10th Doctor - Army of Ghosts (vi)

Viewer Quotes -

"Who will win? Will it be Dustbins? Will it be Cybermen? Sod that, I want to see Jackie and Yvonne take each other on in a triple bill of foxy boxing, mud wrestling and long distance nude jiggling. Now THAT would be something worth applauding... oh, and I was VERY not impressed with Freema Agyeman is the new companion. Tell me she doesn’t need an acting class. Doesn’t help that she isn’t even in the same UNIVERSE of beauty as Billie either. Mind you, I think that if her character - Foxy Brown - hangs around in the TARDIS in a yellow bikini, it could work. Bent over the console the Doctor will say "Showing a bit more cheek than usual, my dear". Oh yes, she can also carry the sonic screwdriver stuck between her cleavage. Oh god. GOOD TIMES AHEAD, PEOPLE!"
- Nigel Verkoff (2006)

"To use the crude vernacular of RTD, if Parting of the Legs was the orgasm of the New Series, then Dustbin -vs- Cyberman! was like premature ejaculation. This is not the worst Doctor Who story ever broadcast, it’s not even Doctor Who, just a chick flick with Doctor Who's iconography and a lot of fanwank as a convenient side show. WHY do so many people like this so much? I hate you all."
- Thomas Cookson & Mike Morris, "Why Humanity No Longer Deserves to Live Now That Eccleston’s Gone" (2007)

"You realize, of course, that if you people had played with RTD as a boy and not left him so lonely and miserable, he wouldn’t have taken up storytelling as a profession. So if people were nicer to each other, this story would never have been written? THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT! I have questioned RTD’s motives and concludes that he is, like me, a completely talentless loser with no life or grasp of Doctor Who."
- eyeofsauros.com.uk (2006)

"Did anyone else hear the Face of Bond in the trailer? Or was it just Satan talking to me again? Sack RTD and reinstate Barry Letts and Terrence Dicks and then we can watch PROPER Dr Who again!"
- Amorous Badger Man (2006)

"That was the worst episode I have ever seen, even worse than Peanut of the Dustbins. Why didn’t they exterminate that smug and very annoying twit! RTD stands for ReTarDed! Genius, my ass! They better not bring back the Dustbins next year, those stupid Welsh imbeciles."
- Fiona Moore (2006)

"Come on, just tell me there isn’t ANYONE ELSE who can’t believe David Banks didn’t get to play the Cyberleader. I’m tired of all their whiny, tinny voices. They need the deep, dulcet tones of Banksy to lead them to victory!" - Jared "No Nickname" Hansen (2006)

"So farewell Rose Tyler. Never again will see you stuff your face full of chips... and did anyone think that the whole series is just this delusion she’s having? And she’s really straight-jacketed and gagged in a mental asylum somewhere? Or is it just me?"
- Reality Is Uncertain Daily (2008)

"The Cult of Fargo are like kittens. Adorable, yet evil. And no one can prove otherwise that they are better heroes than Doctor Slitheen-Murderer Who. They are soldiers destroying evil like Touchwood and the Cybermen. They are always in the right. They have supernatural powers. The Dustbins are gods and all the evidence to the contrary is propaganda by evil humans. I will not be convinced otherwise. Especially not by Jews and other inferior bipeds. So let’s try to keep this discussion civil, please. Heil Himmler."
- Alan Stephens (February 4, 2007 – he went mad, which was coincidentally the wish I made when I blew out the candles on my birthday cake. There IS magic!!!!)

"Screw the Doctor. This should be the Ricky Smith show!"
- Noel Clarke’s agent (2007)

"Really, it was like watching all the fan fiction you wrote when you were 11 come to life on screen. Well, the ones YOU wrote. The fan fiction *I* write is brilliant. The Cybermen and the Dustbins invading Earth - come on! I did that much better in my comic strip The Penultimate Weapon! It’s very difficult to maintain any suspension of disbelief when in a single episode, the whole thing is very, very silly. Unlike my brilliance. The interaction between... well, EVERYONE is embarrassing to say the least. Actually I heard my wife give a sigh of disappointment when it became clear we’d been cheated and Rose was going to live. Mind you, she sighs like that a lot whenever I’m in the room. I’m afraid the champagne went back into the fridge. I’m not allowed to drink ever since I broke my son’s arms in a drunken rage when I found him saying he enjoyed The Michaelmas Evasion. I’m still allowed to see him on weekends, but no closer than 200 metres." - Ron Mallet (2006)

