Wikipedia has a page on stories that were planned or at least discussed but which were never made.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unmade_Doctor_Who_serials_and_films

Some of these are well-known now (Shada, the 'lost' Colin Baker stories, etc.) but some I had never heard about before.

After reading this, I am now, more than ever, really glad that the American series didn't get the green light. I particularly cannot even begin to imagine the one called 'Land of Fear.'

So which of these stories do you most wish had been made?

Too bad Colin Baker's original second season didn't get made. It sounds WAY better than that Trial garbage.

There are two excellent specials on the dvds about lost seasons. One on the Trial set and one of the Survival dvd. Both are awesome.

I've read "The Masters of Luxor", which was to have been the 2nd serial of the 1st Doctor's run. Instead, "The Dead Planet/The Daleks" was produced. While "Luxor" is okay, I can't imagine that it would have created the same impact at "The Daleks", and without the Daleks, we probably wouldn't be talking about seasons 2-27 of this show.

Of the unproduced 6th Doctor stories, I've read "Mission to Magnus", "The Ultimate Evil", and "The Nightmare Fair". The first two are unspeakably bad, while the latter is okay. The video arcade part of the storyline would have dated it terribly, though.

"Illegal Alien", a 7th Doctor lost story, is basically "Age of Steel" crossed with "The Curse of Fenric", with Nazis thrown in for fun. It also spawned the unfortunate sequel, "Loving the Alien", which features a not-dead alternate universe James Dean, and a dead Ace replaced by her 50 foot tall doppelganger (no, I'm not making up that last part).

Finally, I always wished the Douglas Adams story "Doctor Who and the Krikketmen" had been completed. It would have been completely insane, and I would have loved it.

They're obviously a bunch of turlingdromes not to have finished it.

There are a few dropped stories missed off that list:

Robert Holmes wrote one story in the late 60s that never got made, can't remember the name but it's mentioned in the DWM special on Holmes.

Sealed Orders by Christopher Priest, who (I think) tried to sue the BBC after it was rejected.

Douglas Adams wanted to write a story about the Doctor becoming a hermit, but it was vetoed by Graham Williams & Shada replaced it.

Richard, you could be thinking of "The Trap", Holmes original story submission to "Doctor Who", which was rewritten and eventually became "The Krotons."

Hmm, I think I'd sue if someone turned my story into "The Krotons."

Hey, it was his first shot at a Who story; plus, it was originally written for "Out of the Unknown."

Besides, his later works more than made up for the Krotons.

There was another Holmes story from the 2nd Doctor era called "Aliens in the Blood" that was rejected by Terrence Dicks for being to similar to "The Wheel in Space." Holmes later rewrote it in 1977 for a radio play, replacing the Doctor & Co. with new characters.

The Douglas Adams story about the Doctor retiring was proposed for a season 17 ending story. The producer immediately rejected as it seemed to make fun of the Doctor. It's possible Adams meant the idea as a joke.

It was aliens in the blood I was thinking of.

The Krotons was submitted to the BBC as in idea for Out Of The Unknown as well as being initially rejected by the Docotor Who production team.

Adams later re-worked Doctor Who and the Krikketmen as The Life, The Universe & Everything, the third Hitchhiker novel.

Too bad Colin Baker's original second season didn't get made. It sounds WAY better than that Trial garbage.

No one loathes That Trial Garbage more than me, but dear god, have you READ the novelisations of Mission to Magnus and The Ultimate Evil?

The Prison in Space by Dick Sharples returned to the idea of a female-dominated planet. The Doctor and Jamie were to be imprisoned, and Zoe was to start a sexual revolution

ZOE was to start a SEXUAL revolution? A MALE sexual revolution? What does she DO, exactly...?

The story was intended to inject humour into the show, and was to feature Jamie in drag and end with the Doctor deprogramming Zoe by smacking her bottom.

I guess everyone has their own definition of 'humour'...

The Daleks in London: it would have had some similarities to The Dalek Invasion of Earth, except set in contemporary London. This similarity caused the production team some concern

Yeah, right, cos similarities between various Terry Nation Dalek stories ALWAYS caused the production team MUCH concern...

The Fifth Doctor's first story was to be Project Zeta Sigma, written by John Flanagan and Andrew McCulloch.

Haaaaaaaaaaaaaang on. Weren't they the MEGLOS guys? Why the HELL would you let them write ANYTHING else, let alone a Doctor's debut?? (Alright, so getting 'Logopolis' Bidmead to write Castrovalva instead was equally insane and worked out rather well, but still...)

Song of the Space Whale: The story concerned a group of people living in the belly of a giant whale in space.

