After "The Pandorica Opens" aired, Moffat tweeted that this appearance of the new Cybermen were in fact the Mondas Cybermen; they just didn't have the budget to change the costume.
  • "The Shakespeare Code" attracted criticism from some fans over Ten's casual response to Martha's worries about encountering racism in early modern England, which was thought to be too flippant and dismissive of her genuine reason to fear. In "Thin Ice", Bill, the show's next black companion, expresses the same worries on arriving in Regency England, and Twelve discusses the issue far more seriously and maturely with her.
  • Ten's epic regeneration in "The End of Time" was because of his huge popularity, with the BBC stating they wanted it to serve a proper farewell to David Tennant, but left some fans feeling it was overly dramatic and made him both Unintentionally Unsympathetic and hypocritical by being bizarrely attached to this face when one of his first lines was to convince Rose that he was the same person as his previous incarnation. Eleven is much more optimistic regarding regeneration and Twelve's apprehension in his final episode is treated with more finesse with his final speech being essentially "Dear Thirteen, it's your turn now."
  • Moffat's era got many accusations of suffering from Continuity Lockout not just from itself but also the classic series, until it felt like the only audience the show was interested in were people who'd grown up with the old episodes. Some of Series 10 could be considered an answer to this, Moffat outright saying the first episode "The Pilot" could serve as a jumping on point for new fans.
  • The Whittaker era crew put out a statement acknowledging the complaints about the severe underutilization of Yaz, and promising to try harder with her in Series 12.
  • After Series 11 was criticized for a lack of familiar characters, an overarching storyline, and a Wham Episode, its 2019 New Years special and 12th series were filled to the brim with course correction: from the Dalek appearing in the New Years special, the Master in the first two episodes of the 12th series, the Judoon and even Jack Harkness showed up in quick succession, more focus on the Timeless Child, and the Lone Cyberman was revealed. Whamtastic revelations such as Gallifrey burned again and the "Ruth" Doctor on the run from the Time Lords brought back the heavy serialized feeling of the Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh Doctor Era.
  • Surprisingly enough, the announcement that Ryan and Graham would both be leaving the show after the 2020 holiday special was widely viewed as one. Despite both characters being quite popular, the fans largely agreed that Series 11 and 12 had suffered from having to split their attention between four main characters. Even better, this leaves us with just Yaz, who had easily been the most ill-served by the arrangement with many hoping this would allow her to finally bloom as a character.
• Banned in China: In a literal sense. The show was banned in Mainland China because the Chinese government discourages time travel plots. However, in 2017, BBC Worldwide signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Chinese media company Shanghai Media Group Pictures making the revival series, Torchwood and Class available on the mainland, with first refusal for four series after Series 11 in the event they were commissioned.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!:
  • There's a widespread belief that the catsuit Zoe wore in "The Mind Robber" was purple, and it's frequently drawn like this in fanart. This seems to have originated from fan colourizations of black and white screenshots; there are colour photos on the DVD showing it was actually silver.
  • Tegan's supposed fondness for using "Rabbits!" as a swear word. She actually only uses it twice.
  • Clara uttered "Oh my stars" only a couple of times early on, if that, but fans adopted it as a catchphrase for her. She never utters it at all in Series 8 or 9.
  • Clara and the Twelfth Doctor never actually have a discussion about whether or not four is too much. The exchange in question was taken from a preexisting meme and transferred to a four panel image of Clara and the Doctor.
• Breaking News Interruption: The BBC famously delayed the airing of "An Unearthly Child" on November 23, 1963 for news coverage of the John F. Kennedy assassination. This is popularly believed to have influenced the episode's initially poor ratings, remedied by the BBC re-airing the episode a week later. This event was later referenced as a Mythology Gag in "Rose" and dramatized in the 50th anniversary docudrama An Adventure in Space and Time.
• Bury Your Art:
  • Douglas Adams attempted to do this with "Shada", a serial he wrote that was abandoned mid-production following a workers' strike in 1979. Adams disliked the story, refused to license it for novelization (it eventually got one in 2012, over a decade after his death), and nearly would've had the serial buried completely (barring some clips being recycled for "The Five Doctors") had he not absentmindedly signed an agreement in 1992 that allowed the BBC to release a reconstruction of it.^note A version of the Shada story was re-used by Adams in his novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, recycling the main characters and aspects of the plot. The Tom Baker role was re-written as eccentric private detective Dirk Gently.
  • After "The Dark Dimension" was scrapped, the Eastenders crossover "Dimensions in Time" was made in its place as the new 30th anniversary special. However, it was made under the agreement that it would never be re-released, and the BBC have adhered to this request to this day.
• Cash-Cow Franchise: The BBC has been prompt to capitalize on the show's new-found success since it returned. Three decades of Expanded Universe literature and audio have also helped.
• Cast Incest: David Tennant, the Tenth Doctor, is married to Georgia Moffett, who played the title character in "The Doctor's Daughter", and is the daughter of 5th Doctor actor Peter Davison, who interestingly enough is Tennant's favourite Doctor and the man who inspired him to go into acting. The couple has five children, too.
• The Cast Showoff:
  • Carole Ann Ford was a trained dancer, which is exploited in her Establishing Character Moment of her doing a very peculiar dance to some chart pop music.
  • A choreographer, Rosalyn de Winter, was consulted to develop the movements for the Zarbi, Menoptera and Optera in "The Web Planet", and the crew was so impressed with her that she was given the role of the lead Menoptera character in the story, Vrestin.
  • Patrick Troughton:
    • One of the Second Doctor's standard manoeuvres was Wig, Dress, Accent, which was deliberately written in to exploit how the Doctor was now played by an extremely versatile character actor who could convincingly alter his entire appearance just by affecting a different voice and mannerisms. Good examples are "Doktor von Wer" and the Harmless Lady Disguise from "The Highlanders", and the deliberately convoluted I Am He as You Are He situation in "The Enemy of the World" where he gets to play the Doctor, the Doctor's Criminal Doppelgänger, and both of them pretending to be each other, or pretending to be the other pretending to be them — some viewers even find that the Doctor and his lookalike come across so differently that they don't look remotely like each other, almost breaking the plot.
    • Troughton, in real life, loved playing the recorder and carried one about with him to play in idle moments, a quirk that got written into the character. The recorder the Second Doctor uses was his own.
    • The Second Doctor's ability to obsessively read people's social dynamics started when Gerry Davis was fascinated by Troughton's ability to do the same.
  • Jon Pertwee:
    • Had a fascination for gadgets and cars, which cropped up in the Third Doctor's stories. In fact, one car used by the Doctor during his run, known affectionately by fans as "The Whomobile", was Pertwee's own personal property, and not a BBC prop. This is why it is never seen or mentioned again after his final regular episode,"Planet of the Spiders", unlike Bessie, the more often seen yellow roadster.
    • Another of his Doctor's quirks was that he was into martial arts, particularly "Venusian aikido". Pertwee was a highly-skilled martial artist and tried to do his own stunts whenever possible (although a lot of the time the fight scenes aren't much more elaborate than running up to someone, lightly touching their arm and yelling 'hai').
    • Pertwee was a well-loved and accomplished singer and voice actor, and one of his Doctor's quirks is a fondness for singing in idle moments, usually in a funny voice or a bang-on impersonation of the original artist.
    • Pertwee was also an accomplished gurner. Several scenes were written which gave Pertwee an excuse to do his amazing face-pulling.
  • Tom Baker:
    • Could pop his already large, wide eyes partway out of his sockets. After a few years, him doing this in an Eye Take was a standard cliffhanger lead-in.
    • Word of God says the reason Tom Baker was given an elaborate Patrick Stewart Speech in "The Ark in Space" was to show off the then-newly cast Baker's speaking ability — both in terms of his ability to pull off the kind of soliloquies that his predecessor would never have been able to, and in terms of showing off his gorgeous voice, with which the production team was universally infatuated. Some writers (especially Robert Holmes) would even sneak Inherently Funny Words into the Doctor's dialogue in scripts, just for the joy of hearing Baker say them.
  • The Fourth Doctor's regeneration into the Fifth had the conceit that the Doctor was deliriously thinking he was still in his own past incarnations, allowing Peter Davison the opportunity to show off his gift for impressions as he played the first four Doctors.
    • Davison also got to show off his cricketing skills in "Black Orchid" and his fencing prowess in "The King's Demons".
  • The whole of Season 23 features the Doctor defending himself in a trial. Before he was an actor, Colin Baker was a lawyer.
  • Early on in his run, Sylvester McCoy would show skills of his from his old vaudeville act, such as playing spoons. As the show got Darker and Edgier, and as the Doctor's character became more complex, such displays were discarded.
  • Averted on several occasions: for example, despite having Kylie Minogue appear in a Christmas episode with a song interlude ("Voyage of the Damned", with the song being "The Stowaway"), she is never called upon to sing; Billie Piper similarly was allowed to do straight acting and not have to sing; and with a few exceptions, Catherine Tate was allowed to tone down her comedic acting and play Donna Noble straight.
  • The football match in "The Lodger" highlights that Matt Smith was headed to be a professional footballer before he had a Career-Ending Injury.
  • Katherine Jenkins, whose character Abigail Pettigrew's voice was pretty much a Chekhov's Gun.
  • "Closing Time" establishes that since leaving the Doctor, Amy Pond has become a popular model. In real life, actress Karen Gillan was a model before she was an actress.
  • Peter Capaldi used to play guitar in a band, so having him play electric guitar into an axe battle (for real!) worked well in "The Magician's Apprentice". Not only does he play the guitar again in "Before the Flood", the episode features a special arrangement of the title theme featuring a guitar solo by him! He also plays the iconic "Clara's Theme" in "Hell Bent".
• Cast the Runner-Up:
  • Jackie Lane and Anneke Wills both auditioned for Susan. They would both play Dodo and Polly respectively.
  • Deborah Watling was originally asked by Innes Lloyd to audition for Polly. She would later be cast as Victoria.
    We both agreed that I wasn’t really ready for it. I was too young and inexperienced. He then suggested I go away, learn more about theatre, and try again in about a year’s time.
  • Frazer Hines unsuccessfully auditioned for the part of Ben Jackson, A few stories he would be cast as Jamie McCrimmon, and his popularity would lead to Ben being written out of the show!
  • When Nicholas Courtney appeared in "The Web of Fear", he was originally cast as Captain Knight, with another actor cast as Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart. When that actor failed to turn up, Courtney got a promotion.
  • Ian Marter was originally offered the role of Captain Yates. He later made a guest appearance in "Carnival of Monsters" before being cast as Harry.
  • Colin Baker first made inquiries about playing the Doctor in 1980 when he learned that the role had become vacant. He was later cast as Commander Maxil in "Arc of Infinity" before being cast as the Sixth Doctor.
  • Sylvester McCoy put his name forward for consideration to play the Doctor in 1983, unaware the Baker had been cast. He would later play the Seventh Doctor.
  • BRIAN BLESSED was considered for Merdeen and Glitz in "The Mysterious Planet". He would be in "The Trial of a Time Lord" as King Yrcanos in "Mindwarp". Furthermore, Honor Blackman was considered for Katyca before being cast as Sarah Lasky in "Terror of the Vervoids".
  • Sophie Aldred originally auditioned for Ray in "Delta and the Bannermen", who was originally supposed to be the new companion. Instead, she was asked to reapply for the alternate companion, Ace.
  • Simon Pegg was originally slated to play Rose's father, Pete Tyler. However, Pegg was unavailable during the filming of "Father's Day", so his role was transferred to that of the Editor, the human villain of "The Long Game".
  • Georgia Moffett was originally offered the role of Robina Redmond in season four's "The Unicorn and the Wasp". She was instead cast as Jenny in "The Doctor's Daughter".
  • Michelle Gomez could have played Ms. Delphox in "Time Heist", but she couldn't make the audition. As she explained it later, "I was moved to write to Steven [Moffat] saying I was such a huge fan and if in the future if he ever needed someone for a razor-cheek-boned villainess then it’s me."^note She already had a connection with Moffat, as her husband Jack Davenport was the lead star of his previous show Coupling. This led to her being cast as Missy, the Series 8 Big Bad who went on to be central to the Twelfth Doctor's Myth Arc.
  • Jodie Whittaker was nearly cast in a guest role in Series 5. When Chris Chibnall became showrunner, she asked if she could play a villain under heavy prosthetics in Series 11, but then he told her there was another role she might be interested in...
  • Similarly, Sacha Dhawan was asked to play a character in Series 11, but was away for filming, then got offered his Series 12 role.
• Channel Hop: While the show has always aired on BBC One in the UK, it has bounced around between broadcasters abroad. For example, in the United States, the Classic series aired on several PBS affiliates, the TV movie aired on Fox, the revival started on Sci Fi, moved to BBC America in 2009, and moved again to Disney+ in 2023.
• The Character Died with Him:
  • Donna Noble's father appeared in "The Runaway Bride", but due to Howard Attfield's terminal illness and death during filming of "Partners in Crime", his parts were replaced by Wilfred Mott, who was retconned into Donna's grandfather, and Geoff Noble is stated to have died. As a dedication to the actor, the 10th Doctor in his final episode gives Donna's mother, as a wedding gift to Donna, a lottery ticket bought with a quid the Doctor obtained by going back in time offscreen to borrow from "a really lovely man. Geoffrey Noble, his name was."
  • Brigadier Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, as stated in "The Wedding of River Song". In fact, by way of tribute to the only actor to in some form act alongside all seven original series Doctors, his death is a crucial plot point in the episode — it is the Brigadier's death that gets the Doctor to stop running and face his fate in Utah. The character has since been mentioned a few times, the Brigadier's legacy upheld by his daughter, Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, a leader in UNIT just like her father. The Brig is unusual about this, in that he technically outlived his actor by years, but was still established as dead years down the line; the Brigadier apparently lived to the ripe old age of 150, decades longer than Nicholas Courtney. This is justified thanks to the Time Travel aspect of having the Doctor learn directly of his death later on and reeling from it. The character, however, briefly came back as a Cyberman in the last minutes of "Death in Heaven".
  • Dr. Harry Sullivan, brief companion of the Fourth Doctor alongside Sarah Jane Smith, when Sarah Jane mentions some of the Doctor's old companions' present exploits in "Death of the Doctor". It isn't spelled out, but he is mentioned in the past tense while the rest of them are mentioned in the present.
  • Oddly enough, inverted by the Master. Before Roger Delgado's untimely death in a car accident, there were plans to have his character Killed Off for Real in a final showdown with the Doctor. He later reappeared as a withered husk (later acknowledged as the same incarnation) played by Peter Pratt and then Geoffrey Beevers, before taking over the body of Tremas of Traken, played by Anthony Ainley, who would portray him for the remainder of the original series' run. Ainley himself died less than a year before the series returned to TV, and in 2007 the character returned, initially played by Derek Jacobi, then John Simm, Michelle Gomez, and most recently Sacha Dhawan.
