Doctor Who: Why is Paul McGann the official 8th Doctor when Peter Cushing is not!

Doctor Who: Why is Paul McGann the official 8th Doctor when Peter Cushing is not included?

Can anyone enlighten me on this puzzle? All the 10 Doctors have been the TV show actors apart from Paul McGann who appears in a one off TV movie. However, Peter Cushing appeared in two films as the Doctor: Doctor Who and the Daleks and Daleks Invasion Earth: 2150AD , but he is never considered an 'official' Doctor. Does anyone have any thoughts as to why this is?

2 weeks ago
Good point about the grandchildren, but I seem to remember from some trivia somewhere that the original Doctor (played by William Hartnell) was travelling with his granddaughter Susan so I don't think it's as simple as that!

Peter Cushing played an alternate version of the first Doctor in film reworkings of two stories from the original TV series. Neither film had any involvement from the BBC. When Cushing played the Doctor, the idea of regeneration hadn't been thought of yet, so it was simply considered as another actor playing the role William Hartnell had made famous on TV.

Also it must be remembered that the concept of the Cushing films was very different from that of the TV series, since Cushing's Doctor was portrayed in the movies as a human scientist who had invented a time machine, whereas it was stated from the very beginning of the TV series that the Doctor and his Grand Daughter Susan were not from Earth, although it wasn't until much later that we found out they were from Gallifrey.

So the Cushing films are not canonical even within context of the first Doctor stories, and really were little more than an attempt to cash in on the popularity of the Daleks as a merchandising phenomenon in the 1960s. In fact "The Daleks", and "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" on TV were far superior to the film remakes in every respect, despite being in black and white.

The 8th Doctor played by Paul McGann was seen to regenerate from Sylvester McCoy's seventh Doctor in the 1996 TV movie which was a collaboration between the BBC and two American film companies. So the BBC had input into the TV movie and no other actor had played the eighth Doctor before hand. The movie does pretty much fit into the TV series canon, although there are a few minor points in it which deviates, and which are best forgotten (The Doctor being half human for example). Also McGann went on to play the 8th Doctor in the BBC radio series and in the Big Finish audio series, which played a large part on filling in the gap between the TV movie and the 2005 series.

As for the Doctor's Grand Daughter, Susan, she was a major character throughout the first series of Doctor Who in 1963-64 and left at the end of the second story in series 2 ("The Dalek Invasion of Earth"). She was played by Carole Anne Ford.