It’s time to vote! Is ‘The Interstellar Song Contest’ really the most expensive episode in Doctor Who history?
It’s fair to say that Doctor Who had its biggest ever budget when it partnered with Disney. Say what you want about the enjoyability of the episodes (even ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ has its detractors) because there’s no denying that every penny of the Disney deal burst out of the screen. Remember, this is the show that rebuilt the studios of Abbey Road for ‘The Devil’s Chord‘ and constructed a full-sized, mock cinema for ‘Lux.’ In the Disney era, Doctor Who was anything but cheap.
And then we have 2025’s ‘Interstellar Song Contest.’ Apparently, its working title was ‘Eurovision in Space,’ so even if you’ve never seen the episode, you can imagine the kinds of demands that were placed on it.
And it’s fair to say that ‘The Interstellar Song Contest’ met those demands. The production team constructed their own Eurovision-style arena at Wolf Studios which, according to reports, used up over half of the facility’s sound stages. This was a space that had to, conceivably, host an audience of up to 100,000 people; Studio D at Lime Grove wasn’t going to cut the mustard.
Fortunately, the team behind ‘The Interstellar Song Contest’ didn’t hire 100,000 people, you’ll be pleased to hear – although it’s fun to speculate what the episode’s budget might have been if it had enlisted such a crowd. The programme makers opted to use ‘only’ 100 extras, and clone them in post-production to flesh out the venue. This may sound like a simple process, but it still wasn’t cheap; these extras still had to be paid, fed and costumed, and then ‘digi-doubled’ in post production so that they didn’t appear as simple ‘copied and pasted’ clones, like some low budget video game from the early naughties.
And whilst we at Lovarzi aren’t experts in the digi-doubling process, it sounds complicated. Every extra in ‘The Interstellar Song Contest‘ had to be scanned digitally so that they could be recreated on a computer, and then have their appearances and behaviours modified so that they, as a collective whole, looked and acted like a genuine crowd. Now, imagine having to do this for 100,000 extras. And then imagine what it would cost.
Now, according to our research (and by ‘research’ we mean Google) the average budget for a Doctor Who episode in the Disney era was around £10 million. And that’s the average, remember; ‘The Interstellar Song Contest’ was not average.
Indeed, the episode’s writer Juno Dawson told Attitude that ‘The Interstellar Song Contest’ was “the most ridiculous episode they’ve ever done… And the most expensive. That’s an exclusive.”
We can imagine, then, that if Dawson’s claims are true, ‘The Interstellar Song Contest’ must have clocked in at well over £10 million, assuming Google’s AI robots have gotten their facts right. This seems likely, given that the contest’s arena is, to all intents and purposes, just set-dressing; it’s simply the story’s backdrop. We haven’t even mentioned the episode’s other components.
First, we have all the guest appearances. Now, we haven’t engaged with Rylan Clark’s agent per se, but we’re guessing his fee was higher than Carole Ann Ford‘s, particularly as he had more to do in the episode (Ford’s appearance was just a fleeting cameo.)
And speaking of cameos, we also have the amusing inclusion of Eurovision stalwart Graham Norton, who’s well-known to Doctor Who fans for his many and varied and unplanned appearances over the years, most notably in the 2005 episode ‘Rose.’ This means that ‘The Interstellar Song Contest’ already has three major guest stars – and yes, we are counting Carole Ann Ford as a major guest star. She’s Susan Foreman. Be quiet. Certainly, the costs are mounting rapidly for the budgeters at ‘The Interstellar Contest.’
And then we have the fact that ‘The Interstellar Song Contest’ is an entirely studio-bound story, with a heavy reliance on CGI. You couldn’t pull a John Nathan-Turner with this one; you couldn’t take your production out of the studio and onto location. You couldn’t construct your concert arena in a BBC carpark a la ‘The Greatest Show in the Galaxy.’ And even if you hired a pre-existing venue, how would you realise the scene where the roof opens and the audience gets sucked into the abyss? This episode needed to be made in a bespoke environment.
And then, just to really make the team’s wallet weep, there is the tiny added detail of the bi-generation at the episode’s conclusion. This is only a brief moment in ‘The Interstellar Song Contest,’ but an important one. The character of Mrs Flood, having been rescued from the vacuum of space, ‘dies’ and bi-generates, revealing herself to be the Rani. This adds another guest start to our bill in the shape of Archie Panjabi, plus of course the associated CGI costs and the technical conundrum of pulling off such an effect.
Apparently, the director Ben A. Williams viewed footage from ‘The Giggle‘s Doctor Who: Unleashed episode for tips on realising a bi-generation, when the same thing was done with David Tennant and Ncuti Gatwa. It may not have been the most expensive scene from ‘The Interstellar Song Contest,’ but it would have been one of the more complicated and time-consuming. And in TV production, of course, time is money.
So even if ‘The Interstellar Song Contest‘ isn’t categorically the most expensive Doctor Who episode of all time, it must be up there. So tell us, reader: was it worth the expense? Where do you rank ‘The Interstellar Song Contest’ among the other Fifteenth Doctor adventures? Let us know in the comments below.
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