![]() In a very different media landscape, the movie was available to buy on VHS prior to being screened in the UK. It is difficult, with hindsight, to recapture just how much excitement there was about Doctor Who returning in 1996. Paul McGann returned to Doctor Who on television in 2013. McGann eventually reprised the role on TV in a specially shot iPlayer “minisode” as part of Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary celebrations. When McGann appears at the convention in the documentary, Jacobs says it was like witnessing people waiting to see the pope. He thrives off snappy, short, little bits of dialogue.” He has a way of making a line that’s written on the page sound like the first thing that’s come into his head. His enthusiastic portrayal of the character trying to recover his identity remains the highlight of the movie, and his Doctor now has over two decades and more than 100 stories behind him on audio.Įddie Robson, who wrote Radio 4’s Welcome to Our Village, Please Invade Carefully recently wrote for McGann’s continuing Doctor Who audio adventures, and says of his Doctor, “Paul has a nice sort of spontaneity as an actor. The film set in motion a whole range of off-screen continuations in books and comics and McGann has gone on to embed himself as a much-loved part of the franchise. ![]() The brief kisses between McGann’s Doctor and companion are relatively chaste set next to David Tennant’s 10th Doctor marrying Queen Elizabeth I, and Matt Smith’s 11th Doctor’s very own “time traveler’s wife” in the form of River Song (Alex Kingston).ĭespite the movie being a one-off, McGann is no George Lazenby among Doctor Whos. Higher production values, a theme tune rearranged with an orchestra, and the revelation of a mysterious new secret about the Doctor’s past seem nothing unusual in 21st-century Who. But, as the BBC gears up to celebrate Doctor Who’s 60th birthday next year, the Doctor Who TV film looks less like a forlorn coda to the 1963-89 series and more like a springboard between the “classic” and modern eras. Its structure is flawed – giving the seventh Doctor, Sylvester McCoy, a regeneration sendoff was a nice continuity touch at the time, but it eats up a third of the film’s run time. Watching the 1996 TV movie again in 2022, it is striking how much the first half-hour feels more like a US medical procedural, rather than the relaunch of a sci-fi/fantasy franchise. Matthew Jacobs gets to try on bits of a Dalek costume during the documentary. Jacobs ends up on screen wearing props and trying on monster costumes as people enthusiastically detail how much time they’ve invested making them, and his reluctance to embrace fandom gradually diminishes. Jacobs thinks that when writers and actors go to conventions, they always initially think it is just for the fans’ benefit, but find “they’re being brought into a family” themselves. On camera, they share stories about how Doctor Who has comforted them through grief and loss, or made their relationships stronger. The TV movie did succeed in introducing some new US fans to the show, and one of the joys of the new documentary is meeting some of the most enthusiastic cosplayers of the American convention scene. “It was usually the older fans, if we met them, who had a visceral reaction,” says Yuille. Photograph: American AnorakĪnother sequence shows a group of fans looking horrified as Jacobs tries to explain the reasoning behind it, as something that expressed the Doctor’s affinity with humanity, and would appeal to US television executives. Writer Matthew Jacobs enters the room at a Doctor Who convention in the US. During the documentary, the executive producer of the movie, Philip Segal, talks about going to a convention and being practically assaulted by a fan who was furious about the movie. It didn’t matter how short the companions’ skirts were in the 60s, the rule of “no hanky-panky in the Tardis” had lasted for three decades until, in Jacobs’ script, McGann was suddenly snogging Dr Grace Holloway, played by Daphne Ashbrook.Įven worse for some fans, the Doctor unexpectedly revealed in 1996 that he was half-human, on his mother’s side. “You have the incipient romantic aspect of the Doctor really coming to the fore with Paul’s Doctor,” says Jacobs. One significant reason was that he had made changes to the very fabric of Doctor Who – McGann had kissed his companion. ![]() ![]() Despite getting over 9 million viewers in the UK, Jacobs’ script didn’t spark the hoped-for new series, and the movie spent years being perceived as a failure. Photograph: Martin Belam/The GuardianĬoming seven years after the original run of Doctor Who had ended, the movie remains McGann’s only major screen outing in the role. How the Radio Times promoted the Doctor Who TV Movie in 1996.
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