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A History of Doctor Who on BBC tv and radio 1963 to 2004
Part 2

BBC Radio

From senior service to One

The BBC has been involved in Radio broadcasting since the early 1920's, long before it's first TV broadcasts. In the post war period there were 3 BBC radio stations in the UK, the Light Programme, the Third Programme and the BBC Home Service. This changed on the the 30th of September 1967, when Radio 1 was born and the other networks were renamed Radios 2, 3 and 4 respectively.

From 1967 until the late 1990's, with the start of a number of digital stations, the BBC's network of national stations remained pretty much unchanged, at least in name. Radio 1 serves the teenage 'pop' fan, Radio 2 originally served the more mature listener of popular and 'light' music, but nowadays concentrates increasingly on 'classic' pop music from the 50's, 60's, 70's and 80's for the '30 something' audience, it also includes some variety and comedy programmes.

Radio 3 was dedicated to Classical music and Radio 4 was what would nowadays be termed a 'talk radio" station with a mix of comedy, drama, factual and discussion programmes.

Five live

Radio 5 was created in the early 1990's initially as a lighter talk radio station than Radio 4 and carried some drama and children's series. In 1994 it was re-positioned as a sports and education network and renamed Radio 5 Live. The BBC's radio stations have all essentially stuck to the above described remits up to the present and, in addition, the BBC runs a large number of UK local radio stations.

Who on the airwaves

Doctor Who has been heard on three of the BBC's non-digital radio stations; Radio's 2, 4 and 5, including original and repeated radio stories as well as documentaries.

It should be noted that since it's launch December the 15th 2002 the digital channel BBC Radio 7 has featured numerous repeats of Doctor Who radio series and related programmes. These have been so numerous that for the purposes of this article I am covering non-digital BBC radio stations. However BBC 7 do include a page dedicated to Doctor Who on their website.

A mere mention

There have been mentions of the series on Radio 1 and in the 1980's there was a series of Dalek sketches on the afternoon show presented by a DJ called Steve Wright. These mentions, however, were not listed in the Radio Times and were only a small part of the shows they were on. Radio 3 would appear to be a bit too 'high-brow' for any Doctor Who related features!

On the other network there have been various programmes that have mentioned the series from William Hartnell's appearance in the 1960's on Radio 4's Desert Island Discs to the recent Radio 4 series Dead Ringers with it's regular sketches involving a very convincing, and very funny, John Culshaw impersonating of Tom Baker's Fourth Doctor. These programmes are, again, not directly related to Who itself and are also too numerous to mention here!

Movies and schools

The radio debut of the Doctor came back in 1966 with a radio adaptation of the second Doctor Who film, Daleks - Invasion Earth - 2150AD, this was billed in the Radio Times under the generic title Movietime, presumably an ongoing series that adapted films for the radio audience.

This was broadcast on the forerunner of Radio 2, the BBC Light Programme and was, according to it's Radio Times listing, allocated a 29 minute slot .

It was 10 years later, in 1976, that Doctor Who next appeared on the airwaves in a Radio 4 schools programme called Exploration Earth: The Time Machine. This starred Tom Baker and Elizabeth Sladen and took the listener on a trip with the Doctor who explained the origins of Earth.

Slipback

Enjoyable and novel though this foray onto the airwaves was, the real radio debut of 'TV' Doctor Who came in the 1980's with Radio 4's airing of Slipback, starring Colin Baker. It is perhaps apposite to pause here and comment on the reasons for this story being made in the first place.

Doctor Who was put on an 18 month hiatus in 1985, at the end of Colin Baker's first full season as the Doctor, Season 22. Despite the BBC's somewhat grudging assurances that this was only a temporary measure whilst the programmes production team put the series back on track many fans worried that Doctor Who was being killed off.

Others, who seemed to get a lot of press coverage over the next few years, felt that it might be better if the programme was ended given the direction that then producer John Nathan-Turner was taking it in. In fact the programme did re-appear for a further four years but during this "hiatus" period there was one chink of light for fans of Colin Baker's Doctor.

