TIME LORD ON TRIAL

The 1980s were a turbulent time for Doctor Who, as well as socially and politically in Britain (although the series would largely disengage from reflecting this, except perhaps in its own behind-the-scenes turmoil). The 1980s were also a time of increasing postmodernity in pop culture, with self-awareness featuring in a variety of media. A postmodern approach to storytelling came to dominate Doctor Who, undermining the audience’s long attachment to the show. There was also a boom in nostalgia, with the 1960s in particular coming under the microscope, something the show was only too happy to trade on. This all fed into flamboyant new producer John Nathan-Turner’s penchant for event television, a growing aspect of the maturing of the media that he would ruthlessly exploit in the promotion of the show.

With the arrival of Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street, Britain faced a period of dynamic historical, political and social change through the 1980s. Ruthless modernisation of the economy led to record unemployment and deindustrialisation, which in turn resulted in greater social division and unrest. Privatisation saw many state utilities sold off, while coal mining came to a virtual end as a result of Conservative policies and the controversial (and violent) miners’ strike of 1984–85. The country also faced increased terrorist activity on the UK mainland carried out by the IRA as the Irish ‘Troubles’ continued.

Doctor Who’s eighteenth season started the decade with a creative revamp that, nonetheless, saw it receive some of the lowest ratings in its long history. Similarly, the twenty-sixth season also saw a creative renaissance, yet achieved some of the series’ lowest ever audience numbers, leading to the end of the show’s initial run in 1989. The only common denominator on Doctor Who through the 1980s was producer John Nathan-Turner.

Taking over from Graham Williams, John Nathan-Turner had a solid history with the programme, unlike the two previous producers. His connections to Doctor Who went back to 1969, as floor manager on the Troughton story The Space Pirates. He’d worked on the show throughout the 1970s, most consistently as the budget-controlling production unit manager. Graham Williams had suggested that Nathan-Turner be associate producer, as he was instrumental in getting the programme made on budget. Concern about Nathan-Turner’s lack of direct producing experience saw Barry Letts appointed as overseeing executive producer. Through the years, Nathan-Turner became as much of an icon of the show as his leading men, Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy. He was a master of publicity, often featuring himself in any coverage as much as the show’s stars.

Most of the stylistic changes and format alterations that Doctor Who had undergone during its first 17 years were driven by, or identified with, a newly installed producer or production team. From Verity Lambert to Innes Lloyd, Doctor Who changed from a serialised exploration of other worlds and strange societies to a series of ‘base-under-siege’ stories in which the Doctor and his companions confronted marauding monsters. The arrival of Barry Letts and colour brought the show down to Earth for several years, with a gritty, thriller approach. This changed again with Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes’ ‘gothic horror’ period, followed by Williams’ era of satire and parody.

John Nathan-Turner’s decade on Doctor Who (from 1980 to 1989) did not feature the same ‘producer’s mark’. After his initial creative producing in the early-1980s, Nathan-Turner became detached from the show. The decade’s stylistic shifts can, therefore, be more easily understood when attributed to changes in script editor. Distinctive periods followed the appointments of Christopher H Bidmead, Eric Saward and Andrew Cartmel as script editors. As the decade progressed, Nathan-Turner was more a practical line producer, bringing the series in on time and on budget, handling internal BBC politics and external promotion. Bidmead and Saward’s periods coincided with the departure of Tom Baker (following attempts to tone down his performance) and Peter Davison’s arrival, with Saward continuing through the short-lived and controversial TARDIS occupancy of Colin Baker. Finally, Cartmel revitalised the show with Sylvester McCoy as the star, before its cancellation in 1989.

Bidmead and Nathan-Turner set out to make a more serious version of Doctor Who. Pastiche and parody were abandoned in favour of serious storytelling and stronger scientific rigour. They paid attention to surface gloss and mise-en-scène (the details of sets, costumes) and visual continuity with the series’ own past. Their removal of the humour left space for a reliance on ‘real science’ for story concepts. This led to a dearth of significant social or political content. This new ‘hard science’ era of the show also drew inspiration from ‘new wave’ literary science fiction and Hollywood movies, rather than from the political and social realities of the 1980s. Where Letts and Dicks engaged with the contemporary politics of the 1970s (as detailed in chapter three), Nathan-Turner and his script editors were inspired by films like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Alien, Star Wars and comic-book superheroes, rather than the politically and socially disruptive rise of Thatcherism.

The problem with this approach was that, instead of being a series with wide appeal and easily accessible to a large casual TV audience, Doctor Who became increasingly insular and was widely perceived as a ‘geeky’ sci-fi show that appealed to a few nerdy obsessives. This style-over-substance approach was suitable for the postmodern 1980s, but it resulted in the series disengaging from its popular audience, turning inwards, becoming self-obsessed and, eventually, losing the support of the majority of viewers, resulting in cancellation in 1989.

The changes to Doctor Who were immediately apparent to TV audiences from the first episode of The Leisure Hive on 30 August 1980. The blue-tinged, time-tunnel title sequence was gone, replaced by a blast of white light and a starfield that formed Tom Baker’s face. This was accompanied by a loud, aggressive, heavily synthesised version of the Doctor Who theme. This was Doctor Who for the 1980s – slick, glossy, fast paced, loud and brash.

Tom Baker’s costume had been redesigned in a deep red that reflected the star’s newly subdued, melancholic approach to the role. The Doctor’s clothes (and those of his companions) had now become a uniform, in the style of comic-book superheroes. This created an easily recognised silhouette, thanks to the distinctive hat-and-scarf combination. In the past, the Doctor’s look could vary from story to story or match a specific theme (like his deerstalker-cap-and-cape affair in The Talons of Weng-Chiang). Now the Doctor’s outfit (and those of Baker’s successors) would rarely change. It was an approach that was much criticised, but it displayed the conceptual thinking that Nathan-Turner (and collaborators) was bringing to the series.

Season 18 was a radical departure for Doctor Who. While largely applauded by dedicated fans (see chapter six), it did not find great favour with the vast majority of viewers. This revamped approach resulted in one of the show’s lowest-rated periods ever, falling by almost 50 per cent from the previous year. The season averaged 5.8 million, with a low of 3.7 million watching the second episode of Full Circle. Viewers were more attracted by the even glossier, easily accessible, action-adventure thrills of the American series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, scheduled opposite Doctor Who by ITV. The show, based on the 1929 newspaper comic strip, provided the easy thrills that audiences had come to associate with science fiction since 1977’s Star Wars. Doctor Who, in comparison, seemed low key, domestic (lacking the new-frontier, space-race spirit of the US), limited and old-fashioned, despite Nathan-Turner’s drastic reinvention.

