The Doctor Who Real Time Marathon: A Davison Era Overview

Following in the footsteps of the show's longest running incumbent was always going to be a tough call. That that incumbent was the mountainous personality that is Tom Baker would suggest that such an endeavour would be destined to failure. However, in 1982 the series got a new lease of life thanks, in part, to the arrival of Peter Davison as the show's fifth Doctor, a shuffling in the TV schedules, and an approach that built upon the shiny new image John Nathan-Turner's production team had brought to the preceding season and an experimentalism which mirrored the arrival of Patrick Troughton over a decade and a half earlier. 

It probably helped that over the previous few years the series had had more than its fair share of ups and downs. By 1978, it had started to feel quite tired with a lead actor who was more often being himself rather than playing a role and a turn away from the more adult themes of the Hinchcliffe era to a more family-friendly string of adventures which often didn't hit the mark. Whilst some may view the wholesome fun fighting the villains with a smart companion who would often get herself into trouble as a return to form, I found Season 16 rather boring, and whilst I love the college humour of Douglas Adams' Season 17 many find it silly and childish. With the arrival of a new Producer who wasn't going to take any of Tom's nonsense behind the scenes, Season 18 really did indicate that the series needed a change of lead. Despite the show looking glossier and more modern than it had in years, Tom looked positively miserable buried under a mass of burgundy fabric, and whilst the stories were now pushing the envelope it was well past time for that change.

Enter Peter Davison, already well known as the lead in the BBC sitcom Sink Or Swim and the ITV sitcom Holding The Fort, but more famous for the role of Tristan Farnon in all three series (at that point) of the highly popular All Creatures Great And Small. It was a canny decision to cast an already established actor as the new Doctor. Familiarity would likely lead to an easier acceptance by the general viewing public, especially since the character of Tristan was already very popular. Not only that but, as with Jon Pertwee, casting someone more associated with comedic roles allowed the public to see a different side to the actor without drawing comparisons to his previous work. Davison himself has stated he feels he was too young for the role at the time, but I'm very much inclined to disagree.

From the very start, Davison hits the ground running. This, on face value, could be assigned to his debut story being the fourth to go into production, but if you look at the first serial he filmed (even the first scenes), in Four To Doomsday he already has a firm grasp of what his Doctor is like, how he acts around his three companions, and how he addresses the situations he finds himself in. He has a confidence that belies his youthful looks, a sharp intelligence which echoes Hartnell's portrayal, and a breathlessness which is much like his predecessor in Season 12. He's also lucky to be surrounded by three very different companions with whom 

he has very different relationships. As early on as Four To Doomsday he's clocked Nyssa as the one he can trust. He leaves her fiddling with machinery while he explores the Urbankan ship, Tegan having forced herself upon him and Adric consigned to stay with the TARDIS, but her technical knowledge is clearly appreciated when she prevents his execution with the Sonic Screwdriver and a pencil. Later, it's Nyssa he takes with him to explore the manor in The Visitation whilst Tegan and Adric are left at the front door with a thespian-cum-highwayman they've only just met, and she gets away with speaking to him much more severely than any of his other companions not only in that story, but also in Earthshock and Arc Of Infinity. 

Tegan is viewed as more of a burden, with a hot temper and a tendency to act unpredictably. He sees her positive side, her ability to take charge and not take any nonsense, but often finds her exasperating. Adric, likewise, has a very rocky relationship with the new Doctor; a contrast to the tutor and student set up that was so endearing in Tom's last stories. Davison's Doctor has less patience and, subsequently, less time for his protégé and this leads to some interesting conflicts during Season 19. 

It's often remarked that Davison's first season has too many companions, but I don't find that to be true. The new scheduling meant that episodes were shown twice weekly (on consecutive nights - all barring the Season 20 debut) which meant that you got to know the characters a lot more quickly than before. This was used to full advantage in Castrovalva where the first two instalments were spent largely building up Nyssa and Tegan's characters, they both having been introduced at the end of the previous season with very little done to flesh them out. Adric, who we already know, is given the back seat, and much is made of how the women deal with the regeneration and events when they reach Castrovalva itself. Within the space of two weeks it feels like you've really got to know the new leads, and subsequent serials would focus on their interactions within the TARDIS as much as during their adventures outside it. Each gets their time in the limelight, Four To Doomsday and The Visitation in particular utilising each based on their skills and characteristics. It's also notable that their relationships are seen to develop throughout the season, particularly with Adric and Tegan's interactions becoming less antagonistic. 

