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March 29, 2024, 12:38:57 AM

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Doctor Who Series 13: Goodbye, Mr. Chibs

Started by Norton Canes, August 10, 2021, 01:08:47 PM

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Mister Six


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Mister Six

#2672
A little snippet from The Writer's Tale, in which RTD discusses his idea for Tennant's last episode, if it were to be a one-parter. The story would have seen the Tenth Doctor giving his life to save just a single alien family in their creaky little ship, venting the radiation from its engines...

QuoteIn venting the engines, the energy becomes the Sun, our Sun, and so the Doctor's sacrifice creates the Solar System.


...

Oh, what if it were Gallifrey? He created Gallifrey! I just thought of that now, typing it to you. Nah, not as effective, is it? He created Space Men In Big Hats. Who cares?

Presented without comment, but a huge amount of implication.

JamesTC

Wish he did that minus the created the sun thing. So much better than the shite ending The Tenth Doctor got.

GoblinAhFuckScary


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Quote from: GoblinAhFuckScary on January 16, 2022, 01:32:59 PMbeeb getting axed. fuckkkkk

Thankfully Doctor Who will he kept afloat with Bad Wolf 👍

GoblinAhFuckScary

Quote from: Replies From View on January 16, 2022, 06:23:24 PMThankfully Doctor Who will he kept afloat with Bad Wolf 👍

I did remember this! But I was under the impression that it would be a collaborative effort? Just curious if this would mean perhaps the BBC relegating even more control to Bad Wolf or something.

JamesTC


mothman

Yeah but just like when they brought Tom Jones back after they got The Voice, you just know they'd insist on getting Tennant for it.

Mister Six

A bit of insight into working for Chibnall here, or at least what it was like to be on the writing team for season one of Torchwood...

The following is taken from Torch, Wood and Peasants by writer Si Spencer, who died last year. I bought it years ago and rediscovered it on a hard disk the other day. Released digitally under the pseudonym Webley Wildfoot, but now apparently only available in hardcopy from France (?), it contained Spurrier's commissioned but never produced Torchwood script and an afterword in which he recalled his time on the show.

He obviously had a bit of an axe to grind, but I reckon it'll be of interest to people here. The names of people throughout the book were changed, so I've added a key, although it's based on my own working out, so I make no claims as to accuracy.

I know it might be a bit rum to put this excerpt up here, bit I figured since the book is so obscure, Spencer is dead and Chibnall's career inexplicably continues, it's not harming anyone.



KEY
Boo Matthews = Matthew Bouch
Stone D. McFerris = Russell T. Davies
Amos Crumpsall = Chris Chibnall
Alien Sex Cops = Torchwood
Woodentop = EastEnders
Black Pudding and Bunions = Born and Bred
Robbie Stockwell = ?
Braintree Road = Coronation Street
Grimoire = Neil Gaiman (Spurrier was writing a  revival of Sandman spin-off The Dreaming under Gaiman's overall supervision at the time he was named as an upcoming Torchwood scribe)
Mercury Steele = Jack Harkness
Leon Clark = Noel Clarke
Jackie Martin = ?



[Boo Matthews] wanted to know if I could clear my diary to work exclusively on Stone D. McFerris's new show – 'Alien Sex Cops', explaining that the schedule and deadlines were going to be tighter than a Jessie Wallace leopardskin top and that I'd have to cancel all my other commitments. Naturally chuffed, I said yes, called my very understanding friend at Woodentop and waited to begin.
 
And then nothing happened, and happened for a while. My agent asked some questions about money and promises were made to look into that trivial matter, then four weeks later, ten pages of really quite excellent script accompanied by four very scant thumbnail characters profiles arrived in my inbox. I was told to ready myself and start thinking of story-of-the-week ideas. So ready myself I did and came up with a tight and grubby thriller, dripping with sex and violence – the dark tale of an angel smiting down the abusive punters of hookers at the point of their orgasm.
 
Another month passed and the chit-chat about money bantered back and forth, the upshot being that the offer was a fraction of what I'd turned down at Woodentop and an even wittier fraction of my previous rate at the network and that of course I wouldn't get paid until the actual commissioning meeting. What did I care?  I was working post-watershed in my favourite genre with the greatest writer currently working in TV – I'd have done this gig for street-sweeper's wages.

In the meantime my name was released to the global online community as one of the writing team, one of the first names to be picked and announced. My google-ability rocketed, emails started to arrive from people I hadn't heard of in years. I was used to being all over the net, but usually for work I'd completed, never for something that didn't even exist as yet.  I even got paid my first half fee – could life get any sweeter? My dues had been paid, I'd done the legwork, I was in the Big League. But I still hadn't been called into a meeting or submitted a single word of work. I decked the halls, I auld lang syned, then finally in January, the call came – a verbal pitch meeting; the chance to strut my stuff - so, riddled with flu with a voice barely above a whispered croak I took a two hour train journey into my glorious future. 

