10 Doctor Who Flops The BBC Has Buried

Another weird wilderness years project, Downtime - like the K9 show - was produced without the BBC's input, so it was essentially buried from the start.

Released in 1995, this unofficial Doctor Who movie angled itself as a sequel to the Second Doctor stories The Abominable Snowmen and The Web Of Fear, bringing back Nicholas Courtney and Elisabeth Sladen to reprise their roles from the show, and also introducing the Brigadier's daughter, Kate Stewart.

Downtime was followed by a sequel, Daemos Rising, in 2004, another unofficial project that did away with pretty much all recognisable Doctor Who connections (including Courtney and Sladen), and instead continued Kate's story.

Unofficial productions rarely manage to overcome that barrier of feeling like cheap knock-offs, and that's exactly how Downtime and Daemos Rising come off. Though Downtime fares the best (it also feels the more "official" of the two, thanks to the involvement of Courtney and Sladen), Daemos Rising is absolutely terrible, and it's no surprise that most fans don't even know these direct-to-video oddities exist.

Understandably, the BBC completely ignored these projects come the 2005 revival, and Kate was recast for her reintroduction in Series 7's The Power Of Three.