The Doctor becomes involved in a plot to rescue the Prince of Tara, or is that Zenda?
You know, you’re fast becoming a prey to every cliché-ridden convention of the American West.
—The Doctor, “The Gunfighters” (1966)
It has been tried before.
—The Doctor, “The Androids of Tara” (1978)
These two lines of dialogue spoken by the Doctor are ironic, even rather cheeky, acknowledgments that Doctor Who borrows heavily from the themes, imagery, and even entire plots of many other sources. The first quote is from “The Gunfighters,” a 1966 story which I will revisit in more detail in chapter 8, and which is a rare instance of a British western. It is filled with actors attempting (bravely in some instances) to perform in American accents and features many gunfights, horses, and western ballads. As such—as the Doctor himself helpfully observes at one point—it leaves no cliché of the western untouched. “The Androids of Tara” contains some features in common with “The Gunfighters.” It is a story of adventure, capture, fights, and escapes from peril. It shares even more in common with another source from beyond Doctor Who’s own diegesis (or internal storytelling): Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda. Hope, a Victorian lawyer who found success as a novelist, published his swashbuckler in 1894. Since then the novel has been adapted on numerous occasions, including as a play that opened in New York in 1895, as an operetta in 1922, and as major motion pictures in 1937 and 1952 (although there had been a film version as early as 1913). Then in 1978 it resurfaced, barely disguised, as a Doctor Who serial, from which the second quote above comes. “The Androids of Tara” tells the story of plotting and adventure in the fictional kingdom of Tara. The young Prince Reynart is shortly to be crowned king but is kidnapped by the wicked Count Grendel. The Prince’s sympathizers (including the Doctor) use an android double of the Prince as a substitute during the coronation, before eventually defeating Grendel’s schemes. Grendel, however, is not captured but lives to fight another day. It is not a long or difficult process to find the analogues to The Prisoner of Zenda, which tells the story of Rudolf Rassendyll, who is a close double of the Prince of Zenda and stands in for him during the coronation after the Prince has been kidnapped by Black Michael. Michael’s plans are thwarted, but he lives to fight another day.
In this instance, the similarities are obvious, and indeed the makers of this Doctor Who story—including the scriptwriter David Fisher, producer Graham Williams, and director Michael Hayes—lost no opportunity to hammer home the message that their story is a pastiche of Hope’s novel. The Prisoner of Zenda begins with the hero, Rudolf, quietly fishing, which is how Prince Reynart’s men find the Doctor at the start of his adventure. The Doctor’s ideas for rescuing the Prince by using a double seems an excellent idea to his allies, but “it has been tried before” as the Doctor admits in a wry acknowledgment of Hope’s inspiration. The major difference—there are robots in the Doctor Who version that were not in Hope’s Victorian original—only serves to reinforce how closely in all other respects this serial is a rewrite of Hope’s novel.
And why not? Hope’s novel was an immediate sensation when published. Hope himself realized he was onto a good thing and published a sequel, Rupert of Hentzau, in 1898. Since then the book has been condensed, issued as a spoken-word book, reduced into a simplified version for children, and experienced other adaptations besides. Neither is Doctor Who the only program whose makers decided that it would be a good idea to revisit Hope’s novel. In the episode of the American spy parody Get Smart, “The King Lives” (1968), Maxwell Smart, Agent 99, and the Chief traveled to “Caronia,” a central European kingdom, to prevent the wicked Basil of Caronia from kidnapping the King before his coronation and seizing the throne. Thankfully, it turns out that Maxwell Smart is a near double in appearance to the King of Caronia and can serve as a substitute when the King is kidnapped. The Get Smart episode is even parody at one remove; it does not so much borrow from the original source novel but parodies the lavish 1937 cinema adaptation produced by David O. Selznick, including Maxwell Smart’s mimicking of Ronald Colman’s uptight and constipated aristocratic accent from the film. The fundamental contours of Hope’s plot—of an exact double of a ruler standing in for the King—has also informed plots of works as otherwise disparate as the 1939 film The Magnificent Fraud, where the story of an actor standing in for a head of state was transferred to a South American republic, and Dave, the 1993 Kevin Kline comedy about the US president’s body double who was called on when the president suffered a massive stroke. Danny Kaye’s The Court Jester (1955) and The Inspector General (1949) are also indebted to Hope’s plot.
