Read Timeless Adventures Online
Authors: Brian J. Robb
Timeless Adventures
BRIAN J. ROBB
is the
New York Times
and
Sunday Times
bestselling biographer of Leonardo DiCaprio, Johnny Depp, and Brad Pitt. He has also written books on silent cinema, the films of Philip K. Dick, Wes Craven, and Laurel & Hardy, as well as Star Trek and Star Wars. He is the co-editor of the Sci-Fi Bulletin web site and lives in Edinburgh.
Dedicated to the God of all fanwank, Craig Hinton.
In Memoriam: Barry Letts (1925–2009)
Several people have been of great assistance in the process of writing (and rewriting) this book. I’m greatly indebted to Paul Simpson for reading the whole thing (several times) as a work in progress and helping me focus my thoughts (as well as catching the occasional factual error: any remaining errors or omissions are entirely my own).
Thanks are also due to Brigid Cherry who read and commented on the manuscript, and to the Titan Magazines’
Doctor Who
‘brains trust’ of Jonathan Wilkins, Simon Hugo and Adam Newell for many hours of
Who
-chat (that must have endlessly annoyed our colleagues).
Additional gratitude is due to all those I’ve known across more than 20 years of involvement in and around British
Doctor Who
fandom, from the Glasgow Braindead gang through to the late-1980s DWAS crowd and the DWB/Dreamwatch group (comprising far too many people through the years to name individually).
Special thanks are also due to Barry Letts, Philip Hinchcliffe and Andrew Cartmel.
7.
Regeneration
Doctor Who
is an amazing television phenomenon. Any 50th birthday is a momentous occasion, all the more so for one of a mere handful of popular TV shows (outside of soap operas) to have made it to the half century and still be on air, as exciting and as fresh as ever. In 2013,
Doctor Who
reached that half-century milestone, just as it was refreshing itself again with the arrival of the twelfth actor to play the mysterious Time Lord title role.
Doctor Who
has a unique and endlessly variable premise. At its most basic it is about the adventures of the heroic Doctor, travelling through time and space in his police box-shaped TARDIS, with a human companion along for the ride. With that set-up, the series can be anything, from knockabout farce to gothic horror, deep-space adventure to an internal drama within someone’s mind. Adventures can be galaxy-spanning, or take place within a virtual fantasy environment like the Matrix (first featured in
Doctor Who
in 1976), or even somewhere as mundane as Tooting Bec.
Doctor Who
began life as a Saturday-evening television series in 1963, and it was back on Saturday night that it triumphed in the ratings in 2013, the show’s fiftieth-anniversary year. In between, the infinitely adaptable premise has seen
Doctor Who
stories told through just about every media available, from movies to audio dramas, computer games to Internet episodes. It has spun off a whole host of merchandising, from the 1960s period of ‘Dalekmania’ to the more recent flood of new series tie-ins.
Doctor Who
’s genius is that, in the guise of a family adventure series, it is
sui generis
, above being categorised as belonging to one specific genre or another. Often perceived as science fiction, the show is generically all-encompassing, as the past 50 years of adventures (in all media) have amply demonstrated. It’s a pop-cultural artefact that appeals to the imagination, and – like the Doctor’s greatest enemies, the Daleks – it has been able to survive and prosper, continually coming back after facing almost certain destruction.
Although most notoriously put on ‘hiatus’ for 18 months in 1985,
Doctor Who
has repeatedly had to fight for survival within the BBC at various crisis points in its 50-year history. Very early on, there was doubt that the show would survive beyond the initial 13 episodes. The impact of the arrival of the Daleks on viewing figures saved the series and allowed it to prosper throughout the 1960s. The next crisis came with the replacement of the lead actor, William Hartnell, by Patrick Troughton, challenging audiences to accept a new actor as the title character. Troughton saw the series through to the next threatened cancellation point at the end of the 1960s, when the BBC were actively exploring replacements for the then six-year-old show. Renewed to run in colour, the five years of Jon Pertwee’s stint under producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks was a period of consolidation, with steady audiences and strong support from within the BBC. That all changed, however, later in the 1970s, when Tom Baker played the lead for seven years and the show hit its highest viewing figures, whilst also facing a sustained attack by Mary Whitehouse and the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association. Accusations of gratuitous violence brought a premature end to producer Philip Hinchcliffe’s run of gothic-horror-style stories, and saw him replaced by Graham Williams, working to a BBC-dictated brief to reduce the tea-time horror and increase the humour. John Nathan-Turner’s decade-long run at the helm in the 1980s was a rollercoaster ride for the series and saw it undergo dramatic changes, with him casting three Doctors: Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy. The lowest point saw the show pulled off air (again due to perceived gore and violence) and ‘rested’ for 18 months in 1985. When it returned, little had been done to creatively refresh the by now 22-year-old show. This period culminated in the production team fighting amongst themselves, cutting short Sixth Doctor Colin Baker’s tenure. The arrival of script editor Andrew Cartmel and new Doctor Sylvester McCoy saw the series dramatically reinvigorated, but it all came too late as viewing figures crashed to little over three million, leading to outright cancellation in 1989. While reaching respectable viewing figures of around nine million, the one-off, US-made TV movie starring Paul McGann in 1996 failed to lead to a series. It was only with strong executive support from within the BBC that Russell T Davies (a self-proclaimed fan of the original run of the show) was able to relaunch
Doctor Who
in 2005 to critical acclaim and audience acceptance, revitalising Saturday evening family viewing and culminating in the celebratory 50th anniversary special in 2013.
