Or rather Michael Grade did when he came back in 2004 as Chairman of the BBC and Mark Thompson when he came in as Director-General (also in 2004). Wankers. http://blogtorwho.blogspot.ie/2013/07/bbc-wanted-tom-baker-for-rtd-relaunch.html
Doctor Who's most dangerous does isn't the Daleks, Cybermen, Sontaran's, Silurians even the Time Lords but Michael Grade the former are a walk in the park. So Mr. Grade doesn't like Sci-Fi well tough I do as do a lot of other License fee payers. And guess what your charter says you have to cater to all tastes.
Clearly this is all rubbish. Michael Grade states very clearly in the charity book Behind the Sofa that if Russell T Davies had come to him with his 'sensational' new take on Doctor Who, he'd have commissioned it himself. And when Grade returned to the BBC in 2004, it was as the first head of the BBC Trust, which had been specifically created to avoid the overlap between overseers and management that had led to the abolition of the Board of Governors. So for him to try and second-guess the actual programme makers... well, it would be inconceivable. As inconceivable as there being any truth in Private Eye's suggestions that people involved in Pinewood had an interest in suggesting that Television Centre couldn't be successfuly refitted for the HD age and had to be shut down. Clearly, everybody involved in this documentary must have been on drugs when they shot it to come out with such rubbish...
Going back to series 1, the image quality is pretty gross actually. Whose decision was that, I wonder? Was it a camera filter that gave things a blurry halo a lot of times or did they shoot the series on video or something?
Nice thought but given that Doctor Who is regularly dubbed for other languages I have a feeling that isn't the case. Probably a way for CBC to justify co-producing the season by trying to have more Canadian content. Doctor Who in French [yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCgcmy9Prkw[/yt]
Obviously they need to re-dub the dialogue to present the show in another language, but the implication of the article is that CBC wanted to re-dup it with a Canadian actor for the English version. After all why would RTD object to re-dubbing for the French version? For that matter, why would only Eccleston be re-dubbed if it were the French version they were talking about?
That would seem to be the implication of the article, but it's vague enough that I wouldn't want to draw any conclusions. Although the other possibility -- that the CBC wanted to justify it as "Canadian content" to comply with Canadian content requirements, and that dubbing Eccleston was an attempt to do that -- sounds just bureaucratically stupid enough to be true.
Cripes. Why did the BBC even bring Michael Grade back? Tried to kill Doctor Who, lost the rights to Dallas, cancelled Blackadder, etc. Was his time at Channel 4 that good in comparison?
His time at Channel 4 was OK. Not as good, or rather interesting, as his predecessor Jeremy Isaac's, but he was the last Channel 4 boss who really maintained the mandate to be different that Isaacs had established. Grade's successors let C4 slide into a morass of Big Brother, property porn and make-over shows. But he was brought back simply because the BBC was in a bad way, and he was seen as a media profesional who could sort it out: the director general and the chairman of the board of governors had both been forced to quit after a row with the government over the BBC's coverage of the government case for going to war with Iraq (a row which, officially speaking, the Blair government had won, but which did so much damage to its reputation that it arguably came off even worse than the BBC. Remember those old silent comedies which end with the warring neighbours both standing in the ruins of their homes? A bit like that...).