More excerpts from RTD’s memoir revealed:
“It’s such a shame we never got to make Series Three, though. Three scripts were fully written for it, and it breaks my heart they won’t be seen.”
“We had a brilliant story set during the Great Fire of London, written by the powerhouse team of Laurence Clark and Jack Thorne, and we should have had the budget to do it properly, with the flames and panic and everything.”
“And we had a brutal horror story, written by the brilliant Lydia Adetunji, set on a NASA-type space station, all about trypophobia – look it up, it’ll make you shiver!”
“There was a really lovely episode set on a council estate in the middle of Manchester. That would have been the ultimate place to bring the Doctor; I would have just loved to see that. It was written by Sharma Angel-Walfall, who’s lived that life. It was like Doctor Who meets the film Rocks.”
“I was talking to a lot of other writers as well, and I wanted to bring Juno Dawson back for another story after her amazing Eurovision episode.”
“I was also talking to the writers Kate Herron and Briony Redman about bringing Jonathan Groff back as Rogue, which would have been glorious. That sequel was forever getting postponed. It didn’t appear in Series Two, but I would have tried for it in Series Three. We were talking about Rogue in an eighties story, maybe set in Blackpool with video arcades at its centre.”
“So we had a lot of fabulous ideas, some fully fleshed out, with a Dalek four-part epic to end the series. We were ready to go.”
We had a brilliant story set during the Great Fire of London, written by the powerhouse team of Laurence Clark and Jack Thorne, and we should have had the budget to do it properly, with the flames and panic and everything.
Honestly sounds pretty great.
And we had a brutal horror story, written by the brilliant Lydia Adetunji, set on a NASA-type space station, all about trypophobia – look it up, it’ll make you shiver!
This one, too.
There was a really lovely episode set on a council estate in the middle of Manchester. That would have been the ultimate place to bring the Doctor; I would have just loved to see that. It was written by Sharma Angel-Walfall, who’s lived that life. It was like Doctor Who meets the film Rocks.
This would probably be fine? Not too exciting to read about, but then I’ve never seen “Rocks.”
I wonder if these scripts will ever see the light of day in one format or another.
They all sound interesting, I think. A Dalek four-parter, too, at least in theory. The maddening part is, this shows that Davies and Bad Wolf had season 3 planned out, far enough to commission scripts — without any season order from the BBC or its partner.
I do hope these can be retooled for a future series, I’m always up for an abstract space horror (yes, even “Sleep no more”). And I’ve seen many fans wishing for Jack Thorne as show runner, so it would be interesting to see his take on the Doctor.
What I get from the memoir excerpts so far is that Davies does a very rosy revision of the story, and dangling these could’ve-beens to distract from that. Elsewhere he’s pretending “The reality war” didn’t need a rewrite and extensive reshoots to accommodate Gatwa’s exit — “oh, we knew Ncuti was leaving”.
Really? Because as of October 2024 Gatwa thought he was going to shoot s3 the following year. He said as much on the Graham Norton show. I’m not buying much of RTD’s version to be honest.
Not that it matters of course, there will be a new production soon enough. But the season that never materialised will probably haunt the fandom — perhaps the general viewership — for a while.
(yes, even “Sleep no more”)
We’ll get there eventually in the retrospectives, but yeah, I think “Sleep No More” is fine. Not a home run, but fine.
I’m not buying much of RTD’s version to be honest.
He’s a real bulllshitter, and seems too diplomatic to tell a gritty tell-all. But these excerpts seem true to be, even if they’re incomplete.
I do have questions about whether these writers were paid for their “fully written” scripts - I assume they must have been, which is odd.
