Doctor Who - The Seventies By @The_Knights87

Ah The 70’s.  Oh how I don’t remember you.  It was the decade I was born. It was the decade that Vietnam ended and unfortunately it was the decade that gave us disco.  Why god, why did disco come to fruition and why did the Bee Gees go to the dark side.  Speaking of the Darkside the 70’s also gave us Star Wars.  But for Doctor Who the 70’s was a decade of stability.  A decade where you knew, that on Saturday at tea time, you would be in for a treat. A treat brought to you by the two longest serving actors in the role.  Of course I’m talking about Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker.

Jon Pertwee heralded a different direction for the show.  Not only was the show being filmed in color but his Doctor was exiled to earth.  For his first three seasons the Third Doctor was earth bound.  The UNIT years were quite different.  In fact you could look to those seasons as a precursor to shows like Fringe and The X- Files to name a few.  

The Pertwee years were the first Doctor Who season that had a linking story line.  The Master Season or Season 8 gave us two of the better known characters in the stories history.  The obvious one was the Master played perfectly by Roger Delgado.  The second was Jo Grant.  Katy Manning was the Third Doctor’s main companion.  She was the perfect complement to Pertwees grumpy puss Doctor.  She had a way of making him smile and when she left you could see sadness in the Doctor’s eyes and you knew his hearts were broken.

One of the best thing about Seventies Doctor Who was that the program celebrated its Tenth Anniversary.  That’s right The Three Doctors reunited the Third Doctor with Doctor’s One and Two.  They banded together to save Gallifrey from the threat of Omega.  Unfortunately William Hartnell wasn’t in good health so was regulated to being in the time bubble but the chemistry between Jon Pertwee and Patrick Troughton was just priceless and a true gem of Doctor Who’s history.

Tom Baker six of his seven years in Doctor Who took place in the Seventies.  Some say his era heralded some of the best stories in the shows history and looking back on them I’ll have to say they are right.  The Fourth Doctor was blessed with some great writers like Robert Holmes, Terrance Dicks and Douglas Adams to name a few.   With such stories like Genesis of the Daleks, Terror of the Zygons and Pyramid of Mars it was like falling into a treasure trove of great stories.  We’ll to be honest he did have some clunkers too.  You will have clunkers being in the show for seven years like he was. 

One of the true gems of Tom Bakers Seventies stories was his relationship with Sarah Jane Smith.  Those two were the perfect Doctor and companion.   There chemistry was just like gold.  Perfect in a sense that you would have thought they would be together forever.  But that wasn’t to be as The Fourth Doctor had a slew of companions like Harry Sullivan, the savage Leela and Romana One and Two.  But the one companion that is still popular today that was introduced during the Seventies was none other than K-9.  The metallic dog was a mainstay of the latter half of the seventies and caused more trouble with production than good. 

The Seventies was a great decade for Doctor giving us fans some great stories, moments and friends along the way.  It also gave us some new villain’s to hate (or love) like Davros, The Sontarrans, The Zygons and of course the Master. It also was the decade where they filmed a story outside of the UK in Paris France for The City of Death.  So for a decade that was full of strife and bad feelings at least Doctor Who gave us something to look forward to and make us very happy indeed.