And it was at this time I wrote my first feature for the
magazine, in issue 318. A cover feature, remarkably, about how Doctor Who was actually a game show. I
suspect it was a pub conversation that got out of hand, but it was an article
the magazine had never done before, which after twenty-odd years, was an
achievement in itself. But ever since – particularly since the show came back –
the article has become an example of how desperate things were back then for
the magazine that it was scraping the bottom of the barrel.
And I’m okay with that. It was only that desperation, that
paucity of barrel content, that gave me my first break on the magazine, which
I’ve written for repeatedly – and hopefully more substantially – since. I’m
eternally grateful to Clayton Hickman for commissioning it. And yes, it was a daft
feature, symptomatic of a fandom running out of steam and slipping into
self-parody (the article may be silly but at the time the magazine was running po-faced
articles examining continuity errors in The Ambassadors of Death, so at least I had a sense of humour).
And – and I’m sorry for beginning three paragraphs with
‘and’ – I think the article does have a point, that Doctor Who has reflected, in various ways, the popular light
entertainment programming of its day. It was usually broadcast in the same
slot, to appeal to same audience, so of course there would be similarities.
Little over a year later, and the news was announced that
Russell T Davies would be bringing back Doctor
Who, and the magazine finally had something new to write about. And what
did Russell do, in that first series, in the twelfth episode? He had Doctor Who incorporating editions of Big Brother and The Weakest Link (both of which were pictured as part of the
feature). So maybe I hadn’t been so far off the mark after all. Maybe Russell
had even been inspired by my article?
This is all by way of a preamble to the near-legendary
article itself, which now follows. This is straight from my hard-drive so this
is what it looked like before it had been sub-edited into English. Enjoy...
Illustrations by Adrian Salmon, reproduced by kind permission.
+copy.jpg)
THE WINNER TAKES ALL!
The very notion that Doctor Who is a game show is, of course, profoundly ridiculous. It’s not a game show, it’s the longest-running children’s-science-fiction-drama TV series. It’s not a piece of Light Entertainment with a theme tune by Ronnie Hazelhurst, it’s a profoundly serious programme about a Time Lord in a scarf defeating aliens and saving planets. It is not, absolutely not, to be treated as a mere game.
Illustrations by Adrian Salmon, reproduced by kind permission.
THE WINNER TAKES ALL!
The very notion that Doctor Who is a game show is, of course, profoundly ridiculous. It’s not a game show, it’s the longest-running children’s-science-fiction-drama TV series. It’s not a piece of Light Entertainment with a theme tune by Ronnie Hazelhurst, it’s a profoundly serious programme about a Time Lord in a scarf defeating aliens and saving planets. It is not, absolutely not, to be treated as a mere game.
After all, if it is a game show,
then where are the contestants? Who is the host and what are their
catchphrases? Where are the little red boxes with the scores in them? Doctor Who is a fiction with its own
inner reality, and it follows the rules of drama. It is most certainly not
about two rival families attempting to win a shiny new Mini Metro and fondue
set.
And yet, in a more fundamental
but slightly spurious sense, it is a game
show. It follows the rules of game shows and holds a similar appeal. It engages
and involves the viewer using the same approaches. In many ways, it is more of
a game show than it is a children’s-science-fiction-drama-TV series. This is a
shocking idea, but it contains an element of truth.
But this fact has not gone
unrecognised. Throughout its run, Doctor
Who proved remarkably successful at originating game show formats. There is
probably not a single TV game show that has not felt its influence.
+copy.jpg)
Let us take one story at random. The Celestial Toymaker. Our heroes find
themselves trapped in a realm where they are presented with a series of
sub-vaudeville comedy routines. There is slapstick, there is a lacklustre dance
number, there is an unfunny fat comedian. Each routine ends with the
presentation of a cryptic rhyming clue – which may or may not lead to success -
and the enigmatic host of the realm has a habit of repeatedly counting
backwards. It is clearly the template for 3-2-1
with Ted Rogers [which began twelve short years later]. The only difference
being that the entertainers in The
Celestial Toymaker were reduced to mindless playthings forced to endlessly
re-enact the same tired routines, whilst in 3-2-1
Chris Emmett and Louise English would merely return to ‘Puss In Boots’ in Hull.
A coincidence? Perhaps. But let’s
turn to The Deadly Assassin. In this
story, a conflict takes place in a virtual reality environment where the Master
controls the game. It is obviously a forerunner of similar computer-game-based
shows, in particular the [suspiciously-titled] Gamesmaster with Dominik Diamond. In The Deadly Assassin the prizes are the Rod Of Rassilon and a Golden
Sash – in Gamesmaster these have been
neatly conflated into the ‘Golden Joystick’. I’m surprised that Robert Holmes
didn’t sue.
Still not convinced? Then what
about that recent TV phenomenon, Big Brother.
