The Wonder Of You

An article I wrote back in 2013, published in DWM 467.

An article I wrote back in 2013, published in DWM 467.

THE WONDER OF WHO

What is so great about Doctor Who? It seems an oddly elusive quality to define. Indeed, so much so that, when asked, one common answer is that what is so great about Doctor Who is that it possesses an ‘indefinable magic’, which is no explanation at all. But if we don’t know why we love Doctor Who, what are we all here for? What is it about Doctor Who that makes it worth celebrating? What sets it above other television shows? It’s time somebody came along and defined the hell out of that indefinable magic once and for all.

First of all, let’s get some of the misconceptions out of the way. It’s nothing to do with nostalgia. Yes, some of us may experience a vestigial the-taste-of-Soda-Stream-Cola sense memory whenever the Peter Howell theme crashes in, but that’s not why anyone watches Doctor Who now. It wasn’t made to be used as a memento, a comfort blanket or a psychic link between the adult and their forsaken childhood. And that’s not why any of us became fans, back whenever it was, sitting cross-legged in front of the television with our Mighty White and Sun Pat sandwiches. Nowadays archive Doctor Who is experienced in a form hermetically removed from any sort of historical context in vividly remastered shiny-and-new quality (so much so that the DVDs include bonus features explaining that these programmes were made during the days of grimy, grey news footage of tired-looking people wearing thick-rimmed spectacles). Watching an old Doctor Who now has as much do to with nostalgia as downloading a Beatles track from iTunes has to do with remembering the 1960s, or watching a Shakespeare play has to do with reliving the good old days of the Jacobean era.

It’s also nothing to do with its longevity. Doctor Who’s longevity is a product of its greatness, not its cause. Nobody became a fan because of the thrill of knowing that the show had been running for twenty-odd years before they started watching it, or in the expectation that it would still be going strong twenty-odd years later. Doctor Who’s enduring appeal is not its reason for enduring.

And let’s knock the whole ‘quintessentially British’ thing on its head too, shall we? If Doctor Who is in some way ‘quintessentially British’ that’s an inevitable consequence of it being made by the quintessentially British Broadcasting Corporation. It’s not about the trappings of Britishness (which is one of the things the 1996 US TV movie got wrong, with its fixation on cups of tea and jelly babies; it’s also the only story where the Doctor is ‘British’), it’s not about the setting – alien invasions take place within a twenty-mile radius of London or Cardiff out of necessity, not choice – and it’s not about any sort of attitude or sense of humour either, as a British mindset (whatever that might be) is hardly unique to Doctor Who. If anything, Doctor Who – a show created by a Canadian, initially written by an Australian and directed by an Indian – is a subversion, if not an outright rejection, of Britishness, the product of 60s libertarianism and post-colonialism, where anything British – a policeman, a bowler-hatted civil servant, a telephone box – will invariably turn out to be an alien, while alien societies will invariably turn out to be British. 

But that’s not why anyone becomes a fan of Doctor Who. Almost without exception, we became fans as children, adoring the show above all others because it was more exciting than anything else, because it was scarier, and most importantly because it was far more imaginative.

And that’s the key. Without exception, through the last fifty years, Doctor Who has always been the most imaginative, the most extraordinary show on television. It might not have always been the most prestigious, the most expensive, the most well-made, well-written or well-acted show on television but it has always been the most remarkable. For two reasons.

First of all, Doctor Who is different to the rest of television. Every few years, another detective drama will come along, darker, grittier and even more improbable than the one before, but nevertheless doing exactly the same thing, telling the same stories, week after week. The same applies to hospital dramas, costume dramas, domestic dramas. The grading changes but the story stays the same. They come and they go, never to be repeated, soon to be forgotten (who now remembers Mogul? Or Public Eye? Or Stay Lucky?) How many other BBC dramas from 1963 can anyone even name?

What makes Doctor Who so unusual is that its format dictates that it can only tell stories that only Doctor Who can tell. As soon as a story starts becoming a story that could be told in any other series, it stops being Doctor Who. Its remit is to always be different from what the rest of television is doing and never to repeat itself. Once something has been done in Doctor Who once, that’s it, it can never been done again. So, for instance, the following conversation could take place:

PRESTIGIOUS WRITER:

Steven! I’ve got a great idea for a Doctor Who story. Yetis! In Tibet! But they’re actually ro-

STEVEN MOFFAT:

Yeah, going to have to stop you there. It’s been done.

PRESTIGIOUS WRITER:

When?