  • Often erroneously applied to Sarah Jane Smith. Although The Sarah Jane Adventures was cancelled due to the death of Elisabeth Sladen in 2011, to date there has been no on-screen indication in the television canon that the character has also died, thus it more correctly applies. Russell T Davies specifically rejected the idea of depicting the character's death in canon when an interviewer brought it up, and despite his history as a Lying Creator, the franchise has kept to it. But in the Doctor Who Expanded Universe, Davies wrote a webcast story in 2020 called Farewell, Sarah Jane that depicted Sarah Jane's funeral. ^note  The special doesn't give a specific date for Sarah Jane's death, but considering her son Luke is stated to be married to his college sweetheart for five years at the time of the funeral, this implies Sarah Jane's death occurred a significant number of years after Elisabeth's Sladen's.
  • Not quite an actor, but the Fifth Doctor's could-have-been companion Kamelion, a shapeshifting robot, had to be written out of the series when the mechanical prop's software designer, Mike Power, died in a boating accident. As he'd only just finished programming the expensive apparatus and hadn't had the chance to write down the instructions, the prop malfunctioned constantly and became such a liability that the character spent the rest of his tenure in a back room of the TARDIS, then was given a Mercy Kill in "Planet of Fire".
• Character Outlives Actor:
  • Barbara Wright. In "Death of the Doctor", Sarah Jane mentions that Barbara and Ian are married, still teaching, and haven't aged since The '60s. This episode aired in 2010. Barbara's actress, Jacqueline Hill, died in 1993.
    • Fridge Horror kicks in when you realize that them not aging is really surreal and will likely never be explained, and this show has already explored the angst of human immortals. At least they have each other.
    • Ian makes a reappearance in "The Power of the Doctor", where he looks his chronological age, suggesting it's finally caught up with him - which is a Fridge Horror all its own.
  • Bernard Cribbins passed away after filming his cameo for the end of "Wild Blue Yonder", but Wilf is mentioned to be safe and sound during the next episode.
• Completely Different Title: In Latin America the first seasons were named "Doctor Misterio" (lit. Doctor Mistery).
• Content Leak:
  • The first episode of the 21^st-century run, "Rose", was leaked online by a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation staffer months before its official release. Articles written at the time of the leak suggested that the BBC orchestrated the leak in order to build buzz for the series.
  • "The Name of the Doctor" was leaked early after a BBC America store accidentally sent out the Series 7 box set two weeks before the episode aired. Despite Steven Moffat asking for people to not reveal anything, one newspaper revealed spoilers from the episode, including the reveal of John Hurt as a new Doctor.
  • Averted during the 50th anniversary. When someone threatened to leak details about the mini-episode "The Night of the Doctor", the BBC just went ahead and released the thing early.
  • The Series 8 premiere episode, along with several scripts for the season, leaked online due to a breach at the BBC's Latin-American affiliate station in Miami, FL. Interestingly, the leaked episode ("Deep Breath") was a workprint copy that was in black-and-white, still retained previous Doctor Matt Smith's credits sequence (instead of Peter Capaldi's) and had unfinished effects. The BBC later claimed that the breach (which also included uncontextualized scenes from workprint episodes for the first half of the season) was caused by someone mistakenly leaving the materials on a publicly-accessible part of the Miami server.
  • A clip featuring the Thirteenth Doctor from "The Woman Who Fell to Earth" leaked onto the Internet in July 2018, prior to the episode's broadcast in October 2018.
  • On November 21, 2018, Amazon Prime subscribers in the US who tried to watch "Kerblam!", the then-most-recent episode, were instead treated to the next episode, "The Witchfinders", which was set to air that coming weekend. With the subtitles for "Kerblam!", no less. The error was fixed after a few hours.
• Costume Backlash:
  • Tom Baker heavily disliked the changes that John Nathan-Turner made to the programme when he became producer in 1980, and this included the changes he made to the Doctor's costume. In particular, Baker voiced displeasure at the question marks that Nathan-Turner added to the Doctor's shirt collar (as part of an effort to more concretely brand the show), a complaint that would extend to later actors during the Classic Series.
  • Colin Baker (no relation to Tom) despised his costume for the Sixth Doctor, an infamously gaudy Stylistic Suck patchwork getup, as soon as he had to start wearing it, pejoratively describing it as "an explosion in a rainbow factory." He'd wanted the Doctor to wear a black velvet outfit to match his character's darkened personality and consequently took more kindly to the uniformly blue outfit that Six wears in a number of Expanded Universe stories, later voicing his approval on Twitter for a fan's customized action figure that approximated the "black velvet" look.
  • Sylvester McCoy didn't voice many issues with his costume as the Seventh Doctor for the most part but considered the question mark sweater vest tacky and overblown. He would swap it out for a red silk vest in the 1996 TV movie.
  • Wendy Padbury found the PVC dress she wore in "The Krotons" to be impractical, because it was so prone to accidental damage (some of which is visible in the episode as broadcast).
  • Martin Clunes, who played Lon in "Snakedance", looks back on his costumes in that serial without much in the way of fondness, something talk show hosts frequently exploit to mess with him, bringing up clips from the serial to riff on the outfits. This played a big part in the story becoming an Old Shame for Clunes.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer:
  • It's become generally accepted, by fans and production alike, that the Doctor's name is not "Doctor Who", but the media doesn't seem to know this. Even the end titles sometimes list the character as "Doctor Who". (That last is less egregious of an error in early episodes, when the name distinction wasn't firmly established yet.)
    • One of the most notorious examples comes from the story known today as "The Silurians", but which was originally named "Doctor Who and the Silurians".
    • That being said, the character of the Doctor HAS been referred to as "Doctor Who" on rare occasion in the show ("The War Machines", for one), and even actors who've played the role (such as Colin Baker or Sylvester McCoy) regularly refer to the character not as "the Doctor" but as "Doctor Who".
  • Jeremy Clarkson wrote an immediately reviled article in The Sun claiming that fans were leaving the show in droves over Series 11 being "too PC". Though there is no denying that there has been a notable fan backlash to it, his evidence for this was based on declining numbers across the series, despite the fact that it started from one of the highest rated episodes the show has ever had, and for its entire run got better viewing figures than the previous season had. Then the paper, along with the Daily Mail, started a rumour that Chibnall and Whittaker were both leaving the show after just one series, only to be stymied by the official announcement that filming on the next one had started with both of them still there. Ironically enough, Series 12 got ratings comparable with Series 10, the previous lowest, so if they’d just been a bit more patient they could have completely avoided making fools of themselves like this.
    • And apparently the anti-Thirteen crowd didn't learn their lesson from this ridicule at all; when a rumour started spreading in the months leading to Series 12 claiming that the Tenth Doctor would return, they tried to start an equally specious rumour that he would be reduced to a Straw Misogynist for Thirteen to lecture. Based on how hilariously Out of Character that sounded, pretty much no one ever bought it.
    • Then it reached whole new levels of pathetic when the same people started crowing again that low ratings had forced Whittaker out of the role after Series 13 long before it even started...as if three series hadn't long been established as the standard amount of time in the role.
• Creative Differences:
  • Maureen O'Brien, who played Vicki, got on very well with William Hartnell both in-character and on-set. When a new production team led by John Wiles took over, he began moving the show in a Darker and Edgier, Failure Hero-led, Internal Deconstruction direction that Hartnell disliked. O'Brien formed a team with him and supported all of Hartnell's attempts to Wag the Director, and Wiles decided to fire her in the hope of breaking Hartnell. Vicki was first pencilled in to be killed off, but was eventually Put on a Bus to Hell to get rid of the actress sooner.
  • William Hartnell's departure was also at least in part due to creative differences with a new production team (although his failing health was also a factor). He saw the show as a children's programme, but the new producers had other ideas. "So did I, so I left", as he said in a letter to a fan.
  • During the Troubled Production of "Nightmare of Eden", the entire cast and crew had it in for director Alan Bromly, an ageing director already in semi-retirement, unused to modern production schedules and values and with a very authoritarian attitude. This especially inflamed Tom Baker, who had been Wagging the Director frequently and who felt he was best when he could Throw It In! and do unscripted business. Seeing Bromly as incompetent, Baker took rather sadistic pleasure using his acerbic wit to bully and humiliate him in front of the crew, eroding his authority further, and their animosity eventually culminated in a screaming match between them in the BBC corridors which producer Graham Williams had to intervene in. The chaos had sent recording well behind schedule and Bromly was decided to have been responsible. Bromly quit, leaving Williams to take over the director's seat to complete the serial, citing creative differences with Baker, and Williams, who had become sick of Baker's difficult personality already, announced his intention to quit at the end of the season also because of creative differences with Baker. Williams' replacement was John Nathan-Turner, who Baker hated, and who wanted a new Doctor to leave his stamp on the show — so Baker eventually left the role stating he felt he had no further to go with his character and citing creative differences with Nathan-Turner. (Baker and Nathan-Turner did, however, become drinking buddies once they no longer had to work with each other.)
  • On "State of Decay", writer Terrance Dicks and director Peter Moffatt clashed with script editor Christopher H. Bidmead. They were in favour of a Hammer Horror approach, which he didn't think was the style that he wanted for the series.
  • The most notorious and damaging Doctor Who example was the conflict between the producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Eric Saward over the ending of the "Trial of a Time Lord" season. Saward, out of his general love for Darker and Edgier content and his hero worship of recently departed writer Robert Holmes, wanted it to end with a Cliffhanger in which the Doctor and his Enemy Without the Valeyard were seemingly either dead or trapped eternally in a Sealed Evil in a Duel situation. Nathan-Turner felt, with considerable justification, that since the BBC wanted to cancel the show altogether, writing an ending that could be seen as a Bolivian Army Ending for the whole show was a very bad idea, as it would give them the perfect excuse for cancellation. Saward, whose relationship with Nathan-Turner was already strained due to personality clashes and his belief that Nathan-Turner was paying insufficient attention to the artistic content of the series, accused Nathan-Turner of having no respect for Holmes' last work, immediately quit and withdrew permission to use his version of the final episode. Pip and Jane Baker had to be drafted in to write a replacement episode (having been chosen for no other reason than the script had to be ready in a matter of days and Nathan-Turner knew they could write quickly), but for legal reasons the new script could not have any similarity to Saward's, with a BBC lawyer sitting in on Nathan-Turner's meeting with the Bakers to ensure he did not tell them anything about the original conclusion. Saward then gave an interview to a fan publication viciously slagging off Nathan-Turner. The whole affair led to a somewhat disjointed on-screen end to a season that, in reality, had been seen as the show's make-or-break chance to avoid cancellation, and contributed to the show's actual cancellation a few years afterwards.
  • Christopher Eccleston left the revival due to his fights with the executives "over the way things were being run" and, according to him, his distaste for non-acting personnel getting bullied by directors.
• Creator Backlash:
  • The increasing powerlessness and incompetence of the First Doctor towards the end of his tenure was partially a response to William Hartnell's failing physical and mental health. His inability to remember lines and hatred of everyone else in the crew after the original crew of the series left put him constantly in a bad mood and gives his character a genuine frailty, and the writers responded by going for a Darker and Edgier tone and giving the Doctor fewer lines to say.
  • Patrick Troughton quit the show in 1969 to avoid being typecast, and because he wished to return to other programmes. He went as far as to urge Frazer Hines and Wendy Padbury to depart at the same time. Troughton enjoyed making comebacks in "The Three Doctors" and "The Five Doctors", and finally alongside Colin Baker in "The Two Doctors", and looked like he was thoroughly enjoying himself in all of them. Of course Troughton didn't hate the character — he would make himself available at conventions, and any time he and Jon Pertwee were at the same convention, the two would appear at joint panels and jokingly mock-bicker as Two and Three did in "The Three Doctors" and "The Five Doctors". Troughton also counselled Davison to stay on only 3 years, and this aided in his decision to leave the show in 1984.
  • Tom Baker was by his own admission a "very depressed man" when he got the role of the Doctor, and used his role in part to work through his own mental issues, referring to the rehearsal rooms as "his own little asylum". (He later stated in interviews that he was struggling to manage undiagnosed bipolar disorder the entire time he played the character.) This led to him being quite allergic to criticism and often attempting to Wag the Director, but his unhinged and obviously personal performance is one of the main reasons his Doctor is praised. The unusual characterisation of the Fourth Doctor in Season 18 is because Baker was seriously burned out with the role after doing it both onscreen and offscreen for seven years and because the line between his own personality and the Doctor's had been getting increasingly blurry — and he was physically unwell, too. Once his departure was known by the writers it was turned into an arc where every story was linked by themes of mortality and decay, foreshadowing his upcoming regeneration. Afterwards, Baker was reportedly keen to distance himself from Doctor Who after leaving the show, refusing to appear in "The Five Doctors", and for a long time refusing to do conventions and public appearances related to the show. He seems a lot more comfortable being associated with the show in recent years, however. In 1993, Baker filmed a small part for the short "episode" "Dimensions in Time". It's said there was far more planned using a different script, but Executive Meddling and a primadonna host got in the way. From 2009, Baker returned as the Doctor for three five-part series of audio dramas for BBC Audio, and in 2011, he finally began to star in the audio dramas for Big Finish Productions. He has shown some regret about not doing "The Five Doctors" and distancing himself from the series at large, but at over 80 years old his health will not allow more involvement outside of a brief cameo towards the end of the 50th Anniversary special and a new ending for "Shada" in 2017.
  • "Shada", written by Douglas Adams, was originally rushed out by him in four days when his previous script got rejected thanks to Executive Meddling. Some of the script was shot, but then shooting was interrupted with a strike, causing it to be cancelled. Adams, for his part, was happy about this, because he thought "Shada" was not up to much — however, since people love Douglas Adams' writing, fan demand became huge. In 1992, he accidentally signed away rights for the BBC to make a direct-to-video version of it with linking narration by Tom Baker, and was so distressed by this that he declared he would give away every penny of the proceeds he made of it to charity as penance. People who have seen the script say that while it wasn't anywhere near as godawful as the notably perfectionistic Adams thought it was (notably, it contains one of the all-time-brilliant Douglas Adams characters, Professor Chronotis, and gives the Fourth Doctor some of the wittiest, most enjoyable dialogue he was ever given), it is not up to the standard of his usual work, having gaping plotholes, minor characters who never get to come into the limelight, a very boring villain and being mostly a lazy, watered-down, low-budget retread of his previous Who script "City of Death". Both the Big Finish version (which was forced to shoehorn the Eighth Doctor into the role as Tom Baker refused to do radio scripts at the time) and the 2012 novelization by Gareth Roberts (written after his death as Douglas Adams would not allow anyone else to novelize it) were both attempts to fix the problems that Adams himself had identified — not to mention Adams' own Ascended Fanfic of the story, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, which replaces the Doctor, Chris and Claire with Expies and rescues Professor Chronotis from oblivion.