The eighteenth season’s seven stories featured little in direct political or social commentary. The Leisure Hive drew from Francis Ford Coppola’s film of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (1972), rather than satirising the British holiday business and the growing ‘leisure economy’ of the 1980s, and rated 5.1 million viewers overall. Only 4.7 million tuned in to the second story, Meglos, which saw the Doctor’s identity stolen by a cactus-like life form. The story is notable as the first manifestation of Nathan-Turner’s interest in the series’ own past and his ‘celebrity guest stars’ policy. Jacqueline Hill, who’d played companion Barbara Wright opposite William Hartnell’s First Doctor, returned in a major guest role. This ‘stunt casting’ would become a regular device used to generate tabloid press coverage.

Bidmead’s ‘real science’ agenda kicked into high gear with the ‘ESpace’ trilogy. Inspired by the 1978 Key to Time season, Bidmead devised a linked trilogy of stories set in a mini-universe dubbed ‘ESpace’ (for exo-space). He drafted a memo for the writers, outlining the scientific basis for the trilogy’s exotic location, although very little of the divergent laws of physics proposed were realised. The three stories provide a satisfying linked narrative that pays off with the departure of companion Romana and K-9 at the conclusion of Warriors’ Gate. Full Circle is an evolution parable, in which the crew of a crashed starliner discover they’re not descended from the original occupants of the craft, but instead from the indigenous ‘marshmen’ primitives, whom they despise. There’s also a critique of animal cruelty in the depiction of the crew’s treatment of the Marshman. Filmic influences include Planet of the Apes (1968) and The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), showing the dominance of the visual media in influencing the show, rather than any ideas reflecting the extreme political and social change sweeping Britain in the early-1980s.

The middle story of the trilogy did little to change this: a revival of Terrance Dicks’ cancelled 1977 vampire script The Witch Lords. In its new form as State of Decay, Dicks transported his vampires (ancient enemies of the Time Lords) into ESpace. The result is a New Romantic-inspired, gothic-influenced version of a Hammer film. Bidmead’s influence on the story was to make the vampires vulnerable to technology (as they’re aliens), rather than anything supernatural. The New Romantic, post-Punk, pop-cultural influence would reach a climax on Warriors’ Gate, where much of the visual style draws from 1980s pop videos, like Adam and the Ants’ ‘Prince Charming’. It features elaborate video effects and lashings of stylistic weirdness. Although the story invokes slavery (a big issue, but not particularly contemporary) in the plight of the time-trapped Tharils (the lion-men), the filmic influence this time is Cocteau’s 1946 film La Belle et la Bête, with the magic-mirror doorway and the look of the Tharils obvious homages. Confirming the dominance of classic filmic culture on this unusual season of Doctor Who, it’s no surprise that Warriors’ Gate director Paul Joyce arranged screenings of source films for cast and crew (often done in the feature-film world). Among them was Alain Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad (1961, featuring time slippage), Cocteau’s Orphée (1950, walking through mirrors), and John Carpenter’s space comedy Dark Star (1974, the blue-collar crew of the trapped spaceship). This primacy given to the ‘look’ of the show over ideas was a deliberate choice.

The conceptually driven ‘ESpace’ trilogy held 5.2 million for the first two stories, with a sudden jump to 7.5 million for the third. This appears strange as Warriors’ Gate is notoriously one of Doctor Who’s more ‘difficult’ stories and is emblematic of Nathan-Turner’s consciously challenging approach. The sudden increase in viewers does not denote a sudden awakening on behalf of the British TV viewing public. Realising Doctor Who was being slaughtered in the ratings at 6.15pm, the BBC moved the show back to 5.10pm, resulting in a sudden influx of viewers (in an age long before video recorders, time shifting and Sky+).

Season 18 climaxed with a double bill of stories (The Keeper of Traken and Logopolis) that saw the resurrection of the Doctor’s archenemy, the Master (Anthony Ainley). The fairytale atmosphere of Warriors’ Gate continued into the penultimate story, The Keeper of Traken. Nathan-Turner carefully structured the end of the season and the beginning of the next to bridge the change of lead actor, fearing that there might be resistance among younger viewers for whom Tom Baker was the only Doctor. New companion Adric (Matthew Waterhouse) had already joined the TARDIS crew in Full Circle, and Romana had left, along with K-9, in Warriors’ Gate. The Keeper of Traken introduced Nyssa (Sarah Sutton), orphaned by the Master, but who doesn’t opt to travel with the Doctor until the season finale, Logopolis. That final adventure for Tom Baker would also introduce the third new companion, Tegan Jovanka (Janet Fielding), an opinionated Australian flight attendant. The biggest change would be reserved for the closing moments of Logopolis when Tom Baker’s Doctor finally regenerated.

The Keeper of Traken is a ‘Garden of Eden’ parable (with an atmosphere that echoes Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, adapted by the BBC that same year), in which a perfectly balanced world is corrupted by the evil Melkur, a long-dormant statue located in a verdant grove. Melkur is revealed to be a TARDIS housing the decaying Master (from 1976’s The Deadly Assassin). The theme of corruption continued in Logopolis as the new Master (having body-snatched Nyssa’s father, Tremas) arrives on the title planet, where a society of mathematicians is preserving the universe’s harmony through the fundamental manipulation of numbers. The Master’s interference disrupts their process and threatens the universe. In defeating the Master, the Doctor falls from a radio telescope to his ‘death’. His regeneration is aided (in an echo of the Third Doctor’s) by the mysterious wraith-like figure of ‘the Watcher’ who has been haunting the Doctor throughout. The 21 March 1981 final episode of Logopolis was watched by 6.1 million, with the season as a whole averaging only 5.8 million.

The regeneration of Tom Baker’s Doctor into Peter Davison, the star of All Creatures Great and Small (a show that had John Nathan-Turner as production unit manager) had come at just the right time. The change of time slot had worked, but it was too late to significantly raise the season-average viewing figures. So important was the change of actor after seven years (a generation had grown up knowing no other Doctor than Tom Baker), the BBC scheduled a repeat series showcasing an adventure from each of the previous Doctors in preparation for Davison’s debut in 1982. However, the show’s retreat from engagement with the realities of the world (filtered through fantasy entertainment) would be a major contributing factor to the decline of Doctor Who through the 1980s. The poor viewing figures for Tom Baker’s final season meant that Nathan-Turner was aware he would have to do something drastic if he was to win back the popular audience. Part of his new approach would be heavily reliant on the casting of the Fifth Doctor, and for the first time the series cast an already established television star:29-year-old Davison.

