Doctor Who is just a day away from its 50th anniversary. On Nov. 23, the long-running British TV series will broadcast a special extended episode in 75 countries. The worldwide broadcast will be simultaneous so fans across the globe will experience it at the exact same time. Viewing parties are planned everywhere, and the episode will even be shown as a one-time screening in some cinemas — in 3D, no less.
It's hard to imagine, but there was a time when things didn't look so good for Doctor Who. In 1989, the BBC put the show, which had been making fresh episodes every year since 1963, on extended hiatus, citing declining ratings and shoddy production values.
See also: How 'Doctor Who' Won Over America
After that, there wasn't much in the way of new Doctor Who content apart from a few novels and comic strips. A 1996 effort to revive the show in the United States through a Fox TV movie of the week blew on the embers of hope, but it failed to ignite any interest (or ratings) in the mainstream.
In the late '90s, Doctor Who was, to most people, dead. Sure, the BBC licensed Virgin Publishing as well as Big Finish Productions to create original content (in book and audio form, respectively) — and Doctor Who Magazine kept running, month after month — but none of those projects ever had any hope of reaching beyond the show's most dedicated fans.
"The best way of putting it is it was completely out of fashion with a mainstream audience," says Nicholas Briggs, the voice of the Daleks and various other monsters in the TV series. "Doctor Who still had very potent references that everyone in Britain understood, but somehow the show itself — the possibility of the show coming back — that didn't seem to be on anyone's agenda."
Then, in the early 2000s, the BBC started producing original animated webcasts of new Doctor Who adventures. Although these, too, didn't have much reach outside of hardcore fans, the digital efforts at BBC Online (née BBCi) actually ended up playing a role in getting the TV show revived, for real, in 2005.

It's well known that BBC Controller Lorraine Heggessey worked hard to strike the 2003 deal with Russell T. Davies (then known primarily for the U.K. version of Queer as Folk) to produce a new series of Doctor Who for broadcast in 2005. That series, starring Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor and Billie Piper as his companion, was incredibly well received, leading to many more seasons and culminating in Saturday's 50th anniversary special.
What isn't as well known are the efforts of the team behind the original Doctor Who webcasts and the role they played in helping the revival efforts, according to people involved at the time. In the early 2000s, the BBC had a team of people managing content around its "cult TV" properties, many of which weren't in production. The team pushed hard for the BBC's first-ever online broadcast to be a Doctor Who adventure.
"I think those things happened because of more and more Doctor Who fans getting into the BBC and finding ways of doing types of Doctor Who," says Briggs. "If we can't have a TV series, let's do some web animation. People were trying to get as close as possible to doing Doctor Who."
The first original Doctor Who webcast was "Death Comes to Time," which aired in 2001 to 2002. It was done as a motion comic, where individual panels are combined with voice acting and sound effects. It was also a very unusual episode, casting the actor who played the Seventh Doctor, Sylvester McCoy, the last man to play the role in the original TV series.

