Endgame on Doctor Who The Collection: Season 26 (Blu-ray) and Survival (DVD) / The Seven Year Hitch on Doctor Who: The Movie (Blu-ray and special edition DVD)
Endgame begins with Peter Cregeen, one-time Head of Series for the BBC, diffidently but not without pride confessing that it was his decision to ‘rest’ Doctor Who in 1989, précising the statement with ‘I’m afraid…’ in the manner of a reluctant teacher explaining to a naughty pupil that there has to be a punishment and he couldn’t change that even if he wanted to. He comes across as more judicious and empathetic than many BBC executives who have made pronouncements on the cancellation of Doctor Who (epitomised, obviously, by Michael Grade), but even so, his reasoning doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny: his claim that the programme had ‘clearly run out of steam’ looks even more patently wrongheaded now that it sits on the Season 26 Blu-ray, a collection of stories that demonstrate that Doctor Who in 1989 was doing anything but running out of steam.
Other contributors theorise about the reasons for the discrepancy between the attitude of BBC bureaucrats and what the show was actually achieving; Ben Aaronovich jovially declares that everyone at the Beeb hated sci-fi, a claim borne out by any inspection of TV schedules from the period. But as the documentary revisits the last three years of the ‘classic’ series, Andrew Cartmel’s vision and the talents who helped realise it, you are left feeling that the real problem was surely that anyone with decision-making powers had stopped watching it altogether. The closest we get to any admission of the kind is Creegan saying that nobody had any idea what to do with it. File under imagination, lack of.
It’s pretty galling stuff for any fan of the McCoy era, well-trodden though these grievances are, but as if that wasn’t infuriating enough, the documentary then takes you through what might have been. A lot of it is speculation – who might have been the next producer, the next script editor, who could have written for the next season – but as Cartmel and Aaronovich detail ideas they’d been discussing and narrate story beats and character ideas, they build a tantalising picture of the-season-that-was-stolen-from-us, backed up by mocked-up titles, illustrations and design ideas, all the evidence suggesting that we were robbed of the chance to see a team at the height of their creative and imaginative powers continue a run of top-tier Doctor Who. For all that the documentary ends in the positive glow of the reinvigorated 21st century series, it’s always going to be bittersweet when the executives trumpeting their success are cut from the same cloth as the ones who couldn’t see what was right under their noses 15 years earlier. (The poignancy of this is further highlighted by the fact that the whole thing is narrated by David Tennant.)
For full pathos, watch it in tandem with The Seven Year Hitch, Ed Stradling’s excellent documentary about the journey towards the 1996 TV Movie which raised the bar considerably for special features on its release in 2010. From the vantage point of the present we know that TV Movie turned out to be a dead end as far as the show’s future was concerned, and in 1996 it was more than disappointing for this young fan with unrealistic expectations, but as you hear about the litany of obstacles that faced everyone involved in the production you begin to realise that it’s a miracle that we got any TV Movie at all, let alone one that, for all its shortcomings, continues to have an impact on Doctor Who today. When producer Philip Segal ends the documentary with a wan smile saying that you should follow your dreams because they’ll happen one day ‘even if it’s not in the way you expected’, there is a sense that he, too, was lucky to come out of his brush with Doctor Who with his sanity intact.
Next up: ‘her eyes gleaming and her dentures percussing with glee…’
Talk To Rex 