Originally published in Doctor Who Magazine 449:
Doctor
Who is
all one, big television show. A show that’s been running, mostly on but
occasionally off, for nearly 49 years. But, like Theseus’s ship, or Trigger’s
broom, it’s not quite what it used to be; it has gradually changed, piece by
piece, until it’s almost an entirely different thing. In fact, if a documentary
maker had examined the show at seven-yearly intervals over the past
half-century, he would’ve found it to have been seven quite different shows
over that time. Seven different shows designed to appeal to different audiences,
shows reflecting the changing state of television and the BBC, shows striving
but not always succeeding to address different problems. So let’s take a look
at Doctor Who over the years, and see
how it’s grown...
1963
‘My name is William Hartnell
and, as Doctor Who, I make my debut on Saturday the 23rd November at 5.15. The
Doctor is an extraordinary old man from another world who owns a time and space
machine.’ Doctor Who is about to
begin, a brand new series on the BBC’s single television channel, and in the
radio trailer William Hartnell has already given away two of the show’s biggest
twists. And for those who missed the trailer, the Radio Times also spoilers the surprise (as well as promising that
the opening episode will explain how the Doctor finds himself visiting the
Britain of today, which it conspicuously won’t.)
So, as four million people
tune into the first episode, and several million more curse the power cuts which
mean that they can’t, they have some
idea what to expect. The show will be about travel through time and space and
it will include stories about a civilisation devastated by a neutron bomb and
Marco Polo. But apart from that, it’s all brand new.
Except that it isn’t, not
quite. In trying to plug the gap between Grandstand
and Juke Box Jury, a group of BBC
staff producers, script-editors and writers had been leafing through the
popular science fiction novels of the day looking for concepts that they could
adapt into a television show. One of which was Guardians Of Time by Poul Anderson. Guardians Of Time is about a man from the present day being
recruited by the futuristic Time Patrol organisation to travel back through
time and prevent wayward time travellers from changing history. It’s a great
idea for a television series and it’s the book to which Doctor Who owes its fundamental premise; a character from the
present day having adventures in history.
The idea grew, with the concept
that the series’ time machine should also be able to travel in space, and that
the series should be based around a teenage girl (to appeal to a teenage
audience and to ‘get into trouble, make mistakes’) accompanied by two young adults
and a mysterious old man. This is essentially the format of Target Luna and its subsequent Pathfinders... serials broadcast on ITV and
produced by Sydney Newman, who is also the guiding hand behind Doctor Who. Newman’s priority is that
the show shouldn’t just be entertainment; it should be an educational
experience and create drama out of genuine science and history. It should not be about corny villains and ‘bug
eyed monsters.’
Overall, Doctor Who is a very deliberate and calculated attempt to appeal to
multiple demographics and capitalise on popular trends, such as the interest in
space travel following the first communication satellites and the first man in
space, and the rising popularity of a quintessentially British kind of terribly
polite science fiction associated with HG Wells and John Wyndham. The new show’s
format offers endless variety as different episodes take place in different
locales, and the adoption of cliff-hangers will encourage the audience to come
back week after week all year round – the intention is to make Doctor Who a ‘loyalty programme’. And, to
promote overseas sales, each episode will be 25 minutes with a fade-to-black at
a mid-way point, so broadcasters can show each episode in an half-hour slot
with a commercial break.
In terms of production, Doctor Who is basic. It’s only allocated
a small studio in Lime Grove and each episode has to be recorded in the space
of one evening, in two or three continuous blocks. The writers are briefed to
write for it as though it’s going out live, and it might as well be, as the
opportunity for post-production is practically non-existent. It’s possible to
edit an episode by physically splicing the videotape, at great expense because
too many splices will render the tape unusable (which, it has to be said,
doesn’t discourage Doctor Who’s
producer, Verity Lambert, from doing so fairly often.) And as each episode is
recorded individually, there’s only room for a limited number of sets, which
results in an episodic and sedately-paced style of storytelling; if our heroes
are held captive in a cave or a cell, you can be sure they’ll be there for the
best part of an episode at least.
For a new show, the signs are
looking promising. There’s a strong cast, though it’s unclear who is the lead –
is it well-known film star William Hartnell, or William Russell who took the
lead roles in Nicholas Nickleby and The Adventures Of Sir Lancelot? It has
an innovative title sequence, and a theme tune by Steptoe & Son’s Ron Grainer realised by Delia Derbyshire using
the Radiophonic Workshop’s most cutting-edge technology (consisting of a
tape-recorder and a cutting edge.) The BBC’s even gone to the expense of filming
a pilot episode which, due to Sydney Newman’s vehement dislike of the Doctor’s personality,
has had to be remounted from scratch. And when the premiere of the first
episode is disrupted by power cuts (and the assassination of a US president) it
gets a repeat showing the following week, an unprecedented step. The BBC clearly
has great expectations for this show and are talking of it lasting for 52 weeks
(though they are being cautious enough to only contract the lead actors for 13
weeks at a time.)
