20 Cancelled Doctor Who Episodes You Need To Know About

A few Doctor Who audio dramas have inspired television episodes – namely, Rob Shearman’s Jubilee, which became Dalek, and Marc Platt’s Spare Parts, which became Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel.

At one point, Shearman’s spooky Christmas tale The Chimes of Midnight (arguably the most acclaimed Big Finish release ever) was also in the running to be adapted.

Released in 2002, the original starred the Eighth Doctor and his audio-only companion Charley Pollard, and was set in an Edwardian country house where people are killed on the chime of every hour.

The television version would instead have featured the Eleventh Doctor, Amy and Rory, with the action moved to a modern-day setting and the Christmas element dropped.

Shearman attended read-throughs for Series 5 but felt he could never quite get the story to work (which is perhaps not surprising, given the dark twists of the source material). As such, it was abandoned.

Nice as it would have been for Chimes to reach a larger audience, a screen version would've potentially lessened its impact. So it’s probably for the best that it never happened.