Season 15 - Part Two

“Why take the smooth with the rough? When things run smooth, it’s already more than enough.”

This month Doctor Who The Collection Season 15 is released on Blu-ray. This isn’t a review of that box set. Not least because I did some work on it and therefore consider myself recused. Instead, this is the second part of the latest in a series about Doctor Who’s “seasons”. The first part, which is free to read, can be found here. Earlier examples of this kind of essay can be found here and here. More will follow! But not necessarily in the right order.

The fourth story of the 1977/78 season The Sun Makers was the last transmitted serial commissioned by outgoing script editor Robert Holmes. It's also one of a handful of Doctor Who serials on which no script editor is credited at all. This is not because it was made in the handover between Holmes and his successor Anthony Read. The story was ultimately scripted and produced before Image of the Fendahl, the previous story in transmission order. It was instead to avoid Holmes being double credited on its episodes. Because as well as its commissioner, Holmes was also the serial's author.

Now, there are very good practical reasons for an outgoing script editor / head writer on an ongoing series to leave behind a script for their successor that would require minimal work, and in practice it happened on old money Doctor Who more often than it didn't. But double crediting was a practice frowned on in the BBC Drama Serials department of the era, although there seems to have been more tolerance of it in Drama Series, at least for those who, like writer / producer / director (and frequently credited as all three) Terence Dudley, enjoyed a strong social relationship with the department's head, Andrew Osborn.