In the offices, I was greeted by an unfamiliar face, Amos Crumpsall, probably then best known for his work on 'Black Pudding and Bunions', a cosy Sunday dinner show about Northern doctors in the 20s – I assumed he was just another writer, but it soon became apparent he had a bigger sway than that. I settled down as Stone and Amos pitched me what they'd got so far and my heart sank as I learned that the second ep was going to be about an alien who makes people explode at the point of orgasm. 

Explaining my predicament, croakily waving my page of pitch-notes as evidence, I was touched when McFerris proved to be kindness personified. Focussing on the angel-as-alien concept, it wasn't long before we'd come up with the idea that an angel wasn't BIG enough for this show and I should make the guest star Christ himself. 

If you've never been in a pitch-room when an idea catches fire, it's a buzz that's hard to explain. The eager crosstalk, the frustrated waving of arms as you try to spit out twenty ideas at once, the ever-popular line 'It's not this, but....'. Notes being frantically scribbled, people jumping swiftly on the back of one idea and rushing off in another direction, till finally, the time up, the whole meeting rose to their feet and gave me a standing ovation. I later learned they did this at the end of every pitch meeting, but what the hell, as incentive it bloody works.

With the applause of one of my idols still ringing in my ears I took the train home and started to write, buoyed by a call from my editor to tell me that they loved my pitch so much that my episode was being bumped to be the third of the series and to get writing as fast as possible. First draft due in two weeks.
 
My first draft was shit. I freely admit it. People who've worked with me will testify to the shitness of my first drafts - they are probably sung about in legends of all things shit. Some writers need to make the big plunging mistake at the beginning, not the end and I'm one of them. Suffice to say I took the whole Christ metaphor way too literally. There was a swimming pool being turned to wine, there was a scene in a bank full of moneylenders.
 
Short of [the character of] 'Livingstone' (which I took not from David, but from Delicatessen) walking into a hard-up sardine sandwich shop and reversing their fortunes by multiplying their output with the last of their stock, I couldn't have been more on the nose. It was, in a word that bears repetition, shit.
   
And this was made fairly clear to me at my first briefing with my editor, politely but firmly and with encouraging tones, just as a good editor should. If you've worked in TV before you won't be surprised to learn that despite the rigid deadlines, this meeting didn't take place until over a week after I delivered – fast turnaround is a phrase generally reserved for writers only, and when it comes to production staff generally translates as 'leisurely reading time'. I took the notes, promising to improve things dramatically.

Obviously by then, with shooting only seven months away time was of the essence, but I was quietly confident I could turn it around in the two weeks allowed for the next delivery. Two days later I got a call; the two weeks turnaround wasn't so much a fortnight as five days. McFerris was leaving the country on the Tuesday and needed to read the drafts before he left.

My heart didn't actually sink; back in those days, I loved pressure, so I sat down adrenalin pumped and started to write, doing what I always do, sketching everything out in pen and ink before settling down to two mammoth sessions at the keyboard just before deadline. But then I got another call on the Thursday – the timings had been brought forward, you have to deliver tomorrow – don't worry, just send what you can.

I hadn't even started typing.

Deadline reduced from 14 days to 1 in the space of three days; there's pressure and there's pressure. I did what I could, frantically typing out my notes, pulling as much of an all-nighter as stress and exhaustion would allow and managed to hammer out forty pages of not very good-ness.
 
The briefing was at 8.30 in the morning in a regency seaside hotel breakfast room packed to the gills with the stench of kippers and the clatter of cafetieres, coffee cups and croissant-crumbed-crockery. Eight of us crowded round one small wrought iron table in the conservatory area and seven gunshots went off in my ear as Stone wafted the few pages I'd managed to type up.
   
'Actually mate, I was a bit disappointed'.  As they talked, it became horribly clear that they thought I'd had far longer than I'd actually had to write this pathetic half a re-write. As I tried to explain the deadline changes without dropping my editor in the bran flakes, phone calls from Canada came and went and none of it got heard.  Eventually, half an hour left on the clock, we turned to the script and its ideas and the table got fired up by someone's suggestion that perhaps Christ was too small and we should actually introduce some sort of vengeful Old Testament God into the mix – an Old Testament, science fiction, planet-slaying God who the Alien Sex Cops would battle and defeat.