Now, it has not gone unnoticed that Big
Brother owes a debt to Vengeance On
Varos. They both share the same winning combination of voyeurism,
outlandish clothing, spa baths, claustrophobia, unlikeable characters, the
promise of nudity and outright sadism. In both shows the viewers observe events
through a network of closed-circuit cameras and get the chance to vote off the
personalities they dislike.
But the Doctor Who story closest to Big
Brother is Carnival Of Monsters.
Consider the facts. In Carnival Of
Monsters the passengers on board the SS Bernice are the equivalent of the
contestants on Big Brother, their
tedious, repetitive, self-obsessed, pampered little lives serving only to
entertain the gathered masses. There is the brief prospect of romance but it
never really gets going. Indeed, the action quickly becomes so stultified that
it becomes necessary to introduce an element of conflict to liven up
proceedings – the giant man-eating Plesiosaur being the equivalent of ‘Nasty’
Nick Bateman. And who hasn’t watched Big
Brother without wishing for an Aggro-meter to get things going? That’s what
we want, after all. Sex and violence. Not people lying in bed reading books all
day.
What this illustrates is that,
time and time again, popular game show formats have their origins within Doctor Who stories. This does not happen
by chance; there are numerous other examples. You don’t believe me? A few more
for you…
Young hopefuls have been brought
together to audition for three uncompromising and impassive judges. They seem
somehow inhuman and unknowable. If the brave hopefuls impress, then the ancient
Gods Of Ragnarok [i.e.‘Nasty’ Nigel Lythgoe] may proclaim them to be Popstars. If they lose, they will be
reduced to cinders [or at least, to make personal appearances at gay clubs for
all eternity]. Cannily, Captain Cook
realises the best way to impress the judges was to form a double-act with a
young woman in fishnet stockings cavorting and making shrieking noises.
Meanwhile, the Doctor’s stand-up
magic routine is straight out of the talent-show tradition of New Faces and Opportunity Knocks. Indeed, if Ace hadn’t got the medallion to him
in time he would no doubt have been forced to resort to the infamous ‘balloon
dance’ from Over The Top.
Have you noticed how, in The Horror Of Fang Rock, each person
dies shortly after proving themselves to be the most credulous and cowardly
person in the lighthouse? One by one they are eliminated by the merciless alien
- the story is a natural precursor of The
Weakest Link.
Now image story which involves a
quest through a variety of locales including a futuristic city and an overgrown
jungle temple. The contestants must recover hidden treasures, each one hidden
behind devious traps that will test both their deductive skills and
co-ordination. They must solve cryptic riddles and cross perilous bridges. And
then, after accumulating their treasures, they must place them into a perspex
polyhedron for the grand finale. The Keys
Of Marinus with Arbitan and Yartek the flipper-footed Voord? Or The Crystal Maze with Richard O’Brian
and Ed Tudor Pole?
Take any game show and there is a
Doctor Who corollary. Through The Keyhole? It’s obviously The Tomb Of The Cybermen with Lloyd
Grossman instead of Eric Klieg. “Let’s go over the facts again. The spartan
metal decoration. The rejuvenation sarcophagus. The symbolic logic puzzle. The
ornamental Cyber-mat by the entrance. The hieroglyphs of silver giants. Who’d
live in a tomb… like this?”
The climax of The Mind Robber ends with the Doctor
defeating the computer by talking, without hesitation, repetition, deviation or
fictionalisation. The episode is short in duration but not quite Just A Minute. Who can forget the
terrifying Robot Wars between K-9 and
Polyphase Avatron in The Pirate Planet?
Or the Treasure Hunt for the Dragonfire, with the ancient and icy
Kane standing in for Kenneth Kendall? Both The
Sontaran Experiment and Survival
are variations on the Survivor / Castaway
format, again with the protagonists being eradicated in turn when their only
crime is to be a bit nondescript and unpopular. And, as the Rani enters the
brain chamber filled with dry-ice in Time
And The Rani, you can almost hear her say, ‘Tonight, Matthew, I’m going to
be… Bonnie Langford’.
Of course, there are exceptions
to every rule. Despite the togas and lack of moral fibre, The Dominators most certainly does not take place on a Temptation Island. Ice Warriors does not
involve any pincer-wielding Martians. And, despite their ability to weave
massive shells, Tythonians are not The
Great Egg Race.
Before I move on from this
section, one final example of Doctor Who’s
ability to originate game show formats. Somebody from Earth has been kidnapped
in a spaceship to take part in an extraordinary alien adventure. Fortunately
some eccentric aliens come to their rescue, aided and abetted by a small robot
dog. It transpires that the goal of their quest is to locate a powerful crystal
guarded by some rather unlikely-looking aliens. Meanwhile, a Machiavellian
talking pot plant switches allegiances and changes its appearance. After the
crystal has been recovered, the grand finale takes place against a CSO
backdrop, in which the victors begin their journey home and the losers are
vaporised…
Conspiracy theorists take note. Meglos was aired autumn 1980. The Adventure Game began in the spring
of the very same year. I think we can draw our own conclusions.
It’s also pertinent to note that The Adventure Game shared much of its
cast with contemporaneous Doctor Who.