"If Parting of the Legs was the visual equivalent of a fruitcake - thick, dark and mostly delicious (and full of nuts, as well) - then Dustbin -vs- Cyberman! is logically a big pile of sugary cakes, on plates made of raw sugar with extra sugary coating served by waitresses made of giant pancakes. It left me not so much hungry for more as malnourished. Oh, and Cyber-Yvonne is totally hardcore and should be in the spin-off."
- The Unpublished Target Novel "Doctor Who and the Cooking Analogies"

"After this effort, Russell T Davies should be spent of fanwank."
- Cameron J Mason (before seeing Journey Till Dawn)

"Well. Guess that showed ME."
- Cameron J Mason (after seeing Journey Till Dawn)

David Tennant Speaks!
"This last story are so beautifully placed at the end of the season. Best place for it. When I first read the scripts, I just cried my eyes out. Billie is one of only two people I haven’t bonked in front of camera as well as behind. And why does she get her name on two lines in the opening credits rather than just one like me? OK, not many people care about that, but it’s interesting to ME! I did feel blooded in the one – you’re not the Doctor until you’ve faced the Dustbins, even though I only had one scene with them. So in your face, Richard E Grant! I don’t really have a preference of Dustbin or Cyberman, and it’s very easy to forget that there are actually PEOPLE inside the Dustbins. You just go, 'if it talks like Nick Briggs, it can’t possibly be human!' as a kind of reflex. It’s a godsend that we don’t have to do it in the same room. I’ve heard it said Chris Eccleston quit because Briggsie kept trying to stab him with to death with a toothbrush since he wasn’t canonical. Which might not be true. But I wouldn’t be surprised."

Billie Piper Speaks!
"I’ve always wondered what those bumps are on Dustbins are for. Is it like warts? An alien skin disease? I guess nutters would know, like the nutters keep complaining about Rose miraculously gaining a heterosexual family unit complete with new baby and back with Mickey as NOT celebrating conservative non-traditional, non-heterosexual families and this is symptomatic of Doctor Who afraid to support its own messages, and afraid to do anything controversial or downbeat. Christ, what a load of wankers who need to rely on a TV show to change the world. Get off your asses and do some gay pride demos if it bothers you that much."

Russell T Davies Speaks!
"Grown men will rend their garments watching this episode!! Dustbins FIGHT Cybermen! Some may say it works better as drunken post-curry suggestion than an actual story, since fans have been imagining such a battle for years, meaning that any attempt to bring it into reality is never going to quite match the scenes in the imagination, but who cares? It lives up to MY imagination, so why the fuck should I care if it lives up to yours! And you may think bringing back the Dustbins not only makes the Cybermen look appallingly weak, but also is a tacit suggestion that Cybermen alone aren’t exciting enough to carry a climactic story, adding insult to injury. BECAUSE THEY AREN’T! There’s only ONE time the Cybermen were in a season finale, and that was in 1975! AND IT WAS CRAP! But don’t think we used this in the hope everyone would forget the season has been crap, since you ungrateful toilet bowls sure won’t stop reminding us...

But Arthur isn’t going to come back. That’s another thing we keep on reading in the tabloids - that Arthur is going to make another appearance. It’s like, did you SEE that ending? THAT was a goodbye!". And check out the horse’s schedule – he’s filming all over the country on other dramas, not with us. He’s never, EVER going to come back. It’s really annoying when people report that, because I think it spoils that ending. That was a farewell... but Rose’ll be back the moment Billie Piper’s free, there’s no point lying about that."


Trivia -
The internet briefly collapsed when 1,334, 1234 million people logged onto Outpost Gallifrey to squee about the cliffhanger at the exact same time... but not me. Oh no. Ban me for harassment will you, moderators? Well, know this: MY VENGEANCE SHALL KNOW NO BOUNDS!!!


Rumors & Facts -

"Dreadful. Jumped the shark. RTD should be sacked. That was the worst episode in the entire 43 years’ history of the series." These are just some of the things that the fans chant, parrot-fashion, whenever they review any new episode, be it average, or instant spectacular classics. Any episode of Doctor Who the fans didn’t write is automatically the worst example ever produced of a television drama and should be drowned in a bucket of bile and sweeping generalizations.

Dustbin Vs Cyberman is more fun than a barrel-load of monkeys! It’s punch-the-air cool! It plugs straight into the "Doctor Who is so cool" part of the brain and has fans roaring like a caveman. Yet at the same time it is the worst story ever broadcast, a chain of bangs and flashes with no hint of story telling, appalling dialogue and uniformly dreadful emotional scenes of tiresome unsubtle self-congratulation – irritating, hollow, empty, manipulative, nasty and contrived.