In casting Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor, producer John Nathan-Turner was looking for a contrast with Tom Baker. Davison’s light, straight hair and his youth contrasted hugely with the near-50, dark, curly-haired Tom Baker. While these superficial elements were at the front of Nathan-Turner’s mind, he was lucky with his choice. Davison was a rising TV star (with sitcoms Sink or Swim and Holding the Fort). The change of lead actor and a controversial move from Saturday early evenings to 7pm on Mondays and Tuesdays (in most areas) contributed heavily to the ratings almost doubling over Tom Baker’s final year. Davison’s first season of stories (the show’s nineteenth on air) all averaged around nine million, with atypical period adventure Black Orchid reaching ten million. The soap-opera-like cast line-up and scheduling helped Doctor Who rise to new levels of success and popularity, even as the show retreated from any popular social or political engagement.

Nathan-Turner, however, appears to have taken the wrong lessons from the failure of Tom Baker’s final season with the viewing public. The season had proved a hit with the increasingly vocal and actively involved fan base. The return of the Cybermen and the Master gave Nathan-Turner a taste for reviving monsters and characters from the show’s past, a process given more momentum due to the looming twentieth anniversary and growing appetite for nostalgia. Nathan-Turner would continue to exploit the growing cultural and intellectual phenomenon of postmodernism in popular culture. Self-reflexivity became central to narratives in film and television, in which characters would make comments or experience events that seemed to reveal an awareness of their status as fictional entertainments. Doctor Who had always enjoyed a loose continuity, but increasingly in the 1980s the show’s own narrative history would become central to its storytelling. At first this engaged audiences with a taste for nostalgia, but over the longer run it would become off-putting, with the series perceived as needing a high degree of knowledge of the past to understand it. Nathan-Turner’s genius for publicity and PR was also part of this, with narrative developments in the show promoted as event television, or manipulated through the prism of other forms of entertainment (shooting on location for Planet of Fire, Davison and Nicola Bryant posed on the beach in a James Bond pastiche, while new companion Bonnie Langford was introduced when she and Colin Baker arrived on a theatre stage suspended by Kirby wires).

The Master was the villain in Davison’s first story, Castrovalva (a sequel to Logopolis), and in the season’s climax, Time Flight, in which a hijacked Concorde lands on prehistoric Earth. Bidmead continued his exploration of complex mathematics in Castrovalva, with a look derived from the work of early-twentieth-century Dutch artist MC Escher. This may have drawn on a then-popular science book, Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R Hofstadter, which connected music, art and maths, but it was definitely inspired by an Escher print called ‘Castrovalva’ that was hanging in a BBC office. With modern video effects, the show just about managed to pull off an Escher-inspired environment. The first two episodes (almost entirely TARDIS-set) dealt with the aftermath of the regeneration, before the final two relocated events to Castrovalva, an artificial environment created by the Master as a trap for the Doctor. This story structure made sense in the new twice-weekly transmission slot.

The glamour of filming at Heathrow and featuring Concorde, with the active co-operation of the airport authorities and British Airways, seems to have been enough for Nathan-Turner to commission Time Flight. Concluding the series with the unexpected return of the Master was also attractive as a more sophisticated version of Barry Letts’ approach to structuring the series (and Nathan-Turner had certainly learned from Letts as executive producer).

Nathan-Turner’s recreation of Doctor Who was a combination of hard science fiction with game-show or light-entertainment production values. New script editor Eric Saward was keen to build on Bidmead’s legacy and push the show in a more ideas-driven direction. Given the political and social upheaval in Britain in the early-to mid-1980s, it is remarkable that this previously socially and politically engaged series should fail to explore this material. Nathan-Turner wanted a new way to engage audiences in an increasingly competi-tive television environment, and he found it in the combination of Saward’s movie-inspired science fiction and an easily accessible visual look that would not be alienating to viewers who experienced Doctor Who as part of an evening’s television.

Saward would implement Nathan-Turner’s idea of event television in the most spectacular way with Earthshock. He’d been hired for the job on the back of submitting The Visitation, a traditional story that re-tooled classic Doctor Who tropes for the 1980s. It featured invading aliens trapped in a historical locale and a notable historical event affected by the Doctor (in this case he’s involved in starting the fire of London, after a similar fire-starting experience in Rome during The Romans).

Following the ideas-driven double bill of Four To Doomsday (a 1960s-throwback political and environmental parable about autocratic rule in which an alien frog god aims for Earth after destroying his own planet’s ozone layer) and Kinda (a complex Buddhist/colonial parable featuring more pop-video-inspired hallucinations), and the pseudo-historic double bill of The Visitation and Black Orchid (an Agatha Christie-inspired heritage-house mystery), Saward and Nathan-Turner unleashed Earthshock, a story that (for better or worse, often both) was to dictate the style of the series for the rest of the decade.

Doctor Who had always used returning adversaries sparingly in the past, with three exceptions: the Daleks (at the height of 1960s Dalekmania), the Cybermen (in the late 1960s ‘monster’ season) and the Master (during the early 1970s). This all changed in the 1980s, with the Daleks returning every two years from 1984 and the Master featured as a regular villain during Peter Davison and Colin Baker’s time in the TARDIS. Nathan-Turner formulated the idea that exploiting the show’s own heritage was a good move following the fan-acclaimed ‘Master trilogy’. He went one step further, tapping the postmodern interest in nostalgia by bringing back barely remembered villains like Omega (Arc of Infinity), the Black Guardian (Mawdryn Undead, Terminus, Enlightenment), and creatures like the Sea Devils and Silurians (teamed up in Warriors of the Deep). The most dramatic return of all, however, was that of the Cybermen in Earthshock.

Six years after they were last seen (in Revenge of the Cybermen), the cliff-hanger of episode one of Earthshock revealed the newly redesigned ‘tin soldiers’ were back, jolting a nation of fans in surprise. Nathan-Turner had turned down the chance of a Radio Times cover announcing their return, preferring to maximise the surprise. This was intended to create word of mouth, turning Doctor Who into a must-see event. The intention was to increase the number of viewers for the second surprise, the unexpected (and equally secret) death of the Doctor’s companion Adric (Waterhouse) at the climax of episode four (something not seen since The Daleks’ Master Plan in 1966).