  • It took a long time for Peter Davison to become comfortable with his tenure as the Doctor. With most of his career still ahead of him, he had been terrified of being typecast and did everything possible to prevent it. In recent years, Davison has also mentioned the show's low budget and poor treatment from the BBC were a major source of his resentment towards the franchise. He has since said that he wishes that he could have worked on the show when it had the budget, studio support, and prestige it enjoyed after its revival in 2005. From the late '90s onwards, he's happily been playing the Doctor in monthly Big Finish Doctor Who episodes, and in 2007, reprised his role on TV in the mini-episode "Time Crash" as part of a charity drive. David Tennant used the short as a massive fan-gasm shout-out to Davison's tenure on the show: "you were MY Doctor." Tennant has repeatedly cited Davison's interpretation of the Doctor as his primary inspiration, and reason for becoming an actor. Davison had always felt that he was too young for the role. In "Time Crash" he felt he was at a more fitting age to play the Doctor, and had a grasp on the character that he was happy with. Ironically, the role of the Doctor being played by a younger man (and the contrast between the character's physical age and his actual age) was one of the primary things that carried over into Tennant and Matt Smith's portrayals, thanks in part to Davison's example.
  • Janet Fielding has stated that she was pretty bitter towards the show when she left because she wasn't happy with how she and her fellow companions were treated. This reached its high point with a notorious on-stage outburst at Panopticon 1993 when she told a room full of fans that any show that treated its female characters as badly as Doctor Who did deserved to have been cancelled. She's since gotten over it and is much more comfortable with the show now, although her negative remarks about certain stories on DVD commentaries have still caused controversy.
  • Surprisingly subverted by Colin Baker, who you would think — given that he was the only actor playing the Doctor to be fired from the role, that his era was for a long time not incredibly popular with fans and that, well, he had to wear That Coat — would have plenty of reason to not want to have anything to do with the show again. Instead, barring some rather understandable regrets, he's always appeared quite enthusiastic about the show, being associated with the show and returning to it in some form on occasion. Baker, long before David Tennant took the trope and ran with it, was the Promoted Fanboy on Doctor Who, having been a childhood fan of the show. He too has been doing Big Finish dramas as the Doctor continuously since the late 90s, and he (and the writers) went the extra mile to completely rehabilitate Six's reputation, leading to him being a poster boy for Rescued from the Scrappy Heap. Both Baker and Davison later took part in The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot, a special made for the show's fiftieth anniversary. It's notable for the sheer amount of Adam Westing the actors took part in.
  • Christopher Eccleston left after Series One, due to having spats with the executives over "the way things were being run" and, according to him, people being bullied by directors on-set was common. He (politely, and after a few cordial meetings with Moffat) declined to return in person for the 50th anniversary — which could have had to do with his commitment to Thor: The Dark World. He eventually returned to the Ninth Doctor for Big Finish from 2021 on.
  • Steven Moffat regards "The Beast Below" as his least favourite of the episodes he wrote, calling it a bit of a mess. A lot of the fandom agrees with him, this episode being widely considered the worst of Series 5.
  • Moffat doesn't have high thoughts on Series 7, often regarded as the revival series' weakest.
    Moffat: I didn't enjoy my third year as much. It was a bit miserable... The workload was just insane. I wasn't coping as well. No-one else's fault, all mine. The 50th was looming, and I didn't know if we could make it work. It was a tough, tough time. My darkest hour on Who was that.
  • Moffat also feels the opening episode to Series 9 wasn't original enough and that it alienated new viewers who weren't familiar with the lore and backstory around Davros and Skaro.
  • Neil Gaiman has since taken this stance towards "Nightmare in Silver" due to the changes the BBC made to the story through the production process.
  • After his surprise return in Series 12, John Barrowman got a bit salty about how the show finally had someone in charge who appreciated Jack, apparently a dig at Steven Moffat never taking advantage of his long-standing offer to drop anything on his plate and return to the show whenever they wanted him.^note Chris Chinball, who by Series 12 then had become the programme' showrunner, had been the head writer of the first two series of Torchwood, the spin-off starring Jack.
  • The show's original producer Verity Lambert was critical of the show after her tenure. She particularly disliked the Pertwee era, finding the idea of the Doctor working for the military unbelievable. By the late eighties, she felt it had become self-parody.
  • Terrance Dicks felt that during the eighties, "the magic just wasn't there". Barry Letts also felt that the series lost track during this period.
  • While no one has nice things to say about the classic series' cancellation, Sylvester McCoy was particularly taken back, having already had his arm twisted to stay on a fourth year.
  • Robert Holmes said that "The Power of Kroll" was the least favourite serial he'd written for the show. He never liked doing "scary monster" stories, so right from the start he was wary of the premise that script editor Anthony Read gave him. He found the finished product dull and shakily executed.
  • Martin Clunes is very embarrassed about his guest role in the 1983 serial "Snakedance" (though he's easily the best thing in the story).
  • Everyone involved with the notoriously bad charity single "Doctor in Distress" would like to forget about it. Colin Baker, who was against the idea from the start and had to be talked into it, called it one of the worst decisions he ever made, while Ian Levine, who wrote and produced it, apologised for it in 2005, calling it "a balls up fiasco".
  • Peter Kay has called his guest spot as the Abzorbaloff in 2006's "Love & Monsters" the one thing in his career that he regrets. While he had fun making it, he was disappointed by the finished product ("I'm a big green lizard running around Cardiff? Is that it?") and is aware that the episode is considered by some fans to be one of the worst ever.
• Creator's Favourite:
  • Jon Pertwee's favourite monster was the Draconians, due to how beautiful they were. It's possible to notice him stepping up his performance in the scenes where he's acting against them in "Frontier in Space". His least favourite monsters were the Daleks, because any emotion they could express was created in the edit and there was nothing to play off as an actor, and during "Planet of the Daleks" and "Death to the Daleks" his performance is clearly bored.
  • Writer Robert Holmes' favourite Doctor was the Fourth, the one he was most involved in creating. He had the Fourth Doctor mention that he preferred himself to the last one in "The Brain of Morbius", and admitted when he wrote Peter Davison's final story "The Caves of Androzani" he did so with him as the Fourth Doctor. He also wrangled a way of giving the Fourth Doctor a gratuitous cameo (by means of the Doctor temporarily regressing mentally) in his Sixth Doctor story "The Mysterious Planet".
  • Tom Baker liked any and all "slithering", Body Horror-themed monsters like the Wirrn and the Krynoid. His favourite companions were Sarah Jane and Romana II. Unfortunately, he's better known for his dislike of the companions he hated (Leela and K-9).
  • Peter Davison's favourite of his companions was Nyssa, as he felt she best complimented his Doctor.
  • Eric Saward's favourite monster was the Cybermen, an affection that some fans (and Terrance Dicks) found crossed into Creator's Pet at times. Dicks' famous Writer Revolt was when he had a very cheap monster, a robot played by a ballet dancer in a morphsuit, slaughter a whole platoon of Cybermen in a gratuitous Kerb-Stomp Battle in "The Five Doctors" just to make Saward cross.
  • Russell T Davies' favourite was the Daleks.
  • David Tennant, a Promoted Fanboy, has often stated that Peter Davison was "his" Doctor. Comic Relief special "Time Crash" involves the Tenth Doctor meeting the Fifth Doctor and is basically a paper-thin allegory for this. His favourite monster was the Zygons, which he never got to fight in his tenure itself — so the featuring of Zygons in "The Day of the Doctor" was written as Steven Moffat's present to him.
  • Moffat clearly loves the Zygons as much as Tennant, having written (or co-written) two stories featuring them opposite three (technically four) different Doctors, while Mark Gatiss was a fan of the Ice Warriors, having used them twice.
  • Patrick Troughton has been the favourite Doctor of perhaps the most succeeding portrayers — Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy and Matt Smith (arguably also Tom Baker, who despite not being a fan had seen some Troughton episodes and admired the performance a great deal). Davison even stated that after meeting Troughton incidentally and discussing things, he took the advice to leave after 3 seasons to avoid wearing himself out on the show; and Smith ultimately took inspiration for his final costume design off the Second Doctor's (especially the bowtie) after seeing "The Tomb of the Cybermen".
• Creator's Pest:
  • The reason the Cybermen were absent during the Third Doctor's tenure was that script editor Terrance Dicks hated them, as he found them boring. When he was tasked to write The Five Doctors, the then-script editor Eric Saward, who loved the Cybermen, wanted them in it. Dicks responded by taking several opportunities to destroy them, most overtly the notorious Raston Robot scene, in which a platoon of Cybermen suffers a humiliating Kerb-Stomp Battle at the hands of a lone bit-part monster created solely in order to do that.
  • In "Destiny of the Daleks", K-9 comes down with "robo-laryngitis" and is sidelined from the plot. According to many sources the reason was Terry Nation disliked the character and did not want his creation, the Daleks, sharing screen time with him. The K-9 prop is also pesky for crew members, as it has an infamous history of breaking down or ruining shots by veering too far left or right. 1980s producer John Nathan-Turner also hated K-9. Tellingly, every story of Season 18 (his first year as producer) saw K-9 damaged in some way, until he gets written out of the series.
  • The problems with K9 were miniscule compared with Kamelion, an actual robot that was hated by everyone in the crew because nobody could get the thing to work properly (partially due to his creator being killed in a boating accident). As a result, he only appears in three serials (one of which was a cameo in a deleted scene). Peter Davison once joked that the best acting he ever did in the show was the Doctor's sorrow at having to kill Kamelion, as he was genuinely glad to be rid of the troublesome prop.
  • Many books have been written about how the implosion of the series during Season 23 was caused in part by production infighting over the companion Mel, who became a locus for the internal rivalries between the script editor, producer and Promoted Fanboy elements of the team. She is disliked in the fandom too, but much of this is because she was intentionally written as an insufferable Damsel Scrappy to sabotage the actress and producer. The team's 'continuity advisor' Ian Levine hated the character so much that he quit over her inclusion; most fans today regard this event as one of the reasons for the show becoming more creatively interesting for its last couple of seasons.
  • Russell T Davies claimed to hate the Master and that the character would never appear in the show while he was in charge. However, this turned out to be a case of Lying Creator. More genuinely, he's made it pretty clear that killing off all the other Time Lords was emotionally satisfying for him, writing that they did nothing for the show except "spout bollocks".
  • Some companions were written out of the series due to the production team deciding that they just weren't working, like Dodo, Ben or Adric. Liz was written out because Barry Letts felt that she was too over-qualified to be the Doctor's assistant, Harry was written out because Philip Hinchcliffe felt he was a redundant presence (though he did admit this was a mistake) and the reason Turlough spent a lot of time imprisoned is that the writers admitted to just not knowing what to do with him.
  • Colin Baker's tenure as the Doctor was abruptly cut short due to Michael Grade's dislike of him.
• Dark Horse Casting: Most of the Doctors have had varying degrees of experience and recognition. Probably the least well-known at the time of casting was Matt Smith, who didn't even have an IMDb page prior to the series, despite some television roles.^note This is largely due to the website's recurring difficulty in tracking different people with the same name. Colin Baker was primarily well-known for acting in theatre,^note though he previously had a prominent role in the '70s series The Brothers, of which Kate O'Mara was part of the cast, meaning that the Rani (played by O'Mara) debuting during the Sixth Doctor's tenure was a case of I Want You to Meet an Old Friend of Mine, Sylvester McCoy was better known for performance art and presenting than acting and David Tennant was little-known at the time of his casting.
• Dawson Casting:
  • Carole Ann Ford was 23 when Susan was passing for 15.
  • Maureen O'Brien was 21 when she started playing the teenaged Vicki.
  • Dodo was a teenager, but Jackie Lane was almost 25.
  • Deborah Watling was 19 when she started playing Victoria, who was supposed to be in her mid-teens.
  • Zoe's age varies depending on what production member you ask, but she probably wasn't intended to be out of her teens, like Wendy Padbury was.
  • Turlough was supposed to be posing as a British schoolboy. Mark Strickson looked quite a bit older than his character, quite frankly.
  • Sophie Aldred was 24 when Ace was 16.
  • "The Curse of Fenric": Jean and Phyllis are supposed to be teenagers, although both actresses were in their early twenties at the time of filming.
  • "Paradise Towers": The Kangs are definitely meant to be younger than the actresses playing them. In an odd way, this adds to the general creepiness of the estate: none of these kids attend school, and the Doctor is the first parental figure they've had in perhaps a decade. Their immaturity is part of the point.
  • "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances": Nancy looks about fifteen or sixteen but is actually twenty or twenty-one (the Doctor's estimate, which she doesn't contradict). Actress Florence Heath actually was just shy of twenty-one when the episodes were broadcast.
  • Karen Gillan, Arthur Darvill and Nina Toussaint-White played school-aged versions of Amy, Rory and a teenage-passing-for River in "Let's Kill Hitler" at ages 23, 29 and 25.
  • Ryan is 19, and Yasmin, his former schoolmate, is presumably about the same age. Their actors, Tosin Cole and Mandip Gill, were 26 and 30 respectively when Series 11 first aired.
  • Dan, who is mentioned to be 42 in "Legend of the Sea Devils", is played by John Bishop, who is in his 50s.
  • Yasmin Finney was 18 years old when she portrayed Rose Noble who was meant to be 15 years old.
• Defictionalization: In reference to the fake Mona Lisa plot from "City of Death", prints of the Mona Lisa were once made available at a Tom Baker signing, signed "This is a fake — TOM BAKER".
• Denial of Digital Distribution: The series has got hit by this in two different ways over the years:
  • For a time during The '90s and the Turn of the Millennium, fan-made audio-plus-telesnap reconstructions of Missing Episodes were only distributed on analogue VHS, to prevent them from being made widely available on the Internet, which might have brought IP complaints from the BBC.
  • For a while, large chunks of the Classic Series were not available on streaming platforms. The Revival Series and many more acclaimed Classic-era serials were up, but the majority of them were relegated to DVD-only status. This eventually changed with the advent of BBC Media Player and Britbox, both of which feature every surviving episode of the Classic Series available to watch.
• Diagnosis of God: Steven Moffat stated in an interview that the Twelfth Doctor has ADHD. The closest this comes to being confirmed in-universe is in the ninth season prologue "The Doctor's Meditation", in which the Doctor himself states "[Clara] keeps telling me I've got ... attention deficit... ah ... something or other."
• Died During Production:
  • Ian Marter wrote a novel about his character, Harry Sullivan's War. He'd planned to kill Harry off at the climax, but was prevented by the publisher, who was considering a sequel. Unfortunately, Marter died the same month the book was published. He was also a prolific writer of Doctor Who novelisations, and his death left a couple of the books unfinished, forcing the series editor to complete them.
