Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="StevenAC" data-source="post: 3111658" data-attributes="member: 12319">Your memory is mistaken.  The first intimation anyone outside the BBC had of the series Torchwood was the announcement on October 17, 2005 -- that's four months after the end of transmission (not production) of Series 1.  The impetus for the series did not come from RTD; the Controller of BBC3, Stuart Murphy, approached him about the possibility of making a "post-watershed sci-fi series" after the success of Casanova on BBC3 (transmitted in March 2005, just before Series One of Doctor Who), and the success of Who itself.There was speculation in various forums about "Torchwood" from about mid-July, but that was based on the hints dropped by RTD in the July Doctor Who Magazine (#359) that Series Two would have a "bad wolf"-like recurring element, the name of which had already been heard in Series One and which was an anagram.  This was quickly worked out by fans to be the "Torchwood" mentioned as one of the Weakest Link answers in Bad Wolf (episode 12 of Series One), but the announcement of a separate Torchwood series in October came as a surprise to everybody.A totally unjustified smear against RTD (and also indirectly an attack on people like Julie Gardner, Phil Collinson, and Jane Tranter for assuming they would allow such a thing without a murmur of protest).  The Torchwood thread in Series Two of Doctor Who is completely self-contained: introduced, developed and concluded within that series.  It needs nothing external to the series to justify its existence.Your statement is also shown to be nonsense by the way in which the promotion for Torchwood has been deliberately kept distinct from Doctor Who -- as far as I am aware, none of the ads and trailers which are now appearing for Torchwood make any reference whatever to Who.  Torchwood will succeed or fail on its own merits.  It's a different series, aimed at a different audience -- they don't want the children in the Who audience to be clamoring to watch Torchwood.The development of the Torchwood series was done over the summer of 2005, after RTD was approached by BBC3 (probably around early June).  By that time, as I said, the structure of Series Two of Doctor Who, including the involvement of the Torchwood Institute, had already long since been worked out.The DWM Series Two Companion reprints some notes by RTD dating from just before the transmission of Series One, which document the plans for Series Two as they existed at that time (March 2005).  All of the episodes, except for Tooth and Claw and Fear Her, are present and clearly recognisable even at this early stage (albeit in a different order to the way they ended up).  In particular, the finale takes place at "the Torchwood Institute, based in a Cardiff skyscraper."  RTD notes:As these notes hint, Tooth and Claw was not initially part of the Series Two lineup of episodes.  It filled a vacancy created when one of the original episodes was moved out to become this year's Christmas special.  And it wasn't originally going to be written by RTD, either; another writer's treatment of the idea didn't work out, and RTD ended up having to quickly produce this script himself.  So much for having a spinoff-pimping master plan.</blockquote>

Verification