THE DOCTORS: THE PAUL MCGANN YEARS / CERT: E /STARRING: PAUL MCGANN, SOPHIE ALRFED, DAPHNE ASHBROOK, YEE JEE TSO, ERIC ROBERTS, PHILLIP SEGAL, GEOFFREY SAX / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
It’s terrifying to think that it’s now nearly a quarter of a century since the Doctor Who TV movie, in which Paul McGann played the eighth incarnation of the once much-beloved TV Time Lord, debuted on American and British television. The feature-length film, always a backdoor pilot for a proposed new TV series, briefly reignited in fans hopes that the show, which had fallen so heavily out of favour in the 1980s, could be successfully reborn for a new generation. But this was to be a false dawn; the film was a bit of a dog’s dinner, the victim of too many creative interests pulling in too many different directions and poor scheduling in America (where it was pitched against the series finale of hugely popular sitcom Roseanne) killed its prospects stone dead even before it attracted an impressive nine million viewers in the UK. Over the years – especially until the show’s rather more successful British reinvention in 2005 – the film has been studied, reviewed, dissected, taken apart and put back together again and again to the point that there’s surely little more that can be said about this interesting hiccup in Doctor Who’s long history. What on earth, you might ask, could possibly justify two DVDs and six hours of your time in this new Koch Media release from the archives of Reeltime Pictures? Quite a bit, as it turns out…
All the major players in what, with hindsight, was always a project doomed to failure, have been rounded up over the years and allowed to talk at length about their careers and their brief time in the Doctor Who Universe. The USP of this particular release, though, is the brand new interview with Paul McGann, the ill-starred Eighth Doctor himself. Recorded last year, McGann is interview by his friend Sophie Aldred (Ace from the last couple of years of the ‘classic’ series) backstage at a convention and it’s an interesting, laidback piece, McGann wandering through his career and spending some time discussing the making of the movie, touching upon his own reluctance to take on the role in the first place and his sense of relief when it wasn’t picked up for a series. The passing of time and his involvement with both audio dramas and the character again on TV (courtesy of the 50th anniversary online mini-episode Night of the Doctor) have done much to rehabilitate the actor’s attitude towards the character and the series; he’s now very comfortable in the Time Lord skin that no actor who plays the part can ever really shed, and is clearly now very warmly disposed towards a character he played on TV for not much more than sixty minutes and his place in its ongoing legacy.
Elsewhere on this collection we find archive interviews with Yee Jee Tso (who played street runner Lee in the movie) and the Eighth Doctor’s erstwhile ‘companion’ Grace (Daphne Ashbrook) who scandalised fandom as the first woman to indulge in a bit of tonsil tennis with the previously-chaste time traveller. Chats with producer Philip Segal, who worked long and hard to bring the show back, only to find his dreams torn apart by interfering studios, and director Geoffrey Sax, are workmanlike but enjoyable but there’s endless fun to be had in a more recent chat with Master actor Eric Roberts. Interviewed by his wife Eliza in their own home, Eric is, to put it politely, away with the fairies, often utterly disinclined to directly answer the question he’s being asked and frequently quite bemused by the whole process.
The TV movie could have been a final full stop to the Doctor Who story. History tells us that bigger and far better was to come in the new millennium but this handy, welcome DVD set reminds us of a part of the show’s history that has been unjustly overlooked and commemorates the work of those who battled against adversity and apathy to breathe new life into a character whose day, it was generally believed, had been and gone.
