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A Time Lord villain introduces Rasputin to disco music? Yes please!
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00:00Exposed to the time vortex, Rose Tyler, now in the form of the Bad Wolf, says that she
00:05can see everything. All that is, all that was, all that ever could be. There's been
00:11a great many could-be's in Doctor Who's past five decades, and the road from 1963 to 2022
00:18is littered with half-finished scripts and rejected pictures.
00:22So, with that in mind then, I'm Ellie with Who Culture, here with
00:2610 Unmade Doctor Who Stories We Wish We'd Seen.
00:30Number 10. Rose Was Actually Created By The Doctor
00:34Russell T Davies' first series of Doctor Who nearly featured a script written by another lauded
00:40British screenwriter. Davies approached his friend Paul Abbott to write an episode for the series,
00:45and the pair had previously worked together on Abbott's BBC series Linda Green, which also
00:51featured Christopher Eccleston. Abbott's episode would have explored the idea that Rose was
00:55an experiment by the Doctor to create his perfect companion. The idea was never developed much
01:01further than that, due to Abbott's commitments with the increasingly popular Shameless. And it's
01:06not clear in the small amount of information given by RTD how exactly the Doctor bread rose for this
01:12purpose. Wimbly-wobbly-timey-wimely-engineered Pete and Jackie's courtship, perhaps? It's strange to
01:18think how different the tone of the show would have been if the Doctor had been revealed to be a
01:23manipulative geneticist. And the Doctor has manipulated companions before, of course,
01:28but it does seem at odds with the lighter, more accessible tone of the 2005 reboot.
01:34Number 9. Killer Cats Of Gallifrey In a follow-up to The Deadly Assassin,
01:39the Doctor Who production team wanted to return to Gallifrey for the following season. Now, that story
01:45ended up being The Invasion Of Time, but the original pitch for the season 15 finale was quite different.
01:51Killers Of The Dark would have revealed that the planet of the Time Lords was also home to a race of
01:57cat people whose culture was similar to those of Asian countries. Not much is known about the story,
02:03other than it was to feature a gladiator-style battle in front of a stadium full of cat people.
02:08Perhaps this would have written out Leela the way Louise Jameson had always wanted,
02:12sacrificing her life in battle for the Doctor. David Weir's script got as far as the costume stage,
02:18with designer Dee Robson submitting some design sketches. In the end, script editor Anthony Reid
02:24and director Gerald Blake decided it would be far too difficult to achieve on Doctor Who's already
02:30tight budget. Instead, they opted to make Invasion Of Time, which introduced us to The Outsiders
02:36instead, Gallifrey's cheaper-to-realise humanoid population who had turned their backs on Time Lord Society.
02:43Number 8. Jamie's Happy Ending The ending of the War Games was heartbreaking.
02:49Sent back to their appropriate time and place, Jamie and Zoe are wiped of their memories of their many
02:55adventures with the Doctor. Not so bad for Zoe, who returns to a fairly comfortable life on a space
03:01station, but Jamie faces a much harder life. Returned back to his life following the Battle of Culloden,
03:07he faces slavery, murder, or as detailed in one comic by the legendary Grant Morrison,
03:14Madness. His ending, however, was almost much more hopeful. In a story that would have formed the
03:20third part in a Yeti trilogy, he and the TARDIS would arrive at a Scottish castle owned by an aging
03:26laird. The castle is soon under siege from the Great Intelligence and the Yeti. The Doctor defeats them,
03:31and Jamie decides to stay on at the castle, becoming its new laird. He falls in love with a local girl,
03:36Fiona, and is left to live happily ever after. The story was never filmed due to an ongoing
03:42copyright dispute between the BBC and the writers Melvin Hazeman and Henry Lincoln,
03:48who eventually withdrew their script. And so, Jamie was left to his fate on the fields of Culloden.
03:55Number 7. Matt Berry As The Meddlesome Monk
03:58Peter Harness, who co-wrote the dark urban thriller The Zygon Inversion slash Invasion with Stephen Moffat,
04:05pitched another story that was much lighter. The story was to feature the return of a renegade
04:10Time Lord last seen in the 1960s, The Monk. Originally played by comedy actor Peter Butterworth,
04:16Harness envisioned Matt Berry in the role. The plot was to feature the Meddlesome Time Lord calling on
04:22the 12th Doctor for help after he accidentally averts the Russian Revolution by playing Boney M to
04:28Rasputin. They then tried to put history back on course, with the monk eventually taking on the
04:33identity of Rasputin. It's a mad comic idea, but it might just have worked, and one can only imagine
04:40what a brilliant comedy double act Capaldi and Berry would have made. Moffat turned down the pitch,
04:45and Harness's next story for the series was the underwhelming pyramid at the end of the world.
04:51Watching a blind doctor trying to crack an entry code is nowhere near as much fun as him mucking around
04:56with Rasputin, Matt Berry and the music of Boney M.
04:596. The Final Game
05:01Introduced to the series as Moriarty to the Third Doctor's Sherlock Holmes,
05:06the Master was intended to be written out towards the end of the Pertwee era,
05:11with a storyline conceived where the former friends would do battle one last time,
05:16and during that confrontation, it was to be revealed that the Master was either
05:21the Doctor's brother or a personification of his dark side. The climactic scenes were to see the
05:27Master sacrifice himself to save the Doctor, his former friend. Whilst it was never produced,
05:33the story has been hugely influential over the years. The idea of the Master's conscience
05:38catching up with them would be a key part of Steven Moffat's final series as showrunner.
