- 14 hours ago
Explore the shocking truths behind the production of Doctor Who. Learn about a near-fatal explosion involving Sylvester McCoy, the asbestos scare that halted filming, and how the Flux storyline was a direct metaphor for the pandemic.
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00The history of Doctor Who is like a creepy old house.
00:03It's been around for bloody ages, is huge on the inside compared to what it looks like on the outside,
00:08and has secrets lurking in every corner.
00:10And some of those secrets are a lot more chilling than others.
00:13I'm Ellie for Who Culture here with 10 Dark Doctor Who Secrets Every Fan Should Know.
00:1910. Asbestos and Explosions
00:22Seventh Doctor serial, the greatest show in the galaxy,
00:25sees Ace and the Doc attempt to stop an evil circus from enslaving people for their own wicked form of
00:31entertainment.
00:32However, the Doctor almost never tangled with these gods of Ragnarok,
00:36because the entire story was nearly shut down before filming finished.
00:39Scenes for The Greatest Show in the Galaxy were due to be shot at the BBC's television centre,
00:44until renovations inside one of the studios uncovered a load of asbestos lurking there.
00:50Asbestos is a material that was commonly used as an electrical insulator and flame retardant,
00:55before people found out it was really bad for your health.
00:58As in, if you inhale it, it will kill you slowly and painfully, kind of bad.
01:02Luckily, the nasty stuff was found before anyone came into contact with it,
01:06so nobody came to any harm.
01:07Studio filming was cancelled, and alternative arrangements were made.
01:11This wasn't the only major brush with danger on the set of this serial, either.
01:15During a scene where Sylvester McCoy had to walk away from an explosion,
01:18its radius was much bigger than he expected,
01:20due to a more aggressive type of explosive being used than what was originally planned.
01:24McCoy was caught on the edge of the blast, and some of his clothes even caught fire,
01:29but he still managed to play it incredibly cool.
01:32The name's Who.
01:33Doctor Who.
01:35Number 9.
01:36The Flux Pandemic
01:37Despite being produced pre-Covid,
01:40Revolution of the Daleks featured some rather timely imagery,
01:43with the Doctor locked in prison and forced to self-isolate from her companions.
01:48Flux was the first series of Doctor Who to be produced in a post-Covid world,
01:52and also featured parallels to the pandemic.
01:54But on this occasion, they were completely intentional.
01:57Most notably, the Flux itself was inspired by Covid,
02:00as former showrunner Chris Chibnall has confirmed in an interview.
02:04He said, quote,
02:05I mean, Flux is a metaphor for Covid.
02:07There's a big thing coming for you,
02:09a massive thing that's going to disrupt all life as you know it.
02:12This was implied in the episodes themselves,
02:14with Belle's opening monologue in Once Upon Time being a clear giveaway.
02:18She said, quote,
02:19The biggest changes to our lives start small.
02:21Catastrophes creep in quietly,
02:23and by the time you realise,
02:24the life you once had is already behind you.
02:27The Flux has much in common with Covid beyond this.
02:29It's relentless, deadly, and takes many prisoners,
02:32with those that do survive finding themselves in a world that has changed forever.
02:36And Tech Taeyoun refers to the Doctor as a virus.
02:39Anything too explicit would have been an unwelcome reality check
02:42in a show that's supposed to be escapism.
02:44But it was all but inevitable that the circumstances affecting Flux's production
02:48were going to creep into the scripts one way or another.
02:52Number 8.
02:53The TV Movie's Dunblane Edits
02:55Production of the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie was notoriously drawn out and difficult.
03:00It was first mooted around June 1991,
03:03but wasn't actually broadcast until May 1996,
03:07going through countless different creatives and story iterations in that time.
03:11The Steven Spielberg was involved at one point,
03:13while one draft of the script had the master able to control his form
03:17and turn his arms into lassoos.
03:19In other words, things changed constantly, and things changed a lot.
03:23But even when that broadcast date neared,
03:25the movie's difficulties weren't yet over.
03:27Though the BBC had been hoping for it to receive a more universal 12 rating,
03:31the British Board of Film Classification decided that the version that would air in North America
03:36was actually more deserving of a 15.
03:38Their reasoning was incredibly sad,
03:40and dictated by real-world events.
03:42Two months prior, the Dunblane School Massacre had taken place in Scotland,
03:47where 43-year-old Thomas Hamilton had shot and killed 16 pupils and one teacher
03:52before taking his own life.
03:54This naturally led to the BBFC being more cautious with depictions of gun violence in the media,
04:00which was bad news for the TV movie's San Francisco alleyway gang shootout.
04:04As a result, this sequence was toned down in order to receive the desired 12 certificate.
04:09It's this more edited version of the TV movie that exists on iPlayer today,
04:14including other tweaks such as Chang Li's death not being shown on screen.
