Radio Times has ranked the 30 best classic Doctor Who stories, putting two Cybermen-era landmarks near the top of a list drawn from the show’s 1963-1989 run. The ranking lands today, in 2026, as the programme keeps finding new viewers well beyond the fans who grew up with its first life.
The selection turns on stories that still hit hard decades later. The Tenth Planet, first broadcast in 1966 and starring William Hartnell, is singled out for the way it pushes the series toward the future. In that story, the Doctor, Ben and Polly land in 1986 at Snowcap, the South Pole base of International Space Command, where the Doctor realises Mondas is Earth’s twin, returned after drifting away to the edge of space many eons earlier. The Cybermen then send an attack force to the base. Radio Times said the story gives a palpable sense of the programme reaching towards the future.
That pick carries added weight because The Tenth Planet has a bitter footnote of its own. It is the first Doctor’s grand finale, and the final episode has regrettably been lost in time, leaving only fragmented clips to represent a pivotal moment in the show’s history. For a series that began in 1963 and has since become a British institution, the loss has only made the surviving material feel more precious.
Earthshock, another Cybermen story, is the other standout. Set in caves on Earth in 2526, it has the Doctor deactivate a powerful bomb before tracing its operators to deep space, where the Cybermen are concealed en masse in the hold of a freighter. That vessel then jumps time warps by some 65 million years and becomes the explosion that wiped out the dinosaurs. The Doctor is unable to save Adric, and Radio Times said the story still packs a punch, recalling the visceral thrill and knotted-stomach shock of first seeing it on transmission.
The ranking also says something about how the modern audience now meets the old series. Plenty of fans came to Doctor Who after its 2005 reboot and have never dug into the classic era, even though the earlier run remains one of the longest-running television stretches in the world. The list arrives as interest in the franchise keeps moving between eras, with recent coverage of Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor related appearances, including a London monologue that took aim at ratings and a teaser built around regeneration, showing how the brand still leans on the same core idea of change. But this ranking argues that the old stories do not survive on nostalgia alone. They still work because, at their best, they reached for scale, fear and loss at once.
For anyone deciding where to start, the message is plain: the classic era is not a museum piece. Radio Times’ top choices suggest the stories that last are the ones that made the future feel dangerous, and made the Doctor’s victories hurt as much as they thrilled.
