Sydney Newman's Doctor Who 1987...

...would it have been complete crap?

Some background. In 1985, the BBC were stony-stinking-sodding-tinking broke. They had no money and were desperate in those greed-is-good times to get their cash back. They made Michael Grade their new Controller and gave him truly unprecedented powers, he could do anything he damn well wanted as long as he got them out of the red and into the black. Grade came up with the idea of simply cancelling every TV show that was costing more than it made the corporation or was just downright expensive full stop.

Unsurprisingly, Doctor Who was part of the list.

Now, it should probably be said that while Grade had no love of the program - in fact, it's quite clear he had a few issues with any TV show starring Colin Baker - it was pretty much "nothing personal" about the cancellation. The BBC couldn't afford to make the show, simple as. However, the BBC was now of the mind they had to be cheap, profitable and dynamic. Nothing cancelled would be uncancelled, even if everyone liked it. Tomorrow's World, Crackerjack, Doctor Who... they weren't going to come back.

But JNT and his web of spies discovered this and sprung their trap. Newspapers across the land were suddenly informed that the BBC - ostensibly a respected public broadcaster dedicated to quality rather than money-grubbing avarice - had axed a national institution in a distinctly usurian manner. Now, this was technically true but the BBC could not defend their position without admitted they were totally broke and throwing aside their principles for the great god Mammon. Ergo, they hastily uncancelled Doctor Who and then denied it had ever been cancelled.

But the problem remained - whatever the high-ups thought of the series, they were still broke. They could not afford to make it for a year and a half at the earliest. But instead of explaining this, they claimed they thought Doctor Who sucked and needed an 18 month rethink. Ironically, history seems to have agreed with them and all three showrunners of the new series agree that if any season merited such a reaction, it was Season 22. As Lawrence Miles put it, that season contains some truly great television, but absolutely appalling Doctor Who.

JNT, Eric Saward and the others were left rather bewildered at this. What had they done that was wrong? Hasty excuses of it being too violent and family-unfriendly were thrown around and while they were weren't wrong, they were hardly actual direction. Saward noted that this lack of direction created despair and apathy through the production office, and not just a loser like him. It ultimately ended with the tragedy of Robert Holmes' Robots of Ravalox getting absolutely roasted by the Director of the BBC - not only was that immensely humiliating, it was horrible because the script WAS as crap as it was accused. Holmes had deliberately dumbed down and LCD-ed it following the vague directives and it was thrown into his face with the haunting words "I expected better of you." Holmes, of course, tragically died before he could get over it.

Season 23 and Trial of a Time Lord came and went. It was far from a critical success, but it was nonetheless too good for the BBC to justify cancelling it. So, the high-ups made their first and perhaps only actual effort to improve the series and told Grade to fix it. Grade reacted by heading straight to Sydney Newman.

This seems incredibly stupid and counter-intuitive from today's perspective, seeking a brand new vision from a guy who hadn't been involved in the show since the mid-60s. Yet, Newman still had a huge reputation as a miracle worker, getting him for anything would have been impressive, and he was probably unique as the only producer who might want to take on a poisoned chalice of Doctor Who.

Grade and Newman spoke about restoring the show to its former glory. Newman had plenty of ideas Grade thought was worth pursuing when Newman dropped a bombshell - although he was being offered a thousand pounds just for spitballing ideas, he was happy to do it for free if they let him take over the show and rename it Sydney Newman's Doctor Who. (As is now known, Newman was hugely insecure and horrified when Terry Nation was mistakenly credited as the creator of the show, and constantly begged for this to change to be made official.)

Grade was willing, but didn't have the authority. He arranged a lunch between Newman and his boss for Newman to state his case but Jonathan Powell wasn't convinced. The BBC's attitude to Doctor Who had gone from vaguely-affectionate apathy to outright spite, and wanted wasting no more resources on the show. JNT was forced to stay as producer by the hatred of his superiors and the show struggled on for three more years before the idea of getting someone else to make it was raised and the BBC dropped the show like a leper's douchebag.

So what was Newman intending to do?

The only actual record we have for his plans was a typed up pitch document that was a rough guide to Newman's pitch (for example, Newman wanted to change the TARDIS from a police box into something else, but that isn't written down in the memo, so it remains a mystery.) Written with a swaggering, bullying arrogance the pitch understandably doesn't have Newman's charisma to sell the points and indeed its hectoring you-naturally-agree-with-me tone has made many a reader sneer with contempt. It's not hard to imagine a BBC worker reading, feeling mocked, insulted and patronized and turning it aside without a second thought.

