10 HUGE Revelations About Disney Doctor Who In Russell T Davies' New Memoir
7. 73 Yards & Dot And Bubble Were Written At The Last Minute
It’s already well-known that Ncuti Gatwa was still filming Sex Education for the first few months of Season 1 production – hence the decision to shoot the Doctor-lites 73 Yards and Dot and Bubble first.
But this wasn’t always going to be the case. We've all been assuming that when Ncuti was cast, the Doctor Who team knew he'd be unavailable for the first few months of filming, and that the two Doctor-lite episodes were part of the plan at that point.
But in fact they weren't written until months after he was cast, when it became clear that Sex Education was going to take longer than expected.
In other words, 73 Yards and Dot and Bubble were actually replacement scripts, written fairly late in the day when Ncuti became unavailable.
As RTD recalls, he was "dancing like crazy to invent stories in which we could parcel up his filming and still give him weight in the story, and get them shot on a mad schedule."
Many have pointed out that having two Doctor-lite stories in an eight-episode season isn’t a great look. And RTD acknowledges this, while reasoning that "there was nothing we could have done."
What this also tells us is that there were originally two very different episodes included in RTD's vision for Season 1, and indeed, the memoir mentions how he pitched a full eight-episode slate to Disney before they came onboard.
Frustratingly however there's no mention of what these two original episodes were. Were they pushed back to Season 2, or scrapped entirely? And which writers were attached to them?
For now, that remains a mystery – though it does explain why so much of Season 1 was written by RTD.