The Trial of a Time Lord - Prologue
“I sentence you to be exposed before your peers.”
It would be surprisingly easy for me to claim that Psychic Paper's hiatus over Christmas and New Year 2023/24, occurring as it did just as the The Long Way Round section of this newsletter reached Doctor Who's 1985 "hiatus", when the start date of the 1986 series was pushed back for nine months, was something other than coincidence. But coincidence is all that it is. Nevertheless, now we're up and running again on a new platform, we're going to return to our scheduled programming. Which in this instance, is a longish read about the immediate causes and effects of the 1985 "cancellation crisis" that preceded that long transmission gap.
On Thursday 28 February 1985 the populist UK tabloid The Sun ran as its front page headline ‘Dr Who Axed In Plot by the BBC’. The story, which had been leaked through intermediaries by Doctor Who’s then Producer, John Nathan-Turner, was a response to his having been informed that week by his head of department, Jonathan Powell, that the 1986 series of Doctor Who would not be going ahead as planned. Mere days before, Nathan-Turner had dismissed internal BBC rumours to this effect when they were put to him by his Script Editor Eric Saward, and his meeting with Powell came as an enormous shock, both professionally and personally.
"John came down almost in tears. His baby had been snatched. He was really upset […] He zoomed in, and I thought 'I wonder what’s happened there?' He did something in his own office, then came over to me, said 'This is what’s happened... I’ve got to go and lie down now.' And went back into his office; and about an hour later we had a chat about it. That was the first he knew, and then I knew a few minutes later. It mortified him, he was really, really upset, he didn’t know what to do."
Eric Saward
Within hours, the Producer had decided he did know what to do: he would come out fighting. He leaked the series’ cancellation to The Sun’s Charles Catchpole ahead of an official public announcement. Ian Levine, a long-time Doctor Who fan who was at the time close to the production office, actually made the call to the tabloid newspaper, using a known Fleet Street codeword for BBC insiders leaking internal matters to the press, while Nathan-Turner sat opposite him, writing down the information he wanted Levine to pass on. Calls to other papers followed. Publication deadlines meant that the first paper covering the story to hit the stands was The Standard, which ran it as a front page item on the evening of Wednesday 27th.
Nathan-Turner’s gambit worked. Knowing from calls from the press that Thursday’s newspapers would be full of the story, and what the tone of that coverage would be, BBC Drama rushed an announcement out themselves: a statement ahead of the leak which had itself been made ahead of their planned statement. The BBC Six O’Clock News and Nine O’Clock News bulletins on Wednesday 27 March carried news of Doctor Who’s not cancellation but "postponement", with both programmes insisting that the then-current series of Doctor Who would not, in fact, be the programme’s last.
Earlier that day Powell, BBC One Controller Michael Grade, and Head of BBC Press Keith Samuels had had a meeting with Bill Cotton, the Corporation’s Managing Director. (Powell has subsequently described himself as "summoned" to the discussion.) The embarrassment of the imminent press coverage was discussed, as was a further financial matter that had been raised internally. Doctor Who was, in theory, part-funded by BBC Enterprises, the corporation’s commercial wing. In practice, Enterprises’ contribution to Doctor Who’s budget was more than was actually spent on the programme, with some of the money being used on other productions entirely. Cancelling Doctor Who would mean that the Enterprises money would no longer be transferred over to the Drama department, meaning programmes other than Doctor Who would face a shortfall of funds following Doctor Who’s cancellation. Powell also recalls an apparent threat by a Doctor Who fan group to picket BBC Television Centre, which prompted Samuels to say:
"'This is what you’re going to have to do, you’re going to have to make some more shows, because if they do that it’ll be on the front page of every newspaper in the world,” and we kind of went, “Oh God, make another series'."
Nathan-Turner’s initial dismissal of rumours which turned out to be wholly accurate is, in its proper context, completely understandable. Pre-production of the 1986 series of Doctor Who was well underway, with at least six 45-minute scripts complete or nearing completion, directors and guest artists booked and location dates for the opening serial The Nightmare Fair, scripted by Nathan-Turner’s predecessor as Producer, Graham Williams, already arranged. Aborting these serials in such an advanced stage of pre-production would involve considerable cost without a single second of television to show for the money paid out. Doing so would make no financial sense.
It would also be against all known BBC Drama procedure. Nathan-Turner would have inevitably been aware that BBC Drama’s commissioning and budgeting was done on a rigid annual schedule, and that the time for decisions about programmes intended for transmission in January 1986 was now well past. He also found it inconceivable that the cancellation of any series would be undertaken by higher management without any consultation with that series’ own production office.
