He was over-rated as a Doctor, to be honest. He benefited from a lot of hype which helped garner more of a following, during the mid to late seventies the media began to focus TV more and sci-fi became more "in vogue" what with star wars and the star trek revival. However he did have his moments.

You don't know that unless you have a psychic link with every producer back then.

Don't agree, the series changed with Hinchcliffe/Holmes making the series more gothic horror. This attracted more adults to the show and ratings increased. Tom's larger then life personna, helped create a hugely popular Doctor. Yes, after Hinchcliffe left, the stories weren't as good and Tom did become a bit too controlling in terms of scripts etc, but his era will always be thought of fondly.

Fair enough. I think post-Davison it was pretty dire, though I did quite like Tom Baker's last season. Mind you, I saw a bit of Castrovalva recently and found it basically unwatchable. Ah, the 80's...

And of course, JNT was responsible not only for the question marks, but also...

Adric.

No I believe the environment played more of a part. The same combination and style in the early seventies wouldn't have worked so well, because the media didn't engage so well in that period and attitudes towards entertainment were more formal. Which is not to take anything away from the production team; they were good but they were also fortunate with the fashion of the day.

Personally, I love all the old stories of Tom being difficult. Every famous actor these days seems to be impossibly nice.

I love all the modern actors who have played the Doctor, but I'm sure if I ever read their autobiographies or heard their anecdotes I'd be bored in ten minutes. Tom I simply find to be an interesting person, even if he's not always a very nice person.

Well no-one did come forward. That's one of the reasons Peter Cregeen gave in the doc on the Survival DVD.

My understanding chatting to the various companions was Louise stood up to him early on shooting Fang Rock, they had a chat and all was reasonably amicable from then on. He was OK with Tamm, but had a habit of being moody and blanking her at times.

(We'll skip Lalla - That's a minefield).

Subsequents : Sutton, Fielding, Waterhouse... Tom had NO TIME FOR whatsoever. Read throughs they were ignored by Tom apart from when he had to script interect with them.

Frankly, on-set, Tom treated them like props/scenery.

I accept the job of producer wouldn't have been attractive at that time but feel sure if the BBC really wanted to change it, they could have done.

JNT was a staff producer whom had no choice but to stay. If they had other such producers around, they could have put someone in new if they'd wanted to.

Oh yes!

I would love it if in years to come it was revealed that David Tennant and Matt Smith were actually complete sh*ts - forever throwing tantrums and treating fellow cast members like dirt.

It would add a whole new - and interesting - dimension to post-2005 Who.

However, I can't see it happening...

It's threads like this that remind you there's always been arguments and production problems on Who, throughout it's 50 years of existence! In years to come we will be hearing the proper stories about what's been going on behind the scenes during Moffat's tenure...

I think we've only heard one side to the Eccleston story so far.

Barrowman has kind of mumbled that he wasn't much fun as Tennant and he was super serious all the time, which is about as much as we've got at this time.

I think the best word people throw around when discussing Chris is "Intense"
I have a feeling he wasn't much liked on set even before the whole fall out at the end of his era.

Time will tell.

(Still loved his Doctor though )

Well because the BBC were in charge.

If an atmosphere had been created where no producer wanted to touch the show then ultimately the BBC are responsible for allowing that to happen.

Also you need to ask why a producer wouldn't touch it. Was it an image thing? That the show was unfashionable and so somebody wouldn't want to be seen associated with it. Or was it because they knew it was a show where a producer would get zero support from the powers that be? And isn't the former in some ways a result of the latter?

Not at that time. The BBC had very few staff producers left, as this is when John Birt's "Producer's Choice" scheme came in, under pressure from the then Thatcher government to outsource more.

Orm society outside the BBC had made that happen. By the late 1980s, Doctor Who was old hat and out of fashion simply because it looked comparitively cheap in its' heyday 15 years earlier.

It's a chicken and egg scenario. Are you really sure the BBC stopped loving it and therefore the public did too? Or was it the other way round?

Well I still think if the BBC had really wanted to improve the programme they could have done so quite easily. You saw the power they had after the hiatus by cutting down the violence etc and by injecting more humour. They basically controlled what happened, it is their programme after all.

The problem was really the producer and that is what they should have done, replaced him. Regardless of who and where he came from, they could have done it. Unfortunately they didn't care about it at the time and they let it rot, maybe they kept JNT on to just finish it off.

How can they have replaced him by force if they had very few producers to replace him with? You can't force freelance producers to do work, and unfortunately due to external political pressure and a changing media landscape, that ultimately blocked them from simply ordering producers to produce their shows.

The BBC's attitude towards staff producers at that time was if they leave a show, make them freelance.