Yet what cannot be denied is that the pitch is full of an energy and passion the genuine makers of Doctor Who admitted they had lost. There's no doubt or hesitation here, it's written by someone who knows with god-like righteousness they can make a brilliant show, fix any problems and laugh about it at the time. There's no doubts or compromise but a simple-minded certainty that Grade was unsurprisingly impressed by.

The document starts logically enough with Newman attempting to deduce what's actually gone wrong with the show in the first place (and doing more work on that score than anyone else it seems)...


(1) The out-in-space, other planet adventures are now somewhat old hat. Their simple good guy vs outer space monsters too rarely go beyond escapism. The best sci-fi always has a mythic, parable element that touches our own lives, and it is this that should make up the outer space stories in the future, which I would limit to 50% of the total.


Looking back at Doctor Who's recent output, it's easy to see what he means. There's no overarching moral over the Sixth Doctor's era, bar stories agreeing that meat is murder, slavery is wrong and tampering with god's domain is always evil. Vengeance on Varos might be a damning indictment of reality TV today, but at the time it was a skit show of video nasties. Is there anything occurring on Karfel, Nekros or Telos that have any relevance to people watching at home? The last season was set entirely on an alien space station two million years in the future arguing over whether moving planets about with a giant magnet was actually illegal.

Reducing the number of space-stories also has merit. The last story set entirely on Earth was Mark of the Rani, located in a 19th century mining town where four time travelers were busily trying to throw tree-making landmines and T-Rex embryos at each other. Timelash uses Earth for cutaway scenes that barely affect the plot, and though most of The Two Doctors is set in Seville it might as well be a planet in the Third Zone. From now on, the settings of stories would matter rather than be decided on how much research a writer was going to do. What if Nekros was actually Earth in the future, where all it was good for was graves? Or Varos, showing an Orwellian Sex Olympics future? Or on the contrary Killingsworth was another planet where the luddite riots really could change history? Earth or Elsewhere, it would now have to play a definite part of the plot and characterization - anything that could be told in 1980s England for example, should occur there rather than putting on some jumpsuits and shouting about interplanetary treaties.

The new series has followed this logic - from The End of the World to Oxygen, visiting far-future outer space type places have explored the morality of technological advance, the value of human life, and the impossibilities of a perfect future utopia. Had Knock Knock been made in Season 22/23 it would probably have been set in some asteroid hotel, and the landlord would probably have been lusting after Bill and wanting her to join him. The central theme of independence, letting go and accepting change would have probably been swapped for locking the Doctor in the cellar with Harry, who he'd continually insult.

And, hey, maybe that might have come up with an entertaining episode but its mindset is different. Saward would not be trying to win over new viewers or impress critics, but rather come up with his own Darwinist sci-fi anthology that happened to have two regular characters. Moffat's final year, and Newman's approach, would be to make TV that mattered to the audience watching.

(2) Our Earth, both present and past, is just as exciting as outer space when creatively explored.

This sort of approach just makes sense. If you want the BBC to do a good job, give them a historical drama. The Sixth Doctor's era had no interest in contemporary Earth - only the first half of the first episode of Attack of the Cybermen, set in ethnographic London, might relate to the world of the audience. Even then, it's hardly realistic as two thirds of the speaking cast are alien time travelers, it's set mainly in sewers and CID are represented with a criminally-stupid knife-wielding undercover op who provides bank robbers with plastic explosive because it would just be boring to do things by the book. A story about police corruption leading to bank robberies in the cynical 80s would be a story worth telling, especially as the criminals are shown to be the heroes with a refreshing lack of hypocrisy. What if the Doctor sided with Lytton on the ground a diamond raid would get the alien mercenary off Earth and thus, in the long run, be for the greater good?

But no. We instead cut to some robots wanting to steal time machines to blow up a completely different planet for a plot point no one understands and everyone we might sympathize with is killed off and never mentioned again.

Ironic for the man who did the first proper pseudo-historical The Visitation, Saward's reign has had no interest in exploring Earth's past. While other writers attempted, they were always drowned out - Time-Flight is set in the time of the dinosaurs, but you'd never know and the idea of it being some evil communist gulag in Siberia is more interesting. Enlightenment has Edwardian era sailing ships, but it's just aliens. The Awakening's twist is that it's not set during the English civil war. Black Orchid and The King's Demons are just padding to fiddle with the cast. HG Wells is only there for a final credit gag. Given Saward spent a good chunk of his life on an oil rig contemplating grim industrial future rather than present or past, is this surprising?