But folks, it’s Russell T Davies. Seriously, what did you expect?

By the end of 1967, the Dustbins and the Cybermen had cemented their status as the shining stars of Doctor Who’s carnival of munsters by virtue of not being complete crap like the Boord or the Macra. On December 5th, an approach was made to Dustbin creator Terry Nation about having both races fight each in an adventure with the Second Doctor, Jamie and Victoria. This was hastily vetoed by Nation, who had a massive inferiority complex and was convinced that if the Doctor could defeat the Dustbins six times in a row then literally ANYONE could beat the crap out his creations!

For this reason he rejected the idea of Dustbins being put up against Cybermen when it was suggested again in 1972, or UNIT as was suggested in 1976, or living scarecrows in 1977, or K9 in 1979, or Blake’s 7 in 1980, or Red Dwarf in 1994, or the American Public in 1996. Terrance Dicks completely ignored this for his stage play The Alternate Adventure, as did Adrian Vole in The Dork Dimension, and in both stories the Dustbins completely assfucked the Cybermen into submission without breaking sweat on their bonded-polycarbide armor.

Nevertheless, this did not soothe their creator’s massive compensation syndrome. Terry Nation finally was captured by dark spirits from the Outer Void in 1997 as penance for the human souls he had been withholding from them, he was in the middle of insisting that the Dustbins could not be used in a Kit-Kat commercial as the confectionery would obviously be a superior fighting force in a serious battle.

This actually has pretty much nothing to do with the production of Dustbin -vs- Cyberman!, but these are my guides and these anecdotes really need to get out into the public domain. Ahem. Where was I?

Oh yes. While charting the course for the second season of the revived Doctor Who program and his own imminent political coup to seize absolute control of the City State Cardiff, executive producer Russell T Davies hit upon the idea of ending the year by using that long-dismissed idea of a Dustbin/Cyberman war. The fact it had been dismissed due to Nation’s deep-rooted neuroses meant that no one ever thought the idea was actually a BAD idea that should have been rejected anyway.

But the Dustbins had already proven tremendously popular during the 2005 season, practically demanding that they be brought back the next year. Actually, this turned out to be Nicholas Briggs making numerous prank calls, but RTD was high on smack at the BBC Christmas Party when he heard the Emperor Dustbin screaming at him from a phone and decided it was best to follow that advice. RTD had every intention of resurrecting the Cybermen for the show’s sophomore season, so the chances of their being a season finale WITHOUT a huge army of Dustbins and Cybermen involved were utterly impossible. Reluctantly, even those in the production team NOT completely insane realized they would have to use an epic conflict or else have wasted the entire season’s budget on two CGI armies that hung around not doing a damn thing.

And such an epic conflict would also provide a suitable backdrop for the exit of Rose Tyler, made necessary by Billie Piper’s decision early in 2005 to leave Doctor Who. Very early. In fact, she’d quit before she’d actually accepted the role, but Billie’s that kind of career-minded girl. And she is dead hot in white shorts. Ahem.

Anyway, as I discussed AT LENGTH in an earlier guide, RTD planted the seeds for Rose’s departure via the mid-year introduction of the new Cybermen and the parallel Earth of their provenance, in Silver Finished. He had recognized the fact that only a calamity of cosmic proportions would suffice to separate the Doctor and Rose and, having ruled out the notion of simply killing Rose on the grounds of it being too encouraging to the pro-Ben Chatham fanbase, RTD instead decided to rip off His Dark Materials and trap her in a parallel universe to which the Doctor could never return.

After the incredibly awkward situation where the cast of Silver Finish decided to cut the crap and write Rose and her family out of Doctor Who in that story rather than waste another six episodes building up to it, RTD stayed up all night with a cappuccino machine and write the season finale – initially entitled Army of Goats for reasons no one is entirely sure, but may have involved the secret origin for the Seventh Doctor’s "sonic goat army" he used throughout Season 24.

A crucial element of the adventure was the Touchwood Institute, a concept RTD ripped wholesale from Big Finish – a reckless and incompetent British secret agency devoted to reverse engineering alien technology for their own jingoistic ends. Based in Canary Wharf tower and with a history stretching back and forth across the last few centuries, Touchwood had appeared in Project: Nightlight, Project: Enigma, Project: Lazarou, Cryptosporidium, The Rip-Off, The Sequel, The Cyb-Fest, Zig-Zag-Gay-Ass, A School for Glory, Nictoine, Son of a Bitch, Ablutions, The Girl Who Never Was A Virgin and MANY, MANY more.

