Trivia / Doctor Who 2007 CS "Voyage of the Damned"

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• Bad Export for You: In Canada, the CBC — which in 2007 was the official broadcaster of Doctor Who in that country — chose not to air the special, skipping from Series 3 to Series 4 and leaving the cliffhanger at the end of Series 3 unresolved. Although it aired on a French-language branch of the CBC, it didn't get an official English-language broadcast until Space, a cable network, took over the broadcast rights to the series and finally gave the special a proper broadcast — a half-decade after it first aired in the UK. In the meantime, Canadian fans had to rely on either DVD releases or illegal downloads to see it.
• Completely Different Title: The French title is "Une croisière autour de la Terre" (A Cruise around the Earth).
• First Appearance: Of Wilfred Mott.
• In Memoriam: To the show's very first producer, Verity Lambert.
• Theme Tune: A new variant of the main theme — again by Murray Gold — is introduced with this story. This was because the credits speed had to be changed around this time, which the old music would not have synced with, so Gold wrote this variant to match. A slightly different variation would be used for the rest of the Tenth Doctor era.
• Stunt Casting: Kylie Minogue as this episode's guest companion is probably the most extreme example of this in Doctor Who history. To be fair, it worked; this episode still holds the record for the most viewers in the history of New Who.
• What Could Have Been:
  • David Jason was approached to play the role of Mr. Copper. Sadly, he proved unavailable.
  • Dennis Hopper was offered the role of Max Capricorn, but wasn't available.
  • It was originally planned for the Judoon to return at the end to arrest Max. RTD threw this out because he thought there were too many things going on in the story.
  • Originally, Max was seen to be a passenger on the Titanic in the ballroom during the episode's opening scenes. He was also not confined to a life support machine at this point. Max became a cyborg on life support because Davies decided that revealing some normal businessman to be behind everything was far too anticlimactic.
  • In his first draft of the episode, Buckingham Palace was destroyed by the Titanic. The Doctor stops the ship from crashing, but not before it smashes through the palace. In this version, instead of wishing the Doctor a Happy Christmas, the Queen is heard to curse the Doctor. This same early draft also featured a hoped-for cameo by Prince Charles. Davies spared the Palace as he felt it was too negative an ending for a holiday episode. It also helped that that the required sfx for the scene was one of the things contributing to the episode being far too over budget. Ironically, the alternate universe timeline created in the events of "Turn Left" showed that the Titanic would've hit Buckingham Palace without the Doctor around.
  • Davies originally wanted to turn the ship upside down before cutting the concept for monetary constraints.
• Word of God: Russell T Davies wrestled with how to make it clear that the rest of the Titanic's crew and passengers weren't just a bunch of humans. It was only after it was too late that he realised he should have made them talk about "the humans" (in the third person) more often.
• Working Title: Starship Titanic. It was changed when it was pointed out that Douglas Adams had created a novel and video game of the same name, with an extremely similar concept, years earlier. RTD decided he preferred the new one since the old one might have given too much away about the setting.
• You Look Familiar:
  • A multi-media example. Bernard Cribbins, who plays the newspaper man (later retconned as Wilfred Mott), played companion Tom in the Alternate Continuity film Daleks' Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D..
  • Geoffrey Palmer (Captain Hardaker) had previously played Masters in "Doctor Who and the Silurians" and the Administrator in "The Mutants".
  • Clive Swift (Mr Copper) played Professor Jobel in the Sixth Doctor serial "Revelation of the Daleks".

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