How true is it that lack of budget held the classic show back?

It often seems the sentiment among fans, that the BBC should've spent more money on the show if they wanted it to succeed, rather than cancelling it as they did, twice over.

But how true is it that lack of money was the problem, or that a bigger budget would've prevented weaker stories? Are there specific reasons or examples where money shortage was the core reason for poor stories or runs?

I'll be honest, sometimes I believe it's just an excuse that's resorted to too easily to cover creative stupidity. Especially if it's possible to produce The Daleks, Horror of Fang Rock or The Ribos Operation on a miniscule budget with a few sets. Likewise I think there's several bad stories (Time-Flight, Warriors, Twin Dilemma) I don't believe could be redeemed at all even if they'd had the budget of Michael Bay's Transformers.

On the other hand it's not hard to think of stories I might've liked a lot more if they'd had it where it counts in the budget, such as Arc of Infinity or Nightmare of Eden, or even possibly Underworld.

But in which ways or instances do you think a potentially great show or era or a given story was legitimately held back because of money, or where disasters could've been avoided with bigger budget?

No, it's not true. If anything the lack of budget usually resulted in greater creativity. The higher the budget, the lower the brain cells, as New Who has more than ably demonstrated.

Invasion of the Dinosaurs would clearly have benefited from a more lavish sfx budget. And its not just a few quid more for the sfx but also ensurng you employ suitably qualified sfx technicians.

Likewise Power of Kroll. Much of the the model work was very good but the scene with Kroll on the horizon (possibly end of episode 3) was ballsed up because a rookie sfx technician misuderstood his instructions. Had a more experienced technican been employed (on higher rates of pay the show could ill afford) it might have been a better result.

The show is littered with poor actors / actresses across its history. A higher budget would have allowed directors / producers to employ more experienced thespians rather than ones fresh out of RADA.

No. Money isnt the answer to everything. You still get incompetence or ill considered decisions being made even if the budget coffers are swelled but it can still make a significant difference to the quality of a production. One cause of poor creativity can be the fact that you can't afford the more successful writers, directors, sfx technicians and have to make do with less skilled persons. That is not to deny you'll still get the occasional Robert Holmes or Raymond Cusick.

I've always felt there is an inverse relationship between the budget and the writing. The better the special effects, the shittier the story. There is no good reason for to it be that way, but it often is. And to me, the writing is the most important thing. Tell a good story with interesting ideas in it and I don't care about bad effects and cheap sets.

The best (new to me) thing I've seen in years was the Omega Factor which I watched a few weeks ago on DVD. And I think its a perfect example of the combination low budget, but great writing, making a really good show.

But if I were to choose a Doctor Who story I think probably could have got the most out of a bigger budget it would be Survival. I like it as it is, but I could imagine a more impressive version.

The lack of budget makes it appealing. Nothing is left to the imagination in the new series because they have the money to show you everything.

I suppose my understanding of the spidergraph splinters of the basic problem of lack of budget would be a few things.

Sometimes we got bad stories commissioned purely for the sake of being cost-cutters. Underworld with its CSO caves was a classic case.

Indeed we ended up with Monster of Peladon and The Invasion of Time not because the scripts were particularly good, but because it was a way to reuse old sets and costumes from a previous story to prevent them going to waste.

I suppose Revenge of the Cybermen can fall under that category if you feel it should.

Season 17 is probably the classic case of a season where the stories got a bit samey precisely because they didn't have the money to do justice to the more ambitious scripts to consider. Hell, maybe if they'd had the budget to more expansively show the populated Empress starliner or the civilization of Skonnos, it would've added more sense of stakes to the story.

Time-Flight and The King's Demons seemed to have been not very good scripts, nonetheless commissioned in the hope that showing off a state of the art advanced aeroplane or robot in the show might make the current series look modern, up to date and give the appearance of putting the expense onscreen, to counter the show's 'cheap' image.

I'm often told that because of that increasingly cheap image, there was more of a resort to bringing back old monsters and continuity to make the show feel more mythic, and (on Saward's side) making it more violent to make it appear more serious, edgy and visceral than the pantomime it often seemed. I wonder if maybe we saw so much of the Master that decade because there wasn't that much of a costly make-up job involved with that particular foe.

I think the only times for me that cheap/leaden production values marred a potentially great story, were Destiny of the Daleks, Kinda, The Visitation and Arc of Infinity.

Pepsi Maxil wrote:The lack of budget makes it appealing. Nothing is left to the imagination in the new series because they have the money to show you everything.

Perhaps not helped by the fact Moffat has (ironically) almost zero respect for the power of mystery.

The problems of the new series are not due to the production team having too much money and so not leaving enough things to the imagination. Rather it is the crappy writing, poor characterisation, rubbishy stories / plots that have prevailed since 2005. I don't feel any of those are a function of the big budgets the show has been graced with since the show came back. Give a shed load of money to a troop of monkeys and they will most likely make monkey shit out of it. Ditto giving the same thing to the Fitzroy crowd for the last 15 years. Even more so since 2018. What you want is a healthy mixture of the budget and the right, talented people.

Despite all i have said I don't have a probem with the low budgets classic Who had. I loved the show. So Ark in Space made excessive use of bubble wrap when Noah and the Wirrn were attacking the crew of the Ark. Didn't bother me - i was more focused on the story and the first rate acting in those scenes. Would the show have been improved with a higher sfx budget? Probably - but that doesn't stop me enjoying what we got anyway.

stengos wrote:Ark in Space made excessive use of bubble wrap when Noah and the Wirrn were attacking the crew of the Ark. Didn't bother me - i was more focused on the story and the first rate acting in those scenes.

I think it really is the acting of the guy playing Noah that makes the bubble-wrap work. He really does play the alien hand syndrome convincingly, and makes it come across like something weighty and disturbing is growing on his arm beneath the membrane that he's desperate to cut off.

It wasn't lack of budget which held the classic series back but lack of body-counts.

Saward should've obviously been hired many years earlier instead of those two cunts Williams and Adams who were better off working for cbeebies or maybe doing Mary Shitehouses filing.