http://www.myspace.com/ian_levine

I don't think you're too far off with your assessment ...

And he never produced the PSBs, Kim Wilde or Bananarama - he remixed some of their singles. I think he may have produced tracks for Take That, however, and jumped on the bandwagon with a string of TT wannabes (Bad Boys Inc, anyone?), none of whom lasted long.

Why is he being cagey about other missing episodes existing? Doesn't he want to rescue them? He didn't do a bad job with some of his other discoveries - even if he wouldn't stop talking about it afterwards ...

I seem to recall reading an interview with him in Record Mirror, back in the 80s, where he spent the entire time fuming about Bonnie Langford instead of talking about music ... much to the amusement of the interviewer (who now, I believe, writes for Coronation Street).

Being a fan of DW is fine - but not to such an extent when you drown out everyone else and elevate yourself to some 'special' status ...

If ever I recover a missing episode I predict with confidence that I would never shut up about it. There would be no false modesty.

But I was not engaged with fandom much in the JNT era so understand if he makes some eyeballs roll. Still, you know, missing episodes!

Heartfelt thanks to anyone who has ever helped with that good stuff. The tomb of the cybermen news was a thrill that could bear repeating! I expect many people here remember spluttering into their papers and doing a little jig.

Just imagine how we'd feel if The Tenth Planet Episode 4 turned up!!!!

We'd be jumping of the ceiling!!!!!

Ian Levine features heavily in this 10minute piece discussing Dr Who in 1987 on 'Did you See?'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhmDtETW2kU

Yes he was an early (first?) producer for Take That on some of their singles which didn't make the Top 40. (In these days Take That would have been dropped by their record label long before they became successful, the label wouldn't tolerate early flop singles.) I don't know the story, but looking in it seemed a bit harsh that he was dropped (if that is indeed what did happen). I don't remember him ever producing the fantastic Dollar.

How and why did this thread turn into a discussion about Ian Levine? To get back on topic I'd like to say I think that I think John Nathan-Turner was pretty good at publicising himself but ultimately a monumental failure as a producer. During his tenure, Doctor Who was first suspended, then its lead actor was fired, and then after three seasons during which he left its creative direction in the hands of a pretentious, novice script editor with no actual TV experience and his clique of equally pretentious novice writers, the series got cancelled. I think the last good decisions John Nathan-Turner made were bringing back Robert Holmes and casting Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant. Everything was downhill from there. I didn't actually think Sylvester McCoy's first season was all that bad, but I would like to say that I think seasons 25 and 26, which many people praise to the skies, were so awful that after I recorded them on video I was quite happy for my parents to tape over them. My first instinct is to blame Andrew Cartmel for that, but who hired him instead of getting a professional with some real TV credentials? Michael Grade fired the wrong man in 1986.

I'm not sure how we got onto Ian Levine either but thanks for getting the thread back on topic!!!!

I do have to disagree with you on the McCoy Era. Season 24 is by far the worse season both JNT presided over and in Who history. Season 25 has some cringeworthy moments but would rather happily sit down and watch The Happiness Patrol anyday rather than the awful Paradise Towers. McCoy's performance was definitely better in those last two seasons and Season 26 was the best he done with some good stories to match.

I agree Grade should have got rid of JNT after Baker went, that would have helped give it the boost and reinvention it desperately needed.

Of course, you do realise that if it had been JN-T who got fired Seasons 25 and 26 would have turned out completely differently, if they turned out at all... but I'll come back to them.

First off, I'm well up on the BBC's attitude towards Doctor Who in the mid-80s, how Michael Grade felt it had lost its way and wanted something like a Star Wars film on the same budget for an episode of Grange Hill, the deliberate mucking about with the schedules, and so on. Obviously, Doctor Who got suspended in 1985 because Grade felt it was rubbish, which surely reflects in some way on the man who had been producer for five years? If not, whose tenure was he basing his verdict on? Evidently he wasn't much more impressed with Season 23, but he fired the one man who was not responsible for all the stuff he didn't like. If he wanted to fire anyone for poor scripts, cheap-looking sets, rubbish monsters and generally low production values, it should have been John Nathan-Turner.

After Colin Baker got fired, in my view JN-T should have tried to get some really heavyweight actors and writers to work on the series, just as Russell T Davies did in 2005. Instead, he hired lead actors more closely associated with children's light entertainment, and a script editor who had never even written a script that got made into anything. You say Season 24 was bad? I agree. But with Doctor Who's future at stake it absolutely could not afford to be. Sylvester McCoy's acting improved? He should have been on top of his game right from the word go, although JN-T must have thought he already was.