You could forgiven for believing that Janet Fielding, Bonnie Langford, Liza
Goddard, Paul Darrow, Nerys Hughes and Sarah Greene had simply wandered into
the wrong studio by mistake and decided that it was all much-of-a-muchness.
But then again, they wouldn’t be
the only ones to make the seamless transition from Doctor Who to another game show. Sylvester McCoy started out on Jigsaw and Jon Pertwee took the quizmaster’s chair of Whodunnit. Peter Purves is, for a whole generation, synonymous with
Junior Kick Start. Colin Baker has
occupied the celebrated ‘Dictionary Corner’ of Countdown. And even Tom Baker dropped in for an edition of Call My Bluff, though he seemed somewhat
boggled by the experience.
The flow of ideas hasn’t always
been in one direction, though. It is important to also note the influence that
contemporaneous game shows have had on Doctor
Who. Or rather, to note how the producers of Doctor Who have identified the aspects of game shows that create
drama and suspense and have then incorporated those aspects into the series.
To begin with, there is the idea
of the ‘game’ itself. At its most elementary, you have the contest in Enlightenment and the various sports and
past-times with which the Doctor has hobbied himself; cricket, fishing, chess
and so forth. More often, though, ‘game’ elements are included into the story
for one reason and one reason only. Padding.
After all, a game serves two
purposes. Ideally, it keeps the viewer engaged and entertained and secondly, it
fills up time without any of that tricky plot development or characterisation
business.
One could argue that those two
surreal 60’s stories, The Celestial
Toymaker and The Mind Robber,
consist of nothing but padding. After all, what are they but a sequence of
rather lame parlour games? It is only the fact that the games are a matter of
life and death that lends them any consequence. The Celestial Toymaker is blind man’s buff, hunt the thimble,
musical chairs, hopscotch – no doubt if it had been six episodes long there
would have been a haunting game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey and a session of
Twister with an electrified mat. The Mind
Robber is even more uninspired, featuring brainteasers too feeble even to
fill out a World Distributor’s Doctor Who
annual. ‘When is a door not a door?’ ‘Can you rearrange these pictures to make
Jamie’s face?’ ‘What kind of weapon can you make out of words?’ And, just like
a Doctor Who annual, there’s a
section on ‘Mythical Monsters’ too.
The technique of using games as
time-filler was revisited once more during Death
To The Daleks. Once again, the puzzles are desperately uninspired – a maze,
another game of hopscotch – and once again they have no function other than to
postpone the story. It’s an interesting thought that the ancient Exxillons
decided to make their city totally impervious to all races… except those who
were good at low-brow picture puzzles. Presumably, like the Cybermen and their
tomb, they intended to restrict access to only those with a certain level of
intelligence. They just set their entrance qualifications a little lower,
that’s all.
However, if that’s the case,
goodness knows what the Horus was thinking when they locked up the most evil
being in the universe, Sutekh, in a prison secured by nothing more taxing than
a ‘spot the difference’ and a variation of the Knights-and-Knaves logic
problem. Presumably the other dangerous Osiran criminals are held captive by
means of a wordsearch and a game of Buckaroo.
The most successful application
of a game to the Doctor Who format is
in The Five Doctors. As Borusa so
aptly puts it, it is ‘a game within a game’ [a line which, indeed, would not
actually make sense if Doctor Who
were not a game-show]. Terrance Dicks knew that the best way to create a
programme with numerous protagonists would be to place them within a framework
which is effectively just a game of Ludo. Each group simply takes a different
route to the Tower Of Rassillon, beset en route by a variety of obstacles and
puzzles. The story can be made as long or short as required; it is simply a
case of adding or subtracting more games or players. And The Five Doctors incorporates every popular game show element;
physical stunts, cryptic puzzles and the now obligatory game of hopscotch.
However, rather than disguise the
fact that it’s all just a big board game, Terrance makes a virtue of it. As in The Celestial Toymaker and The Mind Robber, the idea of playing a
game of life and death directed by an unseen hand is used to sinister effect.
And it is for this reason that the story begins with a roll-call of all the
contestants [as in Stars In Their Eyes, we
see each participant going about their daily lives] before a miniature of each
character is placed onto The Ludo Set Of Rassillon. It is a device to make the
nature of the show explicit.
And how does the story end? The
climax is a ‘quickfire head-to-head round’ between the Doctor and Borusa,
before we get to see the celebrity special guest – Rassilon – and the
allocation of prizes – immortality to the loser, the presidency to the victor.
Of course, the rule ‘To Lose Is To Win, And He Who Wins Shall Lose’ is somewhat
arbitrary and unfair on the contestants, but in a way cleverly presages the
rise of such ‘cruelty’ game shows as Shafted
and The Weakest Link [recently
parodied in The One Doctor audio to
hilarious effect].
