REGENERATION

Doctor Who returned to BBC1 on 26 March 2005, starring acclaimed actor Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor and former pop star Billie Piper as his new travelling companion, Rose Tyler. Those who’d re-created the show (now in 45-minute episodes containing stand-alone stories with some two-episode tales, rather than 25-minute four-to-six-part adventures) were unsure what reaction to expect. TV viewers had not seen a regular series of Doctor Who since 1989 and the casting was unexpected (and controversial with fans). A whole generation, the producers feared, had grown up knowing Doctor Who as something old-fashioned that their parents liked. BBC research, in advance of transmission, seemed to confirm this view, much to the BBC’s trepidation.

Showrunner Russell T Davies and executive producers Julie Gardner (head of drama at BBC Wales, where Doctor Who was now to be made) and Phil Collinson (the show’s practical line producer) needn’t have worried. Rose, the opening episode, was a rematch between the Doctor and the Nestene consciousness that controlled the plastic-based Autons (previously foes of the Third Doctor). It introduced Rose Tyler (and her mother and boyfriend) and drew an audience of just under ten million viewers. The series was credited with single-handedly reinvigorating Saturday night family viewing, a niche long since believed lost by most broadcasters.

The series – quickly dubbed ‘NuWho’ by a new generation of fans who saw the Internet and websites like Outpost Gallifrey as their home – was a successful reinterpretation of the classic Doctor Who formula, updated for the twenty-first century and carrying an overlay of the contemporary concerns that Davies had incorporated into his previous dramas, such as Queer as Folk and The Second Coming.

While succeeding as ‘family entertainment’, this new version of Doctor Who still managed to tackle a whole series of social and sexual issues in a way reminiscent of the Barry Letts years, but with the 1980s event-television showmanship of John Nathan-Turner. Over the five years that Russell T Davies would run the revived franchise, Doctor Who would delve into politics (right in the middle of a UK national General Election), consumerism (repeatedly used as a front for alien invasions, despite the revived series’ own seemingly endless merchandise spin-offs), the media and popular television (satirised several times) and romance and sexuality (the Doctor’s relationships with his companions, Rose and Martha, were a little different than those of old, while Captain Jack brought a whole new orientation to the series).

Being Doctor Who, and with 40 years of history behind it, the new show could not ignore the series’ own past. Major monsters and characters would return over the years to come, but each return was handled in a much more successful and mass-audience-friendly way than any of those attempted by Nathan-Turner. Creatures and characters were rethought so they’d work as new for an audience unfamiliar with them, but would also play to an engaged audience (much like the late-1960s version of the show) who remembered them from first time around or who were familiar with them from satellite TV repeats or DVD releases. However, an in-depth knowledge of the past was not necessary to enjoy the new Doctor Who.

However, Davies could not resist building his own mythology, introducing a series of characters and events that would pay off only at the end of the initial four-year run of the new Doctor Who. Seeds sown in Rose would later mature in 2008’s final regular episode (until 2010), Journey’s End. This seemingly complicated back-story required little more from a mass audience than an awareness of key characters who’d appeared in the show over the past two to three years and their relationships to each other and the Doctor. Audiences well used to the ongoing developing narratives of domestic soap operas were comfortable with such character recall, so Doctor Who fitted right into the modern TV landscape (even if this aspect of the series saw many fans criticise it as ‘too soapy’).

To many people’s surprise, not least some of its most die-hard fans, the new series of Doctor Who became the biggest hit the BBC had enjoyed in a long time. It successfully re-energised a timeless format, making it relevant to a contemporary mass audience. It successfully captured the attention of a whole new generation of young viewers who saw Doctor Who as part of an entertainment landscape that included Harry Potter and High School Musical. In fact, the audience who seemed to be most upset about the return of their favourite show was a sub-section of the series’ own longest-serving fans.

During the first season of the new Doctor Who, long-term viewers may have felt there was something familiar about the series’ satirical engagement with contemporary politics. Just as Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks had tackled the contemporary political reality of the 1970s in their fantasy-driven stories, so did Russell T Davies in the 2005 version.

There is much wrong with the new series’ first two-part story, Aliens of London/World War III. The new production crew had to learn how to make Doctor Who after such a lengthy break. However, the satirical engagement with the then-imminent UK General Election was a masterstroke. The story depicted the infiltration of the highest power in the land, Number 10 Downing Street, by the alien Slitheen family in a plot to destroy Earth. The Slitheen were intent on provoking a nuclear conflict and selling off the resulting ruined planet for a profit. The Prime Minister (possibly intended to be Tony Blair) has been killed and key ministers replaced by fat, yellow-green aliens disguised in human ‘skin suits’ that make them appear to be obese humans. They’ve additionally faked an alien spaceship crashing into the Thames in order to gather the world’s experts on alien life in one place to eliminate them, so they don’t uncover the Slitheen plan. The most notorious ‘expert’ snared by the trap is the Doctor.

