From This Is Kent:
SCRIPTS from never-seen episodes of Doctor Who have been found in Herne Bay.
Prop-maker Jason Onion unearthed them while researching the town’s links with the series – the brainchild of BBC head of drama Sydney Newman – as part of a plan to build a Tardis to raise money for Children in Need.
The works had laid undiscovered in a box of paperwork by writer Anthony Coburn, who devised the concept of the Tardis at his Herne Bay home after seeing a police box near BBC headquarters.
Life-long Doctor Who fan Mr Onion initially didn’t realise their significance and believed they were from the first four episodes, screened in 1963, written by Mr Coburn.
He said: “With the consent of Anthony’s wife, Joan Coburn-Moon, and other family members, the family lent me a box of his work and I saw the scripts, but put them to one side. When I scanned the cover later I realised it didn’t have the right title for the first episode.
…
The scripts were early drafts for the first episodes – the collection includes two versions of the first episode and an alternative episode two, and another three scripts as well as the Masters of Luxor stories, which were replaced by the original Dalek serial.
This bit is most interesting to me:
“It explains the Tardis’s original name, the planet Doctor Who came from and that his granddaughter – Susan in the programmes, but Suzanne in the scripts – was a princess saved from another world.
That’s closer to what I’ve always imagined Susan’s “real” story was — I simply couldn’t imagine the Doctor abandoning her among short-lived humans if he knew she was destined to a much longer life than them.
Head over to This Is Kent for more of the lost tidbits.
(If you stumble across a cool Doctor Who thing, feel free to email me with a link.)
Interesting, but regeneration in particular is a huge claim to be making this early in the programme’s history. I’m sceptical for now…
Me too. There’s a tremendously strong desire often seen, to create an author (or auteur) when one is not evident, and one of the remarkable things about Doctor Who is how strongly it resists the whole concept. I’m sure Coburn came up with some interesting stuff, but I’d be very much surprised if The Onion’s interpretations above weren’t stretching things a bit.
The extract seen doesn’t seem to add anything to what we already knew from the production subtitles on the DVD; the ‘sonic screwdriver’ is surely the Doctor’s pen torch; and like RogerBW I would need to see the texts to judge how close Coburn’s concept of bodily renewal is to what we saw in 1966 and afterwards.