STEVEN MOFFAT:

Ah, well, that’s the thing, you see –

PRESITIGIOUS WRITER:

Oh no. Was it a few years ago? Being a very busy prestigious writer, I may have missed -

STEVEN MOFFAT:

No, no, it was more sort of in... 1967.

PRESTIGIOUS WRITER:

...That’s quite a long time ago.

STEVEN MOFFAT:

Yes, but the thing is... people will notice.

PRESTIGIOUS WRITER:

Why? Is it a particularly highly-regarded story?

STEVEN MOFFAT:

Not as such, no. About average really.

PRESTIGIOUS WRITER:

Oh, has it been repeated a lot? Or released on DVD?

STEVEN MOFFAT:

Er... no. It’s never been repeated or released on DVD, the BBC wiped the tapes and threw away all the films in the 1970s.

PRESTIGIOUS WRITER:

So what you’re saying is, I can’t tell a Yetis in Tibet story, because of an ‘about average’ story shown nearly fifty years ago, that nobody has ever seen since?

STEVEN MOFFAT:

Pretty much, yes. Any other ideas?

And the same applies to designers, and everyone involved in a creative aspect of the show. Doctor Who is the show that forces you to innovate and avoid what has been doing before. But it also has the flexibility which means there will always be a way of doing things differently. The strength of its format is that every element, every bell and every whistle, can be tweaked or replaced; the setting, the era, the tone, the style, even the lead actor. It’s an anthology series, telling a different story every week, but with the advantage of having the same hero and sidekick every week, so you already know who to care about. And if you don’t like this story, well, never mind, because there’ll be another one along next week which will be as different as possible.

The flexibility of Doctor Who’s format also means that it can absorb elements from others shows and reinvent itself accordingly (like a cross between an Abzobaloff and a Krillitane). When it started, it was a hodge-podge of the best bits of HG Wells, Jules Verne and CS Lewis, amongst others. But before long the Doctor Who snowball gathered up Hammer films and Quatermass and ITC spy serials and Hollywood blockbusters and 80s comics and so on into today. All of television (and all of culture) is grist to the Doctor Who mill. It may have the trappings of science-fiction, but it’s not limited to telling science fiction stories (any more than Star Wars is); the stories may feature time-travel and spaceships and robots and monsters but when it comes down to it they are adventure stories, about good guys vs bad guys (or, occasionally, unfairly maligned artificial intelligences that happen to follow their programming in an inordinately sinister manner.)

Doctor Who also has to cater to several different audiences at once, from wide-eyed children to love-struck teenagers to devoted sci-fi nutcases to mocking, cynical adults tuning in just to laugh at the special effects. As a result, Doctor Who is astonishingly textually rich, with every story containing literary allusions, references to popular culture, classical myth, cutting edge science. Anything and everything that could increase and diversify the show’s appeal. Imagine reading a Fact of Fiction on, say, an episode of New Tricks. It would be about three lines long. Doctor Who has depth and it has substance. Every episode is doing half a dozen different things at once, which is why they bear so much re-watching. (When future academics research the history of television and British culture, Doctor Who will be considered as worthy of serious study as the work of Dickens or Shakespeare are today.)

It also affords viewers a kind of time travel, a (non-nostalgic) window into the past. The stories, after all, reflect contemporary concerns, from the optimism of the Apollo programme to the fuel crises of the 70s, from women’s lib to Margaret Thatcher to The Weakest Link, Sat-Navs and Wi-fi, the show is a Space-Time Visualizer into social history. You can probably date any story from the early 1980s just by how much blusher Janet Fielding is wearing. But it also acts as a window into the heritage of television, offering a ‘way in’ to archive drama, to discovering shows like Quatermass, Secret Army and Tenko and appreciating the work of great actors like Bernard Kay and Kevin Stoney. It’s a bridge between now and then; a tasting menu of the best the past has to offer.

On that point, it’s a bit of a myth that Doctor Who was a poor relation compared to other shows of its time. Yes, the sets occasionally wobbled, but that’s just because Doctor Who had more physical action in its studio scenes than other shows (watch any studio-based show with an action sequence from the same time and it is wobbly-walls-galore). And yes, sometimes the CSO (Colour Separation Overlay) isn’t very good, but it’s usually far better than other shows from the same era (and at least Doctor Who had the excuse that it wasn’t trying to be completely realistic). The truth is that any Doctor Who episode is as well-made as, if not better, than any other studio-based drama made in the same year. In terms of production, it was – and remains – at the cutting edge of innovation. Indeed, sometimes it got ahead of the cutting edge and attempted effects before they were technically possible. Whenever the BBC bought a new visual effects box of tricks, it would be tried out on Doctor Who. And in terms of the work of the Radiophonic Workship and the Visual Effects Department, Doctor Who was always where the most interesting work was being done. All born of the urge to be different, to avoid playing safe and repeating what had been done before.

