“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