January 31, 2025

“N n n n n Nineteen”

Season by Season

Doctor Who had started the 1970s with a clean break. A new regular cast, a new format and the series in colour for the first time. The result was renewal. The 1980s, though, arrived at the midpoint of a story, with The Horns of Nimon being transmitted over Christmas and New Year 1979/80. A relaunch under a new producer, John Nathan-Turner, who saw his role as “taking the show into the 1980s”, was nine months away. But even with an aesthetic overhaul which involved a new title sequence, a new costume for the Doctor, all-new directors and a Radiophonic overhaul of the series' sound, Doctor Who still starred Tom Baker and Lalla Ward and featured the robot dog K9.

This meant that for all the above changes, and further shifts behind the scenes such as a new Script Editor, Christopher H Bidmead, with a very different approach to the outgoing Douglas Adams, Doctor Who was still "business as usual" for much of its audience as the new decade got underway. It might even be that taking Doctor Who for granted played a part in the record low ratings for the series in late 1980. Viewers can’t, after all, have been put off by the changes initiated to welcome the new decade. Viewing figures for the first episode of the new series, Doctor Who’s eighteenth, were so low they demonstrate that much of the audience never saw them in the first place.

By the end of Season 18, Baker and Ward had moved on and producer Nathan-Turner had dispensed with K9. A new cast of characters, Doctor Peter Davison, and three young companions, Tegan (Janet Fielding), Nyssa (Sarah Sutton) and Adric (Matthew Waterhouse) all chosen by him, were in place. This makes the 1980/81 series, although much admired by some in retrospect, rather curious. The late 1970s cast wandering around the early 1980s version of the show with, at least on original transmission, almost nobody watching. Had Tom Baker stayed another year, or even two, he might have become as identified with the new style as he had been with two previous versions of the series, under producers Philip Hinchcliffe and then Graham Williams, but as it is the 1980/81 series feels as much like a coda as a relaunch, at the centre of a very odd Venn diagram of old Doctor Who’s longest serving lead actor and its longest continuously present creative figure. 

Season 19, though? Season 19 is where Doctor Who really gets a kick up the 80s. Although the process of delivering that kick was far from smooth. Bidmead had already gone by the time the first of its stories reached the studio. He’d asked, he says now, for a raise in deference to how much work Doctor Who involved, and when refused, on the grounds that BBC staff salaries worked in bands, had decided to seek employment elsewhere.

Despite that, most of the stories that made it to air in 1982 had been commissioned by him. There were three exceptions. 1920s set murder mystery Black Orchid, commissioned by Nathan-Turner, albeit from a storyline Bidmead had rejected. Earthshock, which was a late self commission by Bidmead’s successor as full time Script Editor Eric Saward, and Bidmead's own Castrovalva which was also commissioned by Saward. Although the simple fact it was written by Bidmead means it inevitably reflects his own ideas for the series. It’s not an exception in any meaningful sense. Only technical ones.

This multitude of script editors (Antony Root did a three month stint in the job between Bidmead and Saward) combined with a complex out-of-sequence production order might explain some things about this run. There are oddities in the season that just wouldn’t be allowed to happen today. For the first part of the season the same old brand new format is that the Doctor is trying to return Tegan back to Earth, so that she can catch the flight she was due to get back in Logopolis. It’s a conscious return to the series earliest days, like having four regular characters, and it’s hard not to suspect the influence of prominent fans who were then close to the production team, in both decisions.

If that were the case, it might explain why Nathan-Turner quickly thought better of them. He quickly planned to write out one of the three companions (JNT favoured Nyssa, Peter Davison intervened and instead Adric was dispensed with), while the strand about getting Tegan getting back home abruptly disappears mid-season. Or rather it almost does. What’s remarkable is that Tegan’s decision that she doesn’t want to return to Heathrow after all, because she has realised she starting to enjoy TARDIS travel happens off-screen between Saward’s own first script for the year The Visitation and Terence Dudley’s second Black Orchid, and is referred to in the past tense in the latter.

That’s a big character beat, and one that sets up the punchline of the TARDIS accidentally arriving at Heathrow in the right year in Time-Flight but after the controls have stopped being repeatedly set for it. It’s an outrageous example of tell not show. One partially due to this season being made wildly out of order, itself partially due to script issues and partially due to Davison’s own availability. (He had a prior commitment to a BBC sitcom which meant production on Doctor Who ground to a halt after two serials so he could go away and make six episodes of that before returning.)

This is one of the most egregious examples of something you can see in minor form in other stories. One example is how the opening scene of The Visitation refers backwards to a version of events in Kinda which got rewritten away in rehearsals. But by then it was too late, The Visitation had been made first. Equally it’s doubtful that a better planned season would have had two stories set in English history (The Visitation and Black Orchid) shown back to back, or had to rely on the two writers mentioned above writing two stories each when other scripts fell through. Additionally, the season’s opening serial was a late commission, made fourth for the year, following the last minute abandonment of the opening show.

