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.