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CSO is the common acronym for a special effects procedure championed by producer Barry Letts during the Jon Pertwee era, but continued to be used by the program for a considerable time thereafter. It was a somewhat primitive forerunner to CGI. It allowed two different live shots to be mixed together to create the illusion of the two elements being in the same shot.
The acronym itself stands for colour separation overlay. Outside the BBC the process is generally known as chroma key.
Procedure
As the name implies, it involves separating the color of the background from one shot then overlaying that now-"background-less" shot onto another one. Usually the color of the background will be green, blue or yellow, because these colors are not natural human skin tones. The mixer then "keys out" that color, replacing it with the image of another shot.
While this "greenscreen" process is a common building block to other special effects processes, like CGI, what distinguishes CSO is the fact that the two shots are mixed together and then recorded live. Any errors of alignment, scale or color separation are committed to the shot.
Loss of popularity
The procedure fell out of favor in dramatic presentations largely due to its inability to depict appropriate perspective between the two shots. The limitations of scale inherent in the process can clearly be seen in serials such as Invasion of the Dinosaurs and The Mutants. For this reason, CSO is now used mainly only in shots where scale is unimportant. A good example of such a usage is in the broadcasting of weather forecasts. A map will be placed in the same shot as a weather forecaster via CSO, largely because viewers aren't expecting that a weather broadcaster's hand will have the same scale as a map.
It has only been used in very incidental ways in the 2005 series of Doctor Who, such as when the "ghost forecast" was given in Army of Ghosts.
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