The only thing that’s holding it back is an initial lack of ambition. It’s a show about a machine that can travel anywhere in time and space... and it goes to the stone age, the least visually and narratively interesting place in the universe. The audience have been promised irradiated civilisations and peripatetic Venetians, not cavemen trying to discover fire. Something extraordinary had better turn up soon, or this show won’t last more than a few weeks...
1970
After seven years on the air, Doctor Who is on probation. Seven years
is a good run for any show, particularly one that’s been on almost all year
around and has clocked up over 250 episodes. The ratings have been gradually
dropping, partly as a result of competition from Land Of The Giants on ITV but partly, it has to be said, as a
result of a run of increasingly over-stretched and under-funded stories. From a
high of nine million for The Krotons first
installment they have dropped to barely half that figure. Nobody would be
surprised if the show was axed; indeed, it’s regularly advocated by viewers
writing into Junior Points Of View. Doctor Who has been recommissioned for
one more season, largely because there wasn’t anything to replace it; but
unless the ratings improved, the 1970 year will be its last.
Desperate circumstances called
for desperate measures and so Derrick Sherwin, the show’s producer, decided to fundamentally
alter its format. He had to make it popular again, and so it had to become more
like the shows that viewers did
watch. It was an unapologetically pragmatic decision, but it was also the right
one.
What other shows were popular
at the time? Shows about flamboyant secret agents with gadgets, shows with a
car chase, a punch up and a shoot-out in every episode, shows with mini-skirted
assistants. The sort of shows being churned out by ITC with cookie-cutter efficiency,
along with ABC’s The Avengers, the
BBC’s Adam Adamant Lives! and Paul Temple, and US imports like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Doctor Who would
have to follow that template to survive. He would have to work for a top secret
organisation with an acronymous name (in the late 1960’s NATO and the UN had a serious
duplication-of-services problem with SHADO, UNCLE, Nemesis, Department S and
whoever the hell the Avengers worked for all covering the same ground.) He
would use gadgets and drive a quirky-but-fast car, he would practice martial
arts and his assistant would wear a mini-skirt.
The other inspiration was Quatermass, ostensibly the 1950’s
serials but more overtly the 1967 Hammer Film adaptation of Quatermass And The Pit, which establishes
the new format for Doctor Who. Just
like Quatermass, he will be an advisor brought in by the military to
investigate whenever something falls on Earth, or is dug up, or when a
scientific undertaking is taking place. That’s his way into stories – no more
landing by accident and spending three episodes proving his credentials – and
from now on all stories will, without exception, feature a civil servant arriving
to stick a spanner in the works three-quarters of the way through.
In short, Sherwin’s solution
was to make Doctor Who very generic.
To get some idea how formulaic this reinvention was, in late 1969 an episode of
Monty Python’s Flying Circus included
a ‘science fiction serial’ sketch which lampoons everything that Doctor Who would become a few weeks
later. The Monty Python boys weren’t being terribly prescient; Doctor Who was just being extremely
derivative.
But nevertheless, when Doctor Who is broadcast in early 1970
this approach works like a dream. Doctor
Who looks like an ITC serial – initially it even looks like it’s going to
be made entirely on film from now on – and Jon Pertwee’s Doctor is dynamic and
charismatic. The show’s ratings improve – not massively, but enough to get the
show renewed for another year. Which is good news for Sherwin’s successor,
Barry Letts, who then begins a process of reversing all of his predecessor’s
format changes.
The Doctor will still work for
UNIT, but will gradually start travelling to alien planets. The stories set on
Earth will not be as reliant on military hardware, but will instead foreground
Pertwee’s humour and personal charm. UNIT will be retained, but rather than
being an organisation of anonymous, parade-drilled soldiers it will be a more
informal outfit with recurring characters the audience can get to know and
like. And the show will adopt a warmer,
more child-friendly tone.
Sherwin’s reformatting had
gone too far and too fast, and it had been a mistake to make the Doctor
earth-bound just as audiences were delighting in the entirely space-bound voyages
of the new American import, Star Trek.
The sub-ITC approach was already
looking dated and staid; the show’s future lay in the stars.
The other major advance for
the show is that the BBC now has the technology to edit videotape in
post-production. The advent of colour is trivial by comparison; although the
show is being made in colour, it’s still being watched in monochrome and is
still being made in the same fashion, with a recording of one episode a week,
only four or five weeks before broadcast. It was only when there was a problem
with the cave sets for Doctor Who And The
Silurians not being ready in time that Letts realised that there was no
reason why Doctor Who couldn’t be
shot out of order. Why not shoot scenes from a story’s final part on the same
day as its first, if it meant sets only have to be erected once and is more
convenient for costume and make-up?
So even though it’s still being
made on videotape, Doctor Who can now
be shot and edited as though it’s on film. Scenes can involve multiple camera
set-ups and be cut together. It can be edited more tightly, with more scope for
video effects utilizing the potential of colour-separation-overlay. Incidental
music can be composed to match the story rather than being played in live. With
this new technology, Doctor Who can
look as good as the very best shows on television...