  • Robert Holmes died before he could write the final episode of "The Trial of a Time Lord". He only managed to complete a rough draft of the first episode and a basic outline of the second, leaving script editor Eric Saward to have to scramble together to complete Holmes' work and turn it into something usable. However, John Nathan-Turner, pretty much rejected Holmes' planned ending (which featured the Doctor and the Valeyard [or the Master] falling through a "time vent", with no way out) as being too risky, given that the show was hanging by a thread and that said ending would give the BBC the excuse to cancel the series. As a result, Saward quit the show in protest, and legal complications meant that the writers who eventually took on the job (Pip and Jane Baker) weren't allowed to be told how Holmes and Saward had planned to conclude the story. Thankfully, the Bakers managed to do enough to help keep the series running for some time afterward, and even when the series was finally taken off the air by The BBC in 1989, it didn't prove to be permanent (though for most people, a 16-year wait can feel pretty permanent when one isn't able to see the future).
• Disabled Character, Disabled Actor:
  • Sil, the alien villain of "Vengeance on Varos" and "Mindwarp", is a mostly aquatic amphibian who is very clumsy on land and has to be carried around by flunkies. Nabil Shaban, who played him, has severe osteogenesis imperfecta, causing him to be very short and use a wheelchair.
  • "Under the Lake"/"Before the Flood": Deaf military officer Cass is played by actual deaf actress Sophie Stone.
  • Blind actress Ellie Wallwork plays blind character Hanne in "It Takes You Away".
• Drawing Board Hiatus:
  • During the Sixth Doctor's tenure, the show was placed on an enforced 18-month hiatus, with its format reduced to fourteen 25-minute episodes (from 13 45-minute episodes — roughly the equivalent of the 26 25-minute episodes previous Doctors had had). The production team threw out all the originally planned stories for that season, even though some of them had been fully written and had directors and guest stars booked, and made the season a 14-part story arc instead.
  • It could be argued that the show went back to the drawing board as well in the lapse between the 1989 cancellation and the 2005 revival, as it went from serialized stories to one-episode, cinematic ones more focused on character interactions.
• Dyeing for Your Art:
  • Christopher Eccleston's natural hair colour is light brown, but he dyed his hair black as the Ninth Doctor.
  • Brunette Jodie Whittaker goes blonde as the Thirteenth Doctor.

E-O

• Enforced Method Acting: Repeatedly.
  • According to Word of God, Alex Kingston (River Song), Karen Gillan (Amy), and Arthur Darvill (Rory) all knew certain things about their character that hadn't been revealed. These details had been intentionally withheld from Matt Smith. So when he doesn't know something, he really doesn't know.
  • According to interviews given by Jenna Coleman (Clara), when they filmed Clara's death scene for "Face the Raven", she had not yet been made aware of how her character arc was going to be resolved at the end of the season.
  • The production team asked Jodie Whittaker what her favourite biscuits were^note answer: custard creams, but wouldn't tell her why they wanted to know. While filming "The Ghost Monument", Whittaker got her answer; as a present for her, the team had secretly installed a custard creams dispenser into the control panel of the TARDIS, which Whittaker discovered while filming the scene where Thirteen explores her new TARDIS. Thirteen's look of absolutely stunned, delighted surprise made it into the final episode.
• Executive Meddling:
  • Why Susan was the Doctor's granddaughter: it looked too odd otherwise.
  • "Planet of Evil": Sorenson was going to die, but the producer felt the death of a sympathetic character was inappropriate.
  • Producer Philip Hinchcliffe was moved on from the show following complaints about the levels of violence and horror during his tenure.
  • K-9 was kept on after "The Invisible Enemy" because the production team saw his potential appeal with younger children. And they were right.
  • Anthony Ainley wanted to play the Master as serious and understated, but the producers wanted a retread of Roger Delgado's over-the-top villain. It wasn't until "Survival" that Ainley was allowed to give the performance he wanted.
  • Why Tegan had '80s Hair, amusingly enough. Producer John Nathan-Turner somehow thought that fans might somehow mistake Janet Fielding^note dressed in a purple pastel outfit for Adric^note ... who was a boy wearing bright yellow and dull greens in long shots. It's a miracle that Ms. Fielding didn't take the guy's head off.
  • Turlough had red hair to differentiate Mark Strickson (schoolboy outfit) with Peter Davison's Fifth Doctor (cricketing uniform).
  • Kamelion was originally going to be played by a series of humans, as he was a shape-changing robot. Instead he turned into a real mechanical prop, which was then shelved when the only person on the planet (and we mean the real planet Earth) who knew how to operate the blasted thing died without telling anyone else how to work it.
  • Executive producer John Nathan-Turner demanded the Sixth Doctor's becoming "totally tasteless" in terms of fashion sense, rather than the Ninth Doctor-esque dark clothes and jacket Colin Baker wanted. And thus, the multicoloured suit was born.
  • The ending to episode 11 of "The Trial of a Time Lord", "Terror of the Vervoids", was supposed to be a model shot of the Hyperion III flying towards the Black Hole of Tartarus. John Nathan-Turner thought that all episodes of the "Trial" season should end on a close-up on the Doctor's face, however (even though episode 9 memorably avoided that), and had the episode re-edited to end on a shot of the Doctor looking vaguely annoyed at Lasky.
  • "The Ultimate Foe", also known as Episodes 13 and 14 of "The Trial of a Time Lord", was to be a four-part story written together by Robert Holmes and script editor Eric Saward. Then it was turned into a two-part story when Pip and Jane Baker wrote a pretty sweet story. But sadly, after many years of loyal contribution to Doctor Who Holmes' time abruptly came — he suddenly took deathly ill and never finished the script. Then, after Holmes passed away, Saward turned in a final script that kept the original plot; in this ending, the Doctor and the Valeyard are left tumbling through the Matrix, fighting to the death. ^note (You know, similar to the ending of that one episode of the Original Star Trek where that guy fought himself between universes for all eternity. Something like that.) Producer John Nathan-Turner rightly felt this could give the BBC the excuse they needed to axe the programme... so Saward resigned and refused permission for his script to be used. As such, the televised version of the final episode was written by Pip and Jane Baker in a matter of days, without being allowed to know anything about the originally intended version. It's nothing less than a miracle that this serial was even finished.
  • The first edit of "The Trial of a Time Lord Part 14" ran to some 38 minutes; Nathan-Turner managed to get permission to extend the running time by five minutes, but still had to make it up by cutting out large amounts of material featuring the Master and Glitz.
  • The sacking of Sixth Doctor Colin Baker was at the behest of BBC management. The fairness of that decision is still hotly debated.
  • A reference that Ace lost her virginity to Sabalom Glitz never made it past the censor (though did find its way into the Expanded Universe).
  • The show's cancellation following the Sylvester McCoy era has been explicitly, if not exclusively, pinned on BBC executive Michael Grade's personal distaste for it (though he was no longer controller by the time of the actual cancellation).
  • Russell T Davies originally proposed bringing the show back in 1998, but was blocked because the BBC's commercial arm insisted on approaching producers for a Hollywood movie.
• Executive Veto: Midge's somewhat unexplained death in "Survival" is because the original script had the Master inciting the other youths to tear him limb from limb for showing weakness, which was vetoed as too horrific even for Doctor Who.
• Fake American:
  • In "The Chase", the Daleks chase the First Doctor and his companions through a New York skyscraper, where a tour guide (Noo Yauwk) and a tourist (Allabayama) speak in entertainingly fake accents.
  • Episode Seven of "The Daleks' Master Plan" ("The Feast Of Steven") takes place in a 1920s Hollywood film set, featuring British actors as American film stars and directors.
  • In the First Doctor's Old West adventure, "The Gunfighters", the entire guest cast is American. With only a few exceptions, they are played by British actors doing hilariously bad attempts at American accents. Canadian actor Shane Rimmer does an (unsurprisingly) much more convincing American accent as Seth Harper, while still technically being a Fake American.
  • In "The Tomb of the Cybermen", Vienna-born George Roubicek and Welshman Clive Merrison play Americans Captain Hopper and Jim Callum. Their accents are quite awful.
  • "The Wheel in Space" features a multinational space station crew played almost exclusively by British actors. Among them is Michael Goldie putting on what appears a (very bad) Dixie accent to play Elton Laleham.
  • Milo Clancey, in "The Space Pirates", has an outrageous hillbilly accent courtesy of New Zealander Gordon Gostelow.
  • Welsh actor Paul Grist's attempt at an American accent as Bill Filer in "The Claws of Axos" was so memorable that the character even has his own fan-produced spinoff.
  • "American" companion Peri Brown is played by British actress Nicola Bryant. Her accent was all over the map in her early episodes, but got better the longer she played the character. Bryant has confirmed in interviews that when she joined the series, an attempt was made to hide the fact she was British, to the point where she was asked to stay "in character" as an American even for TV interviews. The charade lasted only a few months before she was allowed to be a Brit again off-camera.
  • In addition to being Nicola Bryant's debut as Peri, "Planet of Fire" also features British actor Dallas Adams as Peri's stepfather Howard Foster.
  • Yee Jee Tso, who played Chang Lee in the TV Movie, is actually Canadian.
  • In "Dalek", the American characters are played by Kiwi Anna-Louise Plowman, Canadian Nigel Whitney, and British Steven Beckingham. Corey Johnson (who plays Henry van Statten) was born in New Orleans, but much of his accent sounds strained and over-precise at times; it's obvious he's heavily trained and spends a lot of time in the UK.
  • "Daleks in Manhattan"/"Evolution of the Daleks" had British Miranda Raison and Ghanaian-born British-raised Hugh Quarshie as guests of that story playing Americans and Andrew Garfield — at this point heard more in American than British — doing a Tennessee accent.
  • In "The Sontaran Stratagem"/"The Poison Sky", British actor Ryan Sampson plays Luke Rattigan.
  • Brits Mark Sheppard and William Morgan Sheppard play FBI agent Canton Delaware in "The Impossible Astronaut"/"Day of the Moon". Other guests include Nigerian Chukwudi Iwuji, British Mark Griffin, and Canadian Kerry Shale.
  • A plot-related use of the trope in "Time Heist": The Doctor adopts an electronically altered American accent as the Architect in order to conceal his identity.
  • "Rosa" has this going on both in and out of universe:
    • Out of universe, Rosa Parks is played by British actress Vinette Robinson, and bus driver James Blake is played by a Canadian actor. The other locals are played by either British or South African actors.
    • In-universe, the antagonist, time traveller Krasko, uses a British accent when speaking to the Doctor, but puts on a Southern accent when speaking to various locals.
• Fake Nationality:
  • "The Moonbase" featured German-born actor Michael Wolf as Danish crewmember Nils, and English actors Victor Pemberton and Barry Ashton as crewmembers Jules Faure (French) and Franz Schultz (German).
  • Patrick Troughton, who was of course British, played Mexican dictator Ramon Salamander alongside his usual role as the Second Doctor in "The Enemy of the World", complete with Brown Face.
  • "Fury from the Deep" features English actor John Abineri as Dutch technician Van Lutyens.
  • "The Wheel in Space" featured a space station with a multinational crew played almost exclusively by British actors: Eric Flynn as the Australian Leo Ryan, Clare Jenkins as the Russian Tanya Lernov, Donald Sumpter as the Italian Enrico Casali, Derrick Gilbert as the French Armand Vallance, James Mellor as the Irish Sean Flannigan and Peter Laird in Yellow Face as the Chinese crewmember Chang.
  • Latoni, the indigenous South American in "Black Orchid", is played by the rather more British Asian Ahmed Khalil.
  • Freema Agyeman is half Ghanaian half Iranian in real life. Before being cast as Martha Jones, she appears as Martha's identical cousin Adeola Oshodi, whose name indicates British Nigerian heritage.
  • This could go for the rest of the Jones family, as all are portrayed by British Anglo-Ghanians except for Tish, whose actress is half South African.
  • Yasmin Khan and her entire family are British Pakistani Muslims; this actuslly becomes a plot point when she discovers her Nani almost married an Indian Hindu. Mandip Gill is British Indian Sikh and the rest of the Khan family are portrayed by actors who are mostly non-Muslim British Indians.
• Fake Scot:
  • Scottish companion Jamie McCrimmon was played by English-born actor Frazer Hines, albeit Hines' mother was Scottish, helping him get the accent right. Oddly enough, this was temporarily averted during "The Mind Robber", when Hines fell ill and was temporarily replaced by the Glasgow-born Hamish Wilson.
  • Jamie's debut story "The Highlanders" also featured English actor Donald Bisset as the Scottish Laird Colin McLaren.
  • The next story to be set in Scotland was "Terror of the Zygons", which featured English actor John Woodnutt as the Duke of Forgill.
• Fandom Nod: In "Blink", policeman Billy Shipton tells Sally Sparrow the TARDIS can't be a real police box because "the windows are too big" (amongst other things). It's been confirmed by episode writer Steven Moffat that this was a reference to complaints made by fans on the popular Outpost Gallifrey discussion forums in 2004. (Likewise, "Time Crash" and "Love & Monsters" both make oblique reference to the fandom.)
• Friendship on the Set:
  • William Hartnell got on with most of his regular co-stars and Verity Lambert and was upset at seeing them leave. William Russell recalled that the food at Lime Grove Studio was so bad the cast would have picnics together. Peter Purves recalled that while Hartnell could be difficult, he was never difficult with him.
  • In contrast to Hartnell's tetchy personality, Patrick Troughton was adored by nearly everyone who worked with him due to his upbeat, easy-going nature. He credited Michael Craze and Anneke Wills with helping him find his footing and was best friends with Frazer Hines, forming an infamous pair of pranksters.
  • Jon Pertwee became friends with Nicholas Courtney, Katy Manning and Roger Delgado. Manning described Pertwee and Delgado as her two fathers. It was Delgado's tragic death and Manning's departure that led to Pertwee leaving the series, as he felt that family atmosphere was disappearing, though he got on very well with Elisabeth Sladen, who considered him to be her Doctor.
  • Tom Baker got on famously with Sladen and Ian Marter, forming one of the best-loved line-ups. Baker and Marter even wrote the unmade film script Doctor Who Meets Scratchman together. Much as Baker hated K9, he got on very well with John Leeson and they would often do The Times crossword together.
  • Peter Davison is still friends with Sarah Sutton, Matthew Waterhouse and Janet Fielding.
  • Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant are still friends to this day, as are Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred.
  • Christopher Eccleston still speaks fondly of Billie Piper and credits her with the success of the show's relaunch. Piper was very close friends with David Tennant, while John Barrowman recalled that he and Tennant would attend Madonna concerts with their partners.
  • Matt Smith, Karen Gillan, and Arthur Darvill spent three years together on the show, and even participated in a virtual reunion during the COVID Pandemic in 2020.
