I like the ending to Revelation of the Daleks

If I’m honest it probably works better with the final word cut out. Imagine trying to excite viewers with wild promises of Blackpool.

Yeah, I like it. It's a good use of negative space, the audience can fill in whatever they like and promises new possibilities on the horizon. Whatever you can imagine (so long as it starts with a 'B' ). Reminds me a bit of The Two Doctors novelisation, in hindsight, where it ends with a single, divorced phrase:

Eh, I'd say it was more a case of leaving the door open to take things in a different direction (should the series required it). If the Doc says Blackpool, then the audience is going to expect Blackpool and be a bit put out when it doesn't happen. If it's cut too early -- say when Orcini detonates the bomb -- then you're adding an extra complication to what might already be a difficult new season. Everyone's automatically locked into resolving what happened in Revelation and any time-skip after that point is going to feel a bit clunky no matter how you do it. With production finished, it would've been much kinder on the future production team just to omit that final word.

Saward and Colin both mock the idea of that cliffhanger on the special features, so yeah - I'll stick with dumb given they would know better than any of us.

When Powell and co decided to bring it back from hiatus for the Trial, I guarantee the "cliffhanger" of where he's going to take Peri next wasn't even slightly on their minds.

Eh, they're entitled to their opinions. We're entitled to ours.

All the benefits of a nice, soft cliffhanger. No obligations. Freedom to spin the regulars out to wherever they needed to go and bring them back in whatever form they liked.

To answer Nucleus' actual question, yes I quite like the choppy abrupt ending. The sting into the credits really helped. Yet it's kinda impossible to discuss without the politics behind it.

The ratings were almost exactly what they had been under Davison so cliffhanger or not, Powell and Grade wanted the show off. The show never had a chance. To this day there's a fallacy that Colin flopped in the ratings but he beat the average for even Davison's much publicised Season 20. More people watched Colin than watched Peter's "A returning character every story" anniversary season.

But the behemoth that was Eastenders was in development and a lot of shows were cancelled or rested to build the Albert Square set at great cost. Who was one of the victims though it was only for 18 months according to Auntie. Though as we now know from the Trials And Tribulations doc it was - according to JNT and others including Ian Levine - never the intention of the Beeb to bring it back the next year hence the Doctor In Distress and the Sun campaign etc. The show was off for good as far as those making it knew.

The cliffhanger was not gonna play a part in saving the show though even if Saward and Colin mock it now and it is the proverbial bringing a knife to a gunfight...at least it was well intentioned from JNT. 

What did bring the show back? No one thing IMO. The public outcry, the ratings being reviewed, international sales being an all time high (this was the heyday of PBS showing Who), BBC Worldwide crunching the numbers on revenue....or maybe they weren't lying and the show was indeed always coming back on air.

Of course a few years later the Beeb learned from the bad PR. Post S26 they just...stopped making Who. By then the ratings were awful. The scheduling wasn't giving it a chance. Yet they never cancelled it, never put it to rest. They just stopped telling the team to make new Who. By then JNT and Cartmel realised that rather than "cliffhangers", this one seemed final so signing off with a statement overdubbed by McCoy in ADR, was a more dignified way to go. Come on Ace...we've got work to do indeed. By 1989 sales of back catalogue Who and the massive growth of VHS meant they could monetise Who without actually making it. Stations like PBS wanted Tom and Jon anyway - not Sylv. No ending was gonna save that last series sadly. A shame as S26 is the best in a looooong time.  

Well, by then there was no "JNT and Saward", they were at loggerheads more often than not and Eric certainly didn't come up with, or like, the idea of the clipped-cliffhanger as he's made clear since.  Eric may have written the story, but the cliffhanger was devised and created in post. By Revelation their relationship had long since been tenuous. 

The larger point - and I'm not sure it's possible to remove what comes after from this - is that no matter how good the cliffhanger, the higher ups wanted it dead. Eric believed they'd want that regardless of the quality of the end of the season, JNT thought otherwise. 

I'll need to relisten to the commentary or watch the doc as I can't remember if Graeme Harper knew much at the time.

No, I'm not talking about Ultimate Foe - they'd not been on good terms long before that, and as we discovered in his tell-all expose in the infamous Starburst interview Eric had not been happy with the direction JNT wanted for the past few years before leaving ("Pantomime!") and had been at loggerheads since at least Davison's last year after the way Peter Grymwade was treated. Their relationship was to become intolerable a year later but even by S21, Saward and JNT were not getting on in any way shape or form.  

As we found out also at the time, Eric was less than enthused with Colin's casting and would be going public with that rather explosively too.

Again, are we discussing the broader relationship between JNT-Saward or what was happening behind-the-scenes specifically in regards to Revelation?