It's the halfway point in this series of 60th anniversary posts, but the moment has been prepared for...
Not the 2017 story - we'll look at that later. This is the first time the Doctor fell, and a popular actor prepared to bow out of the series.
After a false start in organised religion, Tom Baker finally got to be an actor and was proving to be a fairly successful one. Stage work alongside Sir Laurence Olivier at the National, a film with Pasolini, and a couple of major movies (playing Rasputin in an all-star historical biography of the fall of the Romanov dynasty, and a populist Ray Harryhausen Sinbad film). Career-wise, the future looked great.
Then, two movie projects collapsed within a short space of time, and Tom found himself living in a bedsit and working as a labourer on a building site in Pimlico, one of the poorer corners of Westminster.
He was so desperate that he wrote to the wife of Shaun Sutton, a senior member of the BBC who had employed him before. Back in 1963 he had turned down the job of becoming first producer on Doctor Who, but had kept an eye on the series ever since. He knew that Barry Letts was seeking a replacement for Jon Pertwee, and was mainly concentrating on an older Doctor, after considering Jim Dale, Michael Bentine and Bernard Cribbins.
That Sinbad film - my favourite, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad - helped Tom win the role of Fourth Doctor after Sutton had proposed him to Letts. Needing to see what he was being asked to consider, he and Terrance Dicks were advised to go see the fantasy film which was on general release at the time.
Tom played the villain - Prince Koura, who is a magician. Through the course of the film, he ages every time he uses his magic, so Tom gets to play the part in more than one way. It was a good enough audition piece for him to be offered the BBC role.
A drinker and a smoker, Tom realised the effect the show had on children and so he kept these habits private for the most part.
After a shaky start, whilst viewers got used to his much more eccentric approach (in comparison to his predecessor), he rapidly became the most popular actor to have inhabited the role to date - and many's the poll up to the present day that has him topping the list, despite the high calibre of those who have been cast since 2005. A comedy sketch in 1993 suggested that everything went downhill after he left, Doctor-wise.
When The Simpsons wanted to include the Doctor, they used Tom's, as he has the most distinctive appearance, with the floppy hat, curly hair, goggle-eyes and that over-long scarf. He has come to symbolise the part - internationally, even decades after he left the role.
Tom Baker was the Doctor - and the Doctor was Tom Baker.
Like Hartnell before him, he quickly became proprietorial about the role, coming to believe that he knew the series better than writers and producers. The experiences of two directors - Paddy Russell and Chris Barry - who worked with him several seasons apart illustrate the change that came over him. They enjoyed the initial experience, but found him demanding, arrogant and difficult when it came to working with him on their final stories together.
Matthew Waterhouse - a DWAS member and huge fan of the show - claimed to have ripped his Tom Baker poster off his bedroom wall after his first day of studio filming with the great man, so disillusioned was he due to his behaviour.
Graham Williams suffered the most. At one point each threatened to resign rather than work together - and both were threatened with being sacked when they couldn't do it. JNT was a great friend of Williams, so when he took over as producer he already knew that he wasn't going to put up with Tom.
It has been argued that he would have gotten rid of Tom anyway since he was the new boss and wanted to stamp his mark on the show with his own Doctor - but he would have been silly to have gotten rid of his star if he was getting on with him and Tom was still popular.
When Tom made his by now annual decision to resign, this time it was taken up.
Later he did admit that he stayed in the role too long, and that his behaviour was becoming out of control.
Logopolis reintroduced the Master in a Delgado-ish form, and the story had other links back to the Pertwee / UNIT years. The TARDIS within a TARDIS had been seen in The Time Monster, and the idea of the Watcher as a projection of the future Doctor had been seen with Cho-Je in The Planet of the Spiders.
The radio telescope setting matched that of the Master's first appearance in Terror of the Autons.
Ill health and unhappiness, coupled with his new darker costume and subdued performance, lent Season 18 a funereal air, and this final Tom Baker story was particularly doom-laden, characterised by the tolling of the Cloister Bell.
On 21st March, 1981, the Doctor fell. In a way, the whole programme fell. Tom was no longer the Doctor, and we would have to wait 9 months to see if we even liked the new boy.
It felt like a death in the family. But, our memories of the show featured him prominently, and even after Davison took over, and Colin Baker took over, and Sylvester McCoy took over, Tom remained our most popular Doctor. Only David Tennant has come close to the popularity of Tom Baker in the role.
That's the thing about this mad old TV series we love - the Doctor Falls.... the Doctor Rises.
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