Pirate radio

Radio 4 was airing a strand for younger listeners called Pirate Radio 4 which 'took over' the airwaves for 3 hours every Thursday morning from the 25th of July to the 8th of August 1985. Each episode of Pirate Radio 4 included 2 10 minute mini-episodes of Slipback, all written by then Doctor Who Script Editor Eric Saward and starring Colin Baker as the Doctor and Nicola Bryant as Peri.

Despite the fact that Slipback was a genuine offshoot of the television series many fans were unimpressed by Saward's seeming attempts to create a Doctor Who version of The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Certainly it was written for laughs but many felt that Saward didn't quite have the same grasp of surreal humour as the writer of Hitch Hikers, Douglas Adams (himself a former Doctor Who script editor). Whatever the verdict of the fans there was never another radio series starring Colin Baker, and he was back on the TV in September 1986 anyway.

Paradise on Five, thirtieth on Two

Doctor Who's next major foray onto the radio air waves was not to come until after the series' end in 1989. It was during the 30th anniversary year, 1993, that Doctor Who really seemed to take off on the UK airwaves. In August and September of that year Radio 5 broadcasted a new 5 part Pertwee adventure The Paradise of Death, penned by Pertwee era Producer Barry Letts.

Although the story met with a mixed response from fans it did do well enough to allow a follow up story to be commissioned. The Paradise of Death was quickly followed in November by a Radio 2 documentary celebrating the 30th Anniversary. Narrated by the Brigadier himself, Nicholas Courtney, Doctor Who - 30 Years was a very good radio alternative to the TV documentaries that celebrated the anniversary on BBC 1.

Ghosts

In 1994 listeners to Radio 2 were treated to a repeat of Paradise, by this time Radio 5 had become Radio 5 Live and Doctor Who was no longer deemed suitable for it's new remit. All went quiet after this and the follow up Pertwee story The Ghosts of N-Space sat on the shelf until January 1996 when it was finally aired on Radio 2.

1996 was the year of Doctor Who's big come back on TV in the form of a multi million dollar TV movie starring Paul McGann. This was aired in the UK at the end of May but tragedy struck the world of Doctor Who a few weeks earlier with the death of Jon Pertwee - it was this that prompted the next radio programmes to cover Doctor Who.

The CPO, The Scarecrow and the Doctor

BBC tv did not see fit to air any special programmes about the life of Jon Pertwee, or even any special repeats. In contrast Radio's 2 and 4 celebrated the life of a man who had been as much at home on the Radio as he had on the Television. In October Radio 4 listeners were given a tribute in the form of the part of a 40 minute documentary about his life.

Radio Lives 1: The CPO, The Scarecrow and the Doctor was a fitting tribute to a man who had entertained a generation of adults with his antics in The Navy Lark and then entertained their children and grandchildren in Doctor Who and Worzel Gummidge.

Hot on the heels of this Radio 2 broadcast Everybody Down! - A Tribute to Jon Pertwee in December. This consisted of an 80 minute documentary, covering Pertwee's three main roles, and was followed by an episode of The Navy Lark. Again radio had surpassed television and given Jon Pertwee a fitting memorial. In December of that same year Radio 2 repeated his last radio Doctor Who The Ghosts of N-Space.

Online moves

In 2000 it was announced that Radio 4 had commissioned a pilot for a Doctor Who radio series. This was to star Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor and included notable guest stars such as Steven Fry, Jacqueline Pearce and John Sessions.

A pilot episode was made but was turned down in January 2001 by a new regime at Radio 4. It was however subsequently picked up by BBC Online who webcast the pilot, as both audio and in a basic animated version, in July 2001. More details of this and subsequent broadcasts can be found below.

Since then terrestrial BBC Radio has been notably quiet on the subject of Doctor Who, apart from a flurry of mentions over the 40th anniversary period, including an appearance by The Cuttings Archive webmaster, Roger Anderson, on BBC Radio Wales' Mousemat magazine programme. There have also been a large number of small mentions covering the announcement and subsequent filming of the new 2005 series but no significant programmes. The focus, for the moment, seems to have moved firmly back to BBC tv as opposed to radio.

