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Doctor Who spin-offs refers to material created outside of, but related to, the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. Both during the main run of the series from 1963 to 1989 and after its cancellation, numerous novels, comic strips, comic books, and other material were generated based on the characters and situations introduced the show. These spin-offs continued to be produced even without a television series to support them, and helped keep the show alive in the minds of its fans and the public. The programme is being revived in 2005.
This entry mainly concentrates on "official" spin-offs, that is to say, material sanctioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation, which produces the series. One aspect of Doctor Who spin-offs which makes them different from spin-offs from other science fictions franchises was that many of the television stars and writers have been directly involved in the production of the spinoffs, and it has become very common for a former television character to reprise their characters in audio.
The degree to which the spin-offs are canon is a topic of much discussion by Doctor Who fans. Although the spin-offs do not intentionally contradict the original television series and the 1996 telemovie, the various spin-off series do contradict each other, in chronology, in characters which are in one series and not the other, and in characterization, particularly of the eighth doctor. One area of speculation is the degree to which spin-off material will be considered canon by the new show.
Novelizations based upon individual Doctor Who serials were first published in the mid-1960s, the first being Dr. Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks by David Whitaker, a loose adaptation of the show's second serial, The Dead Planet (a.k.a. The Daleks). Doctor Who novelizations became something of a tradition beginning in the early 1970s when Target Books (later to become part of Virgin Publishing) began publishing novelizations on a regular basis, initially based upon then-current Doctor Jon Pertwee's episodes, but soon expanding to include all past Doctors as well.
By 1991, when the final Target book was published, virtually every Doctor Who serial had been novelized, as well as a radio play (Slipback) and even a mid-1970s children's story record (The Pescatons which has the distinction of being the final Doctor Who book published under the Target imprint). Most of these novelizations contained minimal amounts of original material and were (usually) adapted closely from the shooting scripts, with the intent of the books being souvenirs of previously aired shows in the pre-VCR era. Although novelizations became more elaborate in later years, the early books usually followed a set formula and were for a time restricted to a maximum page length as they were considered children's literature.
After Virgin began its New Adventures and Missing Adventures line of original novels, it also published several additional novelizations both on their own and under the Missing Adventures label. Two radio plays featuring Jon Pertwee produced in the mid-1990s were novelized, as were several non-official spinoff video productions such as Shakedown and Downtime, adding an air of official sanction to them.
In 1996, BBC Books published a novelization of the Doctor Who television movie, ending an era. A one-time return to serial novelizations occurred in 2004 when BBC Books novelized the made-for-Internet adventure, Scream of the Shalka.
Several serials remain unnovelized in large part because the original authors expected more money than BBC is willing to pay, and it is unlikely they will ever see print. Fan-written novelizations of these stories do exist, however. The unnovelized serials are:
The first original Doctor Who--related fiction appeared in 1986 when Target launched a series of books entitled The Companions of Doctor Who which were original works focusing upon former assistants of The Doctor. The first two books were Harry Sullivan's War written by Ian Marter who had actually played Harry Sullivan on the series a decade earlier, and Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma by Tony Attwood and based upon a character played by Mark Strickson in the early 1980s. These books were unsuccessful, and after a third attempt (a 1987 novelization of the 1981 Doctor Who spin-off, K-9 and Company) the series ended.
A couple of years later, Target launched another short-lived series of "original" novels, this time titled The Missing Episodes and based upon episodes commissioned for but never produced for the cancelled 1985-1986 season. Again, only three books were published, the first being The Nightmare Fair by Graham Williams.
Billed as telling "stories too broad and deep for the small screen", Virgin Publishing's line of original novels featuring the Seventh Doctor began in 1991. Virgin's predecessors, Target Books and WH Allen, had by this point been publishing novelisations for twenty years, and even before the series had come to a conclusion, successive editors of the range such as Nigel Robinson and Peter Darvill-Evans had identified the need for original material to complement the few stories there were left to be novelised. The New Adventures were joined in 1994 by a companion series (the Missing Adventures) telling "untold" stories with earlier Doctors, set between episodes of the television series.