As part of the increasing postmodernism of the show, Earthshock features a quick catch-up on Cyber-history when the Cybermen view a selection of clips from past Doctor Who adventures. The first time Nathan-Turner had tried this was in a flashback sequence just before the Fourth Doctor fell from the Pharos Project radio telescope in Logopolis. This was part of the general nostalgia surrounding the programme as it approached its twentieth year on air, with TV review show Did You See? devoting a special report to Doctor Who’s past monsters on the back of the return of the Cybermen.

The effect of Earthshock on 1980s Doctor Who would be profound. Saward would go on to write a series of macho stories full of soldiers, violence and space opera (Resurrection of the Daleks, Attack of the Cybermen, Revelation of the Daleks) that would come to define the decade’s Doctor Who in the eyes of a dwindling audience. As script editor, he would shape others’ work to this template (with other stories modelled after Earthshock: Terminus, The Caves of Androzani, Vengeance on Varos and The Two Doctors). Each of these stories would (in part) emulate the macho American cinema of the 1980s, drawing on the work of James Cameron and films featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. There’s a lot of Die Hard in the often self-referential tone of much of Saward’s work, and it seemed that Doctor Who’s mass audience didn’t care for it.

From Earthshock onwards, Nathan-Turner’s Doctor Who would be driven by event-television choices. The show’s twentieth season saw each story contain a significant element from the series’ own past, largely thanks to the influence of fan ‘continuity consultant’ Ian Levine who was helping the production office keep the show’s 20-year-old continuity straight (see chapter six). Each story had a headline-attracting stunt attached, some more than one.

Season opener Arc of Infinity combined the return of companion Tegan, who’d been left behind in Heathrow at the conclusion of Time Flight, with an encore appearance by Omega, the Time Lord villain who’d appeared in The Three Doctors. Adding to the sense of special occasion, the production featured foreign filming (for the first time since City of Death) in Amsterdam (a habit that would recur in each of the next two years, on Planet of Fire and The Two Doctors).

Although there had been a BBC2 repeat of The Three Doctors (featuring Omega as the anti-matter villain) as part of the Five Faces of Doctor Who season before Peter Davison’s debut, Arc of Infinity is guilty of assuming detailed knowledge of the show’s past. Returning creatures or villains were not effectively reintroduced, other than with a throwaway ‘Oh it’s X, Y or Z’ uttered by the Doctor, and maybe an ‘I’ve met them before’ aside to the companion.

The rest of the season would see an encore encounter with the Mara (the dark-side threat from Kinda) in Snakedance (a spiritual remake of Planet of the Spiders); the Black Guardian in the loose trilogy of Mawdryn Undead, Terminus and Enlightenment; and the Master in historical adventure The King’s Demons. The original plan was for the twentieth-anniversary season to climax with the return of the Daleks in the Saward-scripted Warhead/The Return (retooled one year later as Resurrection of the Daleks). This reliance on the past allowed for a certain amount of creative reinvention (returning monsters were invariably redesigned), but it satisfied hardcore followers of the show (fans interested in its deep history) at the expense of the wider, casual audience.

The Black Guardian trilogy introduced new companion Turlough (Mark Strickson), an alien masquerading as an English public-school boy, pressured into attempting to kill the Doctor (repeatedly) on the Guardian’s behalf. The idea of a traitor-cum-threat within the TARDIS crew was a new one, but old elements of the show continued to recur with an appearance from the Brigadier (replacing the originally planned return of the First Doctor’s companion, Ian Chesterton) inspiring another series of nostalgic clips of old episodes built into the narrative. Again, as with Arc of Infinity, little care is taken to reintroduce the nostalgic elements to less regular viewers. Showrunner Russell T Davies would better handle the process of bringing back old monsters for the refreshed Doctor Who. He would also cleverly rework old plot elements, such as the way David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor seemingly began the regeneration process in The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End, echoing the false regeneration featured in the Davison adventure Mawdryn Undead, when the Doctor’s companions misidentify a disfigured impostor as the regenerated Doctor.

Big science-fiction ideas feature in Terminus and Enlightenment. Terminus sees the Doctor save the entire universe by ensuring the Big Bang happens in a story that draws heavily from Norse creation myths (mythology that would recur twice more during Sylvester McCoy’s time), while Enlightenment has the immortal ‘Eternals’ amuse themselves by racing spaceships disguised as old-fashioned sailing ships. The anniversary season ended with something of a whimper – thanks to the cancellation (due to strike action) of Warhead/The Return – with The King’s Demons, an old-fashioned historical tale in which the Master attempts to disrupt the signing of Magna Carta. Ratings had averaged seven million viewers for the season, an improvement on Tom Baker’s final year, but still falling behind the series highs of the 1970s.

The Doctor Who nostalgia boom culminated in a giant, over-subscribed convention at Longleat (see chapter six) in March 1983 and the broadcast, in November 1983, of the celebratory anniversary story The Five Doctors. This TV movie was screened as part of 1983’s Children in Need charity telethon night, two days after the actual twentieth anniversary on 23 November. This was the height of Doctor Who’s growing self-awareness, uniting three Doctors (Davison, Pertwee and Troughton), with a stand-in for the late William Hartnell (Richard Hurndall). The Fourth Doctor (Baker) featured in previously unseen material recycled from the incomplete story Shada. Opening with a clip of William Hartnell from The Dalek Invasion of Earth, The Five Doctors encapsulates all the signature traits of Doctor Who in the 1980s. The plot – in which various Doctors and companions have to make their way to the Dark Tower in Gallifrey’s Death Zone to defeat renegade Time Lord Borusa in his attempts to achieve immortality – comes across as a variation on the Marvel comic-book team-up and a riff on the growing popularity of Dungeons and Dragons adventure gaming. It is simply an excuse to pack in as many references to the show’s past as possible, and feature characters that ordinary viewers may or may not recognise, but each of whose fleeting returns would be applauded by fans. Various faces from the past were shoe-horned into Terrance Dicks’ busy script, with guest villain appearances from a lone Dalek, an army of Cybermen and the Master.

The tendency to recycle and reuse characters and story elements continued into season 21. Facile political commentary crept into underwater, base-under-siege story Warriors of the Deep. Pertwee foes the Sea Devils and the Silurians returned in a heavy-handed Cold War analogy thrust forward to the year 2084 (one hundred years after the year in which it was broadcast). Less sophisticated than much of the political content of the show during the early-1970s, it was nonetheless a late – and rare – attempt to re-engage with wider, real-world issues that connected to the larger viewing public. Warriors of the Deep was Doctor Who’s reaction to the rise of Ronald Reagan, his ‘star wars’ missile-defence policy, and the Greenham Common protests against the arrival of US nuclear missiles in the UK.

