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5. Steady As She Goes: The Fifth Doctor
Prior to taking sole responsibility for production duties late in the year, John Nathan-Turner ("JNT" to his friends and enemies alike) was a de facto co-producer of Doctor Who alongside Graham Williams for most of 1979, in which capacity he enjoyed unprecedented latitude (aided and abetted by script editor Douglas Adams, who privately expressed his intention to Nathan-Turner to remain in the role until at least 1981 to ease the transition) to "set the board" for his prospective ascension to the top role.
JNT had big plans to redefine Doctor Who for the new decade and believed that he would need to "go big" to realise his goals by casting a "name" actor as the incoming Fifth Doctor. Christopher Neame, for all the popularity he had achieved, had been a young and hungry unknown and correspondingly a gamble that could easily have gone wrong; John Nathan-Turner was in no mood to take such a risk again. Instead, eager to drum up speculation, he made a cryptic announced at a press conference that he had had tapped "one of the most recognisable faces on our television screens in recent years" as Neame's successor.
Gossip and conjecture were indeed as rife as JNT had hoped, with guesses running the gamut from credible to ridiculous. John Thaw and Martin Shaw, both well-known for their heroic roles in The Sweeney and The Professionals respectively, were initially the bookies' favourites, while older stars such as Patrick Macnee and James Ellis were acknowledged as outside possibilities. [1] More outlandish proposals centred around sitcom and soap stars such as Frank Thornton, Michael Crawford, Clive Dunn and others, each rejected by the odds-makers more or less out of hand (granted, largely by commentators wholly unaware of JNT's predilection for "light entertainment" media), because what right-thinking casting director would ever contract a lightweight comedy actor to carry a science-fiction drama? Even John Le Mesurier had demonstrated some dramatic flair before he became Bill Hartnell's first successor.
Regardless, Nathan-Turner's eventual choice did indeed take audiences, critics and the entertainment press by surprise: he had indicated his intention to cast "one of the most recognisable faces" in British television, but at no point had he suggested that said face would be one of TV's most beloved protagonists. In 1979, Colin Baker was most immediately recognised for his successful stint playing the villainous yuppie Paul Merroney in four seasons of the BBC drama The Brothers between 1974 and 1976, a role which made him a household name, albeit as the man viewers at home loved to hate.
In other words, an unusual choice for the role of a hero beloved by children across the country, or so one might assume. However, Colin Baker had been a fan and admirer of Doctor Who for all of the programme's life and an appreciable chunk of his own. [2] He was convinced that he was right for the role – even born to play it! – and, if behind-the-scenes rumours are to be believed, received it after insisting as much to John Nathan-Turner and Douglas Adams during his audition. Despite some reluctance over his perceived similarity to Christopher Neame (in 1979, Baker was 36, a full decade older than Neame had been when cast in 1973, but only four years older than Neame was on departing the role earlier that year), Baker promised and quickly demonstrated that he could and would provide a very singular interpretation of the character indeed.
Baker's debut serial was "City of Fear", a script co-written by Adams and Graham Williams and credited pseudonymously to the BBC's all-purpose in-house pen-name David Agnew to work around informal rules to prohibit script editors from editing their own work. It saw him arriving in present-day Rome (production staff joked that JNT wanted to give himself a European holiday) accompanied by Borusa and K-9 and encountering the deadly villainess Countess Scarlioni (Jacqueline Pearce). This script was highly praised for its clever use of time travel and effective humorous tone. Discovering that Countess Scarlioni was in fact the notorious villainess Lucretia Borgia, the Doctor and Borusa journey to three separate versions of Rome throughout history culminating in the Doctor disguising himself as Michelangelo and hiding a secret message in the roof of the Sistine Chapel while Borusa attempted to distract an unseen Pope off-screen in humorously poor Latin. "City of Fear" continues to rank highly in "best debut" polls of series fans.
