Artistic License History / Doctor Who

• "The Web of Fear" has the Doctor say Underground trains are "a little after your time, Victoria" (the novelisation goes further, with Victoria absolutely bewildered by the idea, because where would all the smoke and steam go?) Victoria met the Doctor in 1866 London, and the "cut and cover" Underground Metropolitan Railway had opened three years earlier (it used condension engines so little steam actually escaped).
• "City of Death" has a doozy — even when the episode aired, people were pointing out that life began on Earth about 3-4 billion (thousand million) years ago, not 400 million. Given a lovely Hand Wave from producer Graham Williams:
  "The good Doctor makes the odd mistake or two but I think an error of 3,600 million years is pushing it! His next edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica will provide an erratum."
  • Another thing — the atmosphere of primordial Earth would have been unbreathable and poisonous, though it's possible the TARDIS is projecting an atmospheric force field as it's been seen to do in other stories.
• "Four to Doomsday" has the Maya civilization being twice as old, or more, as it actually was.
• In the Victorian-era set stories "Ghost Light" (1989) and "Tooth and Claw" (2006), different villains plot to overthrow Queen Victoria and seize the throne for themselves thereby, it's explained, becoming rulers of the most powerful country in the world. The only problem with this plan is that Victoria was a mostly powerless symbolic figurehead, and the villains' plots make about as much sense as a 2010s villain planning to control Britain by replacing Elizabeth II (which, incidentally, is used as the basis for the villain's plot in Johnny English). The British monarch has not attempted to veto a Bill of Parliament since Queen Anne, and has not appointed a government that did not have the confidence of Parliament since King William IV. The first example may be justified by the villain in "Ghost Light" being very stupid and over-confident, although that doesn't excuse the second. Fans have theorised either that since the villain arrived in the Elizabethan era when the monarchy had far more power and has been pretty isolated ever since, it didn't quite realise that its plan wouldn't work, or that it intended to use Victoria's position of vast informal influence (for one thing, most of the European monarchs were directly related to her) to access the people with actual power. Either would have made sense, though the latter might have required a bit of explaining.
• "The Shakespeare Code" repeatedly shows plays being performed in the Globe Theatre at night. Plays in Elizabethan England were performed during the day, since several hundred years prior to the invention of electric lighting (or even limelight), they would have had no way to light the stage properly when it was dark. This one can be chalked up to the fact that all of the scenes at the Globe were shot in the real-life Globe, which, like the original which it is a replica of, stages its plays exclusively in the daytime, resulting in very limited daytime shooting time for the show to use.
• "The Next Doctor" is explicitly set on December 24, 1851. There is a splendid full Moon that night and early that morning — though on that precise day, the Moon was actually a waxing quarter.
• "The Pandorica Opens": The Doctor accurately points out that Stonehenge was already ancient by 102 AD/CE... but it was also a lot more complete back then, having been gradually quarried over the centuries before becoming a public site. Of course, rebuilding Stonehenge would have been beyond the show's budget.
• "Rosa" is, for the most part, a very historically accurate telling of Rosa Parks' story — except for one detail that can probably be chalked up to budget: her 1943 encounter with James Blake, unlike its depiction in the episode, actually took place during a torrential downpour.
• "The Witchfinders":
  • In a justified case, given the sexism of the period, King James I/VI states as a fact that his mother murdered his father. Lord Darnley's murder is actually a hotly debated subject among historians, though his wife Mary, Queen of Scots arranging it in revenge for the killing of her secretary David Rizzio has been a quite enticing theory.
  • Becka Savage chopping down a tree. A lady of her social standing would surely have ordered a servant to do it instead. However, it is pointed out that she married up, so the social etiquette may not have occurred to her.
• "Spyfall" gives Ada Lovelace's maiden name as Ada Gordon. Clicking on that link to The Other Wiki will inform you that no, it wasn't: her maiden name was "Byron" after her father. This is, however, a somewhat understandable mistake, as her father's full name was actually George Gordon Byron. Presumably the writer did not realise that his daughter only inherited the latter part of his surname, or thought he was "George Gordon, Baron Byron" in the same way as, say, Tarzan is John Clayton, Earl Greystoke.
• "Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror" is set in 1903 and includes Tesla's assistant Dorothy Skerrit. However, in real life Skerrit didn't start working for Tesla until 1912.
• "Wild Blue Yonder" has a Cold Open in which the Doctor and Donna briefly meet Isaac Newton in 1666, and Donna uses the word "gravity", which he mishears as "mavity", which from then on becomes the actual word. Slight problem: Isaac Newton already knew the word "gravity", which dates from before 1500 in the sense Donna uses it (pun aside) and from 1620 in the sense Newton would later use it.

---