And the season itself it wonderfully diverse. There are adventures in spaceships, forests, the far future and the distant past, fictional cities and Mediaeval villages, with realism and surrealism both on show. We have the first serial in fifteen years not to feature monsters or aliens, and the surprise return of the Cybermen which leads to the surprise death of Adric. Each story has its own look and feel, and the season has an overarching narrative which concludes with Tegan's departure in an adventure based around her arrival the previous year as an air stewardess on the way to Heathrow Airport. Time-Flight may be a less satisfying story than the others in Season 19 - the nonsensical fancy dress the Master dons and its racist overtones, the questionable CSO, the Plasmatons - but it rounds the season off well and sets things up for a more traditional line up of Doctor and Companion for the anniversary season.

Unfortunately, I don't think Season 20 works remotely as well as those either side of it and, it would seem, Davison himself was disappointed with how it panned out choosing to leave the show at the end of the following series as a result. The fault, I think, doesn't lie with the stories themselves as such but more with the sequencing and the general design. There's not really much that could be done about the sequencing and that really lies in the hands of the Script Editor, Eric Saward, and Producer John Nathan-Turner who should both have foreseen the issues and done something about them.

The decision to feature something from the show's past in every story for the 20th Anniversary Season was a laudable one, but one which robbed the series of the freshness that its predecessor had. That three of the serials would be a trilogy (akin to the successful E-Space trilogy of Season 18) featuring the return of the Black and White Guardians was, in my opinion, something of a mis-step, but did at least allow us a sort of respite from the repetitive returns when Steve Gallagher chose to minimise the appearances of said returning foe as much as possible and focus on the story he wanted to tell. That one of the returning foes was 

the Mara from the previous season also helped keep things a little fresher than they may have been, Snakedance being one of the season's highlights. I'd probably go as far as to say that it's one of the show's best sequels, taking elements from Kinda and building on them to great effect, far surpassing that story in terms of world-building and featuring a very different and unique design aesthetic featuring caves, bazaars, opulent living quarters and desolate landscapes inhabited by a strong cast of characters who all bring something interesting to the proceedings. Nevertheless, the three serials comprising the 'Black Guardian Trilogy' all take place on spaceships, meaning that for five weeks everything felt rather samey and studiobound. The designers all do their best from the overly fussy grandeur of Mawdryn's ship to the starkness of Terminus and the Lazar ship and the stunning interiors of the Eternals' period vessels. Only the latter makes a positive impression, though. The lighting for the interiors in Mawdryn Undead and Terminus deprive the stories of any atmosphere allowing far too much (the Garm, for example) to be clearly seen.

And that leads me to another problem with Season 20. Overall, the design for Season 19 is strikingly good. Yes, the Mara in its true form is too puppety, and the Plasmatons as seen at the end of the first episode of Time-Flight are basically huge, grey bogeys on legs, but their appearances are kept to a minimum. Elsewhere, we have the gorgeous Terileptil android and the wonderfully designed Terileptils themselves, some truly brilliant design and lighting for the interior of Tegan's mind, a bang-up-to-date makeover for the Cybermen, and even Monarch doesn't look too bad for a sort-of alien frog person. In contrast, Season 20 has the Ergon - a truly poorly designed skeletal chicken-man who gets way too many brightly lit close-ups, the foam rubber and cellophane dress/bodies of Mawdryn and his kind (not to mention their spaghetti brains), the top-heavy Garm with its Muppet-mouth and light-bulb eyes, and Kari and Olvir's Things To Come Cosplay costumes. Even the Mara at the end of Snakedance feels a bit too rubbery. Add to that some atrocious effects such as with the background for the first appearance of the Black Guardian, the weird interior of the Matrix, and the incredibly flat-looking exterior shots of Mawdryn's ship and the season doesn't look remotely as slick as the previous year. Furthermore, the narratives themselves aren't (for the most part) nearly as satisfying. Snakedance and Enlightenment are exceptional, but as much as I love Terminus, Tegan and new companion Turlough spend three full episodes crawling around service ducts which is a terrible way to treat half of the main cast, especially when it's only Turlough's second story! Elsewhere, we get a rehash of The Keeper Of Traken but with Time Lords and Omega instead of Trakens and the Master where the locations are utterly wasted by a director who clearly had no idea what he was doing and a return for Tegan which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. There's very little I can say about Arc Of Infinity which is positive other than it gives us a slight taste of what it might have been like to have a season with just the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa. Narratively, it's nonsense, it doesn't look very good, and it further diminishes the Time Lords whose mystique had already been chiselled away in The Invasion Of Time. 

