Why did JNT stay so long?

Most producers did 3 to 5 years, but JNT did 9 years. Why did he stay so long?
I realise this is completely speculative, but could the series have gone better with some new blood running the show if he'd stepped down and given someone else a chance after a few years?
I know he gets a lot of flak, but that's not really my angle here. It just seems rather a long time to have had so much creative control over a flagship show, that usually underwent a change of hands more frequently.

They wouldn't let him leave. He was first planning to leave after season 20, but he wanted to do the 20th special and they made him do season 21 as a condition of letting him. And every year after that he was hoping to move on and he was kept on. Whether no one else wanted it, whether it was down to Grade both disliking Who and disliking JNT and keeping them throttled together, who knows.
Most notoriously he was promised another project at last if he did Grade's dirty work and gave Colin the news he was fired, even though he was against it, only to be dragged back to do season 24 at the eleventh hour.
Certainly after the cancellation debacle I think if he'd just said "fuck it, I quit" they'd have just canned the show even earlier than they did.

From reading Richard Marson's biography, I think JNT always intended doing the show to be a launchpad for pitching other projects and getting other commissions. Some reports even suggest he expected doing Season 18 to just be the one-off for him.

There was a lot of stuff he pitched (particularly as he knew the BBC were looking to do a new big soap series and were open to pitches before they settled on Eastenders). His main idea had been to do a revival of the soap Compact. But nothing got picked up, so he had nothing to move onto. I suspect if K9 and Company had taken off, then he would've moved onto that.

Sadly once Michael Grade and Johnathan Powell came in, they openly saw JNT as too much of a liability to be trusted with doing anything else (which even I think was unfair, as the main source of the show's irresponsible violent content was actually Eric Saward), but they couldn't really justify firing him, so they just kept him on a show that they wanted to die. Infact, Terence Dudley offered to take over producing the show for him in 1985, but there would've been no other work for JNT if he left, so he stayed.

It's a shame certainly, and I think it's largely why after Season 18, the show seemed to become more backward-looking than forward-looking, and based on what Ian Levine suggested, and what would please the convention crowds. I don't think there was much forward vision beyond that. Though I have to say I'm much more of the mind these days that it's actually Saward who should've gone far sooner.

Sounds like a pretty complex period. I don't know much about it, so thanks for the info.

He was offered Bergerac in 1988 but turned it down; so he could of got off there.

The veracity of that story is rather dubious. Apparently Cartmel may have misunderstood when JNT was just taking the piss.

JNT could have resigned and looked for a job elsewhere. To say the BBC wouldn't let him leave seems to miss this rather obvious point. He wasn't tied to the corporation.
In light of that I can only conclude he wasn't that bothered about leaving. Despite what his defenders often say.

No but presumably he liked eating and having a shirt on his back. Like everyone else on the planet.

Personally I don't feel the need to "defend" him anyway. He was a great producer, hardly his fault he was there when the BBC was being run by Thatcherite cunts like Grade and Powell.

He decided to hang on rather then seek a job or opportunity elsewhere in the market. That is not the same as the BBC not letting him leave.

I dont think he faced penury if he had chosen to resign. He would have kept the shirt on his back and eaten well. As you say he was a VG, succesful TV operative. I think he had an excellent CV and the idea that that did not constitute a marketable asset he could have sold elsewhere is a nonsense. But he didn't want to try. He was comfortable where he was. Fair enough but he therefore chose to stay on Dr Who. The BBC did not make him.

For the record I liked a lot of his output on Dr Who. I am not a JNT hater.

I sense from reading that Marson book that JNT mainly wanted to stay close to his contacts in the BBC and on the show. Figuring his best chance of getting another commission was through working with the likes of Terence Dudley, Anthony Root, Peter Grimwade and Pip and Jane and putting forward their pitches for a new show he could produce and develop with them.

I suppose this shouldn't entirely have tied him to the BBC, given that some of those contacts, like Root and Grimwade were able to cross-over to ITV, but I sense it's within the BBC where he felt he knew the right people and felt he could spot the best windows of opportunity.

They "made him" if he wanted to keep working with the BBC. Which he did. No, they didn't tie him down and hold him at gunpoint, but the fact is he wanted to move on to other things as far back as 1983 and they wouldn't let him.

iank wrote:Personally I don't feel the need to "defend" him anyway.

For someone who doesn't feel the need to "defend" him, you don't half do it a lot  

iank wrote:He was a great producer,

No he wasn't! If he was then the ratings would have been better. I have been hearing people defend this idiot for the best part of forty years now and it is getting old.