  • Peter Capaldi and Jenna Coleman became quite close during the filming of Series 8. The friendship between the two was part of the reason why Coleman decided to stay on for one more season.
• Hostility on the Set: It's one of the most candidly-documented shows ever, but most actors still insist that they all got along famously. There are only a handful of cases of people admitting the opposite:
  • Michael Craze and Anneke Wills have said that William Hartnell was extremely nasty to both them. This was probably partly due to Hartnell's dementia and partly to him being unhappy about his impending departure from the show. Hartnell also had a poor working relationship with producer John Wiles, whose attempts to make the show Darker and Edgier didn't go over well with Hartnell who as the sole remaining member of the original team saw himself as the guardian of the series' original values. When Wiles' attempts to remove the star were unsuccessful, he removed the actors who played Vicki and Steven Taylor, his costars Maureen O'Brien and Peter Purves (the latter revealed that he has no fond memories of Wiles).
  • Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee reportedly did not get on during the making of "The Three Doctors", due to a clash of acting styles (Troughton's tendency to ad-lib whenever he thought he could improve on the script unsettled Pertwee, who preferred to play the part as written). Terrance Dicks remembered this and wrote "The Five Doctors" so that the two of them wouldn't share a scene until the big final confrontation between everyone, which ended up upsetting both actors, who had become friends later through doing fan conventions together.
  • Tom Baker and Louise Jameson have admitted that they got on very badly, because Jameson couldn't put up with Baker's ego, while Baker didn't think that the Doctor should be tolerating Leela's Psycho Sidekick tendencies and allowed his dislike for the character to bleed into his treatment of her actor. He did soften to her eventually and they buried the hatchet enough to record audio plays together.
  • Baker clashed with his second producer Graham Williams over his demand for greater creative control. After season sixteen, their conflict escalated to the point where both of them threatened to resign. This was eventually settled when Williams advised Head of Drama Shaun Sutton that Baker was bluffing, which he was.
  • There were also periods of intense feuding between Baker and Lalla Ward, who played the second incarnation of Romana, but that was down to the up-and-down progress of their Romance on the Set. (Once asked by an interviewer who was the worst monster she had faced on the show, Ward promptly replied "Tom Baker", which Baker in turn was amused by when he heard about it). To this day, Baker and Ward have never recorded a Big Finish Audio in the same room, despite having appeared together in dozens of them. Both Baker and Ward reportedly did not get on with Matthew Waterhouse, because they thought he was incompetent and didn't like the concept of his character. Janet Fielding and Sarah Sutton both found Baker intimidating.
  • In this interview, Paul McGann and Daphne Ashbrook have nothing but nice things to say about almost everything about the TV movie... except Eric Roberts, who was apparently standoffish, rude (making personal remarks about McGann being "effeminate"), and sometimes "amazingly bad".
  • John Barrowman revealed that he didn't get on with Christopher Eccleston:
    Chris was always grumpy. You don't always have to be intense. There comes a point when intensity makes you miserable - I think that was the case with Chris. I much prefer working with David - he likes to have a bit more fun, he's more charismatic as a person. Chris might have been a great Doc but he was darker and had a chip on his shoulder, he was not as much fun on set as David. I will give him the credit that he was the first Doctor to bring back the series and made a damn good job of it. But I just wouldn't go to the pub with him. On the other hand, David's been to my house, we went to the Madonna concert with our partners - we socialise together. He's a lot more fun.
    • Meanwhile, many of the show's crew and and extras were not particularly fond of Barrowman as his tendency to expose himself in public and play "pranks" of a sexual nature on his co-workers essentially amounted to sexual harassment—and this sort of thing would eventually get Barrowman dropped from later series and Big Finish audios.
  • Eccleston for his part claimed that he didn't enjoy the onset environment due to conflicts with certain people behind the scenes. In a series of 2018 interviews with Radio Times, he claims that his working relationship with Russell T Davies broke down during filming on the series; since Eccleston was known primarily for his serious dramatic roles, he wasn't entirely comfortable in a more light-hearted series. He also claims that he was blacklisted by certain powers that be at the BBC for a few years for leaving the show, and he had to work in America until there was a "regime change", and will never work with Davies again because of this, because despite his promise to not to say anything that might ruin the fledgling revival's reputation, he was still blacklisted and Davies either supported it, or did nothing to help Eccleston out. When it was announced that Eccleston would appear in Big Finish Doctor Who which Davies has no involvement with, Eccleston gave this quote to the press release: "Forget producers, forget politics – here are real people who have seen me do my stuff and want to shake my hand".
  • Tom Baker claimed that he was mostly ignored on the set of "The Day of the Doctor", with the exception of Matt Smith, whom he got on very well with.
  • Steven Moffat reportedly had a fractious relationship with producer Caroline Skinner. This reached breaking point during Series 7 when she resigned following a blazing row with Moffat.
• Hypothetical Casting:
  • In 1986, Sydney Newman suggested brining back Patrick Troughton, then have him regenerate into a woman, with his top choices being Dawn French, Joanna Lumley and Frances de la Tour.
  • In the early 1990s, The BBC approached Verity Lambert to revive the show. She wanted Peter Cook to play the new Doctor, but he eventually declined involvement.
  • Russell T Davies has mentioned envisioning certain actors in his head while creating various characters. He said that while creating Adelaide Brooke for "The Waters of Mars", he created her with Helen Mirren in mind (the role eventually went to Lindsay Duncan, who does bear a slight similarity to Mirren.) Similarly, for River Song, they considered Kate Winslet for the part (which went to Alex Kingston.)
  • A sketch for the Ninth Doctor's look describes him as "Terence Stamp if he ran a market stall".
  • Romana I was pitched as a Grace Kelly-type Ice Queen.
  • Tom Baker suggested Dawn French and Eddie Izzard as his choices to play the Doctor.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • The 1993 charity special "Dimensions in Time", a crossover with EastEnders, was created on the condition that it'd never be rerun or released on home video. You can find it on YouTube, however.
  • It was in part due to this trope that a number of lost episodes have been recovered over the years, and complete audio recordings of every lost episode exist.
  • Fan-made recreations of missing episodes have been circulating for decades.
• Late Export for You:
  • Series 10 in Asia. The BBC's announcement for Series 10 implied that the season would only be available through the BBC Player service in Singapore and Malaysia and the show would not be made available over BBC First^note While the video mentions both BBC First and BBC Player, the accompanying note omits mention of BBC First., possibly due to the fact that Bill Potts is a lesbian companion. It eventually turned out that while Australia's and New Zealand's BBC First would be getting the season with just several hours' delay, the show could be delayed as much as two weeks before it appeared on BBC First in Malaysia and Singapore, possibly to encourage use of the BBC Player service (which has severely limited access even in both countries), and due to censorship screening — Malaysia and Singapore have conservative blue-nosed censorship boards that impose strict restrictions over the portrayal of LGBT characters on TV and in the cinemas and demands to screen episodes in advance, but are more relaxed about shows being made available over Internet streaming services.
  • This repeated with Series 12, and not just in Asia but also Australia and New Zealand. Series 12 arrived in these regions three weeks late again, and this time even the show was late on BBC Player. The BBC blamed the lack of staff during the holiday season which resulted in the production of the non-English translation subtitles falling behind as the reason they were late.
• Lying Creator: The BBC website made it sound like the Cybermen would be major enemies in "A Good Man Goes to War". In reality, they're merely cold open cameos.
• Marth Debuted in "Smash Bros.": A case where this applies to both UK and non-UK audiences: the Fourteenth Doctor's adventures actually began in the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip before any of his episodes aired.
• Meaningful Release Date:
  • The first episode of "Silver Nemesis" aired the day before it was set (which was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first episode's air date).
  • "The End of Time", "The Big Bang", and "The Impossible Astronaut" are set on their airdates (accounting for British time zones).
• Memorial Character: Elisabeth Clara Sladen was one of the longest serving and most beloved Doctor Who actresses, having played Sarah Jane Smith in both Doctor Who and in her own spin-offs K-9 and Company and The Sarah Jane Adventures for just under four decades. After she passed away in 2011, the next companion was named Clara, after her middle name.
• No Export for You:
  • Americans had to wait until 1972 before finally seeing an episode on their screens (and even then the syndicators chose to skip over Pertwee's first story, and it wasn't until the 1980s that Americans finally got to see episodes from the 1960s). Nearly happened again in 2005 when US broadcasters initially refused to buy the new series, reportedly because it was "too British".
  • France was notoriously one of the only major countries never to import the original series. Other countries were late adopters as well; India, for example, never aired the series until 2008. Though to be fair this might be more a case of "No Import for You".
  • From about 2006 to 2010 it was commonplace for online content produced related to the series to not be viewable outside the UK (behind the scenes videos, prequels, games etc). This has improved in the last couple of years, but there is still extensive content that cannot be viewed outside the UK (at least until someone posts it to YouTube...). Although some original content eventually makes its way onto DVDs that get released in North America, there have been some notable exceptions, such as the "TARDISodes", a series of prequels released online in the UK only and never included on DVD, and Captain Jack's Monster Files, a web series featuring John Barrowman that remains web-only in the UK, and the minisode "Good as Gold", which was included in the UK box set of Series 7 but not included in the North American release.
  • Initially applied to a series of computer games produced for online distribution beginning in 2010. Eventually were made available via a retailer with North American release rights, except for the Mac version, even though it was available for Mac in the UK.
  • In a minor reversal, only viewers in North America and Australia viewed a unique pre-credits sequence narrated by Karen Gillan that was added to non-UK broadcasts of Series 6 in order to introduce new viewers to the show. This opening never made it onto the DVD releases in the UK or anywhere else.
    • When "Let's Kill Hitler" first aired on BBC America in 2011, it included an exclusive animated scene sponsored by an advertiser that aired in lieu of a commercial break and filled a gap in the story (it expanded on Rory and Amy's motorcycle chase through Berlin). Although later announced as being planned for inclusion in the Series 6 DVD box sets in North America and the UK, this never happened.
  • Averted with "The Day of the Doctor". Normally, there's several hours between the airing in the UK and the airing in the US, allowing fans to find and download the episode. For DoTD, the episode was shown at the exact same time in 94 countries, earning a Guinness record for biggest global simulcast.
  • BBC Worldwide's Asia arm has never been good with the specials (Easter specials are outright skipped over, while other specials are chosen at its own discretion, irrelevant of the interest shown on social media). However, most egregiously, "The Time of the Doctor" was skipped over back in 2013, and this special is important as it showcases the regeneration of Matt Smith to Peter Capaldi, and regenerations are extremely important events to Whovians. Many wrote to the BBC, who claimed that they have noted the interest of Asian viewers in the episode, but had announced that it would not be aired in the near future. It finally aired in mid-Febuary 2015, during Chinese New Year and over a year after its premiere in other regions, but BBC Entertainment Asia will still hand pick which specials it will and will not show in the future. And oh, the pre-2005 episodes have never been aired on BBC Asia's feeds, either.
  • In 2009, Astro Malaysia dropped BBC Entertainment from its channel lineup. As it was the only Pay TV provider carrying the channel, Malaysians were denied the show until 2012, when competing provider Hypp TV picked it up. Unfortunately, Hypp TV decided to drop the channel on December 1st, 2015, halfway through Series 9. To say that Malaysian Whovians weren't pleased with that decision is an understatement. Thankfully, the show became available on Netflix Asia in mid-2016, and then Hypp TV quietly proceeded to pick up the BBC First Video-on-Demand service in October 2016, making the good Doctor, along with a whole slew of BBC programming that went away with BBC Entertainment, once again available in Malaysia. It was finally averted completely when BBC Worldwide extended the launch of BBC Player into Malaysia.
  • In another case of "No Import for You" the CBC in Canada never bothered airing the 2007 Christmas special, "Voyage of the Damned", leaving the Series 3 cliffhanger unresolved for those who hadn't bought the DVDs; ultimately, the special wouldn't air on English language TV in Canada until 2010, when Space obtained the rights to show it.
• No Origin Stories Allowed:
  • The franchise has a complex relationship with this trope: the broad outline, that the Doctor is an alien Time Lord from Gallifrey, has been established since the end of the Pertwee era, and it's acceptable to have references and scenes from the Doctor's past in that context. What's considered off-limits is anything that ventures to explore the nature of the mystery around them and their identity. For many years, most of the various creators on the franchise were determined to not provide an origin story for the Doctor^note though had certain of the late Eighties-early Nineties feature film proposals come to fruition, this would have been averted; fandom in the main sees this as having dodged a bullet, given what's been revealed about them. The penultimate Doctor Who New Adventures novel Lungbarrow attempted to do so, but this proved highly controversial with fans and has been flatly contradicted by later TV episodes. Then the last episode of Series 12, "The Timeless Children", tried to do so and promptly sparked the biggest split within the fandom for decades. However, for all their controversy, Lungbarrow and "The Timeless Children" avoided trying to be definitive origin stories, preferring to leave some degree of mystery around the Doctor - as of yet, no-one has tried a definitive origin, and fandom would probably erupt like never seen if they did.
  • Neil Gaiman proposed giving the Doctor's origin in "The Doctor's Wife", but was turned down by Steven Moffat.
• Official Fan-Submitted Content:
  • A few monster designs, among other things. For instance, the Abzorbaloff from "Love & Monsters" was designed for a Blue Peter contest.
  • The Twelfth Doctor's title sequence was based on an immensely popular fan-made sequence.
  • "Timelash" featured a fan-produced painting of the Doctor and Jo Grant as an in-universe reference to an unscreened previous visit.
• Only Barely Renewed: The show was nearly cancelled in 1985 by BBC1 controller Michael Grade, who openly disliked the series for its unimpressive production values and rapidly escalating amounts of violence. Following protests from the show's production staff, he begrudgingly turned the cancellation into an 18-month-long hiatus, after which the show's budget was slashed and its episode count was limited to 14 25-minute installments (divided among four serials) per season. Additionally, between Seasons 23 and 24, Grade moved the show's timeslot to Monday evenings to compete with Coronation Street, which analysts described as a deliberate attempt to tank Doctor Who's ratings. Sure enough, while the show managed to truck on for a few more years, it eventually got cancelled by Grade's successor and fellow Who detractor Jonathan Powell after the conclusion of Season 26 in 1989, not returning to regular airing until 2005.
• On-Set Injury: In the course of its long run, the actors of the series endured several injuries during production.
  • William Hartnell cut his hand on one of the Dalek casings in "The Daleks".
  • In "The Dalek Invasion of Earth", Hartnell injured his back when a prop ramp malfunctioned. Following discussions between Hartnell's solicitors and The BBC's, the BBC denied liability and paid for an X-ray. Hartnell was given a week off to recover, and the fourth episode underwent minor rewrites
  • During the scene in "The Rescue" where Barbara fires a flare gun at Vicki's pet, Jacqueline Hill was injured, suffering shock and a sore face. This occurred when the explosive connected to the wooden prop gun went off with more force than expected.
