• Always prepared: When Christopher Eccleston
was cast as the Ninth Doctor, he watched the 1977 story 'The
Talons of Weng-Chiang', featuring Tom Baker, to prepare himself
for the role.
• Not today: Executive producer and head writer
Russell T Davies originally approached the BBC in 1999 with
plans to relaunch the series, but he was turned down by Peter
Salmon, the BBC One Controller at the time.
• A rotten leak: On Saturday 5th March 2005,
just three weeks before its anticipated TV debut, 'Rose' was
leaked online by an anonymous employee of CBC in Canada. The
episode was taken offline soon after, and the person responsible
had their employment immediately (ex)terminated...
• Doctor, Doctor: Russell T Davies put Christopher
Eccleston on his shortlist for potential Doctors, but never
thought that he would actually accept the role. How wrong he
was...
• Back for more: The BBC commissioned a second
and third series of Doctor Who based on the viewing figures
of 'Rose' alone.
• Across the decades: Mike Tucker and director
Graeme Harper are the only crew members to have worked on both
the classic series and the new series.
• Anagrams: Ever wondered where the name Torchwood
comes from? When the first series of Doctor Who was being filmed,
television pirates were desperate to get their hands on the
preview tapes, so they were labelled with the anagram of Torchwood
so nobody knew what they were. Sneaky!
• Keeping it in the family: Georgia Moffett,
the daughter of Fifth Doctor Peter Davison, originally auditioned
for the part of the Doctor's companion, Rose Tyler. However,
she later appeared in Series 4 as the Doctor's daughter, Jenny.
• Defender of the Earth: When Billie Piper
left Doctor Who in 2006, a spin-off entitled 'Rose Tyler: Earth
Defence' was planned. Scripts were written, and it even got
as far as pre-production, but it was later cancelled after Russell
T Davies deemed it as being "one spin-off too many."
• On top of the world: The sequence involving
the camera panning towards Earth and zooming into London has
been used in the episodes 'Rose', 'The Christmas Invasion',
'Army of Ghosts' and 'The Runaway Bride'.
• Strictly speaking: Christopher Eccleston
is in fact the third actor to portray the Ninth incarnation
of the Doctor. In 1999, Rowan Atkinson played the character
in a Comic Relief spoof entitled 'Doctor Who and the Curse of
Fatal Death', and in 2003, Richard E. Grant was the voice of
the Ninth Doctor in a BBC web animation called 'Doctor Who:
Scream of the Shalka'.
• Master of all: The Ninth Doctor is the only
incarnation (so far) to have never encountered the Master.
• Time fry's: Stephen Fry originally wrote
an episode for Series 2, but the episode was pushed back to
Series 3 for budget reasons and was replaced by the cheaper
story, 'Fear Her'. However, Fry cancelled the script altogether
when he found out that Rose wouldn't be in Series 3, because
he didn't have enough time to rewrite all of her lines for the
new companion.
• Lights, camera, action: The first four series
of Doctor Who were recorded on single camera video, and were
'filmised' during post-production to make them look like they
were recorded on film.
• 21st century Who: The 2009 Easter special,
Planet of the Dead, was the first Doctor Who episode to be filmed
and broadcast in High-definition.
• Sudden exit: On Thursday 31st March 2005,
the BBC confirmed that Christopher Eccleston would be stepping
down as the Doctor after just one series. The press release
wasn't supposed to be released until after the first series
had finished, and the crew had originally hoped that they would
be able to keep his regeneration at the end of 'The Parting
of the Ways' a secret until its broadcast. However, the BBC
were under pressure to confirm the news after the various British
tabloids wrongly claimed that a second series with Eccleston
had been commissioned.
• More than just a name: At the end of the
2007 Christmas special 'Voyage of the Damned', Astrid Peth,
played by Kylie Minogue, is killed, but the Doctor enables her
to travel through time and space, just like the TARDIS. Interestingly,
the name Astrid is an anagram of TARDIS.
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