A lot of it comes down to production issues up top. It seems the current production company genuinely has a problem with the pace. Series 5 they managed it because they had an extended run-up due to the specials still rolling production at the same time.
There's a lot of stuff and scandal behind it all. None of it is absolutely confirmed, but enough smoke in a lot of cases that it seems there was fire to go along with it. Like, Beth Willis and Piers Wenger seemed to oversee on some budget disasters during Series 5 and Series 6 both.
Willis allegedly hired her boyfriend to the production team temporarily and took him out abroad for the filming of Vampires of Venice, then decided to stay out there after the BBC paid for the flights to have a little holiday! This, allegedly, is why she jumped before she was pushed, and went back to her previous job for an external production company. Wenger was allegedly a bit of an arsehole. Two of the lower-level producers left, supposedly due to Wenger/Willis treating them poorly during S5 filming. They were series stalwarts - one had been with the show since Eccleston, another since Series 3. Wenger and Willis left within a month of each other (telling!) and were at that point he only two top-flight Who production staff to not be massively promoted - Willis went back to her old Job and Wenger got shuffled sideways after series 6 was over.
While the official line is the split was a conscious decision to help the show internationally (and make kids have 'less of a wait' domestically) it's been widely reported it was due to a colossal budget fuck-up that forced the BBC to spread the cost of the series across multiple periods. Allegedly the series had to be rewritten and rejigged to accommodate this.
Then there were more producers, and it's been musical chairs ever since. Then Moffat allegedly had a row with the replacement of Wenger/Willis, Caroline Skinner, and threw her into a crack in time (Private Eye reported that at a BBC Worldwide party, the row became loud and noticeable, and Moffat stormed out after shouting "You are erased from Doctor Who!!" at her - the next week she resigned. She didn't appear in the post-titles credits in 7b despite working on it) - and she worked on everything up to and including the 50th, which she left midway through production. Some people claim the topic of those fights is linked to the reason Eccleston turned down the 50th after initially agreeing in a preliminary fashion.
So they're settling in with another all-new top-end team around Moffat now for Series 8, which supposedly isn't going to start filming 'til January. Settling all that is probably difficult, plus Moffat's commitments to Sherlock.
It is a bit weird, though, to think what we got before. Cast your mind back to the ancient year 2008, where we had:
- 13 Episodes of Doctor Who
- A Doctor Who Christmas Special
- 13 Episodes of Torchwood
- 12 Episodes of Sarah Jane Adventures
- 14 Episodes of Doctor Who Confidential
- A podcast commentary featuring cast & crew on the website immediately after every episode of Who/Torchwood, Plus a full 13 all-new commentaries on the DVD
and right now seems a bit pathetic/grim by comparison. The commentary thing in particular naffs me off, as a being a commentary/behind-the-scenes nerd it irritates me we've never had Smith commentate one of his performances, and his era DVD sets have commentary tracks for less than half the episodes. What happened?!