  • "Spearhead From Space": In one shot, actor Derek Smee, who played Ransome, slashed open an index finger while climbing over some barbed wire filming his escape from the Nestene Consciousness. He finished the shot and had a bandage put on for the day so that his getting stitches wouldn't slow up filming. The bandage (and him favoring the finger) can be seen in subsequent shots.
  • "Terror of the Autons": While filming the Doctor and Jo's escape from the Auton policemen in the quarry, on location, which was virtually Katy Manning's first scene, the short-sighted Katy tripped and sprained her ankle. Production assistant Nicholas John took her to hospital, and joked about the producer having to replace her. Manning took this seriously and when Jon Pertwee found out he told off John for upsetting his new co-star.
  • On "The Sea Devils", Pertwee injured his ribs during recording when he dived forward and fell on the sonic screwdriver prop, which was stowed in his breast pocket.
  • While filming "The Sontaran Experiment", Tom Baker slipped on some wet grass and broke his collarbone. The scarf came in handy for covering up his neckbrace.
  • Peter Davison would later jokingly claim that the staff were actually attempting to kill him on "The Caves of Androzani". Among these accidents are two notable instances:
    • During a scene in which Sharaz Jek backhands the Doctor, the mask Christopher Gable was wearing impaired his vision enough to make him legitimately strike Davison by mistake.
    • As the Doctor carries Peri back into the TARDIS at the end of the story, he flinches at a nearby mud burst. This is because the explosion was prematurely triggered by the technicians, shooting sand into Davison's eyes and forcing him to recoil in pain.
  • Anthony Ainley recalled that for the Doctor and the Master's final confrontation in "Survival", Sylvester McCoy found the contact lenses he had to wear painful. Ainley accidentally struck him in the wrist with the bone and apologised. McCoy quipped that thanks to the pain in his wrist he couldn't feel the pain in his eyes.
  • The cane Matt Smith uses in "The Time of the Doctor" was actually necessitated by Smith injuring himself on set.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Generally averted in favour of The Nth Doctor. It's played straight, however, with the recasting of the late William Hartnell as the First Doctor with Richard Hurndall in "The Five Doctors", and later David Bradley for "Twice Upon a Time".
  • Done for a grand total of 3 seconds during the Sixth Doctor's regeneration, as Colin Baker didn't return to portray the Doctor for a fraction of an episode. The Sixth Doctor's Dick Sargent to Colin Baker's Dick York was Sylvester McCoy, who simply wore a curly blond wig while sparkly special effects covered his face. It didn't work. Leave it to the producers of the "Time and the Rani" DVDs to sneak an Easter Egg in that seeks to make the regeneration look better by carefully rotoscoping in Colin's face, which is, soothingly, much better.
    • Colin Baker jokingly insists that since he never actually regenerated, he's still the Doctor and all the later ones are mere pretenders to the part.
  • Paul McGann briefly plays the War Doctor after the regeneration but he doesn't speak and when the face is seen in a reflection it is a younger John Hurt.
  • The Master at some points. Doesn't reach The Nth Doctor level because Peter Pratt and Geoffrey Beevers played the same incarnation. Gordon Tipple played the Master briefly in the 1996 Movie, though sources vary on whether the Tipple Master and Ainley Master are supposed to be the same one.
  • Davros has been played by four different actors over the years: Michael Wisher, David Gooderson, Terry Molloy, and Julian Bleach. The makeup helps to hide the fact, as does the fact they generally try to imitate Wisher's voice.
  • John Leeson was replaced by David Brierly as K9 for Season 17, but came back for Season 18 and all of K9's occasional reappearces since then. Also, Roy Skelton did his voice for a fleeting scene in "Destiny of the Daleks", where all that K-9 did was make a brief coughing and croaking noise, incapable of speaking because he had contracted robot laryngitis and had to be confined to the TARDIS to recuperate. Who better to provide that kind of noise than someone who voiced aliens who have croaky voices all the time?
• Out of Holiday Episode:
  • There's the 1996 TV Movie, intended to be a turnkey pilot for a USA-based revival of the series. Here, the Doctor arrives in San Francisco, a few days before New Year's Eve 1999, before being immediately shot and regenerating from his seventh incarnation to his eighth one. It premiered in May of 1996.
  • "The Unquiet Dead" is set at Christmas 1869 and is for all intents and purposes a Christmas Episode, involving Charles Dickens and riffing on A Christmas Carol with the presence of "ghosts". It aired in spring 2005.
• Out of Order:
  • Twice during Sylvester McCoy's tenure:
    • "The Greatest Show in the Galaxy" was supposed to air before "Silver Nemesis". However, the planned broadcast order had to be changed when transmission of the series was delayed, as "Silver Nemesis" was the 25th annniversary story and they wanted the first episode to air on the anniversary itself. This creates a continuity error, as Ace is seen wearing Flowerchild's earring before the story in which she obtains it.
    • "The Curse of Fenric" was supposed to be the first story of Season 26, as it debuted the Seventh Doctor's new brown jacket (he is wearing a large duffel coat for much of the first episode, with the intention being to surprise the viewer with the new look when he takes the coat off). Furthermore, Ace's line about haunted houses was meant to foreshadow "Ghost Light".
  • Series six of the revived series was split into two parts, and after it was decided that the first half was too repetitive with all its episodes about people going around a dark area with flashlights, "Night Terrors" was pushed to the second half, while "The Curse of the Black Spot" was moved into its place. The latter apparently required quite a bit of rewriting to make sense in its new spot, but specifics haven't been given. As for "Night Terrors", they got away with simply adding a little tag to the end (although it does now contain Foreshadowing for something that had already happened).
  • "The Eaters of Light" was supposed to be early in Series 10, which unfortunately makes Bill look a bit dim for only now realizing the TARDIS is translating the languages she hears.

P-W

• Playing Against Type:
  • William Hartnell took the role of the Doctor to distance himself from the military-type roles that had defined his career up to that point. He got his wish, alright...
  • Then-known for his comedic talents and funny voices, Jon Pertwee subverted his own screen persona with the no-nonsense performance of the Third Doctor.
  • Sylvester McCoy had, prior to his role as the Doctor, been best known for vaudeville, kids' TV, juggling, human blockhead exploits and the such, including, for some reason, stuffing ferrets down his trousers. As the Doctor, while at first still playing a variation on his previous roles, he eventually grew into one of the most straight-up manipulative, amoral, calculating incarnations of the Doctor.
  • Mark Sheppard playing Canton Delaware, a genuinely heroic character.
  • Prior to Doctor Who, Jodie Whittaker's best known roles were mostly in serious and sometimes very dark dramas, particularly Broadchurch. However, her Thirteenth Doctor is irreverent, hyperactive, and lighthearted, closer to her real-life personality.
  • Comedian Sir Lenny Henry playing cold, serious villain Daniel Barton.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends:
  • There's a long-standing legend that the original TARDIS police box prop was previously used in an episode or episodes of Dixon of Dock Green. In fact, it was built new for the show.
  • 1960s Doctor Who in colour. Various rumours have circulated about parts of or entire episodes of Hartnell and Troughton stories being made in colour as unbroadcast technical experiments. This never happened. The probable source of the rumour lies with unofficial colour films of location shooting for a couple of sixties stories, which were made by crew members or fans.
  • A persistent rumour is that the first season (or seasons) were broadcast live. It wasn't. It was recorded "as live" before broadcast. (Although many other early BBC productions were broadcast live, most notably the original version of The Quatermass Experiment, and in subsequent interviews some cast and crew members claimed Who was originally broadcast live, likely mixing it up with other shows they worked on.)
  • The "missing sixth episode" of "The Dæmons", set off by an April Fool's prank in a fanzine. The somewhat abrupt and ill-explained ending of the story, combined with its unusual length of five episodes, led to a fan rumour that it was made as a six-part story and then had the last two episodes crudely edited into one. This had happened a couple of times earlier in the show, with "Planet of Giants" and "The Dominators", but "The Dæmons" was written as broadcast.
  • There were several wild rumours involving the true authorship of the stories "Kinda" and "Snakedance", due to the unusually cerebral nature of the scripts and the fact that the writer, Christopher Bailey, didn't write very much else and quickly gave up scriptwriting for academia. It was commonly alleged in fandom that "Bailey" was a pseudonym for a very well-known person who didn't want to be known as a Who writer, with the most common targets being Kate Bush and Tom Stoppard.
  • There was a fan rumour that "Terminus" was supposed to feature the return of the Ice Warriors. These turned out to be false.
  • A fan myth concerning "The Doctor's Daughter" states that incoming showrunner Steven Moffat learnt that the titular character, Jenny, was to be killed off at the end of the episode, and specifically requested that current showrunner Russell T Davies have her survive as he intended to use the character in the future. This is a result of Gossip Evolution: what actually happened was that Moffat made an offhand remark (after reading the script) that Davies had a habit of creating interesting characters then killing them off, and that prompted Davies to change his mind and have her come back to life at the end of the episode. When Moffat saw the episode go out, he was very surprised to find that Jenny now survived the episode, and was even more surprised to learn that he was the reason she did.
  • But the most notorious urban legends in Doctor Who fandom surround Missing Episodes, with wild tales of evil collectors or secret circles of Fandom VIPs who own copies of missing episodes and refuse to release them to the wider public.
    • In November 2013, tabloids the Daily Mail and the Mirror reported as news that a copy of the seven episodes of "Marco Polo", the earliest missing serial (and one of only three to have no existing footage whatsoever) had been found, recorded off-air by a handheld camera pointed at the TV screen. This was presumably a Chinese whisper based on the fact that many brief clips of footage have survived via this method — filmed by an anonymous Australian fan using an 8mm cine camera — but certainly not any full episodes.
    • Ever since the rediscovery of "The Enemy of the World" and "The Web of Fear", the fandom has been plagued by the "omnirumour", which, promoted by some well-known American geek news sites, alleges that most or all of the 1960s Missing Episodes have actually been found, but that it's been kept secret because the people in possession of them want more money and/or because The BBC wants to keep a guaranteed home video income stream by "finding" them gradually over the next few decades.
    • The "evil collector" legend actually achieved ostension in 2015, when the missing episode hunters who recovered the Nigerian copies of "The Web of Fear" revealed that Episode 3 of the story (one of the most sought-after of all Missing Episodes, since it features the first on-screen appearance of iconic franchise character Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart) had been stolen between their discovery of the episodes and their official removal from their original location.
  • Difficult negotiations with the estate of Terry Nation so the new series would be able to use the Daleks, combined with the species' relatively frequent appearances in the revival that averaged out at around once a year, led to the belief that the series was contractually obligated to have to use the Daleks at least once a year in order to keep the rights. This was debunked by Steven Moffat shortly before he left the position of showrunner, and it has been claimed that the real reason for the Daleks' much more frequent appearances in the new series is due to a combination of Running the Asylum and the species' iconic status as one of the Doctor's archenemies.
  • Fandom Memetic Mutation would have it that the Dalek that shoots the Doctor in "The Stolen Earth", nicknamed "Dalek Fred", didn't shout "EXTERMINATE!" before doing so. Re-watching the episode reveals otherwise.
  • One of the most persistent urban legends about the show is that Queen Elizabeth II was a fan of it, to the point a claim arose stating that Michael Grade, the BBC Controller in charge at the time of the start of the show's "extended hiatus" in 1989, was supposedly the only Controller to never be knighted, and that this was the Queen's payback for it. A quick look at the history of BBC Controllers would show that at least this particular aspect is patently false in every sense.^note Of the 21 Controllers of BBC 1 over the years, only two have been knighted, Sir Paul Fox and Sir Bill Cotton, both about 20 years after their tenure. Not even Lorraine Heggessey, the one in charge at the time of the show's revival in 2005, was so honoured. And even if Michael Grade was knighted, he is the only Controller of BBC 1 to be made a baron, so either the Queen didn't mind that much or she doesn't actually have that kind of veto power over the honours. As to whether the Queen was really a fan, the most proof that can be gained is that Buckingham Palace was used to host a reception to mark the show's 50th anniversary, and that might be more because of the show's status in British pop culture than because of the monarch's personal tastes (and any query towards the issue would inevitably bring back a response from the Crown stating that they do not comment on the Queen's personal hobbies).
• Production Posse: The three Twelfth Doctor finales and his regeneration story reunited the same top crew: showrunner and writer Steven Moffat, director Rachel Talalay, composer Murray Gold and lead actor Peter Capaldi.
• Promoted Fanboy:
  • Colin Baker had been a fan of the franchise since the first episode was aired and leapt at the chance to even be in the story, much less portray the Doctor himself. He's also the president of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society.
  • Matthew Waterhouse (Adric) and the author of his introduction story, Andrew Smith.
  • Writer Rona Munro started watching the series with William Hartnell when she was a little girl.
  • Nicholas Briggs started out creating and starring in fan audios (Doctor Who Audio Visuals) using at least half a dozen pseudonyms. He managed to befriend all of the cast and crew of Doctor Who, created documentaries, convinced many of the Doctors and companions to star in BBV Productions such as The Stranger and The Airzone Solution (both written by him), and eventually became the Show Runner of Big Finish Doctor Who. He promptly re-wrote many of his Audio Visuals into official episodes. Oh, and he now voices the Daleks and the Cybermen in the TV show.
  • David Tennant. Not only did he start acting just to become the Doctor, there was a special that landed him with his favourite Doctor, Peter Davison. The following year, Tennant met Peter's daughter Georgia, fell in love and proposed, later having a child together, Olivia. Not only is Tennant clearly the ultimate Promoted Fanboy, but Olivia and her younger siblings are the only people who can claim both her father and grandfather were the Doctor.
  • Steven Moffat got the chance to put ideas he thought of back in 1995 into the show.
  • Peter Capaldi is a lifelong Doctor Who fan, having begun watching the show right around when it was first airing and kept up with it throughout the 70s and 80s.
  • Russell T Davies wrote the Doctor Who New Adventures novel Damaged Goods, and had Vince in the British Queer as Folk be a Who fan.
  • Chris Chibnall once represented the Doctor Who Appreciation Society on BBC public opinion show Open Air in 1986, criticising the show's current quality. Thirty years later, he ended up as showrunner, becoming the latest fan target.
  • "Pfutz" and Oursler, designers of a pinball machine based on the series, were big fans of the series.
• Queer Character, Queer Actor:
  • Captain Jack Harkness, who is pansexual, is played by openly gay actor John Barrowman.
  • Bill Potts, who is a lesbian, is played by Pearl Mackie, who came out as bisexual in 2020.
  • Midshipman Alonso Frame who flirts with Jack, is played by gay actor Russell Tovey.