Present-day adventures are rare too and similarly often irrelevant. Time-Flight avoids the 1980s as much as it can, as does Arc of Infinity, Resurrection of the Daleks and Planet of Fire following it. It's no surprise to see that, of the planned Season 23 only one story was fully-set in contemporary England (notably at JNT's request), none were set in Earth's history and the rest set on alien planets.

Season 23's most egregious flaw is ditching Peri Brown (an increasingly-vaguely defined character) and replacing her with Mel, a woman with no past, no backstory, no last name who seemed to be Bonnie Langford playing herself - no wonder the public recoiled, they probably wondered if this was some live-action theatre sports. Even Holmes' plans for the aborted finale were a bunch of Jack the Ripper cliches that were obviously a dream. We had lost any connection with the "real world", in a story where 80% of a given episode was an unreliable testimony of something that had no relevance to anyone watching.

RTD and Moffat have shown humanity is inherently self-interested and your average audience wants to watch a humanity-oriented show. While perhaps they could be a tad braver, we've seen that treating an alien planet and its people as nothing special leads to The Doctor's Daughter while overloading the awe causes The Rings of Akhaten, two stories that have not stood up well to the test of time. Neither story has much to say beyond war is bad and sacrificing children is something to be frowned upon either. Yet the stories that followed both - The Unicorn and the Wasp and Cold War - were damning portrayals of the past's behavior and reflected human morality with that of the aliens who were portrayed as having families and caring for their children rather than outright monsters.

Again, not only was Doctor Who not exploring the past, it wasn't even trying to be creative.

The wonders of technology, science, medicine, the green Earth movement etc are hot subjects today.

Seasons 22 and 23 had paid lip service to this with some clunky moments - Peri whining about ecological damage and the Rani's disapproval of eating meat in Mark of the Rani, the Doctor bitching about alternative energy in Mindwarp, etc, but they're few and far between. Technology in this era is virtual magic, without the faintest Bidmead token of an explanation. Magic rays, hallucination machines, mind-swapping helmets... the most scientifically-accurate and interesting example would be Alexei Sayle's rock-and-roll gun, and that's a throwaway scene. With no stories on Earth's past or present, there's no discussion about the advances in computer tech or surveillance. The idea of a natural sleeping draught or replacing serotonin is dismissed with a remark and there's not a single character who actually wants to fix the environment when they can just get more slaves.

With Greenpeace, the Rainbow Warrior, not to mention the burgeoning awareness of AIDS and the like, it's not as if Doctor Who was short of things to deal with. Instead of evil scientists - Quillam, Dastari, Crozier, Lasky -being told off for daring to challenge nature before their monstrous creations kill them, we could actually have positive role models doing good works for a change and even affecting modern day society. They wouldn't even need to succeed, thus maintaining the status quo, as the Pertwee era was eager to show. Imagine eco-terrorists trying to destroy a country's oil supply to cripple Western civilization. Would that hold the attention more than a bunch of aliens who get buried or maybe frozen or maybe both on an ice planet, none of whom we ever meet or discuss?

Now we get some story ideas...

Doctor Who and his Earthlings should find themselves: inside a human body (child), involved in a war between her life and cancer cells (preferably a war between something medically less frightening, but that’s something left up to the research to come);

Yes, it's Fantastic Voyage - or to another extent The Invisible Enemy - but that didn't stop them using it again for Into the Dalek. Yet what a pitch! The TARDIS crew must save a little girl - or she dies! How simple and powerful a premise is that? When was the last time it had such a visceral gut-punch? Your daughter is sick, can Doctor Who save her? It's not the same as some aliens are going to get nuked by some other aliens because a monster is ugly and fancies Nicola Bryant, is it? Or some alien cannibals go to a Spanish town and eat a lot, ruining some different alien's plans to get a working time machine? Or a bunch of psycho plant people are about to fall into a black hole?