And yet he was wrong. Because while under normal conditions a decision about a programme for the coming January would not – and as Nathan-Turner understood could not – be made in the February of the financial year prior, during the winter of 1984-85 "normal conditions" had been quietly suspended. Late 1984 had seen Grade, an executive hugely experienced in commercial television but who had never worked at the BBC, appointed to run the channel. By his own account Powell had a strong desire to indicate to Grade, who commenced work at the BBC in December, his personal willingness to accommodate his new superior’s tastes and interests in his department’s output, even if it meant the substantial redrawing of already made and costed plans. Thus the axe fell on Doctor Who, wholly outside the normal processes of programming commissioning and budgeting, at a cost to the BBC Drama department of very slightly under £90,000. (This is approximately a quarter of a million pounds in current values.)
This happened, very simply, because both Powell and Grade thought Doctor Who was not the kind of programme the BBC should be making in the mid-1980s. Earlier in his career, while an executive at London Weekend Television, Grade had routinely used Come Dancing (1950-98) and Doctor Who as totemic examples of tired BBC programmes that demonstrated how the corporation had failed to move with the times. And as for Powell:
"I don’t know what [Powell] thought of Doctor Who before he arrived [at the BBC] but he hated it, no two ways about it. We would walk in, and his face dropped. He used to sit on the sofa for the producer’s playback and he nodded off on one occasion. If he’d said something you would have at least been able to go somewhere [with his feedback], but it was just this disdain… He loathed it."
Eric Saward
A flamboyant figure with a public profile, it was Grade, not Powell, that bore the brunt of public and media scorn for their joint decision to cancel Doctor Who. Most stories about the cancellation singled Grade out for attention. Several punned on his name in headlines or subheadings. Many sought to portray Grade as, in effect, the latest and greatest in Doctor Who’s long catalogue of villains, equating his attempt to end the programme with their fictional attempts to kill its eponymous lead.
Grade and Powell’s decision, taken in haste and against procedure, was swiftly reversed because of, perhaps even in, their meeting with Cotton and Samuels, and Powell would, in later years, express disbelief at his and his colleagues’ cowardice in not standing by their decision.
Much of the press coverage of Doctor Who’s |cancellation crisis" mentioned that Grade was unavailable for comment, as he was on holiday, with The Times of 1 March specifying that he was skiing in France. Given that Grade had been present in the meeting that Wednesday morning, it is hard to interpret his sudden desire to be on the piste as anything other than running away from the over-personalised press controversy Doctor Who had unexpectedly generated.
Other BBC employees, too, were keen to avoid the subject if at all possible. On the morning of 28th February Frank Bough, presenting the Breakfast Time television magazine programme, stopped discussion of the BBC’s Doctor Who embarrassment during the regular What the Papers Said slot, initially joking that he "...hardly dare speak about Doctor Who... my job is in jeopardy." Then, when his guest, the actor Gwen Taylor, pressed on with discussing the series regardless, Bough pointedly referred to his earpiece adding, "Someone has just said in my ear 'I think that’s enough on Doctor Who,’" before abruptly changing the subject. The topic of Doctor Who was clearly a sore point within the Corporation at the end of that week, and how it was discussed was of concern to those with ‘front-facing’ roles within the organisation.
This, though, did not prevent a brief skit on the matter being staged on that Friday’s edition of Wogan. The sketch featured the programme’s presenter Terry Wogan and David Banks as a Cybercontroller. The joke that Grade was simply the latest Doctor Who villain was expanded, with the Cybercontroller praising Grade as an ally who should be ‘Cybernised’ as a reward for achieving something the Cybermen never had: The defeat of the Doctor.
That same day, Friday 1 March 1985, only the day after the Sun story appeared, Bill Cotton formally communicated via the BBC press office that there would be a 1986 series of Doctor Who. It would start later in the year than originally intended, with transmission pushed back from January to the autumn. Cotton’s announcement also revealed that the programme would once again be made as 25-minute episodes, the 1985 series having been produced, experimentally, in the 45-minute format even then more common for drama for adults. Crucially, it stated that reverting to the 25m format would allow the series to be aired for "a greater number of weeks".
Officially speaking, this postponement or "suspension" was very quickly all that had ever been intended, and this period swiftly became known in fan argot as "the 18-month hiatus" (although in practice, it only involved the 1986 series’ start date being pushed back by nine months).
Nathan-Turner would for the rest of his life maintain that "a hiatus" was the worst-case scenario for Doctor Who in 1985. He may have come to believe that to be the case. Powell has since indicated more than once that, despite what was said after the leak to the papers, it absolutely was both his and Grade’s intention that the then-current series of Doctor Who would be the programme’s last, with the series concluding with the Eric-Saward-scripted Revelation of the Daleks, due to be transmitted in the last two weeks of March 1985. (Both Colin Baker and Eric Saward have separately since acknowledged that the situation was initially explained to them as outright cancellation of the programme.)
