10 Doctor Who Facts Most Fans Don't Know
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00:00 When you've got a show running as long as Doctor Who has, it is absolutely certain that
00:03 there are going to be so many little in-jokes, tidbits and bits of information that it's
00:09 just impossible to stay up to date with.
00:11 I mean, six decades!
00:12 That's a lot of Doctor Who!
00:14 And even in reviewing these articles, I must confess that even I myself am finding out
00:19 things I never knew.
00:20 For example, did you know that they recast him?
00:23 With that in mind, I'm Sean Ferrick for WhoCulture, and here are ten Doctor Who facts
00:28 most fans don't know.
00:30 Number 10.
00:31 Ridley Scott's involvement with Doctor Who.
00:33 The iconic design of the Daleks has been key to their longevity in the popular imagination
00:37 and has led to the villains appearing in some truly unexpected places over the years.
00:41 Designed by Raymond Cusick and built by Bill Roberts, along with the team at Shawcraft,
00:44 Terry Nation's classic creations rolled plunger-first onto screens in December of 1963 and of course
00:50 changed the course of Doctor Who's future.
00:51 Cusick wasn't the original BBC set designer assigned to the first Dalek serial, however.
00:56 Also working as a set designer at the time was future sci-fi director Ridley Scott, and
01:00 the job of designing the Dalek city and the Doctor's iconic foes was originally assigned
01:04 to him.
01:05 It's an enticing "what if" scenario, but Scott left the beat before work commenced
01:08 on the Dalek serial.
01:10 Unfortunately for sci-fi fans, this means there's no hidden treasure chest of Dalek
01:14 designs drawn by the director of Blade Runner and Alien.
01:17 Number 9.
01:18 2001 A Space Odyssey was inspired by the Daleks' master plan.
01:22 Ridley Scott isn't the only legendary Hollywood director to have had a brush with Doctor Who
01:25 and the Daleks.
01:26 In 1965, while the BBC was airing Doctor Who's epic serial, The Daleks' Master Plan, one
01:31 Stanley Kubrick was mounting his iconic sci-fi movie, 2001 A Space Odyssey.
01:36 The production design of Kubrick's film was hugely influential on release, and still
01:39 influences the design of sci-fi blockbusters today.
01:42 So it's surprising that Kubrick's production team reached out to a cheap teatime TV show
01:46 for help in achieving the film's groundbreaking sci-fi aesthetic.
01:50 Following the broadcast of episode 5 of the 12-part serial, a member of Kubrick's team
01:53 contacted the episode's director, Douglas Canfield, to discuss how he'd achieved certain
01:57 effects.
01:58 That episode follows on from when Katerina became the first Doctor Who companion to be
02:01 killed off after ejecting herself and her captor out of an airlock.
02:04 This sequence drew the attention of Kubrick's team, who wanted to know how the bodies of
02:08 Katerina and her captor floating in space were filmed.
02:10 They were also interested in how he achieved the molecular dissemination effect similar
02:14 to Star Trek's transporter technology.
02:16 Given Doctor Who's reputation for having wobbly sets and cheap effects, it's heartening
02:20 to know that Stanley Kubrick's team recognised the inventiveness of this show.
02:24 Number 8.
02:25 Not even John Pertwee knows where the third Doctor's tattoo came from.
02:28 The third Doctor's cobra tattoo has been the subject of fan myth and speculation for
02:32 decades.
02:33 Is it a Time Lord prison tattoo?
02:34 Some form of Division branding?
02:36 The real story of how John Pertwee got his cobra tattoo is equally mysterious, with the
02:39 actor confirming that even he isn't entirely sure where it came from.
02:43 In his memoir, Moon Boots and Dinner Suits, Pertwee recounts many stories of his impressive
02:47 career in the Navy.
02:48 Most people already know that he worked alongside James Bond creator Ian Fleming in that department,
02:52 adding an additional layer of the meaning of the oft-repeated comparison between the
02:56 third Doctor and Mr Bond.
02:57 In one passage from the book, Pertwee writes about waking up with a horrendous hangover
03:01 from a night out while serving in the Navy.
03:03 "I'd been tattooed.
03:04 A green and scarlet cobra was squirming itself into a question mark on my forearm.
03:08 God knows where or by whom this work of art was done, but whoever it was had executed
03:12 quite a fair job and it doesn't seem to have upset too many people over the years."
03:17 Apart from those perplexed Doctor Who fans who are still trying to write the cobra into
03:20 canon, that is.