Clearly Doctor Who is not distinctive in borrowing, even to a remarkable level, from other sources. There are schools of thought that remind us that original ideas in the world of fiction are finite in number and perhaps even limited to single figures. Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots is a recent (2004) reassertion of this common idea. Booker suggests that among the ideas are quests, tragedies, and comedies.[1] Others would suggest that there may be more in number, but there is general concurrence that there are a limited number of plot archetypes, even if these split off into many variants. There may, for example, be distinctions in literary quality, depth of characterization, or cultural impact between Jane Austen’s novels and those of the romantic novelist Barbara Cartland, but much less difference in terms of the basic “boy meets girl” stories they tell. Let’s not forget that Shakespeare is by no means the only Renaissance playwright to have written plays about King Lear or Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.[2]
While borrowing or adaptation may therefore be by no means unique to Doctor Who—and may even be essential to storytelling in general if the number of original ideas really is quite limited—my goal in this book is to give an in-depth study of the ways that Doctor Who’s makers have adapted other sources into the plots and themes of their stories. This goal moves me into controversial territory, relating to questions of fidelity between a source and the adapting work, and suggesting the limits of originality. Both fidelity (meaning faithfulness in adapting a work) and being original when writing or creating a dramatic work have traditionally been cherished and valorized, but in the case of Doctor Who, either quality can sometimes be hard to locate. Adaptations, however, proliferate; as Christopher Marlow succinctly puts it, “The history of Doctor Who is the history of adaptation.”[3] This circumstance means that across fifty years, Doctor Who registers as a cross-media creation, in dialogue with a wide range of sources, ideas, and creative impulses. To study adaptation in Doctor Who is therefore not just to look at one program and the how and why it got made, but at entire media and textual cultures and traditions.
Doctor Who is a drama series that has been broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) since 1963. The original series (now often called the “classic series”) ran from 1963 until 1989, when it was canceled by the BBC. There was a brief revival in a one-off television movie in 1996, and since 2005 the “new series” has run on the BBC and at the time of writing remains in production. From the first broadcast on November 23, 1963, up to December 25, 2013, there have been 800 episodes made, spread across 241 stories.[4] Even a casual perusal of both classic and new series indicates that their creators have taken inspiration, or even entire plots, from other sources, but it would be beyond the scope of this book to look at all these stories, and a particular selection will be the basis of each chapter’s discussion.
For those unfamiliar with the series, Doctor Who’s central character is a time traveler called the Doctor. The Doctor is an alien from the planet Gallifrey and is a member of a race called the Time Lords. Because he is a Time Lord, the Doctor can avoid death by regenerating and changing his appearance. His mode of travel is a time and space craft called the TARDIS (an acronym for Time and Relative Dimension in Space). Inside the craft is infinite, but from the outside it looks like a London Metropolitan Police telephone box.
The Doctor rarely travels alone and normally is accompanied by one or more companions—originally his granddaughter Susan and currently a young woman named Clara Oswald. Doctor Who is also a global phenomenon and a major ratings and merchandising success. Although the program is often also described as quintessentially British, the chapters that follow also show the program’s makers to have been omnivorous consumers of sources that are diversely international (including the western, a genre quintessentially American).
