Season 7



The seventh season of Doctor Who ran between 3 January 1970 and 20 June 1970. The debut series of Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor, it was the first series produced and broadcast in colour and the first set entirely in one time period and almost entirely on Earth. Although the series did not have an overall story arc, it did feature a recurring subplot of the Doctor trying to adjust to life as an exile while trying to circumvent the restrictions placed upon him by the Time Lords. Beginning with this series and continuing for the next few years, most storylines involve the Doctor working with UNIT.

It consisted of four serials and twenty-five episodes. It was the shortest series of Doctor Who to date (and had the fewest number of serials until Season 23). It has the distinction of being the earliest Doctor Who series to exist in its entirety (though not completely in colour, with the monochromatic copies of episodes later subjected to various recolourisation techniques) in the BBC archives. This is also the first series (other than the first one) to not feature any returning monsters from earlier stories.

Beginning with this series and continuing through the Pertwee era, the BBC changed the show's scheduling with new, shorter series from this point beginning in either January or very late December, rather than Autumn as had been the previous format; the series would return to an Autumn series start in the Tom Baker era. The new scheduling reflected the change from around forty to forty-five episodes a series to more or less twenty-six per series, though the length of the episodes remained the same.

Recurring

 * The Third Doctor - Jon Pertwee (Introduced in Spearhead from Space)
 * Liz Shaw - Caroline John (Introduced in Spearhead from Space)
 * Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart - Nicholas Courtney
 * Sergeant Benton - John Levene

Stories set during this season

 * PROSE: Who Killed Kennedy (during all serials of season 7)
 * PROSE: The Straw that Broke the Camel's Back (short story) (between Doctor Who and the Silurians and The Ambassadors of Death)
 * AUDIO: Old Soldiers (between Doctor Who and the Silurians and The Ambassadors of Death)
 * AUDIO: Shadow of the Past (between Doctor Who and the Silurians and The Ambassadors of Death)
 * AUDIO: The Last Post (contemporaneously with Spearhead in Space, Doctor Who and the Silurians and The Ambassadors of Death)

VHS

 * Spearhead from Space (1988) (edited movie format)
 * Spearhead from Space (1995)
 * Doctor Who and the Silurians (1993) (colour restoration)
 * The Ambassadors of Death (2002) (partly in black and white)
 * Inferno (1994) (poor colour restoration)
 * The Pertwee Years (1992) (Inferno episode 7)

Novels

 * Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion
 * Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters
 * The Ambassadors of Death
 * Inferno