Winning Designs (feature)

Winning Designs was an article in 1987's DWM 131. It concluded an interactive event begun in DWM 108 and furthered in DWM 113, wherein which readers were first invited to submit their own fan-casting for a new Doctor, companion and antagonist (as the Doctor Who Casting Competition), and in the second part to submit sketches for the costume design of the winning entires of the first part (as the Doctor Who Design Competiton.

As such, Winning Designs, featuring new art of the designs jointly submitted by Wanda Sue Morain and Mike Acord, debuted an imaginary Doctor, companion and Master. They were supposedly played by Brian Blessed, Meryl Streep and John Hurt, respectively. These castings had been the winning entry of the first phase of the contest, submitted by Scott Sauber.

The article also contained an overview of a plot suggested by Acord and Morain for the characters, wherein which the Master would first be confronted in disguise by the Doctor and his companion Maggie while posing as the designer of a new space-themed ride for an American amusement park. It would transpire that the "ride" was actually a teleporter with which the Master planned to bring a large workforce of aliens to Earth to help him build a device meant to destroy the planet. The Doctor would later discover that the Master had neglected to warn his "allies" that their own planet would likely also be destroyed by the machine.

This material long predated Hurt being cast as an incarnation of the Doctor on television, and the costume given to the new Master also bore coincidental similarity to the "Shalka" Doctor's, who had also yet to make his debut. Maggie also predates Grace Holloway as the Doctor's first American companion to be introduced.