The most basic part of the premise - what would you do to save your child? - is used to award-winning affect in RTD's Children of Earth. This isn't the Doctor proving a point about Daleks or even an episode-long diversion about an alien virus conquering the solar system. This is a child's life and our heroes cannot be allowed to fail. The stakes are high, the focus is on the regulars, the whole point is compassion. This is as anti-Saward an approach to a story as it is possible to go and for all its hokey one-sentence-summary, it's no wonder Newman suggested it first.

inside a NASA shuttle, a polaris submarine etc, in which of course something dreadful happens;

True, this gives a vague evocation of the Pertwee era but there's nothing with that and certainly neither Ambassadors of Death nor The Sea Devils devoted a story to it. Given the Challenger disaster, a NASA drama would certainly have the ripped-from-the-headlines factor and also of course have the "first contact with aliens" B-plot. Trapped in a stricken vessel, possibly sabotaged, running out of air, not knowing who to trust... what more traditional Doctor Who plot could you come up with?

they return to Earth the size of ants while human ecologists are trying to shop farmers from using DDT;

And it's clear at this point Newman is now struggling. That's the plot of Planet of Giants but is it necessarily a bad thing? True, we've already had a story where they've been shrunk but so did Capaldi and Smith. It's clear Newman is thinking something a bit more like Honey I Shrunk The Kids in terms of our heroes being menaced by giant bugs, and certainly more of a thriller than some guys in a backyard hiding a body and being outwitted by a telephone operator and the local plod. If you wanted to redo a Doctor Who plot, there's few more wasted and forgettable than Forrester and Smithers in some bloke's country cottage - a storyline so poor the makers cut it in half.

they return to the past getting involved in a mutiny on one of Christopher Columbus’s ships, which sinks at the right time, allowing Colunbus to discover America; and so on.

Again, there's some flawed logic in this. A pure historical had not been attempted since 1967, and multiple production teams had passed on that option. The idea of an educational story without monsters and the excitement of not knowing how things turn out has been very hard to sell, with even Big Finish's Erimem run of pure historicals focused on the possibility of the companion leaving or deliberately changing things. (Indeed, the idea of such a plot without some rogue Time Lord/alien trying to alter events seems nigh ridiculous.)

Secondly... Columbus? We have to assume that Newman was trying to pick a historical figure the show hadn't done because Columbus is a rubbish idea. The discovery of America wasn't going to win over the cynical British public who were sick of yanks anyway; it was unlikely the story would be a more brutal assessment of old Chris like the Ninja Turtles did, and worst of all was that the idea of a Columbus story would be best served in 1992 - the fifth-hundred anniversary of the event, hence why the attempt to revive Carry On films was Carry On Columbus and even that was considered to take a nosedive the moment the plot actually reached America.

(It's also worth noting that even with pure historicals, BF tends to sticks only to British history - Sir Francis Drake, Elizabethan England, World War 2, the Great Exhibition... Doctor Who is quite parochial, Pompeii aside.)

In the above, containing the standard, do-or-die, life-in-peril approach, at least our central characters sill be experiencing adventures which, despite their peripheral educational values, engage the concerns, fears and curiosity of today’s audiences of all ages. Don’t you agree that this is considerably more worthy of the BBC than Doctor Who’s presently largely socially valueless escapist schlock!

Well, yes, but you can see why phrasing like that would piss off readers.

Yet this is precisely what RTD aimed for (and more often than not succeeded at). Andrew Cartmel had a similar to-do list and it's not hard to see the application. Paradise Towers and The Happiness Patrol have more to say about contemporary Britain than anything post-Pertwee, cushioned in the outer-space frippery. By Season 26, Ghost Light had the historical angle and Survival showed contemporary commentary in a contemporary setting. In short, there's no denying Newman was on the right track on restoring Doctor Who to its original glory.

But it's also clear Newman had no interest in continuing the adventures of the Sixth Doctor and Mel...

Doctor Who himself should see the return of Patrick Troughton – still the not-quite-there tramp from outer-space. 

Now here it gets difficult. Is Newman speaking literally or figuratively? Is he referring to a Second-Doctor-archetype like McCoy or Smith? Is he actually suggesting Troughton resume the role? The latter would never happen, obviously, but Troughton was alive and acting at the time of Newman's suggestion which in turn leads to the question - what?!! Would the new series debut with the Seventh Doctor played by Troughton, perhaps the Time Lords restoring the regeneration they took? Would it be a full reboot with a new, alternate Doctor played by Troughton? Or was there going to be some reveal that the Second Doctor never changed and this was all a dream in the Land of Fiction or somesuch?

