Last updated 17 April 2017


The Lady of Mercia

The Lady of Mercia

Series Episode Number: 173

First Broadcast: Fri 31 May 2013 - ~8:00pm UTC (United Kingdom)
Running Time: 120 minutes


Recorded on Mon 07 Jan 2013 in The Moat Studios



The TARDIS brings the Doctor, Tegan, Turlough and Nyssa to the University of Frodsham, close to where the warrior queen Æthelfrid fought a desperate and bloody rearguard action against the savage Danes. Over a thousand years later, in 1983, battle is still being raged, with student activists taking on savage funding cuts… and disrupting a conference about Æthelfrid convened by history professor John Bleak.

Meanwhile, over in the Physics Department, Dr Philippa Stone is working night and day on a top-secret project – but can her theoretical time machine really be the solution to the university's problems?

Present and past are about to collide – and the results, as the TARDIS crew is about to discover, will be far from academic!