What did you have in mind?
The basic premise (which I outlined in a PM to
@Ncw8, to whom I extend my gratitude for some suggestions) is that Sidney Newman does not take the Head of Drama job at the BBC and remains with Associated British Corporation as their Head of Drama. The concept for
Doctor Who eventually finds its way to him when Donald Wilson and C.E. Webber are unable to get it produced at the BBC, so Newman makes some additions to the premise (i.e. the Doctor and the TARDIS, as he did in OTL) and responsibility for producing the series finds its way into the hands of Lew Grade of ITC Entertainment
Grade engages Gerry Anderson and his independent company AP Films to assist with the production; Anderson had enjoyed some success on American network television with his Grade-funded Supermarionation series
Supercar and
Fireball XL5, but he was keen to write, direct and produce in live action. In this TL,
Doctor Who is his opportunity. I also had the notion that, as a sop to keep Newman happy, Grade hires one of his proteges at ABC, Verity Lambert, as an associate producer. Most of the directors and screenwriters come from the existing ITC stable and include names such as Dennis Spooner, Philip Broadley and Terry Nation. So that is the basic premise of the concept: there's no
Thunderbirds or
Captain Scarlet in the 1960s because Gerry Anderson is making
Doctor Who for Lew Grade at ITV.
My idea is that Grade is keen to package the series as
The Avengers for kids, so it initially runs as a half-hour historical adventure serial on Saturday mornings under the title
The Explorers. The initial cast is headed by Steve Forrest, an American actor playing Captain John Clark, agent of Time Command (to improve the marketability of the series in America, which was always a key objective for Grade) with Sue Lloyd as his glamorous assistant and playwright and stage actor
Hugh Burden as an eccentric scientist named Doctor Who (in my mind, his performance would be comparable with his title role in
The Mind of Mr J.G. Reeder), who built the TARDIS and used a variety of James Bond style gadgets.
Burden easily steals the show and Forrest decides to leave after a single season, citing disenfranchisement with the series and a desire to move his family back to America. Compare to Ian Hendry quitting
The Avengers after one season in OTL. Sensing the off-beat potential of a series headlined by Burden, Grade arranges for the second season to be moved to a primetime evening slot with a full-length running time. Around this time, Terry Nation presents a script entitled "Crisis in Deep Space", a two-part episode in which the Doctor encounters a belligerent mechanical species called the Rocket Men, which are given a striking visual design by Anderson's art department and essentially become the Daleks of this TL. Encouraged by Lambert and Anderson, Grade has this story edited into a feature-length television movie and successfully sells it to NBC in America, who agree to license the broadcasting rights and put
Doctor Who on American screens in a primetime slot on a major network.
Burden announces his decision to leave the role at the end of his fourth season (1967/68) and Spooner devises a concept which serves the same role as regeneration in OTL (I couldn't think of anything very creative; I'm sure I could have come up with something eventually, but one must use one's imagination at this stage) and the Doctor is recast with
Laurence Payne in the title role. Payne's aristocratic demeanour and dashing appearance are an immediate hit with audiences, as is the introduction of a new arch-nemesis for Doctor Who in the form of "the Hood", a mad scientist created by Gerry Anderson who had access to his own time machine, played on a recurring basis by Peter Wyngarde for the best part of the next decade. Unfortunately, Payne is partially blinded while filming a fencing scene (mirroring a real life incident which I believe occurred when he was shooting an episode of
Sexton Blake) and has to quit the part unexpectedly in 1971.
Scrambling for a solution, Grade is able to persuade
Frank Finlay, who bore a superficial resemblance to Payne, to continue to play the same incarnation of the character. Finlay as "the second Second Doctor" is probably the only somewhat novel idea I had for this TL in the sense that I don't think it's been done by any other
Doctor Who TL, at least none which occur to me. Finlay never quite catches on and does not return after his one season as a replacement Doctor. I think around this time, Anderson would have quit as well, leaving under a cloud having realised that Grade's lawyers had drafted their contracts such that he was left with no rights of ownership to any of his creations.