It’s important that he be innocent, almost child-like, to enable us to see him figure things out in his flashes of incredible intelligence. The important thing is that the audience should see the traps he and the Earthlings will fall into, but then Doctor Who, and/or the Earthlings with him, will find a way to avoid the pitfalls the audience cannot foresee.

This is clearly a reaction to the unpopular Sixth Doctor who blindly wandered into traps, often spending the whole story locked in a cell, was rude, bullying, unpleasant and violent. Even in Trial of a Time Lord, the Doctor doesn't actually prove his intelligence - the Master and Glitz have to tell him everything, and even his discovery of the Valeyard's booby-trap required a nudge-wink-pun from the villain himself.

Rather than an insufferable genius convinced he's better than anyone else, Newman re-positions the Doctor as a kind of idiot savant much more humble than Colin Baker's version and capable of amazing deductions (compare to Sixie's godlike realization that Quillam wears a mask because he isn't pretty - take the night off, Sherlock!) though as we'll see Newman wasn't merely going to bring back the Second Doctor's character, bringing up an irritable old man aspect with incomprehensible vocabulary. (Google "addlepating" and you get taken to this pitch, for example, as no one else has ever apparently used such a word.)

The important fact is that Doctor Who does not know how to control his time-space machine!

Now this is something that's been abandoned by virtually everyone. Mark Gatiss aside, the only time the TARDIS makes a random landing is when the Doctor deliberately hits random. Whether or not this is a flaw, in the context of 1980s Who, taking away a steerable TARDIS would have altered the series at its core and also ramped up the drama no end. Imagine Season 22 like that - Attack would not be able to pad out the plot with TARDIS hops, and the attempts to track down Lytton would occur on foot, thus being more dangerous. Fighting through Cyber Control to rescue him would be much more dramatic than simply using the TARDIS and likewise the convenient escape would not work. The yoyoing between locals in Timelash and The Two Doctors would similarly no longer be feasible, forcing the narrative to stay in one place and time. The risk of the TARDIS leaving without someone would once again be a death-sentence to the regulars, and also mean the Doctor could no longer act as a know-it-all tour guide for their destination restoring the exploration/education of the earlier eras.

Of course, whatever plans were made for Colin Baker's successor, he wasn't going to be around for long.

At a later stage, Doctor Who should be metamorphosed into a woman. This requires some considerable thought – mainly because I want to avoid a flashy, Hollywood ‘Wonder Woman’ because this kind of hero(ine) with no flaws is a bore. Given more time than I have now, I can create such a character.

The fact that the man with the right to claim creator of Doctor Who thinks this is a good idea thirty years before Jodie Whittaker should not be forgotten. Despite the "metamorphosed" suggesting this isn't a straightforward regeneration, it's clear Newman wanted the lead character to be female for more than a random bodyswap episode though logically just writing for the Doctor per se should have been enough. It again shows that Newman wasn't going for sensationalism and intended to get the show back on its feet before another radical change.

Just as Doctor Who doesn’t want to go wandering through space and time and just wants to go home, the same must apply to the Earthlings with him.

This is the first real clue Newman might not be clued up about the current show (rather than merely simplifying things for the document). The Doctor's wanderlust has been core to the show since its second season, but who's to say that this isn't to change. Notably, he wants to go "home" rather than Gallifrey and given the Sixth Doctor's occasional rants suggesting he's sick of having to save the universe, the idea that this new version doesn't want to travel gives him a straightforward if cliched motivation. It's an inversion of the exile scenario, where the Doctor is trapped in a situation he was often in voluntary. It's all right wandering the universe by choice, but when you're forced against your will? His desire to return home could be to get the TARDIS fixed, after all.

I suggest they be: A homesick girl of 12 wearing John Lennon-type Dickensian spectacles (she’s stylish). On Earth she played a trumpet in the school orchestra. Sometimes, when nervous, she plays it badly, and at other times gives a virtuoso performance. It’s the one possession she values most; sometimes it gets her into trouble when it is taken from her. Her high notes can smash glass, and sometimes it signals the advance to battle or retreat from danger. Sometimes it irritates Doctor Who when he’s trying to think. ‘Hush, child, you’re addlepating me!’

