Wartime (film)

Wartime
Cover of the 1997 VHS reissue
Production
Directed by	Keith Barnfather
Written by	Andy Lane Helen Stirling Derrick Sherwin (characters)
Produced by	Keith Barnfather John Ainsworth (assistant)
Music by	Mark Ayres
Running time	1 episode, 35 mins.
First broadcast	20 January 1988 (revised 1997)

Wartime is a 1988 direct-to-video science fiction film produced by Reeltime Pictures. It is the first professionally produced, authorized independent spin-off of the British television series Doctor Who, and the only such production to be made while the original run of the show was still on the air.

Produced and directed by Keith Barnfather and written by Andy Lane and Helen Stirling, Wartime follows Warrant Officer John Benton of the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce. During a mission for UNIT leader Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart, Benton visits his childhood home where ghosts of the past rise up to haunt him. John Levene, who played Benton on Doctor Who off-and-on between 1968 and 1975, reprised the role for the film. In 1997, a revised version of the film was released, acknowledging in the credits for the first time a voice-only cameo by Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier which had always been present in the film.

Although the British Broadcasting Corporation owns the rights to Doctor Who and its lead characters, Reeltime was able to obtain permission from Derrick Sherwin, creator of Benton and UNIT, to use both entities in this film so long as the Doctor was not mentioned. This set a precedent that led to further independently made spin-offs featuring former companions of the Doctor, and alien races from the show, which would be released over the following decade; ultimately an independent company, Big Finish Productions, would in the late 1990s receive a licence from the BBC to produce officially sanctioned Doctor Who-based productions.