The replacement opening story, Bidmead’s Castrovalva has a freshness unseen in Doctor Who before - and despite its numerous story links to the final story of the previous era, which Bidmead had also penned. Yet with conceits such as the new Doctor literally unravelling his previous incarnation’s clothes, and going on a physical and mental quest to discover “my old self.. or perhaps it’s my new self!” it’s very aware of its job as an opening night; and yet the curiously large number of pseudo funeral processions it contains also seem like symbolic concessions to those missing the old era.

Castrovalva features the TARDIS seemingly being landed by Tegan, although this turns out not to be the case. It kicks off a run of stories where the difficulty in landing and / or piloting the TARDIS changes from story to story. In Black Orchid and Earthshock, the TARDIS can easily make short jumps in space, if not in time. In Four to Doomsday, The Visitation and Kinda it can’t get to the right planet on the right day, only one or the other. But this isn’t a progression, in Time-Flight (commissioned before most of them but made after them all) the ship is suddenly uncontrollable again. This might not sound important - and indeed maybe it isn’t - but it is textual evidence of very different ideas of the series competing behind the scenes. 

But then it was the turn of the decade, and while you could not possibly look at any 1982 story and mistake it for something made in the 1970s or the 1990s, they are also not products of the the “High 1980s”¹ of untrammelled Thatcherism. The Falklands War had not happened yet. The government’s majority was solid but small and they were twenty points behind in the polls. Whatever the future looked like, it did not look like the past we remember. It was a time between the ‘now’ and the ‘now’. Or if you want a more respectable reference, when the old world was dying but the new had yet to be born.

In Doctor Who terms that future, unglimpsed then, past prologue now, is Eric Saward’s creative stewardship of the show. But curiously we don’t, as a fandom, often choose to read his contributions to 1982 through the lens of the near half decade of creative control they begin. The opposite approach to our culture’s usual view of the early 1980s as a whole.²

Saward came to Doctor Who from radio, and The Visitation was not just his Doctor Who script, but his first work in television. His name had been passed to Bidmead by colleagues in Radio 4, on the strength of his work on Saturday Night Theatre and although he’d not seen Doctor Who in years, Saward was enthused by the idea of moving to the more prominent and better paid medium. Bidmead was so happy with Saward’s Visitation scripts (at this point entitled “Invasion of the Plague Men”) that he suggested he be prompted to apply for his own soon-to-be-former-job. Root was appointed before Saward had a chance to apply, but when Root moved on quickly Nathan-Turner remembered Bidmead’s advice and called Saward to offer him the post. He had perhaps been prompted by the enthusiasm of Peter Davison, who’d entered rehearsals The Visitation proclaiming the script “fantastic”. 

That was, Davison would often later say, in part because of something which characterises Saward’s work on Doctor Who, as both writer and script editor; a greater number of shorter scenes to quicken pace. Earthshock has ten times the average camera set ups for 1980s Doctor Who, but that’s not all director Peter Grimwade’s doing. It’s him responding to Saward’s script. “We .... have to keep hammering away with the action”, Saward told Doctor Who Magazine shortly afterwards.

In this he was initially in accord with Nathan-Turner, who wanted to reduce comedy in Doctor Who. Later Saward began to feel Nathan-Turner was mistaken, looking to include more humour of his own. But this didn’t mean reducing action, “Doctor Who works best when it thrills one moment and is funny the next” he said, and looked to pair the increased humour with a depiction of violence he considered “More realistic... if you hit someone it hurts.”

This evolution was perhaps slow enough to not be detectable, even in retrospect, and The Visitation is often taken to be a different beast to Earthshock, and even more so Saward’s later stories. Yet there are more similarities between them than than you might suspect. Both, and like his Resurrection of the Daleks (1984), see the Doctor having an argument about ethics with the leader of his alien adversaries (two of whom are prosaically known simply as “Leader”) and on all three occasions he loses. All these stories also see the Doctor unable to contrive or improvise a solution to the problems of the drama he’s in.

In the 1982 stories³ it’s historical inevitability that rides to the rescue. Resurrection, like its own sequel Revelation of the Daleks (1985) ends with another character engaging in a redemptive suicide bombing. But Saward’s evolving portrayal of violence does need to be read backwards into his 1982 stories. In Saward’s universe, there are some problems that the Doctor cannot solve, because he baulks at murder. Historical inevitability and the self-destructive violence of others are two separate ways out of the problem this creates.

There are two kinds of men in Saward’s stories, innocents caught up in worlds too existentially dreadful for them, and loners who have toughened and coarsened to survive. This is something carried over from Saward’s 1970s work for radio. From the first iteration of Richard Mace⁴ in The Pegasus, a raffish actor who becomes expert at solving crime to clear his name or Terry Molloy’s feckless teddy boy, busking literally and figuratively through life until he is embroiled in espionage in The Gene Factor, to the corrupt, violent and angsty police figures featured in both.

