Every time Doctor Who reaches the end of a decade, it seems to be an automatic point of change and renewal for the series. Here's the second in a series of blogs looking back over a decade of Doctor Who.
The 1970s
So here I am, more than two years after I wrote about the 1960s, at the end of another decade of Doctor Who. It's not quite the end of an era, but it definitely feels like the end of Doctor Who's 1970s with the final episode of The Horns of Nimon, broadcast just 12 days into 1980. A lot changes after Season 17, and although there's another season of Tom Baker's Fourth Doctor to go, it's a good opportunity to stop, take stock and look back at what has been a rollercoaster 10 years.
Whereas the 1960s began as a mild curiosity in a junkyard, the 1970s began with a technicolour bang at a cottage hospital in deepest Essex. Doctor Who changed so much between Seasons 6 and 7 that it was almost unrecognisable to what had gone before. The War Games had been an epic finale for the season, the Second Doctor and the decade, but as soon as Jon Pertwee collapsed out of the TARDIS in Oxley Woods in Spearhead from Space - in colour, and on film - it was clear the series had a renewed impetus. Pertwee was an older leading man, but that didn't matter because this new Doctor was all about the action! It was like Doctor Who had been given an ITC transplant, and suddenly it felt like a contemporary of one of Lord Lew Grade's genre-twisting action-packed exports such as Department S or Strange Report.
