Starry Eyed

To commemorate tonight's 'Lockdown Doctor Who' communal viewing of Vincent and the Doctor, here's an appreciation of the story I wrote for Doctor Who Magazine back in 2017, as part of an article listing 20 Amazing Things About Steven Moffat's Doctor Who. The issue is still available digitally, very cheaply, from Pocket Mags and I blogged about it previously here.

VINCENT AND THE DOCTOR

A very simple idea lies at the heart of Vincent and the Doctor. Anyone who has ever lost someone in tragic circumstances, particularly where they have taken their own life, or gone suddenly and too soon, will find themselves feeling that a terrible injustice has been perpetrated. It just seems so monstrously unfair that they should die without knowing how much they were loved. And in that situation, you can’t helping thinking that if only they had known then maybe things would have been different.

That’s why Vincent and the Doctor is so powerful and moving. It’s about that desire to put things right. It’s a blatant piece of wish-fulfilment from its writer Richard Curtis, who has made a whole career based on wish-fulfilment of one kind or another. With Vincent Van Gogh he chose the perfect subject, because of the immense gulf between how lowly he was regarded when he lived, how much he suffered, and how highly he is now regarded. It’s all beautifully expressed the scene where Vincent hears that he is regarded not only as the greatest artist who ever lived but also as one of the greatest men.

Yet it doesn’t change anything. He still kills himself. The story gives us the wish-fulfilment of ‘If only they had known’ and shows us that it wouldn’t have solved Vincent’s mental illness, that it is, sadly, not so easily overcome. But it’s a story anyone can relate to; just as Amy wants to see all the paintings Vincent would have gone on to paint, fans of John Lennon and Kurt Cobain, for example, want to hear all the songs they would have written. And anyone who has lost someone will regret that that person will now miss out on so much; they will never get to meet new-born nephews or grandchildren, they will never share another Christmas, they will never get to watch new episodes of Doctor Who that they would have loved. They will never know how much they were loved.

But this article is supposed to be about Steven Moffat. Because he didn’t write it, because parts of it are so Richard Curtis-y that you can imagine somebody going on to say “...because love actually is all around”, you could perhaps be forgiven for underestimating Steven’s contribution. But even when his name isn’t in the title sequence of an episode, Steven’s ideas and sensibilities will have shaped that episode every step of the way; from deciding which writer to hire, maybe giving them an idea for a story or deciding which of their ideas to take forward; giving notes on every outline and draft; sometimes even writing the final draft. Vincent and the Doctor is pretty much all Richard Curtis, but even then, there are odd moments – the scenes addressing the ongoing ‘arc’ of Amy forgetting Rory – that sound like Steven Moffat. Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t, maybe we will never know. And even once the script is finished, Steven’s influence doesn’t end there, in fact his influence is greater, as he gives notes on every edit of the story. In collaboration with the writer, the director, the producers and executive producers, yes, but as show-runner he has the ultimate responsibility.

And Vincent and the Doctor is a case in point, because there was so much material shot for it and the first assembly of the episode was so over-length, that the story was effectively given an extra rewrite (or at least heavily script-edited) in the edit suite. Somebody took the decision to excise a subplot about the Krafayis being a monster from the Doctor’s childhood and a subplot about the dead girl’s mother and instead to focus on Vincent’s mental illness, and that somebody would have been Steven Moffat.

In short; great stories don’t just happen by accident. They happen because the guy in charge knows a great story when he sees one.

Angry

One of my ‘You Are Not Alone’ columns from back in 2007, published in DWM 393 under the headline 'Losing my Religion?':

Worst episode ever!!!

Normally, I enjoy watching Doctor Who. If anything, I enjoy it slightly more than is healthy. I’ve said before how inordinately excited I get in anticipation of watching an episode, and usually that anticipation is rewarded by the following 45 minutes of thrills, corridors, and hopefully something exploding at the end.

I make a big emotional investment in Doctor Who. I can’t help it; it has given me so much pleasure over the years that I find I care. It can mean the difference between ecstasy and despair, between skipping around the room with uncontainable delight and wanting to locate and dismember the nearest small furry animal.