This book examines the variety of ways that narratives, themes, and sometimes entire plots from diverse sources were adapted into Doctor Who stories. Doctor Who has attracted an enormous body of critical and academic attention, but hitherto there has been limited focus on the way its writers, directors, scriptwriters, and producers have adapted from other sources, and so far no in-depth study of this adaptation and its impact on the program has appeared. Numerous books on Doctor Who have examined different aspects of the program from its technical and production history, to biographies of its leading actors and behind-the-scenes personnel, as well as academic studies of the program’s televisual history, its audiences, or its many spin-offs. These studies include major works by John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado, James Chapman, and Matt Hills.[5] Recent studies of particular dimensions of the program, including the racial politics implicit in its narratives and the portrayal of religion within the program, are indicative of the continuing critical interest in the program and the different approaches that inform study of it and the types of questions that can be used to interrogate the program, its themes, and its history.[6] Books already published include works that have addressed highly specific aspects of source adaptation, including mythology and philosophy. The volume The Mythological Dimensions of Doctor Who explored the way that classical myths and legends have fed into the program’s narratives, while The Humanism of Doctor Who: A Critical Study of Science Fiction and Philosophy and Doctor Who and Philosophy: Bigger on the Inside offered similar analyses of the philosophical underpinnings of the program.[7]
But study of adaptation within Doctor Who lags behind the field of adaptation studies in general. This field has in recent years experienced a critical revival and has opened up new and exciting areas for study. Traditionally, adaptation studies related to interpreting strategies for storytelling when a book was adapted into a film. This critical focus has since widened in terms of the sources interpreted and the types of questions asked. Adaptations are now recognized not only in film and television programs, but in video games, comics, theme park rides, merchandise, and a multiplicity of other textual types and popular cultural outputs. Adaptation theory is applied to interpret what can be termed the “moment” of adaptation, or the transformation of an original source into the adapted work, and adaptation studies in general seek to register and interpret the cultural interest created by this moment of change.[8] Adaptation theory suggests that where a transgression or change from the original reality is most pronounced, there will be generated the highest level of cultural interest. Adaptation theory also reinforces the importance of medium. In Doctor Who’s case it is television, and adaptation theory also can be applied to interpret the reshaping of a source into a medium-specific creation, such as the transition of a poem, film, myth, or murder mystery into a television production. All these types of sources have been the basis of Doctor Who stories.
Throughout this book I draw on insights from adaptation theory in order to suggest the nature and implications—in terms of the types of stories told—of Doctor Who’s creators having adapted from sources. Neither adaptations nor interpretations of them are static. Among the Doctor Who stories I study are examples of what Peter Brooker calls a “more intensively . . . ironic and self-reflexive” set of adaptations from sources such as classic literature.[9] In turn, adaptation theory itself has developed in enriching directions, moving past the traditional emphasis on studying the fidelity of a film adaptation to a source novel into more adventurous areas, reflecting the more adventurous adaptations now made. Inherent in the traditional interrogation of the adaptation of a book into a screen version were several judgments that are critically questionable, including value judgments of the “fidelity” of the adaptation to the source and criticism of works that are putatively “betrayals” of the adapted work.[10] These judgments do not assist in examining adaptation in Doctor Who. If placed within the traditional fidelity paradigm, arguably every adaptation would be a “betrayal” in some way, from gentle mockery of westerns to inserting androids into a story of Victorian adventure. Instead in Doctor Who the significance and importance of the adaptation process lie in the transgression and the extent of the transgression from the source or sources. In moving beyond the fidelity paradigm, more recent theorists have begun to explore the notion of adaptation as both a process and an object, and to break down the traditional conception of adaptation as comprising a single identifiable source. Moving away from fidelity, or even the idea of an adapting work being derivative of a prior source, it is possible to reorient adaptation as a vital and organic process. Julie Sanders expresses this idea usefully, arguing that “texts feed off each other and create other texts.”[11] When these insights are taken on board, it becomes both limiting and difficult to be concerned with “fidelity,” not least because an adapted work cannot be simultaneously faithful to multiple points of origin. It is more stimulating and more fruitful to think in terms of intertextual dialogue and to interpret works that are in dialogue with each other, in terms of the adapted work with an original source, or multiple points of origin in dialogue with each other within the narrative of the adapting work.[12]
Examining the adaptation of sources into Doctor Who stories can take us into controversial areas. Doctor Who’s makers seem on occasion—perhaps none more so than with “The Androids of Tara”—to have sailed very close to the wind in terms of the outright plagiarism of ideas. Doctor Who not only provides exceptional opportunity for study of adaptations of other sources and ideas, but also demands sustained study of its processes of adaptation given the centrality of borrowing to the way the program has told—and continues to tell—its stories. The creative potential of the program, and the creative intentions and ambitions of its makers, can all be assessed by thinking about them as adapters. Across fifty years of its production we are faced with not only a wide range of stories that program makers borrowed from, but also widely ranging strategies they followed to make their adaptations. Doctor Who is a fruitful means for exploring, interpreting, and attempting to understand this major impulse in storytelling at all levels and of all types to borrow, take from, and recreate stories. It is also striking that these adaptations are often built into a narrative that can have multiple points of origin. Adaptation in Doctor Who is thus different from many other television programs or even films. As Lorna Jowett Stacey and Abbott point out in their recent survey of television horror, most television adaptations are advertised as adaptations, because the adapted source can be used to market the program.[13] In other words, there is a pre-sold audience.[14] Adaptations abound in Doctor Who, but they are there not as proclaimed or marketed ideas but as the foundations of stories. They are not a selling point in a direct way but are the basis of narratives.