• Quietly Cancelled: During the 1989-2005 TV hiatus, The BBC never admitted that the series had been cancelled, continuously claiming that they were simply waiting for the right time to bring it back. (In the final years of the gap, it's widely believed that the return of the TV series was chiefly being obstructed by attempts to get a cinema film produced.)
• Real-Life Relative:
  • Karen Gillan and Caitlin Blackwood are cousins who had never met before being cast to play Amy.
  • As Edward Travers, Jack Watling twice appeared alongside his real-life daughter Deborah, who played companion Victoria.
  • Canton Delaware's older self is played by Mark Sheppard's own father.
• Reality Subtext: Adric, whose older brother is killed shortly before Adric joins the Doctor, was played by Matthew Waterhouse, who sadly knew from experience what it's like to lose an older brother. Twice.
• Recast as a Regular:
  • Jean Marsh played Richard the Lionheart's sister in "The Crusade" before becoming one of the Doctor's travelling companions in "The Daleks' Master Plan".
    • Decades later, she played the villain in "Battlefield".
  • Peter Purves played two different characters in the same serial ("The Chase") — Fake American Morton Dill and new companion Steven Taylor.
  • Nicholas Courtney played a character called Bret Vyon for four episodes of "The Daleks' Master Plan", before returning three years later to play The Brigadier until his death.
  • John Levene first appeared in the Patrick Troughton-era stories "The Moonbase" and "The Web of Fear", and then appeared as UNIT soldier Sgt. Benton in "The Invasion", becoming a regular cast member for most of the Jon Pertwee era. A bit less noticeable than other examples, as in the first two stories he was dressed in Cyberman and Yeti suits, respectively.
  • Ian Marter played Lieutenant Andrews in "Carnival of Monsters" before joining the regular cast as Harry Sullivan.
  • In "The Armageddon Factor", Lalla Ward played Princess Astra — whom Romana liked so much that she modelled her next regeneration on her.
  • Inverted by Jacqueline Hill, an original Doctor Who companion who came back fifteen years after her departure to guest-star as Lexa in "Meglos".
  • Colin Baker guests in "Arc of Infinity" as Commander Maxil, an antagonist of the Fifth Doctor, about two years before being cast as Doctor No. Six.
  • Eve Myles played Gwyneth in "The Unquiet Dead", and then became a future relative of that character as Torchwood lead Gwen.
  • Freema Agyeman, who became the Doctor's companion Martha Jones, previously appeared as minor character Adeola Oshodi. In-universe, Martha and Adeola are cousins with a Strong Family Resemblance.
  • Adjoa Andoh played Sister Jatt in "New Earth", and then was cast as Martha's mum Francine, in another example obfuscated by heavy makeup.
  • Bernard Cribbins co-starred in Daleks' Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. way back in 1966 as well as in the Big Finish episode "Horror of Glam Rock" before playing Wilfred Mott.
  • Peter Capaldi, the Twelfth Doctor, first appeared as the Roman nobleman Caecilius in "The Fires of Pompeii". He also had a prominent role as John Frobisher in the spinoff Torchwood: Children of Earth. This is addressed In-Universe following his regeneration, and in "The Girl Who Died". In the latter, the Doctor sees it as his reminding himself that he can save people even when all hope seems lost.
    • The official In-Universe explanation for the resemblances: The face is originally Caecilius'. Frobisher is a direct descendant, and the 12th Doctor subconsciously copied his appearance for the reasons mentioned above.
  • Karen Gillan became regular companion Amy Pond two years after playing a cult priestess in "The Fires of Pompeii", the same episode that featured Capaldi.
  • Neve McIntosh played Silurian sisters Alaya and Restac in 2010, and from 2011 onwards she played Madame Vastra, the Silurian detective.
  • Similarly, Dan Starkey has been playing random Sontaran warriors since the return of the series, then was cast as the recurrer Strax. Notably, this means he has played two different lead characters at the BBC Doctor Who Proms (Skorr — which he played in two 2008 episodes — and Strax). Those are two of three different speaking Sontaran parts he's had (the other being Jast^*Not to be confused with Dalek Jast). He has, though, played different extra roles even after starting as Strax, because of the reasonable anonymity afforded him for all the Sontaran makeup: another random Sontaran warrior in an episode without Strax, and Ian in "Last Christmas".
  • Paul Marc Davis played Chiefs in both Doctor Who and Torchwood before becoming The Trickster.
  • Bradley Walsh played the Pied Piper and his various alter-egos in The Sarah Jane Adventures story "The Day of the Clown" before being cast as Thirteenth Doctor companion Graham O'Brien.
  • In another inversion, Anjli Mohindra, who played Rani Chandra on The Sarah Jane Adventures, guest-starred in Series 12 episode "Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror" as the Queen of the Skithra.
• Recursive Adaptation:
  • The Third Doctor was based partially on James Bond, who was allegedly partially inspired by Jon Pertwee.
  • Since 2005, several TV episodes have been based, to a greater or lesser extent, on stories from various parts of the expanded universe.
• Recycled Set:
  • The Red Waterfall reception area in "The Girl Who Waited" is near-identical to the hospital reception from "New Earth".
  • The garden location where the "Heaven" scene in "Deep Breath" was filmed was previously used as the Garden Zone in "The Girl Who Waited".
• Re Run: Except for some serials with missing episodes (and, depending when you're reading this, the most recent episodes) every story has been repeatedly repeated. The most notable of these is the first repeat of "The Evil of the Daleks" where the repeat was in continuity with the rest of the series, as the Doctor showed his new companion one of his previous adventures.
• Role-Ending Misdemeanor:
  • Philip Hinchcliffe produced the show from 1974-7, a period that saw the series enter Darker and Edgier territory that was often criticised for being too scary and violent for children (and often considered the Golden Age of the series). The final straw came the notorious cliffhanger to episode three of "The Deadly Assassin", which saw the Doctor's head being held underwater. This was seen as going too far by Moral Guardians (most notably Mary Whitehouse) and, while The BBC publicly defended the programme, after three seasons Hinchcliffe was moved onto the adult police thriller series Target in 1977, and his replacement Graham Williams, who had created Target, was specifically instructed to lighten the tone of the storylines and reduce violence.
  • Dalek operator Nicholas Pegg was booted from the series following an incident where he snuck an acrostic message into one of his Wotcha columns in Doctor Who Magazine that read "PANINI AND BBC WORLDWIDE ARE CUNTS", with multiple references on the same page to secret messages and things being "hidden in plain sight"; Pegg inserted the message to protest the column being Cut Short due to Executive Meddling. Pegg wouldn't return to the series until "Revolution of the Daleks" in 2021.
  • Writer Gareth Roberts was fired from the series due to numerous social media posts in which he was openly transphobic. The last straw came when he was assigned to a book anthology of Who stories, and several of the other writers involved said they wanted nothing to do with him and would quit unless he was removed. Gareth's attempts to critique this, making a post in which he denied transgender people existed, was regarded as Digging Yourself Deeper. Prior to this, he got into a confrontation with Peter Capaldi while filming season eight's "The Caretaker", thus ensuring that he wasn't invited back for the rest of his tenure.
• Romance on the Set
  • Tom Baker and:
    • Sue Gerrard, who had been working as an editor on "Horror of Fang Rock". He had an on-and-off relationship with her, broke it off to marry Lalla Ward (see below), and then, after divorcing Ward, rekindled his relationship with Sue and married her. They've been married ever since.
    • Lalla Ward. They eventually got divorced after 16 months. Eagle-eyed viewers can play along at home noting whether or not Baker and Ward got along at the time of shooting their scenes. There are noticeable moments when the two of them absolutely refuse to look at each other.
  • David Tennant dated several of his Doctor Who guest stars. In fact, he's married to and has a daughter and a stepson / and now officially adopted son with Georgia Moffett, who's the real-life daughter of Fifth Doctor Peter Davison, and who played the daughter of Tennant's Doctor (well, "genetic clone") on the show. That's right, there is a kid out there that has the Doctor as her father and grandfather. (Yes, the Doctor's daughter played the Doctor's daughter and then had the Doctor's daughter. Try to get your mind around that!)
    • Another one was Tennant and Sophia Myles, who appeared in Series 2's "The Girl in the Fireplace".
  • Frazer Hines (Jamie) and Deborah Watling (Victoria) briefly dated during their time together on the show. Watling also developed something of a reputation for flings with the monster operators. Over her tenure she went out with a Yeti, a Cyberman and a couple of Ice Warriors (which was awkward because they were "too tall").
• Running the Asylum: It's the longest running Science Fiction show in existence, heavily influencing just about everyone in the UK who ever did anything related to Science Fiction. It's a fair bet that there's a few long-time fans on the payroll, such as David Tennant.
• Screwed by the Network:
  • Happened quite a few times in the 80s, which ultimately put the show on a year and a half hiatus and was the reason Colin Baker was fired.
  • Arguably happened with Series 8 and 9. The BBC moved the time of broadcast from spring to autumn, which meant it had to air after Strictly Come Dancing at a time too late for a family show. It also had to compete with ITV's The X Factor and at one point a few rugby games. The result was comparatively low ratings. Series 9 also suffered from trailers spoiling some episodes and a bad publicity campaign.
  • Subverted by Series 10. At first, no series in 2016 sounds like getting screwed, but this was to allow Series 10 to be broadcast and not suffer competition from the Olympics and other events. Plus, it allowed the series to be broadcast in the spring. This prevented the problems the last two series had and allowed Moffat to work on Sherlock without Doctor Who suffering the way Series 6 did (see Troubled Production below), though it didn't stop all problems.
  • Indirectly screwed by the satellite provider monopoly Astro in Malaysia back in 2009, when said provider screwed BBC Entertainment over by dropping it from their channel lineup. The show, along with other BBC programming, remained unavailable in Malaysia until 2012 when a IPTV provider, Hypp TV, finally picked up the channel. Hypp TV dropped the channel in December 2015, but it turned out that Hypp TV was advised by The BBC that they were going to discontinue BBC Entertainment in 2017 in favour of launching the BBC First VOD service and to not renew their contract. They picked up BBC First in October 2016, as soon as the BBC ended the trial in Singapore and opened up the VOD service to other providers in Asia.
  • The 50th anniversary release of the animated reconstruction of "The Power of the Daleks" on BBC America got shafted out of its 8:25 PM timeslot, putting it at 11 PM to make room for yet more Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns.
  • Australians and New Zealanders were screwed over when the Disney+ deal was announced in 2022, as it means the show leaving free public broadcasters ABC and TVNZ for a service you have to pay for.
• Series Hiatus:
  • After the transmission of Season 22 in early 1985, the show was rested for 18 months on the orders of BBC One controller Michael Grade. The stated reasons were that the levels of violence in the programme had become to high, and the BBC wished to invest money in creating new dramas. The show returned in late 1986, but with a completely different set of stories to those that had been originally planned, under the umbrella title "Trial Of A Time Lord", reflecting the way that the show was effectively on trial in real life.
  • The cancellation of the classic series in 1989 was originally described as a "hiatus" by the BBC. And it was, of a sort. It just lasted considerably longer than the earlier one: at least seven years (until the 1996 TV movie) and up to sixteen years (until the series resumed on a regular basis with "Rose" in 2005).
  • The BBC also announced that Doctor Who would be on hiatus between the 2015 and 2016 Christmas Specials, since Steven Moffat was busy with Sherlock^note Although that hadn't been an issue before Series 4, many commentators complained that working on both shows at the same time lead to Doctor Who suffering from Seasonal Rot, giving him the ultimatum of working on one show or the other. In fact, 2015 was the first year Moffat worked solely on Doctor Who, which lead to an increase in critical acclaim. The BBC themselves felt it was a good time to allow a hiatus since they were broadcasting so many events such as the Olympics it would constantly interrupt their flagship series.
• Spared by the Cut:
  • Louise Jameson wanted Leela to be Killed Off for Real in "The Invasion of Time", where she would die defending the Doctor against the Sontarans. Producer Graham Williams and script editor Anthony Read considered agreeing to her request, but ultimately decided against it as they felt that this would traumatise children.
  • Peri's death in "Mindwarp" was originally going to be permanent. However, "The Ultimate Foe" later revealed that it was a lie by the Matrix and that she's alive and married to Ycranos. Nicola Bryant didn't learn about this until later and she was not pleased.
  • The Brigadier was supposed to die in "Battlefield", facing off against the Destroyer. This was approved by Nicholas Courtney, Andrew Cartmel and John Nathan-Turner. Ultimately, Ben Aaronovitch couldn't bring himself to do it.
  • In "The Invasion", Routledge attempts to shoot Tobias Vaughn, but Vaughn convinces Routledge to shoot himself. This scene was filmed, but was cut before transmission. It was restored in the novelisation.
  • Episode Five of "Planet of the Daleks" was originally going to end with all of the Thal characters massacred by the Daleks. Terrance Dicks, however, asked that Terry Nation not include this plot point, as the series was beginning to be criticised for its violent content.
  • In the original script for "New Earth", the Face of Boe was going to die in this episode (and thus impart his secret to the Doctor a year earlier) and the only way for the Doctor to cure all the diseased was to euthanize them all. But then Russell T Davies read Steven Moffat's introduction segment in The Season One Shooting Scripts book, in which Moffat good naturedly mocked Davies, saying he "creates interesting characters and then melts them". This made Davies decide to have them all survive instead. The Face of Boe was spared because his final message was felt to work better in Series 3.
  • In "School Reunion", what exactly happened to Milo between the Doctor's class and the scene at lunch? In the footage that was cut, the Doctor's questions to Milo actually made him collapse, prompting the Doctor to bring him to the school nurse, who turned out to be another Krillitane. This Krillitane then ate Milo, explaining what Wagner is referring to when he comes up to Melissa and tells her she's being moved up because Milo's failed him.
  • In a leaked workprint of "Into The Dalek", Dalek Rusty self-destructed when he returned to the Dalek spaceship, destroying the spaceship and its Dalek crew. This was removed from the final episode, and Dalek Rusty made a subsequent appearance in "Twice Upon a Time".
• Spin-Off Cookbook:
  • The Doctor Who Cookbook by Gary Downie had recipes submitted by actors from the show and given 'verse-inspired names like Castrovalvan Kebabs.
  • A second cookbook was published in 2016, this one written by professional cookery writer Joanna Farrow.
• Technical Advisor: While the extent of the matter is disputed by the show's own staff, Ian Levine, a record producer and longtime fan of the show, is commonly reported to have served as an unofficial "continuity advisor" during much of the '80s to bolster producer John Nathan-Turner's attempts at appealing to hardcore fans. According to these reports, Levine's job was to both maintain the accuracy of continuity nods and callbacks and suggest new elements in these categories, most significantly co-writing "Attack of the Cybermen", a Sequel Episode to "The Tenth Planet", "The Tomb of the Cybermen", and "Resurrection of the Daleks". Levine stayed on board until Season 23, leaving midway through its production due to his discontent with the casting of Bonnie Langford as companion Mel Bush.