(Take, for example, the humble Minotaur. Doctor Who has done the Minotaur a few times, but never the same way twice. First time, it’s a manifestation of a myth in a Land of Fiction. Next it’s a man transformed into a bull-headed guardian by Kronos. Next it’s a race of aliens with horns and platform shoes that swarm across the galaxy like locusts. And most recently it’s an alien imprisoned in a virtual-reality hotel feeding on faith. Every time, it’s a different take on the same idea.)

Which leads me to the second reason why Doctor Who is so remarkable. That in-built inexhaustible hunger for fresh ideas meant that Doctor Who has always been the first rung on the ladder for new talent. The fact that it was held in low esteem for so long, that it was under-valued and under-funded, meant that it could be a proving ground for untried writers, directors, designers, composers and actors. They would all face a vertiginous learning curve and innumerable challenges, but if they succeeded against those odds, for so many talents, Doctor Who has been a place to shine. A place to show what you are capable of, to show that if you can produce great, ambitious work despite a lack of time and money, you can produce it anywhere. And as Doctor Who launched careers, vacancies were created for new writers, directors, designers.

It’s that sense of excitement, of being let loose on the greatest toy box in television, that is at the heart of the best of Doctor Who. You get a strong sense of it in The Caves of Androzani, where Graeme Harper has been given his first chance to direct, his first chance to shoot action sequences, and he grabs the chance with both hands. You get a sense of it in The Crusade, Douglas Camfield’s first (proper) directing job. It’s evident in the direction of Michael Ferguson, of David Maloney, of Andrew Morgan, of James Hawes and Toby Haynes, that feeling that a director is delighting in the chance to set off explosions, to use visual effects, to shoot stunts, to find ways of making monsters scary. A chance to be more visually daring and distinctive than would be permitted on Holby City or The District Nurse. Watching their work is like being on a rollercoaster ride of unadulterated enthusiasm.

I’m not sure that ‘unadulterated enthusiasm’ is the best way to describe Ray Cusick, but nevertheless his design work on the show – and that of Barry Newbery, Roger Murray-Leach, Edward Thomas, amongst others – demonstrates a level of ingenuity and visual flair that you’d be hard-pressed to find in any other show. In other shows, designers design kitchens and police interview rooms; in Doctor Who there’s all of history, space ships, caves and endless corridors to be created with very little money and a couple of black drapes. Doctor Who was an opportunity for people to stretch themselves, even to show their genius. And the same applies to all the other designers, unsung legends like Daphne Dare, James Acheson, Ken Trew and Barbara Kidd (costumes and rubber monster suits), all the make-up designers, special effect experts, Delia Derbyshire with her painstakingly-spliced tape loops, Dudley Simpson and all the bleary-eyed-haven’t-seen-daylight-for-weeks Radiophonic boffins. The list isn’t endless, but it is very long indeed.

Doctor Who was also provided a first chance for producers; Verity Lambert and Philip Hinchcliffe were both in their twenties when they took over the show, while Graham Williams and John Nathan-Turner were barely into their thirties. Every single person who produced Doctor Who during its initial run came to it as their first producing job, viewing it as their big break (at least at first), a chance to do good work and get noticed. Even Barry Letts, who came to Doctor Who at a later point in his career, came to it with a pioneering spirit, eager to bring his own thoughts about ecology, morality and spirituality to the show, and even keener to play with the BBC’s CSO machine.

For actors, Doctor Who also offered a chance to impress. Where else - apart from maybe performing Shakespeare in the theatre – does an actor have the challenge of trying to bring reality to outlandish situations and heightened, often quite unnaturalistic, dialogue? Doctor Who gave actors who had spent their careers playing policemen and businessmen and mothers and wives the chance to play alien warlords, insane geniuses, wild-women-of-the-woods, spaceship captains, figures from history. To play against monsters (some rubber-suited, some imaginary), to perform action sequences, to try to keep a straight face in a spandex bodysuit. To play the greatest game of make-believe there is. In all the greatest acting performances in the show - from the Doctors, the companions and the roll-call of villains, even down to the humblest guard – there is a sense of delight in being given the chance to play a character a world away from everyday life and make them seem real. In being given the chance to show off.