I left with a page of notes headed 'The God-Killing Machine'. Looking back at my notes from that day now, I see these lines...   'Godhead, Gandhi and Pol Pot'  'If God was going to send us a Christ today, he wouldn't send us a hippy, he'd send a Terminator'  'To demonstrate his powers, death will stop for five minutes'  I have no idea what any of those notes mean and little memory of writing them down.

I left the hotel around 9.30, my week starting with me broken-hearted and head reeling from the worst set of ideas I'd heard in a good long while. Next morning, sitting down to make sense of The God Machine, I was called by Amos who apologised for yesterday's chaos – I almost wept with relief. We talked and by exploring some of my ideas, we crept towards a better, stronger and more plausible idea, an idea I really liked and really wanted to write; the idea you've just read as 'Blood'.

Fired up again and almost piss-stained with relief I sat down to write a version of this story, combining the best elements of my original idea along with a heartfelt story, a political message of sorts and a few hits of mystery and action. They 'loved' it. I use inverted commas because it's now abundantly clear that they didn't but at the next briefing I was greeting by a new face to the team, but an old face to me – Robbie Stockwell gave me my first break at Braintree Road, we were friends, we shared a lot in common when it came to television, we'd even been shat on from a great height by the same execs. He 'loved' the script, with a few reservations; we talked it through and agreed on several tweaks to improve it.

And improve it they did; the last full draft I wrote was the one you've just read, and sure, it's horribly flawed, has some hideously hokey lines and it's not always clear what's going on, but I'm still pretty pleased with it.

That's when things started to turn surreal...  I was invited to speak at a comic convention for the first time in about fifteen years; naturally I thought at first they wanted to talk about my work with Grimoire and my new impending title, but no; everything was about Alien Sex Cops.

Despite my protestations that I was sworn to secrecy on every detail, I spent a strange hour blinking in spotlights answering question after question with 'I can't tell you that', 'That's a secret; and 'Wait and see'. I was even asked to sign Mercury Steele memorabilia afterwards and I'd like to apologise to everyone whose valuable merchandise is now rendered completely worthless by the signature of the man who didn't write Alien Sex Cops. 

And then it was back to work. In hindsight it's pretty clear that by now Stone McFerris had delegated his responsibilities on the show to Amos Crumpsall. Of course no-one had told me that, so I was a bit surprised when I received an invitation to Crumpsall's home, some 150 miles away in a remote rural town. Arrangements were made, rail tickets posted and I made the trip out into rural Wessex, stepping off the train into a timewarp single-line rural station whose quiet charm was marred only by the enormous sewage reclamation plant right next door.  The expected taxi to drive me the next thirty miles was conspicuous by its absence, as were any other buildings save the waiting room and the sewage plant. I tried my phone and noticed something else was absent from the landscape – phone masts.

With only a pound in change and an unmanned station, I managed to make one brief call to the production office. 'I'm here. What's happening?'. The pound lasted just about long enough to hear 'Hang on, I'll just go and find... klik-brrrrrrrr'.

I could spend a long time detailing the three fucking hours I spent standing in the middle of the arse end of nowhere, my nostrils reeking with the stench of shit, with no idea whether a car would turn up or whether I should just hop the next trainful of braying Country Life-reading tosspots back to the Smoke or not - but I won't. Suffice to say if you thought the last sentence was overlong, you haven't stood inhaling effluence in a state of bewilderment wondering whether that distant dot on the horizon might be a pub. In retrospect, three hours of breathing in human effluence would turn out to be a truncated metaphor for the next three months.

Finally turning up chez Crumpsall, four hours late, I was ushered into a small office room, one wall of which was lined with Buffy memorabilia and DVDs – that should have been a sign of what was to come. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of the Slayer and the Scoobies, but I do try very hard not to consciously steal lines wholesale from the show, and I certainly wouldn't have thought it wise to cast an ex-member of the show and steal lines to put in his mouth. But I digress into critique and petty sniping; better put those claws away....
 
I wasn't alone at the house; it transpires that in the garage, Leon Clark was working away on his own episode, receiving hourly notes on each set of finished scenes. Leon's stunning career as award winning actor, writer and director had never really prepared him for this; sitting in a spider-infested outhouse having his work periodically judged by an author of feelgood family ferret-based fun. Still, at least he was writing scenes; as I pulled my script out ready to take notes, I noticed I was the only one in the room with a copy – I have a writer's eye, it's easy to spot little details like that when there are only two people in the room and one of them's you clutching your script.
   