The apparent destruction of the TARDIS in Frontios was part of Nathan-Turner’s ongoing event-television agenda. The production office had publicly hinted that the police-box shape of the TARDIS might be abandoned and, with the seeming destruction of the ship by a Tractator-manipulated meteor storm, it was plausible that the plan was being enacted. Nathan-Turner would often float these high-concept ideas in press conferences, thereby generating publicity. The idea of an actress playing the Doctor had been used when Baker quit the role, and resurfaced when it was announced that Davison was leaving. The TARDIS replacement idea was given another workout in the opening to Attack of the Cybermen when the Doctor (Colin Baker) gets the chameleon circuit working briefly. Despite its originality, Frontios also reveals a growing trend in Doctor Who stories of the 1980s: it amalgamates elements from various stories from the past. The insect civilisation of the Tractators echoes that of The Web Planet, while their plot to pilot the planet of Frontios is drawn directly from the Daleks’ plan in The Dalek Invasion of Earth, and the far-future civilisation seems based upon that shown in The Ark.

The next story, Resurrection of the Daleks, featured the annual flashback sequence made up of clips from old episodes. The focus this time was on a series of images of the Doctor’s companions as the Daleks probe the Doctor’s mind (although a production oversight missed out Louise Jameson’s Leela). Narratively, however, Saward’s script was once again a combination of Alien and Star Wars, drawing on popular cinematic SF rather than creating any real-life allegory. The nearest Resurrection of the Daleks comes to social comment is a Dalek’s parting threat that Dalek-hidden duplicates still occupy positions of power in the British Government. The Doctor describes the duplicates as ‘less than stable’. Here it is a throwaway line, but Russell T Davies would make aliens-in-government the central conceit of a witty two-part story (Aliens in London/World War Three). The story also sees Tegan leave the TARDIS in an abrupt manner when she decides the death and destruction she experiences travelling with the Doctor have become too much. In reality, Fielding, Strickson and Davison were all leaving the show in 1984, so their departures were staggered across several stories. By The Twin Dilemma, the entire lead cast of the series had changed.

Nathan-Turner continued playing with icons of the series in Planet of Fire. It climaxed with the Master in a no-escape situation (once again), burning in the numismaton flame. He utters the unfinished line (to the Doctor): ‘Won’t you show mercy to your own…?’ Fan speculation had long proposed that the Doctor and the Master were not just Holmes and Moriarty or contemporaries at the Academy on Gallifrey (as the series had established), but might actually be related, even brothers. The line seems to play into that speculation, especially as the story has Turlough discovering his own lost brother. Russell T Davies would play with this speculation in The Sound of Drums in 2007, when the Master (John Simm) returns and Martha speculates about his relationship to the Doctor (a family connection dismissed by the Doctor, accusing Martha of watching too many soap operas).

Davison exited the show on a high in Robert Holmes’ The Caves of Androzani, a morality tale in which the Doctor tries to save his poisoned companion at the expense of his own life, while around him an interplanetary war reaches its climax. While the gunrunning and corporate scheming neatly reflected growing 1980s concerns, even Holmes finds himself falling into the postmodern trap of playing with icons of the past. The semi-sympathetic villain of the piece is Sharaz Jek, a scarred, masked figure who lurks in caves, and is another reprise of The Phantom of the Opera (as was Holmes’ own The Talons of Weng-Chiang).

Unfortunately, the full reveal of Sixth Doctor Colin Baker the following week in The Twin Dilemma was a huge step backwards. The regeneration was another big event and, to make it different from any of the previous colour series, Nathan-Turner had the new Doctor debut in the final story of the season. The Twin Dilemma was a poorly written and poorly realised adventure, resulting in a controversial debut for a new Doctor whom a lot of viewers professed to dislike. It would be a while before Baker had an opportunity to develop his Doctor and The Twin Dilemma left a bad taste with many viewers, one that would be long lasting.

John Nathan-Turner’s event-television and publicity strategies came to dominate Doctor Who by the middle of the 1980s. Approaching his fifth year in charge – almost all previous producers had moved on by then – Nathan-Turner and his script editor Eric Saward had an uneasy working relationship. While Saward struggled to compile a coherent narrative, Nathan-Turner was on trips to conventions in the UK and US, authorising Doctor Who merchandise and creating ‘shopping lists’ of elements that future stories should include.

The twenty-second season continued to be influenced by big-screen science fiction, but there was at least a theme running through it: loss of identity and physical transformation. New advances in cosmetic plastic surgery and unnecessary operations (especially cosmetic breast enlargements) were often featured in the news or in the growing consumer and ‘lifestyle’ sections of Britain’s expanding newspapers. Each story saw a major character undergo significant physical change, some more permanent than others. About the only character who wasn’t physically altered was the one whose physiology regularly allowed for just such transformation: the Doctor.

In Attack of the Cybermen, a convoluted, continuity-ridden adventure, the mercenary Commander Lytton (Maurice Colbourne) returns from Resurrection of the Daleks, forms an alliance with the Cybermen and is partially Cyber-converted. Vengeance On Varos, a smart critique of video violence, saw companion Peri (Nicola Bryant) transformed into a birdlike creature as part of a mad scientist’s experiments, while The Mark of the Rani had the Master teaming up with villainous Time Lady the Rani (Kate O’Mara) to alter history in nineteenth-century Britain. This tale saw a character transformed into a tree, thanks to a bio-mine. The Two Doctors had Troughton’s Second Doctor changed into an Androgum, one of a race of hungry carnivores. In Timelash, HG Wells joined the Doctor and picked up various story ideas (the very stories that partly influenced the development of Doctor Who). The villain was the Borad, a hideous fusion of man and monster. Finally, Revelation of the Daleks featured a well-executed scene that saw the father of a young rebel encased in a transparent Dalek frame, mid-conversion, pleading with his daughter to kill him.

The series’ format had been transformed, too, from (mostly) serials comprising four episodes of 25 minutes each to two-part stories where each segment lasted 45 minutes (more suitable for transmission on US TV). Previously, Resurrection of the Daleks, made as a four-episode tale, had been forced into a 45-minute format due to scheduling problems caused by the BBC’s coverage of the 1984 Winter Olympics. In an attempt to update the series to the mid-1980s, it was decided that the entire twenty-second season would be in the 45-minute episode format, so Attack of the Cybermen was the first story to be written specifically to this style. It was the first story since Logopolis to air on a Saturday, with the BBC abandoning the twice-weekly screenings that had run throughout Peter Davison’s three years.