There is a strange sense in which Saward’s Doctor over the course of five years and two actors, changes from one kind of man to the other, and that begins here.

Four to Doomsday and Kinda, both commissioned long before Saward reached the Doctor Who production office, share an anti-colonial mindset, although they express that theme in very different way, and of the two Kinda’s expression is far more celebrated. Kinda’s director Peter Grimwade annoyed its writer Christopher Bailey by using iconography (e.g. pith helmets) that suggested a specific Empire (i.e the British) rather than allowing the ideas space to breathe for themselves, Bailey later called Grimwade’s interpolations a “meaningless veneer”.

Grimwade’s additions are certainly cruder than anything in Bailey’s text, but it’s arguable that without them the audience for mainstream, production line television for children might not have picked up on Bailey’s ideas, let alone his use of Buddhist names and symbols. This is itself something Bailey has since apologised for, worrying that it’s appropriative, but his deployment of them is complex, considered and respectful and it’s hard not to suspect some influence of Barry Letts on the story. Letts, nominally Doctor Who’s Executive Producer until not long before Kinda entered studio, was a practicing Buddhist, and his notes on other serials of this era are extensive. Sadly those for Kinda do not survive.

The anti-colonialism of Terence Dudley’s two stories is paired with the theme, which recurs often in his work, of a distrust of hereditary practice, particularly hereditary power.⁵ The back story of Black Orchid is that a colonial explorer has disappeared during an expedition, and come back a monster. But it’s always seemed to me that he was always some kind of monster.

Certainly his family are crude and cruel behind their aristocratic facade. The family matriarch has hidden her mentally unwell and physically disabled son away from the world, and is prepared to cover up murder in order to continue so to do. To the point where she is prepared to let innocents die for a crime they did not commit. Hope can only when Charles Cranleigh stands up to his mother, rebelling against the hereditary, arbitrary authority she wields over the situation, and instead doing what is right.

What does not seem arbitrary, ironically enough, is that the villain of Four to Doomsday is called simply “Monarch” or that he is under the impression he’s a God - and the single God of a monotheistic system come to that. It’s a delusion that makes Caligula’s look small, and the extreme fealty he demands (“Conformity, there is no other freedom”) is based on the assumption of an unquestioned right to it.

One might point, entirely reasonably, to the cliched presentation of the non European human cultures on board Monarch’s ship or Black Orchid’s seeming equation of facial difference and moral monstrousness as problems with both stories. But something can be avowedly anti colonial while still displaying the unconscious biases and assumptions of its creators. That’s no kind of contradiction, merely an example of the tension of critiquing a society while living in it. Or of creatively speaking biting off more than one can chew.

In retrospect it’s both easy and correct to point at the 1982 series viewing figures (never below 8m, often above 10m) as a sign of success. Perhaps an even surer sign of approval is how every story but the last increased its audience between its first and last episodes, with some managing to put on new viewers between every instalment.⁶

This isn’t just a series which people tried and found they liked. It’s a series people tried and liked and stayed and encouraged their friends to try, and then they stayed too. It’s an endorsement of the decision to move the show from Saturday evenings for the first time in its history, as well as the series’ new, young cast and the stories favoured by Bidmead, as well as Nathan-Turner's new aesthetic.  

About that last story though. Nathan-Turner believed, and was later proved right, that British Airways could be persuaded to allow Doctor Who to feature Concorde in a story provided they had script approval. That they would not require payment, being happy with the publicity and what later generations of marketeers would call “brand synergy”. A story featuring a Concorde which could be filmed on for free would be cheap, but look expensive. At least in theory. But that isn’t what happened with Time-Flight.  

Yes, the gratis location work at Heathrow and around and even in Concorde looks amazing. But Time-Flight’s scripts are weak, confused and short, reflecting Saward’s inexperience as an editor. That would matter less if the rest of the production were as strong as the location work, but they also ask things of the series’ production budget that it cannot supply. That’s almost inexplicable, given that they were written by Peter Grimwade, who had directed four Doctor Who stories since 1980 and should surely have been someone who could have been relied upon to know exactly what was possible in studio.

While recording on Time-Flight’s pitiful prehistoric Earth set, Peter Davison began to seriously consider limiting his time on Doctor Who to the three series he had theoretically, if not contractually, committed to. He wasn’t the only one giving up. Two million viewers abandoned the series between Parts One and Four. The series would not crack 10m viewers again in the twentieth century.

Two years before this, and again a year after, Doctor Who had lost the final serial of its current production block to industrial action. It’s entertaining to imagine what might have happened had “disaster” struck on this occasion too. Grimwade’s interviews about his sacrificed “vision”. Clips of the limited location filming conducted before the axe fell shown to gasping convention audiences. The version narrated by Anthony Ainley released on VHS in 1992. No one knowing how lucky they were that their final sight of Doctor Who in 1982 was silent credits after the exploding space ship blotted out the stars.