"We did try to cancel it, there was Bill Cotton, the Managing Director, Michael [Grade] and myself, the Head of Drama. But I remember the reaction was so severe."
Jonathan Powell
Any ambiguity in Grade’s feeling about Doctor Who was probably dissipated when, on 2 March 1985 and after four uninterrupted days of often highly personalised press criticism, his holiday was interrupted when The Daily Mail successfully tracked him down to the French Alps, and pressed him for comment against his will while he was in public with his family. It is in these comments that Grade first claimed that Doctor Who’s "suspension" was related to falling viewing figures, a claim that doesn’t really stand up when comparing 1985’s numbers to the years immediately prior. (Grade would return to this point in the 23 to 29 March issue of Radio Times, in a response to a letter criticising his decision.)
The Daily Mail’s intervention in Grade’s personal life marks the first time he was prepared to go publicly and overtly on the offensive at the slight on his professional judgement that criticism of his cancellation of Doctor Who represented, and the near demonisation of him in the press during that week. It would not be the last. Among many examples he called the 1985 series "tired and unimaginative" and was quoted as saying, "The people who make it have got rather complacent, they got rather violent and lost a lot of its imagination, a lot of its wit and was relying far too much on straightforward on-the-nose violence."
It is little wonder that, against such a background, Nathan-Turner and Saward were left feeling that ‘the hiatus’ was a condemnation of their work on the series. Because, and despite assurance made to them internally that this was not the case, it clearly was. Their superiors had attempted to end their programme, at significant cost and outside normal BBC procedures, because they disliked it, and felt its budget could be better spent elsewhere. Accordingly, both men thought it likely they would not be in charge of Doctor Who when it returned in the autumn of 1986.
"I thought John might be demoted or put on another show. And I thought they would cancel my contract and that would be it. My removal wasn’t asked for."
Eric Saward
In the end, both Nathan-Turner and Saward remained in post. Bad publicity had forced BBC Drama to continue Doctor Who, but there would have been no tabloid outcry had its Producer and Script Editor, people whose names were largely unknown to the general public, been moved onto other BBC series and their roles on Doctor Who taken by other BBC staff or contractors. Yet this did not happen, with neither Nathan-Turner nor Saward moved to make way for an appointee more to Powell’s liking.
"There wasn’t anybody else around… There was no natural line of succession that I could remember seeing. I had no ideas. Also, what was I going to do with fucking John Nathan-Turner? ... I couldn’t find anyone else to do it. I didn’t know what I was going to do with him if he wasn’t going to do it."
Jonathan Powell
Nathan-Turner was a staff producer. Terrance Dicks, Doctor Who’s Script Editor from 1968 to 1975, and by 1985 a BBC Drama staff producer himself, has indicated that it was essentially "impossible" to remove a staff producer from his job "unless he urinated on the Director General’s desk or something".
Powell was probably unaware that Nathan-Turner was considering his own position, and the latter would later ponder whether he should have resigned from the BBC entirely at this point. With the BBC publicly committed to another series, had he removed himself from the Producer’s chair BBC Drama would have had to have appointed a successor. Saward, for his own part, came to feel in retrospect that he too had made a mistake in staying:
"I thought 'If I go now, it will look as though I’m running away,” so I stayed and I think that was a mistake – I should have gone. I should have left on my own personal small high of [writing] Revelation [of the Daleks], it would have been a good time to go."
Eric Saward
Something which is rarely acknowledged in discussion of this period of Doctor Who’s history is that, if Grade and Powell thought Doctor Who was a bad television programme, and as such a waste of BBC resources, then they had not only the right, but arguably a duty, to cancel it. The production and scheduling of BBC Drama Department productions was, jointly, their responsibility. It was quite literally their jobs. Comments by both about the content of Doctor Who, made in the aftermath of the events of February 1985, almost certainly reflect both their genuine professional opinions of the series, and their reasons for attempting to end it.
What is also worth acknowledging is that, whatever their professional judgments, they also had a duty to observe professional standards when implementing those judgements. Had they wanted to axe Doctor Who in early 1985, the proper way to go about that would have been to refuse the production office’s "offer" to the department for a January 1987 series, during the spring 1985 ‘offers round’. Yes, that would have meant one more series of a programme neither liked, but it was a series that had already been budgeted and, largely paid for, and much of the money could not be recouped. They would at least have had 13 more hours of television for that money, and probably avoided a public scandal on the scale of the one their unorthodox cancellation technique provoked.
They would also have had to wait all of six weeks to take the decision in this way.