05:43Not only that, but the idea of the Master sacrificing their life to save the Doctor was
05:48echoed in the climax to The End of Time Part II, when he forces the Time Lords back to hell.
05:53The story was never produced due to the tragic and untimely death of actor Roger Delgado,
06:00and his loss heavily impacted Pertwee, who decided to leave the show,
06:04along with script editor Terence Dix and producer Barry Letts.
06:085. Return of the Autons
06:12If Doctor Who hadn't been put on hiatus after its 22nd season, there was a whole host of
06:17adventures planned. Many of these, like The Nightmare Fair and Mission to Magnus,
06:22have since been both novelised and dramatised in the intervening years.
06:27One unmade story that remains so, due to the lack of a finished script,
06:31was Robert Holmes' Yellow Fever and How to Cure It.
06:35In a classic example of producer John Nathan Turner's grab-bag approach to story commissioning,
06:40it was to be set in Singapore and featured the return of the Master,
06:43the Rani, and for the first time in over 20 years, the Autons. Also appearing would be the Brigadier,
06:50who would be in Singapore on holiday before being dragged into the adventure.
06:54All that's really known about the story is that the Master and the Rani would be disguised as street
06:58theatre performers. Now, John Nathan
07:00Turner did do a location scout, or a holiday as some might call it, but beyond this, not much more was
07:06planned. It does sound like a little bit of an overstuffed combination of elements,
07:12but if anyone could make it work, it's Robert Holmes.
07:15Number 4. Nazis in the British Museum
07:18Mark Gatiss has written for nearly every series of Doctor Who, from 2005 to 2017, with a few gaps
07:25here and there. And one of those gaps is in series 4, when his script entitled The Suicide Exhibition
07:32was dropped in favour of the Fires of Pompeii. It was held over for a potential special in the
07:37following series, but it was ultimately not made. Set in the British Museum at the height of the
07:42Blitz, it was an Indiana Jones-style adventure that pitted the Doctor and Donna against a team of
07:48Nazis trying to release something. The museum is revealed to be a giant puzzle box, and the Doctor
07:53and Donna have to deal with trapdoors, booby traps, and various other nasties in order to stop the
07:59Nazis achieving their goal. While this particular story went unmade, he was able to visit another
08:06London tourist attraction when he set Victory of the Daleks in Churchill's War Rooms.
08:12Number 3. The Live Halloween Episode
08:15Another fourth series story that was eventually abandoned by the production team was Century House,
08:21written by Tom McRae. The writer had previously written The Cyberman
08:25two-parter for the second series, and was this time given a very different concept by Russell T Davies.
08:32Designed to function as the companion light episode, it would focus mostly on the Doctor,
08:37taking part in an episode of Most Haunted. Donna would be watching the live broadcast from home as the
08:43Doctor and a group of TV ghost hunters investigate the haunting of the Red Widow. Davies liked the script,
08:50but he worried that following The Unicorn and The Wasp there would be too much comedy. He also felt
08:56that he'd given the writer a poor premise and no longer had faith in the concept. The story was
09:01eventually shelled and replaced by the RTD-penned Midnight, a far scarier episode than Century House
09:07would have been. It was a fun concept, but it's unlikely we'll ever get to see it given that TV
09:12ghost hunting isn't as popular as it used to be. Number 2. Stephen Fry's King Arthur story.
09:19How exciting was the lead-up to Doctor Who's second series? Not only had the return of the Cybermen,
09:27Sarah Jane Smith and K9 been revealed, but fans were also promised an episode written by Stephen Fry.
09:35Now, the polymath author had got quite far in the writing process. He's attended the first read-through,
09:41he went for dinner with his fellow Doctor Who writers. His episode was set in the 1920s and would
09:47feature a sci-fi spin on Arthurian legend. More specifically, The Green Knight, recently immortalised
09:54on film by Dev Patel. Fry's episode was to reveal that Gawain had survived his beheading because he
10:00was actually of alien origin. The finished draft was deemed too expensive to realise in its original
10:06form and rewrites were suggested. Sadly, a multi-talented figure like Stephen Fry is constantly in demand,
10:13and so he couldn't commit to the rewrites. The story was sadly abandoned, and despite suggestion
10:19that it might have been revisited in the following series, it again never surfaced.
10:25What's even more upsetting is that the story that replaced it was the critically derided Fear Her.
10:31Sentient crayon drawings are cheaper to realise than Arthurian legends, but much less exciting.
10:36One of the great what-if moments in Doctor Who history is Tom Baker and Ian Martyr's proposed movie
10:48in the mid-to-late 1970s. They had a director attached, but they could never raise the funding
10:54required to make it a reality. Had it been made, it would have been an incredibly memorable combination
11:00of folk horror and psychedelic sci-fi. Doctor Who meets Scratchman was to pit the Doctor,
11:06Harry and Sarah against scarecrows in a Scottish village and the devil himself, climaxing in a
11:12giant game of pinball featuring the Daleks. It's quintessentially Tom Baker, utterly mad but very
11:19charming. Whilst the film never saw the light of day, BBC Books did eventually commission Tom Baker
11:26to adapt his and Martyr's original treatment into a novel. It's both a creepy, blackly comedic Doctor
11:33Who adventure and a touching tribute to the Baker era. And that concludes our list. If you can think
11:40of any that we missed then do let us know in the comments below and while you're there don't forget
11:44to like and subscribe and tap that notification bell. Also head over to Twitter and follow us there
11:50at WhoCulture and I can be found across various social medias just by searching Ellie Littlechild.
11:55I've been Ellie with WhoCulture and in the words of Riversong herself, goodbye sweeties.
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