Doctor Who: Six Reasons To Revive The 6th And 7th Doctors

2. Colin Baker Got Shafted During His Era

Explaining all the ways in which Colin Baker was mistreated during his time on the show would fill an entire post, and even then you'd have to skip over some of the finer points. Suffice to say that the head honcho at the BBC, Michael Grade, disliked sci-fi in general and dismissed the show as a goofy relic with wobbly sets, rubber monsters and a main character decked out like he'd had a fight with Elmer the Patchwork Elephant. Grade was in a position to give the show the money it needed to improve but instead put it on hiatus, made it practically beg for its life in the thinly-veiled subtext of Colin Baker's final serial 'Trial of a Time Lord', only to bring it back but sacking Baker in the process. Whilst Grade wasn't the one to finally drop the axe in 1989, his influence caused damage that even the great stories of McCoy's era couldn't fix. Colin wanted his incarnation of the Doctor to become as iconic and long-lived as the former Baker, but the scripts and circumstances of his run didn't favour it. His first story is renowned as one of the worst serials in the classic show's history and the timing meant that this bitter aftertaste was all the audience had of the new Doctor for a full year. None of which is Colin Baker's fault. The characterisation of the Sixth Doctor early on was an admirable attempt to give an incarnation development that had never really been attempted since the First Doctor, but the heavy-handed way this was done in his earliest stories and lack of time to develop it really short-changed Colin Baker. Big Finish and other spin-off media has done a wonderful job of giving Colin Baker a second chance at playing the Doctor the way he wanted. Though not always gems, the variety of writers and lack of visual constraints has given the Sixth Doctor some truly excellent adventures and even established a general consensus to tone down the hideous coat to a more agreeable deep blue getup. Establishing the Sixth Doctor's more refined persona onscreen would make it up to Colin Baker for how the BBC treated him in the Eighties and establishing the blue coat will prevent burning out the viewer's retina in the process.