Despite limited personnel changes, 1973 was a transformative year for Doctor Who. As the show began its second decade, things would never be quite the same again…

By PAUL KIRKLEY

A Drashig in Carnival of Monsters; Jon Pertwee as the Doctor in The Time Warrior (1973-74); Omega in The Three Doctors; a Draconian in Frontier in Space; giant maggots in The Green Death; a Dalek in Planet of the Daleks; the Master’s spaceship in Frontier in Space; and Jo Grant (Katy Manning) in the same story.

Jon Pertwee and Patrick Troughton in The Three Doctors.

In its tenth anniversary year, Doctor Who would have had every excuse for kicking back and taking its foot off the gas a little. Under the stewardship of producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks, the series had revived its once flagging fortunes and secured its place at the heart of BBC1’s Saturday schedule. Jon Pertwee’s flamboyant showman of a Time Lord was arguably the most popular Doctor yet, supplanting even the Daleks – who hadn’t even shown up until his third season – as the undisputed star of the show. On paper, 1973 wasn’t a year of seismic change for Doctor Who. It entered January with the same team that had made the previous few seasons such a success, and exited December with Pertwee, Letts and Dicks’ names still above the door. But look closer, and it was a year of quietly radical reinvention: one that introduced bold new forms of storytelling while also becoming aware, perhaps for the first time, that it was now a programme with a legacy. And if it didn’t quite close the book on the Third Doctor’s travels, in many ways 1973 feels more like the end of the ‘Pertwee era’, as it exists in the popular imagination, than does Planet of the Spiders from 1974.

THE SCENES OF COMIC ONE-UPMANSHIP BETWEEN THE DOCTORS ARE THE INEVITABLE HIGHLIGHT OF THE THREE DOCTORS.

The birthday celebrations started somewhat prematurely, when The Three Doctors debuted on the last Saturday of 1972 – little more than a month after the series’ ninth anniversary. From a 21st-century perspective, it’s hard to appreciate just how extraordinary this story must have seemed to viewers at the time. These days, we think nothing of different incarnations of the Doctor casually bumping into each other whenever it’s convenient to the plot. In The Three Doctors, though, it’s stated that “the First Law of Time expressly forbids him to meet his other selves”. Clearly, then, this was a Big Deal all round.

The idea didn’t come completely out of left field, though. According to Barry Letts, “People had often come up to us and said, ‘Why don’t you have the Doctor meet himself?’ And we suddenly thought, ‘Why are we so against it?’”

Despite William Hartnell’s contribution being severely limited by ill-health, the scenes of comic one-upmanship between the Doctors are the inevitable highlight of the anniversary story – the puckish Patrick Troughton all twinkly-eyed mischief, Pertwee’s patrician Time Lord brisk, businesslike and irritable. These scenes also establish the tradition of the ‘younger’ incarnations deferring to the First Doctor as the elder statesman – even though, technically speaking, he’s the baby of the group.