16 NOVEMBER
TIME CRASH
There’s something very wrong with the Fifth Doctor’s TARDIS – not least the skinny idiot he finds suddenly inside it…
By ALAN BARNES
Five Alive
Fitting neatly between Martha’s departure at the end of Last of the Time Lords and the bow of the starship Titanic bursting through the wall of the TARDIS control room ahead of Voyage of the Damned, Time Crash was a short (7m 42s) sketch especially mounted for the BBC’s annual Children in Need telethon. This was an association first established in 1983, when the 20th Anniversary Special The Five Doctors was held over, missing the actual anniversary by two days, so it could be shown during the course of the night.
Time Crash marked the first time a ‘classic series’ Doctor had turned up in the revived series – with Peter Davison again directed by Graeme Harper, who’d been responsible for his final adventure proper, The Caves of Androzani (1984). In Doctor Who Magazine issue 389, writer Steven Moffat described how David Tennant first proposed Peter (in principle) when they bumped into one another at a Chiswick House event: “…we were having a bit of a laugh, and drinking too much, and he said, ‘We should get Peter back in,’ because he really loves Peter, and loves his Doctor and all that. He was dead keen.” Tennant had been 11 when the Fifth Doctor made his debut… hence the Tenth Doctor’s line to his earlier self: “You were my Doctor.”