The Unofficial Whoniverse: the history of fan-made Doctor Who films
If the show can stagger on for another six years, the rebooted version of Doctor Who will have been on the television for as long as the original run that began in 1963.
Originally, Who was on the air for 26 years, beginning with An Unearthly Child on November 23rd, 1963 and finishing up with the somewhat ironically named Survival in 1989, and the rebooted Doctor Who got to its 20th anniversary last year, which is an incredible achievement in and of itself, but where the show goes from here, no one seems to know. The show really hasn’t been in straits this dire since it was first taken off the air in 1989, and it looks like us Whovians really do have to prepare for the prospect of another cancellation.
However, as anyone who lived through the first cancellation will tell you, that might not be the end of the world. Not just because, as much as it pains me to admit it, Doctor Who hasn’t been unmissable telly for a while now, no matter what amazing actors they get to play The Doctor these days. No, Who is at the very least trying to carry itself like a mega-franchise these days, and as with all mega-franchises, the most interesting stuff happens at the very fringes.
When it comes to Doctor Who, some of the most interesting work happened after the show was taken off the air. There was a vast amount of unofficial, unauthorised fan works produced while the show was off the air and this goes far beyond the standard stuff you’d expect of prose fiction, comics and the occasional audio drama if they felt real fancy with it. No, we’re talking making full-on films with (something resembling) an actual budget.
Oftentimes, with the original actors featured in them, who were definitely not reprising the roles that made them famous. At least if any lawyers asked.
When did these unofficial ‘Doctor Who’ productions begin?
The first of these productions began in earnest long before Doctor Who had come off the air. In true nerd fashion, these began as films created by Ryan K Johnson as entries to a film festival held for a sci-fi convention in 1984. Johnson decided that his entry was going to be an episode of Doctor Who, and, in a progressive move, it would take the actual show nearly four decades to catch up with, he cast a woman in the title role, the actress Barbara Benedetti.
What began as one short blossomed into a full four-story arc, culminating in Benedetti’s regeneration, and the stories aren’t all that bad. They’re quite obviously fan films, but there’s creativity and spirit to burn. Enough to inspire a few people with a little more money than Johnson to get involved. The biggest of these came in 1991 with the production of a series of short films called The Stranger. The budget going into these films meant that the creators now had to be careful with copyright… But not that careful.
After all, the series was built around a mysterious, travelling alien known only as ‘The Stranger’, who travelled with a younger, female companion – the former was played by Sixth Doctor Colin Baker, and the latter was played by Nicola Bryant, who played the Sixth Doctor’s companion Peri Brown for two years, and as the series went on, more ex-Doctor Who cast members like Sophie Aldred, Peter Miles and Michael Wisher also joined the fun.
These weren’t the last unofficial Who productions either, not by a long shot. In fact, the more of them that get made, the more in common the show actually has with the origins of Doctor Who as a television show. After all, these are cheap, scrappy, weird sci-fi productions made on a shoestring budget. Doctor Who is arguably never better than when it’s a cheap, scrappy, weird sci-fi production made on a shoestring budget.