By now, continuity was threatening to swamp original storytelling, and would prove to be a major off-putting factor for the audience as Doctor Who entered its declining years. The confusing storytelling of Attack of the Cybermen lost the show almost two million viewers between episodes. Serving as a sequel to several stories, notably the Cybermen’s debut, The Tenth Planet, and The Tomb of the Cybermen, Attack of the Cybermen was action packed and stylish. However, it was impossible to understand without a crib sheet detailing Doctor Who history. Cannibalising its own past, the show featured redone set pieces from previous decades, recast with a glamorous 1980s sheen. Ostensibly set in environments first seen in long-deleted stories like The Tomb of the Cybermen, little effort was expended on remaining faithful to the original designs (many reference photos existed, even if the actual episodes were lost).

Attack of the Cybermen was criticised for its gratuitous violence (with many Cybermen dismembered and Lytton’s gory conversion). Ironically, Vengeance on Varos – the following story – was a critique of video violence and its effects on society (a hot-topic debate in the British media in the early-to-mid-1980s). The ‘video nasties’ controversy saw movies for home rental subjected to prosecution and eventual classification. This was the subject matter for Philip Martin’s tale of a society addicted to watching torture on TV and voting on the outcome. Well in advance of the rise of reality TV and the interactive, participatory television culture of the 1990s and twenty-first century, Doctor Who presented a cliff-hanger that relied on a knowing pastiche of television technique. As the Doctor appears to be dying on a video screen, the Varos Governor orders the vision controller to ‘cut it, now!’ as the episode cuts to the closing titles. The story ends with the Greek-chorus characters of Arak and Etta (who’ve been watching – and voting on – the action of the story, without ever meeting anyone else involved) deprived of their entertainment and lamenting, ‘What shall we do now?’

Rather than feeding off its own narrative past by restaging its greatest hits, or creating sequels and overusing returning monsters, finally the show used its own off-air past and current news headlines (as it had always done previously) to create a truly innovative story. Drawing on the 1970s attacks by Mary Whitehouse (who’d continued to campaign to ‘clean up TV’ into the 1980s), Martin created a society that used violent imagery to keep the population entertained and sated, thus reducing the likelihood they’d revolt. This was the first Doctor Who story for a long time to directly comment on the news headlines. Martin had experienced censorship directly himself when his late-1970s series Gangsters was attacked for being too violent. That series also featured several postmodern touches that would recur in Vengeance on Varos, including characters commenting on the fiction they were participating in and the creation of the drama being witnessed by the audience (Martin was seen in later episodes of Gangsters writing that particular episode’s script, while in Vengeance on Varos various TV tricks are used to structure the narrative – an idea Steven Moffat would adapt into the ‘narrative edits’ sequence of Forest of the Dead in 2008).

It’s a shame that such political commentary did not feature more often during the 1980s, although it could be argued that the following story, The Mark of the Rani, dealing with Luddites battling mechanisation, saw the show mirroring the recent industrial turbulence and unrest in Britain. Primarily the story was about the introduction of the Rani, a female equivalent to the Master, and an excuse for more stunt casting by Nathan-Turner, bringing in soap star Kate O’Mara.

The poorly written and realised Timelash offered a guest-starring role for another of the Blake’s 7 cast: a suitably melodramatic Paul Darrow (who’d appeared briefly in Doctor Who and the Silurians in 1970). The season climax saw the return of the Daleks and Davros in a Saward-written story crafted in the style of Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, with a dash of Soylent Green (1973). Davros is discovered posing as ‘the Great Healer’, whose base at the Tranquil Repose funeral home is providing him with all the raw material he needs to feed a hungry galaxy and create a new race of malevolent Daleks. Like Vengeance on Varos, the story featured a narrator in the form of Alexei Sayle’s radio DJ, commenting on the action before being exterminated.

During the transmission of The Two Doctors the BBC announced that Doctor Who would be taking a longer break than usual. The unusual announcement sparked a media frenzy, with The Sun running a front-page story headlined ‘Dr Who Axed in BBC Plot!’ The break, as a result of a funding shortfall at the BBC after the launch of daytime TV and EastEnders, was seen by those outside the executive floor of Television Centre as cancellation, especially as the show had been criticised from within (mainly by Head of Drama Jonathan Powell and BBC1 Controller Michael Grade) as too violent and having lost its way. The controversy was partially instigated by producer John Nathan-Turner working through ‘continuity consultant’ Ian Levine, who could plant stories in the press while leaving the BBC producer with a clean pair of hands. Once it was explained that the series would be back after an 18-month break, The Sun claimed to have ‘saved’ Doctor Who, even though it appears there was no actual intention of permanently dropping the show.

Nonetheless, when season 23 did air, Doctor Who was felt to be on trial, a fear that pervaded the production team. This led to the season-long umbrella theme of the Doctor on trial by the Time Lords. The original plans for the next season were abandoned, even though writers had been commissioned, in favour of four interlinked stories that would be transmitted across 14 episodes under the overall title banner The Trial of a Time Lord.

The decision marked the climax of Nathan-Turner’s event-television approach: the entire 14-episode season would be the event. The resulting series made many concerned fans and casual viewers wonder what had gone on during the 18-month period the production team had to prepare the show. The growing tensions between Nathan-Turner and Saward were apparent. While Saward had been struggling to find new directions, Nathan-Turner had become increasingly caught up in such extracurricular activities as attending fan conventions (especially in the US), and producing Christmas pantomimes, often starring the main Doctor Who cast. Saward had increasing misgivings about the casting of Colin Baker and was extremely worried about the way that Nathan-Turner was running the show, his sixth year in charge (the longest-running Doctor Who producer to that date). The casting of child star Bonnie Langford as the Doctor’s companion (she’d arrive mid-trial) fuelled Saward’s worries.

The Trial of a Time Lord was unrewarding for viewers, despite the gimmick of foregrounding the show’s own ‘on-trial’ status in the onscreen narrative. This took Saward’s obsession with Greek choruses (characters within the drama who comment on the action) within the programme (Vengeance on Varos, Revelation of the Daleks) to a new extreme as the Doctor himself settled down to watch his own adventures on a big screen in the Time Lord courtroom. The trial format –conjured up in a moment of desperation by Saward and enthusiastically adopted by Nathan-Turner – was intended to mirror Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, with adventures from the Doctor’s past, present and future. The opening story (known as The Mysterious Planet) was written by old Doctor Who hand Robert Holmes to be more humorous following a brief from Grade, but was dismissed by Powell as being ‘lightweight’. This contradictory feedback further alienated Saward from the production and would ultimately lead to his acrimonious departure before the completion of the season. The Mysterious Planet is a soft Mad Max in which mankind has reverted to primitive ways on a planet revealed to be a relocated Earth. It was an inauspicious and low-key re-launch for a series living on borrowed time.

