Last of The Time Lords - Production and Publicity

Production and Publicity

"Last of the Time Lords", along with "Utopia" and "The Sound of Drums", are treated in several sources as a three-part story, the first such story in the revived series of Doctor Who. However, Russell T Davies has said that he regards "Utopia" as a separate story, but notes that the determination is arbitrary. "Last of the Time Lords" was a subtitle proposed at one stage for a film version of Doctor Who that was in development from 1987 to 1994. This episode was planned to be broadcast live to the crowds attending Pride London in Trafalgar Square via a giant screen. However, a local curfew after the nearby attempted terrorist bombing the previous day prevented the screening. Freema Agyeman and John Barrowman attended the event.

In order to keep the episode's details secret, access to preview copies of this episode was restricted. There was a similar moratorium on copies of "Doomsday" the previous year and on the series four finale "Journey's End" the following year. The episode was allocated a 50-minute timeslot for its initial broadcast, as with "Daleks in Manhattan" previously, and 55-minute timeslots for the BBC Three repeats. According to Russell T Davies in Doctor Who Magazine 384, this is because it ran over-length but they did not wish to lose the material. The official run time from freemaagyeman.com for the episode is almost 52 minutes. The final episode of The Trial of a Time Lord was also extended by five minutes in 1986. In the audio commentary, the producers reveal that Graeme Harper filled in to direct some scenes after director Colin Teague was injured.

At the start of this episode, The Master enters the bridge of the Valiant as "I Can't Decide" by the Scissor Sisters plays in the background. He refers to it as "track 3", its place on the Scissor Sisters' second album, Ta-Dah. Two sets of audio commentaries were recorded for the episode: one with producers Russell T Davies, Julie Gardner, and Phil Collinson, which was intended for podcast broadcast to coincide with the episode's initial UK telecast, and the other featuring actors David Tennant, Freema Agyeman, and John Barrowman, which was included on the UK DVD release of the episode as part of the Series 3 box set. However, the Region 1 (North America) release of the DVD saw the actor commentary replaced by the earlier podcast version, although a production error resulted in the set's booklet not indicating this substitution (and the booklet also omits Tennant's name). This episode marked the last regular-episode use of the Doctor Who theme music arrangement by Murray Gold that had been introduced in 2005 and used (notwithstanding minor modifications and an extension of the closing theme in 2006) thereafter. The opening theme would be heard once more in its 2005 arrangement in the Time Crash short episode, before both opening and closing themes would be revised beginning with Voyage of the Damned and continuing into Series 4 in 2008.