News Doctor Who Am I: Documentary about the Paul McGann film

Variety reports that Kaleidoscope Films has acquired the distribution rights for Doctor Who Am I, a documentary about the production of the 1996 Doctor Who film and will feature interviews with the film's writer Matthew Jacobs (who also co-directed this documentary), Paul McGann, Eric Roberts, Daphne Ashbrook, and other members of the cast. No release date has been announced yet.

I haven't watched the film in many years but as a long time fan of The Eighth Doctor thanks to Big Finish, I'm very curious to see this documentary and how it reflects on that production. I also wonder if there will be any mention of Big Finish itself since McGann has gotten a second chance to portray The Doctor as he wanted.

 

And a second chance for Eric Roberts as the Master iirc.

 

All the cast have turned up in Big Finish by this point.

I quite liked the movie (or The Enemy Within) and the extras on the original DVD release were really quite extensive luckily.

 

Honestly, I'd have liked a little documentary that detailed and described Eight's life as told by BF. Nothing long, just a vid that said "here's what happened: in 2001...." or something. Something for newer things to dig their teeth in as an alternative to TV and a way to get something out of this incarnation for new fans who would have no way of knowing otherwise.

 

Or the EDAs of the books. My preferred version xD

 

I'd have liked, if they'd finished with the animated versions of missing episodes and Lost Stories, that we could get McGann act out animated versions of those books.

But, a docu detailing his expanded life would be great. I emphasize BF because its performed media and its Paul McGann getting to actually play the role himself and all.

 

True. I enjoyed quite few of the Eighth Audios, I just think the EDAs have some of the absolute best Who in. (The Faction Paradox stuff, Adventuress of Henrietta Street, anything by Lloyd Rose, that last out of publication order one whose title I forget but had that awesome twist.) Much of which genuinely be amazing properly dramatised, but some is really dependent on being literature.

There’s a reason the show has been… ‘inspired’ by those novels in particular.

 

Aw, can we be Who chums?

I was too young to get into the NAs properly, but for a time, especially from The Burning onwards, the EDAs were the ‘real’ continuing form of Who for me. Even after BF started.

I remember being on a kind of ‘I’m grown up now’ Who hiatus, till one day I found an issue of DWM magazine in the newsagent which had the same cover as The Burning. It was being hyped as a jumping on point. From there it was a 5 minute walk to WHSmith and that was that.

A few months later I got a little windfall and went to Galaxy 4 in Sheffield and bought every EDA pre-Burning in one job lot.

So many good ones. So so many. And a few bad ones too, especially in the early days, but still. Amazing stuff.

Great days. It’s a shame Lawrence Miles went on a maniac quest to burn every bridge he had with the other authors and finally (in effect) the DW production team.

I’m still pissed the Doctor didn’t mention Fitz in Night of the Doctor.

 

Fitz should have got a mention for sure… I think Gary Russell wasn’t a fan of the novels despite writing for them. Tons of Miles stuff has been an influence on the modern series though, especially the Moffat era. (Clara is very much like Sam from a certain perspective, and the Doctors scar on Trenzalore is basically the same as when his bio data was messed up in San Francisco. River Song and the church are all very very Faction Paradox. Just off the top of my head.)

I started with the NAs straight after the series ended, but drifted off. Popped back now and then for stuff like Happy Endings, but it was hard to afford and get the books when I was a kid. (Smiths for me also.) I drifted away from Who in general — I was more into Trek, and then into ‘grown up’ stuff like going to the pub etc etc.

I got the Fall of Yquitane (or whatever) on a copy of SFX as a freebie when I was waiting for a train. Then I saw about twenty EDAs in one of those discount store and bought them on a whim, and like you started filling a lot of the gaps. (Sometimes that took years. I got Interference off eBay about ten years back) Some didn’t interest me much, but I was pretty much a regular reader towards the end (though mainly I went for the BBC books seventh doctor stories tbh… still too expensive to be a regular habit.

I had the ‘I,Who’ book as well, which helped fill in the gaps, and the Tardis Library website. Oh, and I struck gold when I found a copy of Dead Romance in a second hand shop, and then went off to fill some NA spots as well (The Fantasy Centre in London was a haunt of mine.)

The EDAs were better than the NAs for my money, in the end, and to be honest it’s the best Doctor Who there has *ever* been. Seven and Eight are de-facto best Doctors as a result. (Though Eleven gets close, because Moffat works in a similar fashion to Miles and Richards at times.)

I’ll take the War in Heaven and I.M. Foreman and a universe in a bottle over that nonsense Timeless Child business any day tbh. Long live the Nine Gallifreys!

Edit: by ‘miles stuff’ I mean all of the books of that era that he was a big influence on. Obviously Orman wrote the biodata in San Fran story. Unnatural History I think. The Faction Pradox era basically.

 

I think we are the only two people in the world who think so, the NAs tend to be more favoured, but I agree.

I recall reading Eater of Wasps and thinking "I don't care if the show never comes back, because this is better than it could ever be". I was wrong of course. And right at the same time. The worst thing about the 2005 revival was the immediate cutback and dumbing down of the books.

I think I once read something quite lengthy about the amount that Moff had cribbed from Miles (or so it's sad). Even down to having the TARDIS appear on the side of a building so that a person falling to their doom can land in the TARDIS swimming pool.

I.M. Foreman = I Am For Man. I guarantee you no-one had that in mind in 1963, but it fits so neatly.

Also of note and rarely mentioned is the 8th Doctor DWM strip which was one of the better runs.

Good times and thanks for the trip down Memory Lane.

 

Totally. I started reading DWM at the same time, having stopped after they junked the NA continuity. (I love some of the NA stuff — I particularly love Transit, Warhead, and Times Crucible. Again… stuff the TV series has made poor shadow versions of as late. That whole Pythia mythology was awesome, and still seemed to fit with a little squinting right until recently.)