Several decades of theoretical speculation about storytelling have developed ideas concerning “adaptation,” but they have also raised a great deal of debate among writers as to what adaptation may be and what the implications of textual borrowing may be in terms of measuring originality or evaluating a text. The starting point for my analysis is that over fifty years, Doctor Who has come to sit prominently in both popular and academic culture, but the program has also absorbed a great deal from contemporary and earlier cultural tropes and archetypes. This point is usefully clarified by scholar Linda Hutcheon, who has written extensively on theories of adaptation and asserts that “adaptations are everywhere today: on the television and movie screen, on the musical and dramatic stage, on the Internet, in novels and comic books, in your nearest theme park and video arcade.”[15] This comment immediately pinpoints the importance of adaptation as a major means of understanding the strategies of storytelling, as well as the artistic and commercial priorities of the creators of a wide range of texts and media.
Television in particular is an adaptive medium; Doctor Who’s own channel, the BBC, is creatively indebted to the stories and characters of many long-dead English novelists. Especially in the earlier decades of the Corporation’s broadcasting—the 1940s and 1950s—there were few original teleplays not taken from a source novel, with only a few notable original stories such as Nigel Kneale’s three Quatermass science fiction serials of 1953, 1955, and 1958. This is where Doctor Who comes in; as created in 1963 by a team of writers and executives in the Corporation’s Drama Department, the program immediately seemed different from many other shows in the same stable: it was an original work, not an adaptation of a novel, play, poem, or short story. Accordingly the template, or perhaps what we might call the general concept of Doctor Who, was original; there was no novel being turned into a serial. Because of this factor, the way we think about adaptation in terms of Doctor Who needs precise understanding. The methodology of many writers on adaptation studies has been to follow a binary pattern: setting original source (normally a novel) against the adapted version (such as a film) and comparing and contrasting them.[16] No such simple contrasts exist in Doctor Who, where the adaptations are often ironic or allusive and are far from being straightforward. Even a seemingly slavish copy of a source such as “Androids of Tara” contains transgressive elements, namely the androids themselves.
Across its so far fifty years of production, Doctor Who has told a wide range of stories, deploying diverse means of telling them, with different settings and characterizations, and showing the influence of many different types of sources. In the midst of this diversity there may seem to be little consistency. Even the central character of the Doctor has shifted and changed over the decades and so far has been played in very different ways by twelve (or even more) actors, with the thirteenth official Doctor recently cast.[17] But there are some core elements that we can distill. While there are diverse permutations in terms of the sources adapted, these different plot archetypes are used by Doctor Who’s writers and producers to create stories within the overarching theme of attack from without and a struggle against alien menace. Almost always the Doctor, aided by companions and some temporary allies who are characters drawn from the particular story, confronts and defeats a menace and fights injustice. In stories set on Earth this will be an alien menace, but regardless of setting it may be a mad scientist, an alien parasite, a robotic race, or some other form of danger. Some of these menaces recur, and the Doctor has been fighting some, including Daleks, Cybermen, and Ice Warriors, from the 1960s origins of the program up to the most recent stories in the revived series. Other alien creatures and villains have appeared only once. Analysis of the titles of the individual serials shows that particular words have often recurred as scriptwriters’ choices for encapsulating what their stories are about; commonly used words in titles include “death,” “time,” “terror,” “enemy,” “doom,” “invasion,” and “evil,” giving a fairly good impression of what the program is about.[18]
Technically then Doctor Who is a program that can tell any type of story, precisely because the Doctor’s TARDIS can take him to any place in this universe or others, at any time. This has on occasion even extended to other universes beyond our own. But as we shall see, due to the obvious limitations of budget, resources, and time, and simply because the program’s base of production and chief viewership was and still is located in southern Britain, more often than not the Doctor and his companions fight their battles in defense of the Home Counties, or the counties in South East and the of eastern England that surround London.
Nonetheless, diversity can be found in other aspects of the program beyond setting, and the imaginative potential of Doctor Who reveals itself in the breathtaking variety of sources and influences that its makers have used. Starting with Homer’s Iliad, through a potpourri of texts—including classical literature, gothic and body horror, swashbucklers, Jacobean revenge tragedies, Orwellian dystopias, the Sherlock Holmes stories, westerns, and detective fiction—the producers, directors, and writers of Doctor Who have demonstrated an inexhaustible appetite for devouring other types of texts, characters, ideas, and themes.