Desperate to save his golden goose (with
The Saint having come to an end and Roger Moore moved on to pastures new), which was still popular in America, Grade lobbies hard for an American actor to play the next Doctor and pulls off a bit of a coup by hiring
Leonard Nimoy, who plays the role from 1973 until 1977 and becomes this TL's equivalent to Tom Baker. In real life, Nimoy worked for Grade in 1973 on an unsuccessful pilot produced by ITC called
Baffled!, in which he played a race car driver who gains psychic powers as a result of a head injury and uses them to solve mysteries. Here he's offered a choice between that and the lead role in
Doctor Who, and opts for the latter, surmising that it could help him to overcome his Spock typecasting.
When Nimoy leaves, Grade turns his attention back to the British audience and poaches a major star from the BBC to play the Fourth Doctor. Fresh off his stint presenting
The Generation Game,
Bruce Forsyth is a surprise choice who brings the full gamut of his decades of experience in music hall to bring more comedic, more whimsical "light entertainment" angle to the Doctor (I had a notion that it would come down to a choice between Forsyth and someone like Martin Shaw or Dennis Waterman, who would have been more of an action man). Here, I was influenced by my knowledge of how Barry Letts had hoped to make use of Jon Pertwee's skills as a song and dance man; he wanted the Third Doctor to sing, dance, play the guitar, do simple magic tricks and so on, though Pertwee was eager to do "proper acting" and it never really came to much. I could imagine Forsyth as the Doctor making lots of guest appearances on
Saturday Night Live, for instance. Somewhere in here, I suspect Grade would be keen to get a
Doctor Who movie into theatres, but I never decided where that would fit.
With six seasons from 1977 to 1983, he's the longest-running actor in the role and if anything more successful than his predecessor (achieving a level of popularity with children unseen since the mid-1960s), but he is eternally the most controversial. A key player in this era is one of Grade's newest discoveries: Jim Henson. Grade produced
The Muppet Show when nobody in America would buy into it, and he sells it back to NBC here as he did in real life. Henson wants to do
The Muppet Movie and Grade is willing to put up part of the money, but Henson and friends contributing their talents to
Doctor Who is one of the conditions. So for part of this run of episodes, the Doctor has a pseudo-Muppet sidekick who kicks about the TARDIS and comes up against all these fantastic-looking aliens courtesy of the Creature Shop. This largely comes to an end when Forsyth leaves and is replaced by a much younger actor,
Jeremy Irons, who had just have come to prominence from his appearances in ITV's adaptation of
Brideshead Revisited opposite Anthony Andrews. He plays the Doctor for two seasons (1983/84 and 1985/86) and despite being considered "so dreamy", his cold, stoic intellectual demeanour is off-putting to audiences and in any event he hears Hollywood calling and quits to be in
The Mission.
At this stage, my plans got a bit murkier. One idea was that it would continue on as usual and I had thoughts about off-the-wall future Doctors including
Martin Kemp and
Hugh Quarshie in the 90s and either
Geraldine Somerville or
Janet McTeer as the first female Doctor debuting in 2000. But the other notion I had was that the same string of box office disasters which forced Grade to close ITC in real life would also play out here, the result being that longtime stateside licensee NBC would intervene to buy
Doctor Who outright and shift production to America. From there, my thought was that production duties would be assigned to someone like Donald P. Bellisario or Stephen J. Cannell or someone else who insists on putting their middle initial in. The first "American" Doctor would be either an expatriate Brit (any Brit would jump at the chance) like
Edward Woodward or
Simon MacCorkindale (though the idea of some footnote about
Manimal being a massive hit series that got eight seasons and won a bunch of Golden Globes may have been too good to resist; I may have already done that in my AH.com TL but I can't remember; I'm not able to access AH.com to check in any case since I was banned) or an American actor. My first choice there would be someone like
Scott Bakula or
Richard Dean Anderson. After that, I suppose the temptation would be to turn it into a parade of popular sci-fi actors from the 90s; no denying that Doctor Who played by
Robert Picardo would be entertaining, of course. All that being said, I realise that "the Americans start making it" is essentially what I did last time around. Perhaps that's why I never got very far with it.
Well, that's it, for what it's worth.