Where Can You Find Doctor Who Scripts?

Philip Bates is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

Doctor Who provides inspiration – particularly for those wanting to work in the TV industry… or how to get a head in business if you’re watching Voyage of the Damned. If you’re a Wannabe Screenwriter, Director, Producer, Script Editor, Nosy Parker, or just want to see the transition to screen, one of the best things you can do is look at scripts. It also helps if you’re searching for a quote or can’t quite remember the exact wording of that scene where the Doctor scares off the Atraxi.

The BBC knows you’d like a glimpse behind the scenes; that’s why Doctor Who Confidential existed, and why Doctor Who Extra continues; that’s why they release occasional books about the workings of each series; and that’s why the Writer’s Room offers a wealth of scripts. One of the most interesting Confidentials involved The Doctor’s Wife scribe Neil Gaiman reading out extracts from his script and then seeing how they were made for TV.

But they’re hard to get hold of. Ian Levine was selling some of his old scripts, but you have to fork out quite a bit of money for originals. I’m the proud owner of Jemma Redgrave’s original (signed) script for The Power of Three – but it’s not the sort of thing you can acquire easily.

So where can you find the scripts? Well, if you’re only looking for inspiration or quotes, not hunting for originals, there are places you can turn to…

Actual Scripts

In 2005, Doctor Who returned, highly praised for its taut writing. The BBC did something brilliant: released them as a hardback book, accompanied by introductions. Yes, there were the scripts, including directions, by Russell T. Davies, Mark Gatiss, Robert Shearman, Paul Cornell, and Steven Moffat. And they were available in good (and bad) shops down your high street! It might still be, depending on how old the stock in your local WHSmith or Waterstones is.

Doctor Who: The Shooting Scripts is one of the most helpful, interesting, and thought-provoking Who books of recent years, and you can still buy it from Amazon. At the time of writing, you can get it for £30.

Sadly, that was the only one. I was really hoping it would be an annual thing, but alas, nothing more has come of it. Maybe there’s still time –  you never know – but it’s doubtful. So where else can you go?

Further extracts can be found alongside detailed thought processes in Russell’s superb book, Doctor Who: The Writer’s Tale, and its revised follow-up, The Final Chapter. These are only bits and piece, though. Fortunately, he kindly uploaded his Series 4 scripts onto the official website. Unfortunately, that no longer exists.

Not that that matters! It’s all archived, so you can still download the following as PDFs: Voyage of the Damned, Partners in Crime, Midnight, The Stolen Earth, Journey’s End, The Next Doctor, Planet of the Dead, The Waters of Mars, and both parts of The End of Time. It really is a fascinating index; well worth a look.

 

Another treat can be found at the BBC Writer’s Room Library, which contains the script for episode one of Series 3, Smith and Jones. I’d also advise you to peruse the rest of the site to find inspiration, opportunities, and further scripts for programmes like Spooks, Luther, and The Archers.

It gets more difficult to find scripts for Classic Who, but they’re out there. In 2001, for instance, they released an annotated book containing the documents for Tom Baker’s first season as the Fourth Doctor, including Robot, The Ark in Space, and Genesis of the Daleks. You can find used copies of Doctor Who – The Scripts Tom Baker 1974/5 on Amazon or on eBay for pretty reasonable prices, considering how beautiful and in-depth the tome is.

Furthermore, some scripts were released as thinner paperbacks in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Sometimes, you can come across a haul at a car boot sale or at a secondhand books market – or again, you can turn to eBay, where you’ll find, amongst others, the Doctor Who scripts for serials such as Galaxy 4, Ghost Light, and The Daemons. Volumes from the Doctor Who: The Audio Scripts series can also be found on Amazon.

That’s perhaps yer lot for Classic Who, but not for Classic Doctors. A few years ago, Big Finish released Doctor Who: The Audio Scripts, beautiful hardback books collecting together a few specially-selected scripts from their early days. These spanned four volumes, and concluded with Omega, Davros, Master, and Zagreus, the fiftieth release.

Once more, you can get used copies from Amazon UK. If you want to write for radio, these are a must.

Transcripts

Okay, so these are quite different beasts, but if you’re after a look at the rhythm of sentences, looking for a good quote, or just want to relive moments, you can always turn to online transcripts. These are basically when dedicated fans type out every bit of dialogue and describe actions to get a decent account of Doctor Who in its entirety.

Let’s take Chakoteya, for example. This is a surprisingly extensive site full of transcripts from every episode ever – as well as some audio adventures! It particularly focuses on speech, so is a little light on action or scene setting. This can mean each set segues into one another without you realising the change, but if you’ve seen the episodes, you know the ins and outs anyway. The exhaustive archive is to be applauded, as is the speed at which transcripts of new serials go up (typically in the week of broadcast).

The Doctor Who Transcript Project is another extensive effort, this time focussing on the Classic Doctors (that is, from Hartnell’s First to McGann’s Eighth). It’s all the serials once more, but this time, the dialogue is split up a little better. The action and shots are described with more precision. You get quite a good idea of how each looks on screen if you can’t quite recall that the first two scenes of The Dominators are model shots of space and the island on Dulkis.

The one thing that hampers this impressive collection is the onslaughts of advertisements: they’ll pop up at the bottom of the screen, at the side, in a separate page…

A good halfway-house, then, is Forever Dreaming’s Transcripts, which treads a good line between dialogue and description.

Unfortunately, this is especially good for NuWho, but has little for Classic Who. In fact, at the time of writing, I could find only Nightmare of Eden.

Just A Guide

Sometimes, it’s difficult to align the continuities of all the potentially-canon stories. If you’d like a breakdown of every story and suggestions of when Big Finish audios, or those Virgin books slot into place, I recommend the Doctor Who Reference Guide

So far, this only covers up to the 50th anniversary episode, The Day of the Doctor, but it’s nonetheless worth losing yourself in the history of Who if you want to focus purely on storytelling as a whole.

Okay, so that’s our guide to finding Doctor Who scripts – but have you got any more suggestions? Any other resources? Let us know below!

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