But since Mark Wright and Cav Scott never copyrighted their oversexed xenotech research and development agency, RTD totally stole their idea and quite simply, everyone believed BAFTA boy and immediately commissioned a new Doctor Who spin-off series entirely on his say-so. However, this lead to the first season of Touchwood and all blame was laid at the feet of RTD, so karma made sure he got his just deserts.

As a very crude attempt to get the public excited about the new series Touchwood, it was randomly mentioned throughout the new series in:

- The Parting of the Legs as one of the gameshows;
- It had blown up the Sycophants in The Michaelmas Evasion;
- Was mentioned in Tennant’s song at the end of Earth 2.0
- Was NOT mentioned in Nun in the Lift-Shaft since Moffat never got the memo to use it as a linking element buzzword
- Was seen investigating Tepapawai Boy’s School in School’s Out
- On Irth, Touchwood was a well-known and unreliable PR Marketing Division of Cybus Industries in Silver Finish
- In The Drunken Ginger Bride, Touchwood was the owner of the secret underground base which was abandoned during a massive global war Donna was irritatingly vague about, which turned out to be a curious bit of foreshadowing by retrospect
- The elite squad lead by Captain Jack Harkness sent to seek, locate and capture Santa Claus in The Santa Tip
- Namedropped with no subtlety in The Idiot Box
- Was on Elton Pope’s email address book in Love & Pizzas
- Mentioned as providing security to the Martian Olympics in Filler (which unsurprisingly lead to eight thousand spectators vanishing into a spectral netherworld while security did fuck all)

Davies originally intended Touchwood to be based in Canary Wharf Tower, until it became obvious that having major London landmarks in the middle of Cardiff was just getting confusing, and also meant that people were to fall for the idea there was a dimensional rift in both Wales and London was rather far fetched. And us Who fans know about far fetched, we worship a show about a time travelling phone box bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. If WE think it’s far fetched, give up now!

RTD briefly considered calling the two episodes "The Deconstruction of Falling Towards Apotheosis While Sleeping In Light" and "Z’ha’doomsday", but decided it was best to stick to ripping off Joss Whedon rather than diversifying into John Michael Strazynsk, and first installment later reverted to Dark Labyrinth while the season finale became Hydrogratz. Once more, editorial policy came into play: if they tried to keep the Dustbin/Cyberman war completely secret, it would be a great surprise for all three people who bothered to watch, so they’d have to publicize it like crazy and ignore the moans of the anoraks who had read all the spoilers anyway and liked to feel better than normal people.

The title thereon fluctuated for forty days and forty nights from Armies of Doom to Defending the Earths to Death Becalms Her to The Doing of the Duty to Ghost Flustered Comings to Flesh Versus Steel to Death Ex Machina to Touchwood and the Big Spherical Problem to Grand Deletion Upgrading Specialties to The Beginning of the End of the Grand Battle With Ghosts of Parallel Pasts to Invasion 3.0: We’re All Doomed!

The first draft of the script had the souls of all the unfortunate Cybermen from Irth manifesting on Earth and Touchwood continues to fiddle with the Null Sphere, confident that nothing can possibly go wrong. They continue to think this, even when the Cybermen invade the Earth, leaving to Pete Tyler and Ricky crossing over and generally getting in the way. At the cliffhanger, the sphere opens to reveal... Rose Tyler! The real one who was accidentally swapped with the Doctor’s daughter, Ayesha, to whom she is physically identical!!

The realization that the father and daughter have shagged each other is almost as disturbing as their mutual stupidity in not recognizing each other. And it is in this state of mind the Doctor reveals he’s simply not in the mood to defeat the Cyberman and uses the TARDIS to trigger every nuclear device on the planet, destroying the Earth and its invaders, but moments before the final countdown the main cast are surrounded by Cybermen and the genuine Rose sprains her ankle. The genuine Rose somehow regenerates into an older and much hotter Billie Piper, who then steals the TARDIS leaving the others to die in the conflagration and the episode ends as the countdown reaches zero.

This script was rejected for three reasons. First of all, it didn’t use the Dustbins. Second, it wiped out all the cast and the Earth and since Billie Piper was refusing to come back to Doctor Who, it would make the next season impossible to write or film. Third, it was shite.

The second draft was identical to the final version up the end of episode two where the Sphere opens to reveal a Dustbin which shoots all the Cybermen and turns out to be Captain Jack having a drunken April Fool joke. Suddenly, there is an earthquake that destroys Touchwood Tower and the Cyber Controller JR Ewing emerges from the rubble and reveals himself, in fact, to be the Bastard all along. The Cybermen capture the whole cast – Pete is killed for being too short, Jackie and Mickey become Cybermen, and the Doctor blows a hole in the TARDIS console, releasing the Genie Factor. The time travelers wish for a dues ex machina to resolve the plot and instantly the Rapture occurs, sweeping up all the true believers into Heaven and this for some reason includes the Cyber Race, Rose, the Bastard and also the TARDIS itself! The story ends on a cliffhanger with the Doctor and Jack marooned on a ruined, deserted Earth.

