For most hardcore, old school Whovians, the show never got better than Tom Baker's run as the Fourth Doctor. That's not to suggest it wasn't without its qualitative valleys as well as peaks, with the actor's singularly eccentric, Jelly Baby-scoffing Time Lord being as good a fit for serious moments of acting as he was for utterly ridiculous serials of whimsy. Case in point: John Lucarotti's The Ark In Space, with the former Moonbase 3 writer drafted in to replace another rejected script called Space Station. The four-part storyline for Doctor Who's twelfth season would have been a cheap-o one that reused sets from Revenge Of The Cyberman, which Lucarotti perhaps didn't take into account. Because, in that writer's mind, the most intriguing idea for a space station episode was for the station in question to be a huge plot of countryside the size of Kent, a Home Counties beyond the stars. His six-part serial was deemed to ambitious, with the main enemy being some sentient fungus taking over the idyllic pastures. Properly bizarre.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
