Creature of Leisure by Stephen Maslin 26/5/16
I don't blame David Fisher for causing Doctor Who to fall into a massive quality-absence gap; he just happened to be there when it occurred. Creature from the Pit, episode 2. Tom Baker lowers himself down a big hole at the end of Episode 1 and with him goes the entire franchise. (In Mr Fisher's defense, one suspects that the 'Teach Yourself Tibetan' nonsense - along with most of the rest of the bad comedy of Season 17 - comes from Messrs Baker and Adams.)
In fact, Fisher had brilliantly - effortlessly - announced his presence in the world of Doctor Who with two marvelous contributions to The Key to Time the year before: here at last was someone to match Robert Holmes' wit and imagination. But then he went and spoiled it all. Or rather, some very poor design work, over-eager script-editing and Tom Baker over-acting for all his worth spoiled it for him. Creature from the Pit - not a bad script per se - thus became the first part of an unholy trinity of awfulness (completed by Bob Baker's Nightmare of Eden and Anthony Read's The Horns of Nimon).
With no Shada to restore dignity, the tail-end of Who in the 1970s was a very shabby affair: nails in the coffin all round. The guilt-by-association was enormous: Graham Williams, Douglas Adams, Dudley Simpson... David Fisher seemed destined to be an innocent bystander caught up in the cull that ensued. Yet he alone of all the writers from Seasons 16 and 17 got one last chance, right at the beginning of the radically overhauled Season 18. The Leisure Hive is in many ways another fine script, well directed too, though with a few too many guiding hands for it to stand out as distinctly Fisher-esque.
For that quality, we have to return to return to the first two and a half episodes of The Stones of Blood and especially to almost every single line of dialogue in The Androids of Tara. (The first time I saw the latter, I couldn't believe it wasn't a Robert Holmes script - and a bloody good Robert Holmes script at that. Tom Baker clearly loved getting his molars around Fisher's writing, and, with Peter Jeffries cast opposite, the sparkling script could hardly be better expressed.) Two thirds of the way through The Key to Time, David Fisher had established himself as one of the show's best writers. Had he been brought on board earlier, one feels sure that there would have been many more gems to his name. As it is, we have but three (and one which is best forgotten).