10 Deleted Doctor Who Characters You've Never Heard Of

A lot goes into making any TV show, especially one that's lasted over 60 years – but almost as much gets left on the cutting room floor. Doctor Who history is littered with abandoned plot threads and even entire episodes, but also a ton of deleted characters who never made it to the screen.

As a show that moves from planet to planet and timezone to timezone on a weekly basis, Doctor Who can produce more memorable side characters in a single series than most shows have in their entire runs. Nearly every episode also has a whole secondary cast that didn't survive the multiple script revisions, and that's before you even begin to think about all the story arcs that were trimmed back, or all the scenes that were deleted during the edit.

From companions who never saw the light of day, to enemies who would have had massive lore implications, to monsters who just sound like they would've been cool to see, let's dive into the weird and wonderful world of Doctor Who's various almost people.

The Stolen Earth already features what must be close to the maximum number of characters you can fit into the end credits of a Doctor Who episode, so it’s in some ways both surprising and unsurprising to find out that there were even more who didn't make the cut.

One of these characters would've been yet another British Prime Minister, with Russell T Davies planning on introducing someone called Aubrey Fairchild as the successor to Harold Saxon, continuing the chain of fictional PMs that began in Aliens of London.

Fairchild’s premiership would not have been long however, as he would've been promptly exterminated after an ill-conceived attempt to negotiate with the Daleks at Westminster. He was removed from The Stolen Earth's script when RTD realised that the Daleks probably wouldn’t bother faffing about with negotiating, and would skip straight to the exterminating.

1/2 DELETED SCENE. There’s an alternative BIG BUDGET version of this, Marvel-movie sized! I think Worldwide should make that, one day, heh. I’ll point out some of these as we go along…HERE, I brought in the Prime Minister. And killed him! #SubwaveNetwork pic.twitter.com/R9dKpIrsdn

— Russell T Davies (@russelldavies63) April 19, 2020

Fairchild's role in the episode was subsequently reduced to a line about Torchwood losing contact with his plane, and he was gone altogether by the time of Torchwood: Children of Earth in 2009, with this story introducing Brian Green (below) as the new UK Prime Minister.

Meanwhile, RTD would reuse the name Aubrey Fairchild in the 2008 Christmas special The Next Doctor, with the Doctor and Jackson Lake investigating his house after he's murdered by the Cybermen.

If nothing else, Fairchild would've at least held the honour of being the least evil Prime Minister of the original RTD era – although that might've just been a result of not having enough screentime to start massacring retreating aliens, or trying to take over the world.