These two episodes aired in April 2005, immediately preceding the election of 5 May in which Prime Minister Tony Blair was seeking a third consecutive term in office (something that had previously eluded Labour). One of the main issues was the conduct of the war in Iraq which the US and UK had been engaged in since 2003. Part of the justification for war was Iraq’s supposed possession of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (primarily taken to mean chemical or biological weapons, and possibly developing nuclear capability), despite the failure of UN weapons inspectors to find any evidence of such weapons on the ground. A government dossier from September 2002 had been compiled to justify the invasion on the basis of weapons of mass destruction that could reach Europe ‘within 45 minutes’, according to a notorious BBC report. That led to an explosive row between the BBC and the government, resulting in the Hutton Inquiry finding against the BBC in January 2004 and the subsequent resignation of Director General Greg Dyke.

Aliens of London and World War III were broadcast in the aftermath of these important political events and in the immediate run-up to an election in which these issues were still playing a major part. The mere replacement of key government figures by corpulent, flatulent aliens may have been an obvious (though no less effective for it) form of satirical caricature of politicians, but Davies went further in his clever script. Dialogue references included comments on the Slitheen plan to use ‘massive weapons of destruction’ that could be unleashed ‘within 45 seconds’. Any alert viewer among the seven million who watched the episodes would have enjoyed a quiet chuckle at these references. This was the kind of thing that Doctor Who used to do regularly in the 1970s (often satirising Whitehall), but had abandoned (along with its appeal to the mass audience) in the 1980s. Davies firmly believed that political, social and even sexual comment belonged in a modern version of Doctor Who.

Other passing dialogue references contained material aimed at the culture of ‘New Labour’, who’d been in power since winning the 1997 General Election. Aliens of London introduced the character of Harriet Jones, MP for Flydale North (and future Prime Minister), who says of the war, ‘I voted against it,’ a common refrain from those MPs who opposed the conflict.

The following week saw the broadcast of the episode Dalek, reintroducing the Doctor’s oldest foes. Mere days before the election, the Radio Times combined the return of the Daleks with that week’s election coverage in their acclaimed fold-out ‘Vote Dalek!’ cover, which saw a trio of Daleks patrolling in front of the Houses of Parliament. In September 2008, the cover went on to a surprise win as the best British magazine cover of all time in a poll run by the Periodical Publishers Association. The cover triumphed over 40 other contenders, including striking and influential covers of such top-selling magazines as (among others) Empire, Nova, Oz, Private Eye, The Face and Vanity Fair. One of the magazine professionals who’d nominated the cover was Adam Pasco, editor of the BBC’s Gardener’s World magazine. ‘It’s May 2005, the General Election is looming, and the public is wondering who to vote for: Labour? The Tories? No – vote Dalek!’ He went on to justify his choice: ‘This Radio Times cover captures the essence of the mood of the nation in a brilliant and original way, and delivers on every level. The cover is totally unexpected and brings a contemporary twist to the iconic image of a Dalek to grab readers of all ages at the newsstand. Radio Times really made a statement with this cover that is simple, to the point and encapsulates that quirky British sense of humour.’ The Radio Times cover, overtly linking Doctor Who and national politics (and by implication all that goes with it) was a natural outcome of the fact that the show had returned to serious political engagement for the first time in over 25 years.

Another thematic preoccupation of the new version of Doctor Who that echoed concerns from the 1970s version of the show was an interest in satirising consumerism and the influence of big business. Several episodes see giant corporations acting as fronts for various alien invasions, often connected to a consumer product or gadget.

The opening episode, Rose, may have missed an opportunity by not returning to the consumerism issues raised by Spearhead from Space and particularly Terror of the Autons, but plastic was not such a thrilling material in the twenty-first century as it had been in the 1970s. The following story, however, tackled rampant cosmetic plastic surgery. The Doctor and Rose travel to the year five billion in The End of the World and encounter the ‘last human’, Cassandra. All that remains of her is a piece of skin with a face stretched across a metal frame, and her brain contained in a container below. Described as both a ‘bitchy trampoline’ and ‘Michael Jackson’ by Rose, it’s clear that Cassandra is a satire on modern society’s health and beauty concerns, taken to an extreme.

Public health and well-being fads are a recurring theme of new Doctor Who, reflecting one of the primary preoccupations of the media in Britain. Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s campaigns to encourage school children to eat healthily figure in the episode School Reunion. The school meal chips (coated in Krillitane oil) are being used to condition the children to solve the Skasis Paradigm. This will allow the Krillitane control over the fundamental building blocks of the universe. While this plot takes a back seat to the nostalgic return (the first of several) of Sarah Jane Smith and K-9, the school meals and poisoned chips element struck a chord with the younger audience (along with the idea that their headmaster and teachers might be aliens, which feels like a story idea Doctor Who should have tackled long ago).