Basically a first-year high school student who uncannily resembles Lisa Simpson as much as her elder brother is Bart. There's something very CS Lewis about this Lucy/Susan character, and she's shown to be insecure and isolated with presumably her character arc being her growing confidence. Her main skills are plot relevant, and it's easy to imagine her trumpet-playing in episodes rather than say Peri's botany prowess or Mel's gymnastics or computer skills. She's also clearly meant to draw in younger viewers rather than Peri whose only attributes were those past puberty, certainly with few on either side of the screen being interested in her intellect and personality. The girl also gives us the "that could me" angle that Rose had in spades, while the idea of a younger girl companion works fine with Amelia Pond or Lucy in The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe.

It also irritates her yobbo, over self-confident brother of 18, who with his aerosol can graffiti the heavens. He’s headstrong, often thinks his little sister a pest, but is also protective of her, knowing that if any harm befalls her, his parent (unseen) would ‘kill him’ when, oh yes when, they were to get back to Earth. Clearly he thinks Doctor Who is ‘way past it’!

Or Bart Simpson, to put it another way. The brother character seems incredibly unsympathetic but is presumably meant to be the disenfranchized youth of Thatcher's Britain, an angry young man with no future or employment, neglected by his parents and forced to look after a little girl rather than live his own life. He's frustrated and resentful, and presumably TARDIS travel would make him a better person. His dismissive attitude of the central character recalls Tegan, while the rest of his behavior recalls Ace (who would pause in attacking the Daleks to graffiti their shuttles, for example). One can also imagine him acting as the muscle to the frail/female Doctor and having his mind expanded by their adventures - in short, he's the 1980s version of Jamie.

Very, very briefly, there’s my ‘way forward’ for the Doctor Who series, which I think is what you want.

In conclusion, the pitch is awful and more likely to put people off than have them keep reading. Whatever Newman's gut instincts could tap into the zeitgeist, he was ridiculed by his peers for not accepting that television and audiences had changed in the last twenty years. The fact he was so contemptuous and dismissive of post-Lambert series gives the not-inaccurate impression Newman was desperate to get back in the industry's goodbooks to the point he was willing to save a series he apparently despised. Certainly, without the expansion and extrapolation I've done, it's hard to imagine the series working at all.

Jonathan Powell presumably was not willing to look between the lines - or expect Newman to work outside them - and considered it a waste of time, effort and money revamping the show they were only keeping alive for PR reasons. But what if he'd said yes? What sort of Doctor Who would we get?

Well, certainly we wouldn't have got any more of it - Newman's first season would still be fourteen 25-minute episodes with the same budget and resources as before. In order to get the maximum amount of "first nights", would he have done multi-part stories or perhaps one-off episodes? We can assume that Colin Baker wouldn't have been asked back for a full series and thus would not have returned merely to be killed off. Bart and Lisa would no doubt have been introduced at the very start along with the new Doctor, the unsteerable TARDIS and a contemporary setting - a secondary school? - with an attention-grabbing cameo by Daleks whose success Newman was notoriously grudging in his acceptance. So we can easily imagine...

1) School of the Daleks Pt. 1
The school concert is interrupted when a police box falls out of the sky, containing a madman claiming his face is changed. In the days that follow, people start to disappear from history until the world is empty bar the madman and the pair of siblings who spent any time with him...

2) School of the Daleks Pt. 2
The Daleks swarm through the school, eager to rewrite history to their own ends. The Doctor and his reluctant allies must work together not only to survive but ensure the universe remains intact... more or less...

3) Frontier Medicine
Arriving at a futuristic hospital at the end of the 21st Century, the TARDIS crew are mistaken for operatives of new micro-technology - piloting biological robots through the compromised immune systems of a young girl. But when the process fails to work, the Doctor suspects her problems might be more emotional than physical...

4) Night on the Hill
Arriving in England in ancient times before the Roman invasion, the Doctor is intrigued to find a village built at the foot of a deserted hill perfect for farming or development but used for neither. It is said that no one who goes up the hill is ever seen again, and the villagers use it as a method of execution. The Doctor's curiosity gets the better of him and his companions must either accept his disappearance or head up the hill themselves.

5) Decaying Orbit
A NASA shuttle to an international space station has only a small safety margin and a materializing police box is well outside those margins. Cold equations mean even leaving right away is not enough to save the astronauts from their doom, so the TARDIS crew must try and find a way to achieve orbit - or perish in the attempt.

