7. THE END OF AN ERA

Tom Baker's love of interference had given him an overbearing presence over the rest of the Doctor Who production team. After demanding the final say over scripts for the show, he nearly got Graham Williams the sack over a bizarre episode involving Graeme McDonald, Head of Serials and his idea for a new companion which turned out to be a lettuce that would sit on the Doctor's shoulder. With Lalla Ward encouraging even more arnarchic behaviour, such as an embarrassing habit of talking directly to the camera, the programme's quality rapidly declined, and became almost a parody of itself with stories such as The Creature From The Pit and The Horns Of Nimon being little better than a children's pantomime. Despite everything, the ratings were still higher than they had been for many years, and the season was planned to culminate in the story Shada, which was due for broadcast in early 1980.

Douglas Adams had written Shada after an earlier story idea, in which the Doctor goes into retreat having become bored with saving the world, had been vetoed by Graham Williams as being too humorous. The story featured the Doctor meeting an old Time Lord at Cambridge University, and travelling to the frightening prison world, Shada. Although the story was privately described by Williams and Adams as "a classic", it was in reality a circus-like romp in the same style, and sadly of the same quality, of the previous stories in the series. Perhaps mercifully, circumstances conspired to leave Shada unfinished, as Douglas Adams explains:

"There was another strike concerning that bloody clock , and we couldn't finish it, although we all thought it was one of the best Whos ever. I believe that John Nathan-Turner later tried to get it remade, but it never happened. What made it worse was that Graham and I were leaving, so our final story was The Horns Of Nimon, which is rather sad, as that story was so awful."

Tom Baker was particularly upset about the cancellation, as it was the climax of a season in which he had to all intents and purposes taken over the programme, having input on scripts, direction and costume, which was part of the reason why Graham Williams had decided to leave for pastures new. Williams had been feeling quite unable to control his leading man, and he died several years later as the result of a bizarre shooting accident. His replacement was found in the show's Production Unit Manager , John Nathan-Turner. Despite his inexperience, Nathan-Turner was desperate for the job, having fallen in love with Doctor Who whilst working as a call-boy during the Patrick Troughton era. However, it was his lack of experience that saw Barry Letts make a return as executive producer, a role which he had been unofficially playing for the past year after Graham Williams fell ill. Nathan-Turner had a wealth of new ideas for the programme, as Lalla Ward recalls:

"John came in and started to change everything around. He got rid of the old theme music, bringing in what he thought was a trendy new arrangement, he changed my costume and Tom's, getting rid of his battered old tweed jacket and replacing it with this terrible red monstrosity. He also insisted on getting rid of all the wonderful humour, which really pissed everyone off."

Christopher Hamilton Bidmead, the show's new script editor, insists that these things were rather peripheral to what was happening. "The real change", he says, "was that we were stopping the silliness, and trying to educate children with the principles of science, like the original producers tried to do in 1963." Indeed, Bidmead had only originally agreed to join the programme if it became more a science fiction drama programme, and less a flamboyant, camp comedy, which is in all honesty what it had become.

Whatever was happening, it was set to rock Doctor Who to its foundations, and the new series in 1980 was to set a precedent for the new decade, with it's new scientific approach, less humorous, more serious dialogue, and a generally more stylish appearance. The changes did not end there, for Lalla Ward was about to leave; Three new younger companions were to arrive; And most importantly of all, Tom Baker was shortly to announce his resignation from the title role, leaving the way clear for a whole new generation of Doctor Who.....