So Piers Wenger and Beth Willis were co-producers during series 5 and 6 along with Moffat. But they weren’t quite as into it as RTD’s Julie Gardner / Phil Collinson dream-team. Wenger in particular was just doing it for his career trajectory and didn’t really care. In an attempt to make a blank slate he fired the production managers, Tracie Simpson and Peter Bennett, and replaced them with Sanne Wohlenberg and Marcus Wilson.
Now Bennett had worked on every episode since
Bad Wolf, and Simpson was credited by RTD for basically saving series 1 with her preternatural thriftiness, so it’s no surprise that the show suffered without these veterans. Wohlenberg and Wilson fucked up
badly. Budget overruns, delays, etc. As a result, series 6 wasn’t ready for spring transmission and Moffat had to do a last-minute change in episode order to put
A Good Man Goes to War at the break point, meaning a ton of rewrites.
In fact this ended up affecting series 7, as well!
The Private Eye wrote about all this in 2011 and said that, because of the lingering budgeting problems, 2012 would be a 2009-style year of specials rather than a series, and the BBC were reconsidering their 50th anniversary plans as a result. Moffat dismissed all this as tabloid nonsense (see also his quote in OP (lol)). But shortly thereafter the BBC One Controller announced the split series 7 plan, blaming it on
Sherlock, which Moffat later denied.
In any case, during series 6 Wenger ended up leaving for Film4. Private Eye described it as “falling on his own sword”, as this was the first time a Doctor Who higher-up hadn’t gotten a big promotion after leaving. Beth Willis also left less than a month later — it turns out she was up to her own shenanigans, like hiring her boyfriend during the overseas shoots of
Vampires of Venice and
Vincent and the Doctor then after filming having a nice Croatia holiday on the BBC’s dime.
(There’s a lot of suspicions that the timing was because
Wenger had been covering for
Willis in some way. She retreated to her pre-DW job at an external company, but when he left his spot at Film4 — to become Head of Drama at BBC, no less — she was his replacement!)
In any case, Moffat asked Tracie Simpson and Peter Bennett to come back and take over, but the two had gone and started their own comedy show
Baker Boys with the bunch of other Who crew who left with them (including writers, editors, costume designers, costume supervisors, gaffers, and production designers, among others). So they turned down the offer. After that was Caroline Skinner, who cared a lot about the show, but there was the affair which led to the surprise resignation and yeah you know about that.
Mercifully by series 8 Moffat had found Minchin, and Simpson and Bennett came back into the fold, so he was able to do series 8-10 without problem. And we all know how well those turned out! We can only imagine what we could have had if not for those scheduling mistakes — and, of course, we can hope that Moffat does his own
A Writer’s Tale one day!
[Edit to fix typo of “The Private Eye” as “The Pirate Eye”, argg.]
