Graham Williams - Wrecker or Saviour?

It’s often said the show was never quite the same again after Mary Whitehouse got her way and Hinchcliffe got shit-canned by the BBC. Graham Williams is the producer who inherited the fallout of that, and for some fans his era was and remains a source of much discontent. That it wasn’t up to Hinchcliffe standard, that it got too comedic or too safe, or lacked the committed professionalism in the acting that allowed us to take it seriously, or that Tom Baker and K9 got too indulged.

Kim Newman was particularly scathing, and said that regardless of the difficult circumstances, the transition from Hinchcliffe horror ‘need not have been a disaster’.

On the other hand it can’t have been easy to carry the show through that turbulent time of devastating inflation, budget cuts, and strike action. In some ways the fact the show continued to hold together as much as it did, and was still there and getting the ratings in 1979 was something of a miracle.

Sometimes it seems ironic that his era was denounced as ‘not proper Doctor Who’ by the likes of Ian Levine, when frankly stories like The Ribos Operation, City of Death and even Horns of Nimon, are probably among the most Hartnellian stories of the colour era.

And certainly in light of eras since, there are many grounds on which Williams was exercising bits of wisdom that were sadly later lost and over-written. He was probably wise to let the Master be rested after The Deadly Assassin, and keep Ian Levine’s oar out of the show. JNT was not. His stories were very literate indeed, in a way that puts the illiterate, trash TV sensibilities of RTD’s Who to shame.

So maybe he was more saviour than wrecker.

What say you?

Neither.
Obviously the buck stops with the producer on many things, but they're not all-powerful. Certainly not then.
Yes, allowing Granny Whitehouse to influence the direction and tone of the show should never have been allowed, but I'm sure Williams himself didn't make such a badly judged decision. He most likely received pressure from above to water down the realism in favour the safe territory of light entertainment.
Also, he had Tom's increasingly erratic ego to contend with, and it strikes me that he either didn't have to stones to stand up to Tom and stop him mugging to the camera and all the rest of it. Maybe he even supported it, I don't know.
It just seems unfair to blame Williams for everything. He probably thought he was doing the right thing.

A saviour for me personally. His era is the only 70s era I truly enjoy.

I don't much care for his period of tenure as the producer so he is not a saviour in my view.

Then again i would not classify him as a wrecker. It seems a tad harsh. To a large extent he was under orders as a result of BBC Management's decision to tone the show down and move towards a more humorous version of the show. Only in doing that i just found the show increasingly insipid, tedious and unfunny, losing any sense it once had of dramatic tension.

Neither - The show changed in overall mood with Williams, but it was good with Hinchcliffe, then it was different, but equally as good with Williams.

I somewhat agree with the argument that the show had problems recovering after the hiatus, but I think the Williams era and early JNT (seasons 16-20) was really a high point, then I think season 21 wasn't the best, but I find it no worse than 12, and I think 22 was very good. I think it struggled in seasons 23-25, but that there were at least two good stories in each of those seasons nonetheless. I think with Remembrance in season 25 the show stated the road to recovery, and by season 26 it was fully recovered and solid again. Then the cunts at the BBC cancelled it..