Season 17



The seventeenth season of Doctor Who ran between 1 September 1979 and 12 January 1980. It consisted of five stories and twenty episodes, plus the incomplete Shada, unfinished as a result of an industrial strike. Lalla Ward joined as Romana II, and the season is notable for the involvement of Douglas Adams in the writing department. This was the last season to use the traditional Delia Derbyshire "Doctor Who theme" arrangement.

Regular cast

 * The Fourth Doctor - Tom Baker
 * Romana - Lalla Ward
 * K9 (voice) - David Brierley (appears in The Creature from the Pit, Nightmare of Eden, The Horns of Nimon)

Stories set during this season

 * PROSE: ''The Lying Old Witch in the Wardrobe (short story) (concurrent with Destiny of the Daleks (TV story))
 * COMIC: Victims (comic story) (After Destiny of the Daleks'')
 * PROSE: The End of Now (short story) (Between City of Death (TV story) and The Creature from the Pit'')
 * PROSE: The Romance of Crime (between The Creature from the Pit and Nightmare of Eden)
 * PROSE: The English Way of Death (after The Romance of Crime)
 * AUDIO: The Beautiful People (between Nightmare of Eden and The Horns of Nimon)
 * PROSE: Festival of Death) (Set between City of Death and The Horns of Nimon)

VHS

 * Destiny of the Daleks
 * City of Death
 * The Creature from the Pit
 * Nightmare of Eden
 * The Horns of Nimon
 * Shada (with extra post-production work and linking narration of unfilmed sequences)
 * The Tom Baker Years (extracts from all stories)

DVD
All serials of season 17 were released between 2005 and 2013

Novels

 * Doctor Who and the Destiny of the Daleks
 * Doctor Who and the Creature from the Pit
 * Doctor Who and the Nightmare of Eden
 * Doctor Who and the Horns of Nimon
 * Shada

Target Books was unable to come to an agreement with Douglas Adams for novelising the televised story City of Death (which Adams co-wrote) and the untelevised Shada. An agreement with Adams' estate eventually allowed BBC Books to publish an adaptation of Shada in 2012, however City of Death remains one of a handful of classic-era serials that has yet to be officially novelised.