Doctor Who: Children in Need - Production

Production

The mini-episode was not broadcast with a title, but throughout the Children in Need appeal a preview banner for the segment called it The New Doctor. Russell T Davies joked in a Doctor Who Magazine article that it was called "Pudsey Cutaway" – after the Children in Need teddy-bear mascot and modifying "Dalek Cutaway", an alternative title for "Mission to the Unknown" (something of a one-off special itself, from the programme's earliest black-and-white era). The 2006 Doctor Who Magazine special Series Two Companion revealed that the title used on production papers was Doctor Who: Children in Need. The 2009 tie-in book Doctor Who: Companions And Allies attributes without source the title Born Again. However, DWM's review of the book indicates this to have been an error and as of 2011 Companions and Allies remains the only officially licensed publication to use this title.

Other specially made episodes of Doctor Who include "Dimensions in Time" (also for Children in Need) and "Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death" (for Comic Relief), which are not usually considered canonical. The 20th-anniversary special, The Five Doctors (1983), was broadcast as part of that year's Children in Need night, but is considered canonical; the 2007 Children in Need mini-episode "Time Crash" is also considered canonical, as is the two-part mini-episode "Space / Time" produced for the 2011 edition of Comic Relief.

The mini-episode was written and recorded separately from both "The Parting of the Ways" and "The Christmas Invasion" and recorded after the latter had completed shooting. "The Christmas Invasion" does not reprise any of this episode (although the Doctor does mention having a mole between his shoulder blades in both the mini-episode and "The Christmas Invasion"). The online feed of the mini-episode ended with several pre-recorded inserts of Tennant and Piper appealing for donations to Children in Need. The appeals in which they both appear were light-hearted, with Piper claiming to be Tennant and vice versa in the first, and in the second the pair introducing themselves as Letitia Dean and Nicholas Lyndhurst. Russell T Davies stated in the book The Inside Story that he brokered an agreement with the BBC that there would be "... no banners along the bottom of the screen thanking people for sitting in bathtubs full of baked beans, and no Pudsey on the TARDIS console!"

The mini-episode ended with the text, "Doctor Who will return in THE CHRISTMAS INVASION", an announcement that also followed "The Parting of the Ways". It had no end credits, and so Tennant was neither listed as "Doctor Who" (as he had been in the credits of "The Parting of the Ways") nor as "The Doctor" (as he was in "The Christmas Invasion"). This special was never broadcast in Canada by the CBC which, at the time, were co-producers of the second series.