N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!
Eighteen years ago today the BBC announced that Doctor Who would be returning to our screens, ultimately bringing an end to what has become known to fans as the Wilderness Years.
For this blog, I’ve barely scratched the surface of what was accessible to Doctor Who fans during those years, preferring to follow a path similar to that drawn by the Ludicrously Niche blog, in a post I owe some gratitude to for helping me firming up my own wilderness running order.
In truth, I’d have loved to have covered Virgin Publishing’s contribution, not least their New Adventures and Missing Adventures ranges, which, as I’ve said before, were Doctor Who for me in the early 90’s.
But then where do you stop?
Throughout it all there had been Doctor Who Magazine keeping the flame alight, especially with its comic strip; there were the unofficial side-projects from Reeltime, BBV and Kevin Davies — many of which I’ve still not seen to this day (Downtime being the one exception); and there was the continued alliance of Doctor Who with Blue Peter (thanks in part to its Who fan editor!).
With the emergence of the web as a medium, the BBC Cult website not only broke new ground with the four webcasts I did cover; it also created photo-novels of missing stories and published ebooks of out-of-print novels in the days long before Kindle. I was very tempted to read The Dying Days again, not only because it was the first of the eBooks, but because it’s nearly a quarter of century since I last did read it. In the end, I decided to keep the lid on that can!
Of course, Big Finish’s audio productions took off in a big way in the second half of the Wilderness Years. It had all started for them with the adventures of Professor Bernice Summerfield. By the time the announcement of the show’s return came, they were regularly producing stories with the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Doctors, in the process ensuring Paul McGann would no longer truly be, as he’d feared, the George Lazenby of Doctor Who. And they’d also generate their own spin-offs by then too — among them Dalek Empire, Sarah Jane Smith and Gallifrey.
There was certainly no shortage of new Doctor Who between 1989 and 2005.
Given I’d included Whatever Happened to Susan? there arguably should have been a place for the radio plays Regenerations by Daragh Carville and Blue Veils and Golden Sands by Martyn Wade, later included in Doctor Who at the BBC: The Plays CD release. There are probably other radio appearances I missed, so perhaps a revisit of the whole of the excellent Doctor Who at the BBC series is in order.
And that’s not to mention all of the VHS tapes inc. special documentaries and extended editions that were released — even with their gloriously misaligned and inconsistently used logos!
(As it was, I did commit myself to watching all of the DVD extras. This included inserting the original DVD release of the the TV Movie so that I could watch the six-second Easter egg that was the Jon Pertwee in memorium dedication, as prefixed to the movie’s original UK transmission.)
The thing is — it’s only going to get more difficult to keep up from now on!
From 2005, there’s the main TV series with all its specials and mini-episodes, the spinoff series, the supporting webcasts, documentaries and more DVD extras. There are further charity episodes, a couple of them fairly critical to Doctor Who lore.
Arguably, radio broadcasts of Big Finish stories have a strong case for being included too, although I think these may be one thing I have to sacrifice or risk never catching up to the present day. Indeed, I feel there’ll either be fewer sidesteps or more likely the sidesteps will take longer.
The Wilderness Years were actually a pretty good time to be a Doctor Who fan and revisiting them for this blog, however briefly, has been fun. At the time, I had no idea how much of a labour of love getting the TV movie made had been for Philip Segal. The man certainly was dogged. After watching The Seven Year Hitch, I was left with the impression that given it had taken one man seven years to get that one episode made, it’s perhaps not so surprising it was another nine before we saw another.
At the time of the BBC’s announcement we were still eighteen months away from the transmission of Rose, but Doctor Who fans had gotten used to waiting. However the new series was received — indeed even if it had bombed — we knew there were going to be at least thirteen more episodes. These days, it’s scarcely believable that Doctor Who has been back longer than it was away.
Even if, as I do, you view the wilderness years as a game of (roughly) two halves — before and after the TV movie — it remains one of the most fertile and creative periods in Doctor Who‘s history, with many of those involved going on to play a part in the “new” show. As such, it’ll have a lot to live up to. But then, that’s Doctor Who all over, constantly renewing itself. At the time of writing, we’re coming to the end of an era once more.
It cannot be a concidence that the news of Russell T Davies’ returning to Doctor Who as its new/old showrunner was timed to the same week — almost to the day — of that initial announcement back in 2003. With a new, Fourteenth Doctor yet to be revealed, the excitement of discovering what Davies’ return might bring to the show will take us into the show’s 60th year!
And, in 2003, as the show approached its 40th anniversary, that it was coming back from its long rest, brought with it a similar sense — that whatever the new series would hold, we hoped, if I may pre-empt the words of the soon-to-be Ninth Doctor, that it’d be fantastic!