Mawdryn Undead is a great idea which has events occurring in two time zones of the same location featuring a separated TARDIS crew for the very first time (!) and it's lovely to see the Brigadier again. Likewise, the introduction of Turlough and the setting up of him as a less-than-trustworthy companion are an interesting idea which get plenty of foundation for future 

writers to work with, but once the Black Guardian has ordered him to kill the Doctor "in the name of all that is evil" you'd think that he might have had pause for thought given he'd been persuaded to do so by the Guardian's claim that the Doctor himself was evil. Ultimately, the reappearance of both Guardians feel quite poorly thought through until Barbara Clegg's concluding instalment which is actually a very interesting character piece for both companions which treats the supposed all-powerful Guardians of Light and Dark with the reverence they deserve.

The season comes to an early conclusion with the charming but slight The King's Demons which has some nice location work and a fairly straightforward plot which may have been better served given to a return for the Meddling Monk rather than the Master. It also introduces another companion in Kamelion, who is subsequently consigned to a cupboard in the TARDIS until his swansong the following year. Several questions arise from his inclusion as a companion: given that it was readily apparent that there were issues with the animatronic prop from the very beginning, why wasn't he written out at the end of the episode instead of very obviously brought on board? What was stopping the Production team from casting various actors to play the shape-changing android in the subsequent serials until they wrote him out? And what, exactly, would his role have been in The Return, the Dalek story which was cancelled due to industrial action at the BBC which would have provided a bombastic climax to the series in the vein of Earthshock, and which eventually became Tegan's final story, Resurrection Of The Daleks? I doubt we'll ever get any satisfactory answers to these questions, and we'll never know if a Dalek-fuelled finale would have given Season 20 the kick the anniversary season deserved. As it stands, the series ended up feeling rather pedestrian with even the better serials weighed down by their weaker neighbours.

The Twentieth Anniversary, however, would receive the celebration it deserved with the multi-Doctor runaround The Five Doctors. Penned by former Script Editor and series legend Terrance Dicks it did everything that it needed to, bringing together all five incarnations of the Doctor (in one form or another) alongside a selection of companions and adversaries. Tom Baker's decision not to be involved was, I think, a blessing as it means his huge personality and extended tenure didn't overshadow his co-stars, his contribution being confined to clips from the abandoned serial Shada. Richard Hurndall stood in for the by-then-deceased William Hartnell (seen at the start delivering one of his most well known speeches from the end of The Dalek Invasion Of Earth - I wonder if that speech would be quite as well known and loved were it not for its inclusion here?) and did a commendable job of bringing the First Doctor to life whilst not really matching Hartnell's portrayal at all. Troughton and Pertwee slipped back into their roles effortlessly and, despite not sharing much screen time, recreated their antagonistic relationship from The Three Doctors. The plot was basic and easy to follow, giving Davison the focus whilst allowing his predecessors plenty of action, and it certainly felt like more of a celebration than anything from the preceding season. I think, perhaps, things would have fared better had Season 20 continued along the same lines as Season 19 and the anniversary been commemorated solely with this Special.

Season 21 saw something of a return to form, however, with more variety on display and something of a serious tone. War seems to have been at the forefront of each script writer's mind - unsurprising in the early 1980s, really - be it the Cold War-style backdrop of Warriors Of The Deep, the Civil War re-enactment of The Awakening, the Israeli-Lebanese-style bombardments of Frontios, references to the Dalek/Movellan war, or the political machinations and gun running of Androzani. Even Turlough turned out to be an exile following a civil war on his home planet. There were still some hangovers of bad design from the previous season - primarily the Myrka in the season opener and the Magma Creature of Androzani Minor, and the Tractators, whilst not too bad, weren't a patch on the Terileptils, but overall the show looked better with a wider variety of locations. Frontios, particularly, was well realised for a studio-bound serial, we got a mix of the modern and historical aspects of village life in The Awakening, which showed how good a two part story could be. The Doctor's mortal enemies finally returned in Resurrection Of The Daleks, a story given an epic feel by being transmitted in two double-length episodes. Whilst it's a narrative mess, tries to do too much, and has some questionable acting from some of the guest cast, it fits well between the more 

considered storytelling of Frontios and Planet Of Fire and injects some energy into the season. 