Most of all, though, Doctor Who has been an opportunity for writers. Because it demands originality, it forces writers to be different, but offers them a canvas the size of all of time and space. It’s a chance to be clever, to let your imagination fly, to play with ideas, styles, and juxtapose influences and elements in surprising ways. It’s a chance to create whole worlds, alien societies, monsters, to write in a more vibrant, more expansive way, to create larger-than-life characters speaking riper-than-life dialogue. It’s a chance to draw on every source of inspiration, from science, from literature, from history, from current affairs, even from the show’s history itself. It’s a chance to experiment with narrative structure and scare the little buggers senseless. It’s a chance to go further, madder, wilder than anywhere else; most of television writing is about writing about realistic characters in everyday situations, writing naturalistic dialogue, and trying to make your episode a bit like all the others in the same series. Doctor Who gives writers a chance to stand out and shout, ‘Look at me!’

And the scripts of the show’s greatest writers revel in that chance. The Pirate Planet may be half-brilliant, half-absurd, but every line explodes with Douglas Adams’ delight that he’s not just writing for television but for the best show on television, somewhere he can – at last – share the extraordinary fruits of his imagination. The scripts of Bob Baker and Dave Martin are so full of unbridled joy you’d think they had just won a competition. David Whitaker’s work on the early days of the show are the work of someone who knows he is shaping a legend with every tap of his typewriter. Terry Nation is a bundle of Welsh enthusiasm, filling his scripts with every sci-fi serial cliché but underpinning it with a real moral anger, writing about the horrors of nuclear war and fascism. Malcolm Hulke builds scripts around ethical dilemmas, where no-one is right, no-one is wrong. And the same exhilaration at being allowed to give their imaginations free reign can be found in the work of all the great writers; Terrance Dicks, David Fisher, Christopher Bailey, Ben Aaronovitch, Mark Gatiss, Robert Shearman, Paul Cornell, Gareth Roberts, Chris Chibnall, and far too many others to mention. And greatest of all, there’s Robert Holmes, Doctor Who’s virtuoso, having so much fun in creating a Time Lord society, in mocking civil servants, in indulging his black sense of humour, in world-building, in creating vivid, eccentric characters and giving them the richest, most colourful dialogue possible. The Talons of Weng-Chiang is the work of a man who loves Doctor Who.

(Imagine, if you will, a Turn Left-style parallel universe where the show Doctor Who was never created. Where all Robert Holmes ever got the chance to write was Emergency Ward 10, Doctor Finlay’s Casebook and Juliet Bravo. He’d be just one more anonymous name on the opening titles, a talent that never got the chance. What a bleak universe it would be. Never mind the stars going out, they’d never had a chance to shine in the first place.)

When it comes to writers whose work bristles with excitement about the imaginative possibilities Doctor Who has to offer, only two others come close to matching Robert Holmes; Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat. Both of whom chose to do Doctor Who because there’s nothing else they’d rather do; Davies putting his career on the line to bring it back, and Moffat hanging up the phone to Steven Spielberg in order to spend more time in the TARDIS. Watching Davies’ episodes like The Parting of the Ways or Partners in Crime is like watching a script written by a combination of an overexcited eight-year old boy (‘And then the Daleks attack! And there are millions of them! And they exterminate everyone!’) and an adult man who writes the most stomach-wrenching and heart-breaking love stories imaginable. And watching Moffat’s stories like Blink and The Eleventh Hour and The Name of the Doctor, it’s easy to imagine him sitting at his computer, chuckling with delight at his latest Plot Twist of Evil, endlessly switching between being a hopeless romantic, a quick-witted sitcom writer and the most inveterate geek-brained Doctor Who fanboy.

Doctor Who may not longer be a proving ground for newcomers, but it remains a show made by people who would rather being working on Doctor Who than anything else in the world. There’s a buzzword that turns up in television press releases a lot; ‘passion’, so much so that it’s become devalued, but that’s what Doctor Who is all about. It’s about people united in the fact that Doctor Who is what they got into television for, for the chance to direct action sequences with robots and explosions, or the chance to play a Time Lord from Gallifrey or a villain from another planet, or the chance to show off their imaginations. To rise to the challenge.

Of course, not everyone has risen to the challenge. That’s part and parcel of Doctor Who, to have glorious successes side-by-side with (equally glorious) misfires. That’s inevitable on a show with ambition, which is pushing the limits of what is possible with no time and even less money. As Doctor Who fans we know that every great special effect must be followed by a terrible one, that every well-judged performance must be matched by a mis-judged one, that even the best scripts have plot holes and even the worst scripts have moments of wonder. That’s all part of the fun.

