Season 17, Episode 2 | 4 parts | First broadcast: 29 September – 20 October 1979 | Writer: “David Agnew” (Douglas Adams and Graham Williams, from a David Fisher story) | Director: Michael Hayes
Cast
- Tom Baker as the Doctor
- Lalla Ward as Romana
- Julian Glover as Count Scarlioni / Scaroth
- Catherine Schell as Countess Scarlioni
Summary
On holiday in Paris, the Doctor and Romana stumble onto a plot centuries in the making when the elegant, ageless Count Scarlioni is revealed to be Scaroth, the last survivor of the alien Jagaroth, splintered across human history after his ship exploded at the dawn of life on Earth. To fund his desperate scheme to travel back and prevent his own ship’s destruction, even at the cost of unravelling human evolution itself, Scaroth plans to steal and forge priceless copies of the Mona Lisa, forcing the Doctor into a race across time to stop him.
Interesting Facts
- City of Death remains the highest-rated story in classic Doctor Who’s broadcast history, helped by a rival channel’s technical outage during its original transmission.
- Extensive location filming in Paris, including at the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, was highly unusual and ambitious for the series’ budget at the time.
- Douglas Adams’s sharp comic wit, refined further by producer Graham Williams under the “David Agnew” pseudonym, gives the story some of the most quoted dialogue in the show’s history.
- Actor John Cleese makes a brief, now-famous uncredited cameo as an art gallery visitor admiring the TARDIS as a piece of installation art.
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