The Cancellation

Doctor Who - The Cancellation

"I was definitely leaving in 

'89 and and had been assured. 

So They said, "...oh it's that dreadful man who 

does that dreadful show can't we just -- 

can't we just get rid of both of them...?"

zzz

I'd never heard the word cancellation and i wish i had it was a slow realization that oh my god you know it's not coming back i may go down in history as the person who killed off doctor who 1989 i was the person who canceled doctor who probably one of the hardest things that happened to him because he'd made doctor who his life it was a shame that the show was cancelled and canceled on his watch and but one reason for that was he he just did it too long he'd been there for years and years and he should have moved on sooner should you have left earlier i think um yeah i mean but it wasn't for lack of trying it wasn't for lack of trying i didn't want to break any records i really didn't i didn't want to be the longest running producer at all i just wanted to do a stint and i i felt that the the time that i'd finished my stint was that 20th anniversary special but i was deprived of that privilege at the end of uh season 26 we all thought the program was coming back the following year i was there on the last studio day which was the last studio day of ghost light and which was the last story i scored for the show and we had a party afterwards and everyone said see you next see you next year there are all sorts of rumors about whether the show was coming back who was going to produce it but nothing definite came out that didn't worry me or concern me too much because i was often commissioned very late anyway but i always knew when the program whether the program was being made or not and and it wasn't um and eventually i think i spoke to sophie or sylvester or maybe mike tucker and and heard that the word on the grapevine wasn't know the show wasn't being recommissioned for the for the following year or indeed for the foreseeable future certainly i know that sophie and sylvester felt cheated that they didn't get to give their characters a proper send-off um it was just a question of that's it it's the last one as opposed to a story specifically written to write them out i didn't know anything about it until one day at home late i don't know late summer the phone rang it was gnt on the phone he just followed me up to tell me he'd written me a letter which seemed a strange thing he said but i said well you're going to tell me what's in the letter and he told me and it was that um you know it wasn't coming back the next season it wasn't until i was rehearsing for corners one day at north acton that i got a phone call no mobiles of course in those days so in the office and it was sylvester and he said are you sitting down i said well i am now and he said apparently we're not doing any more doctor who you never expect anything actually to have a long life because it never does it always changes that's one of the joys of being an actor but it's also sometimes a bit disappointing and i was i was a bit miffed i thought oh wait a minute i committed myself mentally and i got very excited about this fourth year this total whole year of commitment to doctor who and trying to create the real the doctor i wanted you know the real mccoy i think the decision not to bring it back or to axe the show had been made regardless of what we were doing at that point i don't think it really mattered how well received the shows were i think decisions had been made there was no nobody said oh this is going to be the last season or anything like that it's just that as we got towards the end of it john began to get the sense of things and began to perhaps there had been some something said but nothing nothing explicitly said to him or me but just definitely that he picked up on the grapevine the feeling that there wasn't going to be another season any time soon doctor who had been halted in its tracks by the bbc no one from the corporation's senior management would confirm that the program had been cancelled but at the same time the bbc's drama department were being coy about what they planned to do with the series when i joined the bbc as head of series there were a number of programs there that had been running for a long time i mean i can't quite remember how long all creatures great and small had been running for howard's way had been running for a long time there were only so many hours on british television for drama and i decided that we needed to look seriously these programs and see whether or not we needed to open up the schedules again and doctor who was one of those programs they killed us through scheduling i think because at that time coronation street was the it was the biggest hit on british television it was it was the mountain it was absolutely a monster so moving us from the saturday night slot and putting it up against coronation street is basically like putting an infant on on the m1 and letting him try and walk across to the other side we were doomed i mean we were not sent out on a suicide mission we all know why the series ended the series ended because um the bbc at the time was entirely run by people who hated science fiction it's that simple that's why there was no science fiction on television on the bbc for like 10 years afterwards they didn't like it they were mostly public school oxbridge educated people who feared more than anything else the embarrassment of their peers it was somewhat of an embarrassment to the drama department um i think at the production level people at afms and design costume people loved working on it because it was a challenge but in terms of the ambitious would-be producers who filled the script in the department it was looked at as something that would be a career killer it wasn't seen as something that they the department was proud of it was i i think if they could have farmed it off to the children's department they'd all be very happy everyone's very quick to blame jnt for absolutely everything that happened in the last few years of doctor who including its demise really john it turns out was struggling against enormous odds everything else was just maneuvering really they didn't wouldn't let john retire john's kept on saying i don't want to go where they won't let me go they keep saying they'll cancel the program if i if i go and that's that's what i heard i mean that's what john said and it was so obvious you know the the management just hated it they just really really hated it nobody really knew what to do with it nobody knew how they should proceed if j t moved on i had no idea the reason dr who finished in 1989 was that we had really decided that this wasn't the program that it had been and that if it was ever to have any life again in the future it needed a long rest not quite as long a rest as actually turned out to be the case michael grade had actually tried to cancel the programme um a few years beforehand when he'd been controller of bbc one so when jonathan pyle and i talked about uh not renewing it the following year i think initially he was probably quite cautious about it and sort of said to me well michael grade couldn't do it had there been somebody around who was absolutely passionate about the program a producer a writer who had got a vision of that program that would actually bring it into a new sort of life a new world because every program needs reinventing every so often it could have been an option to actually push that forward at that stage but i couldn't see anybody there around nobody was certainly making themselves evident that they were passionate to become involved with doctor who because i think most people at that stage regarded it as a program that had seen better days and i decided let's just give it a rest a lot of people saw that as a smoke screen i think to to cancellation but it really wasn't that um i thought probably it would come back on the air again three or four three or four years time as it was it took considerably longer than that doctor who's final episode was shown on bbc one on wednesday the 6th of december 1989. doctor who's 26 year run had come to an end i was really upset um and sort of shocked i think it was a shame that the program was cancelled when it was i think it was a shame that it was canceled in the way it was cancelled which was basically to keep everyone hanging on then suddenly oh no we're not doing it it needed to be treated in a different way it needed a rest it needed people to think about it in a different way i don't know if it needed to wait as long as it did to come back i'd like to be remembered for keeping it going rather than finishing it off you're gonna see all sorts of things ghosts from the past aliens from the future there'll be no cliffhanger ending no i'll be back yes i'll be back just a wave and a fond farewell would i've taken the big job on doctor who if i'd known then what i know now you betcha