Mindless Ones

The levels of taste and good judgement in the Doctor Who production office in the mid-1980s can be summed up in three words:

Doctor In Distress.

Earthshock is almost universally considered one of the very best Doctor Who stories of Peter Davison’s tenure in the role, with only The Caves Of Androzani offering it much competition. In Doctor Who Magazine‘s 2009 reader’s poll ranking the first two hundred televised stories, it was rated number 19, and was one of only three stories from the 1980s to feature in the top twenty (in contrast, a full ten of the bottom twenty were from that decade).

It’s therefore a good case study to look at exactly what went wrong with the show

Shada is a television story from 1979 starring Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor, Lalla Ward as Romana and David Brierley as K-9, the incomplete parts of which got a video release in 1992.