Doctor Who
is one of the most written-about TV shows in history – if not the most written about. The reasons for this are many and complex, but much of it is down to the participatory fandom that has grown up around the show, and the fact that (despite all its ups and downs) the show has a unique connection to British television audiences. There are books of
Doctor Who
lists, many episode guides (some more useful or insightful than others), several very good production histories (and some not so good) and a growing body of academic literature tackling the original and revived versions of the show. So why add another volume?
This
Doctor Who
book attempts to achieve three key things. Firstly, it’s a basic introduction to the series and its 50-year history on British television. Chapter one is an in-depth account of the show’s creation and the cultural and social factors that affected its development. However, this book’s history of the show is tackled from a very different perspective than most others. The thesis here is that
Doctor Who
earned its place in the affections of British TV audiences because underneath its fantastical adventures was a critique of contemporary social, political and cultural issues, from the 1960s through to the twenty-first century. Fantasy is often seen as divorced from reality, offering an escape from everyday cares. At worst, it is seen as a refuge for the socially inadequate or the desperate. It’s a damned genre perceived as having little social relevancy. This could not be further from the truth. The best fantasy – like all stories we tell ourselves – has a subtext that deals with important realities and makes it more engaging for an audience. At its best, this is what
Doctor Who
did with its privileged access to generations of family audiences on Saturday evenings in the 1960s and 1970s.
Taking this idea on board, chapters two to five cover the key periods of the series’ history, with a special emphasis on those adventures that reveal an engagement with the social, political and cultural history of Britain. The series arguably suffered in the 1980s (chronicled in chapter five) when it abdicated the key to this unique relationship by turning its back on the mass audience and their concerns to pander instead to the narrower interests of
Doctor Who
’s dedicated fanbase.
And this brings us to the second key focus:
Doctor Who
fandom (explored in depth in chapter six). This began with a number of likeminded individuals who appreciated the show and grew into a series of cliques, some of them actively affecting the direction the series took and others heavily criticising the choices being made.
I’m proud to say that I’m a
Doctor Who
fan, something it hasn’t always been easy to admit in polite society. Once upon a time, fans (of anything, but mainly of SF TV shows or film series) were seen as geeky loners severely lacking in social skills, clutching a plastic bag of memorabilia. Like all stereotypes, there are such fans. However, it seems that, now,
everyone
is a
Doctor Who
fan!
I’ve been part of active fandom for many years. I’ve edited
Celestial Toyroom
(the officially sanctioned
Doctor Who
Appreciation Society newsletter), and I’ve written for
Doctor Who Bulletin
(the rebel title that opposed the official view) and edited the later incarnation when it was called
Dreamwatch
. In the late-1980s, I regularly met with
Doctor Who
producer John Nathan-Turner to gather news for
Celestial Toyroom
and attended studio recordings of the series at Television Centre. I wrote a history of the coverage of
Doctor Who
in the
Radio Times
for the official
Doctor Who Magazine
. My connections even run through to the current series, when I visited the set of the new
Doctor Who
(when it was in Newport) and saw the new TARDIS interior before it was made public. I’ve been several times to the Cardiff Upper Boat studio complex where
Doctor Who
, and the two spin-off series
Torchwood
and
The Sarah Jane Adventures
, are made. It’s amazing to still be involved (however peripherally) almost 20 years on.
Active, involved fans from the 1980s became those entrusted with continuing the
Doctor Wh
o legacy while the TV series was off the air, developing the character’s adventures in novels, comic-strips and audio plays, as well as researching and chronicling the making of the original show in sometimes absurd depth. It was due to the action of dedicated fans that the BBC was prevented from wiping any more old episodes in the late 1970s, and many of those same fans were responsible for the recovery and restoration of many episodes now released by the BBC on DVD and CD. The continuation of
Doctor Who
in audio drama by Big Finish has meant that the actors who play the title character never really give up the role. Paul McGann is still playing the Eighth Doctor on audio, over 13 years after his oneshot TV movie appearance. Similarly, Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy have all continued to develop their Doctors, long after their time on TV was up.
