Trivia / Doctor Who S26 E4 "Survival"

---

• Actor-Inspired Element: It was Sylvester McCoy's idea to have a Cats poster in the youth club. Sophie Aldred also added her own initials to the graffiti.
• Awesome, Dear Boy: Rona Munro approached script editor Andrew Cartmel at a BBC scriptwriting workshop and said that she'd "kill to write for Doctor Who".
• Cast the Runner-Up: Hale and Pace swapped roles soon before recording; Hale was originally going to have played Harvey, while Pace was originally going to have played Len.
• DVD Commentary: Along with the normal commentary on the DVD, the third episode also was commentated on by a group of fans who won a contest in Doctor Who Magazine.
• Executive Meddling: Several things regarding Ace were removed from the script due to concerns about the young audience, including a line about underage drinking and being "almost legal" now, and her possession of a Swiss army knife, which was changed to a regular tin opener.
• Executive Veto: Midge appearing to drop dead at the Master's word is because BBC executives considered his originally scripted fate (where the Master had the other cheetah-infected boys tear him apart for showing weakness) unacceptably gruesome.
• Looping Lines: The closing monologue was recorded over the ending scene when it was clear that there wouldn't be another season.
• On-Set Injury: Anthony Ainley recalled that for the Doctor and the Master's final confrontation, Sylvester McCoy found the contact lenses he had to wear painful. Ainley accidentally struck him in the wrist with the bone and apologised. McCoy quipped that thanks to the pain in his wrist he couldn't feel the pain in his eyes. (Lisa Bowerman also suffered an allergic reaction from wearing the lenses for so long, meaning that a planned shot of her eyes turning back to normal as she died had to be scrapped.)
• Orphaned Reference: The motorcycle duel was meant to take place on a building site, which would have made the pile of rubbish the Doctor lands on more explicable than it is in the final product. It's implied in a Past Doctor Adventures book that the Doctor went back in time to before this serial to leave the rubbish in the open field for him to land in. An earlier Doctor Who Magazine comic strip has the Seventh Doctor encountering the Sixth Doctor, who turns out to have left the sofa for him, and complaining that he asked for something less obvious.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: Adele Silva embellished her part of Squeak in interviews once she was an adult. In her version of the plot, Squeak is infected by the Planet of the Cheetah People and Silva had to wear yellow contact lenses like William Barton (Midge) and Anthony Ainley (The Master) did. In the real serial, none of that happens to Squeak.
• Recast as a Regular: Lisa Bowerman (Karra) would later play Bernice Summerfield.
• Stunt Casting: Alternative comedians Hale and Pace feature prominently as staff in a corner shop.
• Stunt Double: Stunt legend Eddie Kidd doubled for William Barton in a motorcycle crash scene in part three. Tip Tipping, the show’s regular stunt coordinator walking off the production, as Kidd was not a member of the actors' union Equity. Tipping's anger was arguably misplaced, however. Margaret Thatcher's government had abolished the requirement of performers to be Equity members earlier in 1988. In other words, Doctor Who was not in violation of any then-current union regulations. Tipping's beef was really with the changes Thatcher — and not John Nathan-Turner — had brought in.
• Troubled Production: Extras struggled with the cheetah suits in the hot weather. Reportedly, there was a delay in filming after one of the extras just stripped out of her suit and walked off set in her underwear having had enough.
• What Could Have Been:
  • According to Andrew Cartmel, the initial draft of the script did not feature the Master at all, and he was introduced because John Nathan-Turner wanted at least one story in the season to feature a "name" villain. A broadly positive example of Executive Meddling, as the Master's role in the story is plausible and in character, and what turned out to be his final old school appearance reversed much of the Villain Decay he had experienced in the previous couple of appearances. Plus, the final classic serial having a name villain is in some ways fitting.
  • There was a scene in which the Doctor tried to stuff a large gold coin into Ange's donations tin. He finally got the coin to drop by tapping it with one finger — which was meant to foreshadow the Doctor's later subdual of Paterson in a similar fashion.
  • Sgt. Paterson was originally a police rather than Territorial Army sergeant (and it was in this capacity that he investigated complaints of the Doctor's behaviour), but this was changed as the producer did not want a negative portrayal of a policeman.
  • Rona Munro's original conception of the Cheetah People was just as humans, albeit with cat-like faces, and cheetah spots all over their bodies.
  • Ace was supposed to burn Karra on a funeral pyre, referencing her penchant for pyromania.
  • Originally, the Doctor was to transport both himself and the Master back to Perivale after their climactic duel on the planet of the Cheetah People. The Master would then confront the Doctor as to his true nature, accusing him of being something other than a Time Lord. The Doctor admits that he has evolved and is not "just" a Time Lord, before describing himself as "multi-talented". The Master then uses a Kitling lurking nearby to escape. John Nathan-Turner felt that this scene was too explicit in casting doubt on the Doctor's past, and had it excised, with the planet teleporting the Doctor to Earth alone and the Master's fate being left ambiguous.
  • The motorcycle duel between the Doctor and Midge was supposed to be in an unused lot, which is why there was an abundance of junk in the area.
• Word of Gay: Rona Munro said that the lesbian subtext between Ace and Karra was deliberate.
• Working Title: Cat-Flap, Blood Hunt and The Survival. The first title is Hilarious in Hindsight because when the show came back some 16 years later, one of the first things the Doctor did was nearly stick his head through a cat-flap.

---