I think some of the fan defences of JNT are valid enough and do point to how blame sometimes lay elsewhere (either Saward or Levine). Some of the fan defences of him just sound either hollow spin or just plain cultish and based on nothing but ugly tribalism.

The show was always going to be forced to look a bit cheap and camp in the 1980s, on the budget it was on. But that never particularly hurt the popularity of T-Bag among the kids, or even something like the late 80's anthology show Monsters.

JNT did perhaps lose a lot of the winning humour of the late Tom Baker era and make the Davison period too humourless, but it was also what the BBC, and indeed Barry Letts wanted and instructed him to do.

Sometimes the era, in its erratic experiments, did discover a winning combination in a story like State of Decay, Earthshock, The Five Doctors, but instantly lost it again for reasons that had nothing to do with Michael Grade and can only be put down to sordid pettiness on JNT's part, simply because he decided he didn't want Terrance Dicks or Peter Grimwade on his show anymore. But those personality problems affecting the show, were exacerbated by JNT being kept on it ever longer.

Furthermore there's moments where the show suffered creatively because Saward could be equally petty and couldn't see quality right under his nose (I'd largely blame him for why we never saw Barbara Clegg write for the show again, and indeed for the nastiness that started to creep into the show in Season 21).

But it is possible that even under a sounder production team that could work together without imploding as JNT and Saward eventually did, even if the humourless Davison era stories hadn't resembled something made by and for a creepy suicide cult rather than the general public, and even if the shocking own-goals like Time-Flight and Twin Dilemma hadn't happened, the ratings problems and loss of popularity could've still happened (then again, Time-Flight was meant to be a money-saver).

There were always ways the show was going to suffer in the 1980's, made on the budget it was, and with Tom Baker's screen presence no longer there to hold everything together. The low ratings of Season 18 suggest maybe interest already was dying even after City of Death's high watermark. Michael Grade's sabotage was always going to happen as he'd hated the show and its popularity even as far back as its Hinchcliffe heyday, so even if Hinchcliffe had been brought back to produce the show again in 1980 and if Season 22 had been every bit as good as Season 14, it probably wouldn't have made a difference. The cancellation crisis and degeneration of the show into toothless pantomime by Grade's decree would've almost certainly still happened.

Sometimes the need or impulse to 'move with the times' can do shocking and even ugly things to a long-running franchise. Particularly in the 1980's. Certainly some of the Carry On films of the time, like Carry On Emmanuel are testament to that.

Sometimes it's comforting for me to treat the whole 80's as a write-off and pretend the show ended on City of Death. Other times an Earthshock, Revelation or Remembrance of the Daleks gets to me and leaves me thinking maybe some things were worth it for them.

At the end of the day I think the show suffered because back when it discovered a timeless, lasting, exportable formula in those three Hinchcliffe seasons, Mary Whitehouse and the BBC sabotaged it anyway right when it was blossoming, by kicking Hinchcliffe off. And it kept forcibly trying to recreate that magic it lost there, sometimes through mindless overkill or unpardonable cynicism, but it was clear that a lot of the time the successive makers had simply lost touch.

And maybe if the Hinchcliffe era had been allowed to run its natural course for success, organically, we would have had a winner show in the 1980's. Maybe even a winner movie series. Instead what we got was, well a catastrophe that still bore a few precious diamonds in the rough that seemed all the more hard-fought for and earned, and made the struggles and lows of the show seem maybe, for that beautiful moment, worth it after all.

DogStar2000 wrote:[
No he wasn't! If he was then the ratings would have been better. I have been hearing people defend this idiot for the best part of forty years now and it is getting old.

Not as tired as I am of idiots slagging him off because they're completely ignorant of reality.

iank wrote:

DogStar2000 wrote:[
No he wasn't! If he was then the ratings would have been better. I have been hearing people defend this idiot for the best part of forty years now and it is getting old.

Not as tired as I am of idiots slagging him off because they're completely ignorant of reality.

Amen!

iank wrote:They "made him" if he wanted to keep working with the BBC. Which he did. No, they didn't tie him down and hold him at gunpoint, but the fact is he wanted to move on to other things as far back as 1983 and they wouldn't let him.

I guess i object to the use of the word "make" of "forced" in this context. It almost makes him sound like a victim.

To my mind it was the usual employer/employee relationship.

Potential employee asks for a job.
Employer makes offer - "you can do this job for this much per annum".
JNT accepted the job for a mixture of reasons - both financial and other advantages of working for that employer.
Obviously in accepting the job he had to perform the duties that the job entailed and not sit around doing what he wanted to do all day.