Yes, there have been people who would much rather be doing something else; directors who had no interest in science fiction and who still shot productions like it was the 1950s; designers without inspiration; actors who take the piss; writers with no original ideas and nothing to say who are happy to tell stories that have been told before because they have nothing to prove. It’s inevitable that there will be people who are watching the clock and just paying the bills, for whom Doctor Who might as well be The Pallisers or Rockcliffe’s Folly for all it means to them. And occasionally, as we all know, the show has had moments where it became a little tired and derivative and flirted with cancellation as a result. But there’s always been someone coming in with some innovation to update and regenerate the show’s format.

Which is, of course, why it has endured to this day. Recently, the BBC Director of Television, Danny Cohen, delivered a speech outlining the idea that the BBC’s output should be judged on whether it is ‘fresh and new’. And – tautologous though that is – that is what Doctor Who epitomises. It’s a show which has fresh and new built into its format, where its whole appeal is its novelty, its unpredictability, its variability. Where its mission statement, if it had one, would be to boldly go where no show has gone before. Even if - especially if - that show is itself.

As long as Doctor Who continues to be ‘fresh and new’ its future seems secure. It has certainly never been more popular than over the last decade. And yet, even at its lowest ebb in the mid-80s, even when the BBC tried to cancel it, it kept going for four more years. It’s an interesting paradox that during the 90s, even while Doctor Who was treated as a joke in some BBC circles, it retained a kind of power. When the BBC attempted to launch itself as a major international player, it did so with the Doctor Who TV Movie. For years BBC Films used the Doctor Who movie rights to get meetings in Hollywood. When the BBC started releasing videos, it was with Doctor Who; when it started releasing DVDs, it was with Doctor Who; when it started producing online drama, it was with Doctor Who. Whenever it launched some new venture, Doctor Who was a part of it, a source of iconography with which to build the BBC brand. For a show no longer in production, Doctor Who was remarkably high-profile, used as the basis for Children in Need and Comic Relief episodes, even gaining a Radio Times cover for its 40th anniversary when there was no associated programme. And now that Doctor Who has returned it has become inexorably linked with the BBC’s corporate identity; every BBC innovation is somehow Doctor Who-related, from experiments like 2006’s Tardisodes and the interactive episode Attack of the Graske, to the online computer games, and the current foray with 3-D. From Doctor Who Confidential to the recent Doctor Who prom and special programmes covering the casting of a new Doctor and the anniversary celebrations, Doctor Who is far more than just a television programme.

But the fans always knew that. Doctor Who was always the programme that was bigger on the outside, with more stories to be told than could ever fit in a television screen. From the very first World Distributors annuals, Doctor Who has survived and thrived as much off-screen as on, through the Target novelizations, through the comic strips published by TV Comic, Countdown, Doctor Who Adventures and this magazine, through the original novels published by Virgin and BBC Books, through the audios produced by Big Finish, through all the factual guides and toys and models and computer games and underpants, Doctor Who has never stopped being fresh and new to its fans. There have always been more stories to be told and more things to find out and discuss, in fanzines or on the internet. Even during the 90s when Doctor Who was no longer in production, being a fan was a voyage of discovery through the videos and repeats on UK Gold. There has never been a point where a fan could know everything there is to know about Doctor Who (and move on to something else more worthwhile). It’s been an ever-broadening, ever-deepening, never-ending phenomenon.

Never-ending? It’s one of those myths that Doctor Who was not expected to last for a long time. When the show began, William Hartnell told Verity Lambert he thought it would last five years and the earliest production memos describe the show as running for 52 weeks a year (if only such a thing was possible now!). And even in those days, the show was being made with overseas sales in mind, with writers being told to include convenient moments for ad-breaks at the mid-point of each episodes. Doctor Who was almost meant to be the international success story it is today, it just took fifty years getting there, that’s all.

And looking back at those fifty years, it’s not hard to see the secret of Doctor Who’s success. It’s because it’s always kept evolving, kept changing with the times. It’s always been looking forward, not looking back. It’s always been striving to be different and avoid repeating itself. It’s always been made by people who relished the chance to prove themselves and be as groundbreaking and imaginative and extraordinary as possible. It’s always been ‘fresh and new’.

And that’s the definable magic of Doctor Who.

FIFTY MAGIC MOMENTS

The Daleks (1963) – The Doctor and his companions’ first sight of the Dalek city, a stunning effect accompanied by the ominous electronic stings of Tristram Cary.