• Trans Character, Cis Actor: Trans villainess Cassandra is played by actress Creator/ZoëWanamaker.
• Trend Killer: The cancellation of Doctor Who in 1989 marked the final death knell of traditional television serials, which had already been declining considerably by then. By the time the show returned to regular airing in 2005, serialization was mostly limited to the miniseries and anthology formats, with long-form shows (including Doctor Who itself) shifting towards season-long story arcs rather than multi-episode serials.
• Un-Cancelled: The show ceased production in 1989, and barring a TV movie in 1996, it would not return until 2005. Although the BBC repeatedly stated in the interim that the show had not been cancelled and was merely on an extended hiatus, it's hard to argue that a 16 year gap between regular seasons doesn't constitute a cancellation followed by a revival.
  • According to Chris Chibnall, the show was actually cancelled during the COVID-19 pandemic. Though the cancellation apparently only lasted for an hour.
• Viral Marketing: There have been, at various times, an actual Cybus Industries website, a conspiracy site based on the one from the first revival episode, and another telling you to vote for Mr. Saxon.
• Wag the Director:
  • William Hartnell demanded that dialogue implying Brother–Sister Incest between Richard the Lionheart and his sister Joanna in "The Crusade" be removed, as he felt it was inappropriate for a family series. The Incest Subtext was still implied in the performances.
  • Jon Pertwee's run had a mild (and positive) example, in that he was a fan of action movies, which reflected in his Doctor becoming more of a hands-on action-oriented figure than his predecessors. He also was fond of gadgets and incorporated them into the show, notably the Whomobile, which Pertwee personally owned. His final story, "Planet of the Spiders", featured an extended chase scene involving the Whomobile, his old car Bessie, and a gyrocopter, possibly as a farewell gift to Pertwee.
  • Toward the end of his tenure as the Fourth Doctor, Tom Baker was becoming pretty insufferable, demanding a minimum of retakes and, because of his volatile romantic relationship with Lalla Ward, occasionally refusing to be so much as in the same room as her. This meant that they did not rehearse scenes with each other and barely even looked at each other on camera. In his final season, Baker met his match with a new production team, led by John Nathan-Turner, who began instituting the now-infamous Limited Wardrobe and other creative edicts. Reportedly, Baker went to the showrunners asking what would happen if Baker left the show as a show of clout, and was very surprised when they called his bluff.
  • When David Tennant was cast as the Tenth Doctor, the production team wanted to include a pair of boots as part of his costume, and were more than a little miffed when Tennant asked to wear a pair of beaten-up red Converse sneakers instead. After much arguing over the idea, with the production team insisting that the Converses wouldn't work for prolonged running and that they were "too cold" or "too warm," Tennant won out, resulting in the sneakers becoming a key part of the Tenth Doctor's getup.
  • A milder version happened much later when Matt Smith, unhappy with how the Eleventh Doctor would dress (word is he was to have a more swashbuckling look, à la Jack Sparrow)^notePictures are available online of the informal screen tests of various trial outfits. Some would have worked quite well, but most, while not quite being pirate-y, definitely gave off a gothic hipster vibe that would have clashed with Smith's in turns childish and curmudgeon portrayal, so it's hard to argue that his changes weren't for the best., successfully lobbied to have the character's look changed to a more professorial appearance, with the inclusion of the bowtie.
  • Another positive example in Big Finish Doctor Who. Paul McGann pushed for a new look for his Doctor, based on World War I-era navy clothes, as well as a World War I storyline. This happened in "Dark Eyes".
    • This played in in a very much "ask forgiveness before permission" fashion. McGann had volunteered to do a photoshoot to put together new photos for the Big Finish CD covers and production artwork. The producers were overjoyed, as they'd long since gotten tired of reusing the twenty-years-old stills from his original movie appearance. When he showed up in his bluish-black leather overcoat, jeans, white t-shirt, and canvas satchel instead of his Victorian velvets... the producers were still overjoyed, and they were more than happy to work the changes into the script. An appearance by McGann in costume at a convention soon after, which met to wildly positive reactions by the fans, was just icing on the cake.
  • Yet another, which was more a request than a demand, during the second series of the new show: Billie Piper requested an episode where she got the opportunity to be funny, after spending the first season tackling some rather serious material. Hence the episode "New Earth".
  • In "Tooth and Claw", the script originally had Queen Victoria liken Sir Robert to Sir Francis Drake (rather than Sir Walter Raleigh), until Derek Riddell (Sir Robert) pointed out that this would have been incorrect for the reference the Queen was making.
  • "School Reunion" was originally meant to have Sarah Jane Smith be reintroduced as a recovering alcoholic, but Elisabeth Sladen suggested that this be removed.
  • In "The Unicorn and the Wasp", the Doctor was originally supposed to ram the Vespiform into the lake with the car that he and Donna commandeer, until David Tennant objected because he was concerned that that ending would portray the Doctor as a murderer.
    • The casting of Fenella Woolgar (who, coincidentally or not, has starred in the Poirot (1989) series twice as of 2010) as Agatha Christie was made at Tennant's suggestion.
  • In defiance of Robert Shearman's wishes, Christopher Eccleston raged against the lone Dalek in the episode "Dalek" instead of mocking it flippantly. After seeing how well it worked, though, Shearman was pleased.
  • David Tennant disliked the original take of the Tenth Doctor's last words ("I don't want to go") in "The End of Time", where his composure breaks and he really turns on the waterworks as he utters them, feeling that it came across as somewhat unheroic and unbecoming of the character. Instead, Tennant managed to argue for a compromise, where the Doctor is still quite emotional about his regeneration, but is also a bit more subdued and composed about it, which was the version that ended up on-screen.
  • In a similar situation to McGann's new look, when John Simm was asked to reprise the role of the Master in "World Enough and Time"/"The Doctor Falls", he arrived at rehersals having already grown a Beard of Evil, something his previous appearances as the Master had lacked. Steven Moffat decided that it worked.
• Word of Gay:
  • The writer of "Survival" complained that her intended lesbian subtext between Ace and Karra was lost in the broadcast version (though some fans will aver that the subtext is still visible if you look). By that point, several stories (including "The Curse of Fenric", written by the character's creator) had explicitly depicted Ace showing romantic interest in male characters, making this more "word of bi".
  • Ricky and Jake in "Age of Steel", as revealed by Russell T Davies in Doctor Who Confidential. The deleted scene showing this is included in the DVD box set.
  • Davies revealed in 2020 that he planned a scene for "Journey's End" where we catch up with Nyssa and Tegan, who are now in a lesbian relationship. In 2020, he wrote the webcast Farewell Sarah Jane which reveals that they're a couple living in Australia.
  • Steven Moffat has said that River is bi. For years, her attraction to women was never mentioned in-universe; even by the time of her intended final appearance all the fandom had was Word of God. This being Doctor Who though, she eventually came back at an earlier point in her timeline, and finally talked about having had female partners.
  • The sexuality of the Doctor is still a topic of much debate, with the two main interpretations being that she's either bisexual/pansexual or asexual. Evidence for both views can be found in-universe, with Doctors from the Eighth onward happily kissing their companions regardless of gender while generally staying away from more intimate entanglements. Steven Moffat finally took it upon himself to say on twitter that the Doctor doesn't understand the human concepts of gay and straight on a personal level. Since the character's development is ongoing to the point of being pretty much eternal, this discourse eventually did make its way into the series with the Doctor explaining that his entire species is genderfluid and has wildly different ideas of male/female dynamics than humans do.
  • Zigzagged with Clara Oswald in her final series. Twice it is hinted that Clara has had an off-screen romance with Jane Austen, both times explicit enough to state that Clara is bisexual, but these are spoken as throwaway lines. In interviews, actress Jenna Coleman has been the one to say if Clara is bisexual but also hangs onto the fact that it is also up to audience interpretation.
  • According to Ian Briggs, writer of "The Curse of Fenric", Judson and Millington's bitter relationship was not simply a friendship turned sour, but one that had turned into a love affair and then gone wrong. Judson in particular was loosely based on Alan Turing.
• Word of God: On the "Planet of the Spiders" DVD, the creators state that they intended the Doctor and the Master to come off as brothers in the Jon Pertwee era.
• Write What You Know:
  • Chris Chibnall revealed in 2022 that the controversial Timeless Child revelation was based on his experiences being adopted.
  • Similarly, Graham being a cancer survivor was based on Chibnall's own cancer diagnosis in his early twenties, along with the experiences of other people he knew in the same position.
• Writer Revolt:
  • In Season 8, the production team kicked out scientist companion Liz Shaw because they saw her personality as too challenging, as the companion's role was to get captured, scream and look good in a miniskirt. They decided to replace her with a ditzy Dumb Blonde, and Robert Holmes was tasked with introducing her. He went out of his way to use her silliness to make her into a Badass Adorable Fearless Fool who almost poked fun at the show's conventions by existing rather than giving them the Damsel in Distress that they wanted.
  • It's hard not to see a certain undercurrent of Biting-the-Hand Humour to "Carnival of Monsters", in which the Doctor and his companion get trapped in a tiny universe made up of corridors and generic monsters to run away from down those corridors. An eccentrically-dressed intellectual gentleman and his plucky blond assistant are involved, but only because they've figured out that scaring children gets them paid. All of this goes on under the purview of privilege-obsessed literal grey-faced bureaucrats who complain about monsters and view entertainment as purposeless. Robert Holmes was asked to do Strictly Formula Who, and instead did a Deconstructive Parody.
  • Philip Hinchcliffe was showrunner during Season 12-14. During "The Deadly Assassin", the high level of Family-Unfriendly Violence and the resulting media firestorm led to the BBC informing him that he was going to be sacked and replaced at the end of the season with a new showrunner who would not be allowed to use Gothic Horror. So Hinchcliffe told the props team to ignore their budgeting and go all-out for the final two serials of the series, "The Robots of Death" and "The Talons of Weng-Chiang", both of which have drop-dead gorgeous production values and are by far the best-looking the Classic series ever got. Of course, the point of this was that the budget got severely slashed for the incoming team, "The Invisible Enemy", "The Horror of Fang Rock" and "Underworld" in particular suffering.
  • The beloved Robert Holmes was script editor for Seasons 12-15, but stepped down from the position after writing "The Sun Makers" due to a mixture of creative burnout, Creator Breakdown, his chief skill not working well in the new Lighter and Softer regime and tax issues. Graham Williams coaxed him back to write a story he intended to be the big Spectacle story of Season 16 — the most popular writer, returned and writing about the biggest-ever monster. However, Holmes disliked writing "big scary monster" stories (preferring Paranoia Fuel, over-the-top humanoid villains and Things That Go "Bump" in the Night) and didn't like doing "business as usual" Who either, and was no less burned out as he had been the last year. He eventually turned in a script, "The Power of Kroll", that used all of the most unsatisfying Who Cliché Storm elements almost as if he had listed them, and quit writing for the show. He was eventually tempted back, but not until six years later.
  • "The Ultimate Foe" contains a barely subtextual Take That! at the derailing Executive Meddling the show was undergoing, in the form of the Obstructive Bureaucrat of the Fantasy Factory.
  • When Terrance Dicks was writing "The Five Doctors", he got fed up with script editor Eric Saward's insistence that Cybermen (his favourite monster) got a bigger and bigger part in the story, so he wrote in a scene with a "Raston warrior robot" (an extremely low-budget monster played by a man in a silver body stocking who could use the equally low-budget Stop Trick to teleport) slaughtering a whole platoon of Cybermen and then exiting the plot. Ironically, in a story about five (well, four) of the Doctor's incarnations meeting each other at the dark heart of Gallifrey, this ended up as the most memorable scene from the special. Dicks also admits in the audio commentary that he quite enjoyed writing the Third Doctor as "pig-headed and completely wrong" in his refusal to trust the Master, due to Jon Pertwee having fought him on a few scripts.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: Partly by necessity. While an individual head-writer/producer might have individual plans, the show's Long Runner status means that this is a little bit necessary. For example, a lot of the things that have made the show so iconic, such as The Nth Doctor trope or the Daleks, weren't planned but added as they went along.
  • Especially notable is "The Ultimate Foe", the end of the "Trial of a Time Lord" story arc. Original writer Robert Holmes died before he could write the final story, and the team brought on to replace him were actually legally forbidden from knowing his intended ending. The two-part finale has a quite noticeably rushed script, with a Master subplot that ends up going nowhere and the bizarre reveal that the prosecutor the Valeyard was actually a future incarnation of the Doctor the whole time, which the show has basically just ignored ever since.
  • Russell T Davies, the first showrunner of the revival series, has openly stated that he tends to write overarching stories (particularly ones that span multiple seasons) as he goes, rather than having it meticulously planned out in advance. This often resulted in him running with things that people pointed out to him:
    • The fact that the Doctor happened to have an encounter with Donna, then coincidentally ran into her grandfather the following Christmas, then happened to run into Donna again after they, by total happenstance, decided to investigate the same suspicious company. Davies has said that someone brought up how coincidental it was, and wondered if there was some reason for it. At the time, which was before he had finished finalising "Partners in Crime" he had nothing planned. He realised that it looked like he did though, and began tying it into the series' overarching narrative. For this reason, they also took the hints that Donna's fate seems cosmically interwoven with the Doctor's thing up a notch in that episode.
    • Similarly, when writing "Planet of the Ood", Davies put in the Ood calling the Doctor and Donna "the Doctor-Donna" just because he thought it sounded cool. Cue the finale, in which Donna becomes half-Donna half-Doctor due to a Time Lord-human metacrisis. Davies didn't realize that he had unintentionally created some major foreshadowing until someone pointed it out to him, thinking he had done it intentionally. He then rewrote "Journey's End" to include a moment of the Doctor remembering that the Ood had called them Doctor-Donna.
    • One notable subversion for Davies was the overarching story concerning the Doctor's severed hand, which went from the 2005 Christmas special to the Series 4 finale in 2008. Davies claims that since the moment he wrote it into the script for "The Christmas Invasion", he knew that he would end up making a "second Doctor" grow out of the severed hand, whom the original Doctor would send off to live happily with Rose. He even told David Tennant about these plans at the time.
    • Davies openly declared after Series 3 that the mysterious shot of a woman's hand picking up the Master's ring had no intended meaning; he had no further plans for the character, but with his time as showrunner coming to an end he figured he should put in some kind of Sequel Hook to make it easier for future writers who wanted to use him again. Then in the very last episode of his initial run, he decided to follow up on it himself after all.

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Trivia for the pinball game:

• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: The first 100 units had a moving Dalek topper. This proved to be too costly to keep up, thus its discontinuation.

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