Such health issues wedded to big-business exploitation would reappear in the fourth-season premiere, Partners in Crime. The Doctor re-encounters Donna Noble (Catherine Tate), his one-off companion from the 2006 Christmas special, The Runaway Bride, while investigating Adipose Industries. The company distributes a mass-produced weight-loss pill that, according to their company slogan, sees the ‘fat just walk away’. The pills cause human fat to be converted into an Adipose creature, spawning from the dieting human’s body. About the size of a bag of sugar, the lard-resembling Adipose simply waddle away from the sleeping human, who appears to have miraculously lost weight in their sleep. The seemingly beneficent company is, in fact, a front for an Adipose breeding programme, operated by the sinister Miss Foster.

Two episodes later, Planet of the Ood presented another evil corporation, this time involved in selling Ood creatures into slavery. The episode used spoof advertising to communicate the consumer benefits of owning a domesticated Ood. Where the Adipose breeding programme was getting out of control and threatening to destroy humans by converting them wholesale into new Adipose, the humans running Ood Operations in the year 4126 find themselves coping with an outbreak of Ood ‘red eye’. The conditions under which they are being kept (they are telepathic, but have been cut off from their collective unconscious) and their treatment by the humans are turning the normally docile Ood homicidal. Donna’s reaction raises the issue of slavery, in addition to the treatment of the Ood as essentially consumer goods (unfeeling domestic aides) rather than living creatures. The Doctor also makes a comparison between the Ood’s plight and that of the low-paid and ill-treated foreign workers who make Donna’s affordable clothes.

Technology and gadgetry are the satirical focus of other stories. In the two-part adventure Rise of the Cybermen and The Age of Steel, the Doctor, Rose and Mickey find themselves trapped in a parallel universe in which the Cybermen are just emerging. The population of this world is controlled through the use of Bluetooth-style telephone earpieces. As the latest popular, must-have gadget, everyone has one, so everyone is susceptible to the signal that controls them and makes them head to Battersea Power Station to be converted into Cybus Industries’ Cybermen. The conversion is seemingly ‘sold’ to the population as a desire to ‘upgrade’, to access the latest life-extending technology. Like Germany during the rise of the Third Reich, the population of this Earth are sleepwalking to disaster through their faith in big corporations and shiny new technology, sold as a way of making their everyday lives easier. The viewing millions would recognise their own world exaggerated for dramatic effect and reflected back at them.

These two episodes also criticised the closeness of industry and government, something repeatedly explored by the 1970s incarnation of the show. The crippled John Lumic, whose personal interest in life extension drives his research into cyber-technology, controls Cybus Industries. Having illegally experimented on the homeless, Lumic knows that Britain’s president will not allow him to expand his technology into the consumer arena. He arranges the president’s elimination when he is a guest at Jackie Tyler’s birthday party, when the new Cybermen attack and ‘delete’ him. Lumic is then free to initiate his plans for the ‘ultimate upgrade’ of humanity.

Another regular target for the new Doctor Who is the mass media. Since the twenty-first century is a much more mediated society than even the 1980s (when Doctor Who was last in regular production), it was inevitable that the media would feature regularly within the narrative. However, the series has gone one step further and satirised media conventions and organisations.

Many of the (monotonously regular) invasions of Earth in the Russell T Davies period have been communicated to the audience and the characters in the drama through the media. BBC news channels often feature (from Aliens of London onwards), covering the events of the story, while the media is also used to give such events a worldwide scale. A seemingly US-based news channel (AMNN) pops up regularly, presented by the same female newscaster in each case (giving an almost subliminal level of continuity). This offers a perspective on each ‘end-of-the-world’ scenario that is different from that of London (distinct from the approach in the 1970s, when alien invaders seemed to have little interest in anything outside the Home Counties).

Beyond the use of mass media to expand the repertoire of storytelling tools available to writers, media organisations were prime among elements of modern life in Britain satirised by the new Doctor Who. The Long Game sees Christopher Eccleston’s Ninth Doctor and Rose arriving on Satellite Five in the year 200,000, during the time of the ‘fourth great and bountiful human empire’. Satellite Five is a news broadcasting station, transmitting 600 channels across the Empire, run by the Editor (Simon Pegg), an almost albino figure, seemingly answerable to a higher power that’s manipulating the content of the station’s broadcasts. Teaming up with two rebellious journalists, the Doctor investigates the mysterious Floor 500 (perhaps modelled after the infamous ‘sixth floor’ of BBC Television Centre, notorious among Doctor Who fans as the location of the offices of the executives who interfered in, and eventually cancelled, the programme in the 1980s).