BBC Online/BBCi

Death comes... online

In July 2001 the BBC made its first foray into broadcasting drama online. Fittingly this groundbreaking broadcast was of a pilot for a new Doctor Who story, Death Comes to Time.

After a substantial amount of publicity, on and off BBC radio and tv, the response to the broadcast was overwhelming with almost 3 million page impressions recorded in the first few days that the story was available. As a result BBC Online commissioned a full series of webcasts that would finish off the story started in the pilot and further episodes were made available on a weekly basis from the 14th of February 2002.

The form that the webcast took was groundbreaking at the time - visitors to the BBC website were offered three options: "Enhanced version", "Sound only" and "Low quality". All of the options required RealPlayer but the first option offered not only sound but also featured 'animated' illustrations (drawn by Lee Sullivan).

Smile!

According to the BBCi website at the time these were produced "using an animation language called SMIL (pronounced 'smile')" and only worked with RealPlayer. RealPlayer was used for the webcast to allow streaming of the sound over the internet but not permanent downloading of the files. This avoided complicated, and potentially expensive, rights issues with actors and their agents.

Critically Death Comes to Time was something of a hit or miss affair depending on your point of view but it would probably be fair to say that the majority of listeners/viewers, whilst quite enjoying the novelty of the webcast, found the story a bit of a confused and somewhat contrived.

This was not helped by the way in which the story was delivered over the internet; every week four two to four minute downloads were made available, these together made up one third of an episode so a single episode would be made up of twelve parts and would take three weeks to download and listen to. This helped to make an already complicated plot even more difficult to follow and must have put some listeners/viewers off the webcast altogether.

Real Time and Shada

Death Comes to Time was followed by three further webcasts; Real Time (2002), starring Colin Baker as the Doctor, a remake of the unfinished Tom Baker story Shada (2003), starring Paul McGann as the Doctor, and Scream of the Shalka (2003), starring Richard E Grant as the Doctor. The first two were presented in a similar fashion to Death Comes to Time although downloading and listening was made easier by avoiding splitting episodes into so many parts and making each episode available every week. Like Death both stories could be viewed in the RealMedia format but Shada was notable in that it offered a Macromedia Flash version.

Macromedia Flash offers far higher image quality than RealMedia formats and is also a technology that is far more seamlessly and less intrusively integrated into web browsers. It is also the format of choice for many modern professional animators. Technical advancements meant that Flash could now safely be used for streamed webcasts without the danger of it being permanently downloaded, thus keeping agents and rights issues at bay.

Real Time, which pitted the Doctor against the Cybermen, and Shada were produced by the successful Big Finish audio team and it should be noted were a greater critical success than Death Comes to Time, although publicity for the two webcasts was not as great. Both were again illustrated by Lee Sullivan with 'simple' animated versions available alongside audio only versions.

Scream!

By the time Shada had debuted BBC Online were experimenting with the delivery of fully animated webcasts using Flash as the delivery format. In 2002 BBC Online had launched a fully animated webcast series, Ghosts of Albion which was co-written and directed by Amber Benson (Tara in Buffy the Vampire Slayer), which had proved a success. BBC Online were keen to continue this success with a similarly animated version of Doctor Who.

In November 2003, timed to coincide with the programme's 40th anniversary, the first episode of this fully animated story, Scream of the Shalka, debuted on the BBC's Doctor Who website. It starred a 'new' Doctor, played by Richard E Grant, and was animated in Flash by Cosgrove Hall, the same company responsible for Ghosts of Albion. The story garnered some publicity in the press and the BBC ran a series of TV trailers on their terrestrial and digital channels to support the webcast.

However, the release of this animated adventure was somewhat overshadowed by news, in September 2003, that the series was coming back to BBC 1. This meant that the Doctor Who ball was firmly back in the television's court and BBC Online were told to freeze plans for further webcasts and as a consequence nothing more has been heard of Richard E Grant's Doctor

 

 

 

 

 

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