7 Fortunate Accidents That Ended Up Saving Doctor Who
Sometimes, it just gets lucky.
Doctor Who has been one long rollercoaster of taking risks and attempting what seems mad and it's a mix of skill and luck which allowed it to get as far as it did.
The new series takes less risks, but still manages to do the odd thing to keep itself fresh, like following up on a geeky heartthrob by putting a violent Scotsman in the lead role.
However, any show built on such needs its fair share of complete blind luck to pull through some unfortunate incidents. While Doctor Who had many such times, it managed to succeed scarily well most of the time. While there was the odd industrial strike which caused Shada to be cancelled, there were plenty of times when people were rushing around trying to save the show at the last minute and somehow succeeded.
In fact, without most of them the show would be entirely different, in that it would have been cancelled and most of it wouldn’t have happened. Rather than fizzle out in an instant, people were able to rejuvenate the show excellently. It’s a show about stumbling around the universe making do with what you have to try and make things work, and the things on this list prove that everybody involved embodied this brilliantly. Here are 7 of the most fortunate accidents in Doctor Who history...
7. "Spack Off!"
Line flubbing is mostly considered to have been a trait of William Hartnell, the elderly First Doctor who seemed less like he was remembering rehearsed lines and more like he was trying to remember what he had for lunch in 1946. However, Tom Baker in Destiny of the Daleks ended up forcing “Stay back!” and “Back off!" into the human centipede portmanteau of “Spack off!”.
And of course it was left in. Destiny was so cheaply made that a primary school in Zimbabwe could have done it better. As such, fans have decided that it’s a Gallifreyan swear word. Presumably, when written in circular Gallifreyan, it resembles somebody showing their arse.