1977
It’s rare for a TV show to
last 14 years. It’s even rarer for a TV show to be the most popular it has even
been after 14 years. But that’s what Doctor
Who is in 1977. The ratings are higher than they’ve ever been, production
values are higher than they’ve ever been, and with Tom Baker, the show has a
charismatic, larger-than-life leading man and a definitive Doctor.
Part of the secret of Doctor Who’s success is that it forms
part of the BBC’s Saturday night line-up; Basil
Brush or Jim’ll Fix It, followed
by Doctor Who, followed by Bruce
Forsyth’s Generation Game or The Duchess Of Duke Street, followed by The Two Ronnies. All ITV has in opposition
is a tired talent show and Celebrity
Squares. And as a crucial part of that unbeatable Saturday night line-up, Doctor Who is considered one of the
BBC’s most important shows. It’s even starting to be taken seriously, the
subject of a Lively Arts documentary.
Which makes it a target.
The problem is that the show’s
tone has become increasingly dark and violent over the preceding three years.
It’s been given an increasingly late slot in recognition of this fact, but in
many viewer’s eyes it’s still a children’s show so they let their children
watch it – only to discover they are viewing a show which its own script editor
thinks is not suitable for an unaccompanied six-year old. It’s a golden
opportunity for those with an anti-BBC agenda, namely the right-wing tabloid
press and Mary Whitehouse, the self-appointed guardian of the nation’s morals
and spokesman of the reactionary National
Viewers And Listeners Association. Doctor
Who has been caught breaking the guidelines and this gives them a stick to
beat the BBC with. What better way of getting publicity than by attacking one
of its most successful shows?
The only way for Doctor Who to continue is by
re-inventing itself, and in particular by becoming child-friendly again. As popular
as producer Philip Hinchcliffe’s approach was, Doctor Who was still perceived as a family show, and graphic
strangulation and torture did sit oddly between Basil Brush and Bruce Forsyth. So
incoming producer Graham Williams is instructed by Graeme McDonald, the new
Head Of Drama Serials (and effectively the show’s executive producer for the rest
of the decade) to tone down the horror and make the show Whitehouse-friendly.
At this point in articles
about Doctor Who it usually then goes
on to say that Graham Williams increased the level of humour in the show, or
allowed Tom Baker to do so. But that’s not quite the case. Tom Baker’s Doctor
is far more humorous – and sillier – in The
Robots Of Death and The Talons Of
Weng-Chiang than he is in any of the stories from the following year (with
the possible exception of The Invasion Of
Time). If anything, he becomes more
serious. The difference is that without the surrounding darkness, the moments
of levity have no dramatic counterpoint and feel like jokes for jokes’ sake. Even
a darker story like The Image Of The
Fendahl seems to be lacking something; if there is a void created by the
absence of violence then the amount of humour has not yet increased to fill it.
The main re-invention that takes
place in 1977 is to increase the show’s reliance on its principal asset, Tom
Baker. From now on he will be carrying the show like never before, holding it
together by sheer force of personality. Because he isn’t just another actor
playing the Doctor. He is a phenomenon, a national treasure in the making, at
the height of his powers. Doctor Who isn’t
getting high ratings because it’s Doctor
Who, it’s getting high ratings
because it’s a show with Tom Baker in.
Saturday nights on BBC One aren’t about the programmes, they are about the personalities: Basil. Tom. Brucie.
Ronnie. The other Ronnie. In Emu’s
Broadcasting Company when Rod Hull and Emu don a hat and scarf and fight
the Deadly Dustbins, they aren’t so much spoofing Doctor Who as spoofing Tom Baker, as much a part of 1977 as James
Callaghan, British Leyland and Mull Of
Kintyre.
Of course, there are other
small changes. Williams champions the inclusion of K-9 as a companion, as much to signal to the adults that this is still
a children’s show as it is to please its
younger viewers. He also decides to fill the void left by the violence by
increasing the emphasis on the show’s mythos.
Building on the achievements of The Deady
Assassin, the show would now create its own legend, of Time Lords and
Gallifrey, of Guardians and missions to find the Keys to Time. Stories would
explore figures of Time Lord legend, or would be mythic allegories. The show,
in short, would become something that would encourage young boys to take it far
too seriously.
Because 1977 sees the
beginning of Doctor Who fandom. It’s
the year of the first convention and very soon, Doctor Who will get its own weekly magazine and will be sold to the
USA.
Why has the USA suddenly taken
an interest in Doctor Who, after
ignoring it for so long? Two words; Star
Wars. Suddenly science fiction – even British science fiction –is big
business, a craze as almost as big as disco. And when Star Wars has its first UK press screening in late 1977, Tom Baker
is in the audience. From now on, Doctor
Who will be judged against the biggest-budgeted science fiction the US had
to offer.
