3. Midnight Was A Hasty Replacement
Series 4 maintained the tradition of the best stories coming about by accident. The third series triumph Blink - now often cited as one of the best episode of Doctor Who in its long history - was something Steven Moffat put together quickly to plug the gap left by Stephen Fry's cancelled episode. Fry had put together an episode for Series 2 that had to be delayed for the next series, but he found he couldn't rework the story for Martha instead of Rose and dropped out. The crown jewel of Series 4 was Midnight, a companion-lite bottle episode that relied brilliantly on psychological horror. But Midnight was also a hastily-written replacement for what was originally planned for the eighth episode of the series, Century House. Written by Tom MacRae, who also penned the reintroduction of the Cybermen in Series 2 and would go on to write The Girl Who Waited for Series 6, this story would see the Doctor go on paranormal reality show Most Haunted. Watched live by Donna and her mum from their living room, the Doctor would have explored a spooky clifftop house in search of the ghost of the Red Widow, with flashbacks to the 1950s and the house burning down at the end. Yvette Fielding's involvement was unconfirmed. In terms of format, it sounds just as experimental as Midnight so who knows how the episode would ultimately have been received. Though the script was completed, it was cancelled by Russell T Davies as he felt that the light-hearted tone was too similar to The Unicorn and the Wasp, which was due to broadcast the week before, and the series was lacking an intensely scary episode. The episode was replaced with Davies' own companion-lite script and moved to later in the series in order to make up for the rewriting time and put a buffer between the Moffat's library two-parter and Turn Left.