h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This was the scariest ever Dr Who story. Back in the good ol' Jon Pertwee days, this one truly had me hiding behind the sofa. Anecdotal evidence from contemporaries suggests I wasn't alone.

That was what I was expecting on the article too ~grin~
Good old Jon "reverse the polarity of the neutron flow" Pertwee
Isn't it odd that your first Dr Who always seems the best (at least to all the people I know anyway)

Clearly you are older than me since Tom Baker was always Doctor Who to me.
I pity those youngsters who had colin Baker as their first Doctor...

Tom Baker stories were by far the most violent (I liked them a lot) JP was still the best and Colin Baker was the worst. not sure if it was the way the first story started off or him but I never liked him. he may even be responsible for the death of the franchise though it took many years to realise it was dead.

Or, as some have said to me, it took many years of deliberate sabotage for the disapproving BBC bigwigs to eventually kill the franchise off....

I hadn't really considered that. It's pretty dumb of them if they did the show is still a classic and could easily be revamped to suit the current generation, like Star trek except easier i have no p[oblem with updating FX as long as the show remained story based. two hours is plenty of time to tell any story yu wanted and the format allows for any kind of story you could imagine ~shrug~ maybe someday but somehow I doubt it.

Things started to go wrong in Peter Davison's time in my view. I personally stopped watching it then, although he wasn't too bad.

The Colin Baker stories were very mixed but many were abysmal. The real problem was not cast or budget but the attitude of scriptwriters/producers/editors who instead of producing a drama programme for all the family started to produce a 'kids' programme. Trying to write 'down' to kids like this always fails. Some of the episodes were like shoddy pantomimes. Colin Baker (while not necessarily a bad actor) was a poor choice for Doctor and was given bad scripts and a bizarre character to play.
Sylvester McCoy was a more suitable actor for the Doctor but he too suffered from highly variable scripts.

The highups at the BBC should have sorted out what was actually their highest foreign income earner in the year it went bust. But Sci-fi has always been seen as 'common' and what was originally a succesful drama series ended up being viewed and marketed as a "kids' show" in its last few years, and this attitude and approach failed miserably.