Immediately, Baker made a visual splash, doffing Neame's pilot leathers in favour of a blue frock coat and silk tie lifted from the prop room of the Italian opera house where the TARDIS landed. "So far," Baker explained before his debut on screen, "I think Doctors have been a bit staid for my tastes. I've spent three years playing a rather plain gentleman on The Brothers so I'm keen on having a bit of colour in my costume. Hopefully it won't be anything too ostentatious."
In most respects, Baker's Doctor was characterised by critics as, "Like Bill Hartnell, only with most of the rough edges sanded off." His take on Doctor cast the Time Lord as an inveterate admirer of human art, literature and culture, and prone to frequent reflections on the "indomitable" nature of the human spirit; it is not for nothing that he has been popularly described as the "most human" of all the classic Doctors. He was the charming and good-humoured gentleman who would probably get on reasonably well with his enemies if only they would stop trying to exterminate him, relaxed and restrained in his manner and dress sense, and as keen to see the sights of Earth's history as he was to save the universe.
Baker himself – who interacted well with the press – explained his intentions in interviews early on in his time on the show, remarking that while he admired Christopher Neame's younger, more intense Doctor, he felt that his long continuous tenure in the part had led to a "dominance of one tone and one kind of story" and that, "I don't think it would be inappropriate to try and recapture some of what impressed me about Doctor Who when William Hartnell was the Doctor."
Such affectations reflected the three components of John Nathan-Turner's plan to reinvigorate the series. First, targeting a clean break with the serious-minded character of the Fourth Doctor, JNT expressed his desire that the Fifth Doctor could, "Be the kind of man who would pass around a paper bag and offer the Cybermen a jelly baby when they had him back into a corner." Facilitating this objective, Douglas Adams agreed to remain on staff as a so-called "script consultant" for most of Baker's tenure after official ending his time as script editor in 1981.
Second, he wished to pull back from the outer space and "gothic alien world" settings common in the Neame / Hinchcliffe / Holmes years and bring the Doctor back to Earth with a higher focus on "historicals", which placed the Doctor in real life historical situations – sometimes with and sometimes without any science-fiction or supernatural elements at all. Adams's successor as script editor, Louis Marks, was a DPhil graduate from Balliol with a particular interest in Italian Renaissance history and would take to this assignment with gusto.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, he made clear that he "wanted the Doctor to win more" after an oft-criticised trend in the late Fourth Doctor era when the Doctor's victories would by pyrrhic as often as they were decisive. [3]
With the conceit that the Doctor had resolved to take Borusa on a tour of Earth's history, these stories were very popular, especially with parents who appreciated their educational tone, although it soon became clear to everyone working on the series that JNT's predilection for "light entertainment" (also evidenced by his casting of soap stars and sitcom actors in roles that did not always suit them [4]) was a larger factor than any desire to improve young minds. In time, the tone of much of the Baker era would come under heavy criticism in later years for its "lightweight" (or, less charitably, "up itself") nature, even as the actor himself always remained well-regarded.
By some distance the inevitable highlight of Baker's tenure with the series was the 20th anniversary special. Although primarily scripted by Terrance Dicks, "Dimensions In Time" featured story ideas contributed by an array of writers associated with the programme, which was treated as a special event by the BBC, it received the unique privilege of being broadcast as a feature-length 90 minute telefilm. Accompanied by his new companions [5], alien princess Teegan Jovanka (Janet Fielding) and dubiously-accented Australian flight attendant Victor Turlough (Mark Strickson) [6], the Doctor pilots the TARDIS into a mysterious dimensional breach and finds himself on a strange alternate Earth overrun by Cybermen.
There, he encounters an aging human scientist who introduces himself as "Dr Who" (Patrick Troughton reprising his role from the Amicus films of 20 years earlier) and explains that these Cybermen attacked while Earth was still recovering from its occupation by the Daleks, and have been rooting out the resistance which he now leads in a losing battle with the invaders. Together, the Doctor and the doctor defeat the Cybermen, and the Fifth Doctor and his friends return home safely.
