Mark Harrison | On 05, Nov 2023

Offering more than 600 Classic Doctor Who episodes broadcast between 1963 and 1996, BritBox and BBC iPlayer’s The Whoniverse are bigger on the inside. If you’ve watched all of the new series already, then why not join us as we turn on the TARDIS randomiser for a monthly primer on the adventures of the first eight Doctors…

Here’s a hot take for you – the final season of Classic Doctor Who is arguably its best. If we accept that the series that always gets counted as one programme is actually several different shows stacked next to one another in eccentric piles, Season 26 is certainly as close as it gets to real TV drama in the 1980s, and certainly until the 21st-century revival.

With Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred firmly established as the Seventh Doctor and Ace, the season holds the Time Lord’s motives at a distance and gives unprecedented attention to the companion’s story arc. Featuring friends and enemies old and new, the season explores Ace’s history while also restoring the Doctor’s mystique.

As many have remarked, there’s less clear blue water than you’d think between the end of the 1989 season and the start of the 2005 one, and there’s even an appreciable boost in production value as Doctor Who starts concentrating on ideas again, rather than its limited special-effects power.

Previously on Doctor Who…

“I am far more than just another Time Lord.”

Once and future showrunner Russell T Davies gets much credit for reviving Doctor Who, but 1980s script editor Andrew Cartmel can also lay claim to piloting a “New Who” in the classic series’ final years. With the exception of his first credited story, Time And The Rani (a Pip and Jane Baker commission he inherited upon taking the job), Cartmel strove to recruit exciting new writers and make Doctor Who about something other than itself again.

And so, Season 24 is a transitional run that nevertheless has some of the best scripts and stories the show had seen in the 1980s up to that point, with stories like Paradise Towers and Delta And The Bannermen significantly refreshing the show’s fusty locales and fanboy perspective. Bonnie Langford bows out as Melanie “known as Mel” Brown in Dragonfire, and Ace boards the TARDIS in mysterious circumstances that would be explored in subsequent stories.

Season 25 starts more confidently with the belting Remembrance Of The Daleks, an action-packed extravaganza set in 1963, which was the show’s most recent historical episode up to that point. Later in the run, The Happiness Patrol takes aim at the fixed grin of Thatcherism, Silver Nemesis bamboozles the Doctor’s history and origins some more, and The Greatest Show In The Galaxy turns a potentially disastrous production into a surreal meta-comic fantasia with some properly scary moments.

So, despite its reputation at the time, Doctor Who was in pretty rude health ahead of its final season. But since the 1985 hiatus, the show had most often been scheduled opposite ITV’s soap juggernaut Coronation Street, and the ratings were in freefall even as the quality picked up…

Battlefield

“Any advanced form of magic is indistinguishable from technology.”

Writer Ben Aaronovitch followed up Remembrance Of The Daleks with the idea of Arthurian legends being inspired by advanced alien visitors from another dimension. With the addition of UNIT and the Doctor’s old mucker Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart (Nicholas Courtney), we get another action-packed revamp of a familiar story type.

Cartmel and Aaronovitch have both expressed frustration with the production side of Battlefield, but the story is strong, and the guest cast is stacked with great performances. What’s more, The Destroyer of Worlds is one of the decade’s most impressive monster creations. Even if it’s let down in other areas, it had been a long time since the weakest serial in a Doctor Who season was THIS good.

Ghost Light

“We don’t want things to change. We make sure that they cannot.”

One of the ways this season gets around its budget limitations is to have more stories in historical settings, which the BBC was generally better at achieving than alien worlds. Additionally, the budget set apart for a six-parter was instead split between two three-parters, one filmed in the studio, and one shot on location. Set in 1881, Ghost Light is the former, an eerie, atmospheric haunted-house tale with a jet-black satirical streak.

This is often written off as a confusing one, but Marc Platt’s story is deceptively straightforward and perfectly in keeping with this season’s narrative ambition. Brilliantly directed by Alan Wareing, it’s an especially strong outing for McCoy and Aldred, as the Doctor and Ace untangle the conflicting plots and mysteries within the Victorian mansion.

The Curse Of Fenric

“We play the contest again, Time Lord.”

Ace comes of age in this cracking horror serial set during World War II, the most recent historical setting the series had yet visited at this point. At a naval installation in Northumberland, an ancient foe of the Doctor’s summons aquatic vampires and possessed humans to help it destroy all life on Earth. Russian commandos, Viking curses, and chess strategy also figure in the plot.

Even by Doctor Who standards, The Curse Of Fenric has a lot going on, but it’s not talking down to the audience. Moreover, it’s maybe the essential story in Cartmel’s approach – its callbacks are to an adventure we never saw, rather than fan service, and it still manages to be all about Ace, her relationship with the Doctor, and her emotional journey.

Survival

“If we fight like animals, we’ll die like animals!”

In Ace’s old neighbourhood, an interdimensional cat flap has opened to a distant, primitive planet where a race of cheetah people are on the hunt. The Master has already fallen into their clutches, and it falls to the Doctor to help him – and other Perivale residents – escape without succumbing to their baser impulses.

Survival is the on-location three-parter for this season and again, it’s a mixed bag – the cheetah people look cuddlier than Cartmel and writer Rona Munro intended, but the outdoor action scenes with the creatures on horseback are still quite effective. Moreover, its grounded hometown concerns and demolition of social-Darwinist attitudes show how far the show has come.

“We’ve got work to do!”

Doctor Who had an axe hanging over it throughout the late 1980s and it was known by the time Survival was produced that it would be the last serial for a while, if not forever. Cartmel was asked to write a monologue to close Part Three, and it goes like this:

THE DOCTOR: “There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, the sea’s asleep, and the rivers dream. People made of smoke, and cities made of song. Somewhere there’s danger, somewhere there’s injustice, and somewhere else the tea’s getting cold. Come on, Ace – we’ve got work to do!”

McCoy recorded this additional dialogue on 23rd November 1989, the show’s 27th anniversary. He would return as the Seventh Doctor in the 1996 TV Movie (which we’ve covered before) and alongside Aldred in 2022’s The Power Of The Doctor, which alludes to a post-Survival falling out between the Doctor and Ace but leaves them on good terms.

We’ve written a lot about Classic Who for newcomers but if you’re just coming to these columns now, the simplest advice is to watch Season 26. The final season has all the same production issues as earlier, denser material, but often pre-empts the approach that made the 2005 revival so successful. McCoy, Aldred, and Cartmel inherited a show in terminal decline, but it’s annoying how good it was again right at the point it went away.

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