6) Green Unpleasant Land
It seems the TARDIS has finally brought its travellers home - or near enough. But the boggy middle-of-nowhere patch is not deserted. This is to be the site of a nuclear power plant but those concerned for Mother Earth are giving the planet a chance to defend itself - and nature's revenge will consume all in its path...

7) The Samurai's Tale
In feudal Japan, the Doctor must seek out the aide of a wandering mercenary to raid a warlord's castle and free his companions. He abhors bloodshed and lacks any decent saki, so can he persuade anyone to rally to his cause to face a palace guarded by deadly komodo dragons and an army of ninjas?

8) Land of the Blind
The TARDIS arrives in an East European town that has been caught at the fringe of a nuclear explosion, turning most of the population blind. As the radiation levels rise towards lethal levels, the time travelers shelter with a group of upper-crust socialites who still have their sight. But the blinded townsfolk aren't going to be bossed around by those whose eyes work...

9) Blockbuster
A brand new method of entertainment is being pioneered - "feelies". An artificial reality built out of emotional and mental experiences of people watching a normal film. But what if one of those people was insane? What will happen now that the film is its independent reality? And when that film is about a vampire? The lines between reality and fiction are blurred and Count Orlock is out for blood...

10) Sub Division
A stricken WW2 German submarine is dangerous enough at the best of times, but when dead sailors seem to swim away and uncharted subterranean currents draw the U-Boat off course. When the TARDIS crew arrive, the Captain is on the verge of paranoid insanity and willing to execute his crew to maintain discipline. Dare they take their chances on the mysterious island thrown up by volcanic activity and whatever inhuman creatures inhabit it? Or remain underwater being drawn down to... what?

11) Technofear
In the not-too-distant future, a fully-automated high rise apartment block keeps the pollution and gang violence away but freedom as well. The TARDIS crew are an unauthorized presence and must fight for their lives along with one of the residents who has snuck out to have an affair with a neighbor. It quickly becomes clear that their deadly predicament is a smokescreen for a far darker secret.

12) A Scale of Disaster
 Eco-protesters are trying to stop the testing of a new pesticide called DDT on crops. It's part of history, but when the time travelers take their leave, the TARDIS reduces them to the size of ants and able to see the ecological destruction up close. Can they return to their own size in time? Or will they have to rely on a protest history declares is doomed to fail to save their lives?

13) Contagion
Arriving on a deserted highway road the authorities and locals avoid, the TARDIS crew find an injured and ill man with no identity. Taking him to the nearest service station gets them a hostile reception, especially when the man becomes violent and starts attacking people and spreading his sickness. Soon, the time travellers are outnumbered by the infected, who are now beginning to transform as the virus turns them into... Cybermen.

14) A New World
Our heroes arrive on the shores of America just as the Santa Maria brings Christopher Columbus to what he thinks is India. Should they help Columbus destroy the Native Americas with new diseases and slavery? What sort of historical anomalies will the TARDIS crew cause at this nexus point? Can this prove the way for the companions to return home five hundred years into the future? The climax sees a tidal wave engulf the Santa Maria, washing the TARDIS crew overboard and as a result the Doctor regenerate into a woman.

Well, that's just an extrapolation based on Newman's ideas being mixed with the contemporary vision of Doctor Who with monsters, comedy and adventure that he had either missed or utterly ignored. But would Newman allow other people to make their mark, as Verity Lambert had stood up to him all those years ago? If he kept only to the guidelines, would his "tone deaf" way forward have even got Doctor Who to the end of the decade?

The consensus is that based solely the pitch, it wouldn't have worked and the BBC were wise to turn it down.

As a wise man once said of the matter, "It always amuses me to think that Grade went to Newman for ideas. Like, sure, the best way to ensure a series gets fresh blood and new ideas is to go back to the man who created it in the first place. It's like when the Daleks dug up Davros. And Davros suggested they needed a kid with a trumpet to defeat the Movellans."

The Doctor's New Clothes

Art by Lucy Crewe, ZestyDoesThings, Violet, Stephen Byrne, Miguel Delicado and Mogamoka2 @twitter.

“I think it’s an excellent idea. I think it’s great that the girls are having a go this time. Some people were outraged, but some people like being outraged, don’t they? If there’s any change they don’t approve of, they get outraged. I must say, I think it’s absurd – she appears to be female the same as I appear to be male, you know. Within the formula of Doctor Who, that could be a misapprehension. Nothing is quite the way it looks. I wish her the greatest of luck.” -- Tom “the Doctor” Baker