The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964) – Barbara and Jenny wheel Dortmun through the deserted streets of London, racing past the Daleks patrolling in Trafalgar Square.

The Space Museum (1965) – A surreal, disorientating montage to the frantic strains of World of Plants by Jack Trombey is followed by the Doctor announcing, ‘We’ve arrived’.

The Ark (1966) – The Doctor, Steven and Dodo return to the ark, seven centuries after they left, and see the statue has been finished with a Monoid head.

The Power of the Daleks (1966) – The Doctor attempts to warn the colonists about the Dalek, as it stares at him through its eyestalk chanting, ‘I am your ser-vant.’

Tomb of the Cybermen (1967) – In a quiet moment, the Doctor comforts Victoria, mentioning his own family. ‘Our lives are different to everybody else’s. That’s the amazing thing.’

The Mind Robber (1968) – A sinister alien vibration fills the air. The Doctor tells Jamie and Zoe to concentrate, when suddenly the TARDIS breaks up in the void.

The War Games (1969) – The Doctor bids farewell to Jamie and Zoe, knowing they will lose all memory of their time together. He watches them returning to their lives without him.

Spearhead From Space (1970) – One grey morning, the shop window dummies twitch into life and start slaughtering members of the public.

The Claws of Axos (1971) – The Master struggles to get the TARDIS to work. ‘Overweight, under-powered museum piece! You may as well try to fly a second-hand gas stove.’

Day of the Daleks (1972) – The Doctor pieces together the paradoxical plot, telling the guerrillas, ‘Styles didn’t cause that explosion and start the wars. You did it yourselves!’

Planet of the Daleks (1973) – The Doctor gives Codal a lesson on bravery. ‘Courage isn’t just a matter of not being frightened, you know. It’s being afraid and doing what you have to do anyway.’

Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974) – Investigating a government conspiracy, Sarah Jane Smith is knocked unconscious and wakes up - on a spaceship that left Earth three months ago.

Genesis of the Daleks (1975) – Davros is confronted by the members of the Elite and uses it as an opportunity to find out who is loyal to him while waiting for the Daleks to arrive.

The Seeds of Doom (1976) – Tom Baker summons up a whole world of horror with the line; ‘On planets where the Krynoid gets established, the vegetation eats the animals...’

The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977) – Faced with a homicidal ventriloquist’s dummy, Leela throws a knife into its throat and gloriously escapes by jumping out of the window.

The Ribos Operation (1978) – Binro was accused of heresy for saying the ‘ice crystals’ in the sky were really suns. Unstoffe tells him, ‘in the future, men will turn to each other and say, Binro was right.’

City of Death (1979) – Tancredi orders his guard to use the thumb screws on the Doctor. The Doctor cries out in pain. ‘If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s being tortured by someone with cold hands.’

Warrior’s Gate (1980) – The Doctor sees a vision of the decadent rule of the Tharils before the Gundan robots burst in and he is slammed back into the present.

Kinda (1981) – Hindle’s paranoia has escalated into a complete breakdown. The Doctor accidentally crushes one of his cardboard figures and Hindle turns on him. ‘You can’t mend people!’

Enlightenment (1982) – The combined talents of Barbara Clegg and Fiona Cumming provide one of Doctor Who’s most breathtaking, poetic moments, the reveal of the sailing ships in space.

Frontios (1983) – To prevent Tegan being used as spare parts for the Gravis’ excavating machine, the Doctor explains that she’s an android. ‘I got it cheap because the walk’s not quite right.’

Vengeance on Varos (1984) – Doctor Who goes postmodern as the story’s villains watch the Doctor’s apparent demise from a studio control room, and give the cue for the cliff-hanger.

Revelation of the Daleks (1984) – Amidst all the misanthropic comedy, there is one moment of pure glorious silliness, as Alexei Sayle’s disc jockey blasts Daleks with an ultrasonic beam of rock and roll.

The Trial of a Time Lord (1986) – Colin Baker’s finest moment, as the Doctor finally realizes who the real villains are. ‘Ten million years of absolute power, that’s what it takes to be really corrupt!’

Paradise Towers (1987) – The Doctor asks to borrow the Caretaker’s rulebook, and convinces them that it contains a rule about them closing their eyes so he can make his escape.

The Happiness Patrol (1988) – Helen A remains impervious and unrepentant until the end, when she discovers that her beloved Fifi has died and she breaks down in tears.

The Curse of Fenric (1989) – Ace demands that the Doctor tells her what is going on for once. ‘It’s like some sort of game, and only you know the rules.’

