A group of celebrity Doctor Who fans and actors from the show (including Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant, the incumbent Doctor and companion respectively), collectively known under the name "Who Cares?", became worried that the show would drop out of the public consciousness during the year-and-a-half it would be off the air, and so decided to produce a charity song — despite promoting the cause of keeping Doctor Who on the air, profits would have gone to Cancer Relief — which written by longtime fan Ian Levine, an Ascended Fanboy who was acting as the show's unofficial continuity advisor.note
The result was Doctor in Distress, released on March 15, 1985. The end product took the form of a high-energy pop song that recounted the show's origins, and many of its most famous monsters and villains.
To put it lightly, Doctor in Distress didn't do much for its intended cause, with many in the press feeling that having to wait a bit longer than usual for the next season of a TV show was an utterly inappropriate thing to base a charity single aroundnote , and that the show's fans should have counted their blessings that it had simply been put on hiatus rather than cancelled outright. The single is now looked back on at best as a weird little oddity, and at worst as something that allowed the BBC executives to paint Doctor Who as a show that only a small group of obsessives cared about anymore.
Not to be mistaken for Doctor in Distress (1963).
Tropes include:
- Big "NO!": The third verse begins with "No, no, no, no, NOOOOO! Bring back the Doctor!"
- Charity Motivation Song: The song's goal was to get Doctor Who Season 23 produced and released sooner than in eighteen months, while raising money for Cancer Relief into the bargain.
- Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: The Cybermen are referenced in one of the lines, with Justin Hayward singing they "had no feelings at all".
- Damsel in Distress: "Each screaming girl just hoped/That a Yeti wouldn't shoot her" — albeit the only female companion who actually encountered the Yeti during her time on the show was Victoria.
- Fantastic Racism: Referenced in Nicola Bryant's line, where she says that inside every Dalek casing "was a bubbling lump of hate".
- Forever War: What the song claims will happen if the show is cancelled, with it claiming the Doctor Who universe will be overrun and conquered by evil monsters. Thus, making this possibly the first "Stop the War" song to apply to a fictional conflict.
- It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: The first verse begins with the line "It was a cold, wet night in November", recounting the day the show premiered in November 1963.
- Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: The American accent that Nicola Bryant used while playing Peri was always flaky at best, but she really can't hold onto it while singing as well.
- Stock Footage: The accompanying music video is mostly constructed out of stock graphics and animations, with footage of the song's studio recording session overlaid.
- You Don't Look Like You: Despite Anthony Ainley performing his one line in-character as the Master, Ainley is shown to be clean-shaven in the accompanying music video. The same applies to Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, although the Brigadier had been shown clean-shaven in what at the time was his second-most-recent appearance (in "Mawdryn Undead").