The most
frequently-adopted game show format in Doctor
Who is that of the quest. At its most simple, it is a journey from A to B
overcoming various obstacles, usually involving giant clams, ice-canos and
bottomless ravines . On a more complex level, it involves the collection of a
variety of objects to be utilised at the finale [whether they be the Keys of
Marinus or the sections of the Key to Time]. Douglas Adams’ unused movie script
Doctor Who And The Krikkitmen even
involved the quest for sections of a set of intergalactic cricket stumps. The
Mutants involves the Doctor’s quest to deliver a Time Lord message-ball to
Ky. The Caves Of Androzani concerns
the Doctor’s quest for a cure to Peri’s illness. Indeed, many stories are about
competitions; the villain attempts to gain an object that will empower them,
and the Doctor attempts to stop them and get the object first. That is
essentially the entire plot of The
Daleks’ Masterplan, after all.
How else does Doctor Who utilise the conventions of game
shows? Well, there are four games we’re all familiar with, but which have not,
until now, been named. They are the Cliffhanger Game, the Who Gets It Next
Game, the Who Done It Game and the Who Actually Is It Game.
I think most of us in the UK who
became Doctor Who fans during the
60s, 70s and 80s did so because, at least in part, we were addicted to the
Cliffhanger Game. We couldn’t get enough of it. We would spend every week from
Saturday to Saturday thinking about it. It was the best part of the programme.
Unfortunately in these days of novelisations, omnibus repeats and videos its
appeal has been somewhat muted, but in the days of nostalgia, the Cliffhanger
Game was king.
I hardly need explain the rules
because I’m sure we’re familiar with them already, but I shall do so anyway.
What happens is this: Each episode ends with a cliffhanger. The Doctor or one
of his companions is in trouble. It looks as though all is lost and they will
be killed. Then the programme ends and we are left asking… ‘How will they get
out of that? How will our heroes find their way out what appears to be an
impossible situation?’
The Cliffhanger Game is about
trying to guess the answer to that question. The one rule of the Cliffhanger
Game is this; all of the clues to the
solution must have been given during the episode. You have to have all the
information the Doctor and his companions have and work out how they will cheat
death. And then, one week later, you find out whether you got it right or not.
More often than not, however, you
would be unable to come up with a solution, and so the real pleasure was in
seeing the answer revealed and having the tension of not-knowing relieved. Of
course – the Doctor was merely holding his breath! Of course – Ace overpowers
the headmaster and opens the cellar door! Of course – the Daleks’ guns don’t
work on this planet! Of course – the gunshots were the firing squad being
attacked!
However, fun as the Cliffhanger
Game is, it is not without its frustrations. Too often, we are put in the
position of the Kathy Bates character in Misery
and are left screaming at the screen, ‘that wasn’t fair!’ because the writers
have cheated. How were we supposed to know that the Doctor carries a snorkel
with him at all times? How were we supposed to know that George Stephenson
would happen to be walking by the mineshaft at just the right moment to prevent
the Doctor falling into it? And how on earth were we supposed to guess that the
Doctor that jumped off the plank was just an image projection?
The worst transgressions of the
rules of The Cliffhanger Game are those occasions where the cliffhanger reprise
completely recontextualises the ending of the previous episode. So the Doctor
is trapped outside the door to the weather centre and about to be poisoned by a
pod. Meanwhile, inside, Jamie and Zoe are cornered by an Ice Warrior. Roll on
episode six and… and it turns out that by the time the Doctor has got to the
weather centre, Jamie and Zoe have evaded the Ice Warrior and run to the other
side of the door. A similar example is the end of The Planet Of The Spiders 5,
possibly the most unfair edition of the Cliffhanger Game of all.
A variation on the Cliffhanger
Game has been popularised by A Question
Of Sport with their ‘What happens next?’ round. Rather than trying to
puzzle a solution to the Doctor’s predicament, we are instead simply left
wondering at the consequences of the events we have witnessed. At its most
basic, it’s ‘oh my goodness, so there’s a monster here’. So there is a Dalek in
the back of the antique shop! So Count Scarlioni is actually a one-eyed green
scaly alien! The two most famous ‘What happens next?’ cliffhangers from Doctor Who are, as we all know, ‘the
Police Box has landed in a wilderness and a shadowy something is approaching
it’ and ‘what is at the other end of the sink plunger?’
This use of cliffhangers, to
create suspense and to keep the audience watching from show to show until
they’re addicted, is common to game shows. It’s at its most conspicuous on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? where
we’ll go to an advert break or the programme will end before the answer to the
question is given. But any game show where contestants continue from programme
to programme has this quality – University
Challenge, Blockbusters, even Blind
Date. And cliffhangers are very useful things. They keep the audience
thinking about a programme after it has finished and they keep the viewer
watching by constantly posing unanswered questions and creating – and drawing
out – the answers.
The Who Gets It Next Game may not
be quite so familiar. It’s a game that can played consciously, with viewers
shouting out the answers at the screen, or on a more subtle level. The Who Gets
It Next Game more frequently applies to disaster movies, detective novels and
horror movies, but also applies to those many Doctor Who stories with a high body-count.
