The New Doctor! A Doctor Who Alternate History Story

Part 18 - Paul Bernard, Correspondence, August 12, 1996

Vienna, 1913? That was the big story. It wasn't meant to be. It was meant to be the warm up. But that's how it turned out.

I'm not happy with it. I'm not sure that any of us were. In fact, I'm certain that none of us were. None of us got what we wanted out of it. I think we all went into it intending different things, we all had Monster of Ness under our belts, and now we each had this vision, this idea, of what our Doctor Who... can I say Doctor Who? Okay. We each had this different idea of what our Doctor Who should be, and we had no consensus. We were all pulling in different directions.

What went wrong? We spent way too much money on it. Way too much money and time. It damaged the rest of the series. But we couldn't help it - it was like this pit, this thing, and we had this notion that if we just put another couple of days, another few thousand, tweaked it a little bit more, we could put it right. It was a black hole, it swallowed everything we put into it. Wherever it was going, I'm not sure any of it made it onto the screen.

The revisions, and the revisions on top of revisions. The reshoots. After a while, I had no idea what we were doing. Just getting it all done, before Ian came up with his latest brainstorm.

Ian Levine. I suppose, him yes. But the thing with Ian was that he had no idea how a production ran, how a production was supposed to run. So I can't fault him for that. The problem with Ian was that because he was a producer, this gave him the notion that he could have opinions, that he could give orders or suggestions on things he knew nothing about.

He was a distraction. I remember, I spent so much time, dealing with Ian's nonsense, his endless suggestions. There was always something, some revision to the script, or some suggestions for lights, or blocking, or props, or something the actors needed to do, or a new location.

Ian would come in and say 'Let's shoot a scene with the white cliffs of Dover.... tomorrow' And I would say 'Ian, it's not that easy, do you know what goes into setting that up, it doesn't just happen.' But he wouldn't get it.

Battling Ian over every little thing. It exhausted me.

And then there was David.

I blame myself for David. I should have controlled him better, should have been on top of him.

The problem with David, I think, was that when we did that little short in Austria, David took that as the way we were going to go - farce. That wasn't what we were doing at all. But that was where he took it.

And there was no stopping him. He was (air quotes) "The Doctor" (rolls eyes). Headstrong, and with his own ideas about how the part should go.

I wanted ... Vienna, 1913, was supposed to be ... polished. I think we all agreed on that, at the start, before it went off the rails. It was going to be a compact, efficient, polished little historical thriller. None of the sloppiness and improvisation that we'd had to put in Monsters of Ness.

This was going to be professional. It was going to be our opening act, a sharp, effective production. AND THEN we were going to go big and blow everyone away.

But you know what they say. Life is what happens while you are making plans. Vienna, 1913, is what happened to us, while were were dreaming of the New Doctor.