"The moment has been prepared for." Or so Tom said. Baker's Doctor had been a larger-than-life character, oozing charisma and eccentricity. A hard act to follow. Davison rose to meet this challenge with his own brand of bland. The Doctor's new idiom was somewhat more low-key, as he flapped his way through each episode towards his slack-jawed horrified cliff-hanger shots.
It's slightly unfair to cast Davison in the same harsh light that each of his episodes were shot in (highlighting every bad set and alien design mercilessly). He was hampered by the worst set of companions (excluding Langford) of any Doctor. This dull, unattractive, whiney, bunch complained their sorry way through his three-year tenure in the role. Only in his final, and finest, story, The Caves Of Androzani, is he finally free of them, and we are given a tantalising glimpse of what his Doctor could have been.
Another problem with the Davison-era was Producer John Nathan-Turner, who had got the job at the tail-end of the Fourth Doctor's tenure. Nathan-Turner would stay in the job until the series' cancellation in 1989, although admittedly he did try to leave numerous times. One of the main reasons behind Doctor Who's lengivity was the continual change running throughout. Not only would the locales and supporting characters change all the time, but the regulars, even down to the title character were regularly replaced. On the production side only the Producer and Script-Editor worked full-time on the series, and even they were never there for long, with the exception of John Nathan-Turner. On becoming Producer he decided that 'his'series should have no humour, the very thing that held many of Tom's stories together. Of course this only made Davison's portrayal even more dull. His numerous other mistakes include the conception and casting of all the worst companions, and Chris Baker.
Peter Davison was previously known to the public as Tristan Farnan in dull soap-operaish old peoples' series All Creatures Great and Small. After three years of turning Tom Baker fans away from Doctor Who in droves, he returned to obscurity and now makes a living from his innate blandness on inane ITV 'dramas.' |