Finally, after a long stretch spent adventuring in Earth's history or on largely Earth-like planets, the Fifth Doctor's final story ("Return to Gallifrey", written by Robert Holmes) saw the first reappearance of the Doctor's home planet in more than 10 years. Learning that his onetime boss, Councillor Goth (Nicholas Courtney returning to the role) has now risen to the office of Lord President of Gallifrey, the Doctor is charged with identifying and catching an assassin targeting high-ranking Time Lords, and teams up with a suspicious Council Guard named Maxil (played by Peter Davison of All Creatures Great and Small fame).
When the evidence seems to implicate none other than President Goth himself, the Doctor realises that he has been set up, and in one of the most famous cliffhangers of the series; Maxil reveals that he is in fact the Doctor's old enemy, the Master, back for revenge. The efforts to keep this twist secret – aided by the assumptions that Davison was another example of JNT's stunt casting and that Tristan Farnon could never be a "bad guy" – were praised by fans, critics and Baker himself. Although he successfully prevents the Master from assassinating Goth, the Doctor is mortally wounded as the villain escapes, and is forced to regenerate once more.
Between Christopher Neame and the early tenure of Colin Baker, Doctor Who had enjoyed a long and sustained peak. Although a sense of tedium over John Nathan-Turner's insatiable "light entertainment" proclivities and increasing sense of stagnancy precipitated by a reluctance to venture too far beyond Earth or Earth-like settings had led to a (small but noticeable enough to be worrying) decrease in ratings, Doctor Who remained in remarkably good condition for a programme in its twenty-first year. [7] It was generally agreed, as any reasonably astute observer could be expected to agree, that another fresh start and new direction would help to introduce a renewed sense of vibrancy and adventure which the series seemed perilously close to losing altogether.
Unfortunately, unbeknown to anyone, the series was on the brink of a downturn…
----
[1] Although never cast as the Doctor, John Thaw's name would subsequently be raised every single time a new regeneration was announced, so publically and pervasively that it became the subject of extensive parody to which even Thaw himself gamely contributed.
[2] As he was fond of explaining in an oft-shared fan-favourite anecdote, Baker had originally planned to qualify as a solicitor and switched to acting to his discovery of Doctor Who after overhearing a flatmate watching a William Hartnell episode shortly after the programme's debut in 1963.
[3] Most infamously, "The Planet of Terror" ended with both the universe-saving defeat of Sutekh the Destroyer and the deaths of every single character other than the Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith, with the Doctor helpless to prevent the latter without jeopardising the former.
[4] John Inman's turn as a "tough as nails mercenary captain" in "The Treasure of Mandragora" was met with particular confusion.
[5] Louise Jameson had left the series in 1981 after a little less than two years, and was briefly replaced in the interim for a small handful of stories by Matthew Waterhouse's teen mathematician Adric, a boy genius whose final story would end with him eaten by a dinosaur, which was then blown up by a Movellan on a planet that was later destroyed when its sun went supernova and turned into a black hole. Waterhouse had failed to ingratiate himself to the production staff and the character had not been well-received.
[6] Strickson was from Stratford, but was ordered to adopt an Australian accent by John Nathan-Turner who wished to make the series "more cosmopolitan". JNT went so far as to instruct Strickson to use the accent (which Strickson disliked using and was always happy to admit "wasn't very good") in public to try and convince audiences that he was a genuine Australian actor. It remains unclear whether JNT hoped to get an Australian holiday out of this strange ploy.
[7] The highest ratings achieved by Doctor Who in the history of its run would be 15.8 million for the fourth and final episode of "The Final Dimension", Christopher Neame's last appearance as the Fourth Doctor, which coincided with a strike at ITV that left the BBC's programming uncontested that week.
