Script Doctor: The Inside Story of Doctor Who 1986-89

Script Doctor: The Inside Story of Doctor Who 1986-89, later retitled and released as Script Doctor: The Inside Story of Doctor Who 1986-1989, was a look back on the Andrew Cartmel years of Doctor Who.

Publisher's summary[]

First summary

Doctor Who has been thrilling, amusing and terrifying television viewers for over 25 years. Andrew Cartmel was the show’s script editor for three of those years. He chose the writers, planned the stories and shaped the programme during one of its most exciting and fertile periods.

Script Doctor takes you into the producer’s office for smokey script conferences and then into the charged darkness of the studio control room as a television show is being shot. It captures the comedy, chaos and struggle of a television classic being made, against all odds.

These are evocative and amusing dispatches from the trenches, conjuring a firsthand and uncensored flavour of what it was like to be there when the cameras were rolling. And what it was like when they stopped.

Second summary

"There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, and the sea’s asleep, and the rivers dream. People made of smoke, and cities made of song. Somewhere there’s danger, somewhere there’s injustice, and somewhere else the tea’s getting cold. Come on, Ace — we’ve got work to do!"

Andrew Cartmel was the script editor on Doctor Who from 1986 to 1989. During his time on the show he introduced the seventh Doctor and his companion Ace (Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred) and oversaw forty-two scripts written by eight writers new to the series.

With a clear mission to bring proper science fiction back into Doctor Who, he formulated what was later termed ‘The Cartmel Masterplan’, re-introducing the mystery to the character of the Doctor as the series celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary and beyond.

Script Doctor is his memoir of this time based on his diaries written sometimes on set and sometimes not even in the diary itself but on the back of scripts. With an introduction by Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat, a foreword by Sylvester McCoy, and an afterword by Sophie Aldred, Script Doctor is illustrated with 32 pages of candid photographs, many never published before. It is a vivid account of life in the Doctor Who production office during the late eighties.

Notes[]

This book contained two different versions of the "Publisher's summary", depending on the edition of the book.
The 2013 edition is revised, containing a small number of corrections and tweaks to the text, but also a new introduction by Steven Moffat, a new afterword by Sophie Aldred and a new coda from Andrew Cartmel, plus many more photographs than the original edition.
- This edition was re-issued in mid-2019, and therefore contained the same ISBN, cover & contents.
The 2013 hardback was signed and limited to 100 copies, and was available exclusively from the Miwk website with an additional 8 copies available from Galaxy 4.
Despite being a new edition from a Ten Acre Films, the February 2021 paperback had the same ISBN as the 2013 Miwk paperback edition.
The July 2021 paperback was a limited “wallscrawl” edition with amended cover design to tie in with the Blu-ray release of Season 24. It was limited to 150 signed copies.