Doctor Who

Well, I know that this might be a slightly boring subject for a lot of people *cough cough*, but I thought I’d just write a little thingummy about this particular TV show, you know, just because.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, it’s kind of a nice show. I mean, it’s quirky, it’s fun, it’s VERY British and it’s been going for, ooh, I can’t think how many years now . . .

. . .

OK fine, so everybody knows what I’m talking about here, don’t they? It’s a big deal and the whole world is now obsessed with it since Russell T Davies and Steven Moffatt and all the Cardiff crew have put it out there on a global scale for all the world to see.

I’ve seen all the hype all over the internet in the last few months (it’s been going on since January for God’s sake!), I’ve seen references to the show in all sorts of places and other shows. Brian Cox, the well known Professor, is said to be a fan – I’m even pretty sure that I heard Stephen Hawking likes it. I was also watching “The Big Bang Theory” the other day and the character of Sheldon was talking about how he watches it as a part of his obsessive compulsive morning routine.

Actually, it was this last one, more than anything else, that led me to write this rambling stuff that you’re about to read because, while it occurs to me to think how great it is that the world has embraced the new Who and gone mad for all the clever writing on the show, I wonder how much of the old series and the complicated 50 year history of it is familiar territory to the rest of the world? Presumably people in America, and in other countries across the globe, have had to catch up a bit with the old Doctors from 1963 to 1989, because I find it hard to imagine that people around the world were watching it all that time (of course they weren’t) and know all about it.

I’m not being territorial here, because I firmly believe that Doctor Who is for everyone, but the fact is that it has always been a typically British thing. The way it was made for a start, with the wobbly sets and the makeshift monsters, the fact that the spaceship was something as simple as a police telephone box as opposed to some sleek, complicated UFO type thing that the people in Hollywood might, quite easily, have been able to dream up. All of that is typical of British TV in the mid-to-late twentieth century – it was done on the cheap and it showed. It was all like that I think – pretty much. Even for things like ordinary comedy and drama, certainly for soap operas – there are stories about Coronation Street, in the early days, suffering from the same wobbly set syndrome. But I guess that people remember this more in the case of Doctor Who because there seemed to be a running joke, never quite spoken but always half-acknowledged, that this makeshift element of the show provided us with unequivocal evidence that British TV could not make sci-fi. I can’t really think of any other show that really tried to do that in this country; it was just sort of accepted that it wasn’t going to work . . . unless, of course, you did what Doctor Who did and acknowledge that “yes it’s all a bit mad, but that’s all part of the plan”. It was laughing at itself in that respect I think and it was supported by a nation who, without analyzing it, really just got the joke.

There’s a thing that Matt Smith has used in his incarnation, about the Doctor being a mad man in a box. Well, he is. But he was that exact thing more than ever in the old series I think because of the kind of imperfect but always-working-out in the end world that the Doctor inhabited there. All the CGI stuff they use now has taken that away slightly, and I kind of think that that has all been done simply to secure the interest of people in the USA and, probably, here. If we consider that people in the UK have pretty much been feeding themselves a diet of American TV, and thereby raising their standards for quite some time, then it stands to reason that anything they did with Doctor Who from the production side would have to be radically updated.

So I’m curious, I suppose, about how many people outside the UK had seen or heard of Doctor Who before they rebooted it in 2005? And how many, if they have seen the old stuff, think there is anything to it? I mean, if you’ve seen Jon Pertwee or Peter Davison or, outside possibility, if you’ve watched anything of Sylvester McCoy, do you “get” it?

Because it’s not necessarily something that people would “get” in that way. I mean, I’ve seen repeats of old American TV shows from before I was born. Things like “Blakes 7” or “Battlestar Galactica” or “Quincy”. And I have to say that they cross over quite well, because American culture has always been able to invade the rest of the world and be something of an open book. But something about our style of TV in the UK just seems to be different and so much of it is taken to be untranslatable; like I said above, it’s quirky to a lot of people.

When I was growing up it wasn’t on TV, but my dad, who was a massive fan of it, was always telling me that I should see it and be proud of it because it was a classic show that WE made and that we as a nation should remember fondly. He was always really disappointed that I did not have a Doctor of my own when I was growing up in the 1990s and I didn’t actually get to see an old episode of it until I was in my teens. I knew what it was, of course, because people still talked about it, but when I first saw it I just saw one episode on repeat and, without the longer narrative, I didn’t think it made much sense.