Now for Seasons 25 and 26. Well, making the Doctor a bit of a darker and more enigmatic character is fine in principle, but the backstory hinted at in Remembrance of the Daleks and Silver Nemesis was grotesquely ill-conceived, with no basis in any of the series's established continuity. Ace comes across to me as a charicature of what 20-something male writers aspiring to be middle-class and right-on think streetwise kids with "issues" are like. As for the stories, out of the eight in the two seasons, at least four are total disasters - The Happiness Patrol, Silver Nemesis, The Greatest Show in the Galaxy and Battlefield. In the supposedly good stories, I think the plots are overly complex and pretentious, and I get the idea Cartmel was obsessed with having cool themes running through them just to show off how cutting edge and smart he supposedly was. The result, I think, alienated Doctor Who's traditional audience, and it was like Cartmel thought the show would be going out at 9:30 on BBC2. To have any chance at all of competing with ITV in the early evenings, I think they had to go more mainstream, not more avant-garde, and I believe John Nathan-Turner and Andrew Cartmel totally failed to realise that. Maybe Doctor Whowas doomed in 1989 no matter what John Nathan-Turner did, as has often been suggested. I wonder, though, if it might not have come back sooner if it'd had a producer who'd done his job better.

Oh God. Can someone please bury this thread with a wooden stake through its heart?



Not all of s.23 suffers from those problems. The Vervoid and Ultimate Foe bits of the story are among my favourite of 80s DW, and the Vervoids may be my favourite monster of all time. They scared me to death, and still give me the creeps.

Did Michael Grade want to fire anyone for poor scripts, effects, sets, etc? I don't think he did. Jonathan Powell had grave reservations about the show for scripting reasons, but Michael Grade just hated it in general.



JNT did get heavyweight actors in. He often gets criticised for "stunt casting" (as RTD has done), but don't forget that, in the years you are criticising, DW featured Richard Briers, Kate O'Mara, Sheila Hancock, TP McKenna, Sylvia Sims, Frank Windsor, Elizabeth Spriggs, Brenda Bruce, Ian Hogg, Wanda Ventham, Donald Pickering, Hugh Lloyd, Don Henderson, Edward Peel, Michael Sheard, Harry Fowler, George Sewell, Pamela Salem, Anne Reid, Janet Henfrey, Anton Diffring, Fiona Walker, Jean Marsh, James Ellis ... these are just the names I can think of off top of head without doing any research.

Writers? On one of the DVD doccos, there's discussion that they would approach well known writers and get the response "oh, I'd have done it earlier in my career, but not now I'm this well established". They were thrilled to get Anthony Steven, who was described as the Andrew Davies of his day. Sadly, he didn't "get" DW, and The Twin Dilemma is nothing to boast about. Philip Martin was very well known for his adult TV drama, and gave DW the two Sil stories. Other than them, DW was right to branch out into new writers. A shame Robert Holmes didn't come back for more but, having died, that would have been rather awkward.

Yes, there area few children's light ent actors in there. There are a few adult light ent actors in there, too. They all do fine. I can think of Jessica Martin (great musical theatre star, a regular on kids telly of the time) who is perfect as Mags in Greatest Show. Nicholas Parsons brings real tragedy to Curse of Fenric. Hale and Pace aren't throwing custard pies at each other in Survival. (I am sure that anyone watching Survival for the first time wouldn't even know they were well known comedians).



I watched the first ep of Time and the Rani last night. A strange way to start off a Doctor. I quite enjoyed the episode actually: it looks great, there are some good performances. Some of the script is a bit mad, but the ideas are sound enough. It doesn't foreground the Doctor enough, and then overcomplicates things by giving him amnesia. But I can forgive all of that cos it has Kate O'Mara disguised as Bonnie Langford.



There's not much hinted in Remembrance. Most of the bits that people get exercised about were cut from the finished product, so they don't count.

The stuff with Lady Peinforte at the end of Silver Nemesis is a bit bizarre and uncalled for, but it's a one-off. Same as "transmission of object" in Ambassadiors of Death is a bit mental and totally unDoctorly but only happens once.

I'm a little bit younger than Ace, and I could see at the time that she was totally unreal. No panic about that though, surely? It's fresh to hafve a character who has elements of reality within her, rather than characters who have no contact with real life such as Tegan, Peri and Mel. While I am fond of all three of those characters, they were totally fictional, without a bare hint of ordinariness about them. Ace has her roots in the real world, even if she's a bit overdone. Ace is the start of things to come. I'd argue that the fad for companions based in reality may have blown over now, and we've back to a fantasy creation with Amy. (Of course, that might well be the whole point of Amy. We'll probably find out next year).



Lay off The Happiness Patrol and The Greatest Show In The Galaxy! I love em both! Happiness has real tragedy to it, some huge laughs, memorable characters, and I love the idea of sadness being punishable by death. The set design is a bit iffy, but the rest is great.

Greatest Show is touched by genius.