'We need to rethink this from the beginning'  Those are words you really want to hear, trust me.  So we rethunked; or rather I did, in what turned out to be not so much a scripting ideas session as a two hour metaphysical debate on my perception of Christ as rabble rouser, displaced political leader and freedom fighter. And that was it, time to go – start again with a new two page pitch for a new episode please.
Six months and four drafts and a 'start again'. The train journey home should have been desperate, but the company of the utterly charming and affable Mister Clark was so funny and pleasant that I still managed to swing back into London in a good mood and ready to write.

Sadly, somewhere in a litany of laptop-crashes, lost memory sticks and my general organizational failings, I no longer have that final pitch. The general premise kept the idea of a Christ returning through 'the aperture', but this time landing smack in the middle of the extreme rendition of three suspected terrorists from the Middle East to the Rapture's airbase. I really liked the idea that to a victim of rendition, the scenario must feel very similar to the classic alien abduction stories; whisked out of nowhere, taken to a mysterious place and subjected to terrifying torture and examination then released with no sense of how much time had passed. I also figured that if they did accidentally scoop up Christ in their raid, his opinions and political beliefs would be enough to get him banged up in some secret very British Gitmo, emphasis on the 'git'.
 
I delivered... and waited. Six weeks. I was aware that now shooting had begun, the notion of my episode being the third was probably a slim hope (but hey, shows often shoot out of sync). I figured six weeks was reasonable enough, given the headless chicken chaos that usually prevails during the first days of a shoot.

And then I got an email from one of the other writers on the show, writer and actor Jackie Martin.  Jackie was fairly new to writing for TV and had had her own problems on the show; as an experienced hack I'd been sending her encouraging mails and reassuring her that TV was always way weirder and harder than you imagine, but not to worry. Her mail on this occasion was a very sweet and heartfelt thank you for my support compounded with massive condolences about me being dropped from the show. The condolences were even sweeter given that she apologized for how long it had taken her to get in touch, when she'd learned about my sacking some weeks before.

After eight months, this was how I discovered I'd been dropped – not from anyone actually in production, just from one of the many other people who'd been told before me. I got in touch with Leon, he too was pretty angry; if I remember his story correctly, he'd called the offices one day and a secretary had told him he'd also been dropped. In his case, the lack of communication was probably even more galling, as it turned out to be untrue.

I phoned Mister Stockwell, my old buddy, my mucker, my old mate and left a message – 'we need to talk, I think'. The next day he returned my call – 'The extreme rendition idea was too much 'of the moment'. Alien Sex Cops was going to be a timeless classic that never wanted to look dated; that whole issue would be dead in the water in six months'. As I'm writing this 'The Event' is just about to air – way to read the zeitgeist, guys.  And that was pretty much - to coin a perfectly succinct cliché - 'it'.

There were a few loose ends; fairly furious, I argued that under the circumstances I thought it fair that after the workload, the exclusivity deal and the shoddy treatment it would be reasonable to pay me my second half fee, otherwise I'd been on hold for the last eight months for less than minimum wage. In their defence, they agreed to pay me, but not before twisting the knife by adding a codicil that they would have the right to use my script in the second series with or without my permission. Luckily I'm a cynical fuck with a dark sense of humour and managed to raise a laugh out of their extorting a promise to surrender a script they'd rejected in exchange for my hard-earned loot.  I later heard rumours of course; some more plausible than others.

Looking back I'm fairly sure that the one about them originally commissioning more writers than there were episodes is probably true. It makes perfect sense after all; a little honesty about it would have been nice though. The other rumours are probably not worth repeating in a position where I could wind up before the beak, but the triumphant return of McFerris to season 3 of Alien Sex Cops certainly supports much of the gossip I heard about his feelings on the direction of the second series.

Norton Canes

Nearly died meself when I read 'Si Spurrier'!

Mister Six

Quote from: Norton Canes on January 24, 2022, 05:07:46 PMNearly died meself when I read 'Si Spurrier'!

Thought I'd fixed it before anyone saw! Dammit. Outed as a Si S* racist.

Replies From View

That's it settled, then.  He shall henceforth known as Anus Chinballs.

GoblinAhFuckScary

Sorry, can't come and hang out tonight.

Mum found the Crumpsall :/

pigamus

If Chinballs doesn't get the blame for these low ratings the way JN-T did in the 80s that really is an historical injustice


Kelvin

In complete fairness to the useless cunt Chibnall, it does sound like the series was headed for disaster, even when RTD was more involved. In fact, based on that write up, it sounds like the problems Spencer faced all stemmed from those first few meetings with RTD; the lack of writing time, the lack of early guidance around tone, and the increasingly ridiculous ideas that were suggested as possible replacements. His episode sounded dead in the water even before he went to Chibnall's house and had to start from scratch.

Mister Six

Yeah, that's what I thought, reading it again all these years later.

