10 Doctor Who Stories That Had Troubled Productions
9. Planet Of The Dead (2009)
The Episode: The Doctor becomes stranded on a desert world after the bus he is on passes through a wormhole. The Problem: Sandstorms and a damaged bus. Planet Of The Dead was basically the Tenth Doctors last hurrah; the final lighthearted adventure he got to have before the darkness of his final days. And to mark that, the cast and crew decided to have some fun with three days of location filming in Dubai. But thats where the episodes problems arose. The biggest and most well known problem to hit this episode was that when one of the two buses acquired by the BBC for the episode was shipped to Dubai, the shipping container it was transported in was hit by a crane and the bus was badly damaged. Various solutions were mooted including shipping the second bus to Dubai or scrapping the overseas shoot entirely and relocating it to a beach in the UK. But eventually the decision was made to write a reason for the damage into the episode and then enhance the damage with visual effects. Problem solved. But another spanner in the works was about to hit. During the first day of the shoot, the desert used for filming was hit by a severe sandstorm; rendering the footage shot unusable and resulting in the production crew having to attempt to fit three days of filming into two. Because this wasnt really possible, some of the scenes inside the bus were filmed in a studio back in the UK with various directorial and effects techniques including lens flares being used to disguise the fact that these scenes werent shot in Dubai.
JG Moore is a writer and filmmaker from the south of England. He also works as an editor and VFX artist, and has a BA in Media Production from the University Of Winchester.
