The Leisure Hive

109 – The Leisure Hive
Doctor Who serial
After a test of the Tachyon Recreation Generator, the Doctor grows decrepit.
Cast
Doctor Tom Baker (Fourth Doctor)
Companions Lalla Ward (Romana) John Leeson (Voice of K-9 Mk. II)
Others Laurence Payne — Morix Adrienne Corri — Mena David Haig — Pangol Martin Fisk — Vargos Roy Montague — Guide Nigel Lambert — Hardin David Allister — Stimson John Collin — Brock Ian Talbot — Klout Andrew Lane — Foamasi Harriet Reynolds — Tannoy Voice Clifford Norgate — Generator Voice
Production
Directed by	Lovett Bickford
Written by	David Fisher
Script editor	Christopher H. Bidmead
Produced by	John Nathan-Turner
Executive producer(s)	Barry Letts
Incidental music composer	Peter Howell
Production code	5N
Series	Season 18
Length	4 episodes, 25 minutes each
Originally broadcast	30 August – 20 September 1980
Chronology
← Preceded by Followed by → Shada (unbroadcast) The Horns of Nimon (broadcast) Meglos
List of Doctor Who serials

Doctor Who and the Leisure Hive

Author	David Fisher
Cover artist	Andrew Skilleter
Series	Doctor Who book: Target novelisations
Release number	39
Publisher	Target Books
Publication date	22 July 1982
ISBN

The Leisure Hive is the first serial of the 18th season in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in four weekly parts from 30 August to 20 September 1980. It marks the return of John Leeson's voice as K-9.

The Doctor and Romana’s holiday in Edwardian Brighton is brought to a sudden end when K-9 goes after a ball and takes in sea-water and explodes. They instead venture to the Leisure Hive of Argolis, a holiday-complex-cum-peace-message built by the surviving Argolin following their devastating twenty-minute war with the Foamasi forty years earlier. They arrive at a point of crisis. The Leisure Hive is facing bankruptcy because of falling tourist trade (through stiff competition from other Leisure Planets) and the Argolin’s Earth agent, Brock, arrives with his lawyer Klout, bearing an offer to buy the planet outright. Regrettably the offer is from the Foamasi, the only species that could live on the radiation-infused surface of Argolis, and so the Argolin Board will not consider it. Hit by the shock of events, the ageing Board Chairman Morix succumbs to a rapid death – the Argolin war-curse of advanced cellular degradation – and his consort Mena is declared the new Chairman. The Doctor is intrigued by the manipulation of the tachyon in the Hive’s Tachyon Recreation Generator, which is the main tourist attraction and is able to duplicate and manipulate organic matter. He witnesses the Generator kill a human tourist after it has been sabotaged, the latest in a series of acts of wilful damage.

No sooner has Mena returned to Argolis to replace her spouse than her own body clock begins to speed up (one of the side-effects of the radiation-heavy atmosphere). Earth scientist Hardin has been brought to Argolis to help her and her people by using time experiments to rejuvenate a people rendered sterile by the war. Recognising the value of scientists, instead of confining them Mena engages the Doctor and Romana to help Hardin with his work. The time travellers know Hardin has been faking his work, but Romana feels the experiments should have worked.