Yahoo News Doctor Who producer reveals plans for 'lost' season
Ex-Doctor Who producer Philip Hinchcliffe has revealed that, before he left the show in 1977, he was planning another season of stories with Tom Baker as the Doctor.
Hinchcliffe's era – which spanned three series between 1974 and 1977 – is widely regarded by fans as one of the show's best. But he'd actually been considering whether or not to stay on four a fourth year.
"We did start to plan another season," he revealed at a BFI screening of the classic story 'Genesis of the Daleks' (held to mark the launch of Doctor Who: The Collection – Season 12 – Tom Baker's first series – on Blu-ray).
"There was all this musical chairs going on, about whether Bob [Holmes, script editor] and I were going to carry on or not."
Hinchcliffe explained that he'd begun plotting a series of possible adventures with an Indiana Jones feel, albeit four years *before* Raiders of the Lost Ark hit cinemas. (Well, this is Doctor Who, after all.)
"I was ahead of the game," he said, recalling the idea of "the Doctor being like a colonial explorer, with a pith helmet out in the jungles".
"So I was kind of already on the Indiana Jones trail without realising it," he continued. "It was the next thing bubbling up in my head that might somehow take the programme in a slightly different way.
"We started to think of stories like that. In fact, I even wrote one and sent it in after I left the programme, and was told it would be far too expensive, so they couldn't do it."
Hinchcliffe's Doctor Who stories like 'Genesis' and 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang' are often celebrated for their gothic tone and for embracing the influence of Hammer Horror movies in adventures like the Frankenstein-aping 'The Brain of Morbius'.
Acknowledging that he sought to make the show "feel a bit more plausible, and maybe appeal a bit more to the adults in the audience", he credited script editor Robert Holmes for bringing in the Hammer influences.
"I hadn't seen a lot of those old movies... it was Bob who knew all those films and kept pulling that in. [Hinchcliffe's predecessor] Barry Letts didn't let him do it, but I didn't know that ... so he took the show in that direction."
It was actually Letts, rather than Hinchcliffe, who was responsible for casting Tom Baker as the fourth Doctor. "In a way, thank God I didn't have to cast the Doctor," Hinchcliffe said. "It was so difficult to cast a new Doctor Who... I'm sure i would've made a mistake! So I was grateful they'd much such a great choice.
"The fact that Russell T Davies and then Steven Moffat [later] made such a success of the show coming back... they could've made so many mistakes, but they didn't. They made some fantastic choices, in terms of the tone of the new series and the quality of the stories and the casting of the leads."
Doctor Who: The Collection – Season 12 will be released on July 2 on Blu-Ray, and is available to pre-order now.
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