Story: In the wake of the making of a troubled 1986 season that saw the show’s script editor quit abruptly, Doctor Who producer John Nathan-Turner hires a new script editor, Andrew Cartmel, after a job interview in which Cartmel states that his aim with Doctor Who’s future storytellign is “to topple the government.” Cartmel recounts that tale, as well as the dozen multi-part stories he helped usher to the screen – some admittedly better than others – in great detail, drawing from diaries he kept at the time of production, describing the events and personalities behind late ’80s Doctor Who in great detail.
Review: It’s become so accepted in Doctor Who fandom to praise the last season of Sylvester McCoy’s tenure in Doctor Who while simultaneously complaining about nearly everything in his first two seasons that it’s a bit tiring. (There is, of course, a subset of fandom that complains about this whole era, as well.) One thing that most everyone does seem to agree on is that there was an uptick in the quality of the scripts (if not necessarily the production itself) thanks to incoming script editor Andrew Cartmel, who had the thankless job of filling the void that had been left rather suddenly by the acrimonious departure of his predecessor. There was no handoff period, no pep talk, no wisdom imparted from Cartmel’s predecessor.
And maybe that’s for the best. One thing that Cartmel details in abundance is selecting, encouraging, and working with his stable of writers, trying to shape their story ideas into the most workable scripts possible during his time on the show. While he did amend and add touches of his own to every episode that made it to air, Cartmel – unlike several of his predecessors – claimed no writing credits for himself. To his mind, the job involved grooming the writing talent, selling them to showrunner John Nathan-Turner to some extent, and then acting as the liaison between the writer and the production while the resulting scripts were before the cameras. All the while, Cartmel was trying to bring high-concept science fiction back to the series, and his hand-picked writers were encouraged to join him in furthering that goal, though to Cartmel’s credit, “competent writer” was higher on his list of criteria than “science fiction buff”. Those who weren’t already steeped in the genre would be given some reading suggestions that ranged as wide as the literary classics of the genre to fairly recent comics including 2000 A.D.
Over time, Cartel admits to undergoing something of an education himself, quickly gaining an understanding of what the BBC was and wasn’t good at producing. Period drama from Victorian mansions (Ghost Light) to World War II (The Curse of Fenric) to Harold Wilson-era postwar Britain (Remembrance of the Daleks)? The BBC excelled at it. Stranger times and places further afield and away from Earth? That was more of a crap shoot that left you at the mercy of how inspired individual prop, costume, set, and lighting designers felt on a given day. Even if a competently designed alien creature was created by a veteran of big-budget movies, such as the creature from Dragonfire, it might all be for nought if it was overlit to the point that the seams showed (a frequent issue with 1980s Doctor Who, not just Cartmel’s reign as script editor). Even when he guided his writers to think in terms of what the BBC was capable of doing well, the results could be highly variable, to put it charitably.
And as for the storied “Cartmel Masterplan”, a name given by fandom to his attempt to restore the mystery surrounding the Doctor? It really wasn’t as much of a carefully-mapped-out scheme as it was a philosophy that was really just getting started when the series came to a sudden, unannounced end. (Though Cartmel did lay out some of the broad strokes of his ideas for the editors and writers of the early Virgin Publishing New Adventures novels, a lot of what is widely considered to be “the Cartmel Masterplan” seems to be the invention of those authors, not just Cartmel himself. Remembrance of the Daleks writer Ben Aaronovitch can probably claim a slice of the authorship for the concept as well. In any case, it came to fruition in print more than it did on screen.) However, the concept of the Doctor as mad, bad, and dangerous to know has carried forward well into the modern half of the series, so regardless of who is credited for it, it seems to have stuck, along with the idea of the Doctor having a previously unchronicled hand in the founding of Time Lord society, a concept revisited – with some attendant controversy – during Jodie Whittaker’s era.
This revised edition carries a second foreword by Steven Moffat, written around the time of Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary celebrations in 2013, indicating that not much has changed: the biggest enemy to properly executing Doctor Who as a storytelling format isn’t budget, but time – a dogged adherence to how many script pages a day must be shot according to the history of prior BBC productions that don’t have special effects to contend with. Sylvester McCoy’s era, and Cartmel’s era, was the first to dip its toes into the world of CGI; one almost can’t imagine Doctor Who without CGI now. It’s a bit sad to think that the power of hindsight afforded by this memoir does nothing to change this part of Doctor Who’s future.
Year: February 1, 2005
Author: Andrew Cartmel
Publisher: Ten Acre Films (2013 printing)
Pages: 222
