News – Planet of the Blog

Planet of the Blog a Doctor Who group blog

Let’s pick some clickbait apart

Posted on November 9, 2023December 14, 2023 by Alex Daily

The thing that’s got Doctor Who fandom in a tizzy today is this article from The Mirror, (archive.is link, if you’d rather not give them the traffic) a tabloid that, to be fair, does have a better track record than you’d typically ascribe to a tabloid. The article purports to claim that Paul McGann is set to reprise his incarnation of the show’s titular character in a spin-off — and I’m gonna pick the article apart line by line. Let’s just get into it. All blockquoted text from the Mirror article unless I indicate otherwise. Headline.

EXCLUSIVE: Paul McGann set to make comeback as the Eighth Doctor in new Doctor Who spin-off series.

Wow, exciting. That’d be cool, wouldn’t it. Don’t even need to read past the headline to get the gist — the claim is clear: The McGann incarnation will be back on your screen in multiple episodes. And it’s an exclusive, too! Nobody else has this information! Which makes sense, because there will in fact be: No information. Next, the lede.

The Doctor Who returns later this month with three specials celebrating the 60th anniversary with David Tennant back as the Doctor and Catherine Tate as Donna Noble and now Paul McCann is set to make his comeback too

First of all, the quality of the copyediting is fucking appalling here — “the Doctor Who,” “Paul McCann,” and have they run out of commas at The Mirror? But that aside, all we’ve got here is a basic restating of both information you already know — Doctor Who is indeed back later this month with three specials starring David Tennant and Catherine Tate — and then of the claim made by the headline. (Though I don’t know who Paul McCann is.) The same claim is restated once again by the opening line…

Paul McGann is set to make a comeback as the Eighth Doctor in a new Doctor Who spin-off series.

The 63-year-old actor had the keys to the TARDIS for the 1996 television film, a co-production between BBC Worldwide and Universal Studios, which was an attempt to revive the sci-fi show after it was cancelled in 1989.

His incarnation of the Time Lord built up a loyal fan base since due to the audio adventures he has voiced. He has had two just TV appearances in the 50th anniversary special and a cameo in Jodie Whittaker’s final outing The Power of the Doctor.

…and the next two paragraphs are broadly speaking accurate restatements of things you already know, too, though I’d argue he didn’t actually appear in the 50th anniversary special but in a webisode, but okay, close enough.

The show is about to enter a new era with Russell T Davies – the man who rebooted it in 2005 – at the helm and Disney co-producing with the BBC and spin-offs are being planned to increase the Whoniverse.

More established information. We know all this, and RTD was explicit about wanting to mirror the Star Wars / Marvel model of a whole range of spinoffs even before he took back over, saying in 2021, in Doctor Who Magazine #579:

RUSSELL T DAVIES: There should be a Doctor Who channel now. You look at those Disney announcements, of all those new Star Wars and Marvel shows, you think, we should be sitting here announcing The Nyssa Adventures or The Return of Donna Noble, and you should have the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors together in a 10-part series. Genuinely.

After the announcement of his return he’s been more coy, but the sentiment is clearly still very much a driving force behind the new Whoniverse branding — if Tales from the TARDIS does anything, it’s signal that it’s all one big show, one big story. A McGann incarnation spinoff would not actually be that weird. But let’s get back to the article.

The spin offs will work in the same way that Disney created series for Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe that stream on Disney+.

Literally explicitly something he said in 2021, sure. Still, to be extremely clear: No new information at this point.

A source said: “Russell likes the idea of bringing back McGann with his own set of episodes in the TARDIS. Disney are on board as they want more original content and want to fully exploit the franchise as they know how big it could become.”

Alright, see, here’s what we’re clearly basing this entire article around, but, is this new information? “A source” could be anyone, that could be my grandfather, for all we know.¹

“Russell likes the idea.” Sure, who wouldn’t? It’d be really cool to see Paul McGann get his real, proper due, right, the idea comes up in fandom all the time. But liking the idea isn’t six episodes on BBC One by winter next year.