The TV Movie (1996) – The eighth Doctor remembers who he is, waxing lyrical about ‘warm Gallifreyan nights’ and remembering watching a meteor storm with his father.

Rose – (2005) – Clive introduces the sinister, enigmatic Doctor to Rose and a new generation of viewers. ‘The Doctor is legend woven thoughout history. When disaster comes, he’s there...’

Dalek – (2005)- The ninth Doctor turns on what he thinks is the last remaining Dalek. ‘Why don’t you finish the job and make the Daleks extinct. Rid the universe of your filth. Why don’t you just die?’

The Parting of the Ways (2005) – Rose tells Jackie about meeting her father just before he died. Jackie runs off, distraught, only to return in Rodigro’s yellow recovery truck.

School Reunion (2006) – Sarah Jane discovers the TARDIS in a storeroom, and turns to see the man she realises is the Doctor standing behind her.

Doomsday (2006) – Amidst the Dalek vs Cybermen carnage, Jackie bumps into the parallel-universe version of Pete. ‘There was never anyone else,’ she tells him. Mickey rolls his eyes.

Gridlock (2007) – Sally Calypso – who we later discover is controlled by the Face of Boe – leads the traffic-bound humans in a recital of The Old Rugged Cross.

Blink (2007) – Sally Sparrow is reunited with Billy Shipton, who has been waiting for her over thirty years. He knows he is close to death. ‘I have till the rain stops.’

Last of the Time Lords (2007) – The Master celebrates having the aged Doctor at his mercy and his total dominion of Earth by singing along to the Scissor Sisters.

Partners in Crime (2008) – The inducer is activated and thousands of Adipose burst into life, sauntering through the streets of London. One even has a slide down the front of a taxi.

Turn Left (2008) – Rocco and his family are driven away in an army truck. Wilf salutes him farewell. ‘Labour camps. That’s what they called them last time... It’s happening again.’

Planet of the Dead (2009) –Doctor Malcolm Taylor, played by Lee Evans, finally gets to meet his hero, the Doctor. He rushes over to him and hugs him. ‘I love you!’

The Eleventh Hour (2010) – The Doctor has persuaded Amy to make him fish fingers and custard. Nothing scares her, except for one thing. ‘Must be a hell of a scary crack in your wall.’

Vincent and the Doctor (2010) – Vincent Van Gogh visits the Musée D’Orsay and discovers it is full of his paintings. Doctor Black tells him that he is regarded as the greatest artist who ever lived.

The Pandorica Opens (2010) – The Doctor stands in the centre of Stonehenge and addresses the spaceships whizzing above. ‘Look at me! No plan, no backup, no weapons worth a damn!’

A Christmas Carol (2010) – Having shown him his past, the Doctor shows Kazran Sardick his future, or rather, he shows the young Sardick the man he will grow up to be.

The Impossible Astronaut (2011) – The Doctor works out that Amy, Rory and River Song are keeping a secret from him. ‘Don’t play games with me. Don’t ever, ever think you’re capable of that.’

The Doctor’s Wife (2011) – The TARDIS finally gets to speak to the Doctor about the fact that he pushes the doors. ‘Every single time. Seven hundred years. Police Box doors open the out way.’

The Girl Who Waited (2011) – Rory is forced to leave the older version of Amy outside the TARDIS. ‘I’d forgotten how much you loved me,’ she tells him.

Dinosaurs on a Spaceship (2012) – The Doctor, Rory and Rory’s dad Brian ride a triceratops whilst being chased by two punctilious, slow-moving robots.

The Crimson Horror (2013) – The Doctor warns Gillyflower that in the wrong hands the leech venom could wipe out all life on Earth. She laughs. ‘Do you know what these are? The wrong hands!’

The Name of the Doctor (2013) – ‘What kind of idiot would steal a faulty TARDIS?’ We see the first Doctor and Susan running away from Gallifrey – and in full colour!

Strangelove

 A You Are Not Alone article I submitted to DWM back in 2008 which was turned down (though I made many of the same points again in the We Are The Daleks article in issue 471 in 2014).

For as long as I can remember, I had a Doctor Who poster on my wall, the one that came free with the first Doctor Who Monster Book. If anything sums up Doctor Who for me, it’s that poster. It has it all. Tom Baker as the Doctor. The Target books version of the logo. Daleks, Cybermen, Ice Warriors, Sea Devils, Silurians, Daemons - and Davros, the scariest monster of them all.

