Wednesday 23 November 1983

The Five Doctors

The Quintessential Crisis

The Colour of Monsters, Episode 5
Sunday 21 December 2025

Well, our ridiculous show has just turned twenty, and so it’s time for everyone both alive and available to celebrate the occasion by reporting first to North Wales and then to the BBC Television Centre. But only one man can give them all exactly the right things to say and do — and that’s the man who knows what colour monsters are.

Notes and links

As Peter observes, 1983 was a big year for Australia’s Doctor Who fans. First of all, Peter Davison visited us for the first time during April, signing books at some shopping centres and presenting at the TV Week Logie awards (don’t ask). Then in May, ABC-TV started a run of Pertwee repeats that included six stories broadcast for the first time in colour in Australia: Claws of Axos, Colony in Space, The Sea Devils, The Mutants, The Time Monster and Frontier in Space. And then, of course, there was The Five Doctors…

Nathan recently recorded another podcast episode on The Five Doctors, this time for The Maran Chess Club, a Doctor Who podcast by Luke Sims-Jenkins which focuses on the Davison Era on TV and in books and audios. Nathan’s episode will be available at Christmas, so like and subscribe now.

We mention that Robert Holmes was the first writer given the opportunity to write the twentieth anniversary story. His treatment was called The Six Doctors. I’m fairly certain that this is the discussion document outlining Holmes’s ideas for the story.

Simon gives pi to thirty decimal places as 3.141592653589793237462643383279, but as he correctly points out, the second 7 there should be an 8. If you feel like outdoing Simon, you can find the first million digits of pi here.

One version of Susan Foreman’s life story was presented on Radio 4 in 1994, in the radio mockumentary Whatever Happened to Susan Foreman?, starring Jane Asher as Susan. Spoiler alert: sick of living on a dystopian post-holocaust Earth, Susan contacts her godfather’s brother Terry, who takes her back in time to the 1960s, where she gets a civil service job and ends up becoming the EC Commissioner for Education.

Terrance Dicks is the author of the best, most influential description of the Doctor’s character, quoted by the Doctor himself in both The Day of the Doctor and Twice Upon a Time. It first appeared in the second 1976 edition of The Making of Doctor Who by Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke. Here’s the quote in full: “He is impulsive, idealistic, ready to risk his life for a worthy cause. He hates tyranny and oppression and anything that is anti-life. He never gives in and he never gives up, however overwhelming the odds against him. The Doctor believes in good and fights evil. Though often caught up in violent situations, he is a man of peace. He is never cruel or cowardly. In fact, to put it simply, the Doctor is a hero. These days there aren’t so many of them around…”

Peter Haining’s book Doctor Who: A Celebration — Two Decades Through Time and Space (1983) was hugely influential in shaping fan opinion throughout the last few years of the show’s original run. It’s been said that a lot of fannish discourse during the 90s was a reaction against the capsule reviews of each story that Haining wrote for this book.

The Doctor Who Exhibition at Longleat House ran for nearly thirty years, starting in 1974. Longleat House was also the site of the Twentieth Anniversary Event, which took place on the 3rd and 4th of April 1983. Fifty thousand people were expected to attend over the two days, but thirty-five thousand turned up on the first day. You can get your commemorative programme here.

Simon introduces his theory that the 20th and 50th anniversaries both signal that start of some kind of decline in the show’s popularity in Flight Through Entirety’s second episode on The Day of the Doctor, Episode 249: It’s No Arc of Infinity.

Flight Through Entirety commented on The Five Doctors in Episode 90: Great Balls of Commentary!, released on Sunday 16 October 2016.

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Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Todd is @toddbeilby.bsky.social, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and Brendan is @retrobrendo.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll keep telling you that story about everyone wearing eyepatches on the set of Inferno over and over again.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Just yesterday, we released a new episode of our Space: 1999 commentary podcast, Startling Barbara Bain. In it, we watch an episode called The Infernal Machine, guest starring Leo McKern and his massive scary robot spaceship husband, who turns up on the Moon and starts menacing the base in what is now the traditional fashion.

And last of all, on Untitled Star Trek Project, we’ve just released our Christmas Special, in which Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford are joined by Todd himself to watch the 1989 film Star Trek V: The Final Frontier — a film that manages to be heartwarming and fitfully entertaining, despite its many, many obvious flaws.