Mark Harrison | On 26, Nov 2023

As Doctor Who launches a new era on Disney+ worldwide, UK viewers can travel the Whoniverse on BBC iPlayer, BritBox, and ITVX Premium. Whether it’s the original run from 1963, the revival since 2005, or any of the fun extras in between, consider this your monthly primer on a back-catalogue that’s bigger on the inside…

This weekend, Doctor Who’s 60th anniversary specials kick off with The Star Beast on BBC One and BBC iPlayer. Throughout the past 60 years, the TARDIS has seen a lot of birthday bashes, usually marked by teaming up Doctors, reviving old monsters, or most often, having a bit of a mess about and a daft laugh with the stories.

So, if you’re in a celebratory mood for Who’s diamond anniversary, there’s a whole bunch of past stories to revisit. Delightfully, these are usually a way to establish serious lore in a very unserious fashion, which is very Doctor Who indeed. From Gallifrey’s origins to the last days of the Time War, here are some of the anniversary specials we’ve had so far…

10 years: The Three Doctors (Season 10, 1972–3)

“Oh, so you’re my replacements – a dandy and a clown.”

A decade into the programme’s original run, Doctor Who’s tenth season opens with a very special serial, in which Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor teams up with his previous incarnations, played by William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton. Trapped by the emergence of a black hole, the Time Lords on Gallifrey rally the three Doctors to investigate a powerful foe who resides in an anti-matter universe.

Written by Bob Baker and Dave Martin, the serial introduces Omega as a threat big enough to prompt the central team-up, but it’s also smart enough to let the Doctors be the main attraction. It’s big without being too serious – in fact, it’s very funny – and it mints the multi-Doctor format that returns in various forms later.

Troughton and Pertwee are on fine form, bickering and competing with each other/themselves throughout the story. Hartnell had left the show due to poor health some years earlier, so he has a briefer role than Troughton, but he was reportedly overjoyed to come back to Doctor Who for what would turn out to be his final acting job. And, in the show’s present, the story ends with a major change for the Third Doctor’s usually Earthbound era.

20 years: The Five Doctors (1983)

“A man is the sum of his memories. A Time Lord even more so.”

Let’s get the technicalities out of the way – the five Doctors does not have all five Doctor actors in it. Hartnell sadly passed away in 1975, so the First Doctor is here played by Richard Hurndall and Baker declined to return so soon after leaving the role, so the Fourth Doctor is represented by footage from the unfinished 1980 serial Shada.

Still, Troughton, Pertwee and a host of other returning regulars join Peter Davison’s Fifth Doctor on a dangerous voyage through the legendary Death Zone on Gallifrey. Abducted from their time streams and foisted together by an unknown foe, the Doctors and their friends battle Cybermen, Yeti, and the fearsome Raston Warrior Robot, and also clash with Anthony Ainley’s Master – even though he’s apparently trying to help.

With scripts by the great Terrance Dicks, this is a fun, geeky and exceptionally camp outing that’s most commonly available as a 90-minute special rather than a serial. A couple of years later, Troughton came back yet again to meet Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor in The Two Doctors (Season 21, 1984), which wasn’t an anniversary special but certainly looked like a nice bit of location filming in Spain for the cast and crew.

25 years: Silver Nemesis (Season 25, 1988)

“Hello, I’m the Doctor! I believe you want to kill me?”

The programme ran into trouble in the 1980s but had something of a creative revival under script editor Andrew Cartmel, starting with Season 24. The next year featured several serials that were mindful of the show’s 25th anniversary, from the return to the first serial’s 1960s London locale in Remembrance of the Daleks to the self-critique and meta-comedy of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy.

The third serial in the season, Silver Nemesis, was designed as the silver-anniversary special proper. In Kevin Clarke’s story, the Seventh Doctor and Ace are just trying to unwind when they’re caught in the middle of three factions vying to capture a mysterious comet – 17th-century sorceress Lady Peinforte (Fiona Walker), a cabal of neo-Nazis and a squadron of Cybermen.

With its ancient Gallifreyan weapon and its returning baddies, it’s something of a rerun of the far superior Remembrance, just a couple of stories earlier. On the plus side, Lady Peinforte gets some good scenes with McCoy’s Doctor, firming up Cartmel’s intention to make the character more mysterious and powerful again. “Doctor who?” indeed…

50 years: The Day of the Doctor (Series 7, 2013)

“You told me the name you chose was a promise. What was the promise?”

The year after Silver Nemesis, Doctor Who went on a long hiatus, but its next big anniversary special on BBC One was also a global simulcast. In 2013, Matt Smith’s third and final series teed up two specials, starting with the golden-anniversary jamboree, The Day of the Doctor.

Steven Moffat’s script both revives and subverts the classic multi-Doctor scheme with the return of the very popular David Tennant (fancy that) and the introduction of a hitherto-unknown War Doctor, played by the mighty John Hurt. With Clara Oswald (Jenna Coleman) and UNIT in tow, the Doctors revisit the last day of the Time War and still find time to foil a centuries-long Zygon conspiracy before tea.

Perhaps Moffat’s finest hour, the special invokes anniversary privileges to redress the 2005 revival’s original sin (“How many children were on Gallifrey?”) while also telling a story about the Doctor’s character and personality. Styled after It’s a Wonderful Life, it’s a fan-pleasing rollercoaster of an episode that ultimately looks forward and not back.

Other birthday bashes

“Quel dommage, Davros!” By this time next month, the 60th anniversary specials will all be on iPlayer alongside these specials, but over the years, there have been some other anniversary bits that you might have to rummage for instead…

Among the 50th anniversary bits you can also find on iPlayer at the time of writing, there’s The Night of the Doctor, a minisode that revisits Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor on screen for the first time since the 1996 TV Movie, and The Five-Ish Doctors Reboot, a hilarious extended sketch that sees classic Doctors Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy try to crash the Moffat episode – Davison also wrote and directed it.

Doctor Who’s off-air anniversaries didn’t go unnoticed. Although plans for a 30th anniversary feature film starring Tom Baker fell through, he and the other surviving Doctors appear in a 1993 Children in Need special called Dimensions in Time. Infamously, the plot brings the Doctors to Albert Square, where they tangle with adversaries like the Rani and, er, the cast of EastEnders. For contractual reasons, this one has never been officially released.

And in 2003, while BBC Worldwide was trying to bring the Doctor to the big screen, BBC got the go-ahead to produce an animated continuation. Just in time for the 40th anniversary, Scream of the Shalka sees an alternate Ninth Doctor (Richard E Grant) who enlists barmaid Alison (Sophie Okonedo) while fending off an alien invasion in Lancashire. News of RTD reviving the series came during production, so further animated adventures became moot.

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