One of my earliest memories is the cliff-hanger to part two of Destiny Of The Daleks, where the cobweb-draped corpse of Davros comes to life. At the time, I’d no idea the story was a sequel; I’d no idea Davros had been in the series before. For me, that was the first Davros story, and David Gooderson was my Davros. I know, I know, the mask wasn’t stuck down properly, they didn’t get the voice effect right and Michael Wisher was better, but none of that matters. What matters is that when you’re six, seeing a cobweb-draped corpse come to life is pretty bloody scary. So next time you’re watching the story, forget all about Genesis Of The Daleks, because for most the kids in the audience, that story was broadcast before they started watching Doctor Who.

But apart from the cobwebs, what made Davros scary? Well, obviously, it has something to do with him being half-Dalek, and Daleks are scary, but why’s that? If you read articles about what made the Daleks successful, it never really explains why they’re frightening. Instead you get a load of over-familiar nonsense about playground games, Georgian State dancers and Raymond ‘Ray of sunshine’ Cusick being paid an ex-gratia fee of one hundred pounds.

But Georgian State dancers aren’t scary. The Daleks tap into a different fear, a universal one we all share, but one that is quite difficult to talk about.

The Daleks are scary because they’re disabled.

Before you start slapping me in the face for being prejudiced, a few facts. Being frightened of disability is an innate childhood phobia. It’s known as teratophobia and serves a clear evolutionary purpose. Children associate physical abnormality with illness and feel threatened by it. The point is, it’s also something we grow out of, or learn to ignore. But deep down, we remain unnerved by deformity – and most film and TV monsters play upon this fear, presenting us with disfigured, and thus dehumanised, versions of ourselves.

To begin with, you have the way that Daleks move. They don’t walk, they glide, like people in wheelchairs. It’s the basis of the crap joke that’s been made ever since their first appearance – how do you escape a Dalek? By running up the stairs. But, as Terry Nation illustrated with Dortmum in The Dalek Invasion Of Earth, that ain’t much help if you happen to be in a wheelchair yourself.

This becomes even more overt in the case of Davros, where the lower half of the ‘Dalek’ acts as his electric wheelchair. It’s why every witless stand-up comedian will draw an oh-so-hilarious comparison with Stephen Hawking. Because clearly everyone who’s in a wheelchair is also an evil genius.

You also have the voice. Because that harsh, grating rasp we associate with Davros and the Daleks isn’t an ‘alien’ voice at all - it’s the voice of a human being who needs a mechanical larynx, a voice box, to speak. It’s playing on our fear that, through illness and by becoming dependant upon technology, we’ll become lose our ability to relate to each other emotionally.

Which is, of course, the point of the Cybermen as well. But the Daleks are more successful, because they not only have inhumanity of movement and voice, they have the attitude to match. We all know the comparison to Nazis, and certainly there is an element of that, but what gets overlooked is that Daleks are also scary because they’re a depiction of mental illness.

Watch the Whose Doctor Who documentary that’s on the Talons Of Weng-Chiang DVD, and once you’ve got past the fact that everyone in 1975 wore a polo-neck, you’ll find an interesting interview with a child psychiatrist who points out that Daleks are a good representation of autism. They have no ability to empathise - indeed, they are expressionless, so we have no way of empathising with them – and their behaviour is repetitive and obsessive.

As a child, I remember finding that terrifying. I remember, around the time Destiny Of The Daleks was shown, my primary school headmaster telling me I was mentally ill and should be locked in a padded cell. This was because I used to get into the most terrible, destructive rages, consumed with anger and hate. And I recognised that behaviour in the Daleks, because the Daleks are children, trapped forever in the throes of a violent temper tantrum. I think that’s what makes them particularly frightening for children, because they are being confronted with an emotionally brutalised mirror-image of themselves.

Davros takes that one step further. He’s not merely crippled; he’s blind, he has an artificial eye in his forehead, he’s down to one functioning limb, he’s even got bad teeth. He’s also incredibly old, which is another innate childhood fear – the fear of death. Davros is an ancient, emaciated, animated corpse – particularly in Destiny Of The Daleks - he’s the very antithesis of good health.

The problem is, what made Davros so thrilling for me as a child makes him, for me as an adult, quite uncomfortable to watch. I can’t help worrying that by playing upon people’s fears of disability, and using physical disability almost as a shorthand for evil – in the same way that in the tiresome Batman movies every villain turned to crime because they suffered from facial burns – we are contributing to the way society continues to stigmatize people with disabilities. I don’t know what the solution is, I said it’s difficult to talk about, but perhaps... perhaps it’s time Davros was left to gather cobwebs once and for all.