N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!
The Fifth Doctor was my Doctor.
I was eight years old during his first season — pretty much the perfect age to be a Doctor Who fan. Yes he was young, he was fallible, but perhaps more importantly he was new. I’ve mentioned before how amazed I was to discover there were Doctors before Tom Baker. Peter Davison was my first experience of what every Doctor Who fan takes for granted these days: the actor portraying the Doctor can change.
It helped that the first season of stories is strong. Even Time-Flight, for all its rubbishness, is memorable to me after all these years, although that hasn’t stopped me marking it down as the worst of the Fifth Doctor’s run — there is, after all, only so far nostalgia can lift a story. Davison’s middle season, whilst still one I would have watched as a child, perhaps holds less enamour for me, but is still very solid, and his last set of stories, despite there being no nostalgia factor to call on at all is also pretty consistent, with a sharp upturn in quality at the end.
True, I can look at my individual scores for Davison’s stories and see that the average is lower than for his predecessors, although not by much, but I think for sheer evocation of my own early childhood television viewing, there’s nothing for me that quite compares to watching a Fifth Doctor story. (Not even seeing old clips of TISWAS!)
For many, this is one of the points in Doctor Who‘s history where we’d reached the beginning of the end (I remember the NME or Melody Maker of all things once claiming it was rubbish after Jon Pertwee!), but, with thirty-five years, sixteen series (and counting) and numerous spin-offs to go before Unearthly Times is caught up, it’s hard to see how that argument can hold up.
"My favourite Fifth Doctor stories are Castrovalva, Earthshock and The Five Doctors."
