Back when I started up this journal, over a year ago now, and I presented a list of series I intended to cover (a large percentage of which have been or are being featured, with more waiting in the wings for imminent release) Unknown Soldier brought up the subject of
Doctor Who. Would I be looking at that long-running (longest-ever running) BBC science-fiction drama? I thought about it and I said it was unlikely, given what I had already in the pipeline, but that if I did attempt it it would only be from the “rebirth” of 2005 onwards. In other words, I would only be looking at the “New Who”, when the show was reimagined by Russell T. Davies with Christopher Eccleston in the role of the ninth Doctor. Why? I’ll tell you what I told him at the time.
Although I watched the series when it was on BBC when I was a lad, I did this for reasons that the younger ones among you will find hard to relate to. The first reason was that back then, in the seventies, we had about four TV channels. There was no digital telly and we didn’t even own a video recorder --- in fact, for much of my earlier youth videos were not even invented or at least commercially available. So you had to choose carefully what you wanted to watch, and it could run like this on a Saturday evening: RTE (Irish national TV station) showing the news and the
Late Late Show (boring chat show), UTV (Ulster TV, the “Northern Irish” part of our viewing, even though it was an English channel --- think Channel 4 before there was a Channel 4) maybe
Coronation Street (soap opera that has been running for 14,509 years now), BBC 1 might have sports results or some gameshow and BBC 2 would be showing
Doctor Who. Now, for a 10-15 year old, bored with no internet or XBox, no mobile phone, no computer even, such a choice was obvious and a no-brainer.
The second reason was that I was already becoming a fan of science-fiction, so whether it was a movie about giant ants, a cartoon with rockets in it or even a dry documentary about going to the moon, I was in.
Star Trek, Blake's 7, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (yeah I know!),
Battlestar Galactica ... I watched them all, devoured them with the almost insatiable hunger of the young and bored and restless. And
Doctor Who, terrible though it actually was, fit right in to these preferences. Thirdly, I watched it because if you didn't then they might be discussing it at school and you'd be left out of the conversation if you hadn't seen it. As I said, there were no video recorders so you watched it there and then or you didn't get to see it at all. Finally, like every young boy at the time, then and since, I watched it because it had girls in it. Well, one girl. But many of the other sci-fi shows did not, though some did. It sort of tilted the balance and made up your mind if you were wavering. Then there was the music. Iconic, spooky, scary, always something to look forward to on a Saturday, even if the episode itself left rather a lot to be desired.
So basically we watched
Doctor Who because it was the best out of what was showing. I’m quite certain now that if I had the choice, with the hundreds of channels, SKY Plus box, internet, videogames and a hundred other distractions we have now, I would not choose to watch classic Who. In fact, it showed a while back and I wasn’t interested. The thing is, Classic Who, to me, was terrible. I know Urban and Unknown Soldier will want to crucify me or feed me to the Daleks for that comment, but it was. The sets were shaky, the acting often awful, the scripts laughable and the effects largely non-existent. I’m not saying that to get at
Doctor Who specifically; back then, the budgets weren’t available and the technology did not exist to allow any sci-fi show to realise its true potential. As the seventies turned to the eighties and into the nineties, and more updated techniques came to the fore, and with the rise of CGI and digital television, on into HD and 3D, television science-fiction strode forward in leaps and bounds. But back then, in the sixties and seventies, the possibilities were very limited.
The result being that shows like
Doctor Who, Lost in space and others looked crap. But to be fair, it wasn’t just the sets or the effects.
Blake's Seven was a show that came up around the same time as I was watching
Doctor Who and though its effects were equally terrible, and some of the acting as bad, the stories were much better overall. US asked me to include that show too, and well the jury’s still out: at the moment I’m finding it hard to even find a source for the show before I can even think of reviewing it, so please stand by but don’t hold your breath. The point I’m making here is that, were there anything better on at the time I doubt I would have watched the original
Doctor Who, and now that there is, I would not even think of going back to watch it. Urban is doing a great job on it in his “Doctor Who thing”, but mostly --- and I realise this is because he intentionally started with the worst episodes first --- he’s laughing at it, saying how bad it was and just basically taking the piss out of it. I feel that way when I occasionally catch an episode, and I find it hard to believe that the “New Who” is based on that original show at all. It’s light years ahead of its parent, but of course with the passage of time you would expect, even demand that. Look at “new”
Battlestar Galactica compared to the original, or even
Star Trek: the Next Generation beside classic
Trek. The series has to grow, expand, mature, both in terms of effects, settings, acting and storylines, and in its appeal to the ever-changing audience demographic. Original
Trek was for young boys who wanted adventures in space, whereas “new”
Trek concerned itself more with political and environmental issues, and gave much more powerful and dominant roles to women, who had been mostly relegated to the equivalent of answering the phones in original Trek: receptionists in space, indeed.
