Doctor Who producer vetoed writer’s "horrific" Ood scene
Some initial ideas were too terrifying for TV.
It's no secret that Doctor Who has never shied away from dark themes, but sometimes an idea comes along that's just too terrifying to show on screen.
That's exactly what happened for Keith Temple, who penned the widely-praised season 4 episode Planet of the Ood, starring David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor and Catherine Tate as Donna Noble.
The episode shows the Doctor and Donna visiting the Ood-Sphere during one of their first adventures together, and vowing to free the Ood when they see the alterations being performed on the creatures.
As he revisits the episode for a new novelisation, Temple exclusively told RadioTimes.com: "When I first started, and this was a first draft and storylining stage, I wanted it to be quite dark – because as a kid, the most memorable stories for me were the dark ones, the scary ones.
"I wrote a whole sequence which was set in Ood conversion, where you see the Ood translator balls being kind of stitched onto the Ood and they're going through these kind of conveyor belts.
"And at that early stage, I think it was maybe [producer] Julie Gardner who said, ‘I think this is just a bit too horrific.’ So we cut it, but I’ve put it in the book."
And it wasn't the only scene that was cut from the episode.
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He continued: "The other one – I don't even know that it made the first draft but it was certainly in the story synopsis, that the Ood could climb up walls, I think that may have been an expense issue, so they said no to that."
The episode provides integral moments in the relationship between the Doctor and Donna, but Temple didn't always know he was writing for Catherine Tate.
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"When I was writing it, Catherine had been in the Christmas special and then she'd gone," he explained. "And when I went for initial meetings with Russell, he would say things like, 'We have this new character, she's called Penny, and she's like this, and she's a bit like that.'
"I had an idea that she was a bit...'Woah', a bit out there. He'd say after a first draft, 'You've sort of got her character right,' and then the second draft was, 'It's nearly there, not quite,' and the last time they said, 'For God's sake, it's Catherine Tate!'"
As for how he feels revisiting the episode for his new novelisation all these years later, Temple explained: "It was fascinating because I was thinking back, not that long ago, it must be 16 years since I first looked at it, created it, and I haven't watched it that many times since. So, looking back at it, I was struck by how it really was a lovely adventure."
The Planet of the Ood by Keith Temple (BBC Books, £9.99) publishes on 13th July. Doctor Who is available to stream on BBC iPlayer with episodes of the classic series also available on BritBox – you can sign up for a 7-day free trial here.
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