The second adventure (known as Mindwarp) provided the highlight of the season, bringing back Sil, the villain of Vengeance on Varos, showing the surprising removal of the Doctor from time, and climaxing with the shocking death of companion Peri in a brain-swap operation. A colourful story, Mindwarp once again saw Doctor Who used as a technical test bed, this time for the HARRY Paintbox digital-effects system, which resulted in Sil’s planet boasting a green sky, purple rocks and a pink sea!

Bonnie Langford arrived aboard the TARDIS in the Agatha Christie-style, murder-mystery ‘future’ segment (known as Terror of the Vervoids), set onboard doomed space liner Hyperion III. This led into the final two-part wrap-up of the Trial season (known as The Ultimate Foe, though all these episode titles were not seen onscreen, and only used for novelisations and DVD releases). By the time these final episodes were produced (before the Vervoids story was made), Saward had decided to leave the show. When he quit he gave a scathing interview to SF magazine Starburst in which he criticised Nathan-Turner’s ‘light-entertainment’ style of Doctor Who, his poor casting decisions and his obsession with peripheral minutiae like merchandising and conventions, rather than well-written scripts or properly thought-out characters. ‘I was getting very fed up with the way Doctor Who was being run, largely by John Nathan-Turner – his attitude and his lack of insight into what makes a television series like Doctor Who work,’ said Saward. ‘After being cancelled and coming back almost in the same manner as we were before, [with] the same sort of pantomime-ish aspects that I so despised about the show, I just think it isn’t worth it.’

As a result of Saward’s departure, his original script for episode 14 could not be used, so a hastily created replacement (by Nathan-Turner stalwarts Pip and Jane Baker) was put together. ‘When I left, I was writing the last episode,’ confirmed Saward. ‘We had talked about this ending and he had agreed, in principle, to a hard, cliffhanging thing. The episode went in and John said, “I don’t like the end; we can’t go out on that end.” He wanted the happy pantomime ending.’ As a result, the climax to the 14-week-long trial was an incoherent narrative that only escaped greater criticism because much of it took place in the fantasy environment of the Matrix (The Deadly Assassin), so logical storytelling was not a strong point. The conclusion revealed the prosecuting Valeyard (Michael Jayston) to be a future, evil incarnation of the Doctor himself, in collusion with the Time Lords to cover up their criminal actions (which involved the moving of Earth in the opening story, The Mysterious Planet). As a result of Saward’s walkout, his original cliff-hanger ending – in which the Valeyard and the Doctor tumbled into a ‘time vent’, their survival (and that of the show itself) uncertain – could not be used. Nathan-Turner felt this ending would be a hostage to fortune, giving the BBC an opportunity to cancel the series. Viewers who had stuck with the trial through 14 weeks would require a satisfactory ending. He didn’t quite deliver that, but Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor left the scene intact, along with new companion Mel (Langford).

The Trial of a Time Lord had been a brave experiment, but one that failed to address the criticisms that had resulted in the show being put on hiatus. The behind-the-scenes and onscreen narrative chaos in which the production ended only added fuel to the criticisms, many now voiced by the show’s own script editor. Despite the latest of his annual attempts to leave, producer John Nathan-Turner was ‘persuaded to stay’ as the show’s producer, although he had no script editor, no scripts, and was about to lose his leading man. Although the BBC decided to continue with Doctor Who, Nathan-Turner was instructed to replace the star, a fact revealed after the broadcast of the final episode of The Trial of a Time Lord.

The whole run had averaged only 4.8 million viewers, compared with a previous average of 7.2 million (a remarkably steady figure through the Davison years and into Baker’s first season). This dramatic loss of viewers during a serial that was intended as a major re-launch for the show was disappointing, and series star Colin Baker was made the scapegoat. It was felt within the BBC that the only way of revitalising Doctor Who was to have a fresh start with a new Doctor.

The casting of Sylvester McCoy as the new Doctor and the arrival of Andrew Cartmel as script editor drew a line under a troubled period in Doctor Who’s history and gave the show a new lease of life for the next three years. Nathan-Turner’s retreat from many of the show’s creative aspects gave Cartmel unprecedented freedom to reinvent the series. He was a young writer and trainee script editor attached to the BBC Drama Unit’s scriptwriting workshop. A huge fan of comic books (then in vogue and being taken seriously as literature in the wake of The Dark Knight and Watchmen), he would bring some elements of comic-book storytelling to Doctor Who.

The fresh start saw season 24 open with another Pip and Jane Baker script (commissioned by Nathan-Turner, rather than Cartmel) featuring dodgy science and a return encounter with the Rani (Kate O’Mara). Much like The Twin Dilemma before it, Time and the Rani proved to be an inauspicious debut for the new Doctor and Cartmel was happy to disassociate himself from it.

Cartmel’s time on the show saw the introduction of a host of new, young TV writers, many of whom he’d met while at the BBC’s Drama Unit. These new writers had grown up watching Doctor Who, would draw on their ‘folk memory’ of the show, and had a good feel for what worked and what didn’t. Several current late-1980s political and social themes permeated the adventures overseen by Cartmel and created by his stable of young writers. After almost a decade, the series finally got around to addressing aspects of Thatcherism, mainly as the writers had come to maturity in Thatcher’s Britain. Writing about this came as naturally to them as writing about the mining industry, the European Union or environmentalism did to Letts and Dicks. The writers were Thatcher’s children, so a sharp increase in political and social allegory appeared from Paradise Towers onwards, although this never came before a need to entertain the audience.

The decline of council estates and the consequences of Thatcher’s sell-off of council housing heavily informed Paradise Towers. In a time when consumer culture expanded to take in architecture and houses, setting a Doctor Who adventure within a run-down, futuristic tower block (perhaps drawn from JG Ballard’s High Rise) seems obvious. Divisions within society (rich and poor, the suburban and urban communities) had grown throughout the eight years that Prime Minister Thatcher had been in power. Since 1979, her policies had largely increased social division, mirrored in the Kangs (devolved youth subcultures) and the Rezzies (secluded residents of exclusive or ‘gated’ communities) of Paradise Towers. With the Falklands war a strong memory for those who were teenagers or in their twenties at the time (like the writers), the anti-war sentiments of the Towers’ ‘hero’ Pex seem understandable. The satire of dictators was played up by the visualisation of the Caretaker as a Hitler figure, helped enormously by Richard Briers’ performance.