04:18Although the non-edited version has also been released in other mediums,
04:22while an uncensored version of the movie will be featured on the upcoming 4K release.
04:27Number 7. Troughton's Terror
04:29Doctor Who has been around for 60 years,
04:32but it might not have lasted past six years if this moment from 1969's The War Games had gone differently.
04:38In his final regular serial, the second Doctor and companions Jamie and Zoe
04:43must stop a tyrannical alien known as the Warlord from conquering the galaxy
04:47by using soldiers from across history to fight in his army.
04:50During a stunt that called for our three heroes to stand near an explosion,
04:54Troughton became uneasy about where his mark was.
04:57He asked to see a run-through of the blast, which the stunt coordinator obliged to,
05:01setting off the explosion, and a huge rock landed directly at the spot where the actors were supposed to stand.
05:08Perhaps playing a Time Lord gave Troughton some sort of precognition, and thank goodness it did.
05:13If the actor hadn't raised his concerns, the second iteration of the Doctor might have been the final one.
05:18But thankfully, we were saved from finding out whether the actors who play the Doctor can regenerate as well as
05:23their character.
05:24It is interesting to compare and contrast the strict safety procedures and filming standards from the 21st century and decades
05:32gone by,
05:32and this is a perfect example of how things were perhaps a bit more lax back in the day.
05:36You'd also imagine that today's big explosive stunts would use a stunt double, or even CGI, rather than the main
05:42actor themselves.
05:44Number 6. The Secret Submarine
05:47You know those stories of TV shows like The Simpsons accidentally predicting our future?
05:52Doctor Who has done something similar on many occasions, including 1971's The Demons predicting the existence of the soon-to
05:59-become-real BBC Three.
06:01Another odd example of Doctor Who foreknowledge revolves around the 1972 serial The Sea Devils.
06:07Shortly after the broadcast of Episode 3, the Doctor Who team was visited by officials from the Ministry of Defence,
06:12who were concerned that a submarine design featured in the episode had been stolen from a top-secret prototype that
06:19they were actually working on.
06:20The submarine featured in the show was actually a model kit from Woolworths.
06:24Do you remember Woolworths?
06:25Which had been adapted and tweaked to make it look more advanced, including upgrades such as altering the propellers.
06:31And it turns out that these alterations made the prop resemble a submarine that the Ministry of Defence was working
06:37on behind closed doors.
06:38In the end, nothing came of this, and the Doctor Who team was presumably let off when they showed the
06:43officials their Woolworths receipt.
06:44Either way, it's spooky to know that the show came that close to getting in trouble with naval intelligence.
06:50Not to mention replicating a classified design they had no idea existed.
06:55Number 5. The Sheriff's Axed Death Sequence
06:58For Doctor Who's Robin Hood episode in Series 8, writer Mark Gatiss paid homage to the 1980s drama Robin of
07:05Sherwood and chose the title Robot of Sherwood.
07:08This was a reference to Robin's nemesis, the Sheriff of Nottingham, who, in a shock twist during the final battle,
07:14was originally supposed to be decapitated and exposed as a cyborg.
07:18However, this vital moment was cut from the finished episode at the last minute in truly tragic circumstances.
07:24In the months leading up to broadcast, headlines were dominated by the terrorist group ISIS, who had been releasing horrific
07:30beheading videos online.
07:32Just days before Robot of Sherwood was due to go out, the group claimed their latest victim, US journalist Stephen
07:38Sotloff.
07:39Less than 48 hours later, the BBC announced that an edit had been made to the episode.
07:44And because early cuts of the first five Series 8 episodes had leaked earlier that summer, fans were able to
07:49quickly put two and two together.
07:50Sure enough, when Robot of Sherwood aired, the decapitation scene present in the early cut, which can still be viewed
07:56online, was absent.
07:57It was completely out of the team's control, but nevertheless cast a saddening shadow over the episode.
08:03It must have been difficult for them to edit the episode with so little time and in such a way
08:07that would be as neat as possible.
08:09But they did a decent job, all things considered, and it was obviously the right decision.
08:144. The Yeti Who Took a Tumble
08:16The Yeti were one of 60s Who's most memorable monsters, and together with the Cybermen and the Ice Warriors spooked
08:23a whole generation of children.
08:24And as it turns out, life playing a Yeti was equally as terrifying.
08:29One scene of their mostly missing debut story, The Abominable Snowmen, involved a particularly precarious moment.
08:35As Professor Travers actor Jack Watling, father of Deborah Watling, who played second Doctor companion Victoria, recalled in an interview,
08:42quote,
08:50Fortunately, the actor in question was perfectly fine.
08:54Amazingly, his seemingly fatal fall had been cushioned by the foam rubber of his Yeti costume, so he got incredibly
09:01lucky.
09:01As for why he'd taken a tumble?
09:03Well, the cast reportedly enjoyed a drink or two between takes.