1984
Doctor
Who is
now in a perpetual state of celebration. 1983 had seen an anniversary special, The Five Doctors, a massively
over-subscribed jamboree at Longleat, a vast convention in Chicago, and the
publication of Doctor Who: A Celebration
by Peter Haining. In 1984, Doctor Who is
now celebrating its 21st anniversary and looks set to celebrate its 22nd. Peter
Davison has enjoyed one of the strongest runs of stories in the show’s history,
featuring the return of the Silurians, the Sea Devils, the Daleks, Davros, the
Master and even Adric, Colin Baker has been announced as the new Doctor and
looks terribly dashing at his first photocall in his white pinstripe suit,
there is an even bigger convention in Chicago, and there is the publication of Doctor Who: The Key To Time by Peter
Haining. It seems that the Doctor Who party,
and Peter Haining’s literary career, will never end.
Which was to be the show’s
undoing, because success breeds complacency. Doctor Who now only existed because
it was a national institution. It was like Crackerjack, The Two Ronnies, The Morecambe And Wise Show. And its
producer, John Nathan-Turner, saw his job as hosting the Doctor Who party, giving people what he thought they wanted. More
returning monsters and references to old stories! Flashbacks with sepia-tinted
clips! Stories about Time Lords and Gallifrey! The new Doctor would be the life
and soul of the party – Colin Baker appears to have been cast solely because
he’d been hysterically gregarious at a wedding reception. He would wear
colourful fancy dress and be surrounded by celebrity guests and even meet a
former Doctor... because that was what the audience at home wanted, wasn’t it?
In retrospect, that was JN-T’s
great mistake. Because in 1984, Doctor
Who was now being made for its fans. JN-T had paid close attention to the
letters, the fanzines and the magazines, he’d attended the conventions and seen
what the fans wanted; they wanted nostalgia, they wanted former Doctors and
companions recreating their roles and telling amusing stories. What JN-T didn’t
realise until it was too late was that the fans who wrote letters and edited
fanzines and who went to conventions were not representative of the show’s audience.
The signs were there. The ratings for Peter Davison’s final year were
respectable, but had a worrying habit of dropping off sharply whenever it was
shown on Fridays against The A-Team (even
on Thursdays, it was massively out-rated by Emmerdale
Farm). Doctor Who’s popularity
was becoming ‘soft’; it was becoming a show people only watched if there was
nothing better on. The attempt to revitalise the show by moving it from its
Saturday evening slot and showing it twice-weekly had seemed a great idea at
first, but it was now undermining the loyalty of its audience by making it
difficult to catch every instalment of a story. It was no longer a ‘loyalty
programme.’
So the decision was made to
move Doctor Who back to its Saturday
night slot, and to make each episode 45 minutes long. Which was an eminently
sensible idea, and would give Doctor Who its
best-possible chance of rebuilding its audience.
What very few people realised
was that Doctor Who was also being
given its last chance. BBC One
Controller Alan Hart had tried to boost its audience by running it twice-weekly
and had failed. His successor, Michael Grade, believed the show had become
stale and lost its popular appeal. Particularly as its low-budget, studio-bound
charm did not compare favourably to big-budget US imports like the mini-series V. Either the show would prove Michael
Grade wrong or it would be axed.
Doctor
Who had
fallen behind the times and its fans – and its producer – were too busy enjoying
the party to notice. Until the late 1970’s, Doctor
Who had enjoyed the same production values as the most prestigious BBC
shows of the time. Everything was made in the same way, as a combination of
35mm film exteriors and theatrical, studio-bound videotaped interiors. But by
1984 the BBC’s Head of Drama, Jonathan Powell, had implemented a shift towards
series made entirely on film, such as Boys
From The Black Stuff. Doctor Who no
longer looked like the best the BBC could do; it looked old-fashioned,
second-rate.
What Doctor Who needed was to be brought bang-up-to-date. It didn’t just
need a new Doctor and a new, even more colourful title sequence, it needed to
rethink its whole approach to appeal to a fresh audience. The 25 minute-episode
format was an anachronism but so were multi-part stories; switching to 45
minutes should’ve meant a switch to single-part stories. It should’ve been more
action-packed, made entirely on film and given atmospheric incidental music. In
short, it should’ve been Robin Of
Sherwood. If HTV could update a centuries-old legend for a mid-80’s
audience, then there was no reason why the BBC couldn’t do the same for Doctor Who.
But in 1984, Doctor Who only sought inspiration in its
past. Video cassette recorders had become affordable and many fans – or their
parents – had obtained one to save The
Five Doctors for posterity on glorious VHS or Betamax. From now on, Doctor Who was a show to be re-watched
until familiarity bred contempt. Because not only could fans revisit recent
shows; if they knew someone in Australia they could obtain stories from the
1970’s, and if they saved up they could buy Revenge
Of The Cybermen or the edited highlights of The Brain Of Morbius for £19.99. The past was no longer an object
of pure nostalgia, of cheating memories; it was now something against which the
current series could be compared and found wanting.
But you can’t blame people for
wanting to celebrate. Not when missing episodes are being found with
encouraging rapidity, the Target novelizations have stopped using photographic
covers, Frobisher has been introduced into the DWM comic strip, and most
mind-blowing of all, the best-ever Doctor
Who story, The Caves Of Androzani, has
just been broadcast. If that isn’t a cause for celebration, nothing is.