Another dictatorial figure emerged in season 26’s The Happiness Patrol. Helen A (Sheila Hancock) was an obviously Thatcher-inspired ruler, while the story featured elements of Chilean dictator Pinochet’s policy of ‘disappearance’ as a way of dealing with political opponents (the Falklands war saw Thatcher’s UK government going easy on Pinochet in return for Chilean support in South America). The visual look of The Happiness Patrol – pastel colours and candy-inspired décor – reflected growing ‘rave culture’ (smiley-face symbols and ‘happy’ drugs) and the dance-music scene revolving around ecstasy. Kitsch culture was celebrated in the Kandy Man, a robotic creature (chief torturer of the regime) whose look echoed that of Bertie Bassett, a cartoon advertising figure built from sweets and used by Bassett to promote their All Sorts brand. The serious satire may have been buried in the day-glo look, but many viewers were turned off by the superficial impact of the visuals without considering the story’s ideas.

Nostalgia, both for Doctor Who’s own past and the country’s past glories, is another theme running through the final three years of the show. Delta and the Bannermen was a fast-moving, three-episode romp from the middle of season 24, set in and around a 1950s holiday camp that is visited by time-travelling tourists, a runaway princess (the last of her race) and a genocidal general (Don Henderson) intent on her elimination. With lots of period music, anachronistic detail and culture-clash humour, the story could easily fit in with the brash approach of some episodes of the most recent version of Doctor Who.

Like the twentieth season before it, Doctor Who’s twenty-fifth year on air was an excuse for narrative celebration. Opening with Remembrance of the Daleks (nostalgically set in 1963, the year of Doctor Who’s debut), the season tackled racism and racial purity through the Daleks and the rise of modern fascism. Nazi ideology recurred in Silver Nemesis, a Cybermen adventure broadcast around the show’s actual twenty-fifth anniversary.

Postmodern pastiche found a new, audience-friendly form during this period too, with characters in Dragonfire all named after prominent film theorists, while much of the narrative (including the origins of new companion Ace) mirrored The Wizard of Oz. This kind of cultural sampling and remixing was relatively new, but it would go on to become a dominant mode of expression in pop culture. When Ace sees a TV announcer introducing a new programme on British TV in November 1963, only the audience are aware that Doctor Who is referring to itself. Self-reflexivity may have reached exhaustion, however, in the cleverly titled The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, which saw the Doctor trapped in a psychic circus, battling the gods of Ragnarok. As well as playing with well-worn imagery like scary clowns, haunted circuses and werewolves, this serial featured a character called Whizzkid, an obsessive fan of the circus who has followed its development and collected the associated merchandise. He complains that the circus ‘is not as good as it used to be’. This portrait, within the narrative of the show, of a Doctor Who fan (referred to disparagingly as ‘barkers’ by Nathan-Turner, and ‘ming mongs’ by Russell T Davies) was about as insular as it was possible to get.

Besides new myths, the final episodes also featured new ways of looking at old myths or old stories. Norse mythology was plundered for both The Greatest Show in the Galaxy and the final season’s The Curse of Fenric (set in the Second World War). The Curse of Fenric also featured material drawn from Bram Stoker’s Dracula effectively mixed with the development of British computing and the quest of wartime code-breaker Alan Turing to smash German ciphers. Arthurian tales provided a strong narrative backbone for the final season’s opening story, Battlefield (nostalgically reviving the Brigadier one last time, and attempting to update UNIT), while female folklore provided a new angle on a traditional good-versus-evil story in Survival (written by Rona Munro, the last of a very few female writers for the original series).

Cartmel’s interest in comic books played a large part in his development of Doctor Who. The Dalek Emperor (really Davros in disguise) portrayed in Remembrance of the Daleks was drawn directly from Doctor Who’s own comic-book past in the 1960s TV comic, TV21. A lot of the absurdist look and feel of Doctor Who in the years 1986–9 was in tune with successful British comic 2000AD, especially stories like Paradise Towers and The Happiness Patrol. Fan input in the series culminated with a fan writing for the show for the first time since Andrew Smith and Full Circle in 1980. Fanzine contributor and aspiring TV writer Marc Platt got Ghost Light into production, playing with themes of evolution and change, overlaid with a strong dash of Victorian literature. The haunted-house setting and the confrontation with events in the Doctor’s companion Ace’s past gave the complicated notions a strong emotional grounding. They also built on a mini story arc for the character that showed her maturing throughout the final year the show was on air. This more proactive approach to a companion would inform Russell T Davies’s ideas years later.

Cartmel had a bigger plan in mind when it came to developing the Doctor. He and the group of young writers he was working with were drawing on their own memories of Doctor Who in refashioning the show. They all recalled a time when the mystery of who the Doctor was featured regularly, so wanted to return that element, which had been diluted with the addition of Gallifrey and the Time Lords to the programme’s growing and increasingly complicated mythology. Cartmel’s answer was to graft a new mythology on top of the old, with hints in various episodes that the Doctor was ‘more than a Time Lord’ pushing the character ever more in the direction of a superhero. Other characters would refer to the Doctor’s mysterious origins or claim privileged knowledge of his secrets. These secrets were never divulged to the viewer, and it was not really clear if Cartmel genuinely had a destination in mind when he started this process. Whatever his intention, he did provide fuel for years of fan speculation that would keep Doctor Who stories going in other media throughout the fallow period of the 1990s when the series was mostly off air.

Doctor Who’s ratings had suffered a terminal collapse from The Trial of a Time Lord season onwards. From average highs of 14.5 million for City of Death in 1979, audience figures had collapsed within a decade to 3.6 million for Battlefield, a fall of over 75 per cent. The failure of the show to engage with the political and social realities of the 1980s, and the producer’s interest in pleasing minority fan culture, had turned off the popular audience. Doctor Who had become a show made for fans, with many creative decisions serving to alienate the wider audience that the show had succeeded in capturing in the 1960s and 1970s. This loss of popular affection (audiences in the 1980s loved the nostalgic idea they had of the show, but not the version on TV starring Baker and McCoy) led directly to a loss of support for the ageing series within the BBC.

Survival saw out the original series, returning the show to its roots in contemporary London (this time 1989, rather than 1963). This tale of cat people arriving on Earth from their own doomed planet and hunting contemporary teens was full of ambitious ideas (like much of Cartmel-period Doctor Who), but was let down by its execution. A final battle between the Master and the Doctor brought Doctor Who to a premature close. There were many ideas yet to be explored and many more worlds to visit, but time had been called on a series that had suffered more than its fair share of missteps through the 1980s. The Doctor’s future would now be in the hands of his fans.