Sounds familiar...;)

Gallifrey was a Pip and Jane Baker script that reportedly would have dealt with the destruction of Gallifrey

*Attempts to breathe slowly to foil imminent heart attack* They - were - going - to - let - Pipn'Jane - blow - up - GALLIFREY?

the light-hearted (and widely regarded as non-canonical) charity special, Dimensions in Time.

Well, 'light-hearted' is ONE way of putting it...

Ah, the dear old Leekley Bible. Anyone who thinks New Who is a reboot would be WELL advised to cast their eyes over THIS particular list...(before tearing OUT said eyes...)

As the original Doctor Who series was nearing its end, and continuing during the first interregnum (1989–1996)

The FIRST interregnum????!!!!

The FIRST interregnum????!!!!

I suppose the second could be after the telemovie.

Oh, of course. I didn't even REGISTER the dates I was cut n'pasting - having never thought of the telemovie as anything other than a blip, I just assumed they were talking about 1989-2005 and nearly had a heart attack at the mere thought that there could EVER be a second interregnum...

Never say never....

From the Wikipedia page linked in the first post above (some new, some just worth drawing attention to):

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(McGann) The Land of Fear, a conflation of The Reign of Terror and The Claws of Axos

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With Jack Harkness having joined the Ninth Doctor and Rose Tyler, Rose feels left out. But when they land in Pompeii in 79 AD, Jack discovers that Rose's life has been manipulated by the Doctor in an experiment to create the perfect companion.

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a children's show featuring "Young Doctor Who" which was vetoed by Russell T Davies and replaced by The Sarah Jane Adventures

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2008 Christmas special untitled
On Christmas Eve, an alien creature attaches itself to author J.K. Rowling. Suddenly, the real world is replaced by a magical reality influenced by the writer's own imagination. The Doctor must battle witches and wizards to reach Rowling and put the world to rights.

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Rose Tyler: Earth Defence

When it was decided that Billie Piper would leave the series at the end of Series 2, executive producer and head writer Russell T Davies considered giving her character Rose Tyler her own 90-minute spin-off production, Rose Tyler: Earth Defence, with the possibility of such a special becoming an annual Bank Holiday event.

The special would have picked up from Rose's departure in Doomsday in which Rose joins the Torchwood Institute of a parallel Earth and the title is a play on what the Doctor says when she tells him.

REALLY like the sound of 'Bridgehead from Space' (as described in DWM 273):

'Deserted London...Humanoid aliens have landed and taken over, striking a deal with the British Government that they should be allowed to occupy the capital...vaporised County Hall...government has retreated north...the aliens' true plan is to demand the South of England, forcing the inhabitants into the over-populated North. They will then await the next provocation from the government allowing them to make new demamds...eventually forcing humanity to live in Australia...the aliens will then drop some H-Bombs on Australia...'

Alright, so the anti-appeasement message sounds a little...unsubtle...but what a GREAT cross between Invasion of the Dinosaurs, Torchwood: Children of Earth, Flip-Flop and Turn Left, four of my ALL-TIME FAVOURITE stories...(OK, THREE of my all-time favourite stories...)

I did some research and found this out at wikia, regarding The Dark Dimension special. I'll let you guys decide if it was good or bad that it was never made...

"he Dark Dimension, written by 'fan scholar' Adrian Rigelsford, was a planned direct-to-video film commissioned by BBC Enterprises that was to have been released in 1993 to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of Doctor Who.
According to Rigelsford, 'Tom Baker went to the BBC and said "I would like to be Doctor Who again", and that's the reason why it happened.' Apparently Baker even suggested Douglas Adams as the script writer.

Initial Production Edit

The Dark Dimension (later known as Lost in the Dark Dimension [1]) ran into obstacles which prevented it from being produced. Large among which was that BBC Enterprises was in charge of generating revenue, not producing films. It therefore lacked facilities, staff and experience in producing something like The Dark Dimension.
...November 1992, BBC1 Controller Jonathan Powell heard of the project and objected to Enterprises making the production on the grounds that it was a marketing wing of the BBC and not a drama production unit.
Actor availability was another of the problems which faced the production which began at some indeterminate time in 1992 (with an aimed release date of November 1993). Scheduling all the surviving actors who played the Doctor (Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy) up to that point would have been incredibly challenging and almost impossible considering the set date of release. Finally when Philip Segal (then part of Amblin Television) joined with Universal Television to co-produce a new TV series of Doctor Who (for the American Market), BBC Enterprises had to pull out of the project due to a conflict of interest.

Some of the actors, particularly Jon Pertwee and Colin Baker were not pleased that their roles were so small (the script featured the fourth Doctor prominently while the others had cameos).

The story

The story would have centred on an older version of the Fourth Doctor, the Brigadier and Ace with shorter appearances by the other surviving Doctors, though in more minor roles. Classic monsters would have included the Cybermen, Daleks, the Ice Warriors and the Yeti.