Well as has been pointed out, it's still the BBC's fault that they made the show unattractive if that was the case. Before the hiatus the show was doing fine in viewing terms but rather than just have a quiet word with JNT and tell him to make the changes they did later before the Trial Season went into production, they suspended it for 18 months. Over 7 million viewers before the hiatus, just under 5 afterwards. Says it all.

Off course we know why that didn't happen. Michael Grade. Simple as that.

So you can keep insisting it's not the BBC's fault all you like but the fact remains they made that decision to put the show on hold in '85. That decision ultimately led to the show's demise in '89. They were responsible to a degree with what happened afterwards. They could have addressed their concerns with JNT without even replacing him after Season 22 had they done it right but they didn't. They just let him stay on and make the show worse and by the time he did start getting it right they axed it.

Billie and Noel have only said good things about Chris, but people never seem to mention that.

Aye, there is no end to the nonsense spoken about CE.


It's never occurred to people that CE might just have thought Barrowman was a prat!

Times moved on dramatically around the time of the hiatus.

Yes, it does say it all. People got bored and chose not to watch, even though Who was popular before the hiatus and it was very well promoted.

They didn't even "axe" it in 1989, it was rested with the intention to bring it back at a later date.

And why blame Michael Grade? All he did was put it on hiatus. He had no input whatsoever on the budget, and he had left for channel 4 in 1987, so he certainly wasn't responsible for the show's resting in 1989.

Not directly no, but indirectly he was.

As I said above, the show's ratings were quite healthy during Season 22. Over 7 Million.

The show's hiatus lasted for 18 months. That was a long time for the show to be off air at that time. By the time it came back, viewer loyalties and the attacks on the programme meant it's audience had waned. As I also said above, the impact of the hiatus meant it lost viewers. It plummeted to around the 4.5-5 million mark and didn't really change from that for the rest of the series run. So you explain to me how that decision in 1985 didn't impact on it's cancellation in '89. And it was a cancellation, it's been described as such in many books as has the impact on the show's viewers from the hiatus.

Quote from wikipedia:

However, in recent years, Grade has sometimes stated that he suspended Doctor Who due to personal dislike of the programme. In an appearance on Room 101 in 2002, he said, "I thought [Doctor Who] was rubbish, I thought it was pathetic, I'd seen Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T., and then I had to watch these cardboard things clonking across the floor trying to scare kids!" Grade admitted in the same programme that he had little interest in, or sympathy for, science fiction.

....

In 1986, Grade decided to fire actor Colin Baker from the title role of Doctor Who. In 2003, he remarked to a journalist for The Daily Telegraph that he had dismissed Baker because he thought that his portrayal of the Sixth Doctor was "utterly unlikeable; absolutely God-awful in fact." Former Doctor Who production manager Gary Downie, however, claimed that the dismissal was for personal reasons: "There's a history between Michael Grade and Colin. Liza Goddard was Colin's wife. And she was Michael Grade's best friend. The divorce was acrimonious and she moved into Michael Grade's house while she was getting over the divorce. And I'll say no more. Michael Grade was determined. He did not want Colin working for the BBC."

So yes you're right, Michael Grade "only" put the show on hiatus err by his own admission ??

Just to add to The Judge's comments.....


Season twenty-three eventually aired in the autumn of 1986. Production of the new season was complicated by various factors. Although the episode length had been reverted to 25 minutes, the number of episodes was reduced to fourteen, just over half the length of most previous seasons. The series was still up against The A-Team and, having been off the air for eighteen months, found it hard to regain viewers who had turned to ITV. Saward and Nathan-Turner had decided on an overarching storyline for the entire season entitled The Trial of a Time Lord, but its complexities proved confusing to both writers and viewers, with the season drawing viewing figures of only four to five million.

Although Michael Grade had left the BBC in 1987 to take up a new position as Chief Executive of Channel 4, Doctor Who remained in its poor slot opposite Coronation Street and continued to suffer in the ratings. Jonathan Powell, the new Controller of BBC 1, who regarded Nathan-Turner with contempt,[12] decided to suspend the series, a decision which was clear to the production team by the end of production on the twenty-sixth season in August 1989.

At the time production of the original series was cancelled, work had already begun on Season 27. Both McCoy and incumbent companion Sophie Aldred (Ace) have stated that they would have left during this season.


Just a little bit of info for you Aidan, though I did notice on the same page about there being no producer available or willing to take over after Baker's sacking, so I concede that point but my view is still as it was that both JNT and the BBC were equally to blame for the show's demise in 1989.

After Season 23 against the A-Team, Seasons 24-26 were on a Wednesday night against Coronation Street (starting five minutes after Corrie, too). The very dictionary-definition of "graveyard slot".