1991
It’s been two years since
Sylvester McCoy strolled off into the distance waxing lyrical about tea, and
the thought of Doctor Who returning
to our screens in the near future is beginning to look an increasingly unlikely
prospect. It would be another five years before it finally did come back as a
TV movie, with Sylvester McCoy briefly reprising his role as the Doctor,
drinking the very same cup of tea he’d been waxing lyrical about at the end of Survival.
The BBC aren’t exactly helping
the fans come to terms with the show not being on the air either. They won’t
say that Doctor Who has been
cancelled, not officially. Instead the fans are told that an announcement is
expected later in the year, that Doctor
Who will continue, but as an independent production, that negotiations are
underway, and the show will come back but probably not until 1993, or after an
extended rest so that it, in the words of BBC Head of Drama Series Peter
Cregeen, it can return as a ‘fresh, inventive and vibrant to the schedule –
rather than a battle-weary Time Lord languishing in the backwaters of audience
popularity.’
The latter part of the quote
seems particularly telling of how Doctor
Who had been viewed by the BBC in its last couple of years. A show
under-budgeted, under-promoted and consequently under-appreciated by the
British public. Simply bringing it back as it was wasn’t an option. If it was
to return, it would have to be as a big, popular success, with a decent budget
– and it looked like independent production was the solution with the BBC
hoping that another company, ideally an American one, would want to provide the
finance while they retained the distribution rights. In particular, there was an
American producer, Philip Segal, who was eager to produce Doctor Who, and while he remained interested, the BBC were
reluctant to consider other offers. But the process of negotiation was
frustratingly slow due to the fact that Segal never stayed in the same company
long enough to make a deal. When it was reported in 1991 that the BBC had four
different US networks interested in the show, it seems likely they were just referring
to all the different companies Philip Segal had been working at over the past
two years.
(There was also the added
complication of a putative big-budget movie, courtesy of Green Light
productions, written by Johnny Byrne of The
Keeper Of Traken fame. Although Green Light singularly failed to live up to
their name, the prospect of a film - and more significantly, its attendant
contracts – served only to frustrate the progress of the return of the
television series.)
But of course the fans didn’t
know any of this. All they knew was that they were being fobbed off and that
their favourite show had been curtailed just as it had been getting back on its
feet. After the traumatic ‘hiatus’ of 1986 they could be forgiven for feeling
distrustful and jittery, and for mounting various campaigns for the shows
return that seemed almost as laughably ineffectual then as they do in
retrospect. But they were no more absurd than the BBC’s decision to cancel a
show which, a few years earlier, it had proclaimed its biggest money-earner in the
BBC Annual Report And Handbook.
Without a new series to look
forward to, Doctor Who fans had no
choice but to look back. Of course, nostalgia to Doctor Who fans is like strawberries and cream to a tennis fan, but
now nostalgia was be all there was; if it couldn’t be part of the current
television line-up, then at least Doctor
Who could be a beloved national institution. It’s pleasingly ironic that
the only ‘new’ episode of Doctor Who broadcast
in 1991 was the premiere of the pilot episode, screened to commemorate the
demolition of the Lime Grove studios.
The early 90’s were, for most
fans, a voyage of discovery into the show’s past, with BSB and latterly BBC 2
dusting down old episodes and more stories being available on video relatively
cheaply (though six-parters would still set you back £19.99). Even lone
episodes from otherwise missing stories were released as The Hartnell Years and The
Troughton Years, serving to foster a fascination with Doctor Who’s missing episodes; throughout 1991 there were endless
rumours that Tomb Of The Cybermen
might still exist in the far east, rumours which turned out to be remarkable
prescient in 1992 even if they were simply the product of wishful thinking.
There were, however, signs
that Doctor Who would have a future, albeit
as a fan-originated series. BBV reunited Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant for Summoned By Shadows, the first in a
range of videos placing former Doctor Who
actors in sinister situations mostly written by Mark Gatiss and Nicholas
Briggs. Even more excitingly, Virgin books had gained a license to publish
original Doctor Who novels, picking
up from where Survival had left off (with
the publication of the Battlefield and
Doctor Who And The Pescatons novelizations,
the well of television scripts had run dry.) These novels wouldn’t just be
written by former Doctor Who television
writers, they would be written by the fans, and that would change everything. With Paul Cornell’s Timewyrm:Revelation a whole generation
of fans realised they could write a Doctor
Who story and get it published; writers such as Mark Gatiss, Gareth Roberts
and Gary Russell soon followed. And the novels weren’t about nostalgia, they
would tell stories, as the back cover blurb put it, ‘too broad and too deep for
the small screen.’ Doctor Who would
be reinvented not just as a book series, but as something created by its fans,
for its fans.
But that wasn’t the most
significant development of the early 90’s. You only have to look at most of the
DWM back covers to see what that
was. Star Trek: The Next Generation had
come to the UK. After years of only being available on video, it was now on BBC
Two. If Doctor Who was ever to return
to television for real, it could only do so with a Star Trek-sized budget.