It's also interesting to note that some of the cringey shite like the Species ripoff sex alien was in there from the beginning. RTD trying to bite off more than he could chew, I guess, but the responsibility for the finished product does still fall in Chibnall's hands, I think.

I also thought it was common knowledge that series commissioned more episodes than needed, just in case some fell through, and Spencer seemed a bit naive to think otherwise. Although having your episode go from third in line after the showrunners to not in production at all without being notified is rum.

mjwilson

Quote from: Mister Six on January 24, 2022, 05:01:54 PMJackie Martin = ?

And then I got an email from one of the other writers on the show, writer and actor Jackie Martin.  Jackie was fairly new to writing for TV and had had her own problems on the show; as an experienced hack I'd been sending her encouraging mails and reassuring her that TV was always way weirder and harder than you imagine, but not to worry.

Random Shoes was written by Jacquetta May, fits the general standard of his aliases, and seems to fit some of the other biographical details. (Wasn't that one of the good episodes?)

JamesTC

Quote from: mjwilson on January 24, 2022, 06:26:11 PMRandom Shoes was written by Jacquetta May, fits the general standard of his aliases, and seems to fit some of the other biographical details. (Wasn't that one of the good episodes?)

I don't know what the general perception is, but I think it is the only episode from the first series that particularly stands out. Nothing special but a level above the rest.

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Malcy

Random Shoes is one of my favourite Torchwood episodes. Daft, believable, a bit sad and just great.

Malcy

Quote from: Malcy on January 26, 2022, 12:26:31 AMRandom Shoes is one of my favourite Torchwood episodes. Daft, believable, a bit sad and just great. Plus it has one half of the main cast from that Welsh comedy which I'm too pissed to remember the name of.

Mister Six

Putting words in your own mouth. Shameless revisionism.

BritishHobo

Quote from: Kelvin on January 24, 2022, 06:17:28 PMIn complete fairness to the useless cunt Chibnall, it does sound like the series was headed for disaster, even when RTD was more involved. In fact, based on that write up, it sounds like the problems Spencer faced all stemmed from those first few meetings with RTD; the lack of writing time, the lack of early guidance around tone, and the increasingly ridiculous ideas that were suggested as possible replacements. His episode sounded dead in the water even before he went to Chibnall's house and had to start from scratch.

It made me think of The Writer's Tale, where RTD is always fretting about badly missing his own deadlines, while also almost completely rewriting the scripts of other writers. I wonder if there was an expectation that he would be doing the same thing on Torchwood, only for it to turn out to be unfeasible once he stepped back. Lots of big, over-excited ideas giving way to the reality that Chibnall was going to have to beat it all into shape somehow.

Was it always planned that Chibnall would be in control once RTD set the show up?

olliebean

All the Flux scripts are up on the BBC Writers Room website, if you can bear it: https://www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/scripts/tv-drama/doctor-who/

GoblinAhFuckScary


Now we know the Doctor dies from pneumonia, having all damp mould in the TARDIS

JamesTC

Why do they keep spaffing money up the wall every few series on a new TARDIS set when the budgets are so tight?

McDead

Quote from: JamesTC on January 29, 2022, 01:55:55 PMWhy do they keep spaffing money up the wall every few series on a new TARDIS set when the budgets are so tight?

Part of the fun of the modern show, innit? A new TARDIS interior gets almost as much heat as a new Doctor. And it almost always marks a new direction of some sort - new tone, new Doctor, new showrunner, that sort of thing.

Plus, it means that you're never stuck with a particularly awful design for too long. I won't be sad to see the back of this very strange mish mash of a console room, it's a bloody mess.

olliebean

#2699
Quote from: olliebean on January 27, 2022, 08:35:47 AMAll the Flux scripts are up on the BBC Writers Room website, if you can bear it: https://www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/scripts/tv-drama/doctor-who/

There's definitely some first draft stuff in here. For example, after Dan's house has been miniaturised:

QuoteThey look back: there's a hole in the adjoining wall into the next house. Bloke in his 50s on the loo, reading the Echo. He looks to them, shocked. Pulls a blind down!

Why would he have a blind to cover a hole in the wall that wasn't there until 10 seconds ago? There's no blind in the actual shot, because of course it makes absolutely no sense for there to be one.

Or this, when they head into the TARDIS after meeting Claire:

QuoteTHE DOCTOR and YAZ head in and stop -- look around. Yaz pocketing the piece of paper, when she realises –

This seems to be the first and last time the piece of paper is ever mentioned in the script, and it's nowhere to be seen on screen. I guess this can't be a first draft after all, as the piece of paper is clearly left over from an earlier one.