The Doctor and Mel go to Paradise Towers for a holiday, only to find the famed condominium complex in a state of deterioration. Long ago, the adults went off to fight a war and never returned. Now all that remain are the Kangs, gangs of wild teenaged girls; the Rezzies, cannibalistic crones; the Caretakers, rules-obsessed old men who ostensibly look after the Towers; and Pex, who was too scared to go to war. But something has turned the cleaning robots homicidal, and now they're picking off the humans one by one... while the insane Chief Caretaker tends to something voracious in the basement.

In late 1986, with Andrew Cartmel's appointment as Doctor Who script editor still weeks away, it was left to producer John Nathan-Turner to find writers for Season Twenty-Four. For the most part, Nathan-Turner was reticent to approach anyone who had recently worked on Doctor Who; many of them were connected with former script editor Eric Saward, with whom the producer had had a much-publicised falling out. As such, he was receptive to inquiries made by a writer new to television named Stephen Wyatt. Having recently joined the BBC Script Unit, Wyatt had developed a dark comedy called Claws, which he was using as an audition piece in the hope of attracting interest from BBC producers.

Nathan-Turner arranged a meeting with Wyatt, who proposed a satirical narrative steeped in Doctor Who continuity. However, when Cartmel joined the programme in mid-January 1987, he found that this notion did not live up to the subversive promise of Claws. Instead, Cartmel and Wyatt discussed a story along the lines of JG Ballard's 1975 novel High Rise, a parable of middle-class existence about a skyscraper where the tenants descended into pseudo-tribal warfare. Wyatt also recalled visiting friends at an East End tower block and being disquieted by the way the building appeared to have a life of its own, with lifts seeming to travel between floors of their own volition. This image appealed to Cartmel, who was keen to embrace more offbeat and complex ideas. His aim was to imbue Doctor Who with some of the same aesthetic that he admired in the work of modern comic book writers such as Alan Moore, the author of pioneering graphic novels like Watchmen from DC Comics.

Stephen Wyatt shared John Nathan-Turner's vision that the new Doctor should echo Patrick Troughton's incarnation

On January 30th, Wyatt was commissioned to write the first episode of “Paradise Tower” as a trial. Despite the fact that no actor had yet been cast as the Seventh Doctor, Wyatt worked quickly and both Cartmel and Nathan-Turner were pleased with the results. The remaining episodes were then solicited on February 19th, with the title slightly amended to Paradise Towers. Soon afterwards, Sylvester McCoy was announced as the new star of Doctor Who, and Wyatt was provided with his audition tape as a guide to the Seventh Doctor's characterisation. This process was helped by the fact that Wyatt remembered seeing McCoy on stage; he also shared Nathan-Turner's vision that the new Doctor should echo Patrick Troughton's incarnation.

At an early stage, Nathan-Turner expressed concern about the lack of a traditional Doctor Who monster in Paradise Towers. Wyatt suggested that the Great Architect might act through tentacles which could drag people down to the basement through the air ducts, but Nathan-Turner cautioned him about the difficulty of realising this idea in a convincing manner. Instead, the notion of the cleaning robots was developed, which Cartmel later encouraged Wyatt to feature more prominently. The name Kroagnon was originally given to the planet, but was later applied to the Great Architect instead. The inclusion of the Kangs was suggested by Cartmel, with Wyatt deriving the name from a contraction of “kid gangs”.

Pex was envisaged as a muscle-bound oaf who would satirise popular American action heroes such as Sylvester Stallone's John Rambo from 1982's First Blood and its 1985 sequel. Unfortunately, finding the right actor to play Pex proved to be a challenge for director Nicholas Mallett, who was returning to Doctor Who after working on The Trial Of A Time Lord (Segment One) the year before. Although he auditioned several actors of the appropriate age and build, he found them reluctant to engage in the level of self-parody that the script required. Finally, to Wyatt's disappointment, it was decided to turn the concept completely on its head by casting Howard Cooke -- a small, slender actor who was clearly not the physical specimen which Pex made himself out to be. Meanwhile, playing Fire Escape would be Julie Brennon; she was the wife of Mark Strickson, who had played the Fifth Doctor's companion Turlough in 1983 and 1984.