This human empire has been manipulated for 90 years by a creature called the Jagrafess, which has used its position of control over the news to create a climate of fear (Davies once again referencing contemporary politics, particularly the fallout from the war in Iraq and 9/11). The Doctor realises that the human race has been enslaved and is not even aware of it, living as it is in a degree of comfort, in a strictly controlled but extremely limited society. Of course, the Doctor defeats the Jagrafess and the Editor and believes he has set the human population back on its correct course to possible utopia.

The title The Long Game only becomes meaningful when the Doctor returns to Satellite Five later that same season in Bad Wolf (the use of the same space station twice in one season echoes the debut year of Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor). The Doctor, Rose and Captain Jack Harkness (who joined the TARDIS crew in The Doctor Dances) are separated and each finds themselves taking part in reality-television shows. Contemporary viewers would recognise Big Brother, What Not to Wear and The Weakest Link as the three TV shows spoofed, along with their iconography and presenters. Contestants are seemingly killed when they are eliminated or ‘voted out’, including Rose. The Doctor escapes the Big Brother ‘house’ and gains access behind the scenes, only to discover he’s back on Satellite Five at a later point in history. Now humanity has a different master: the Daleks!

Led by their Emperor (‘the God of all Daleks’), the Daleks have been harvesting humans to boost their numbers. In the opening to the season finale, The Parting of the Ways, the Doctor declares these new post-time-war Daleks to be mad, driven insane by self-loathing as they have had to depend upon human organic material to create their new race. Indeed, the Daleks are depicted as a fundamentalist religious group, crying blasphemy when the Doctor suggests they’re half-human (this is also a fan in-joke on the part of Davies, as the 1996 Paul McGann TV movie postulated that the Doctor was half-human, a development decried by a subset of online fans as blasphemy). These mad Daleks are limited to their appearance in this one story, but their fundamentalist nature reflects a very precise point in time following the 9/11 attacks on the US in 2001 and terrorist activity in the UK. The episode was broadcast just three weeks before Islamic fundamentalists carried out the 7 July 2005 attacks on transport in London. Religion and the threat posed by its fundamentalist proponents has not often featured in Doctor Who, but The Parting of the Ways did a fine job of updating Terry Nation’s original space fascists to confront one of the most important contemporary issues concerning the mass audience now attracted to Doctor Who. Unfortunately, by the time of Journey’s End in 2008, the Daleks were back to being simple space fascists, an aspect of their character made literally evident by the scene in which the Daleks conquering Earth speak German!

The Daleks’ rivals for the position of top Doctor Who monster were not about to be left out of the media spotlight. When the Cybermen returned again, in Army of Ghosts, their attempts to break through from their universe to ours cause them to appear as ghostlike figures. Once again satirising media conventions, the appearance of these ghosts across the world is shown to be a media sensation. The ‘supernatural’ events happen at the same time each day, with television providing a countdown. Rose’s mum, Jackie, is shown waiting for Rose’s dead grandfather to appear during the daily ‘ghost shift’. Clips from programmes like soap drama EastEnders or talk show Trisha reveal to the Doctor how the ghost phenomenon has been absorbed and normalised by the culture. Investigating, the Doctor realises the ghosts are Cybermen, pushing themselves through a breach between universes to become material in our reality. The full materialisation of the Cybermen (represented by reports from Indian, Japanese and French newsreaders) is topped by the opening of the mysterious Void Sphere captured by Torchwood. This reveals four surviving Daleks who escaped the Time War (the Cult of Skaro), setting the stage for a Cybermen-Dalek face-off in the following episode, Doomsday.

The uses of, and satirising of, the media has become an intrinsic part of the audience’s experience of new Doctor Who. With the media forming such a large part of most viewers’ lives, its reflection within the narratives of the show and the use of tricks and techniques seen in other media is further evidence of how the series has been successfully updated to appeal to a new mass audience.

In the 1980s (in response to tabloid speculation), John Nathan-Turner had declared that there would be ‘no hanky-panky’ in the TARDIS. With an attractive and young cast, and the tendency in the 1980s to dress the female companions in revealing outfits (a situation that reached its climax with Peri’s introduction in a bikini and her regular outfit of tight-fitting leotards), it was no surprise that some observers wondered about the Doctor’s relationship with his young, female travelling companions.

One of the most radical changes that Russell T Davies brought to the revitalisation of the show was to explore the emotions of the Doctor in relation to his companions. Both the Ninth and Tenth Doctors have enjoyed grand romances, primarily with Rose Tyler, but also with Madame de Pompadour (The Girl in the Fireplace) and (when the Doctor is in the guise of human, John Smith) Joan Redfern (Human Nature/The Family of Blood). Despite these events, Davies was always keen to return the character to the status of ‘the lonely Doctor’, as seen at the conclusion of Journey’s End. He may be interested in his companions and others he meets along the way (dating back to Cameca in The Aztecs), but being a long-lived Time Lord (the last remaining, so excluding relationships with one of his own species), he can never sustain a conventional relationship.