Absurd, isn’t it? What a ridiculous lack of perspective! It’s only a television programme, after all. There are more important things in the world to worry about, like, wars and famines and remembering to cross the road correctly and money and relationships. Doctor Who, in the grand scheme of things, doesn’t matter one jot.

Except that it matters to me, because I expect a return on my emotional investment. My reaction to an episode of Doctor Who will predicate whether I spend the rest of the evening getting drunk, beginning sentences with ‘Wasn’t it incredibly cool when...’ or whether I spend it getting drunk, beginning sentences with ‘And another bloody thing that annoyed me…’

I don’t want to be the ‘annoyed’ person. Never mind that fact that it means I’m awful, niggly company, it’s really tiresome and unpleasant to be in the epicentre of a zone of pedantry.

You might get the impression that it’s a polar response, that it’s either ‘Fantastic!’ or ‘Romana-was-appalled’ (or, to use the internet terminology, it’s either ‘cringe’ or ‘squee’ with additional letter ‘e’s where appropriate). And it’s not – I have the capacity for ambivalence – but with Doctor Who my responses do tend to be more extreme, where every reaction is an… over-reaction.

‘When I was a child, I thought as a child,' said Nicholas Parsons in The Curse Of Fenric. He was right, and could easily have gone on to say, ‘When I was a child, I thought all Doctor Who was great.’ Because, when I was a kid, I didn’t conceive of the possibility that there might be such a thing as a bad Doctor Who story – after all, it was Doctor Who, ergo, it would be automatically really amazing. I enjoyed everything because it never occurred to me not to.

But I can still recall my first ‘bad’ Doctor Who story. It’s a formative moment in every fan’s life. I won’t say which specific story it was – suffice it to say that it featured Sylvester McCoy, some Daleks, and had production code 7H – and I can’t remember what it was about it that left me so vexed – it was, and remains, a marvellous story – but nevertheless, suddenly, and massively, it really me pissed off.

Which is an odd response, if only because Dragonfire had been on the previous year and I’d found that perfectly congenial. I suspect the difference was not with Doctor Who but with me; I had reached a ‘certain age’, where things grow – in particular beard hairs, genitals and the capacity to take everything a bit too personally.

I had turned fourteen and was a prickly, insecure adolescent. And my problem with Doctor Who was that, overnight, it didn’t take itself as seriously as I took it. I wanted this show to continue to mean to me what it had meant when I was six years old, when it was realistic, gritty drama like The Creature From The Pit… but now the powers-that-be-at-the-BBC had decided to turn it into a cheap, silly, children’s programme. An embarrassment. Suddenly Doctor Who stopped being something that everyone liked, and became something that only I liked, and something that stopped girls from wanting to have sex with me (amongst other reasons).

This sort of over-reaction isn’t unique to Doctor Who, though. It’s the same sort of feeling you get when you buy the latest album from your favourite pop group, only to discover they are experimenting with ‘suddenly being shit’. Or when your football team gets relegated. Or when your political party comes second.

On all of these occasions, you have a valid reason to be miserable. And the same applies if you don’t enjoy an episode of Doctor Who. Over-reacting badly is all part of being a fan. There’s nothing wrong with it, as long as you are still over-reacting positively most of the time. As long as you’re dancing with glee more frequently than you are dismembering woodland creatures.

But there are two important things to remember. Firstly, although you have a very personal, very emotional response to Doctor Who, if you don’t like something, it isn’t because the programme makers have decided to annoy you. Just as pop groups don’t sit down and decide to release a bad album, with even the most lacklustre Doctor Who stories, everyone involved was working with the best of intentions. Every story was written, directed, acted and produced by people who genuinely thought it would be fantastic.

Even, hard as it may be to believe, Underworld.

And when things do go wrong, the programme makers are as acutely aware of the shortcomings as the viewers, if not more so. They are just not in a position to announce this publicly, and wouldn’t even if they could, because they know that every bad show started out as a good idea, and how, in a collaborative medium, things go wrong without it being any one person’s ‘fault’.

The second thing to remember is, whatever you do, don’t get drunk and go on the internet. The internet and five pints of lager do not mix. You will read things that will make you tetchy and you will post things you will regret.

Instead, my advice is, pick up the Radio Times and read the listing for next week’s episode… and start looking forward to that instead.