Doctor Who Spin-offs - Webcasts

Webcasts

A series of audio plays have also been webcast on bbc.co.uk, beginning with Death Comes to Time in 2001. The first episode had been made for, and then turned down by, BBC Radio 4 and after an experimental webcasting of this pilot generated over a million page hits, the rest of the episodes were produced and webcast. The serial featured Sylvester McCoy reprising his role as the Seventh Doctor.

Despite Death Comes to Time's award-winning success, political wrangling behind the scenes meant the next two serials made specially for webcasts were by Big Finish Productions: Real Time (2002), with the Sixth Doctor versus the Cybermen and Shada (2003), with Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor in a script originally written by Douglas Adams and intended for the Fourth Doctor Tom Baker in 1979, but abandoned halfway through filming back then due to a BBC staff strike.

Although all of these adventures were intended as purely audio and were later released on CD, as webcasts they were accompanied by a slideshow of partially animated illustrations drawn by artist Lee Sullivan. Death Comes to Time was also released as a special MP3 CD with interactive content, including an option to view the illustrations as well as other bonus material such as cast and crew interviews that were originally available online.

In the middle of 2003, BBCi initiated plans to bring webcast production back in-house, producing the all-new adventure Scream of the Shalka by Paul Cornell, starring Richard E. Grant as the Ninth Doctor and Derek Jacobi as the Master. This differed from the previous webcasts in that it was specifically an audio-visual experience and not an audio adventure: it was fully animated to broadcast standard (although the webcast version was slightly simplified for that medium) by the Cosgrove Hall animation company, and webcast over five weeks in November and December 2003.

The adventures were originally intended to be an official continuation of the Doctor Who mythos, and Grant was, for a brief time, touted as the New Doctor. However, with the announcement of the new BBC television series, Shalka was relegated to non-official status, and Russell T Davies, producer of the 2005 revival series, has referred to Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor. Plans for further webcasts were shelved as well as a DVD release of the serial. A novelisation was, however, released by BBC Books in February 2004, complete with a lengthy "making of" section.

The canonical status of the remaining webcasts is also uncertain, and is made murkier by the fact that the webcasts could be considered canonical since they were broadcast by a branch of the BBC. Most of the webcasts feature elements that contradict series continuity, most notably Death Comes to Time which some fans have used to support their view that the 1996 television movie and 2005 television series (and all related spinoffs) are not canon.