Sex has a much more prominent role in the new Doctor Who than it ever had in the old show, reflecting the era in which the show is now made. Beyond some sudden and very chaste romances (like those between Susan and David Campbell, and Leela and Andred, concocted as exit strategies for both companions), the original series’ approach to sex was simply in the guise of the glamorous assistant or ‘Doctor Who girl’ of tabloid fame. Katy Manning (who played Jo Grant) infamously took this one step further by posing naked with a Dalek for men’s magazine Girl Illustrated, but only after she’d left the show.

Steven Moffat (who took over from Russell T Davies as showrunner for the 2010 fifth season) has paid close attention to the Doctor’s love life. The two-part story The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances introduced both the omni-sexual Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman), a time agent from the fifty-first century, and the metaphorical concept of ‘dancing’ as a family-friendly euphemism for sex. He wrote The Girl in the Fireplace, giving the Doctor his first romance other than that seemingly being enjoyed with Rose. Moffat was also the writer of Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead, the fourth-season, two-part story that introduced River Song (Alex Kingston), seemingly a future romantic interest for the Tenth Doctor (strongly hinted at as ‘the Doctor’s wife’, itself a spoof episode title written on an office notice board by John Nathan-Turner in the 1980s in an attempt to track down the source of information leaking to fans).

The casting of the young (under 40) and photogenic David Tennant helped build the growing female audience for new Doctor Who (the perception being that the audience for the original series was largely male, while the core of organised fandom was largely gay). For his Doctor to be played asexually, as most others had been, would simply not have been possible in a modern television environment. Giving the Doctor an emotional life ensured a higher level of engagement with the series among the casual, especially female, audience that had abandoned the show in the late-1980s. It was the casting of the ‘young and dashing’ Peter Davison as the Doctor in 1981 that led to the ‘hanky-panky-in-the-TARDIS’ tabloid speculation. However, Davison’s Doctor was never invested with the same emotional range as Eccleston’s and Tennant’s characters.

Casting a young, attractive Doctor showed that, in many ways, Russell T Davies had learned the right lessons from the misguided 1980s when John Nathan-Turner was producer. Like Nathan-Turner, Davies is a firm believer in event television as part of a strategy to grab a larger-than-usual audience. Likewise, as a longstanding Doctor Who fan, Davies was keen on maintaining the series’ internal continuity and in refreshing successful elements and characters from the show’s past. The new production, however, took a lot more care in reintroducing key things from the past, communicating clearly to an audience who perhaps didn’t recognise them why they were important and worth bringing back.

Davies’ opening episode had used the Autons, mainly for the recognisable moment of showroom dummies breaking through a shop window (a well-remembered incident from Spearhead from Space that was not actually seen on screen, instead being simply heard as a sound effect, an oversight Rose rectified).

The big question, in the run-up to the series’ debut, was whether the show would feature the Daleks, following a protracted negotiation with Terry Nation’s estate. With the rights to the Daleks secured, Davies took a cautious approach to their reintroduction, aware that the Doctor’s biggest foes had become the butt of many jokes in the years when the show was off air. Although Daleks had been seen to fly (or hover) twice towards the end of the original series (in Revelation of the Daleks and Remembrance of the Daleks), they were still considered by comedians and the popular press to be creatures who could be foiled by simply running up a set of stairs. Drawing on a Big Finish audio by Robert Shearman (Jubilee, in which a captured solo Dalek is tortured), the episode Dalek saw Rose become sympathetic to a chained and abused lone Dalek. The episode goes on to unleash the creature, showing the deadly power it is capable of. The significant ‘media moment’ the episode builds up to is when the Dalek announces its intention to ‘elevate’, and is then seen hovering up stairs in relentless pursuit of its quarry.

Audience (and fan) nostalgia also played a major role in School Reunion, the episode that saw the return of Elisabeth Sladen as Jon Pertwee/Tom Baker companion Sarah Jane Smith and the robot dog K-9. This was a direct appeal to viewers who remembered the show at its 1970s peak, although Sladen and K-9 were never teamed up on the regular show, only in the 1981 spin-off special K-9 and Company (and briefly in The Five Doctors). The return of these characters was part of a publicity boost for the series, especially K-9. Davies strongly believed that K-9 would appeal beyond fans and older audiences who remembered him to the new younger audience attracted to the revitalised version of the series. The gambit was so successful that the characters returned again to Doctor Who (in Journey’s End). Elisabeth Sladen went on to star in her own amazingly successful children’s spin-off series called The Sarah Jane Adventures, 30 years after she first boarded the TARDIS. The spin-off series is even structured like the original Doctor Who, in 25-minute episodes, with each two-part story enjoying an end-of-episode cliff-hanger. The character of Captain Jack Harkness also enjoyed a spin-off series of his own. Torchwood saw Jack heading up a team of Cardiff-based investigators who confront alien incursions and other odd occurrences. Both spin-offs would be reunited with the parent show in the two-part, season-four finale The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End.

