SIR: Dr Duckels' response (Letters, 10 November) on Doctor Who (THE LISTENER, 27 October) is detailed enough to deserve a brief reply.
Peter Davison's was indeed a subtle performance—but that never disguised his basic unsuitability. (Questions of time and timing, I agree, might have helped him.) Scripts like 'Kinda' were marvellously intelligent—but a consistent fusion of the serious and the playful was never achieved: hence the series' easy decline into draining self-parody, a reaction to Michael Grade's attack, repeating the same mistakes that followed The Deadly Assassin'. The tentative movement, during the Davison seasons, towards that 'hard SF' which Dr Duckels rightly admires, was certainly a potential means of renovating the show. But that instinct wasn't pursued. The only kind of intelligence now permitted is pastiche—and that is one of the reasons why the ratings today are generally less than a third of their pre-Assassin' peak.
Mark Ball
Birkenhead
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