In the chapters that follow I will first explore the types of sources adapted into Doctor Who stories, the personnel and writers responsible for doing so, and their reasons for doing so. In part I, the chapters will in turn interrogate the issues of what is adapted, who did the adapting, and why they did so. Then in part II there will be studies of specific instances, or case studies, of particular sources and the serials into which they modulated. In part I a wide selection of both classic and recent serials are under review, whereas in part II each chapter will focus on a few serials only. In part II we start with some of the oldest sources adapted into Doctor Who stories—the classical literature of ancient Greece and Rome. Then in order, the chapters will examine Victorian literature and its neo-Victorian offshoots as the basis of Doctor Who serials; gothic cinema from Britain and America; the influence of American-style westerns on both older and recent Doctor Who stories; the ways in which Agatha Christie’s crime novels have been reconfigured as murder mysteries accented by science fiction trappings; and then finally the way that diverse sources—with seemingly nothing in common—could be brought together as a range of harmonized influences to create individual stories (in this case looking at the fusion of Jacobean revenge tragedy, the science fiction writer Harry Harrison, and Evelyn Waugh in the stories “The Caves of Androzani” and “Revelation of the Daleks”). Nowhere else but in Doctor Who would one find these types of texts brought together as mutually reinforcing sources. In these chapters there will appear many different texts, from works by Shakespeare, Homer, the Jacobean tragedists, the Queens of Crime, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, to film and television texts from the Alien series to Hammer horror. However, these works will most often appear in unfamiliar lights, not simply as inspirations for Doctor Who serials but as works recreated in ways that often transgress the original sources. Across these chapters I will assess some of the most popular classic stories from the 1963–1989 series and the most recent stories from the successfully revived program made by Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat. In terms of methodology, it is my intention to assess the 1963–1989 and the 2005– series together, and I believe it would be artificial to separate them. As we drill down to the details, it will become clear that neither incarnation was a consistent entity. Instead producers, directors, script editors, writers, and actors have worked on the program at different times, influencing it with often wildly divergent ideas. However, adaptation is a consistent impulse across different eras and different production regimes, and this common impulse brings different eras of the program together in the analysis that follows. I will also seek to shed light on some of the forgotten aspects of the program, including little-known serials lost from the archives. However, I start with Doctor Who’s own beginning: the writing, casting, and production of the first episode in 1963 and the myriad people who brought the show to life.
Perkin, “How Many Stories Are There?”
Ousby, ed., Cambridge Guide, 542.
Marlow, “Folding Text,” 46.
Useful overviews of all serials are available on the BBC’s websites for the “classic” and “new” Doctor Who at http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/episodeguide and http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006q2x0.
The foundation for much subsequent analysis was set by the pioneering text by Tulloch and Alvarado, Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text, which has since been supplemented by a wide body of monographs, edited collections, and journal articles, especially Hills, Triumph of a Time Lord; Muir, Critical History of Doctor Who on Television; and Chapman, Inside the Tardis.
These issues are addressed in Orthia, ed., Doctor Who and Race, and McGrath and Crome, Time and Relative Dimensions in Faith.
Burdge, Burke, Jessica, and Larsen, eds., The Mythological Dimensions of Doctor Who; Layton, The Humanism of Doctor Who.
Hutcheon, Theory of Adaptation, 7–8.
Brooker, “Postmodern Adaptation,” 110.
The current condition of adaptation studies is usefully outlined in Lowe, “‘Stages of Performance,’” 99.
Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, 13–14.
Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 2.
Jowett and Abbott, TV Horror, 59.
Wheatley, Gothic Television, 96.
Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 2.
Murray, “Materializing Adaptation Theory,” 4.
See the table of actors to have played the Doctor at the front of this book. In addition, Peter Cushing played the Doctor in two 1960s feature films, Richard Hurndall played the First Doctor in 1983’s “The Five Doctors” (William Hartnell having died in 1975), and Michael Jayston played the Valeyard in “The Trial of a Time Lord,” and the character was revealed to be an amalgam of the dark sides of the Doctor’s different incarnations. At time of writing John Hurt has been cast as the “Unknown Doctor.”
“The Watcher,” 100 Objects, 82.