Having successfully revived the Daleks, the return of other popular monsters was inevitable. Each season would see at least one prominent monster reinvented for the new show. Season two had the parallel universe Cybermen in Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel (again drawing on a Big Finish audio-drama precedent: Marc Platt’s Spare Parts), with further reappearances in Army of Ghosts/Doomsday and the 2008 Christmas special The Next Doctor. Season three saw a dramatic reinvention of the Master (John Simm) in Utopia. Unexpectedly (for most viewers), Derek Jacobi’s mysterious ‘Professor Yana’ regenerated (in a similar style to the Eccleston/Tennant regeneration in The Parting of the Ways, a gambit adopted so viewers would recognise the change that was happening) into Simm’s new, younger, more dynamic Master. This led into the two-part season finale The Sound of Drums/The Last of the Time Lords, which saw the Doctor and Master fighting for the future of mankind.

Season four’s returning monsters were the 1970s clone warriors the Sontarans in The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky (the Sontarans had also recently reappeared in the long-running Doctor Who comic strip, another influence on the new TV series). The creatures had a dramatic redesign and their behaviour had changed significantly, with this supposed warrior race attempting to take over Earth by stealth using a front company run by a teenage genius. The end of season four saw the return of Dalek creator Davros (introduced in 1975’s Genesis of the Daleks) in another two-part season finale, the epic The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End.

Each of these returns was carefully stage-managed, with publicity stills of the reinvented monsters released to the media long in advance of the episodes, and often accompanied by Radio Times covers priming the viewing audience for the episode during the week of transmission. The huge interest in the new Doctor Who by tabloid newspapers, once it had proved to be a hit, resulted in several key storylines and character returns leaking (itself sometimes a useful publicity strategy). The Sun had reported the Cybermen/Dalek battle almost a full year before the episodes aired, while the returns of both the Master and Davros proved to be open secrets in the world of online fandom long before the characters actually appeared.

The new series also saw dramatic changes in fandom. Printed fanzines were few and far between, as most comment had migrated online in the form of authored blogs or forum postings. Fans participating in Doctor Who’s online culture were just as likely to be female now (partly down to the casting of Tennant, but also due to the show’s new emotional intelligence). Creating work like music videos illustrated with clips from the new series was far easier than it had been back in the 1980s, and the audiences for such YouTube postings was far larger than local fan groups or conventions. Exhibitions up and down the land attracted families, while a brand-new young audience bought the merchandise (or more likely had it bought for them). The Internet had also created a new fan hierarchy, illustrated by the growing spoiler culture (as wittily addressed by Steven Moffat in his script for Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead). Fans in possession of advance story details, or who were in a position to spread leaked information, became notorious (in both positive and negative senses), while misinformation and rumour was easier to spread than ever before.

The new nature of ‘NuWho’ fandom, however, had not removed strong fan criticism. In fact, the Internet provided a venue that made such criticism easier (and easier for those who criticise unthinkingly). Accused by fans of recreating Doctor Who in the image of a soap opera (by including the companion’s families and allowing the Doctor to have emotional involvements), Russell T Davies countered by claiming such things were simply the basis of good modern TV drama. However, Davies set out deliberately to create a new mythology for his version of Doctor Who, one that would culminate in Journey’s End.

Eccleston’s Doctor is revealed to be the last of the Time Lords, the sole survivor of a grand ‘Time War’ that has wiped out his home planet Gallifrey and the Daleks. He’s suffering survivor’s guilt, and the four years from 2005 to 2008 play out the consequences of his (unseen, offscreen) actions as the Time War is woven into the unfolding narrative of the series. The arrival of each new companion (after Rose there was Captain Jack, Martha Jones and Donna Noble) allowed for the basic set-up to be restated to the audience in a natural and engaging way (a simple trick that the writers and producers of 1986’s The Trial of a Time Lord totally failed to understand).

Beyond this, there were the storylines assigned to each individual companion. It was always Davies’ intention for a version of the Doctor and Rose to end up together, but the first-draft plan saw a split-off human version of the Doctor settling down with Rose following the Tenth Doctor’s regeneration (this was somehow tied up with the return of Gallifrey, the resolution of the Time War and the ‘human Doctor’ storyline of Human Nature). Changing production priorities (the departure and return of Billie Piper, uncertainty about when David Tennant would be leaving the role) saw the grand plan revised to become the storyline that unfolded in The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End. The final outcome of the relationship was the same, however: a half-human version of the Tenth Doctor ends up with Rose Tyler.