THE FIFTH DOCTOR
Colin Baker
(1979 – 1984)
Colin Baker
(1979 – 1984)
Prior to taking sole responsibility for production duties late in the year, John Nathan-Turner ("JNT" to his friends and enemies alike) was a de facto co-producer of Doctor Who alongside Graham Williams for most of 1979, in which capacity he enjoyed unprecedented latitude (aided and abetted by script editor Douglas Adams, who privately expressed his intention to Nathan-Turner to remain in the role until at least 1981 to ease the transition) to "set the board" for his prospective ascension to the top role.
JNT had big plans to redefine Doctor Who for the new decade and believed that he would need to "go big" to realise his goals by casting a "name" actor as the incoming Fifth Doctor. Christopher Neame, for all the popularity he had achieved, had been a young and hungry unknown and correspondingly a gamble that could easily have gone wrong; John Nathan-Turner was in no mood to take such a risk again. Instead, eager to drum up speculation, he made a cryptic announced at a press conference that he had had tapped "one of the most recognisable faces on our television screens in recent years" as Neame's successor.
Gossip and conjecture were indeed as rife as JNT had hoped, with guesses running the gamut from credible to ridiculous. John Thaw and Martin Shaw, both well-known for their heroic roles in The Sweeney and The Professionals respectively, were initially the bookies' favourites, while older stars such as Patrick Macnee and James Ellis were acknowledged as outside possibilities. [1] More outlandish proposals centred around sitcom and soap stars such as Frank Thornton, Michael Crawford, Clive Dunn and others, each rejected by the odds-makers more or less out of hand (granted, largely by commentators wholly unaware of JNT's predilection for "light entertainment" media), because what right-thinking casting director would ever contract a lightweight comedy actor to carry a science-fiction drama? Even John Le Mesurier had demonstrated some dramatic flair before he became Bill Hartnell's first successor.
Regardless, Nathan-Turner's eventual choice did indeed take audiences, critics and the entertainment press by surprise: he had indicated his intention to cast "one of the most recognisable faces" in British television, but at no point had he suggested that said face would be one of TV's most beloved protagonists. In 1979, Colin Baker was most immediately recognised for his successful stint playing the villainous yuppie Paul Merroney in four seasons of the BBC drama The Brothers between 1974 and 1976, a role which made him a household name, albeit as the man viewers at home loved to hate.
In other words, an unusual choice for the role of a hero beloved by children across the country, or so one might assume. However, Colin Baker had been a fan and admirer of Doctor Who for all of the programme's life and an appreciable chunk of his own. [2] He was convinced that he was right for the role – even born to play it! – and, if behind-the-scenes rumours are to be believed, received it after insisting as much to John Nathan-Turner and Douglas Adams during his audition. Despite some reluctance over his perceived similarity to Christopher Neame (in 1979, Baker was 36, a full decade older than Neame had been when cast in 1973, but only four years older than Neame was on departing the role earlier that year), Baker promised and quickly demonstrated that he could and would provide a very singular interpretation of the character indeed.
Baker's debut serial was "City of Fear", a script co-written by Adams and Graham Williams and credited pseudonymously to the BBC's all-purpose in-house pen-name David Agnew to work around informal rules to prohibit script editors from editing their own work. It saw him arriving in present-day Rome (production staff joked that JNT wanted to give himself a European holiday) accompanied by Borusa and K-9 and encountering the deadly villainess Countess Scarlioni (Jacqueline Pearce). This script was highly praised for its clever use of time travel and effective humorous tone. Discovering that Countess Scarlioni was in fact the notorious villainess Lucretia Borgia, the Doctor and Borusa journey to three separate versions of Rome throughout history culminating in the Doctor disguising himself as Michelangelo and hiding a secret message in the roof of the Sistine Chapel while Borusa attempted to distract an unseen Pope off-screen in humorously poor Latin. "City of Fear" continues to rank highly in "best debut" polls of series fans.
