10 Deleted Doctor Who Characters You've Never Heard Of

It takes a long, long time to create a brand-new television series, and along the way there are countless ideas considered, altered, and thrown away. Doctor Who was no exception.

During the show’s development in the early 1960s, the basic characteristics of what would become the original TARDIS team were established quite early. There would be the Doctor of course, travelling alongside a teenage girl, a young teacher somewhere in her mid-20s to early-30s, and an action-focused younger man.

While these are pretty consistent with the trio of Susan, Barbara, and Ian that we ended up with, the original plan was for the names and the specifics to be quite different.

Biddy, Lola, and Cliff were the original characters to fill the three companion roles. Biddy wasn't actually related to the Doctor at this stage, and simply discovered the TARDIS alongside Lola and Cliff, who, unsurprisingly, was named after pop legend Cliff Richard.

Even the Doctor himself went through a few big changes, with some original documents describing him as fleeing some sort of interstellar war, while his time machine was going to be invisible.

Watching the finished result, it's hard to imagine things being any other way. Would Biddy, Lola, and Cliff have been as iconic as the characters who replaced them? Who knows.