This epic romance defined the other companions. The return of Sarah Jane Smith was played (in soap-opera terms) as the return of an old girlfriend (Rose’s boyfriend Mickey calls the meeting between Sarah Jane and Rose a clash between ‘the ex and the missus’). Martha Jones’ storyline was one of unrequited love: she falls for the Doctor in much the same way that Rose did, but he’s not in the right place emotionally to reciprocate (as he’s still pining for Rose, trapped in a different dimension after the events of Doomsday). Finally, there’s Donna Noble, a no-nonsense, older (although possibly less sophisticated) companion who eventually proves to be the most significant companion of all, saving not only this universe but all of reality when caught up in a ‘human-Time Lord metacrisis’ in Journey’s End.

Davies’ revolving roster of characters included Rose’s family members, specifically her dead father, Pete Tyler (who plays a major role in time-travel paradox adventure Father’s Day, with an alternate-universe version of Pete appearing in Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel and Army of Ghosts/Doomsday), as well as her mother, Jackie, and her boyfriend Mickey (who also travels with the Doctor, maturing as a character as he does so). Again, Martha’s entire family are caught up in the Doctor’s world, especially in the ‘year that never was’ of The Sound of Drums/The Last of the Time Lords. While Donna Noble’s mother also regularly appears, she is more critical of her daughter than either of the other companions’ mothers we see. Donna’s significant family connection is to Wilf, her grandfather (played by Bernard Cribbins, whose Doctor Who connections stretch back to the second Peter Cushing Dalek movie). The episode Turn Left allows audiences to see a version of Donna’s life that might have unfolded if the Doctor didn’t exist, and how the familiar characters that surround her would react and be changed by events. Cribbins, in particular, is given an opportunity to shine when local people are rounded up for despatch to internment camps and he recalls the similar events of the Second World War (so that old Doctor Who standby proves it is still useful).

As well as these characters, who recur on and off throughout the series, providing the audience with an ensemble cast among whom they can choose favourites, Davies also built a mythology set around the year five billion, with returning characters like the Face of Boe, Cassandra, the last human and Novice Hame, one of the cat people. The unfolding stories of these characters, across the first three seasons, provided a more subtle serial narrative that paid off for regular viewers of the series, who could connect episodes across a number of years. The revelation that immortal Captain Jack Harkness would eventually become the Face of Boe (seemingly inspired by fan speculation and intended by Davies as a joke) connected the two ongoing narrative strands together.

Retaining viewers through character loyalty (harking right back to the establishment of the series in the 1960s) was taken to its ultimate extreme in the 2008 season finale The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End, with the last episode especially extended to 65 minutes to accommodate the story and a huge number of returning characters. These episodes featured all the previous companions from this four-year period, characters from The Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood, and other incidental recurring characters like Penelope Wilton’s Harriet Jones, ex-Prime Minister. (‘Yes, we know who you are,’ say the Daleks, prior to exterminating her, paying off a running joke that began in Aliens of London, three years previously.)

This sort of long-term planning (albeit revised, changed and altered as the series developed due to production realities) was a clever strategy, making Doctor Who part of a modern TV experience and drawing on the soap-like elements of the twice-weekly Peter Davison episodes and the event-television-driven John Nathan-Turner approach. The difference was that Davies never forgot the mass audience. Where Nathan-Turner got caught in the trap of pandering to fans, Davies largely ignored the ‘ming mongs’ (as he rather rudely dubbed engaged Doctor Who fandom, of which he had been a very active part in the past) and wrote the new Doctor Who for the family audience watching TV at (roughly) 7pm on a Saturday night.

Russell T Davies’ reinvention of Doctor Who has been an unalloyed triumph. Like it or loathe it (and many dedicated fans seem to alternate between these two positions depending on what’s happening on screen in any given week), Doctor Who is now one of the BBC’s most important programmes. Regularly drawing audiences of between six and ten million, the show has created an entirely new young fan base, while appealing to adults and parents as well as to most fans of the original series. Many of the episodes of the Eccleston-and Tennant-starring series have featured in the week’s top ten TV programmes, often only beaten by the daily soap operas. Journey’s End achieved a first for the show, topping the chart for the first time in the series’ 45-year history with 10.57 million viewers.

To achieve this, Russell T Davies brought all his event television tricks to bear on the series. Having hoped to keep the Eccleston regeneration a secret until it happened on air, the high-profile nature of the actor’s departure from the series had thwarted that plan. However, at the climax of The Stolen Earth, David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor is exterminated by a Dalek and appears to begin to regenerate (the dramatic scene was missing from preview discs distributed to the media to preserve the secret). This phenomenal cliff-hanger ending fed into endless media speculation about Tennant’s departure from the show, speculation that had started almost the moment he was announced as the new Doctor following Eccleston. That the threatened regeneration was a bluff was not clear to the mass audience until the beginning of the following episode, Journey’s End. The resolution of the cliff-hanger sees the Doctor’s regeneration energy siphoned off into his severed hand (kept in the TARDIS since Last of the Time Lords), resulting in the creation of a half-human Doctor that, in turn, allows for the long-running Rose romance story to be paid off. It may have struck many viewers as a cheat. A good proportion of the 11 million viewers (up from 8.7 million for The Stolen Earth) tuned in following media coverage during the week solely to see a potential new Doctor revealed (a very similar trick was ill-advisedly used for the 2008 Christmas special, The Next Doctor). Whatever the motivation, viewers stuck with the episode through the defeat of Davros and the Daleks to the interminable sequence of goodbyes that saw the long-brewing Rose-Doctor romance finally concluded as she departed back to her alternate universe with a half-human clone of the Doctor.