The central idea to the story was that of the alteration of time by an evil creature so that the Fourth Doctor would not have died and regenerated after falling from the Pharos Project (as see in Logopolis). However his future incarnations did survive (some how), but, in doing so, the creature created a 'Dark Dimension'.

The production would have also featured "Summerfield", who would have been the Seventh Doctor's companion Bernice Summerfield from the New Adventures book series.

Monsters

Along with the inclusion of almost all the 'classic' monsters, many of them were to be redesigned or feature totally new developments of the original design.


"'The Cybermen were not like any we've ever seen before,' says Rigelsford. 'There was a specific Cyberman who was being made by the people at Henson's Creature Workshop. The guy who designed it was Chris Fitzgerald . It had holes in its knuckles and there was a point where it held up its hand, made a fist, and six-inch blades shot out of its knuckles! It was like Wolverine out of the X-Men comics; Cyberrine!'"[1]
The Daleks also were to have featured a redesign featuring a new special weapons Dalek.
"'The Daleks were going to have laser-guns that were going to be done with computer animation so the laser bolts would be in 3-D rather than just going 'Zap!' with a blue line. The bolts were going to be like spears coming out in 3-D.'" [1]
Production Edit

Graeme Harper was scheduled to direct the story.
"About three weeks worth of test filming was done including model and titles effects, and some location filming was also undertaken. 'We were going to go down to Shepperton film studios,' says Rigelsford, 'and have it shot on film on one of the largest sound-stages on Shepperton.'"
Further Development

Adrian Rigelsford wrote a book entitled The Making of the Dark Dimension which contained scripts and concept drawings. However, it repeatedly ran into release problems and has never been released. The Dark Dimension and its production were briefly mentioned in Rigelsford's own Classic Who: The Harper Classics.

And k.d. lang was going to play Summerfield, honest she was. You have to work from the assumption that nothing Adrian Rigelsford says here is remotely true, and there are some rather more reliable sources out there. ('The Nth Doctor', the DWM 8th Doctor special, About Time 6, and even JN-T's memoirs are all rather more plausible.)

Adrian Rigelsford notoriously published "newly discovered" interviews with Hartnell and Delgado that were actual post-mortem from his imagination.

In his defence, inventing interviews with dead celebrities is hardly a criminal offence... unlike that other stuff he did.

OTHER stuff...?

Oh, and according to DWM, McCoy started yelling on the Dimensions in Time set, vis-a-vis The Dark Dimension: 'I don't understand why those BBC Enterprises people can't get us all together for love nor money, but when JN-T makes a few calls, we're all here with our boots blacked - doing it for nothing!'

"OTHER stuff...?"

Stealing those photos, which led to him going to jail?

"Oh, and according to DWM, McCoy started yelling on the Dimensions in Time set, vis-a-vis The Dark Dimension: 'I don't understand why those BBC Enterprises people can't get us all together for love nor money, but when JN-T makes a few calls, we're all here with our bookts blacked - doing it for nothing!'"

JN-T must have had some really incriminating negatives.

Stealing those photos, which led to him going to jail?

Ooh, what photos?!

This should answer all your questions: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cambridgeshire/3839733.stm

Colin Baker in DWM on The Dark Dimension: 'The whole story was centred around Tom Baker! The rest of us only had a few pages each' - and this is a problem WHY, exactly? 'If you're going to have one Doctor as the main character in an anniversary story...you use either the senior or the current incarnation. To arbitrarily choose Tom just because he was seen as the tricky one to get...' - er...I suspect they 'arbitrarily' chose Tom Baker because HE WAS THE BEST AND MOST POPULAR AND LONGEST-RUNNING DOCTOR YOU CRETIN.

'And then, thank God, someone who'd been on holiday or something arrived back to find that BBC Enterprises were planning to make Doctor Who, so they squashed the thing flat!' - yes indeedy! Praise the Good Lord that there'd be none of this making some Doctor Who stuff for its thirtieth anniversary!

This place seems like the best one to ask this. Has there ever been a Doctor Who story with a time loop? I know the Doctor used the Key to Time set up a short one in the Armagedon Factor, but I'm talking about a Groundhog Day style time loop, where the same day repeats over and over, with nobody except for one or two persons being aware of it happening.

Meglos, but it was resolved in episode 1 I think.

And Axos, but only in the conclusion.

Thanks. I'll have to watch those.

They're brief Armageddon-style time-loops. Plus both stories are rather rubbish. Still, OF COURSE you should watch them, they're Doctor Who.

Although brief, the time loop in Meglos is the best part of the story.

And be forwarned that the one in Axos is merely mentioned. You don't see it at all. They could have just as well used the phrase 'time locked' rather than 'time looped' and the story would be completely unaltered.

