Talk:List of unmade Doctor Who serials

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Contents 1 Stephen Fry 2 Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen 3 The Dark Dimension 4 Incomplete list marker and custom TOC?

[edit] Stephen Fry

This article is well-sourced, except for the one statement about why Fry didn't complete his script. This needs a source. 23skidoo 23:24, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

I did look for one on the BBC DW & news websites, but couldn't find it. There was one in List of Doctor Who serials a while back; I'll grovel through the history and see if I can pick it out. Percy Snoodle 11:19, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Ah, it was on Outpost Gallifrey - that was why I didn't find it. Added. The bit about it being lack of time 'for rewriting' comes from the BHOTT ref - should I repeat that reference? Percy Snoodle 11:24, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

It probably wouldn't hurt, since this is a new article and new articles are getting some pretty heavy scrutiny these days for sources. 23skidoo 14:22, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

OK, done. Thanks. Percy Snoodle 15:15, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen

I remember hearing about this one, but we should have a source for it as well since it appears to be the only unsourced item left on the list. 23skidoo 12:33, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Tricky - google's not helping me much here; there's just a lot of people saying "everyone knows that..." but no-one actually giving any sources. IIRC it was mentioned in passing in the Scratchman article in DWM, so that might do for one. Percy Snoodle 12:51, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps tellingly, Jean-Marc Lofficier's book The Nth Doctor (which I'll be plundering in due course to add information about planned but ultimately unmade Doctor Who films) seems to make no reference to Krikkitmen. 23skidoo 15:52, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

Hmmm. According to this usenet post the plot is outlined in a book called "Don't Panic" - presumably the Neil Gaiman book. I may have to skim it next time I'm in town to find a page number :-) Percy Snoodle 16:29, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

That's cool. Something else I need to track down is a source regarding the fact a third Peter Cushing movie was supposed to be made based upon The Chase. It's worth noting here, too. 23skidoo 18:10, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

And done. I also found info about a planned American Daleks-based TV series featuring Sara Kingdom, too. 23skidoo 03:34, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] The Dark Dimension

Should this be under the Fourth Doctor? Percy Snoodle 11:31, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

I think it shouldn't be under any particular Doctor, given it doesn't really come under any of their 'eras', as such, although of course the Fourth Doctor was supposed to be the focus of the script. Angmering 12:12, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

I agree. Although it would have been an alternate universe Fourth Doctor story, it would have been produced long afterwards. If anything it would more correctly be a Seventh Doctor story, much like The Five Doctors is considered a Fifth Doctor story, etc. A case has been made that the non-canonical Dimensions in Time should be considered a Seventh Doctor story because there's some dialogue that suggests all the previous Doctors and companionss shown were actually the Seventh Doctor and Ace under some sort of illusion field or something ... how anyone could make enough sense out of the script to come to that conjecture (or any conjecture) is beyond me. 23skidoo 13:30, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Incomplete list marker and custom TOC?

I've been looking at the featured list criteria to get an idea of how this article should be improved. I think it falls down in two places: "comprehensiveness" and "not overwhelming table of contents". The BHOTT site lists a huge number of unmade serials that probably don't belong in this article because there's really nothing to say about them; so perhaps we should mark this page as an incomplete list. The TOC at the moment is huge - so perhaps we should consider a custom TOC restricted to the main headings. What do people think? Percy Snoodle 14:13, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

• Picking and choosing what serials to list is a POV judgement call and I don't support it. There should be criteria so someone doesn't start adding fanfic or "stories I submitted to the BBC"-type things, of course. But if the serials are mentioned in a non-trivial source as being considered (and thus far all the ones I've seen have been), then they should be included, even if we have no information beyond the title. I do not pay attention to the FA guidelines because they change every week; I went through a very stressful situation with an FA article (Thunderball) that another editor spent a lot of time getting up to FA standards of the time, only to be humiliated when the standards changed and it was stripped of its FA status (and split into several articles, to boot). Personally I don't want to have anything to do with FA anymore. I don't think the TOC as it currently stands is unreasonable; I've seen far more complex TOCs used. There is also a bit of coding that suppresses TOCs altogether if you don't like having the table. 23skidoo 14:32, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

I agree that we need criteria, not whimsy, to determine what goes in; if we care about comprehesiveness, we need to be comprehensive within those criteria, or else we would have to include "stories I submitted". My approach at first was only to list the green- or blue-labelled episodes from BHOTT; others have since listed ones which were novelised or given an article in DWM. Perhaps we should put "seriously considered" into the lead sentence? As for the TOC, I think having no TOC would be worse than a long one; but perhaps one like the one on List of Doctor Who serials wpuld be better still. Sorry to hear about your woes with the FA process. Percy Snoodle 17:31, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

I thought about that chart, too, except it might encourage people to create articles for each of the proposed stories, and I think we should try to discourage that (with the obvious exception of the ones that have been adapted as books; an article on Masters of Luxor could also be justified since it's been published as well. I think the criteria should establish that the stories listed have either been commissioned or invited by the BBC, officially submitted to the BBC by recognized professional writers, proposed by people directly connected with the series (i.e. Tom Baker's Scratchman), or otherwise been cited in non-trivial sources. In theory that should discourage the "fanfic" element, or someone claiming that back in 1975 when he was 15 he mailed in a script to the DW Production Office but never heard anything back. I suggest the "submitted by recognized professional writers" criteria because if some well-known writer makes the claim to have written a Doctor Who script that was rejected, I think this is notable enough to be mentioned, assuming it can be sourced and verified, etc. For example, Harlan Ellison was a huge fan of DW and is credited with helping to promote it within the SF fan community in the 1970s. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that somewhere in the BBC archives is a script or story treatment submission from Ellison; if Ellison were to state this in an article or autobiography, then it would be worth adding to the list, even if the BBC never actually commissioned it nor invited Ellison to write it. 23skidoo 17:47, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, good idea. I've added a sentence on the article's scope which includes those categories of story. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Percy Snoodle (talk • contribs) 09:58, 20 March 2007 (UTC).

We shouldn't just restrict it to DWM, though, since there have been books and other professional (i.e. non-zine) articles on the topic as well. For example, when I have time I intend to add additional unproduced stories as cited by Jean-Marc Lofficier in his book The Nth Doctor. I'll make that change, otherwise the intro looks good. 23skidoo 14:10, 20 March 2007 (UTC)