10 Doctor Who Stories That Had Troubled Productions
7. The Two Doctors (1985)
The Episodes: The Second and Sixth Doctors meet after becoming mixed up in a Sontaran plot to master the secrets of time travel. The Problem: Various production issues. While changing this storys filming location from New Orleans to Seville for financial reasons would prove to be a minor change at most, it led to far more problems than just writer Robert Holmes having to cut a lot of the humour based around the differences between Britain and America. The heat of locations in Seville caused makeup to melt; wigs worn by Patrick Troughton and Jacqueline Pearce (Chessene) were lost and replacements took three days to arrive, a local stuntman refused to perform a stunt as choreographed, and Carmen Gómez (Anita) refused to wear a costume designed for her. Gómez has also revealed that she was cast at the last minute to replace an actor who had dropped out. But most notably; a scene filmed in an olive grove had to be reshot after the negatives were scratched. This wouldnt havent been too serious an issue under normal circumstances but because the damaged negatives were discovered after actors James Saxon and Carmen Gómez had finished their work on the story; the reshoot necessitated flying them back to Seville at great expense. Though had the plan to shoot in New Orleans gone forward, these issues would have been correspondingly larger because of being further away from the UK.
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.