1998
If any year could be
considered Doctor Who’s annus horribilis it would have to be
this one. Two years have passed since the broadcast of the Paul McGann TV
movie, and its much-anticipated follow-up series has failed to materialise. Not
because the TV movie wasn’t a success; if anything it proved that with
sufficient promotion, a decent budget and a charismatic lead actor there was
still a large appetite for new Doctor Who
in the UK. But it also proved that there was an even stronger appetite for Roseanne in the USA, and that any
attempt to re-launch the show as an American co-production would be doomed to flounder
half-way across the Atlantic.
Doctor
Who was,
basically, a victim of its own success. The BBC – and Alan Yentob in particular
– were keen to make more episodes of the programme, but only if they could be
funded with American dollars, as making a show that could compete with the X-Files and the various Star Trek iterations was beyond the
BBC’s means. During the 90’s, the BBC all-but gave up on science fiction – and
whenever it did attempt a new science fiction or fantasy series, it got its
fingers burned. Invasion: Earth was
the BBC’s single attempt at science fiction during 1998, a co-production with
American money and American stars which failed to find an audience on either
side of the Atlantic despite the best efforts of writer Jed Mercurio. It’s
telling that when Invasion: Earth was
being promoted in the Radio Times,
its makers were keen to stress that it wouldn’t
be like Doctor Who (as though trying
to avoid being like a show which had
achieved ratings of over nine million viewers two years previously was a recipe
for success). But that’s how Doctor Who was
regarded; as a short-hand for cheap, old-fashioned, childish and wobbly-setted
science fiction. It was a relic of the past that could only be appreciated
ironically as a piece of kitsch nostalgia.
So what did fans have to
celebrate 35years of their favourite show? No new episodes. The nearest thing
many would have to any new Doctor Who would be a few clips from
lost William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton stories on the video release of The Ice Warriors. By this time, Doctor Who was a regular fixture on UK
Gold, showing an omnibus every Sunday morning, and the video releases had
reached the point where if they were not actually scraping the bottom of the
barrel then it was very much in sight.
There were also the original
novels, now published by the BBC, continuing the adventures of the eighth
Doctor and his companion Sam. But with only the TV movie to work from (and
initially no clear editorial direction), these novels were forced to be rather
formulaic efforts, with only Paul Magrs’ fantastical and unapologetically
literary The Scarlett Empress
bringing something fresh to the table.
It didn’t help that in taking
over the books, the BBC had alienated the fan base that the Virgin books had
cultivated, a problem exacerbated by Virgin books continuing to publish their
own rival range following on from the New
Adventures with the character Bernice Summerfield. The BBC Doctor Who range couldn’t help looking
like the poor relations; particularly as a couple of years earlier, Virgin
books had boasted a novel by Springhill’s
Russell T Davies and a short story by Joking
Apart’s Steven Moffat.
There was also a Doctor Who night on BBC Choice, a digital
channel launched in September of this year which would eventually become BBC
Three. The night consisted of repeats of Genesis
Of The Daleks, Tomb Of The Cybermen and the TV Movie along with links by
Sylvester McCoy.
Such was the show’s moribund
state that after two years of reporting on BBC executives’ muttered maybes and
headlines like ‘Are repeats the best hope for the future of Doctor Who?’, DWM consigned its Gallifrey Guardian news page to the back of the
magazine, and, as an ironic commentary on the increasing improbability of a new
series with Paul McGann, featured a story, The
Final Chapter, in which the Doctor apparently regenerated into a new
incarnation portrayed by Nicholas Briggs. Such was the plausibility of this
prospect, of Doctor Who only ever
continuing as a fan-made spin-off, that everybody was taken in.
Because in 1998 spin-offs were
the only new Doctor Who being made,
even though none of them had a license to make it official. Reeltime Pictures
had Sophie Aldred facing a Sontaran in the video Mindgame, BBV had the Auton videos
and Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred having audio adventures scripted by Mark
Gatiss (as well as a follow-up range by Mark Duncan which memorably featured
Sophie Aldred posing topless on the covers for no discernible reason). BBC
Worldwide produced their own audio short-story CDs with readings by Paul
McGann, Nicholas Courtney and Sophie Aldred. And a new company called Big
Finish got in on the act by producing their first Bernice Summerfield audios
(the second of which would feature Sophie Aldred, for whom 1998 seems to have
been a very busy year.)
So looking back, 1998 doesn’t seem
as miserable a year as it felt at the time. There were talented writers out
there – Davies, Moffat, Gatiss – who were keen to write for Doctor Who and who, given a few more
years to get some more hit television series on their CVs, would be in a
position to make it a reality. And there were powerful people at the BBC who wanted
to bring back Doctor Who, even if
they were convinced that the only way of doing so was as an American
co-production. The will was there, but the time wasn’t yet right.
And, most excitingly of all,
after almost a year ‘on hold’, it looked like Bob Baker’s K-9 television series might finally be going into production...
