Still trapped in E-Space, the TARDIS materialises near a mediaeval village. The townsfolk live in fear of the Three Who Rule, who govern from their mighty Tower. Bats serve as their minions, science is forbidden, and youth are periodically taken from the village, never to be seen again. The Doctor and Romana meet a group of rebels who have discovered ancient equipment from an Earth spaceship. They realise that the Tower is the ship, and the Three Who Rule are somehow identical to the original crew. Meanwhile, Adric is the latest to be selected by Lord Aukon... and, beneath the Tower, something vast and terrible stirs.

Of the few unused scripts available to John Nathan-Turner when he became Doctor Who's producer in December 1979, only one was deemed to be viable for further development. This was “The Vampire Mutations”, written by former script editor Terrance Dicks. Its origins lay almost three years earlier. The intention was to produce a serial in line with the fondness of that era's production team -- producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes -- for adventures steeped in the Gothic tradition. One of the principle works which had not yet been tapped by Doctor Who was Bram Stoker's seminal 1897 novel Dracula, and so Dicks was inspired to formulate a vampire narrative.

Originally known as “The Witch Lords”, it was commissioned as “The Vampire Mutations” on January 11th, 1977, and was planned to be the first serial of Season Fifteen. A month later, however, work on “The Vampire Mutations” was abruptly halted by Head of Serials Graeme MacDonald. The BBC was planning an expensive new adaptation of Dracula, and MacDonald feared that a Doctor Who story about vampires would be construed as a send-up of the marquee project. Dicks' scripts were shelved, and he hastily wrote Horror Of Fang Rock to replace it.

John Nathan-Turner had little option but to resurrect “The Vampire Mutations”

Although Nathan-Turner favoured stories grounded in legitimate science over the horror movie stylings of Hinchcliffe and Holmes, he found himself faced with little option but to resurrect Dicks' serial. A revised storyline was commissioned from Dicks on December 13th, 1979. Some changes were necessary, such as replacing Leela with Romana. The original version had not included K·9, but Nathan-Turner was content for Dicks to feature the robot dog in only a minimal capacity.

A bigger departure was the inclusion of a new companion: Adric. Nathan-Turner had decided that the team of the Doctor, Romana and K·9 was too indestructible, and too unrelatable to a general audience. He wanted to gradually introduce more vulnerable companions with whom viewers could easily identify. The first of these would be a fifteen-year-old orphaned mathematical genius whom Nathan-Turner envisaged as an updated version of the roguish Artful Dodger from Charles Dickens' 1839 novel Oliver Twist. His name was an anagram of “Dirac”: a tribute to Nobel Prize-winning physicist Paul Dirac, a pioneer in the field of quantum mechanics. Nathan-Turner and new script editor Christopher H Bidmead issued a character outline for Adric on January 30th, 1980.

Although “The Vampire Mutations” would be the first serial in production to feature Adric, it was decided that it would not be the new companion's debut story. This would be Andrew Smith's Full Circle, which would be recorded later in the year. But while he did not have to deal with Adric's introduction, Dicks nonetheless struggled to find a raison d'être for the character, and ultimately decided to play upon his duplicitous tendencies by making the viewers think that he had actually sided with the villains. Nathan-Turner and Bidmead subsequently toned down the more overtly mendacious aspects of Adric's personality, and so this element of the narrative was substantially diminished.

Dicks also had to reflect the fact that “The Vampire Mutations” would be the second chapter of a three-serial trilogy in which the TARDIS was trapped in a pocket universe called E-Space. This had been developed by Bidmead at the suggestion of Ian Levine, a diehard Doctor Who fan who was acting in an unofficial advisory capacity to the production office. Levine recalled the way that early Doctor Who adventures would sometimes dovetail into one another, and he encouraged a return to this format; Bidmead was also influenced by the success of arc-driven programmes such as the soap opera Coronation Street. Other departures from the original storyline included the elimination of subplots involving townsfolk turning into zombies who stalked the woods at night, and rebels being found with bat-like bite marks on their necks.

Christopher H Bidmead adamantly tried to steer Terrance Dicks away from horror clichés

The full scripts for “The Vampire Mutations” were commissioned on January 24th. Around this time, Bidmead changed the title to “The Wasting”, because he wanted the inclusion of vampires to come as a surprise. Dicks disagreed: he felt that viewers would quickly deduce the nature of the villains, and he thought that the new title would leave the serial open to ridicule. The script editor was already unhappy with the storyline, which he felt ran contrary to the efforts he and Nathan-Turner were making to ground Doctor Who in solid scientific concepts. The two men found themselves butting heads as Bidmead adamantly tried to steer Dicks away from horror clichés. This resulted in the addition of material on phonetic shift, and the revelation that the Tower was actually a disguised spaceship; this, in turn, inspired the story's new climax.

Dracula was not the only vampire story to influence “The Wasting”. The name Camilla was an homage to Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's 1872 story Carmilla and, indeed, the character was initially called Karmilla. Other altered names included Aukon and Habris, who were originally known as Mikos and Harkan, respectively. The Time Lord hermit who told the Doctor about the Great Vampire was described as an old woman in many drafts. Some elements of “The Wasting” had to be toned down after MacDonald advised Nathan-Turner on April 11th that he felt the scripts were too horrific.