This was rejected for three reasons. First of all, it didn’t use the Dustbins enough. Second, it not only made the next season impossible to write or film, it also made the spin off series Touchwood similarly unlikely. And thirdly, it was really, REALLY shite.

The third draft was pretty much what we finally got, though there was a key point of debate in RTD scripts was the climactic moment in which Rose dumps the Doctor to live on Irth in fabulous wealth for the rest of her pampered, decadent and hedonistic life. RTD and executive producer Julie Gardner felt that it should reveal that when Rose unwittingly created Irth, she would also have created a parallel Ninth Doctor who was all human (but with a little animal thrown in) and she would effectively ditch the Doctor to live with the Doctor. However, some thought was given to assigning this role to Ricky, a position championed by producer Phil Collinson and actor Noel Clarke who firmly believed that even Rose would follow an accepted universal law: once you go black, you can NEVER go back.

Meanwhile, one expensive sequence removed from the script at the development stage involved the Doctor and Rose hijacking a passenger plane with Stanley knives and forcing the pilot to fly the plane directly into Touchwood Tower, screaming that all infidel alien killing machines must die as the will of God himself! This was replaced with the much simpler moment of the Cult of Fargo exterminating Kursty Wark live on national TV.

As written, nothing physically differentiated the Cult of Fargo, given the names Dustbin Sex, Dustbin Fey, Dustbin Cunt and Dustbin Rape in an intentional break with tradition and good taste. Production designer Edward Thomas encouraged having the Dustbins in different colours to hearken back to the original Doctor Who series where the alien race was depicting as a squabbling rock band of only four members who were unable to conquer the universe due to creative differences within the band. Sarcastic, RTD rolled his eyes and suggested they just name the Cultists after the Ninja Turtles – which, unfortunately, was taken completely seriously by the production team. Davies also indicated that the CyberLeaders should wear flares, a design element which, tragically, was also in keeping with Doctor Who tradition.

To ensure the availability of Noel Clarke, Shaun Dingwall, Nicholas Briggs, Billie Piper, Freema Agyeman, David Tennant, Arthur the House and Camille Coduri – not to mention the entire production crew – the increasingly paranoid director Graeme Garden decided to make both episodes in one epic block alongside Silver Finish.

The production team was careful not to distribute the final pages of
The script to anyone, which was MEANT safeguard both the Doctor’s final conversation with Rose and the cliffhanger ending, which would lead into the 2006 Christmas special. But tragically this meant absolutely no one knew about it and thus the ending was completely and utterly unfilmed. To this day, no one – but NO ONE – knows what it might have involved, but one Sparacus "Flamingo" Jones was more than prepared to tell everyone what he was utterly convinced it would be:


The Doctor heads back for Rose and unwittingly unleashes the Cybermen and the Dustbin once again, and this time Irth is the planet caught in the crossfire, and this time, they succeed!

The battle rages on as the Blue Dustbin and the Cyber Controller fight a tag-team wrestling match with a Zarbi and a Slitheen, and in the crossfire Rose, Jackie and everyone who possesses XX chromosomes are killed by some technical wizardry before Captain Jack defeats them all with his incredible sexual prowess and animal magnetism.

Lavros himself arrives and exterminates the Doctor, who regenerates into an actor with suitable gravitas like Lee Williams.

The poor old Doctor is left with Irth in ruins and that tart played by Billie Piper dead. He blames himself and decides that he will never use the TARDIS to travel again, so he throws its key over a bridge and into the Thames exactly like in "Dirty Harry", allowing the next season to start afresh and focus on a smoothe-chested amateur archaeologist named Ben Chatham and played by the incontinent and bipolar Adam Rickitt...


Sparacus demand a whip round be made to buy him a bottle of finest French absinthe, but at a pinch would accept not being brutally murdered by the incredibly irritated RTD.

In any case, the material that actually WAS recorded, was filmed on November 2nd, 2005, while the rest of the world was blissfully unaware of anything in their eagerness to see David Tennant’s first episode. Otherwise they might very well have spotted all the Dustbins and Cybermen and shit. But people being people and Who fans being Who fans, they completely missed it and were too busy hurling abuse at Big Finish for the shocking drop in standards now the proper show was back on telly again.