The thing was, the role of the Doctor had already been recast in the 1996 TV movie, and technically another actor, Paul McGann, who was also recording audio Doctor Who adventures for Big Finish at the time, was the "proper" current Doctor. That wasn't even the most surprising thing about the story: At the end (spoiler alert!), the Doctor dies.
That's right: The first piece of original Doctor Who content directly produced by the BBC in 12 years killed off the Doctor.
Although the story and its ending were controversial with fans, "Death Comes to Time" was still new Doctor Who content from the BBC, and fan interest was massive. Over 100,000 people clicked on the stream — a lot for any web property in the early 2000s.
"I'm rather glad that 'Death Comes to Time,' in its small way, started the avalanche for new Doctor Who," says Nev Fountain, who served as a script adviser on the story. "The click count went off the charts. The fans thought this was the BBC bringing Doctor Who back and they killed him. So there was a lot of fury."
As a result of the popularity around "Death Comes to Time," the BBC commissioned further webcasts. The next, "Real Time," was more of a conventional Doctor Who adventure starring one of the past Doctors, Colin Baker. Again, it took on the animated "web comic" format, putting voices over mostly still images (with a liberal use of fading, panning and zooming).
Then there was "Shada," an online remake of an unfinished adventure from the series' 1979-80 season, starring McGann as the Doctor.
Finally came "Scream of the Shalka." The year was 2003, the 40th anniversary of the TV show's first broadcast, and the cult team wanted to do something special. This time the production would be fully animated, and the story would have a daring twist: With no official Doctor Who being produced outside of the books and audio adventures, the cult team boldly decided to go forward with plans to cast a new Doctor.
The team did so carefully, first getting permission, then ensuring the BBC actually had the right to produce new Doctor Who adventures, which was, incredibly, in question.
"It was a commonly held belief at the BBC that, 'Oh, there's a problem with the rights,'" says James Goss, who ran the BBC's Doctor Who website at the time. "There's a maxim at the BBC: People will find 99 reasons to say No before finding one reason to say Yes."
The problem was a widespread misconception that the rights to Doctor Who had been complicated through the deal with Universal to produce the 1996 TV movie, and that they would need to be re-negotiated before the BBC could move forward with a new series.
"We started to get a lot of very worried emails from fans" says Goss. "If the BBC had accidentally given away their favorite TV series, this would have been very worrying. But it was completely made-up fan speculation."
In truth the rights had reverted back to the BBC years earlier. Daniel Judd, a researcher with the cult team, worked to confirm this. To reassure fans, the team published a short summary of Judd's research online, then went back to working on "Scream of the Shalka," casting Richard E. Grant as the Ninth Doctor (Grant would later play the Great Intelligence in the TV series).
Months later, Heggessey commented publicly about the so-called rights problem surrounding Doctor Who, and that it stood in the way of the BBC producing a new series. Then, Goss says, her office discovered the summary page about the rights actually belonging to the BBC after all. The article even ends with the pointed line, "So, the BBC could commission a new Doctor Who series for TV if it wanted to."

Of course, Heggessey had been claiming (truthfully) all along that the BBC wanted to make new Doctor Who. Her office called the cult team, asking that the page be taken down. Goss says the team refused on the grounds that it would "look awful." Heggessey's office summoned the cult team's boss, Martin Trickey, for what Goss describes as a "bollocking." Goss describes what followed:
"He took with him Daniel's research. I remember him coming back looking a bit odd after that meeting. They asked if they could keep a copy and said, 'Thank you.' But oddly. Then he was summoned for a couple more meetings and came back from one a fortnight later grinning like it was Christmas."
The news Trickey was smiling about, of course, was the deal struck with Davies to produce a new Doctor Who TV series. The BBC announced the return on Sept. 26, 2003, with the show due to begin airing in 2005.
The announcement came months before the "Scream of the Shalka" webcast was due to air, and suddenly its future looked very uncertain. To the cult team's surprise, far from shelving the project, Heggessey and BBC got behind it, with the caveat that it could no longer be considered in any way part of the TV series' storyline. Even though it was official BBC content, it would be, in fan parlance, "non-canonical."
The first episode of "Scream of the Shalka" appeared on the BBC website just 10 days before the show's 40th anniversary. After it wrapped in December 2003, the focus turned to the coming TV series, and the rest is history.
Clearly, the vast majority of the credit for bringing Doctor Who back to TV lies with Davies (who insisted on working on the show if he was going to do anything with the BBC), Heggessey and others at the BBC. They did the heavy lifting, and they had obviously put a lot of thought into making new Doctor Who for the small screen long before anyone had ever heard the word "Shalka."
It appears, however, that the perceived "rights problem" was widespread at the BBC, and the work of the cult team — particularly Judd — played a role in clearing it up so the key players felt confident to go ahead. According to the book Who's 50: The 50 Doctor Who Stories to Watch Before You Die, once Heggessey's office received Judd's research, she immediately got BBC Films to cede its claim to make a film (which had been in "development" for years), getting the last obstacle out of the way for a new series.
Certainly, a new Doctor Who TV series would have been produced at some point regardless of the efforts of the BBC's cult team. But would it have been greenlit in time to ensure Davies' involvement? Would Eccleston — who approached Davies about playing the Doctor when he was between jobs — have still starred in it? Would Piper, composer Murray Gold, current showrunner Steven Moffat and a host of others whose brilliant work has shaped the new series still have happened?
Possibly, maybe, some of it. But Doctor Who, a show about the infinite possibilities of time travel, would have its own alternative history were it not for the efforts of a few ambitious people who happened to be working for the BBC website at the time.
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