10 Terrible Doctor Who Ideas That Nearly Happened
9. Tom Baker In The TV Movie
One of Philip Segal's biggest stipulations for the 1996 TV Movie was that he maintained continuity with the previous 33 years. To that end, he cast Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor for the regeneration into Paul McGann's Eighth Doctor.
While that itself was arguably a bad idea for a relaunch of the show, it made far more sense than one change suggested by one of the executive producers.
Jo Wright, who represented the BBC's interests on the project, was keen to move away from the apparently negative public perception of the Sylvester McCoy era. Wright believed that Tom Baker would be a bigger draw as a past Doctor to hand over the torch to McGann.
That might've been true – not least because Baker was the best-known Doctor in the USA at the time – but it would've been utterly disastrous for Doctor Who continuity if an older Tom Baker had been gunned down in San Francisco. Would that negate the entire 1980s period of Doctor Who? What would that even mean?!
Sylvester McCoy was absolutely the right choice for the TV Movie, and given Baker's reluctance to work on things like The Five Doctors, there's no telling whether he'd have agreed to return anyway.