Shots of Westminster Bridge were also taken on this day before certain anti-terrorist organizations became suspicious of exactly what the hell a bunch of suspicious looking people with explosives were doing loitering around public landmarks. The excuse that they were working for the BBC and Doctor Who wasn’t accepted – the IRA had had a string of successful bombing campaigns thanks to their cover story that it was a particularly epic Sylvester McCoy episode about Ace blowing things up.

On the 16th, the interview with purported psychic Derek Acorah (host of Most Haunted) was recorded at Tredegar House in Newport, before the ghost of Terry Nation possessed him and he started screaming he never gave his permission for the Dustbins to be involved. This ruined the simultaneously-filmed scenes with Alistair Appleton as one of the dead, a guest appearance by Nelson Mandela as the Touchwood window cleaner, and put Iron Maiden off completely. Garden was really hoping that they could record a special version of the theme tune for this episode with Bruce Dickinson actually singing the "oooeeeeooo" bit. Still, the best laid plans of mice and men can go wrong, especially half-arsed daydreams like this one.

On November 29th, the cast and crew realized that this was getting a bit serious and it was time to stop piss-farting about and make Dustbin -vs- Cyberman! the principal focus of the production block rather than something they might eventually chat about over lunch. They immediately decided to film everything in four consecutive days and then bugger off to rural Norway to recover their wits. On December 6th, the Tyler family driving at Hoel Spencer was taped Brynceithyn, Bridgend, even though this was not actually part of any draft of the script.

Further work of some description then took place both before and after Christmas, while everyone went home, ate too much, got appallingly drunk and lost at playing Attack of the Grinch. January 6th was spent at HTV Studios in Culverhouse Cross, Cardiff, to get over everyone’s respective and respectable hangovers.

This was Agyeman’s last day on the story, playing two versions of Esme Jones and by now she had caught the eye of the production team who were searching for someone to play the Doctor’s next companion in the 2007 Season. She had more importantly caught the eye of David Tennant himself who fancied his Dark Lady something rotten.

Piper’s exit from Doctor Who was still being kept secret - although it had been rumored in the press for months - and so to avoid tipping their hand, Agyeman was asked to audition for a role she was told would feature in the next pornographic film by Nigel Verkoff, "Abducted by the Dustbins 2: This Time, No Lubricant". However, Agyeman was no one’s fool and quickly realized she was auditioning for the part of Esme’s identical twin sister Martha.

Yet RTD wanted to hold off introducing the character until the start of the 2007 season and also was adamant that the departure of the amazingly popular Arthur the Horse come as a complete surprise to the audience, and so not even Garden was informed of this, which was really ironic as they’d finished filming months before and so this had to be added in at the last moment at great expense and Arthur’s departure became more well-known than the title!

As well as using existing music such as the themes for the Dustbins (the Go-Gos sining "I’m Gonna Spend Michaelmas With A Dustbin!") and the Cybermen (Tubeway Army with "Are Friends Cybernetic?") and Rose (Seal’s "Kiss From A Rose"), Murray Gold decided for the first time to actually compose a piece of music for Rose’s farewell. RTD and the rest of the production team expected a hack like Gold to come up with swelling violins, but Gold took a minimalist approach:

"I wanted to get that kind of throbbing, sort of hurt sound of quite emotional rock music, because I thought that’s what the Tenth Doctor would do if Rose ditched him and he’d run up to his bedroom, lock himself in his room and have a good old cry like a girl. But that was far too much like hard work, so I just nicked Golden Brown from the Stranglers instead!"

This revelation was so embarrassing, RTD decided to try at all costs to prevent the public from hearing the tune and to do that, he had to make sure no one was watching it. He thus immediately spread rumors that the filming of the Christmas Special meant that the season would only be twelve episodes long and anyone claiming to see a spectacular season finale was a lying, two-faced scumbag. All copies of the final episode were withdrawn and destroyed, but tragedy struck when Nicholas Briggs – in revenge for RTD trying to remove an episode chock-a-block with Briggs material – played the entire thing at the 2006 BAFTA Television Awards while Tennant was collecting an award.

RTD was forced to allow the final episode to screen as planned, but prayed that everyone would watch the World Cup games instead. But the big Welshman’s attempts to hush up the episode made the public even MORE eager to see it, and episode thirteen had a record average viewing figure of 9.22 million viewers, making it the most watched program that week. Worse, everyone was so impressed with Murray Gold’s DJ work they immediately released the Doctor Who Soundtrack Album right away.

