His first companion was Melanie Bush (Bonnie Langford), a computer programmer who had travelled with his previous incarnation, and who is soon succeeded by troubled teenager and explosives expert Ace (Sophie Aldred), who becomes his protégée.

After the programme was cancelled at the end of 1989, his adventures continued in novels until the late 1990s though he did make televised appearances in “Search Out Space” in 1990 and Dimensions in Time in 1993.

Growing more secretive and driven from this point on, the Doctor took Ace under his wing and began teaching her about the universe, all the while keeping an eye out for Fenric's plot.

The Doctor began taking a more scheming and proactive approach to defeating evil, using the Gallifreyan stellar manipulator named the Hand of Omega as part of an elaborate trap for the Daleks which resulted in the destruction of their home planet, Skaro.

He engineered the fall of the oppressive government of a future human colony in a single night and encountered the Gods of Ragnarok at a circus on the planet Segonax, whom he had apparently fought throughout time.

Perhaps due to the anaesthesia, the Doctor did not regenerate immediately after death, unlike all previous occasions; he finally did so several hours later, while lying in the hospital's morgue.

As something of a showman, the Doctor would sometimes act like a buffoon, usually preferring to manipulate events from behind the scenes; much like his second incarnation, he was prepared to play the fool to trick his foes into underestimating him, inevitably leading to their defeat at his hands.

Although his more obvious whimsical tendencies disappeared over time (particularly his spoons-playing), he maintained a fondness for idiosyncratic speeches that occasionally referred to literature, ordinary places and even food and drink amidst the weightier concerns on his mind.

He was empathetic to his friends (and even his enemies, such as Helen A) and somewhat melancholic at times (such as during Mel's departure and before his decision to eradicate the Daleks) but now placed greater burdens upon himself in the name of protecting the universe.

This may have led him to shroud his true intentions in mystery and the use of sleight of hand as befit his fondness for performance, in effect, subverting his more lighthearted qualities to complement and enhance his heroic and darker ones.

At two points he even abused Ace's trust in him, once to develop her as a person and again to keep her alive (on both occasions, freeing her from the evil influences that had haunted her during her life), while on one of these adventures, he showed great difficulty in admitting his foreknowledge of the situation's severity to her when she finally confronted him.

In spite of his immense fondness for her, and hers for him, he often frustrated her with his secretive nature as his alien behaviour, the great importance of his objectives (especially his focus on obliterating enemies from his past) and his strong desire to both educate and protect her would lead him to keep even her in the dark and would even subordinate her feelings towards him to succeed in their battles.

Their close, almost familial bond was likely what helped Ace in moving past the feelings of betrayal she sometimes felt towards the Doctor, particularly as he genuinely had her best interests at heart.

In fact, while he appeared to be an unassuming figure, fond of performing magic tricks and displaying notable showmanship, the Seventh Doctor was actually quite powerful and calculating, for he would use his friends and foes alike as pawns in his elaborate chess game against "evil".

In direct contrast to his third incarnation, this Doctor was absolutely opposed to violence of any sort (as demonstrated in stories such as Battlefield, where he stops a battle merely by ordering the warriors to desist) and he was totally against the use of firearms (to the extent of 'talking down' a soldier ordered to execute him in The Happiness Patrol by emphasising the easiness of the kill versus the enormity of ending a life), although he also proved capable of rendering a man unconscious with a touch (Battlefield, Survival).

Instead, he almost always managed to talk his enemies into submission, often into suicide – perhaps most memorably in Remembrance of the Daleks, where he taunts the seemingly last Dalek in existence until it self-destructs, or in Ghost Light, where he defeats the dangerously unstable Light by ramming home the folly of trying to prevent evolution (he employs variations of this 'talk to death' tactic in Dragonfire, Silver Nemesis and The Curse of Fenric, although primarily to manipulate opponents to guarantee the outcome in his favour).

It consisted of an ivory safari jacket with a crimson paisley scarf worn under its lapels and a matching handkerchief in the left pocket, a fob watch chained to the left lapel, a plain white shirt, a scarlet paisley tie, a yellow-brown fair isle-themed pullover adorned with cherry question marks and turquoise zigzag patterns, sand-beige tweed plaid trousers, beige brogued spectator shoes, an ivory colonial-styled Panama cap with a scarlet paisley hatband, an upturned brim and a black umbrella with a cherry question mark-shaped handle.

However, in the final two seasons with Andrew Cartmel as script editor, the stories soon explored the true nature of the Doctor, hinting at dark secrets in his past.

In Silver Nemesis, Lady Peinforte hints she knows the Doctor's secret of being more than just a Time Lord (deleted scenes in Remembrance of the Daleks and Survival also refer to this).

According to McCoy and Cartmel, a number of Seventh Doctor stories were intended to satirise or protest the rule of then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

One story mentioned as having an anti-Thatcher theme was The Happiness Patrol in which the tyrannical Helen A outlawed unhappiness and remarked "I like your initiative, your enterprise" as her secret police rounded up dissidents.

The Doctor persuaded "the drones", who toiled in the factories and mines, to down tools and rise up in revolt, an echo of the miners' strikes and printers' disputes during Thatcher's first two terms in office.

[1] Cartmel assembled several "angry young writers" such as Ben Aaronovitch and Rona Munro to produce storylines that they hoped would foment anti-Thatcher dissent.

The Virgin novels pit the Seventh Doctor against the powerful Timewyrm, a complex plan to change history by his old enemy the Monk, facing the renegade time traveler Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart, a mysterious psychic brotherhood and their role in Earth's history, and culminates in a return to his family home on Gallifrey that reveals details about how the Doctor left Gallifrey in the first place.

These novels also introduce original companions Professor Bernice Summerfield (who proves so popular that she acquires her own spin-off series), Roslyn Forrester, and Chris Cwej.

Some of these are stand-alone stories, but authors Robert Perry and Mike Tucker created a miniseries that explores the Doctor's discovery that Ace is destined to die in her immediate future and the Doctor's attempts to prevent it (as well as a confrontation with his foe the Valeyard), setting up a complex confrontation with the twisted psychopath George Limb who abuses time-travel to avoid his fate of becoming a Cyberman.

Sylvester McCoy reprised the role of the Seventh Doctor in 2021 for a trailer promoting the Season 24 blu-ray release alongside Bonnie Langford as Mel.