10 Unbelievable Doctor Who Facts That Are Somehow True
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Anyone who's ever watched a special feature or attended a Doctor Who convention can attest to the crazy behind the scenes secrets often trotted out by the cast and crew. Anecdotes such as Nicholas Courtney's eyepatch story have become so well-known that they're greeted as if it's a beloved band playing their greatest hits. Often, it doesn't even matter how much of the anecdote is true.
And yet, many of Doctor Who's tallest tales are true.
Yes, John Nathan-Turner really did offer Sir Laurence Olivier a role as a mutant in Revelation of the Daleks! Writer Malcolm Hulke did have an MI5 file! But it's debatable if any Dalek operators really were left inside the casings while everyone went off to lunch.
Given that Doctor Who has been around for 62 years, it's inevitable that it's generated countless wild stories that are rooted in unbelievable truths. Be it a former companion discovering a future Doctor at a youth theatre production, or Tom Baker's new companion almost being a heavily-armed robot rottweiler, these unbelievable Doctor Who facts are utterly, utterly true.
10. The Twin Dilemma Writer's Typewriter Explodes
The Twin Dilemma is a deeply flawed story, and there's plenty of blame to be doled out for the failures of the Sixth Doctor's debut. One of the guilty parties was the serial's writer, Anthony Steven – progress on the script was painfully slow, and what was submitted didn't meet the approval of script editor Eric Saward or director Peter Moffatt.
Although Steven eventually fell ill (forcing Saward to overhaul the story and do the rewrites himself), he did offer some increasingly wild and out-there excuses for the delays to the script. The one that the production team remembers is that Anthony Steven's typewriter "literally" exploded, which certainly trumps the dog eating your first draft as an excuse!
Whether Stevens' typewriter actually exploded or not isn't known, but it's clear that the more than 60-year-old screenwriter wasn't up to the task of writing his first and only Doctor Who story. Indeed, with the exception of further credits on drama series All Creatures Great & Small, The Twin Dilemma would be one of Stevens' final writing gigs altogether.
To borrow a word from the Master's vocabulary, it was a rather ignominious end for the veteran screenwriter.