Doctor Who: Children in Need

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This article is about the Doctor Who special produced in 2005 for Children in Need. For the 2007 special, see Time Crash.
"Doctor Who: Children in Need"
Doctor Who charity special

The Tenth Doctor, having just regenerated.
Cast
Doctor David Tennant (Tenth Doctor)
Companion Billie Piper (Rose Tyler)
Production
Writer Russell T. Davies
Director Euros Lyn
Script editor Unknown
Producer Phil Collinson
Executive producer(s) Russell T. Davies
Julie Gardner
Production code N/A
Series Children in Need special (2005)
Length 7 minutes
Originally broadcast 18 November 2005
Chronology
← Preceded by Followed by →
"The Parting of the Ways" "The Christmas Invasion"

"Doctor Who: Children in Need" is a 7-minute "mini-episode" of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. It was broadcast on BBC One as part of the 2005 appeal for the children's charity Children in Need on 18 November 2005.

Contents

[edit] Synopsis

The Doctor has just regenerated; will Rose be able to trust this strange new Doctor?

[edit] Plot

Following on directly from the end of "The Parting of the Ways", the newly-regenerated Tenth Doctor sets the TARDIS coordinates for the planet Barcelona (Tuesday, 6 p.m., October 5006) while Rose watches him suspiciously. He delightedly examines his new appearance (noting he has a slight weakness in the dorsal tubercle, a full head of hair, sideburns, is slimmer, and has a mole between his shoulder-blades), while asking her what she thinks of the way he looks.

Rose, confused and frightened, asks him who he is, and when he tells her he is the Doctor, she does not believe him. Confused as to what she has just seen, she theorises that this stranger has replaced the Doctor by means of teleportation, or perhaps he is a Slitheen. She demands that he bring the Doctor back, and the Doctor tries to reassure her that it is him, telling her how they first met in the cellar at Henrik's, and the first word he ever said to her — "Run!"

Rose starts to believe him, and the Doctor leaps around the console happily. However, she is still unsettled, and asks him if he can change back. Deflated, he replies that he cannot, and asks her if she wants to leave. When Rose hesitates in her answer, he resets the ship's coordinates for her council estate on Christmas Eve, offering her the choice to stay with her mother or continue her travels with him.

Suddenly, the Doctor suffers some form of seizure, expelling glowing energy from his mouth, and the TARDIS shudders as if in sympathetic response. The Doctor tells Rose the regeneration is going wrong and starts to act maniacally, throwing switches on the TARDIS console and ranting about increasing speed as the sounds of the Cloister Bell start ringing through the console room. As Rose hangs on to the console for dear life, the TARDIS heads for a crash landing on Christmas Eve.

[edit] Continuity

  • The pre-credits sequence for the mini-episode was a montage of the climactic scenes of "The Parting of the Ways".
  • Apart from the recap of the events at the conclusion of "The Parting of the Ways" and the time tunnel effects, this is one of only three stories that take place entirely within the confines of the TARDIS and features only the regular cast, the others being the First Doctor story The Edge of Destruction and the later Children in Need special "Time Crash".
  • Rose refers to previous adventures, mentioning nanogenes ("The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances"), the Gelth ("The Unquiet Dead") and the Slitheen ("Aliens of London"/"World War Three" and "Boom Town").
  • During the Doctor's initial spasms, Rose suggests they go back and get Captain Jack to help. The Doctor replies that Jack is too busy rebuilding the Earth (devastated in "The Parting of the Ways"), suggesting that he is aware — or at least may want Rose to believe, that Jack is alive. This could be a foreshadowing of the spin-off series Torchwood. According to his comments in "Utopia", the Doctor knew that Jack would be immortal.
  • Post-regeneration instability has been present, to varying degrees, in every one of the Doctor's regenerations, from the Second Doctor's casual shrugging-off of his predecessor as someone else (The Power of the Daleks) to the Sixth Doctor's psychopathic behaviour (The Twin Dilemma) and the Eighth Doctor's amnesia (the 1996 Doctor Who television movie). This behaviour seems to be common to Time Lords, as the Master exhibits the same manic instability at the end of "Utopia" when he regenerates, a fact that was confirmed by Phil Collinson in the podcast for the show.
  • The ringing sound that echoes through the console room near the end of the mini-episode is the sound of the TARDIS's Cloister Bell, first heard in Logopolis. Its ringing is supposed to signal "wild catastrophes and sudden calls to man the battle stations," as the Fourth Doctor put it. This episode contains no in-dialogue explanation for the sound effect.

