20 Cancelled Doctor Who Episodes You Need To Know About
5. Century House
Like Mark Gatiss, Tom MacRae (writer of Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel for Series 2) was commissioned to write a story for Series 3 that was pushed back to Series 4 and then abandoned.
It would've been a Doctor Who spin on Most Haunted-style shows, following a television crew as they attempt to track down the ghost of the Red Widow in a spooky clifftop house.
It was specifically conceived as a companion-lite episode, with the Doctor joining the broadcast and the companion watching events unfold from the comfort of their sofa, allowing these scenes to be shot in a single day.
Despite its dark setting, Century House was apparently quite light in tone. It was pencilled in as the eighth episode of Series 4, directly after The Unicorn and the Wasp. However, as production drew nearer RTD realised that he didn’t want to run two comedic episodes back-to-back, and he opted to write a last-minute replacement.
And that last-minute replacement was? Only a certain stone-cold classic known as Midnight. So yeah, probably a good job that Century House never got made!