The Horns of Nimon

Doctor Who is littered with hypotheticals. What if Geoffrey Bayldon had succeeded Willian Hartnell? What if Mr Pastry had succeeded Patrick Troughton? What if Verity Lambert’s pitch for the 1996 TV special had succeeded? What if Christopher Eccleston had participated in the fiftieth anniversary?  

Paths we didn’t take: doors we never opened. 

And “Doctor Who does Greek Mythology” was a perfectly decent premise for a story. A perfectly decent premise that had been done twice before; but the show has never particularly cared about repeating itself. We all know that there are three Atlantises and two Loch Ness monsters.

The best thing would have been to focus firmly on the myth of Theseus. To have the randomiser whisk the Doctor back to the Bronze Age where he could have discovered that the legendary man-bull was a mutant or a genetically engineered bovine. Or an alien or a robot. Or a malicious rumour. Or perhaps the story would have begun further back; with the Doctor persuaded to design a prison to house the terrible creature, and then, to construct a primitive flying machine for the young prince…

It is more likely that the story would have revisited Underworld and proposed a Whoniverse driven by eternal recurrence, events in the distant future sending echoes back to the remote past. And that would have been fine too. We would have accepted, indeed, welcomed, a world of ray-guns and space-ships lightly dusted with Greek architecture and Greek costumes. There must have been a fair few togas lying around gathering dust since Up Pompeii! finished. 

One hopes, at any rate, it would have given us a break from the Doctor-Who-by-numbers format that the series was spiralling into. A mythology themed story could have avoided the chases through endless corridors (which all look exactly the same). And there would have been no need for the kind of BBC model spacecrafts that had become an even bigger embarrassment since Star Wars hit the big screen. And perhaps they could even have found actors prepared to deliver science fictional lines with a reasonably straight face? 

Perhaps the script would have given Romana a chance to shine; perhaps it would have allowed K9 to be K9. The previous stories had reduced the tin dog to a piece of hardware: a get-out-of-jail-free card and an exposition upload device. If K9 was going to justify his continued existence, it would have to have been as a character: as part of a double act with the Doctor. (It is not clear who would have been the straight man and who would have been the comic turn.) Tom Baker never had quite the rapport with David Brierly that he did with John Leeson, but we would still have enjoyed seeing them in extended two-hand sequences. 

Wishful thinking: all wishful thinking. Plenty of promising Doctor Who stories have foundered in the production. Graham Crowden, who would have played Soldeed, the major bad guy, had very nearly been cast as the Fourth Doctor. (He was literally offered the part in 1976 but couldn’t commit to it for the required three years: the role went instead to an out of work actor someone discovered on a building site.) Perhaps Crowden would have demonstrated that he could have been as Shakespearean and brooding and charismatic as Tom Baker ever was. But I fear there would have been an overwhelming temptation to simply out Baker Baker in the overacting department.

It seems so silly to us now. But tea-breaks and even toilet-breaks had been hard-won by the Trades Unions. They rightly believed that to concede a tiny point was to risk undoing the major strides that had been achieved in the first half of the twentieth century. A management / workers agreement stated that only the Standing Union of Domestic Staff could serve refreshments to performers. In a break during the first day of filming, Tom Baker absent-mindedly reached for a teapot. Lalla Ward gently put her hand on his wrist. 

But it was too late. 

The ensuing row between Equity and SUDS closed down the Doctor Who studio for the rest of the season. The Horns of Nimon was destined to sit forever alongside Song of the Space Whale and the Masters of Luxor as one of the great un-made stories in the Whovian canon. 

We will never know how good it might have been. If you enjoy my writing about Doctor Who, please consider joining my Patreon.