10 Doctor Who Moments That Were Improvised

2. The Doctor's Best Friend (The Seeds Of Doom)

Doctor Who The Seeds Of Doom Fourth Doctor Sarah Jane Smith
BBC

The Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith were an all-time-great Doctor-companion pair, and simply by watching their serials, you can tell that Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen thoroughly enjoyed their time together.

Aside from Pyramids Of Mars, the pair also did a spot of improvising in The Seeds Of Doom. During the scene where Scorby holds the Doctor and Sarah Jane at gunpoint and brings them to meet Chase, the Doctor - in a heartwarming move - introduces Sarah Jane as his "best friend", which was fully improvised by Baker.

There's also a funny bit of improvisation earlier in the story, when Scorby tells the Doctor to "turn around" - again, at gunpoint - only for the Doctor to do a full 360-degree spin, clearly mocking the instruction that his assailant gave him. According to Sladen in her posthumous autobiography, Baker decided to do this little move in the moment, with the actress remarking that nobody expected the scene to go like that.

Finally, Sladen's autobiography also mentions that she herself ad-libbed a line. While the Doctor and Sarah Jane are escaping from the chauffeur in the third episode, Sarah Jane yells "down here, cloth-eyes!" to lure him into a trap. Sladen improvised this while filming, because she thought it was something that Sarah Jane would say.

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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!