03:21 Number 7.
03:22 The Met Police sued the BBC for the rights to the TARDIS.
03:25 In the run-up to the 1996 TV movie, the Patent Office approved the familiar blue box of the
03:30 Doctor's TARDIS as a BBC trademark.
03:32 The police objected to this, stating that they should own the copyright given that the
03:35 TARDIS was disguised as a police public call box.
03:38 However, police boxes had begun to disappear from UK streets in 1958, five years prior
03:43 to the broadcast of Doctor Who's very first episode in 1963.
03:46 This led the hearing officer to state, "I bear in mind that for most of the period since
03:50 the police call box was taken out of service, the only sight the public at large would have
03:54 had of this item of street furniture has been in the TV programme Doctor Who, provided by
03:59 the BBC where it is a TARDIS, a fictional time-travelling machine with the external
04:03 appearance of a police box."
04:04 It was a bizarre move by the Met to try and profit from the merchandise from a sci-fi
04:08 show, and nowadays their craven commercialism would surely attract the attention of the
04:11 anti-corruption officers from Line of Duty's AC-12.
04:14 You can just picture Ted Asting staring at a Met copyright lawyer across a table of TARDIS
04:18 t-shirts, piggy banks and bubble bath bottles, firmly shaking his head and uttering, "You've
04:23 got a bloody nerve."
04:24 6.
04:25 Captain Jack was almost beheaded to become the face of Bo
04:28 Despite what John Barrowman may have said in later years, Stephen Moffat did want to
04:32 bring Captain Jack back to Doctor Who during his tenure as showrunner.
04:36 When the Doctor and Rory set out to rescue Amy from Madame Covarrion in A Good Man Goes
04:40 to War, the Doctor assembles a formidable team to assist them, and originally Captain
04:43 Jack was supposed to be in that team, alongside Madame Vastra, Strax, Jenny and a fashionably
04:48 late River Song.
04:49 The only issue is that John Barrowman was busy making Torchwood Miracle Day and was
04:53 unable to appear in Season 6's mid-season finale.
04:56 To fill the gap left by Jack, Moffat brought back Dorian Maldivar.
04:59 Dorian has a pretty brutal end, decapitated by the Headless Monks and forced to live the
05:03 rest of his life in a box.
05:05 The fate was originally to befall Captain Jack, which would have set up his transformation
05:09 into the face of Bo further down the line.
05:11 Jack's eventual fate was first teased at the end of Doctor Who Series 3 by a characteristically
05:15 mischievous Russell T Davies.
05:17 For now, the nature of the transformation will remain ambiguous.
05:20 Number 5 – The Doctor was originally a villain
05:23 Yes, the Doctor is a bit shady in both the original unaired pilot and the as-broadcast
05:28 version of An Unearthly Child, but the original version of the character was envisioned as
05:31 a much more villainous creation.
05:33 Co-writing an outline for Doctor Who with Sidney Newman and Donald Wilson, writer C.E.
05:37 Webber put forward an alternate origin for the Doctor that, weirdly, has something in
05:41 common with Chris Chibnall's Tecteun.
05:43 In the original outline, the Doctor was on the run from his own people, who were concerned
05:46 about his meddling with time.
05:47 And why were they so concerned?
05:49 Well, the Doctor was travelling through time to find his perfect past, and when he found
05:52 it, he intended to stay there forever by destroying the future.
05:55 In a pop-cultured landscape dominated by fan nostalgia and people living in the past, this
05:59 is a strong concept for a Time Lord villain in modern Doctor Who.
06:02 It would have been the kiss of death for the original show, however, and thankfully the
06:05 idea was nixed by Sidney Newman with a rather blunt script note, "Nuts!"
06:09 Number 4.
06:10 The Fourth Doctor and the Valliard were offered a threesome.
06:13 Tom Baker's drinking days in the Colony Club in Soho during the 1970s are the stuff
06:17 of legend.
06:18 There are references to those days in Matt Berry's sitcom Toast of London, where a
06:21 man dressed as the Fourth Doctor can regularly be seen having a drink in the background of
06:25 Toast's club.
06:26 John Hurt, later the War Doctor, was another of the Colony's regulars.
06:29 Tom Baker also knew the future Valliard, Michael Jaston, and somehow, the two actors were once
06:34 propositioned by the acclaimed British artist Francis Bacon for a threesome in exchange
06:38 for one of Bacon's paintings.