During the New/Missing Adventures era, Virgin also launched a series of Doctor Who-based short story anthologies titled Decalog. BBC Books also published anthologies under the title of Short Trips. Publication of the Short Trips series has been taken over by Big Finish Productions.
Also, Marvel Comics commissioned the writers of the various novels to write short pieces entitled "Brief Encounters" which were run in the Doctor Who Magazine. These short stories (never more than one magazine page in length) usually focused on an event just prior to a particular novel, or on a character prior to his/her encounter with The Doctor. Some non-novel related "Brief Encounters" were also written, including one in which the Seventh Doctor met a future incarnation of himself.
In the climate of renewed interest in the series that followed the 1996 telemovie, the BBC decided to reclaim Virgin's license when it next came up for renewal and publish its own series of Doctor Who novels. The last two Virgin Doctor Who novels were released in April 1997, bringing to an end almost 25 years of Doctor Who publishing outside of the BBC, with the first two BBC-published novels released in June that same year. Virgin, meanwhile, continued the New Adventures line for several years afterward, focusing upon the Doctor's former assistant, Professor Bernice Summerfield who had been the first companion created specifically for literature, rather than for television. These books (sometimes referred to informally as The Adventures of Benny Summerfield) gained their own fan following and featured appearances by other characters created specifically for the literary world of Doctor Who.
The BBC began releasing two new novels every two months, one featuring the ongoing adventures of the Eighth Doctor and the other an "untold" story of an earlier Doctor, referred to as the Eighth Doctor Adventures (EDAs) and Past Doctor Adventures (PDAs) respectively. Although many authors who wrote for the Virgin line returned to write for the BBC series, direct continuity between the two sets of books was discouraged.
In 2004, the BBC halved the frequency of publication from 22 books a year (One EDA, one PDA per month) to 12, each release now coming out once every other month. With the new series starting in 2005, the EDAs will end, with future novels featuring the Eighth Doctor to be part of the PDA range. A new line of Ninth Doctor Adventures in hardcover will begin with three releases around March 2005.
By far, the most prolific writer of Doctor Who fiction is Terrance Dicks, who has written well over 100 titles including the majority of Target Books novelizations, as well as original works for both the Virgin and BBC Books series.
Telos Publishing produced a series of original Doctor Who novellas, published individually in hardcover; the first, Time and Relative by Kim Newman, was released on November 23, 2001. Although the series was reasonably successful (in spite of the odd publication format, which resulted from the BBC having reserved for its own use the rights to publish Doctor Who story collections and Doctor Who books in paperback), the BBC chose not to renew Telos's license, and the series ended in March 2004.
Comic strip adventures of the Doctor appeared almost from the beginning of the television series, first in the 1960s publication TV Comic, and during the 1970s in the mainly Gerry Anderson related comic Countdown. They have also continued to be regularly featured in the pages of Doctor Who Magazine. DWM's strip began in its first issue in 1979, and the magazine continued to be published despite the programme ceasing production in 1989. The comic strip features the current Doctor in a series of adventures independent of the novels and the audios, and with another companion, though crossovers with the worlds of the audio and literary Doctor Who and the comics often occurred. Selected stories were reprinted in North America by Marvel Comics, which was also the publisher of the Doctor Who Magazine at the time.
Those that have worked on the DWM strip have included such notables as writer Alan Moore and artists Dave Gibbons, Mike McMahon and John Ridgeway. Two semi-official spin-off series, "Miranda" from Comeuppance Comics and "Faction Paradox" from Mad Norwegian Press have also appeared, both featuring characters who had debuted in the BBC Novels series.
Doctor Who Magazine, which is no longer published by Marvel, continues to print new comic strip adventures.