Production on Paradise Towers began with scenes around the pool, recorded on May 21st and 22nd at Elmswell House in Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire. Unfortunately, the house was up for sale and so the water had not been heated -- much to the chagrin of Bonnie Langford and her stunt double, Ellie Bertram. Since completing the season premiere, Time And The Rani, it had been decided that McCoy would no longer wear his braces outside his pullover; the image was deemed to have looked too silly.

On June 4th and 5th, recording took place at BBC Television Centre Studio 1 in White City, London. Scenes in the square, the Rezzies' flat and various corridors were recorded on both days, together with those in the TARDIS and the lift on the first day. Nathan-Turner and Cartmel quarrelled over the actors who had been cast as Caretakers, with the script editor objecting to the fact that they were generally younger and in better shape than the old men gone to seed described by Wyatt. A meeting was subsequently arranged for June 10th, where Nathan-Turner and Cartmel resolved their differences.

Work resumed in TC8 from June 17th to 19th. Mallett's primary focus was on various hallway sequences, most of which took place on the higher-numbered floors. Other sets in use included the square and the Red Kangs' headquarters on the first day, the lift and the Caretakers' base of operations on the middle day, and the basement on the final day. Part of the last day was also spent on various inserts. In post-production, material originally intended for the final installment was brought forward to form a new cliffhanger for Episode Three. Wyatt's script had ended with the Chief Caretaker screaming inside the cylinder, rather than the Doctor being grabbed by the cleaning robot.

For several years after he became Doctor Who's producer in 1979, Nathan-Turner had exclusively used the services of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop for the programme's incidental music. He had relaxed this policy more recently, and the commission for Paradise Towers went to freelancer David Snell, on the strength of some samples he had submitted to the production office. Unfortunately, as Snell's work began to be dubbed onto the completed footage, Nathan-Turner discovered that it was dull and repetitive. On September 11th, he wrote to Snell to inform him that his incidental music would not be used. The composer was aghast, having been unaware that there were any misgivings about his work, and he offered to rescore as much of the programme as necessary, free of charge. Nathan-Turner, however, had already asked Keff McCulloch to step in and hastily prepare replacement music; McCulloch had already worked on Time And The Rani, and was in the process of scoring the year's third serial, Delta And The Bannermen. Snell would not work on Doctor Who again, but he enjoyed a long career as a conductor, contributing to feature films such as The Cider House Rules and Chocolat.

The Hungerford massacre prompted Michael Grade to ask for Paradise Towers to be re-edited for overseas sale

Although the broadcast of Paradise Towers Episode One on October 5th still preceded Hi-de-Hi!, as of the following week Doctor Who would instead lead into the second season of the sitcom Brush Strokes. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom had been grappling with the events surrounding the Hungerford massacre on August 19th, when sixteen people in the town of Hungerford, Berkshire were shot dead by a lone gunman. One of the worst mass killings in modern British history, it prompted careful scrutiny of violence in entertainment. Although no changes were made to Paradise Towers prior to transmission, complaints from the public prompted Michael Grade, the Director of Programmes, to ask for the serial to be re-edited for overseas sale. In particular, several trims were made to sequences in Tilda and Tabby's flat which made conspicuous use of knives.

Wyatt was happy with his first Doctor Who story, and he began to consider writing a sequel to Paradise Towers. It would have revisited the Kangs, who had been sent away to attend boarding school, but remained determined to find their male counterparts. Jonathan Powell, BBC One's Controller of Programmes, likewise suggested an adventure in which the Daleks invaded Paradise Towers. Cooke, too, wrote to Nathan-Turner to suggest a story in which Pex was found to have survived the explosion. Nothing would come of any of these ideas, however, and Wyatt would instead write The Greatest Show In The Galaxy for Season Twenty-Five.

• Doctor Who Magazine #326, 5th February 2003, “Archive: Paradise Towers” by Andrew Pixley, Panini Publishing Ltd.
• Doctor Who Magazine Special Edition #10, 13th April 2005, “Crazy Crazy Nights” by Andrew Pixley, Panini Publishing Ltd.
• Doctor Who: The Complete History #43, 2016, “Story 145: Paradise Towers”, edited by John Ainsworth, 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 Seventh Doctor by David J Howe and Stephen James Walker (1998), Virgin Publishing.
• In·Vision #92, October 2000, “Production” edited by Anthony Brown, Cybermark Services.