Immediately, Baker made a visual splash, doffing Neame's pilot leathers in favour of a blue frock coat and silk tie lifted from the prop room of the Italian opera house where the TARDIS landed. "So far," Baker explained before his debut on screen, "I think Doctors have been a bit staid for my tastes. I've spent three years playing a rather plain gentleman on The Brothers so I'm keen on having a bit of colour in my costume. Hopefully it won't be anything too ostentatious."
In most respects, Baker's Doctor was characterised by critics as, "Like Bill Hartnell, only with most of the rough edges sanded off." His take on Doctor cast the Time Lord as an inveterate admirer of human art, literature and culture, and prone to frequent reflections on the "indomitable" nature of the human spirit; it is not for nothing that he has been popularly described as the "most human" of all the classic Doctors. He was the charming and good-humoured gentleman who would probably get on reasonably well with his enemies if only they would stop trying to exterminate him, relaxed and restrained in his manner and dress sense, and as keen to see the sights of Earth's history as he was to save the universe.
Baker himself – who interacted well with the press – explained his intentions in interviews early on in his time on the show, remarking that while he admired Christopher Neame's younger, more intense Doctor, he felt that his long continuous tenure in the part had led to a "dominance of one tone and one kind of story" and that, "I don't think it would be inappropriate to try and recapture some of what impressed me about Doctor Who when William Hartnell was the Doctor."
Such affectations reflected the three components of John Nathan-Turner's plan to reinvigorate the series. First, targeting a clean break with the serious-minded character of the Fourth Doctor, JNT expressed his desire that the Fifth Doctor could, "Be the kind of man who would pass around a paper bag and offer the Cybermen a jelly baby when they had him back into a corner." Facilitating this objective, Douglas Adams agreed to remain on staff as a so-called "script consultant" for most of Baker's tenure after official ending his time as script editor in 1981.
Second, he wished to pull back from the outer space and "gothic alien world" settings common in the Neame / Hinchcliffe / Holmes years and bring the Doctor back to Earth with a higher focus on "historicals", which placed the Doctor in real life historical situations – sometimes with and sometimes without any science-fiction or supernatural elements at all. Adams's successor as script editor, Louis Marks, was a DPhil graduate from Balliol with a particular interest in Italian Renaissance history and would take to this assignment with gusto.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, he made clear that he "wanted the Doctor to win more" after an oft-criticised trend in the late Fourth Doctor era when the Doctor's victories would by pyrrhic as often as they were decisive. [3]
With the conceit that the Doctor had resolved to take Borusa on a tour of Earth's history, these stories were very popular, especially with parents who appreciated their educational tone, although it soon became clear to everyone working on the series that JNT's predilection for "light entertainment" (also evidenced by his casting of soap stars and sitcom actors in roles that did not always suit them [4]) was a larger factor than any desire to improve young minds. In time, the tone of much of the Baker era would come under heavy criticism in later years for its "lightweight" (or, less charitably, "up itself") nature, even as the actor himself always remained well-regarded.
By some distance the inevitable highlight of Baker's tenure with the series was the 20th anniversary special. Although primarily scripted by Terrance Dicks, "Dimensions In Time" featured story ideas contributed by an array of writers associated with the programme, which was treated as a special event by the BBC, it received the unique privilege of being broadcast as a feature-length 90 minute telefilm. Accompanied by his new companions [5], alien princess Teegan Jovanka (Janet Fielding) and dubiously-accented Australian flight attendant Victor Turlough (Mark Strickson) [6], the Doctor pilots the TARDIS into a mysterious dimensional breach and finds himself on a strange alternate Earth overrun by Cybermen.
There, he encounters an aging human scientist who introduces himself as "Dr Who" (Patrick Troughton reprising his role from the Amicus films of 20 years earlier) and explains that these Cybermen attacked while Earth was still recovering from its occupation by the Daleks, and have been rooting out the resistance which he now leads in a losing battle with the invaders. Together, the Doctor and the doctor defeat the Cybermen, and the Fifth Doctor and his friends return home safely.