I came back for the Eighth, and found it amusing that RTD cribbed a bit from The Flood, and even Captain Jack was a bit of a borrowed character in some ways. Rumours are he’s at it again, but I think it’s just cos the new specials are set in Camden.

Yeah… I reckon Moffat dealt in EDA era stuff, and with Lawrence Miles in the know, but because of a variety of factors — including the dislike for Miles in some fandom circles — hasn’t gone publicly on the record about it. Gareth Robert’s and Paul Cornell transitioned to the screen of course, but Cornell is a writer who started really good and then sort of slowly got worse. Roberts I actually prefer his TV stuff, but he was very good at his Tom Baker stuff.

Ah well. The series might go back to some of that influence now.

Edit: I didn’t mention it was ‘fey’ and ‘feyde’ from whom we get a fair bit of Captain Jack.

Edit edit: and I might as well say: The Timeless Child stuff would have worked if they had left Tecteun alone after the first appearance, leaving her basically resembling one of the Gallifreyan Heroes, and if it had been The Master. The woman with Rassilon always reminded me of the Pythia, and Night of the Doctor leant into them as exiled Gallifreyans really nicely. The subtext of Rassilon/Sacred Male/Reason and Pythia/Sacred Female/Supernatural, with the Doctor sitting comfortably with neither was something that always worked well, and was built on stuff in the series. The new stuff post Chibnall rather missed the point in so many ways.

 

FWIW, Moffat's novelisation rectifies that.

 

Nice interview with Paul here https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/sci-fi/paul-mcgann-doctor-who-am-i-big-rt-interview/

 

Wonderful interview, even if I had hoped for a bigger mention of Big Finish. Still, cool to find out that they're working on stories that are connected to The Night of the Doctor.

I also loved that little tidbit about Christopher Eccleston.

 

Watched this documentary last night and was disappointed. It's not a documentary about the production of the 1996 Doctor Who film. It's more about the writer of the film Matthew Jacobs. There are some very brief interviews with cast members of the 1996 movie but clearly the focus is on Jacobs himself and not the 96 movie.

 

Damn, that's too bad. I had forgotten this was coming out soon and I haven't heard where it's available in the US (if at all).

 

It doesn't seem to be available yet in North America. There's an official Facebook page for the documentary, and the last I saw was that they expect distribution in some form in North America at some point in 2023.

 

That'll be sweet to see!

I wish the movie's Blu-ray release had a recomposite of all the 35mm film negs instead of just an upscale of the same VT master that the aired version was.

The EDA novels had a slick look and color scheme for the covers... after The Rewrite of Androzani The Janus Conjunction, I started getting bored with the series. The Faction Paradox was still a cool idea, even if the result is yet-another destruction of Gallifrey as an epic plot development*... wasn't it bad enough that the classic era of the show had shown or mentioned Atlantis's destruction a whopping three times? So glad the modern era hasn't bothered to fiddle with Atlantis...


* is arguably the second successful attempt. The first is an unproduced but rumored "lost original season 23" story entitled "Gallifrey" from 1985, surviving only as a brief synopsis, which would involve its destruction. In 2005, we have the big ol' time war that has the Doctor making the decision to wipe out the Daleks but sorts blew up teh 'Frey in the process... then trots along the Master, who does it because he's pissed off at the Doctor's special timeless child whatever nature. Never mind he almost destroyed the planet in "The Deadly Assassin" (aka "The story where the writer puts in a sappy end-date via regeneration count limit". Then again, noting Robert Holmes and this being the era of his most cynical, what was he really thinking at the time...) And people thought that just blowing up baddies' home planets, like Skaro, was divisive to the fandom in 1988, the idea or carr-ythrough of destroying the Doctor's home planet has been copied and/or outright used too many times to just parrot "Chibnall bad" because he's not the only one to have canonized a source deemed non-canon at the time... even if the books and audios and such aren't always deemed "canonical", neither were ditched scripts containing story or character ideas long thought abandoned until dug up and revised and used. It's all good.

 

I'm not sure it was ever promoted as being about the making of the movie, as opposed to being abot Matthew Jacobs, but yeah, it's definitely not a making of. It's a very personal project. As I rambled on Facebook: This week in occasional uncomfortable documentaries, following on from In the Court of the Crimson King, it’s Doctor Who Am I, about Matthew Jacobs, who wrote the 1996 American Doctor Who TV movie. The movie did not do well in the US ratings and didn’t lead to a series, and a lot of fans didn’t like some of the things the movie did, so Jacobs kept his distance from Doctor Who and fandom… and then decided to go to some cons to see what it’s all about and make a documentary about it all. There’s some happy reunions with Paul McGann, who kind of helps him through the experience a bit, Daphne Ashbrook, Eric Roberts, and others, but there’s also some prickly moments thanks to opinionated fans, and some more downbeat moments around his father’s role in a 1960s Doctor Who story and what was happening in his family around then. But it’s much less cringe-inducing than that old Trekkies documentary with Denise Crosby, and Jacobs comes off as a more normal human being than Robert Fripp. Fans of the TV movie should see it, though I doubt it has much crossover appeal.

Even though it's not a making of, I do think a lot of TV Movie fans will get something out of it. McGann's worth seeing, and Ashbrook and Roberts are fun. For those who haven't seen it, adjust your expectations and give it a shot.

 

I appreciate that review, Steve. It's disappointing that it's not a making of documentary but I'm encouraged by the inclusion of McGann, Ashbrook, and Roberts in a good manner. That alone will probably make it worthwhile, if only partially. Assuming it ever becomes available in the U.S.

I didn't know Jacobs' father was in The Gunfighters so that's a neat connection to follow-up here.