Doctor Who in the 80s: The Turbulent Years

Often known as the John Nathan-Turner Era, the 1980s were a turbulent time for the show. It had its ups and downs, but the downs lasted far longer than the ups. It's really bad more often than not.

The problem is really that the creative hand of JNT was all about changing things up, and unfortunately he wouldn't have a good reason beyond just being slightly different. It was not a good decade.

It started off nicely enough, Tom Baker's final season in the role gave us some big changes, changes that I think actually helped the show, because it was beginning to show it's age near the end of 70s.  Baker doesn't truly gel with this new direction, but that is why he finally left, and Peter Davison was a good choice for JNT's new direction and style, but the writing was often problematic, and Davison took Troughton's advice and decided to leave after three years. He had one of the best stories of the whole franchise in his swan song, but as he has often pointed out, if the scripts had been as good as that throughout his tenure he might've stuck around for one more year.

Then comes Colin Baker. The guy got screwed at every angle. JNT was doing things because they were shocking, and that didn't help a show that no one wanted to watch anymore. Baker wasn't a bad Doctor, but the writing had hit rock bottom at this time. A show going on continuously for 20 years is bound to run out of ideas. JNT gave him the bad coat, the bad attitude, the bad writers, the bad production...and Colin Baker got the whole blame.

Sylvester McCoy took over at the start of Season 24, and the show struggled to get back to its roots. Luckily by the end of Season 25 it seemed as if we might be getting there, and while Season 26 was a definite improvement, it was clearly too little too late, the viewers just weren't there anymore. The show got the axe at the tail end of the 1980s.

JNT's hand on the show had started off to be just the shot in the arm the show needed, but he made weird decisions like only trying out new writers and not bringing in any previous writers...or changing the Doctor's demeanor, or definitively destroying the sonic screwdriver, or changing the TARDIS's outward appearance, or making the Doctor unlikable, or that Colin Baker coat, or just the question marks thing...he was making these out-there decisions just to shake things up...but a little bit of a shake-up can be a good thing, but once he shook things up and it worked, he didn't need to keep rocking the boat.  Unfortunately for the series he rocked it until it sunk completely.

NEXT TIME: The Wilderness Years