Planet Of Fire not only saw the introduction of new companion, Peri, but saw much more effective use of locations than the previous story to be filmed outside the UK. Lanzarote not only represented itself, but also the planet Sarn with some truly breath-taking shots of the volcanic landscape. It's a world away from the understated and often poorly-framed locales of Amsterdam in Arc Of Infinity and gives the serial a more expensive and exotic sheen. It should also be noted that there's notably more flesh on show in this story than most others in the Classic era, even counting Tegan's outfit throughout most of Season 20! Things come to a head in The Caves Of Androzani, which is justifiably one of the most popular stories of the 20th Century. The stakes are high, the direction superb, the atmosphere oppressive and we know it isn't going to have a happy ending. Davison gives one of his best performances, which is saying something given that he rarely failed to hit the mark. By the end of the third episode he's turned his performance up to eleven providing one of the show's most emotional cliffhangers, and his final episode and regeneration scene are incredibly powerful. Penned by series stalwart Robert Holmes, his first script for the show since 1978, it's very easy to see how this story influenced the direction in which the programme would head over the next couple of years, for better or worse.

Overall, the Davison era was (in my opinion) incredibly successful. It reinvented the series, moving away from the preconceptions of the viewing public to give us a Doctor who couldn't necessarily sweep into a situation, flash his teeth and defeat the bad guys every time. Davison's Doctor was intelligent and energetic (a complete contrast to Baker in his final season) speeding from scene to scene with a breathless vigour. He wasn't always listened to with those around him not taking him seriously on more than one occasion, and thus he often found situations out of his control. This was never more clear than in Earthshock which underlined the fact that just because you travel with the Doctor doesn't mean you'll always be safe. Killing Adric was an inspired decision, giving the show some of the gravitas it had lost over the years. That it was near the end of a series where the Doctor and Adric had often been at loggerheads, where the Alzarian had often found himself an outsider makes his fate all the more tragic, especially since they have some sort of reconciliation during his final serial. It's a shame that they chose to bring Tegan back so quickly after her abrupt departure/abandonment at the end of Season 19. I would have liked to see the Doctor and Nyssa travel alone for a while, and for Tegan's return not to have been so contrived and unbelievable. Likewise, it would have been nice for Turlough to have had some development between Mawdryn Undead and Planet Of Fire (and for him to have changed out of the uniform of the school which he hated so much!) since, aside from those stories and Enlightenment he does very little but act as a sounding board for supporting characters. Even his development in Frontios, gibbering about the Tractators from a 'race memory', feels underdeveloped and a little lame. Likewise, Peri has an incredibly good start but, despite how good The Caves Of Androzani is, quickly becomes a damsel in distress, and Kamelion was both a wasted opportunity and a foolish acquisition. He should either have been written out at the end of The King's Demons or had his shape-changing ability utilised more intelligently. What we got instead was simply pointless.

Nyssa will remain my favourite of the Fifth Doctor's companions. Capable and smart, she's frequently the perfect foil for Davison's Doctor, able to have an intelligent conversation with him but alien enough to not know everything about what they encounter. Despite its flaws, I think her final story is the perfect send off for her, seeing her use her talents to help others because it's the right thing to do regardless of how dangerous or lonely it might be. Throughout Seasons 19 & 20 she was the mediator between the Doctor and his other, less capable friends and the one he could always rely on. All the Fifth Doctor's companions bring something unique to the show, though, regardless of how well or poorly they were written.

The most notable thing about the era to me, though, is how short it felt. Watching it between 04/01/22 and 16/03/24 it seemed to be over only as it was getting going. This isn't solely down to it following on from seven years of Tom Baker; Davison's second and third seasons were curtailed - firstly by the anniversary season finale being cancelled, then by the introduction of his replacement before the end of Season 21. Added to that is the fact that his seasons ran for half as long as previous series due to being transmitted at two episodes per week. There may have been almost as many stories as before, but the amount of weeks per year in this Doctor's company was not the same. It's a shame that Davison had decided to leave after three seasons before filming of his final series began as I don't think I'd feel quite so short changed if he'd stayed on for a fourth. Nevertheless, what we got was almost all brilliant, and he proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the show was bigger than Tom Baker and had a place in the new decade. More than that, the show was more popular than ever for its anniversary year which, for a show celebrating two decades, is nothing to be sniffed at!