Not counting the 1996 television movie, which was a revival, not a spin-off, only one attempt has been made (so far) to produce a Doctor Who spin-off television series. In 1981, a 50-minute pilot episode for a series to be called K-9 and Company was aired. It focused on the adventures of former Doctor Who assitants Sarah-Jane Smith and K-9, a robot dog. The pilot, subtitled "A Girl's Best Friend" did not garner strong enough ratings for a series to be commissioned, though Sarah and K-9 would later appear together on the main Doctor Who series and their adventures would be continued in audio form by Big Finish Productions in the 2000s. There was some discussion about spinning off the characters of Jago and Lightfoot from the serial Talons of Weng Chiang into their own series, but nothing came of it.
Doctor Who also appeared on television in the form of special one-off productions to benefit charity. The most notable was "Dimensions in Time" (1993), a special in two parts, running about 12 minutes in total, which featured all surviving Doctor Whos (including Tom Baker in his first appearance as the character since 1981), and more than a dozen former companions.
In 1999, the charity appeal Comic Relief created the adventure Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death, a parody starring Rowan Atkinson as a future incarnation of the Doctor in his final battle with The Master (Jonathan Pryce). During the parody's climax, when the Doctor regenerates several times, top actors Richard E. Grant, Hugh Grant, Jim Broadbent and finally Joanna Lumley all had a chance to play the famous role. (Ironically, Grant would play another incarnation of The Doctor for the webcast of Scream of the Shalka). Needless to say, this skit is not considered canon, though BBC Video has released it to video using the same format as regular Doctor Who releases.
The hunger for more Doctor Who on television has been partly answered by direct-to-video productions by various companies. The BBC has never authorised any Doctor Who video productions (presumably on the basis that one might as well make a new television series), but production companies have been able to license individual characters and alien races from the show directly from the writers who created them, and feature them in adventures of their own.
Companies who have released videos of this kind include Reeltime Pictures (also known for the long-running Myth Makers series of documentaries) and BBV (who have also released a number of Doctor Who-related audio adventures on the same basis). The first spinoff of this nature was Wartime, a half-hour film produced by Reeltime in the late 1980s and starring John Levene as Benton, a UNIT soldier who appeared on Doctor Who in the early-mid 1970s. In the 1990s, Reeltime distributed PROBE, a series of five made-for-video movies featuring Caroline John as her Pertwee-era character, Dr. Liz Shaw. Many of these independent productions have been acclaimed for their writing and high production values, some of which even exceeded those of Doctor Who.
BBV is also known for a number of productions that, while not using any elements from the show itself, tell a similar style of story and feature ex-Doctor Who stars in roles similar to those they played in the series; these include a direct-to-video series starring Colin Baker as "The Stranger", and a series of audio dramas starring Sylvester McCoy as "The Dominie". In later episodes of the Stranger, it was made clear that the Stranger was not the Doctor, and some of this clarification appears to have been the result of BBC pressure.
A number of audio productions based upon Doctor Who have been produced over the years. The first, in 1976, was a children's audio adventure entitled Doctor Who and the Pescatons by Victor Pemberton. Around this time an audio version of the televised serial "Genesis of the Daleks" was released on record, with specially recorded narration by Tom Baker. Both of these early releases have since been reissued on CD.
In 1985, during a period when the series was on a sabbatical at the BBC, BBC Radio hired Colin Baker and his TV companion Nicola Bryant to reprise their TV roles for a new production called Slipback, broadcast as part of the Radio 4 children's magazine Pirate Radio Four, which received quite a bit of press fanfare, though it did not receive good reviews. It too was later released on audio tape and CD.
Doctor Who audio adventures diversified somewhat in the 1990s, when the BBC began issuing the soundtracks of 1960s-era serials on cassette and compact disc, some with added narration. These releases were usually derived from serials that were incomplete in the BBC vaults, thereby making this the only format in which fans could enjoy the entire story.
BBC Radio, meanwhile, attempted to get a new series of Doctor Who stories made for radio. Although more were planned, only two were ever completed: The Paradise of Death (1993) and The Ghosts of N-Space (1995), both featuring Jon Pertwee in his final performances as The Doctor.
