Writer and script editor Andrew Ellard has described what a modern UK script editor can be: either a consultant, a conduit or a contributor. This role has evolved a lot since the likes of Robert Holmes or Chris Boucher, who with Doctor Who and Blake’s 7 respectively often wrote or rewrote stories. 

In today’s television, there is often a person you associate with a show’s creative heart. For Doctor Who, it is Russell T Davies and then Steven Moffat, each being an executive producer and the head writer. 

When thinking about earlier Doctor Who, would we consider the script editor as the equivalent of today’s head writer/executive producer? They wrote many stories and rewrote others. However, they were not the only driver of the series. Take Robert Holmes’s time script editing Doctor Who. Philip Hinchcliffe had just as much influence on the show, also contributing to the new horror of the show. No script editor had sole, single influence on the show. John Nathan-Turner played a huge role in the creative direction, for example with his “new broom” update of Doctor Who in partnership with script editor Christopher H. Bidmead. Verity Lambert and David Whitaker were a team. 

And for today’s Doctor Who, I think the same. Davies and Moffat are not the sole drivers. Davies’s co-executive producer Julie Gardner and producer Phil Collinson both influenced the show, suggesting story ideas and setting the feel. And I suspect that Moffat has the same relationship with his peers. 

Today’s head writers and yesterday’s script editors play an important, central part in the creation of a show’s stories, but they are not the only part. Creating a show is team work, from writer to director to actor to designer to producer. Today’s script editor reinforced that team-work principle. 

Consultant. Conduit. Contributor. 

Anglophenia at BBC America features a post on Sarah Jane Smith, which begins discussing what makes a Doctor Who companion:

Ideally there’ll be some chemistry which is like flirting, but not actually flirting. A kind of bickering overfamiliarity where no one ever has to fully admit to their feelings for anyone, but each is utterly loyal to the other. The lonely Doctor is fascinated by his new chum, and his new chum is bowled over by the things her Time Lord pal can show her.

This is an interesting balance: bickering and being loyal. Those companions who can be the Doctor’s most loyal and his best friend are the best companions, provided they can still stand up to him. Thus, Sarah Jane:

Sarah’s his conscience, the person who provides the human boundaries within which he operates best, and with her on side, he can go back to being as cocky and roguish as ever.

In an interview with BBC America (here quoted by The Radio Times), Steven Moffat states what many people have known about Doctor Who for a long time:

“The story of Doctor Who is always the story of the companion, it’s always their story,” said Moffat. “It was Rose Tyler’s story, it’s Amy Pond’s story - the story of the time they knew the Doctor and how that began; how it developed and how it ended.”

At the beginning of Doctor Who, Ian Chesterton was the hero and main character of the show. When Ian left, Steven Taylor took on that role. It was only after Steven did the Doctor start becoming the hero. Yet the story focused on characters like Sarah Jane Smith, Leela and Ace. Doctor Who was telling the companion’s story. This has become even more apparent with the new series.

“The story begins again, not so much with the new Doctor, but with the new companion,” Moffat told BBC America. “It is their story. The Doctor’s the hero, but they’re the main character.”

The hero may be the person who saves the day, but it is the main character who changes. It is difficult for a character like the ageless and alien Doctor to change. The Doctor’s life is like the mountains, it changes over geological periods. The companions change through their adventures with the Doctor. This is why they are the main character of Doctor Who.

Composer Mark Ayres has written a history of the Doctor Who theme from 1963 to 1989). Delia Derbyshire’s and Peter Howell’s versions are brilliant and ageless. Dominic Glynn’s and Keff McCuloch’s are not, and Ayres pinpoints the reason: they were not created the same way as the previous version. Derbyshire, Howell and the Radiophonic Workshop took loving time, experimented and struggled with technologies, and focused on simplicity. They created something new. Others used existing techniques to recreate the theme.

Patrick Mulkin at The Radio Times on when Doctor Who was axed in 1985:

On 13 March 1985, Saunders [David, then co-ordinator of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society] and I were granted an audience with JN-T [producer, John Nathan-Turner] in his production office on Shepherds Bush Green. Guarded as ever and looking chastened, he lamented that “the whole of next season was commissioned and most of it delivered. And back-up scripts.” All would be jettisoned for a fresh start. […]

But there was a trace of optimism. “I think the reaction to the postponement of the show has taken a lot of people by surprise, very senior people at the BBC. I’m not surprised at all.” So what would he be doing during the hiatus? “I’ve built up a lot of leave, which is a constant embarrassment to my personnel officer. And now there’s time to think.”

Doctor Who should have returned with a fresh start after its “hiatus” in 1986. What we got was “The Time of a Time Lord”, a season with reduced violence though still steeped in the show’s history. Why did Nathan-Turner and the show’s script editor, Eric Saward, not do something more? Why did they not make the changes that Derrick Sherwin did in 1970’s “Spearhead from Space”, Nathan-Turner did in 1980’s “The Leisure Hive” and Steven Moffat in 2020’s “The Eleventh Hour”? Was Nathan-Turner still stuck with his approach to Doctor Who?

Or did he simply go on holidays and not care anymore?

Caleb Howells at Doctor Who TV:

What makes Doctor Who so good? Have you ever wondered that? Perhaps a friend who doesn’t watch the show asked you that once. Or maybe it’s you who doesn’t watch it, and you’re wondering why you should, whether Doctor Who really is any different to any other sci-fi show on TV at the moment. Whatever the reason, I’ll be dissecting what Doctor Who really is and what makes it so good, to me at least.

Howells lists the standard reasoning why Doctor Who is so good, from being any genre to it constantly changing. This brings uncertainty, which brings a risk:

Because of this, and of course all the many writers who have contributed to the show, there’s bound to be a part of it that someone will like, even if they don’t like some other aspect of **Doctor Who*. For instance, if someone doesn’t like the Russell T Davies era, they could try Steven Moffat’s era, and vice versa. Over the course of 49 years, there have been many, many changes to this show. New Doctor’s new companions, new writers, and so on.

I’m not sure whether this gets down to what makes Doctor Who* great. My theory is that Doctor Who is about the Doctor and his friends doing good and having fun, despite living in a dark, dangerous universe.

Anglophenia’s (at BBC America) feature on Mel Bush:

Never mind River Song and her blessed spoilers, Doctor Who has been messing about with the correct order in which people meet each other for AGES. Mel’s first encounter with the TARDIS and the Doctor is not recorded on screen. When we first see them together, it’s as part of a the Sixth Doctor’s 14-episode story Trial of a Time Lord, in which the Doctor (Sixth, this time) is once again on trial for meddling. She’s already his companion because, from the perspective of the court, they’re watching events in the future.

It’s all rather confusing. And remember, this is some 20 years before the expression “wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey” was ever coined.

The greatest problem¹ is that we never saw Mel meet the Doctor. If this introduction was ever filmed, the dynamics would have been interesting. Mel is meeting the Doctor for the first time. The Doctor already knows who she is.

River Song would have had a true predecessor.

Anglophenia (at BBC America) says what we are thinking about Ace:

There’s a powerful argument to be made that Ace, companion to the Seventh Doctor and posh girl pretending to be street-scruff (her real name is Dorothy, y’know), is the Scrappy Doo of the Whoniverse: she’s a terrier, likes a fight, has a big mouth and a lot of what I believe you Americans like to call “addy-chewd.”

She’s also pretending to be something she isn’t (tough, in Scrappy’s case, streetwise in Ace’s) and possibly only exists because the producers of the TV show were worried about losing the younger viewers.