“Disney are on board,” well, yes, they’re spending a lot of money, they generally seem to get along with the RTD2 team very well. I’m sure if RTD shows up with a spinoff premise that he’s excited about and thinks will work, Disney are on board.

Other possible spin-offs include a series on UNIT, the Earth based military wing that works with the Doctor to defend the planet and a villain anthology.

Oh, we’re already moving on from the McGann incarnation spinoff, huh? The UNIT spinoff has been widely rumoured for a long time now, and the modern incarnation of UNIT could probably sustain a spinoff, so, sure. And I hadn’t heard the “villain anthology” one before, but if you’re going as vague as “other possible spin-offs,” you could say just about anything. “Other possible spin-offs include a drama about Dr Who’s biscuit supplier, a Zygon police procedural with a psycho-sexual twist, and a film about Professor Prudeish from off The Time Warrior as he fights his care home in court.” Sure, Jan.

Doctor Who returns later this month with three specials celebrating the 60th anniversary with David Tennant back as the Doctor and Catherine Tate as Donna Noble. Ncuti Gatwa is then taking control of the TARDIS in 2024.

More restatement of known information, though, small correction, Gatwa actually takes over at Christmas this year.

Speaking in an interview recently, Paul said he would be interested, adding: “I finally got to be in an episode. The fans tell me that they hope there will be a chance of some more, that would be nice. I would be well up for it.”

Actor wouldn’t turn down followup to job they’re famous for. Some of them say they wouldn’t, some of them seem somewhat desperate for it, but it’s not an uncommon sentiment, is it. Certainly it doesn’t sound like a man who’s in active negotiations with the BBC.

A spokesman for Doctor Who declined to comment.

They would, wouldn’t they, the sneaky bastards.

So, in conclusion: The only actual new information in this entire article: An unnamed source claims “Russell [T Davies] likes the idea” of a McGann incarnation spinoff. …Yeah, man, I’m sure he does.

1
Both of them are dead.

On barnacles

Posted on October 18, 2023December 14, 2023 by Alex Daily

David asked about the Stef Coburn situation — the son of writer Anthony Coburn is claiming his dad had enough of an ownership over the first Doctor Who serial that he, as controller of his estate, now seems to be able to block its re-release¹ — and I basically blogged about it in reply.

This is my lightly edited² earnest understanding and assessment of the situation, as I rattled it off at 9:30am this morning after sleeping for twelve hours. I am not a lawyer, and I am not qualified to write about this in any way except that I’m a Doctor Who fan.

Most people writing about this are idiots. I’m probably one of them.

One

Stef Coburn is a misogynist, a conspiracy nutter, a vaccine truther, a racist, a transphobe, an all-round bigot, a typical modern conservative³, who, though I’m sure he hates that Dr Who is played by a Black actor now just by default,⁴ seems to have experienced the show’s very existence as a miserable intrusion upon his awful life, so I think it’s less “Stef is doing this because Ncuti” and more “Stef is doing this because he chooses to,” with a layer of “Stef is doing this now because he knows it’s a time when he’ll get the attention and outrage he seems to crave” — he also tried to claim ownership of the TARDIS using basically the same tricks during the 50th anniversary period.

Personally, I think this kind of thing works best when you get the fandom to rally behind you — I’m generally happy to say, yeah, somebody who made a major contribution early on to something that’s a billion dollar brand now should be recognised beyond what they were paid at the time — but Stef seems to have gone the “I know how to make a stink and I’m gonna make the smell everyone’s problem” route.

Two

The contract situation on old Doctor Who is messy. The rule, generally, is, if something was invented by somebody on BBC payroll, it belongs to the show, and if it was invented by a freelancer, they have some amount of legal ownership over the concept. Terry Nation fully owned the Daleks, now his estate does, and for much of the 60s and 70s he tried to make a standalone Dalek show — typically a 60s-style sci-fi space police thing — happen.⁵ Bob Baker and Dave Martin owned K9,⁶ the Brig has his own long-running military sci-fi novel series fully licensed from the Haisman and Lincoln estates that the BBC has no involvement in⁷, etcetera.