[edit] Production

  • The mini-episode was not broadcast with a title, but throughout the Children in Need appeal a preview banner for the segment called it The New Doctor. Russell T. Davies joked in a Doctor Who Magazine article that it was called Pudsey Cutaway – after the Children in Need teddy-bear mascot and modifying Dalek Cutaway, an alternative title for "Mission to the Unknown" (something of a one-off special itself, from the programme's earliest black-and-white era). The 2006 Doctor Who Magazine special Series Two Companion revealed that the title used on production papers was Doctor Who: Children in Need.
  • The mini-episode was written and recorded separately from both The Parting of the Ways and The Christmas Invasion and recorded after the latter had completed shooting. The Christmas Invasion does not reprise any of this episode (although the Doctor does mention having a mole between his shoulder blades in both the mini-episode and The Christmas Invasion).
  • Other specially made episodes of Doctor Who include Dimensions in Time (also for Children in Need) and Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death (for Comic Relief), which are not usually considered canonical. The 20th-anniversary special, The Five Doctors (1983), was broadcast as part of that year's Children in Need night, but is considered canonical; the 2007 Children in Need mini-episode, "Time Crash", is also considered canonical.
  • The online feed of the mini-episode ended with several pre-recorded inserts of Tennant and Piper appealing for donations to Children in Need. The appeals in which they both appear were light-hearted, with Piper claiming to be Tennant and vice versa in the first, and in the second the pair introducing themselves as Letitia Dean and Nicholas Lyndhurst.
  • The mini-episode ended with the text, "Doctor Who will return in THE CHRISTMAS INVASION", an announcement that also followed "The Parting of the Ways". It had no end credits, and so Tennant was neither listed as "Doctor Who" (as he had been in the credits of "The Parting of the Ways") nor as "The Doctor" (as he was in "The Christmas Invasion").
  • Russell T. Davies stated in the book The Inside Story that he brokered an agreement with the BBC that there would be "... no banners along the bottom of the screen thanking people for sitting in bathtubs full of baked beans, and no Pudsey on the TARDIS console!"
  • This special has yet to be broadcast in Canada by series co-producers the CBC.

[edit] Broadcast and DVD release

  • According to the Broadcasters Audience Research Board (BARB), the overnight ratings suggest that 10.7 million viewers were tuned into BBC One from 9.00pm to 9.15pm (a 45.1% audience share), the slot in which the mini-episode was broadcast in most regions. This represented the highest ratings that Children in Need had received in eight years.
  • The mini-episode was included on the Series 2 DVD box set.[1] The version of the special on the Region 2 DVD is slightly different: the opening montage to recap "The Parting of the Ways" has been changed, the cloister bell sound has been removed, and the incidental music throughout being re-done (including a rare use of part of the main theme as incidental, when the TARDIS changes course to Earth). This was later revealed to have been a 'rough-cut' version that was used by mistake and should never have been released, and the later Region 1 release features the broadcast version.
  • The U.S. Series 2 premiere on Sci-Fi in September of 2006 featured the Children in Need special spliced in at the beginning, blending into The Christmas Invasion. The seven minutes added to the one-hour special fit the typical U.S. show length for a 90-minute slot (with commercials). The episode was re-aired in this fashion as well that Christmas, but subsequent airings on Sci-Fi of Christmas Invasion are in its original length. The BBC America airing of Christmas Invasion did not feature the special either, as the episode was edited down to fit into an hour slot with commercials.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Series 2 boxset details

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
The TARDIS Index File has information related to:

[edit] Reviews

v • d • e
Doctor Who: Regeneration television stories
First Doctor
Second Doctor
Third Doctor
Fourth Doctor
Fifth Doctor
Sixth Doctor
Seventh Doctor
Eighth Doctor
Ninth Doctor
Tenth Doctor
"Doctor Who: Children in Need" • "The Christmas Invasion"
Other characters
Planet of the Spiders • Destiny of the Daleks • "Utopia"
See also