So the new
Doctor Who targeted a double demographic: those who had grown up on the original and those who had never seen it, but would nevertheless appreciate a well-written, well-constructed and above all enjoyable show. Which just happened to be a sci-fi one. Original
Who was very much up its own arse and there was little, as I remember it, real humour or self-deprecation about it. New
Who changes all that, and with its, so far, three incarnations of the Doctor and a new one on the way, has won new fans and probably in all likelihood alienated many purists who grump and fold their arms and complain that it’s become a “kids’ show”, forgetting that originally that was the audience at which
Doctor Who was aimed in the sixties.
You surely know the basics of the show one way or another. If you’ve been following Urban’s Doctor Who Thing (and if not, I expect a very good explanation on my desk Monday morning at nine o’clock!) he’ll have filled you in on the basic premise of the series, but very briefly The Doctor (no other name, and no he’s not called Doctor Who) is a Timelord, an alien from a race of time-travellers who live on a planet called Gallifrey and basically police the universe. After many run-ins with humans the Doctor has come to grow fond, and indeed protective of the Earth, and fights many enemies who wish to destroy, enslave, sell or otherwise mess with our home planet. Oddly, he has no special powers
per se --- he’s not a superhero --- but he does have the benefit of over nine hundred years’ experience to draw on, and as he goes from adventure to adventure his fame --- and respect for him --- has spread, to the point where often the mere mention of his name has been enough to scatter whole invading battlefleets, who suddenly think
well maybe Orisis IX in the Crab Nebula was a much nicer planet: let’s invade there instead! He also has the undoubted advantage of not really dying: he can "regenerate", that is, take on a new form, each time he comes close to death. But the number of regenerations is limited, otherwise he'd be immortal. At the time of the rebirth of the series he is on his ninth incarnation.
The Doctor travels through time and space in his spaceship, a blue old-style fifties police box called the TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimensions In Space), and almost always has a human companion with him, nearly always female. The Companion keeps him grounded, reminds him who he is and stops him occasionally going off the deep end. One or two have been instrumental in saving his life too. He has many enemies, of whom the best known are of course the Daleks (or, if you live in Ireland, Dar-licks!) and the Cybermen, who all for some unknown reason seem to think Earth is the place to be. You’d think there’d be enough planets across time and space for them to hassle but no, they always have to come knocking on our door.
I used to read my sci-fi/cult TV mags and note with amusement the campaigns for, rumours of and denials about the return of
Doctor Who. After all, it was cancelled by the BBC in 1989, and looked a dead duck. But fan campaigns persisted, people speculated on how, when and who, and finally, after more controversy than a reunion of Pink Floyd or the Beatles, the word was officially out:
Doctor Who was returning, and it would be better than ever. I suppose someone in an office in BBC Towers must have finally realised this could be a huge moneyspinner, and cash speaks loudest. Therefore on March 26 2005, almost nine years to the day as I write this (well, a few weeks off) Christopher Eccleston, who had made his name in series like
Cracker, Our friends in the north and
Clocking off, as well as movies like
Existenz, 28 days later and
The Others, stepped onto our TV screens as the hard-man northerner ninth incarnation of the Doctor, and after sixteen years the BBC’s
enfant terrible was back. And it was indeed better.
Unlike Urban, I’ll be doing my usual on the series. I may take an occasional pot-shot at some gaffe or unfortunate error of judgement in storywriting but I will generally be taking this seriously. There were, undoubtedly, bad episodes across the so-far eight season run of “New
Who” (which, for the sake of my sanity and the preservation of inverted commas everywhere I will only refer to from here on in as
Doctor Who, with the explicit understanding that I am only talking about the new series) but the good mostly outweighed the bad, and when they were good sometimes they were very very good indeed. I’ll be starting my coverage soon, and some of my material may indeed dovetail with what Urban is writing. So if you want a straightforward, serious look at how New
Who (last time I’ll use the phrase I promise) beats the crap out of Old
Who, check out this journal. If you want comments on how bad Old Who could be, read Urban. Or better yet, read us both. We’re sort of doing the same thing, though in two extremely different ways.