Some version of this is still happening, even — we know legally RTD invented Captain Jack even though Steven Moffat wrote his first appearance, meaning RTD essentially owns Torchwood, and Moffat seems to have retained some amount of control over the Paternoster Gang concept in the years between Big Finish getting the modern license and them getting to do Paternoster Gang stories of their own. Note also who and what get “created by” credits when in the modern show.

(This is even more of a thing in the various book ranges, where a lot of the ownership of the text has fully reverted back to the authors, and you’ll sometimes see whole books reprinted as self-published versions with the Doctor Who bits stripped out.)

Three

Stef’s TARDIS case a decade ago never went anywhere because when Anthony Coburn contributed the idea of the police box shape for the TARDIS’ interior he was on BBC payroll, a staff writer.⁸ Coburn was also on payroll when he first conceived of the caveman story he would go on to write, and when he was first commissioned to write it, but then the BBC’s general Script Department was dissolved, and he was re-commissioned to write it as a freelancer. That, ultimately, is where the issue seems to lie.

But: Loads of Doctor Who scripts were written by freelancers, and even when they own their concepts or even everything that happens in the story — the Haisman and Lincoln estates are able to license out the events of Web of Fear to such an extent that the Brigadier in those books is allowed to acknowledge everything that happened except that the people involved were called “the Doctor,” “Jamie McCrimmon,” or “Victoria Waterfield”⁹ — that doesn’t seem to mean the BBC doesn’t own enough of the rights to keep rereleasing them on DVD, Blu-Ray, audiobooks of novelisations, etcetera.

So the big part I’m personally unclear about is — is this situation different in some way I can’t see? Or is this just the first real instance of an estate being controlled by somebody who’s not just happy to cooperate, who’s not just happy to take the occasional licensing paycheck, but is choosing to play nasty? Could they all have been playing nasty this whole time? Either way, the BBC seem to believe there’s something here. I thought they were just playing it safe when they offered to pay him off — £20k, according to Stef, which he seems to have turned down because he’s being normal about Gary Lineker, I think? — but then yesterday a BBC rep explicitly said they don’t own all the relevant rights¹⁰, which surprised me.

So that’s where this situation is right now. I don’t know how it’s gonna evolve, but I suppose it either ends in the BBC being willing to match Stef’s (undoubtedly very high) asking price, or it going to court. Would court go how Stef wants? I’d imagine he’d rather avoid finding out.

1
Here’s Gizmodo on the issue. I would recommend strongly against clicking through to Coburn’s Twitter.
2
Coburn doesn’t seem to be particularly litigious towards people writing about this, but for legal reasons I feel slightly less comfortable being very rude here.
3
These are all claims I feel I can back up just by pointing at his Twitter, but rest assured I edited out several things I felt like I couldn’t.
4
David had linked to a social media post suggesting Coburn was specifically doing this because he was mad Dr Who was Black now.
5
A pilot script was adapted for audio by Big Finish in 2010 as The Destroyers.
6
See: The relationship between K9 mostly being absent in The Sarah Jane Adventures and the existence of Disney XD’s K9 series. And the perpetually definitely-happening K9: TimeQuake.
7
From Candy Jar Books. I like these, but they only did audiobooks for the first few seasons.
8
The general concept of the TARDIS was invented by, well, probably Verity Lambert or Sydney Newman or somebody else, look it up yourself. Either way, the BBC has pretty cleanly owned the police box shape since 2002.
9
They become “the Cosmic Hobo,” “the Scottish lad,” and “the girl with the queen’s name.”
10
From the Radio Times: “A spokesperson for the BBC said: “This massive iPlayer back catalogue will be home to over 800 hours of Doctor Who content, making it the biggest ever collection of Doctor Who programming in one place but will not include the first four episodes as we do not have all the rights to those.””