Chris Chibnall:
“I think the biggest thing you can say about all of that is it’s very easy to miss the point ‒ that this is primarily about money.”
“It’s not really about all of the things that everybody is banging on about and moaning about or what or getting emotional about.”
They should just go back to filming in quarries.
Quarries and alleys and occasionally a warehouse if you managed to get some decent money thrown your way. All you need.
What, you’re telling me they’re NOT looking for the best pitch for how to retcon everything after 12 or even just the Timeless Child? Heavens.
🕶️
I’m not in favour of retconning anything, least of all “everything after 12”, that’s just what Certain People are yelling for very loudly and I’d assume he’s referencing.
I haven’t really watched since 12s first season, loved Capaldi and Coleman just didn’t like the writing. Why are people clamoring for it? Hoping not just because 13 & 14 were a woman and a black man respectively
No that is exactly the reason. Though they won’t tell you, obviously.
Ugh I fucking hate that, like I said I never saw Jodi or Ncuti other than a few clips here and there and they both seemed great. The Doctor would be disappointed
The writing had issues but Jodie and Ncuti are not to blame.
BTW, Ncuti was 15, not 14. We had a special guest star as 14 in the 60th anniversary, an up-and-coming actor called David Tennant ;D
Fuck, you right I saw David came back in a press release, for some reason I thought that was after Ncuti, a spite rewatch starting with 9 may be in order now
So what he’s saying is, the showrunners aren’t listening to the fans.
Why are so many fucking moronic losers in charge of so many things?!
No, he’s saying the process at the moment is about figuring out what budget to set. There isn’t a showrunner at the moment.
I still find it ridiculous that a show which used to be gold with a shoestring budget suddenly cannot find funding. And they’re still saying nothing that indicated understanding about all the feedback from previous seasons.
Shoestring is going back so far as to be irrelevant. In 2005 it started out as £1.3m per hour which put it in the high end of drama budget (the BBC’s biggest-budget production that decade had been Rome with HBO, with the BBC contributing £1.25m/hr), in SD on EFP cameras. Now a streaming partner will expect 4K delivery. Inflation, diesel prices, and audience expectations have increased the cost of production and a regular high-end drama will be around £3m/hr, and that’s without the burden of bespoke sci-fi sets, costumes and effects. The BBC/Disney deal gave the show a budget of £6m/episode.
So decisions must be made about budget, format, order length. These will impact the commercial viability of the show, and are things that need to be considered before the invitation for tender is drafted. Remember, the creative will be part of each tender bid so that’s months in the future and it isn’t time for that yet.
The BBC is facing a large shortfall in the licence fee, while costs increase. It has started cancelling stalwart series and cutting back services. It has a duty to ensure the licence fee is responsibly spent. It can’t therefore throw money at Doctor Who. It has to fit into the circumstances.
Thanks for TL;DR’ing the linked article. No, really.
Fans have as many individual “solutions” to making Doctor Who as there are… fans. What Chibnall is saying is, the BBC actually want to make the show, but there just isn’t money for it at the moment. Hence the tender process they’re going to have.
All and any fandom wishes come after that.
The BBC has the money - when the show goes to tender, they will be paying for it - but they don’t have vast sums to spend on it. So they need to look around and see if any streamers want to come on as funding partners, and if not they need to define what an affordable amount is for the tender.
The BBC has the money
Clearly not, since production stopped completely when Disney+ dragged their feet and eventually neglected to renew the show. You say it yourself, they absolutely need co-funding to make the show.
I.e., they do not have the money to produce it on their own. I think Chibnall puts that quite plainly.
I never said they absolutely need co-financing, just that it would be preferred.
What you are completely and utterly failing to understand is… WHY is there suddenly no funding for a DECADES OLD franchise with MILLIONS of fans?
Didn’t they just answer that? Because there’s less money around and a shoestring budget doesn’t work anymore in today’s media landscape.
There is certainly failure to understand here, yes. You’ll want to look up the concept of publicly funded media like the BBC, and how they differ from purely commercial ones.
And it’s not sudden, I think in most countries public service media have suffered cutbacks over decades. Again, that is spelled out in the linked article.
