14 Doctor Who Urban Legends That Are Actually True

12. Every Day's A School Day

BBC

It€™s widely reported that the BBC originally conceptualised Doctor Who to be the educational offering of their Saturday night line up which families would be able to enjoy together as they ate their tea. Every day€™s a school day, after all. The intention was to subtly inform the audience about space and time travel through the narrative guise of the titular Time Lord€™s ongoing escapades which sounds pretty good on paper. Historical figures, such as Marco Polo, would be featured to add a sense of real life gravitas to the proceedings with viewers being left with a general sense of enlightenment after each episode. Well, that was the plan, anyway. As it turns out, though, early test screenings showed that viewers just weren€™t responding to the more informational aspects of the series and producers were also forced to re-evaluate their initial premise of the TARDIS taking the form of an object relevant to each respective story€™s historical setting when it transpired that the show€™s limited budget wouldn't be able to support all of the redesigns. As such, the Doctor€™s spaceship became the blue police box that fans know and love today and the show€™s educational mantra was ditched in favour of a more fantasy-based drama. There are still lessons to be learned from watching Doctor Who, of course, and it€™s storylines are always (well, usually) based on scientific fact.

Doctor Who Editor
Doctor Who Editor

Dan Butler is the Doctor Who Editor at WhatCulture.com. When he isn't writing his own articles or editing other people's, he can be found trawling the internet for gifs of Steven Moffat laughing. Contact him via dan.butler@whatculture.co.uk.