Its not like he was even on minimum wage doing a mind numbingly boring job like stacking shelves or sweeping the streets having to support a family of 9.

If i applied for the job of a JCB driver and got it, it would be unreasonable of me to then start bleating that i was being "forced" to drive the JCB instead of what i really wanted to do which was be Site Manager or Managing Director of the Company.

But i think i am beginning to think I am misunderstanding the point of this thread so perhaps i should shut up ...

Thanks for replying Iank.

DogStar2000 wrote:

iank wrote:Personally I don't feel the need to "defend" him anyway.

For someone who doesn't feel the need to "defend" him, you don't half do it a lot  

iank wrote:He was a great producer,

No he wasn't! If he was then the ratings would have been better. I have been hearing people defend this idiot for the best part of forty years now and it is getting old.

He wasn't "great" but i thought he was very good - especially in his first 5 years.

I am not sure the ratings bit is fair. Wasn't the programme pitched against Coronation Street in JNT's later years? Imagine the conversations across the nation's living rooms - "Mom can we watch Dr Who". "No. Mike B is banging Deidre and I wanna see Ken deck him". In that context The Gods of Ragnarok were always going to lose.

I think he did very well as producer up to the end of the Davison era, but i think he began to expire as a creative force soon after.
Easy to say in hindsight, but I’ve always wondered if a fresh producer might’ve helped the show survive longer than it did. I still think that S24 was a kudos killing catastrophe that sealed its fate.

Ronnie wrote:I think he did very well as producer up to the end of the Davison  era, but i think he began to expire as a creative force soon after.
Easy to say in hindsight, but I’ve always wondered if a fresh producer might’ve helped the show survive longer than it did. I still think that S24 was a kudos killing catastrophe that sealed its fate.

I don't really rate those first four years either. They're just rather shrill, humorless and soulless to me with far too many dumb, unpleasant companions and far too much overuse of the Master. To me it all started falling apart as early as Time Flight.

But I do think think after that initial shake-up of the show and the bringing in of new blood in JNT's first few years, the pieces seemed there in place for a genuine renaissance. I do think Barbara Clegg could indeed have become the next Robert Holmes had she been nurtured for more than one story. Perhaps Christopher Bailey too. And infact quite a few of the Lost Stories audios make me lament what could've nearly been.

The problem is, something seemed to continually stop that renaissance happening. Both JNT and Saward seemed increasingly too short-sighted and too at loggerheads to see that raw talent and potential, and so we never heard from those writers again. A fresh pair of eyes taking over the show after Time-Flight or The Five Doctors might've made all the difference.

If we got more stories as compelling as Enlightenment, The Elite and Point of Entry, I think audiences would've been more likely to stay with it and see it as something accessible and good-hearted enough to watch as a family in a way, say, Mindwarp wasn't.

It probably wouldn't have changed what Grade did though, but if the show could've withstood the ratings and could reverse its 'death by niche' trap that JNT and Levine had pushed it toward, then maybe we would've got at least a few more years of good quality Who.

Ronnie wrote:I think he did very well as producer up to the end of the Davison  era, but i think he began to expire as a creative force soon after.
Easy to say in hindsight, but I’ve always wondered if a fresh producer might’ve helped the show survive longer than it did. I still think that S24 was a kudos killing catastrophe that sealed its fate.

Comment souvent faire toi avoir sexe avec votre épouse?

Ken Grubshaw wrote:Comment souvent faire toi avoir sexe avec votre épouse?

I fart in your general direction!

Fair comment, Tannmann.
I agree that apart the odd gem, the Davison era isn’t anything fantastic, but I find it more tolerable on the whole than what came later, and apart from a wobbly start, I think it’s reasonably consistent compared to the Colin and Sylv eras which are all over the place, tone-wise at least. I agree about the overuse of the Master though, f’sure.
As an aside, I think SI8 feels more like a Davo season than a Tom season.

Tanmann wrote:

Ken Grubshaw wrote:Comment souvent faire toi avoir sexe avec votre épouse?

I fart in your general direction!

Thanks for putting me off my shortbread and scones.

Ken Grubshaw wrote:

Tanmann wrote:

Ken Grubshaw wrote:Comment souvent faire toi avoir sexe avec votre épouse?

I fart in your general direction!

Thanks for putting me off my shortbread and scones.

hee hee haw haw

prick wrote:

Ken Grubshaw wrote:

Tanmann wrote:

Ken Grubshaw wrote:Comment souvent faire toi avoir sexe avec votre épouse?

I fart in your general direction!

Thanks for putting me off my shortbread and scones.

hee hee haw haw

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