The game is quite simple. All you
have to do is to guess who will be the next person to die. You can also guess how they die, but that’s not quite so
important. Will it be Laird, will it be Calder, Archer, Stein, Mercer or
Styles? This game particularly applies to the inhabitants of Fang Rock, Storm
Mine 4, the web-infested London Underground, the Hyperion III, and stories by
Eric Saward. We know that, one by one, they will be dispatched in a brutal and
inhuman manner, just like the contestants on Fifteen To One.
As you might expect, there are
various rules to the Who Gets It Next Game. You’re not going to kill off your
most expensive guest star in the first five minutes. You want to keep a good
mixture of age groups, ethnic minorities and genders for as long as possible so
it doesn’t look like you’re killing people off on the basis of age, ethnic
group or gender. The lead characters, the Doctor and his companions, will
certainly survive, unless it’s in a story by Eric Saward or Dennis Spooner and
Terry Nation. And generally speaking, the brave, resourceful, clever people
will survive longest, and the evil, cowardly, greedy people will get it first.
Following on from this, we have
the Who Done It Game, which is largely self-explanatory. It’s about picking up
the clues and working out which person is the traitor/murderer. However, Doctor Who has trod the murder mystery
path only rarely and it is fair to say that even then it has gone astray. The
murderer in The Robots Of Death can
be identified within the first few minutes by his distinctive eye-catching
trousers and the intriguing murder-mystery aspect of Terror Of The Vervoids ends up buried in the
Brummy-plants-taking-over story. The murderer’s identity in The Rescue is rather belied by the fact
that there is only one possible candidate; this elementary mistake is repeated
in The Space Pirates. Indeed, the
only really effective times where Doctor
Who has done a who-done-it are The
Web Of Fear and The Reign Of Terror where
the traitors identities do come as a genuine surprise. And possibly The Deadly Assassin, Arc Of Infinity and The Five Doctors too, at a push.
Such was the potential of the Who
Done It Game that another science
fiction show adopted the format wholesale to great effect. Captain Zep combined both the sci-fi action and the game show
elements; the studio audience would help the eponymous Super Space Detective
solve cases by remembering ‘clues’ from the episode, and the viewers at home
could win badges by writing in with other details, ‘What was the name of the
alien ambassador Professor Spiro met on Santos?’. The only drawback was that
anyone who had a video recorder could cheat.
Turning our attention reluctantly
away from Captain Zep and back to A Question Of Sport, we have the
‘Mystery Personality’ round or, as it would apply within Doctor Who, the Who Actually Is It Game. This game works in two
ways. The first way is the Who Actually Is It In Terms Of Doctor Who. We see a character – usually an evil master-mind –
lurking in the shadows. We don’t see their face; only perhaps a black glove is
visible, or a scaly claw or pincer. They sit in a chair with their backs to us
and cackle insanely. The game is, of course, to correctly identify them before
their identity is revealed on-screen. The most effective use of this device was
in The Keeper Of Traken, though a
variation on it worked very well with the Master’s allies in Frontier In Space.
Even if the
mystery personality is not a returning character, the game is still effective
as the viewer attempts to glean some idea as to the hideous nature of the
creature or character in question. We see very little of the Silurians in their
early episodes, for example, and are left only to guess at their appearance
from a claw and a wall-drawing. Similarly with the K-1 Robot, the Tetraps, the
Captain, the Haemovores… virtually every Doctor
Who monster. Once again, it’s raising unanswered questions to heighten suspense.
Similarly,
the introductions of Magnus Greel, Sharaz Jek and the Borad toy with viewers’
expectations. I’m sure I’m not the only one who thought the mysterious masked
figure in The Caves Of Androzani
would actually be the Master, or that the rasping battle-computer-thing in Remembrance Of The Daleks was Davros.
Sometimes,
though, the Who Actually Is It Game fell rather flat. The revelation that the
unconvincing French swordsman who looks like the Master in an orange beard and
wig is, in fact, the Master in an orange beard and wig comes as something of an
anticlimax to the end of part one of The
King’s Demons. Similarly the surprise that the invisible monsters on
Spiridon are Daleks is rather spoilt by the fact that the story in question is
called The Planet Of The Daleks.
The second strand of the Who
Actually Is It Game is best illustrated in Paradise
Towers. Here we have some very typical ‘Mystery Personality’ camerawork – a
brief glimpse of moustache, a finger flicking a switch, a couple of lines of
muttered dialogue. We’re left guessing who this character is and what
significance they hold. And then, towards the end of the episode, all is
revealed - it’s ‘The Good Life’s Richard Briers! [This wasn’t the first time
this device had been used, and its use parallels the introduction of a
‘Celebrity Guest’ element which I will discuss later.]