06:40 Baker and Bacon were drinking buddies at the Colony, but it's unclear if Jaston was a
06:44 member.
06:45 Perhaps Tom signed him in?
06:46 The story was told by Jaston at a Doctor Who signing a few years ago, recounted by Darren
06:49 Floyd in his hilarious blog about getting the Doctor Who cast to sign an NWA album.
06:54 The two men politely turned Bacon down, possibly just as well.
06:57 Number 3.
06:58 The Doctor almost met Jesus.
07:00 In the early stages of Doctor Who, various big ideas were thrown around regarding potential
07:04 Christmas episodes, and the Hartnell era did actually get one.
07:07 1965's bonkers The Feast of Stephen, in which the Doctor and his companions take a
07:11 break from the Dalek's master plan to get arrested, crash a silent movie set, and wish
07:15 everyone at home a very merry Christmas.
07:17 However, the original ideas were much more outlandish than anything in The Feast of Stephen.
07:21 One of the ideas saw a drunk Doctor as Marley's ghost in A Christmas Carol, something that
07:25 Stephen Moffat would finally realise in 2010.
07:28 Another idea would see Cinderella's fairy godmother revealed to be the Doctor's wife,
07:31 who was chasing him across time and space, again an idea that Stephen Moffat would finally
07:35 realise - sort of - between 2008 and 2015.
07:39 The most eye-catching idea was a Doctor Who historical set in Bethlehem during the birth
07:44 of Jesus Christ, which wasn't too far away from some of the educational historical adventures
07:48 that would define Sidney Newman's original vision.
07:50 Perhaps the Doctor, Ian and Barbara would pose as the three wise men, or perhaps use
07:54 science to create some sort of beacon to act as the nativity star.
07:58 Number 2.
07:59 Boris Karloff was originally offered the role of the Doctor.
08:02 Horror icon Peter Cushing famously played the Doctor in the two 1960s Dalek movies,
08:07 and a year after the release of The Dalek Invasion of Earth 2150 AD, another horror
08:11 icon was being considered for the role of the Doctor.
08:13 Boris Karloff, best known for playing Frankenstein in the Universal Monster movies, was considered
08:17 for a proposed radio spin-off for audiences in Australia and other overseas territories.
08:22 Given his legendary status, and the fact he won a Grammy for narrating the 1966 animation
08:27 How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Karloff would have been a voice actor of note for an international
08:31 audience.
08:32 He turned the role down, however, as he was too busy to take on the proposed 52-episode
08:36 radio serial.
08:37 The project was ultimately rejected by the BBC, but a pilot is believed to have been
08:40 recorded based on a script by Malcolm Hulk entitled Journey Into Time.
08:43 It would have seen the Doctor and his granddaughter arrive during the American Revolution, and
08:47 accompanying promotional material suggested that, if successful, the radio show would
08:51 have adapted existing Doctor Who stories while also telling new ones.
08:55 Number 1.
08:56 TARDIS wasn't supposed to be an acronym
08:58 How exactly to write the name of the Doctor's ship has been the source of contention for
09:01 quite some time.
09:02 Is TARDIS a universally accepted acronym, or is TARDIS merely a name, like one you would
09:07 give to a sailboat?
09:08 According to David J. Howe and Stephen James Walker's unofficial guide to Doctor Who,
09:11 the sailboat concept was the original intention by the creators of the show, something that
09:15 is backed up by a lot of the dialogue in its early days.
09:18 For example, the first Doctor and his companions rarely refer to the TARDIS, but rather the
09:22 ship.
09:23 Stephen Moffat even made a nostalgic joke about this when the first and twelfth Doctors
09:26 met in Twice Upon a Time.
09:27 The Doctor Who annuals also appear to follow this pattern of the ship being dubbed TARDIS,
09:31 rather than the word being an acronym.
09:33 Sometimes, the stories in those pages would refer to the Doctor and his companions returning
09:37 to TARDIS, rather than to the TARDIS, as is the norm now.
09:41 For years, fans were hung up on the line about Susan inventing the TARDIS acronym, which
09:45 perhaps suggested something larger.
09:47 Maybe she was just a trendsetter who dubbed the Doctors rickety old Type 40 TARDIS, and
09:50 the Doctors legend caught on and influenced the branding of future time capsules.
09:54 That's everything for our list today folks.
09:56 What did you think?
09:57 And do you think we missed anything?
09:58 Let us know in the comments below.
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