Former Doctor Who producer Philip Hinchcliffe has revealed some intriguing details about a series of Doctor Who that was planned but never filmed. Hinchcliffe was the boss for Tom Baker’s first three series, but if Hinchcliffe had stuck around for a fourth collaboration with Baker instead of heading off for pastures new, things would have looked very different.
“We did start to plan another season,” Hinchcliffe revealed at a BFI event in London, which Digital Spy reported on. “There was all this musical chairs going on, about whether Bob [Holmes, script editor] and I were going to carry on or not.”
Although the Indiana Jones film franchise hadn’t kicked off yet – this is 1977 we’re talking about – Hinchcliffe recalls tapping into similar ideas for his proposed fourth series for Baker’s Doctor.
“I was ahead of the game,” Hinchcliffe said, before revealing that he wanted “the Doctor [to be] like a colonial explorer, with a pith helmet out in the jungles” in Tom Baker’s fourth series in the role.
“So I was kind of already on the Indiana Jones trail without realising it,” he added. “It was the next thing bubbling up in my head that might somehow take the programme in a slightly different way.
“We started to think of stories like that. In fact, I even wrote one and sent it in after I left the programme, and was told it would be far too expensive, so they couldn’t do it.”
The idea of cutting the Doctor from an Indiana Jones sort of cloth certainly is an intriguing one, and we’d love to slip into a parallel universe for an afternoon to binge the box set of that. Here in our universe, though, Hinchcliffe didn’t stay on and this vision never came to pass. Baker did stick around for four more series, but there wasn’t a pith helmet in sight.
We’ll bring you more Doctor Who news as we hear it.