Often, though, the answers to the
Who Actually Is It Game are only given in the end titles – to this day, I have
no absolutely idea which Cryon is supposed to be Sarah Greene. And is it really
Mike out of The Young Ones playing
Lord Kiv? It still strikes me as surreal that Lord Varga the Ice Warrior is
none other than Bernard ‘Ah, sorry, Sid’ Bresslaw
Of course
these aren’t the only games that viewers can play whilst watching Doctor Who – there is the recent
phenomena of ‘drinking games’ where the viewers drink in response to clichés
and catchphrases – but the difference with the above games is that they are all
deliberate on the part of the
production team. The writers and directors are conscious that the viewers will
engage with the programme on the level of a game show, and realise that the
best way to involve an audience is to set them puzzles and make them think.
Let’s return briefly to The Five Doctors. Such is the undisputed
genius of Terrance Dicks that within this story he virtually invented a fifth
game. A game which has since surpassed all others. This is the Spot The
Reference Game.
In a sense, it’s a variation on Telly Addicts or that edition of Mastermind where the guy chose Doctor Who as his specialist subject. It’s
about testing the viewers’ knowledge of the programme and rewarding them for
close, attentive viewing. Again it’s questions and answers; in this case,
though, the question is, ‘What is the writer referring to?’ and the answer can
only be found within a lifetime of Doctor
Who trivia.
An early example of this game
comes in Arc Of Infinity where the
TARDIS is recalled to Gallifrey – ‘this has happened only twice before’, we are
told. So the fan viewer is immediately engaged in the Spot The Reference Game;
just when did it happen twice before? Cue a hasty rummage through the Doctor Who Programme Guide and a few
Target novelisations for the answer.
But it is in The Five Doctors that this game becomes of crucial importance for
the first time, as the 2nd Doctor defeats the apparitions of Jamie
and Zoe not by willpower, wits or ingenuity, but by pointing out that they’ve
got their Doctor Who continuity
wrong. He defeats them by Spotting A Reference to The War Games.
Now, the fans in the audience
have always been playing this game, but usually what references they spotted
were unintentional. The Five Doctors
was the first time the programme recognised that some viewers would be playing
the Spot The Reference Game and thus deliberately incorporated it into the narrative.
Since then, as we all know, the
Spot The Reference Game began to take over the programme to the exclusion of
all the other games, until it finally found its ideal home in the books.
Characters, planets, chapter titles – virtually everything is an allusion to
something in the TV show, or the author’s favourite pop groups, or the names of
their mates, or bits from other TV shows, films and books. As the book ranges
grew, so the novels even began to accommodate references to themselves,
creating an ever-more-mind-boggling web of trivia. Paul Cornell came up with
the first really impressive Spot The Reference Game with the ‘Hoothi’ in Love And War – taken from a mumbled
aside in The Brain Of Morbius – but
the current masters at creating Spot The Reference Games are authors Gary
Russell and Lawrence Miles. Indeed, Miles’ Christmas
At A Rational Planet is rumoured to contain a reference to every single Doctor Who story, a feat which surpasses
even The Doctor Who Quiz Book. And
this is, of course, adds greatly to the fun.
Before I move on, I should
mention that there is possibly a sixth game. In the tradition of Call My Bluff, there is the What Does
The Dialogue Actually Mean Game. Pioneered by writers Pip and Jane Baker, such
lines as ‘Catharsis of spurious morality’ have a certain cryptic quality which
would certainly leave Clement Freud and Sandi Toksvig beguiled. But, it has to
be said, if this game does exist, it hasn’t really caught on.
To become serious for just one
second. What all the above games illustrate is that Doctor Who, like all great TV game shows, engages its audience by
posing questions and then rewards its audience by revealing the – often
surprising and overlooked – answers. It keeps the viewers in suspense and gets
their brains working - and that is what
viewers love. The process has three stages: 1) The question. 2) The viewer
shouting out the answer to the question. 3) And then the programme giving the
answer. Intrigue –interaction – reward.
The ideal formula for entertainment.
In other respects, Doctor Who has followed the trends
displayed in other TV game shows. The most obvious element it has implemented
is that which I alluded to briefly before – celebrity guests.
Now, the idea of a celebrity
guest is actually quite a modern invention. It was virtually unheard of in
television throughout the 60s and 70s when actors were fairly anonymous types.
Although there are many recognisable faces from 60s and 70s television, there
were very few actual ‘celebrities’. By a celebrity I mean an actor [or at
least, someone associated with the entertainment profession] who is famous
enough to get away with not actually
doing anything. In the 60s and 70s entertainers only appeared on television
doing what it was they were actually famous for.
That all changed in the 80s and
the programme that changed it was Blankety
Blank. Suddenly actors were not just people who played parts; they were a
spectacle in their own right. The fact that someone had once appeared in Butterflies or Seaside Special or even just an advert for Luton Airport suddenly
meant they were worth putting up on screen. TV producers realised that if you
got enough of these half-famous non-entities together, you’d get an audience.
