Why the Female Doctor Who is a flop.

Yes, it is true that my knowledge of the Doctor Who tv series is not complete.
My knowledge of the show only goes back to when the show restarted in 2005 up to the present.
I have virtually no knowledge of the early Doctor Who series.

From the moment I started watching the restart of the show 15 years ago, I have been a huge fan of the series.
Doctor Who is a wonderful tv series and a real joy to watch. I truly enjoy watching Doctor Who.

18. Bernard Cribbins (Wifred Mott)

The second cinematic excursion of the Daleks shows little advance on the first... The filming of all this is technically elementary... and the cast, headed by the long-suffering, much ill-used Peter Cushing, seem able, unsurprisingly, to drum up no conviction whatever in anything they are called to do. Grown-ups may enjoy it, but most children have more sense."

If you ask the average person on the street in Britain what Doctor Who looks like, then chances are, the first thing they’ll mention is a long scarf. Even in the U.S., where the show has only really taken on wider popularity in recent years, the closest the Doctor has come to full cultural osmosis is in his appearances in The Simpsons – where he sported the curly hair, toothy visage and, yes, multi-colored scarf of Tom Baker‘s incarnation.

Despite the efforts the the three men before him had put into the role, it was Baker who would come to define it like no other. He embodied elements of all of them—the intelligence of Hartnell, the clownishness of Troughton and even the action stripes of Pertwee—but what he brought to the table, arguably truly completing the character for the first time, was his unique sense of freewheeling lunacy. You could simply never tell what this Doctor would do next, or what was going on behind those mad eyes. More than any other, he gave the sense of not having a clue what was going on, while ultimately remaining completely in control of the situation.

It was during Baker’s tenure that the show reached heights of popularity that even now, it has never quite retained. In the late 1970s, it was at an unassailable peak of quality and critical acclaim, with script editor Robert Holmes overseeing stories that were dazzling in their inventiveness and frequently with a dark, almost horror-orientated—yet also frequently blackly comic—tone to them. But at the center of it all was the Fourth Doctor. Doctor Who could run for another 50 years, and it’s unlikely that this incarnation will ever be supplanted as the most popular and enduring.

“He embodies everything Doctor Who is,” says Dan Williams of PopCulturePreview.com. “Tom Baker was iconic in appearance and his sometimes moody attitude is always fun. He had a childlike sense of wonder that was never repeated until Matt Smith took the role.”

“Nobody has the sheer unpredictable, manic and otherworldly presence of Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor,” agrees Christopher Bahn of The A.V. Club. “To me, he’ll always be the quintessential Time Lord.” Christian Cawley of Kasterborous.com, meanwhile, remembers childhood viewings: “His face stared at me every Saturday tea time, he made me laugh, he made me cry when he regenerated and he was fortunate enough to have been a part of the show during a creative high.”

Paul Murphy of BBC Three Counties Radio describes The Fourth Doctor as “A moral compass, a sartorial role model, an imparter of terror in the most magnificent way”, while Paddy O’Meara of WhatCulture.com says that “there is a certain magical quality about Tom Baker, particularly to a child!” And Paul Semel labels him “Sherlock Holmes from space”, while to former Doctor Who Appreciation Society co-ordinator Tony Jordan he was “Simply the best. A quite wonderful, eccentric, other world portrayal.”

“He was the Doctor for seven seasons. That doesn’t happen accidentally,” concludes Erika Ensign. “There’s a reason he’s synonymous with Doctor Who for so many people. He’s simply fantastic.”