“Toymaker, Toymaker, make me a Toy.”

The mostly missing The Celestial Toymaker has prompted a variety of fan responses since its single UK television airing in 1966. It is, for example, one of the 1960s Doctor Who serials less well represented by off air audio copies recorded by fans on transmission. Because at least one of those fans didn’t like it enough to want to listen to it again, and so recorded over it to avoid wasting expensive tape. Yet in the 1970s members of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society were so keen on it they named their house magazine in honour of its opening episode (The Celestial Toyroom). In 1984 producer John Nathan-Turner planned to bring back the story’s titular villain, played again by the same actor (Michael Gough), for The Nightmare Fair, in part because fans were so keen on the serial.

Said sequel didn’t happen due to the abandoning of almost all plans for the 1986 series following a confrontation with BBC management in early 1985. It subsequently became one of Doctor Who’s most mythologised unmade stories. Yet in 1991 the announcement, again by Nathan-Turner, that the sole existing episode of The Celestial Toymaker (The Final Test) would be released on VHS as part of the documentary The Hartnell Years literally brought boos from a convention audience, who seemingly would have preferred to see almost anything else. That’s almost as much of a rollercoaster ride as Space Invader at Blackpool Pleasure Beach which would have been a key feature of The Nightmare Fair had it been made.1

The cancellation of The Nightmare Fair was a curious echo of how The Celestial Toymaker itself had had an intensely troubled production history. Credited author Brian Hayles’ work was substantially rewritten twice, firstly by outgoing story editor Donald Tosh, and then by his successor Gerry Davis. What prompted Tosh’s rewrites is difficult to ascertain. Davis’ rewrites were a consequence of Tosh’s decision to include in the story, via his own re-write, George and Margaret, the titular characters from a play of that name from the late 1930s. One for the teenagers there, eh Donald?

George and Margaret was the work of Tosh’s new Head of Department at the BBC, Gerald Savory, whom Tosh felt would be flattered this “…welcoming salute.”.2 While he does seem to have agreed to Tosh’s idea in advance, he was decidedly not flattered by its execution on paper, and the remarkable notion of one of the BBC’s in-house drama productions being sued by its own on-staff Head of Serials seemingly briefly reared its head. (Although accounts differ.) With Tosh not simply out of the office, but out of the country on a belated honeymoon, Davis rewrote his predecessor’s scripts in his absence. When Tosh returned he was as appalled by Davis’ version of his own work, as Savory had been of Tosh’s appropriation of his. As Tosh recalled, on his return he was -