09:06Watling added, quote,
09:07We found this Yeti, and when we opened him up, he was absolutely stoned out of his mind.
09:12So the moral to that story is, if you want to get drunk and fall off a mountain, wear a
09:17Yeti costume, because it's all foam rubber.
09:19A robot Yeti roaming the Himalayas is terrifying enough, but a drunk robot Yeti roaming the Himalayas scarcely bears thinking
09:25about.
09:26No wonder they left this moment out of the animated reconstruction.
09:30Number 3. Doctor Who and the Haunted House
09:33Doctor Who has had its fair share of haunted houses over the years, and some of them are just as
09:38creepy in real life.
09:39Fields' house in Newport, which became the weeping angel-infested Wester Drumlins in Blink, and later the landlord's premise in
09:46Knock Knock,
09:46really was in a sorry state when the crew filmed there, and thus required little work from the art department.
09:52Similarly, the disused custom house on Cardiff's Butte Street, which appeared as the Scovox Blitzer's lair in The Caretaker,
09:59is not somewhere you'd want to find yourself alone on a dark night.
10:02But none of these beats the haunted house that really is haunted.
10:06In 2013's Hyde, the Doctor and Clara find themselves at Caliburn House,
10:10where a professor and his assistant are trying to solve the mystery of the Witch of the Well.
10:14One of the locations used for Caliburn was the 19th century gothic mansion Margam Castle,
10:20which has reportedly received visitations of its own,
10:23from a murdered gamekeeper, a burly blacksmith, and giggling Victorian children.
10:27Said gamekeeper, Robert Scott, was shot dead by a poacher while patrolling the castle grounds in 1898.
10:34Locals claim he can still be heard stomping about the place doing his job.
10:38And that's not all.
10:38The deceased daughter of the mansion's first owner, Christopher Rice Mansell Talbot,
10:43is said to haunt the building and can be seen dressed in all-white floating around.
10:47In the Doctor Who universe, the Witch of Caliburn House was actually trapped space traveller,
10:51Hila Tachorian, trying to escape from a pocket universe.
10:54But Margam's real-life hauntings remain unexplained to this day.
10:59Number 2. David Suchet's Creepy-Crawly Encounter
11:03With its creepy-crawlies, wooden lady, and omniscient landlord,
11:07Knock Knock is one of the most unsettling Doctor Who stories in recent years.
11:11But like the best haunted house stories,
11:13it's the tragedy rather than the scariness that unnerves you the most.
11:17In a shock twist, we learn that the spooky happenings at 11 Cardinal Road
11:21are the result of the landlord trying to protect his mother,
11:24with the house absorbing its tenants to extend her lifespan.
11:27The only way this twisted tale can end is with a mercy killing,
11:30with Eliza sacrificing herself and her son to the lice.
11:33This scene required little acting from David Suchet,
11:36who had found himself in a similar predicament 50 years earlier.
11:40As he recalled to Doctor Who the Fan Show,
11:42he once rented a room in Liverpool with nothing more than a horsehair mattress
11:46and an old woolly coat in the way of bedding.
11:48On one occasion, the young Suchet went to bed,
11:51only to wake up covered in wood lice.
11:54Being able to pull on a memory that traumatic clearly aided Suchet's performance,
11:58and it makes it even tougher to watch
12:00when you know that something similar happened to him in real life.
12:04And number 1. A Dalek Terror Attack
12:07Anyone who's seen Remembrance of the Daleks
12:09will know that it's a pretty explosive episode,
12:11with battles and set pieces galore.
12:13And production-wise, this had some rather unexpected ramifications.
12:17The story was filmed in various London locations,
12:20including a road called Windmill Walk.
12:22This was the site of the climactic battle
12:24between the Imperial and Renegade Daleks,
12:27during which multiple Daleks are blown to smithereens.
12:30Following an early victory for the Renegade Daleks,
12:32the Imperials deploy their secret weapon,
12:35the tank-like Special Weapons Dalek.
12:37But this wasn't the only specialist called to the scene.
12:39Indeed, the explosions quickly attracted the attention
12:41of the emergency services,
12:43who feared that they were part of a terrorist attack.
12:46At the time the serial was shot, in April 1988,
12:49tensions were still high in Northern Ireland,
12:52and the UK had already been subject to multiple IRA bombings.
12:56There was a very real possibility of further action,
12:58and the police were on standby to respond.
13:00Of course, in this particular case,
13:02there was nothing to worry about.
13:03But the fact that the police were called in the first place
13:05just goes to show how realistic these explosions were,
13:08and makes the sequence all the more hair-raising to watch.
13:12And that concludes our list,
13:14but if you're still in the mood for the dark moments,
13:16why not check out our giant compilation video
13:18of the 62 darkest moments in Doctor Who history.
13:22In the meantime, I've been Ellie for Who Culture,
13:24and in the words of Riversong herself,
13:25goodbye, sweeties.
13:26Thank you very much.