Beginning in 1999, Big Finish Productions, under license from the BBC, began a range of audio plays on compact disc, with one released every month starring one of the surviving actors to play the Doctor, namely the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Doctors. The ongoing Eighth Doctor series (which have been released in "seasons" of between four to six consecutive releases) is independent of the novel line, with the Doctor doing different things with a different companion, played by India Fisher in the role of Charlotte ("Charley") Pollard. None of the audio plays have featured Tom Baker (as the Fourth Doctor) who has declined invitations to reprise his role.
Big Finish have also produced a limited-run series of audio plays based around one of the Doctor's former television companions, Sarah Jane Smith, as well as a limited "Doctor Who Unbound" series that explores possibilities contrary to the established mythos (for instance, "What if the Doctor had never left Gallifrey?"); the "Unbound" series allows well-known actors such as Derek Jacobi and David Warner to play the Doctor, albeit once each.
The BBC has extended Big Finish's license to produce the audios until 2007. With the advent of the new television series, Big Finish intends to "fold" the Eighth Doctor adventures into its ongoing alternating releases of past Doctor adventures rather than as seasons. It is not known if Big Finish intends to do audio plays featuring the Ninth Doctor.
Other Doctor Who-related mini-series include
The status of the various audio adventures in terms of canonicity has not been confirmed, with many fans of the belief that the stories (at least those produced by Big Finish) are canonical since they have been officially licensed by the BBC, which has final script approval, and because they often star the actors and actresses in the original series. However, the novelizations were also officially licensed and in some cases produced by BBC, and the continuity of the audio adventures differs considerably from the novelizations. It remains to be seen if the new television series will do anything to confirm the audio adventures' place in canon or not.
A series of audio plays have also been webcast on the BBCi web site, beginning with Death Comes to Time in 2001. The first episode had been made for, and then turned down by, BBC Radio 4 and after an experimental webcasting of this pilot generated over a million page hits, the rest of the episodes were produced and webcast. The serial featured Sylvester McCoy reprising his role as the Seventh Doctor.
The next two serials were made specially for the webcasts by Big Finish Productions: Real Time (2002), with the Sixth Doctor versus the Cybermen and Shada (2003), with Paul McGann as the Doctor in a script originally written by Douglas Adams and intended for the Fourth Doctor Tom Baker in 1979, but abandoned halfway through filming back then due to a BBC staff strike.
Although all of these adventures were intended as purely audio and were later released on CD, as webcasts they were accompanied by a slideshow of partially-animated illustrations drawn by artist Lee Sullivan. Death Comes to Time was also released as a special MP3 CD with interactive content, including an option to view the illustrations as well as other bonus material such as cast and crew interviews that were originally available online.
In the middle of 2003, BBCi secretly initiated plans to bring webcast production back in-house, producing the all-new adventure Scream of the Shalka by Paul Cornell, starring Richard E. Grant as the Ninth Doctor and Derek Jacobi as the Master. This differed from the previous webcasts in that it was specifically an audio-visual experience and not an audio adventure: it was fully animated to broadcast standard (although the webcast version was slightly simplified for that medium) by the Cosgrove Hall animation company, and webcast over five weeks in November and December of 2003.
The BBCi adventures were originally intended to be the official continuity of Doctor Who. However, BBCi and the parts of BBC interested in reviving the series were unaware of each other's existence. With the announcement of the new BBC series, it was stated that Shalka is not part of official continuity, and Russell T. Davies, producer of the 2005 revival series, has referred to Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor. Plans for further webcasts were shelved as well as a DVD release of the serial. A novelisation was, however, released by BBC Books in February 2004, complete with a lengthy "making of" section.
As with the audio adventures, the canonical status of the webcasts is uncertain, and was made murkier by the fact that the webcasts would have been considered canonical since they were broadcast by a branch of the BBC. However, with the exception of the standalone story Real Time, all the other webcasts feature elements that contradict series continuity, most notably Death Comes to Time.
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