Ending months of speculation, the BBC finally confirmed that Piper would be leaving the show and replaced by "sexy Welsh beauty" Eve Myles as Gwen Davies. This was told to the public on June 15th, 2007, months after Season 3 had ended and Agyeman was busy telling people she’d be playing Martha Jones AGAIN next year.

On a more relevant note one year earlier, shockingly, the season finale was accorded covers of the Radio Times, the finale even being promoted with the choice of two images (featuring the Dustbins and the Cybermen, respectively, with a football theme to tie in with the broadcast of the 2006 World Cup because the Radio Times is SO imaginative). This brought to an astounding four the number of episodes granted Radio Times covers over the course of 44 years. That’s a ratio of one every eleven years, only two behind Only Fools and Horses!

Back in the ethnographic present, RTD made it quite clear to anyone who listened that in order to give the character of Martha Jones the best possible chance of audience acceptance, Rose would never be mentioned again. However, it was at this point he decided to commission ANOTHER Doctor Who spin off to join Touchwood, The K9 Exploitation and The Sarah Jane Misadventures: Rose Tyler Décolletage! A brand new TV series starting with a 90-minute special on May Bank Holiday 2007, featuring Billie Piper and her breasts lounging around a paradise island and having hot moist sex with various characters as Irth society collapsed.

About four weeks later, Rose Tyler Décolletage was cancelled for various reasons. For one, it was a spin off that established that Rose had a much more interesting sex life without the Doctor, and her hardcore pornographic adventures were likely to kill Doctor Who in the ratings. For another, the occasional visits RTD had made to Touchwood had shown him that all in all the spin-offs were clearly doomed to be horrible, embarrassing sex farces. And for another, the new series title Rose Tyler Décolletage spelt out RTD in a display of rampant egomania that no one wanted to encourage.

Rose Tyler Décolletage was cancelled, crippling the Doctor Who franchise and leaving Billie Piper all hot and bothered and demanding a lead role in a TV series about her incredible sex life. Luckily, there was one going spare called "Secret Dairy of a Call Girl" about a high class hooker by night, mild-mannered milk maid by day. But the tragedy was that the scripts for Season C had already been written with corporate branding buzzwords for "Rose Tyler Décolletage", like Season B had with "Touchwood". So the whole series made constant unsubtle references to Rose, irrevocably damaging Martha’s character arc, FOR NO GOOD REASON WHATSOEVER!

Doctor Who’s 2006 season came to a close on July 8th. The program had managed to maintain the popularity of its inaugural year, despite the fact that the entire cast of regular and supporting characters introduced in Ruse were now back to the dole queue. Modern audiences seemed to have smoothly accepted a new Doctor and come up with all sorts of shipper fics involving him stripped naked and bathed in honey.

The question now raised was whether they could grow accustomed to a change in the companion, the very character who represented their window into the universe of Doctor Who? The answer was ultimately revealed "of course we bloody will, what sort of subnormal freaks do the BBC think the audience are?!"



Season B Round-Up –

In 2005, Doctor Who got trailers, an evening of documentaries (mostly on digital) right before the series began, some pre-publicity from newspaper TV reviewers, a Radio Times poster offer, and a few bits and bobs on Blue Peter, Jonathan Ross, a Children in Need special, a Christmas special, PLUS Doctor Who Confidential and one Sunday night repeat on digital. Even the departure of Eccleston was an asset to the series publicity, despite the Sun swearing blind the actor had quit because he "didn’t have to be part of this shit!"

In 2006, however, there was not only a repeat of the previous season plus extensive repeats of earlier episodes of THIS season during its run, the BAFTA triumph conspiracy, the kid game show Totally Doctor Who every week and repeated at CBBC, even MORE Blue Peter coverage, AND Doctor Who Confidential, two repeats per week, a new Doctor Who magazine to supplement the extant one, not to mention pre-publicity from reviewers, the Sun, trailers, Jonathan Ross, etc.

And yet the show STILL lost viewers! WHY?

Well, the fact this season was pretty crap may just possibly have had something to do with it. True, it may have featured the Doctor fighting Santa, the Dustbins and Cybermen having a war, Mickey dying horribly, but also was being ran by a smug egotist convinced that the show has to constantly pander to the mainstream in a very constraining, insular, unimaginative, desperate and haphazard way in order to remain popular.

In a second series, does Doctor Who progress itself and push its remit further than Series One, or it would stick to its old formula and do the same thing again, with the handicap of having this time not moved an inch from its starting point? True, we only spend two episodes on a council estate rather than half a season, the Doctor is hip and cool and not a hormone driven suicide bomber unable to do a damn thing, though both are desperate, artificial, sneering and adolescents obsessed with pop culture like the common chavs they are...

