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The fifth Doctor Who was Peter Davison,
a popular actor known best for his appearance in All Creatures
Great and Small. Davison was absolutely superb in the role. He
brought to the Doctor a combination of the innocence of youth and the
wisdom of old age, and played the part with absolute conviction
throughout. If there is a fault with Davison's Doctor, it lies not
with the actor but with the production regime throughout the eighties,
which tended to concentrate on glossy production values at the expense
of decent story telling. The producer also didn't understand what made
Doctor Who so popular, and as with the final year of Tom
Baker's tenure, most of the humour was removed from the series. That's
not to say that the programme went bad overnight - indeed, there were
many excellent stories during this period. Also, the new format proved
initially popular, and audience ratings were quite high, but they
tailed off somewhat during Davison's run. It has been speculated that
the audience figures were inflated at first by new viewers who were
fans of Davison rather than of Doctor Who itself. It is
probably significant that Davison's episodes coincided with the series
being moved from its traditional Saturday teatime programming slot,
which I believe may have contributed to it losing much of its most
important audience - children. A weekday early evening timeslot was
perhaps not the ideal time to pick up and inspire a new generation of
children, what with school the next day, homework to do, and so on. In
retrospect, we can probably see this as the beginning of the end for
Doctor Who. At the time however, things still seemed fairly
rosy. When the programme celebrated its twentieth anniversary during
Davison's tenure, it was confidently predicted that it would go on
forever. Who could have imagined that in just six short years, it
would all go so horribly wrong?
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