10 Biggest Controversies In Doctor Who History

3. The John Nathan-Turner Sex Scandal

John Nathan-Turner Doctor Who
Dopefish (Via Wikimedia Commons)

John Nathan-Turner ran Doctor Who throughout the entirety of the 1980s, overseeing the show from the end of Tom Baker's tenure, to its cancellation in 1989.

Some would say that he ran Doctor Who into the ground, and the fact that he was in charge for some of the worst periods of the classic era doesn't exactly beef up his credentials. But Nathan-Turner - who passed away in 2002 - was at the centre of another big controversy in 2013, when a former Doctor Who Magazine writer accused him of having made sexual advances towards underage fans.

In an interview with Starburst, Richard Marson said that Nathan-Turner tried to get "a bit frisky" with him, at a time when Marson was just seventeen years old - four years below the homosexual age of consent in the 1980s.

In addition, Marson said that the producer was "promiscuous", and liked "getting off with young guys", hinting that his inappropriate sexual behaviour towards young Doctor Who fans was less of a one-off incident, and more of a habit.

While Marson was also careful to specify that he didn't believe Nathan-Turner was "predatory", this story emerged at a time when the world was still reeling from the Jimmy Savile sex scandal, and as a result, it was taken extremely seriously by the BBC, who launched a full-scale investigation into the matter.

In this post: 
Doctor Who
 
Posted On: 
Contributor
Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!