“The Wasting” was pegged as the fourth story to be transmitted during Season Eighteen, although it would be the second into production. The director assigned to the adventure was Peter Moffatt, with whom Nathan-Turner had worked on All Creatures Great And Small. Like Dicks, Moffatt also found himself drawn into conflict with Bidmead. Moffatt was eager to draw upon vampire tropes emphasised in the horror movies of Hammer Films, and he was unhappy that Bidmead was persistently amending the scripts to downplay these elements. Ultimately, Nathan-Turner's intervention prompted Bidmead to reinstate some of the material that had appealed to Moffatt.

Moffatt was also tasked with helping Nathan-Turner and executive producer Barry Letts find an actor to play Adric. Amongst the unsuccessful candidates was Christopher Hamill who, under the stage name Limahl, was later the lead singer of the pop band Kajagoogoo and the vocalist on The NeverEnding Story, the theme song of the same-named 1984 fantasy film. During March, a young BBC filing clerk named Matthew Waterhouse was suggested to the team by internal casting adviser Jenny Jenkins. Waterhouse was a longtime fan of Doctor Who, but was only just embarking on his acting career. Nonetheless, the production team was impressed by Waterhouse's unusual features and obvious energy. On April 3rd, he was contracted for up to twenty-four episodes -- covering the final six serials of Season Eighteen -- with an option for as many as twenty-eight more during Season Nineteen.

As production began on “The Wasting”, a source of some concern was the health of Tom Baker. The series star had been feeling poorly since the start of recording on the preceding serial, The Leisure Hive, and his condition was beginning to deteriorate. To make matters worse, he and Lalla Ward were still not on speaking terms, after Ward had rebuffed his attempts to rekindle their romance some weeks earlier. It was under this cloud that location filming began on April 30th at Burnham Beeches in Burnham, Buckinghamshire, for scenes in the woods and countryside. Moffatt's team remained there on May 1st and 2nd, although part of the last day was also spent at Lucas CAV in Acton, London, where a ventilation tower offered a venue suitable for some of the material in the inspection shaft.

Waterhouse's casting was announced to the press on May 8th. Unfortunately, during rehearsals, Waterhouse developed a poor rapport with both Baker and Ward. He felt that his co-stars were intimidating, while they found the neophyte actor too often impertinent and disrespectful, refusing to follow the instructions of cast and crew with vastly more experience. As with the new apparel created for Tom Baker to wear from The Leisure Hive onwards, Waterhouse would be outfitted in a regular costume as Adric. This was created by Amy Roberts, the costume designer for “The Wasting”, and was based on Adric's description in the scripts for Full Circle.

It was at about this point that the serial's title was altered to State Of Decay, in response to Dicks' continued misgivings about “The Wasting”. The writer was not particularly enamoured of this latest name for his story, but no further changes were made. Less significantly, the spaceship crewed by the Three Who Rule was amended from the Hyperion to the Hydrax. This came after Levine noted that another vessel called the Hyperion had already appeared in Doctor Who -- albeit back in 1972, in The Mutants.

Studio recording for State Of Decay began with a two-day session on May 15th and 16th at BBC Television Centre Studio 3 in White City, London. Baker's illness was now at its worst and had even caused his hair to flatten, such that it had to be permed to regain its usual curl. The first day dealt with scenes in the Centre, the TARDIS, and the inspection shaft. The second day involved material in the rebel headquarters, the scout ship control rooms, and the storage area. The image of the Great Vampire was originally intended to be created with an actor in a bat-like costume but, when this proved ineffective, a rod puppet was used instead. Model filming then took place on May 20th and 21st at the BBC Visual Effects Workshop in Acton, London.

Tom Baker was delighted that Lalla Ward was willing to give their relationship another chance

As rehearsals resumed for State Of Decay, Baker was finally on the mend; he was also surprised and delighted that Ward was now willing to give their relationship another chance. In hindsight, Ward would acknowledge that this was a mistake on her part: she allowed her reaction to Baker's unhappiness and the closeness of their characters to muddy her judgment. Meanwhile, in a newspaper interview published on May 24th, Ward revealed that she would soon be leaving Doctor Who.

The second studio block took place from May 29th to 31st in TC6. On the first day, Moffatt recorded sequences in the state room, the sleeping vault and various Tower corridors. Designer Christine Ruscoe's attempts to portray the sets as being made of ancient metals were found to appear more like wood on camera, undermining Bidmead's attempts to play up the science-fiction elements of the narrative. Work on the second day completed the Tower scenes, including those in the state room, the sleeping vault, the high cell, the entrance, and more corridors. The demise of the Three Who Rule was achieved in no fewer than nine stages. This left material in the caverns, together with additional model and insert shots, for the last studio day.

There was still some modelwork to be completed, which was captured on June 4th at the Visual Effects Workshop. Meanwhile, it was around this time that Baker and Ward carefully began confiding to friends and co-workers that they were now engaged to be married...

• Doctor Who Magazine #288, 8th March 2000, “Archive: State Of Decay” by Andrew Pixley, Panini UK Ltd.
• Doctor Who Magazine Special Edition #9, 22nd December 2004, “Another One Bites The Dust” by Andrew Pixley, Panini Publishing Ltd.
• Doctor Who: The Complete History #33, 2017, “Story 112: State Of Decay”, edited by Mark Wright, Hachette Partworks Ltd.
• Doctor Who: The Eighties by David J Howe, Mark Stammers and Stephen James Walker (1996), Virgin Publishing.
• Doctor Who: The Handbook: The Fourth Doctor by David J Howe, Mark Stammers and Stephen James Walker (1992), Virgin Publishing.
• In·Vision #49, March 1994, “Production” edited by Justin Richards and Peter Anghelides, Cybermark Services.