To have had any chance of competing with ITV, they'd have needed to have beens cheduled against something other than Corrie. That has always been, and remains to this day, a graveyard slot. The BBC puts cheap stuff on against Corrie. Factual stuff that won't get a massive audience. ITV does the same against EastEnders. ITV has still got a responsibility to produce some regional programming, so they bung that on while Enders is on the other side.

There's no point producing drama to go against a big soap. That's a scheduling error.

When was DW more mainstream than with Remembrance of the Daleks? Set in 1960s London, with bloody great big Dalek armies fighting soldiers!

Should every story be about invading monsters in London? (The 21st century series did this, and it began to bore me). Does mainstream mean no alien planets? Does mainstream mean heavyweight actors?

DW has always been a bit avant garde. It might be easy to disciss the show as "some people running about in quarries", and the series attempted to do more unusual things with its quarries in later years. Greatest Show is full of iamgination. It goes a bit wobbly at the end, but shows the series in full flowering of creativity.

Kids dolls coming to life and strangling people is a bit avant garde, but was okay in 1971. People pubished by taxation is avant gardem but was okay in 1977. A fantasy world peopled by playing cards is avant gardem but was okay in 1966.

Should all DW be about "people in red hats shooting at people in blue hats, in some caves"? Is that un avant garde enough? (There's an agrument that this storyline makes up a fair amount of Caves of Androzani).



Yes, DW was doomed, from approx 1985 onwards. JNT's hard labour kept the show on the road. Apparently, the upcoming rerelease of the TV Movie has a docco which deals with the issue of whether the show could have come back sooner, and even whether the show was taken off air because the Americans were sniffing around it.

I won't be buying Revisitations (at least, I won't until it comes up in the sales), but that docco sounds as if it will shed a lot of extra light on matters discussed in this thread.

Er, if you'd read the thread then you would have seen how

Bit of a contradiction here! Why was it doomed in 1985? Are you really saying none of it was the producer's fault? A bit far fetched in my view. The producer is the top person and has to take responsibility.

Okay, you have to remmeber Mccoy was thrown in right at the deep end after Baker went. He didn't have time to get the chraracterisation he wanted until after Season 24 had ended so it's no wonder it was a bit jumbled Season 24, though even then he did well.

Yes, if someone else had come in, I would have been quite happy to have two completely different seasons from the ones that we had, I could easily not have to watch The Happiness Patrol and The Greatest Show in The Galaxy.

Yes, it was kind of a rhetorical question...

I think they're a lot better than what followed, yes... I like lots of stuff from Trial of a Time Lord, actually.


I didn't actually know that about Jonathan Powell, but if he did have reservations about the scripts I wouldn't blame him.


Well quite, but that's only the supporting cast, and they were wasted on some of the tripe they had to do. My point was that for the leads at that time, they needed people who were better known for acting than being children's TV presenters.


New writers? Fine by me, but I think it would have been preferable for either them or the script editor to have had some more experience of actually writing for television. I know Stephen Wyatt, Kevin Clarke and Rona Munro had done a bit, but otherwise it looks to me like JN-T had a novice leading other novices.


Including the fact that the Doctor somehow had in his possession this mega powerful Time Lord artifact? I think that hints at quite a lot, myself.


A one-off that suggests very strongly that the Doctor's background is totally different from anything the previous 25 years of stories had led us to believe.


What's ordinary about getting zapped across space after blowing up your bedroom, and then proceeding to blow more things up with home-made explosives?


Just didn't like them at all. Sorry.


Perhaps if people like the aforementioned Jonathan Powell had thought it would actually be any good, they would have found a different slot for it. Sounds to me like they didn't expect it to get decent ratings even at a time when ITV didn't have anything big to pit against it.


Only decent thing about that story in my opinion. It might have been a bit more accessible to views than stuff like Ghostlight or The Happiness Patrol, but I still don't think it was very good.


Yes, but those stories were written by good writers who knew what they were doing.


John Nathan-Turner had been producing Doctor Who for five years up until that point. I'm inclined to see the decision to suspend the series in 1985 as a judgment on his tenure. I think he was kept on so he could continue making a series that everyone could agree was a bit dated, panto-like and rubbish, thus ensuring that no objected too much when the plug was quietly pulled a few years later and Jonathan Powell got on with churning out garbage like Eldorado instead.

Don't start on Eldorado! Groundbreaking and years ahead of its time. Some of the stories they dealt with are now being done by EastEnders and Corrie ... but the Rado did it 18yrs ago!

Forgive me for editing your post but this section rather leapt out at me ...

If scheduling against a drama against a big soap is an 'error', why did Blake's 7 get scheduled against Coronation Street and then frequently pulled in ten million-plus viewers?

And why did the revived Doctor Who get scheduled against Emmerdale or Coronation Street at Christmas and then beat them? Was that a scheduling error, too?

It was perfectly possible for DW to have performed respectably against Coronation Street in the late 80s - if the show had bothered to engage with a mainstream audience.