“It’s the Master, step in time!”

Season by Season

Doctor Who got out of the 1960s more or less by accident. Once a top ten series watched by more than 10m people every week, by the spring of 1969 its audience had dwindled to little more than 3m viewers. It survived by a suitably paradoxical combination of inertia on the part of BBC departmental bosses and the speed at which it was made. The 1970 series was assumed by many of those making it to be the last, but ratings for the first two months of that year, which improved considerably on those for the same weeks of 1969, led to a surprise recommission, and a 1971 series was ordered at some point in late February (Jon Pertwee was contracted for it in the first week of March). 

Producer Barry Letts and Script Editor Terrance Dicks, preparing their first full season together, were unhappy with the changes to the series’ sixties format which had been imposed on them by their predecessors Peter Bryant and Derrick Sherwin. But they understood why they had happened. Making a colour television series about travelling through space and time in a police box on a BBC budget was very difficult. It still is very difficult fifty years later, and in many ways, the entire history of Doctor Who since 1970 is the story of successive production teams facing the problem that their programme’s format was conceived for an era of 9” monochrome TV screens and universal acceptance of studio bound drama.