Actually, it’s not that different from last year now I come to think of it. Yes, stories frequently come to a complete standstill for yet another relationship discussion and the adventure is dying, the stories are getting boring, circular and redundant... but we all still mindlessly adore whatever crap Steven Moffat throws to us. Yes, the 900 year old time traveler is an ageist, self-conscious bully prick afraid of ridicule he cowardly mocks the closest person to him as a deflection... but we all still like the Sixth Doctor, don’t we? Yes, Rose is an insensitive, sneering, cliquey bunny boiler using the TARDIS to mock and ridicule everything and everyone in sight with a pathologically narrow minded-outlook... but she was last year, we just didn’t get to see her tits as much. Yes, the TV show hasn’t progressed from its ghastly, stupid, disastrous and absurdly collection of the domestic and the otherworldly in the series... but why the hell do we want it to? Isn’t that why we tune in? If we don’t like that, why do we call ourselves fans? It’s like someone with policeboxaphobia complaining about Doctor Who, it’s missing the point!

Therefore I can only conclude that Doctor Who 2006 is just as brilliant/shithouse as last year and it’s just the fans who have become uninteresting whining bitches. Who cares about a bunch of socially awkward geeks moaning about emotional journeys and partner troubles when they’ve never had either? Why do they care so much about what Doctor Who does for the public now rather than the last forty years? Does ANYONE really give a shit about a blend of empathy and bitchiness or metrosexual womanist anti-empathic culture?

Is it maybe that fans are so used to blaming current modern cliquish society and that the lack of Doctor Who excuses the nastiest, most bullying, abusive and even psychotic behavior? And now it’s back they have a pent-up reservoir of bile and vitriol? So they claim that Doctor Who may be back, it’s complete rubbish that betrays everything the diamond logo stands for? While being so completely delusional they think that they’re the ONLY fans to act like this and that everyone from 19863-1989 were blissed out on Who perfection?

I’d just like to end by saying that these fans can take up a suicide pact and get the fuck out of our lives, you miserable, defeatist, lazy, spineless little bastards waving your puny, malnourished limbs and wailing miserably that normal people like Pirates of the Carribean and no one will bonk you. Oooh, hoo, you losers moan "unfortunately, people are under the impression that Doctor Who good, and that can’t go on! This is a Black Day when Doctor Who stopped being the program it always has been about constructing a story and understanding the nature of reality cause a story about Dustbin/Cyberman carnage does not have incredible subtext and sociopolitical content! Why, Rusty, why?"

IT’S ABOUT TWO RACES OF ROBOTS BEATING NINE COLOURS OF SHIT OUT OF EACH OTHER, NOT WAR AND PEACE YOU WORTHLESS ELITIST SCUM! STOP TRYING TO JUSTIFY YOUR PATHETIC EXISTENCE BY SAYING DOCTOR WHO USED TO BE MORE IMPORTANT THAN FUCKING SHAKESPEARE!

Oh, and, by the way, begone varlets.


...


I SAID, "BEGONE!!"

Meanwhile, David Tennant continued his baffling desire to sing in every episode, celebrating the end of the Rose Tyler years with a specially composed ballad marinated in the brandy of the damned:

"Sung by Ten" by Murray Gold and Two Broken Hearts

Well I woke up today
And the world was a depressing place
Now it seems that way for me

And I wandered around
And I thought of your face
That lying tart looking back at me

I wish today was just like every other day
Cause today has been the doomsday
Nothing that I ever dreamed

I started to sulk
Pretty soon I will cry
And I’ll be angsty at the though of you

Cause you were my love
Till you gave me the shove
I’ve had a crappy time with you

I wish today was just like every other day
Cause today has been a shit day
Nothing that I ever dreamed

So I hope your life sucks
For what you did to me
Broke both my hearts
And left me out at sea

Wherever you go
I’m thinking of you
I want you to know
You were crap too

Well I woke up today
And you’re on the other side
Our time will is over for good

But I never liked you
You were smug and so dumb
I’m better off alone, is that understood?

I wish today was just like every other day
Cause today has been a doomsday
Nothing that I ever dreamed!

...

I LET HER GO, SHE’S REALLY GONE! OH ROSIE BABY, I’M SO SORRY! WE SHOULDA BEEN FOREVER! DON’T LEAVE ME AGAIN, ROSIE! COME BACK! I’M SORRY, COME BACK! I DIDN’T MEAN IT! WAAAAAAAH!!

---------------------------
DOCTOR WHO
will return in
THE MICHAELMAS WEREWOLF
---------------------------