Doctor Who fan confirms reportedly dangerous 2004 flaming sofa stunt

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There is a persistent rumour regarding a dangerous stunt during the filming of the first episode of Doctor Who Season 1 titled Rose.

The most infamous story from this filming is that, in the scene where Henrik’s department store explodes, a scene was shot of a sofa flying out of a window on fire, landing in the street.

Australian Doctor Who fan Paul Masters captured video of the shot in his newly-released video of Doctor Who filming from July 2004, 22 years ago.

Director Keith Boak arranged for a crane to drop a flaming sofa on the street, which landed very near two people. It’s unclear whether the duo in this near miss are actors or stunt performers. What follows is Masters’ description of the filming.

“…the crew began filming stunt shots with people running across the street as bits rain down from cranes above. Each take involved prolonged setups, but eventually they got what they needed.”

There have been other oblique mentions of this incident.

Another interesting revelation is that, during this 2004 filming, Masters was relaying information and sending photos to a fellow fan — writer Pete McTighe. Yes, the same Pete McTighe who would go on to write the Doctor Who episodes Kerblam! (2018), Praxeus (2020) and Lucky Day (2025). The same Pete McTighe who complained when a Sea Devils aficionado snapped a photo of Gugu Mbatha-Raw as the character Salt during the filming of an episode of the Doctor Who spin-off The War Between the Land and the Sea he penned.

“It’s a shame, really,” said McTighe in Doctor Who Magazine 625. “because people who deliberately leak stuff spoil it for other people — all for the sake of a tiny bit of Twitter glory. It’s also really disrespectful to the cast and crew that work on the show and spend hours doing all this stuff, for people to then spoil their work.”

It’s worth noting that Twitter didn’t exist until March 2006 and it wasn’t until 2012 that fans began using a specific hashtag on Twitter (now X) to relay Doctor Who filming news, location sightings and set reports. If Twitter had existed in 2004 with the same organised fan effort, there very likely would have been an even wider distribution of this filming news. In a noteworthy quote from his video, Masters says, “an old friend I used to run the local fan club with moved to Melbourne. He told me where to look online for Doctor Who news and leaks.” McTighe was president of the DWCA Victoria chapter (The Doctor Who Club of Victoria) during the 1990s.

The video is worth a watch and serves as a reminder of the very defensible shared excitement whenever new episodes of Doctor Who are in production, especially in 2004 when the series came back into production after an extended hiatus.