When a very public scandal dictated that Doctor Who had to continue to be made despite both men’s wishes, they again had not simply the right, but also a duty, to make it as good as they thought it could be. Again, they were high-ranking BBC staff members, who were (well) paid to make logistical and creative decisions about BBC programming.
Given Powell’s contempt for Nathan-Turner, and Saward’s feeling that this dislike also extended to him, that logically should have involved the removal of the series’ Producer and Script Editor. This did not happen. In fact, Grade and Powell allowed the series to continue under a Producer in whom neither had any faith, and whom Grade was prepared to publicly criticise. It’s another, equally strange but curiously diametrically opposite, failure of professional standards. It was probably equally rooted in the pair’s joint dislike for both the series and its producer, and almost certainly in part prompted by resentment at media responses to, and portrayals of, them exercising the functions of their jobs.
Managerial refusal to engage with what they perceived to be creative problems with Doctor Who at this stage, instead allowing a programme which they had been publicly embarrassed into allowing to be made to continue without making efforts to improve it, is itself arguably a dereliction of their professional duty, as both public-sector workers and creative figures. Had overt, dramatic managerial intervention become a kind of hostile neglect? Maybe. Perhaps there was more to it than that. Maybe Powell, if not Grade, felt that Doctor Who and John Nathan-Turner deserved one another.
"I wanted him to fuck off and solve it – or die, really. If he’d solved it fine, but it had probably gone beyond solving."
Jonathan Powell
So it was that, in the absence of being pushed, both Nathan-Turner and Saward declined to jump, erring on the side of caution and, quite understandably, of assured continued employment. Both men might also have, quite justifiably, felt that they now had something to prove to their superiors, if not the world at large.
And then, for a quarter of a year, nothing happened. The unseemly public brouhaha about Doctor Who was followed by three months in which both Nathan-Turner and Saward felt largely unable to do any new work on the 1986 series, unsure of what was now required of them.
"Much to my amazement we were still sitting there three months later. I can’t remember what I was doing for the three months, after having been so busy to suddenly have nothing, but yes, I did turn up. They were paying me."
Eric Saward
In May Nathan-Turner and Saward finally had a single, brief meeting with Powell and Grade, in which the management’s creative concerns about Doctor Who were finally discussed. The Producer and Script Editor were told that the 1985 series had been too violent, and that the 1986 series should be more humorous. "A lot of these accusations came later, when they were looking for reasons," comments Saward. On another occasion, he would note that in his opinion three 1985 stories, Vengeance on Varos, The Two Doctors and Revelation of the Daleks were "very comic". Little else in terms of advice or feedback was offered from either the Head of Department or the Controller of BBC One. The programme would be permitted to continue but, counterintuitively, in almost exactly the form that had seemingly prompted Powell and Grade to take such extraordinary measures to end it.
"Finally we were told we had to come up with a relaunch for the show, that was all. Nothing about what they wanted… no indication as to how they wanted this relaunch to be handled."
Eric Saward
Some progress was made on Doctor Who’s new creative direction when Nathan-Turner pitched to Grade and Powell Saward’s idea of a linking theme for the new series: a run of stories in which the Doctor would be placed on trial by his own people for his actions as an adventurer in time and space. The story idea had come from Saward’s partner Jane Judge’s observation that the series and its production team were in effect "on trial".
Saward himself has since described the concept as prompted "more by desperation than creativity" and "not my best idea", but the approach was nevertheless accepted by Powell and Grade.
Another aspect of Saward’s concept was his decision to loosely base the structure of the 1986 series, and the Doctor’s trial, on that of Charles Dickens’s 1843 novella A Christmas Carol. The first story would show the Doctor in the (recent) past, the second his actions immediately before being brought to trial, and the last section a possible future for the character, should he be acquitted. With the Doctor’s trial echoing the programme’s, there seems to have been a desire for a story that would demonstrate, on more than one level and to more than one audience, Doctor Who’s inherent worth and right to continue to exist – to continue indeed to have new adventures, in both a fictional and a metafictional sense.
It was at this point that things began to go really wrong.
This article is an edited, condensed and amended version of the introduction to my book on the closing episodes of The Trial of a Time Lord, in which you can find much more detail on the above (and footnotes!) as well as an in-depth exploration of what happened next on both a scripting a production level. It is available as both a paperback and a kindle book here.
Quotations from Eric Saward are largely drawn from a 14th December 2006 interview conducted by Ed Stradling, Richard Molesworth and Richard Legree for use on the then BBC Doctor Who DVD range. Much of the material remains unpublished, and I have worked from a transcript. Thanks to Ed for this.
Quotations from Jonathan Powell are taken from Richard Marson's biography of John Nathan-Turner, which is available here. Full credit to Richard, with whom I cleared the use of quotations in the book version of this essay. Now go get his book.
