Wednesday, January 1, 2014

RECASTAWAYS - FROM COLIN'S DOCTOR TO McCOY'S





I couldn't resist this choice for the donor of the DNA used for the regeneration into the Seventh Incarnation of the Doctor:

As seen in 'Doctors', Graham Capelli used to star in "The Amazing Lollipop Man", a show about a time-traveling eccentric who's on the run from his own people. 


Here's the IMDb summary:
Graham Capelli, an aging actor most well known for his role as a time traveler in a 1980's kids program, 'The Amazing Lollipop Man', visits the doctors to see Dr West. Unfortunately it is the day of Dr West's funeral. Capelli spends his time now recording DVD commentaries and hoping the show will return.

 

David Semple wrote the episode and had this to say about it:
The fictional show I invented within my episode – "The Lollipop Man" – is about a time traveller who, whilst hiding out on earth, gets a part time job as a school crossing patrolman, but his lollipop stick can take him anywhere in time and space: so he takes children on amazing journeys…he mostly takes them on journeys of self-discovery, so, for example, with a child who's upset because his granddad has died, the Lollipop Man takes him back to the Second World War, where he gets to meet his granddad as a small, scared evacuee…and they get to play together one last time, even though it's a kid his own age he's playing with. That's what the Lollipop Man does – he helps people over the road, both literally and metaphorically.


As Colin Baker's tenure with 'Doctor Who' as the Sixth Doctor was during the 1980s, I'm sure he had plenty of London-based, off-screen adventures during that time.  Sooner or later he would have seen or heard about the TV show 'The Amazing Lollipop Man' and would have been mighty suspicious about it, considering how closely it hewed to his own life.

I think it's pozz'ble, just pozz'ble, the Sixth Doctor and Mel would have gone to the BBC in Birmingham to see if somebody did know too much about him.   There he would have met Graham Capelli and his biological imperative would have taken it from there once they shook hands.

And who knows?  Maybe it turned out the writer of the show within the show (not necessarily David Semple) was an alien hoping to expose the truth about the Doctor through his scripts.



If you're interested in seeing Graham Cappelli in his later years, here's the episode of 'Doctors' in which Sylvester McCoy guest-starred:



BCnU!

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