When I was 4, Sylvester McCoy was still playing him, and I think I must have seen some of that because I have a fairly vivid memory of seeing Sophie Aldred on the show with him and of recognizing her from her work as a children’s TV presenter on the BBC. But I was always taught not to like these episodes because, according to my dad and anyone else of his generation, by the end of it all it had been reduced to nothing more than a sappy children’s show and without any sort of scary monsters or gripping stories to speak of – even the Daleks were failing to grip people at that point it seems and the new flying feature that they took on somewhere in the very late ‘80s was only seen as a disappointing and desperate attempt to win viewers.

So when it disappeared no one was surprised and Sylvester McCoy is probably kicking himself to this day that he ever took the job since, as the Doctor who killed the show, he is not well remembered. (Sorry to be unfair to Sylvester McCoy because, as an actor, he is very fine and talented, but as the Doctor he was not so good. Sorry.)
The hey-day of the show was really in the 1970s with Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker and this is what most people remember. But later I think the adult audience sort of waned.

I don’t actually think that’s worthy of too much criticism really though – “Doctor Who” has always gone hand-in-hand with children’s television and I think it must always have been accepted that the larger fan-base for the show would be kids. It was actually developed for them, principally, I think. It wasn’t supposed to be a scary adult show when they first made it. In the UK we have a kids show called “Blue Peter”, which has been running as long, if not longer than “Doctor Who”. It’s is a kind of magazine-show, you know where they have presenters who do features (almost like journalists do features for the news) on fun things for kids and they show you how to make stuff from old food containers and sticky-back plastic. It’s not a show I ever liked much, I always found it a bit too wholesome and boring, but it had a lot in common with “Doctor Who” because most of the gadgets and monsters on the show looked as if it had been made by the guys on “Blue Peter” out of old cereal packets and tin trays. You only have to look at K-9 in the old series to know what I mean, he was almost certainly the product of a crazy recycling attempt . . . but I digress.

Aside from this, as far as my memory and general knowledge serves, the Doctor of the era would usually make an appearance on “Blue Peter” at some stage to do interviews and meet kids and generally get involved with the fans. I wasn’t alive when Tom Baker had his tenure, but I have an idea that he might have gone on kids TV and offered people jelly babies and let a lot of kids try on his scarf. It’s the kind of interactive thing that they were expected to do even then.

Now, of course, it seems to be much harder to be the Doctor – almost like being the Prime Minister or something. You know. There are a set of pressures and responsibilities on people like Matt Smith and David Tennant that I don’t think any of the other Doctors had. Not only do they have to play the role now, but they also have to BE the role for the kids they meet, they have to get involved with the kind of cultural impact that the show has – it’s probably done quite a lot for tourism and culture in Cardiff where they film, and I know for a fact that they now have a big, on-going exhibition in Cardiff where they show all the disused costumes and monster masks from the show. I believe it’s very popular and, because of its nature, probably has a close relationship with the show.

Then, there are the conventions they have to go to, not to mention all the spin-offs and side-shows that have sprung up in the aftermath of the reboot, which did not exist before and probably would not have done if it weren’t for the fact that most of the writers and producers on the new show were massive fans of the old series and spent most of their youth writing fan-fiction. I read something recently that said Steven Moffatt was pretty prolific at this and I think Russell T Davies must have been as well since most of the spin-off stuff was actually his idea. But my point is that now, either because it was intended to appeal to a much wider audience, or simply because there was a demand for it, the whole thing has got bigger and more complicated than ever.

So, what we had initially, this quirky thing with a mad man running around with a funny looking electronic wand thing that he, somehow, calls a screwdriver, has now become something else. And I think, for people living in the UK, that is both a wonderful thing and a slightly bizarre one. Because we all, even my generation who hardly knew anything about it at all, all of us grew up with this idea that it was just a show for us. The old show was a part of our history and culture, like music halls, bangers and mash, Punch and Judy shows, it was just a funny little thing on TV that everybody in England watched but that nobody on Earth expected the rest of the world to understand.

I guess what I’m saying is that it’s great that other countries have taken this to their hearts as well, and I’m even more amazed that it’s so popular in America because the USA has notoriously looked on UK culture as something quaint and a little bit strange. In previous decades this has been considered a bad thing and attempts to take our inventions and creations out there have not always gone well. But “Doctor Who” as it is now, has been well received and, perhaps also, as a result of this, the old show has started to receive a fan-base there too. I just can’t help wondering about what would have been the case if they had not re-booted it, and if the old show had been left as it was, with Sylvester McCoy as the last Doctor. No one outside of this country, and certainly nobody without a tendency towards geeky old sci-fi shows, would ever have watched it would they? Or would they?

Tell me what you think anyway, I’m always interested in obsessive telly fans and what kinds of things they love and hate. Who’s your favourite Doctor? Come on. :-)