Finally, after a long stretch spent adventuring in Earth's history or on largely Earth-like planets, the Fifth Doctor's final story ("Return to Gallifrey", written by Robert Holmes) saw the first reappearance of the Doctor's home planet in more than 10 years. Learning that his onetime boss, Councillor Goth (Nicholas Courtney returning to the role) has now risen to the office of Lord President of Gallifrey, the Doctor is charged with identifying and catching an assassin targeting high-ranking Time Lords, and teams up with a suspicious Council Guard named Maxil (played by Peter Davison of All Creatures Great and Small fame).
When the evidence seems to implicate none other than President Goth himself, the Doctor realises that he has been set up, and in one of the most famous cliffhangers of the series; Maxil reveals that he is in fact the Doctor's old enemy, the Master, back for revenge. The efforts to keep this twist secret – aided by the assumptions that Davison was another example of JNT's stunt casting and that Tristan Farnon could never be a "bad guy" – were praised by fans, critics and Baker himself. Although he successfully prevents the Master from assassinating Goth, the Doctor is mortally wounded as the villain escapes, and is forced to regenerate once more.
Between Christopher Neame and the early tenure of Colin Baker, Doctor Who had enjoyed a long and sustained peak. Although a sense of tedium over John Nathan-Turner's insatiable "light entertainment" proclivities and increasing sense of stagnancy precipitated by a reluctance to venture too far beyond Earth or Earth-like settings had led to a (small but noticeable enough to be worrying) decrease in ratings, Doctor Who remained in remarkably good condition for a programme in its twenty-first year. [7] It was generally agreed, as any reasonably astute observer could be expected to agree, that another fresh start and new direction would help to introduce a renewed sense of vibrancy and adventure which the series seemed perilously close to losing altogether.
Unfortunately, unbeknown to anyone, the series was on the brink of a downturn…
----
[1] Although never cast as the Doctor, John Thaw's name would subsequently be raised every single time a new regeneration was announced, so publically and pervasively that it became the subject of extensive parody to which even Thaw himself gamely contributed.
[2] As he was fond of explaining in an oft-shared fan-favourite anecdote, Baker had originally planned to qualify as a solicitor and switched to acting to his discovery of Doctor Who after overhearing a flatmate watching a William Hartnell episode shortly after the programme's debut in 1963.
[3] Most infamously, "The Planet of Terror" ended with both the universe-saving defeat of Sutekh the Destroyer and the deaths of every single character other than the Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith, with the Doctor helpless to prevent the latter without jeopardising the former.
[4] John Inman's turn as a "tough as nails mercenary captain" in "The Treasure of Mandragora" was met with particular confusion.
[5] Louise Jameson had left the series in 1981 after a little less than two years, and was briefly replaced in the interim for a small handful of stories by Matthew Waterhouse's teen mathematician Adric, a boy genius whose final story would end with him eaten by a dinosaur, which was then blown up by a Movellan on a planet that was later destroyed when its sun went supernova and turned into a black hole. Waterhouse had failed to ingratiate himself to the production staff and the character had not been well-received.
[6] Strickson was from Stratford, but was ordered to adopt an Australian accent by John Nathan-Turner who wished to make the series "more cosmopolitan". JNT went so far as to instruct Strickson to use the accent (which Strickson disliked using and was always happy to admit "wasn't very good") in public to try and convince audiences that he was a genuine Australian actor. It remains unclear whether JNT hoped to get an Australian holiday out of this strange ploy.
[7] The highest ratings achieved by Doctor Who in the history of its run would be 15.8 million for the fourth and final episode of "The Final Dimension", Christopher Neame's last appearance as the Fourth Doctor, which coincided with a strike at ITV that left the BBC's programming uncontested that week.
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