2005
After nearly 11 years off the
air, Doctor Who returns to BBC One
and Saturday nights. And it’s more successful than anyone could have wildly
imagined. Within a few days of the very first episode, Rose, being broadcast the BBC announces that the show will be
coming back next year and that Christopher Eccleston won’t be the Doctor when it
does (and David Tennant is tipped to replace him).
For the show’s long-term fans,
it’s a very confusing and stressful time. They’ve had an agonising long wait
since the show’s return was announced in September 2003. They’ve pored over
illicit photos from the filming, fretting at the sight of an oversized TARDIS
and the Moxx of Balhoon on a fag break. Rumours abound that this series will be
nothing like the show fans know and love. The companion’s family will be a
regular fixture and ‘every story will come back to Earth’ rather than featuring
alien planets.
And then there’s been the
build-up to the launch itself. It’s been a glorious optimistic few weeks,
tinged only by the lingering fear that this is Doctor Who’s last chance saloon, and if this revival doesn’t
succeed, then it will be dead forever. After all, the BBC have gambled a great
deal on this revival. They’ve given the show a large budget (by BBC standards)
and have spent goodness-knows-how-much on a billboard campaign showing the
Doctor, Rose and the TARDIS doors opening outwards (which gives the fans one
more thing to fret about). Even the Paul McGann movie didn’t get this sort of
promotion. There are endless trailers, a radio documentary, even a repeat of The Story Of Doctor Who (presented by
Jon Culshaw) and a special edition of Mastermind
in the week before broadcast.
Well, the week before official
broadcast. The internet has come a lot way since 1998 and now has the power to
allow people to share television programmes before they’ve been broadcast. So
for many fans – for whom the long wait had been agonising and the fear had been
lingering – the leak of a copy of Rose onto
the internet was too tempting to resist.
But for most fans, whether
they first saw Rose on a computer
screen or on the BBC with live commentary from Graham Norton, the final episode
was worth the long wait. Because it was spectacular. Okay, so it wasn’t
perfect, maybe the bin shouldn’t have burped, maybe Mickey could be less
annoying, but on the whole it was a fan’s dream come true. Autons, smashing
through shop windows! The TARDIS console room looking more exotic and
marvellous than ever. And a new Doctor who was, quite simply, brilliant. It was
so good that some fans even watched it a second time on video before going onto
the internet to discuss it.
The internet had changed Doctor Who fandom. Although there
weren’t that many fans left, as might be expected after sixteen years without a
show, those that did remain could now get into contact with each other and
argue with people on the other side of the world about Sylvester McCoy to their
heart’s content. The internet turned Doctor
Who production gossip into a valuable commodity and websites such as Outpost Gallifrey concentrated and
focused fans’ fervour for the show.
The show returned at the right
time, because given a few more years, things might’ve been very different. The
books were in decline, having been supplanted in fan affections by the Big
Finish audios, which since 2001 had offered an ‘official’ continuation of the
series with Paul McGann’s Doctor. Many of the audios were extremely good – and
in many ways prefigured the more ‘emotional’ approach of the new series with
the Doctor and his companion Charlie Pollard expressing their love for each
other – but they could only ever cater to the existing fanbase.
And until the announcement of Doctor Who’s return as a television
series, the omens didn’t look good. An attempt to relaunch Doctor Who as a Radio 4 series had failed to get any further than
the BBC’s Doctor Who website, which
in turn attempted its own revival of the show as a web-based animation written
by Paul Cornell, Scream of The Shalka,
a project undermined by the casting of a clearly disinterested Richard E Grant.
If Russell T Davies were to succeed where others had failed, he would have to
do something different. He would have
to go mainstream.
There are many reasons for Rose’s success; not least the
unprecedented amount of budget and promotion. But the most significant reason
is that Russell T Davies took Doctor Who
and made it what it hadn’t been for a long, long time: a show for people who
don’t normally watch shows like Doctor
Who.
Because when Doctor Who returned it wasn’t a show
like Star Trek: The Next Generation or
Buffy The Vampire Slayer or The X-Files. It wasn’t designed as a
cult show at all (which had proved so disastrous for Randall And Hopkirk (Deceased) in 2000). No, Doctor Who had been reinvented as an ‘aspirational’ ITV drama. It was a show for the sort of people
who had watched Bob & Rose, The Second Coming and Mine All Mine, who watched Fat Friends and At Home With The Braithwaites, and Cutting It and Clocking Off
(two BBC shows, admittedly). It was based around a working-class single-parent
family, albeit one with a remarkably colourful flat lit with fairy lights (a
common feature of aspirational ITV dramas). It even had incidental music by
Murray Gold and starred Mark Benton,
for goodness’ sake.
And that, I would argue, was
Russell T Davies’ masterstroke. The spaceships and aliens and distant planets
could come later. The most important thing was to start in a recognisable
location with a couple of characters the audience could identify with and love.
