With no new Doctor Who this year, we’re all resting on upcoming spin-off Class to provide us with our regular slice of wholesome Whoniverse entertainment.

As you probably know, Doctor Who has had two spin-off series before Class: CBBC’s family-friendly The Sarah Jane Adventures and BBC Three/Two/One’s adult-orientated Torchwood.

> Buy the complete The Sarah Jane Adventures box set on Amazon.

> Buy the complete Torchwood box set on Amazon.

Oh, and there was that Disney-made K-9 series, but we don’t talk about that. Ever.

Yet several other spin-offs have also been mooted over the years; from prequels to animated series, to shows based around the Doctor’s greatest enemies.

Let’s take a look at the spin-offs that never were…

 

The Daleks

Doctor Who has been courting spin-offs since the ’60s, when Dalek creator Terry Nation wanted to remove his precious pepper pots from the show and create a series revolving around them to be made in the US.

Inspired by ‘The Daleks’ Masterplan’, The Daleks would have followed the heroic Space Security Service (including Jean Marsh’s Sara Kingdom) as they fought against the Daleks. Nation wrote a pilot, ‘The Destroyers’, but the series was never picked up and so the Skarosians were deposited back into the main show.

If you’re intrigued, those trusty people at Big Finish adapted the pilot for audio back in 2010, as part of their The Lost Stories series.

 

K-9 and Company

The cancelled Who spin-off that got the furthest along, 1981’s K-9 and Company was actually the first off-shoot to star Sarah Jane – despite her being rather unfairly described as ‘company’ in the title.

Only a pilot episode of the series was broadcast, titled ‘A Girl’s Best Friend.’ It sees the intrepid reporter being given a model of K-9 by the Doctor and proceeding to investigate not aliens or even mad scientists but… a witch’s coven.

Despite the failure of K-9 and Company, it is firmly canon, as Sarah Jane and K-9 later appeared together in ‘The Five Doctors’, ‘School Reunion’ and, of course, in The Sarah Jane Adventures.

 

Doctor Who: The Animated Series

Animated Doctor Who has been made several times, but never quite as successfully as hoped. For instance, the Tenth Doctor starred in ‘The Infinite Quest’ and ‘Dreamland’, both of which seemingly tried to start a running fixture that never happened.

Back in the 1980s, animation company Nelvana (they made the Care Bears) started work on a Doctor Who cartoon that was later shelved. Bizarrely, their Doctor looked like a cross (or a hybrid!) between Tom Baker and Jon Pertwee.

There was also ‘Scream of the Shalka’, an animated serial starring Richard E Grant, who later appeared as The Great Intelligence in 2012-2013. This wasn’t so much a spin-off as an aborted version of the actual series, as it was made shortly before the 2005 revival.

 

Continued on next page…