The most important thing you need to know about the 1996 TV Movie is that it was a huge success. It was a massive hit. Sometimes, when a project doesn’t lead to the greater things that had been hoped for it, it is retrospectively considered a failure, but the TV Movie was a triumph.
Bear in mind that seven years earlier Doctor Who had been barely scraping four million viewers; apart from a few, little-watched repeats and an EastEnders mash-up for 1993’s Children in Need it had been off the air since 1989. It was, at best, regarded as an object of nostalgia, as a fondly remembered but nevertheless dead TV show; and, at worst, regarded as the butt of a joke, usually one about wobbly walls or monsters proving unable to climb stairs.