Here’s Peter Davison looking back on his first season, which had just finished when this ‘Doctor Who Magazine’ interview was published.
“I was quite happy with the second to last story – ‘Earthshock’. It was well written and very pacey, and based on quite a neat idea. In some ways it was reminiscent of old ‘Doctor Who’ from way back in how it came full circle. It was very compassionate and the baddies, the Cybermen, although they were bad, were not thoroughly bad, if you know what I mean. I like the action scenes, which is why ‘Earthshock’ is my favourite. On reading it and when we did it, we established a very fast pace. Plus we had the leap from one place to another – it wasn’t all set in one location, which made it appeal to me.
“I felt, in a way, that I had to be more fallible because I didn’t want to play the Doctor as a hero as such – like, dare I say it, a Buck Rogers type figure. I was never pushed towards this, but the implication always is that if you get someone younger to play a lead part like that, you tend to try and make him dashing. I felt he should be a sort of anti-hero, not evil so much that he doesn’t go about things in the way a normal hero would.
“Doing the first season hasn’t put me off doing it for any length of time to which I’d envisaged doing it, but exactly how long I’ll do if for, I just don’t know. I will certainly give it what I consider to be a substantial time, but I think I can safely say I don’t want to break any records for duration. At the same time, though, I doubt I’ll be the shortest.”
