Screening from September 1979, season 17 of Doctor Who is largely a pretty shabby affair. Hampered by inflation-crippling budgetary restrictions and with star Tom Baker now looking increasingly scruffy and delivering performances that tended to rob the stories of any dramatic punch, it’s in many ways a season too far, a show in desperate need of sprucing-up and a creative overhaul. For better or for worse that was to come in the following season but Doctor Who limped into the 1980s looking tired, cheap and worryingly irrelevant in the post-Star Wars sci-fi era.

Script-edited now by Douglas Adams, hotter than hot in the wake of the stratospheric success of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, season 17 isn’t actually short of the big, bold, brassy high concept ideas Doctor Who’s reputation was built on. The last survivor of an alien race splintered in Time and attempting to change his own history by wiping out Humanity, an alien blob trapped in a pit on a verdant forest planet, creatures whose remains create a lethally-addictive drug, bull-headed aliens using two artificial black holes to invade other planets; all rich, colourful ideas too often scuppered by cheap-as-chips production and, in the end, industrial action that resulted in the abandoning of the final serial ‘Shada’ with only its location filming and one studio block in the can. The season starts off brightly enough, though,  with ITV off-air thanks to its own bout of industrial dissent the first two serials were rewarded with unnaturally high viewing figures (still used as a stick to beat the current series with by ill-informed online trolls). ‘Destiny of the Daleks’ is a tacky (but enjoyable) return for the show’s most formidable creations and ‘City of Death’ (written in a hurry by Adams) remains one of the classic show’s triumphs, marrying a clever, witty script with judicious location filming in Paris and the best production values of the season. Sadly it’s all downhill thereafter; ‘Creature From The Pit’ runs out of steam after its third episode and veers off into an entirely new direction (let’s draw a discreet veil over the unfortunately phallic titular creature), ‘Nightmare of Eden’ introduces the laughably inept Mandrells (dubbed by the Press at the time as “Doctor Who’s scariest monsters!”) and ‘Horns of Nimon’, screened over the Festive period, is often regarded as the show’s ‘pantomime piece’ thanks to ripe performances and visuals that sail perilously close to ‘unacceptable.’

Presented on Blu-ray, Season 17 looks and sounds great; the 5.1 mixes on ‘Destiny’ and the newly-episodic ‘Shada’ animation are especially impressive but, despite a raft of new special features, there’s a strange sense of perfunctoriness about the set that reflects the season itself. There’s some good new stuff here including a documentary looking at the work of Douglas Adams, the usual ‘behind the sofa’ stuff, a couple of new ‘making of’ documentaries, Tom Baker in full flow for forty-odd minutes and an in-depth chat with writer Bob Baker by Matthew Sweet (especially poignant as Baker, who passed away in  November, is reminded at the end of the piece that he’s the ‘last man standing’ of the 1970s Doctor Who writing team). But there’s nothing absolutely essential here, no USP piece such as the absorbing tributes to Elisabeth Sladen and John Nathan-Turner or Frank Skinner’s investigation into the life and times of script editor/writer Terrance Dicks that have enlivened previous sets. It’s almost as if the team working on Season 17 couldn’t find a fresh and original angle on this particular era or, more likely, were hampered by pandemic-era restrictions.

Season 17 certainly isn’t a ‘must buy’ in the tradition of many of the previous nine Blu-ray sets, but it’s worth a punt for the brilliant ‘City of Death’ (which really showcases the on-screen – and elsewhere, as it turned out – chemistry between Baker and Lalla Ward, debuting this season as a new incarnation of Romana), and the novelty of seeing the Daleks again for the first time in five years, but sadly the rest is a little too slipshod and ramshackle and really hasn’t stood the test of time.