Hence Blankety Blank. Never mind that
they weren’t actually doing whatever it was they were famous for doing – they
were ‘celebrities’ and their mere presence was enough. Indeed, as Rowan Atkison
once observed, the only other TV programme that these people ever seemed to
appear on was ‘Celebrity bloody Squares’. Many viewers would be quite
right in suspecting that many of them had never actually done anything to merit
their fame in the first place; they had just gestated, fully-formed, onto the
right-hand side of the bottom row of Blankety
Blank.
One of the great achievements of
John Nathan-Turner as producer was to recognise this trend and adopt it
wholesale for Doctor Who. If Blankety Blank was getting viewers
because it had celebrities, then so would our favourite sci-fi show. Indeed,
many of the names were interchangeable; in Season 19 alone we have Bert Kwouk,
Stratford Johns, Nerys Hughes, Michael Robbins and Beryl Reid; later seasons
would up the celebrity contingent considerably. And it worked. It seemed
incongruous at times, yes - occasionally it seemed like lunatic mis-casting -
but it made Doctor Who bigger and
more important and it gave viewers a bonus as they played the Isn’t That
Whatsername, Oh What Have I Seen Her In? Game. [this game actually first occurs
at the end of City Of Death, where
John Cleese has no call to be there, but the beauty lay in the fact that he is there].
In many ways, John Nathan-Turner
was ahead of his time; nowadays we think nothing of Barbara Windsor turning up
in Eastenders or Les Dennis in Brookside or virtually every BBC drama
containing someone out of The Fast Show.
In the early 80’s, however, it did come as a culture shock to some to see
Rodney Bewes, Chloe Ashcroft and Rula Lenska fighting the Daleks [not to
mention Leslie Grantham, though his budding celebrity had, at the time, yet to
flower]. Without wishing to be disingenuous, one suspects that a similar
approach was even used in the casting of at least one companion – hiring them
not because they were necessarily suited to the role, but because of their
celebrity caché and the corresponding audience they would bring in.
And there is nothing wrong with
that; indeed, every ‘celebrity’ to appear in Doctor Who acquitted themselves more than admirably [with, perhaps,
the possible exception of Leee John!] because Doctor Who gave them a chance to get away from playing the
‘Supermatch Game’ and tittering at Kenny Everett’s microphone-bending-antics
and to actually demonstrate their talent. One need only look to Nicholas
Parsons – the only first-division game show host to appear in Doctor Who – who gives a revelatory
performance in The Curse Of Fenric.
In many ways, it’s a shame Doctor Who finished when it did. Who
knows, it was only a matter of time before we were treated to guest
performances from Fred Harris, Su Pollard, Paul Daniels, Duncan Norvelle,
Johnny Ball and Gary Wilmott. All of whom would have been terrific. The
Krankies could have been an Oak and Quill for the nineties.
It’s interesting to note that Big
Finish have not been slow in realising the additional kudos [and additional
sales] that result from including celebrity ‘names’ in the casts, and in so
doing are continuing the approach initiated by John Nathan-Turner. If Doctor Who were on TV today, it would do
well to boast a cast that included Mark Gatiss, Lucas & Walliams, James
Bolam, Simon Pegg, Jessica Stephenson, Christopher Biggins and Murray Head’s
little brother. And it’s no coincidence that Death Comes To Time includes Stephen Fry and John Sessions in its
cast. The celebrity factor is big business nowadays – it’s a fact that if David
Jason wanted to play Doctor Who then
the series would come back tomorrow.
How else has Doctor Who followed the fashions of game shows? Well, in the late
70’s Tiswas was enjoyed throughout
the land [except by those children who were so middle-class they weren’t
allowed to watch ITV] and its appeal was largely due to seeing people being
drenched in cold water or splattered with foam [often flung by a certain Sylveste
McCoy]. Now, Doctor Who had been
doing foam since the late 60’s when the BBC special effects department bought a
foam machine and used it on every single Troughton story in some capacity or
other. But what Tiswas did – and what
Crackerjack and Noel Edmonds later
refined – was the appeal of seeing people being covered in slime – or ‘gunge’
as it became known.
So it should come as no surprise
that 80’s Doctor Who was full of
gunge too. Most obviously in the slapstick finale to The Mysterious Planet, yes, but in many other stories; just as the
losers in Crackerjack would get
gunged, so the defeated monsters in Doctor
Who would have equally slimy deaths. Every villain, be it Silurian, Malus
or Omega, would have gunk simply oozing out of its eye sockets and nostrils. If
there had been a studio audience, it would’ve been going, ‘Oooeeeuch!’
Another area where Doctor Who and other game shows have
borrowed from each other has been in their sets. Many game shows attempt to
create a sense of concentrated power and high technology; the resemblance
between the set for The Weakest Link
and the Daleks’ control room in The Dalek
Masterplan cannot be a coincidental.
And on one occasion Doctor Who
actually used a game show set outright; my namesake helped the Doctor defeat
the Mara on the very same stage where Nicole sang ‘A Little Peace’ in the 1982
Eurovision Song Contest.
Finally, there is one more way in
which Doctor Who works as a game show.
That is in terms of contestants and hosts. Each one has a specific function
with the programme.
The contestants are you and me.