Although they didn't use the term 'time loop' City of Death has a brief scene where the events repeat themselves but only the Doctor and Romana notice.

From the link at the top of this page:

(SJA)
The Battle of Bannerman Road

Written by Russell T. Davies. Planned for the eleventh and twelfth episodes of the fifth series, it would have featured the revelation that Sky was the child of the Trickster, seen the return of Katy Manning as Jo Grant Jones and the destruction of Bannerman Road.

Oh maaaaan.....

Don't. Just...don't.

Gods, if Sladen had hung on for just another few months...

Mustn't think like that.

Must start thinking that SJA: Season 6 would probably have been rubbish after RTG had blown up Bannerman Road for no readily apparent reason. Just like Torchwood: Miracle Day was rubbish after RTG blew up the Hub for no readily apparent reason.

The Prison in Space would sound great to those fangirls who quite like the idea of being spanked by Patrick Troughton and/or Frazer Hines.

Nope, I'm thinking that even those who wanted to get spanked by Patrick Troughton and/or Frazer Hines would have drawn the line at Prison in Space.

Doctor Who Meets Scratchman was rejected for adaption by Big Finish as the script is too visual. Target Books was going to adapt it but Ian Marter died on them.

And I guess his estate wouldn't let anyone else write the novelization (like, until recently, the Douglas Adams estate prevented them from writing novels of his stories).

Or, of course, no one else in the universe, not even the kind of bizarre losers who'd write novelisations of The Pescatons or The Ultimate Evil, would touch Scratchman with a bargepole.

And I guess his estate wouldn't let anyone else write the novelization

As far as I'm aware, no one has ever seriously proposed novelising Scratchman, so it's a bit pointless to speculate on what his estate might or might not have said about it. Especially given that co-writer Tom Baker is still alive.

Even if Tom Baker gave a novelization of Scratchman his blessing, they would still need the permission of the Marter estate.

I'm presuming that Baker owns half the copyright and the Marter estate the other half.

Peter Davison's take on The Dark Dimension:

'By January I'd heard rumours that although we were all in it, it was a Fourth Doctor story, at which time I thought it might be a good idea for my agent to make a telephone call. He made several but none of them were returned. He asked for a script, for intended filming dates. Nothing. Then at the beginning of March, without contacting any of the other Doctors, without checking anyone's availability or desire to be involved, and without negotiation of any kind, BBC Enterprises announced we were all on board, and filming would commence shortly. At which point we politely informed them that it wouldn't' - look, I'm not denying that certain miscalculations were made and you all had every right to feel seriously pissed-off. What I DON'T understand was how you could place your pathetic Earthling hurt-feelings above GIVING US ANOTHER PROPER EPISODE OF DOCTOR WHO you filthy traitor.

What I DON'T understand was how you could place your pathetic Earthling hurt-feelings above GIVING US ANOTHER PROPER EPISODE OF DOCTOR WHO you filthy traitor.

I'm not sure that the contents of Adrian Rigelsford's imagination count as a "proper" episode of Doctor Who.

Sunshine, by this stage I was so desperate that even THE TELEMOVIE counted as a proper episode of Doctor Who...

And it would have been better than Dimensions in Time, right, I mean it would HAVE to have been...

It would have been made on the same kind of budget that they spent on the links for the Years compilation tapes. It might have looked much shonkier than 'Dimensions in Time'.

Still probably would have been better though.

Space Helmet, re The Dark Dimension: 'Strangely, the BBC's official line was to deny the project had ever existed. Will Wyatt, managing director of BBC Network Television, claimed it had amounted to nothing more than a few people kicking around some ideas at BBC Enterprises - conveniently ignoring the fact Tom Baker had been contracted (and was paid in full) for the special, and that a BBC product brochure had listed the story as scheduled for broadcast on BBC1 on Sunday, November 28th from 8pm-9.40pm' - bloody hell, it turns out that FEELING like the BBC was trying to obliterate Who from existence in those days was one thing, but getting actual PROOF that this is EXACTLY what they were doing is...sobering.

The product brochure was much remarked upon at the time, so it's not like Space Helmet has suddenly found the smoking gnu.

It wasn't claiming to, it was just news to ME and I thought I'd share it. One can never have too many reminders that, whatever the glorious bounty over the past twelve years, we can never relax our guard and TRUST the BBC.

To be fair to the BBC, the departmental snarl-up that led to the cancellation of 'The Dark Dimension' needed some degree of plausible deniability, even if that made it look like a bunch of shifty liars.

The official line in Sonic Screwdriver (the Melbourne Australia club's fanzine) back in 1993 was that it was Peter Cregreen's fault... that he had been put in charge of the special and made a series of impossible demands.

Doubtless this load of dingo's kidneys was fed to them by the loony fan camp in UK.