Because if Doctor Who had just been
about Rose and Jackie, and their adventures with Mickey and Debbie on the end
and Arianna, it would’ve been a hit. The Doctor, the TARDIS and the Autons were
the icing on the cake.
2012
Doctor
Who
is now the BBC’s biggest show. It remains a massive ratings success and a
massive money-earner. A significant chunk of the BBC’s revenue is now down to Doctor Who and it’s increasing
popularity in the international television marketplace, particularly in the
USA, where it’s BBC America’s flagship show and a top seller on iTunes. In
addition, it’s now a central tenet of the BBC’s ‘brand’, because it’s one of
the few programmes associated with the BBC that is not only a major, current
success story but which is also owned
by the BBC (due to it having been created in-house, back in 1963, by staff
producers, story editors and writers.) It’s not just part of the BBC’s
heritage, it’s a visual shorthand for everything that is great and beloved
about the BBC. When the BBC wants to promote the Olympics, they do so with a
trailer showing a warehouse containing a Cyberman head (along with relics from
defunct shows like Only Fools And Horses and Top Of The Pops) and they get the
current incarnation to carry the Olympic flame. It’s virtually impossible to
enter any BBC premises without passing a TARDIS, a Dalek or a photographic blow-up
of Matt Smith’s mysterious face. And
like all valuable ‘brands’, it’s to be maintained at all costs and guarded
jealously. Doctor Who now has a
totemic significance; it’s emblematic of everything the BBC stands for, with the
Daleks as the ravens in the BBC’s Tower of London. The BBC might not have many
popular comedies, or live football matches, it might be cutting budgets to
drama and children’s programming... but while it still has Doctor Who, it has something to be proud of. Doctor Who is The Two
Ronnies, it’s The Generation Game, it’s
Dad’s Army - but the BBC owns it, and
it’s still running, and it’s huge in America.
And there is no writer more
suited to this ever-more competitive and high-stakes television climate than
Steven Moffat. Because no other writer is more obsessed and determined with
finding ways to engage an audience, to avoid giving them reasons to switch off.
It’s virtually pathological. At its best, Doctor
Who is so full of ideas, of jokes, of scares, and unexpected twists and
turns, it’s like being driven at 100 miles an hour through a fairground by a
maniac as Aaron Sorkin and Joss Whedon trade bon mots on the back seat. It’s almost too much to take in in one
sitting.
But you’re not supposed to.
The paradox of 2012 Doctor Who is
that it’s simultaneously designed to grab casual viewers whilst also rewarding
loyal and attentive viewers. It’s a show designed to be watched multiple times,
a show for the iPlayer generation, a
show to be bought or downloaded as a box set. It’s exactly the show Graham
Williams was talking about when he told Douglas Adams in 1978 ‘to make the
scripts complex enough to keep the kids interested and simple enough for the
adults to understand.’ It’s as involved as The
Wire or Game Of Thrones or any of
those Scandinavian crime dramas. Not even when Doctor Who was a ‘cult’ interest, with its stories told through
books, comic strips and audios, did it have such intricate plotting. Which is
the great difference between 2012 and past incarnations of the show; in the
past, only the fans could be expected to follow an ‘arc’ storyline, by buying
all the books, comics or the audios in the series, whereas now, everybody watching has the whole series
available to them at the push of a button, and so everybody is effectively a fan.
With Doctor Who being of such importance to the BBC, it’s production
values have never been higher. Which results in another paradox, because the
more the show strives to be visually flawless, the more limited its visual
ambitions become. The irony is that although Doctor Who makes so much money for the BBC - more than covering its
costs – its budget remains relatively small, and has effectively been cut as
part of the Delivering Quality First initiative. This results in a show
which looks incredibly glossy and beautifully shot in HD, but which can only
afford three Silurian masks, and where each new monster is an exercise in cost-saving
ingenuity (the Silence requiring only heads and hands, the Flesh requiring only
prosthetics, the headless monks requiring only a cloak). And to disguise any
shortcomings in the sets, everything is now shrouded in darkness. In 2012 Doctor Who follows the same approach as
that of 70’s producer Philip Hinchcliffe, of tailoring the scripts to the
budget.
So Doctor Who in 2012 is both visually very cautious, and yet more
ambitious in terms of storytelling than ever before. It’s no longer just being
made for the license-fee payers, it’s being made with one eye on the international,
and in particular the American, market (with annual excursions to the US for
filming and Americanized dialogue, like Rory saying ‘gas’ instead of ‘petrol’.)
But this is no new thing – as mentioned at the beginning of this article, Doctor Who has always been made with a
view for foreign sales.
The only other thing we can
sure about Doctor Who in 2012 is that
Steven Moffat will defy expectations. Because if one thing characterises his
writing, it’s that he will always go out of his way to do the unpredictable.
Everything is up for grabs and nothing is as it seems. Even Doctor Who’s scheduling is a
closely-guarded secret to 'keep people on edge wondering when it will come
back.’ Because nowadays Doctor Who is
no longer a mere television show. It’s an FA Cup, it’s an X-Factor final, it’s the new Harry
Potter. Doctor Who is an event.