Ordinary Joe Public audience identification figures. When we see the
contestants on screen, we put ourselves in their place. We empathise with them
and thus we are drawn into the action. And the companions in Doctor Who fulfil the same function.
The most successful companions
are those which have been defined by their ordinariness. We watch Ian and
Barbara, and we think, ‘That could be me, there, facing down Koquillion on the
surface of Dido.’ Similarly with Dodo, Ben, Polly, Jo, Sarah… the list goes on.
Even when the companions have an extraordinary [and extraterrestrial origin]
they are still our identification figures, because they are the same age as us
[or our older siblings] and act accordingly. Vicki, Zoe, Turlough and Stephen
might have been ostensibly from the far future, but they all sounded and
behaved like 60’s teenagers. Similarly with Jamie and Victoria. The only
companions who, arguably, didn’t work were those with whom the audience could
not identify; no-one ever had a poster of Kamelion on their wall.
So the contestants/companions
have been transported into a realm where they must use their wit and stamina to
beat the forces that weigh in against them; the forces of faceless, reasoning
intelligence [often personified as a computer, as in Family Fortunes] and random chance.
What about the quizmaster? Well,
there are two types of game show host. There are the nice ones who work with the contestants, who cajole, joke
and encourage. And there are the nasty ones who stand against the contestants
and who subject them to cold, bitter interrogation. In recent years, the nasty
ones have gained more popularity [Anne Robinson, famously, though Jeremy Paxman
has a neat line in sarcasm]. It does not take a leap of insight to realise that
the hosts represent the Doctor/villain contention.
The nice hosts are, effectively,
the Doctor. In the case of The Crystal
Maze, Richard O’Brian’s unusual dress and eccentric banter meant that he
had effectively ruled himself out of the role of Doctor Who, on the grounds that he had already played the part for
several years. The hosts gain the friendship of the contestants whilst not
gaining their trust; this unequal relationship is essentially the same as that
between Doctor and companion.
The nasty hosts are the villains.
They dress in formal, black clothes, and they sit in a dark and spooky Villain
Den behind a Villain Desk in a high-backed Villain Chair. They are at the
centre of a web of power with controls and information and monitors at their
fingertips. They are the Controller, the Borad and Sutekh. They are the
question-Master, and they are to be feared.
This is quite neatly illustrated
within the series during its fingers-on-buzzers rounds, or, to use a more
appropriate term, interrogation scenes. In Genesis
Of The Daleks Davros has the Doctor strapped to a chair; name? Doctor.
Profession? Time traveller. Chosen specialist subject? The future history of
the Daleks. The parallels are so obvious I almost need not have drawn them.
What conclusions then, can we
draw from the above? Doctor Who is a game
show in many respects. It utilises the same devices to engage and entertain the
viewer, to bring them to the programme and make them addicted to it. It creates
suspense by posing questions. In particular, it involves the viewer by playing
games with them and making them work.
One of the buzzwords in the world
of television at the moment is ‘interactivity’. And, like all buzzwords, it is
used by people who have no idea what they’re talking about. The future of
television is, apparently, ‘interactive’.
Now, there are several ways in
which ‘interactivity’ can be achieved. You can have little URLs at the end of
every programme to encourage people to go to web sites. You can have
accompanying books, magazines and DVDs. The latest technological breakthrough
allows viewers to ‘take part’ in programmes by pressing buttons on their remote
controls, a development predicted in the wonderful Vengeance On Varos.
But this is completely missing
the point. Television doesn’t become interactive through buttons and web sites
and merchandise. Television is interactive through challenging its audience. Game shows, in which the viewer
constantly and consciously participates with the action, are the original
interactive television. And so is Doctor
Who. Simply by reading this article you are interacting with the show. Doctor Who is a programme that has
sparked our imaginations, a programme that has aroused our interest. A
programme that has taught us things and a programme which we have analysed and
discussed and studied. Another buzzword is ‘water-cooler-television’;
programmes that make people talk. Doctor
Who was water-cooler television in the playground; it was drinking-fountain
television.
But the problem is that the
people using the buzzwords believe that television is, essentially, a passive
experience. It’s television as wallpaper; Ground
Force and Animal Hospital and Changing Rooms and I Love 1983. Television where the viewer is just a consumer being
drip-fed with a product.
And that’s the important thing. Doctor
Who is different. Doctor Who is the original interactive television programme. That’s why it’s a game
show, first and foremost; because it’s a programme we all take part in.
+copy.jpg)
Interactivity is indeed the
future. After all, it’s the game shows that capture the publics’ imagination
and deliver the big audiences, isn’t it? Big
Brother. Popstars. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. The Weakest Link. Every television
channel is desperately searching for another format that will break through in
the same way. Another format with the same appeal for viewers, another
programme which viewers don’t just passively watch, but which actively engages
them on many levels and gives them something to think about.
So bring back the ultimate game
show. The greatest game show in the galaxy. Bring back Doctor Who.
After all, they did it with The Generation Game.
