How a Gallifrey Story Could Be Done

[Allyn Gibson]

Saward's problems with JNT went back years. Holmes' death was simply the final breaking point.

Saward had three main problems with JNT. The first was JNT's belief that Doctor Who was the perfect venue for light entertainment stars. (In JNT's defense, he wanted the show to be more mainstream [so why not cast familiar actors in guest roles], and he succeeded in that initially.) The second was the casting of the Doctor; Saward thought that Davison was a terrible choice, and then with Colin Baker he thought JNT was out of his sodding mind. (Ironically, Colin Baker became Saward's biggest defender inside the production.) Finally, he felt that JNT's refusal to work with writers and directors who had worked on the program in previous years was detrimental by depriving the program of experienced voices who understood Doctor Who and how it worked.

Was Saward right? As script editor of the period, he certainly had a direct effect on the program. On the one hand, he brought Robert Holmes back to the program for "The Six Doctors" (which wasn't made, and eventually Terrance Dicks wrote "The Five Doctors" to take its place). On the other hand, he wrote stories like "Earthshock" and "Revelation of the Daleks" that pushed the Doctor into the background of his own series or wrote stories like "The Visitation" that were pure "formula." So, he may have been the cause of some of his own problems.

Nevertheless, JNT certainly wasn't blameless. By the mid-80s, he had become enamored of his own image. The description of JNT as someone who produced Doctor Who as something to do between American conventions isn't really that far from the truth. Yet, he kept the program going, until finally it stopped.

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

The original plan, in Robert Holmes' outline for episode fourteen and in the episode Eric Saward wrote based on that outline, was that the Valeyard was simply the Doctor's evil final incarnation, and the episode ended with the Doctor and the Valeyard (the Master in the outline) trapped in combat for all eternity. This ending had been planned so that if the show was cancelled after season 23 it would end on a dramatic note; if it continued, it would have been resolved somehow, of course. However, once the episode was written JNT decided he didn't want such a downbeat ending. But Saward had refused to write the story if JNT insisted on any changes to Holmes' outline apart from substituting the Valeyard for the Masteer in the final conflict. As such, he refused to change the ending and denied JNT permission to use his script, which meant that new episode fourteen writers Pip and Jane Baker couldn't have a copy of the Saward/Holmes version without violating copyright law. They had to develop their own ending based on Saward's characters and locations, and it was they who came up with the regenerative hybrid explanation of the Valeyard.

Oh, I know the story. I'm just not sure why it wasn't enough for the Valeyard to simply be the distillation of all of the Doctor's evil impulses without actually placing him at a point in the Doctor's actual timeline.

 

[Tom]

Well we have seen this before with the watcher in logopolis who was an amalgamation between the 4th and 5th doctor as that Valeyard was and evil version (and more definded) between the 12th and 13th doctor.

 

[Brendan Moody]

I'm just not sure why it wasn't enough for the Valeyard to simply be the distillation of all of the Doctor's evil impulses without actually placing him at a point in the Doctor's actual timeline.

Perhaos it was as close as they could get to the planned ending (which had been as much JNT's idea as Saward's in the first place) without raising potential for legal problems.

By the mid-80s, he had become enamored of his own image. The description of JNT as someone who produced Doctor Who as something to do between American conventions isn't really that far from the truth.

That's not really relevant, is it? I imagine that most famous people who aren't actively hostile to their public images are enamored of them to one degree or another. And given that he was trying for several years to leave the programme, I think a closer image to the truth would be someone who didn't want to produce Doctor Who at all.

I tend to agree with the comment offered by many of the professionals who worked with JNT: that his skills were on the production side of things rather than in creative matters, and as such his instincts in defining ongoing characters and seasons weren't great.

 

[Cutter John]

I never had a problem with JNT insisting on casting known actors in the show. The current version does the same and it seems to work just fine.

My only real problem with JNT was his poor choices of stories and writers.

 

[Brendan Moody]

I never had a problem with JNT insisting on casting known actors in the show. The current version does the same and it seems to work just fine.

Yeah. In a lot of ways the new series approach is not that different from JNT's. (That's really the genius of the new series; it takes the best bits of every era instead and adds its own touches.) The difference is that top television professionals are now involved in carrying out that vision, instead of the... less distinguished people who sometimes worked on the classic series.

 

[Stevil2001]

And similiar to RTD, JNT took a lot of flack for his casting, but it often worked out quite well. Beryl Reid is one of the best parts of Earthshock.