Just before Hallowe’en 2008, David Tennant finally announced (live on TV, after winning a National Television Award for the third year running) that he would be vacating the TARDIS following the 2009 ‘specials’. This left the way open for a fresh start to the series by new 2010 showrunner Steven Moffat (winner of three Hugos – science fiction’s Oscars – for his acclaimed Doctor Who episodes).

Tennant felt he was leaving the show in good shape: ‘I think the cross-generational, cross-cultural appeal of Doctor Who is pretty unique. I can’t think of anything else that has fans who are seven and 70 in almost equal measure.’ Russell T Davies had already announced his own departure from the series he’d so successfully reinvented: he’d also step down from the show at the conclusion of the 2009 specials, making his and his star’s departures simultaneous. Davies saw this moment of change as a positive step that would help ensure the revived show’s long-term future (as if being number one in the ratings wasn’t enough in that department). ‘[Change] is always good for the programme,’ said Davies. ‘It will keep up a new head of steam and there’s lots of excitement about the new Doctor Who and that’s brilliant. It’s still going to be a television programme about a man who fights aliens. It’s still going to be Doctor Who on a Saturday night, just like it has been for 45 years.’

Doctor Who’s forty-fifth-anniversary year was capped with the announcement of a new Doctor, 26-year-old Matt Smith. His surprise casting was revealed in a special episode of Doctor Who Confidential, broadcast on BBC1 on 3 January 2009 to six million curious viewers (beating ITV’s live coverage of the FA Cup). Speculation about who would win the coveted role had mounted since Tennant’s announcement, with press coverage suggesting actors as diverse as Paterson Joseph (Survivors), Michael Sheen (Frost/Nixon), Chiwetel Ejiofor (Kinky Boots) and James Nesbitt (Steven Moffat’s Jekyll). Moffat had previously expressed his own preference for an older actor to play the Doctor, a ‘grandfather’ figure, so it came as a shock to some fans when he cast the youngest actor yet in the role.

The series’ new executive producer Piers Wenger, who made the choice of Smith alongside Moffat, noted: ‘It was abundantly clear that he had that “Doctor-ness” about him. You are either the Doctor or you are not.’ For his part, Smith was looking forward to working closely with Moffat in developing the Eleventh Doctor. ‘The script is where it starts, it’s always about the words, and luckily we’re in the hands of Steven Moffat, who has this show ingrained in his soul and searing through his blood. We’re going to discover it together, who the Doctor is in Steven’s mind and words, coupled with pockets of my personality, my history, my life. There’s Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, and Doctor Who. It has resonance in our cultural fabric.’

As filming began on his first series in July 2009, Smith commented: ‘The scripts are brilliant and working alongside Karen [Gillan, new companion Amy Pond], Steven [Moffat] and the rest of the crew is an inspiration because their work ethic and passion for the show is so admirable. I’m excited about the future and all the brilliant adventures I get to go on as the Doctor.’

Unveiling the Eleventh Doctor’s tweed-jacketed new look, showrunner Steven Moffat recognised the latest instance of renewal in Doctor Who’s long and on-going history. ‘Here it is, the big moment – the new Doctor, and his new best friend. And here’s me, with the job I wanted since I was seven – 40 years to here! If I could go back in time and tell that little boy that one day all this would happen, he’d scream, call for his mum and I’d be talking to you now from a prison cell in 1969. So probably best not then.

‘Matt and Karen are going to be incredible, and Doctor Who is going to come alive on Saturday nights in a whole new way – and, best of all, somewhere out there a seven-year-old is going to see them, fall in love and start making a 40-year plan…’

Despite the casting of Smith and arrival of Moffat promising yet another new era for a show that thrives on change and renewal, some critics still failed to realise the cultural importance of Doctor Who across its 45-year history. Writing in the Independent, columnist Thomas Sutcliffe welcomed the departure of Russell T Davies, hoping it would allow him to return to writing ‘serious drama’ once more, what Sutcliffe called ‘popular series that don’t invent other worlds to escape to, but address the one we actually find ourselves living in’. What Sutcliffe failed to realise was that Doctor Who always did, and always will, address the world we live in, with the big issues of life made palatable for a family audience in the guise of fantasy adventure.

Long may it continue to do so.