Doctor Who is an amazing television phenomenon. Not many programmes can survive for 45 years and then top the TV ratings chart as Doctor Who did with the episode Journey’s End on 5 July 2008. That Saturday evening saw 10.57 million viewers tuning in to see the Doctor (David Tennant) and a host of companions defeat Davros and the Daleks.
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 2008, the show’s forty-fifth-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 45 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 45-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 that number-one spot in the ratings in July 2008.
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 45-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 like-minded 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 Who 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 one-shot 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.
The third strand featured in this volume is the return of Doctor Who to television in 2005 in the newly revitalised series, chronicled in chapter seven. It’s a show now run by fans (both show-runners Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat and star David Tennant are all self-confessed active fans of the original series). However, the new version of Doctor Who has re-engaged successfully with the mass audience the series lost in the 1980s. The show was refurbished to appeal to everyone, yet it is recognisably still the same Doctor Who that went off air in 1989.
Doctor Who is more successful now than it has ever been, and has enjoyed a sustained period of success. When Doctor Who was off the air, the memory of the show remained with audiences who’d grown up with it as children, whether in the 1960s, the 1970s or the 1980s. In 1996 the series was dramatically declared the All-Time Favourite BBC Programme in a public vote celebrating the BBC’s 60th anniversary, beating the likes of much-loved shows EastEnders and Casualty. The revived version of the series has won armloads of awards, from BAFTAs and National Television Awards to the science-fiction Oscars, the Hugos.
Crucial to this success has been the revived series’ willingness to engage with modern social, political and cultural (even consumer) issues in a way not seen since the early-to-mid-1970s. Unlike in the 1980s, but very in tune with the 1960s and 1970s, Doctor Who is once again a TV show that attracts an audience due to its accessibility and the fact that it is easily understood as part of a modern television environment.
While the finishing touches were being put to this volume, David Tennant announced his departure from the leading role in Doctor Who. The series was once again thrown into one of its regular moments of crisis: who could follow the incredibly successful Tenth Doctor? The fact is that Doctor Who’s very strength is in such change. The show thrives on renewal, and with a new show-runner in Steven Moffat and new Doctor Matt Smith lining up for the fifth season of the revived series in 2010, yet another new start looms.
Long thought of as a dead series during much of the 1990s, Doctor Who is now guaranteed a future, as long as the series remains relevant to its audience. The Doctor himself is now one of the great British fictional folk heroes, alongside Sherlock Holmes, Robin Hood and James Bond. Each of these characters returns again and again, in new forms and in new media, telling new, but always relevant, stories. Just like them, Doctor Who will keep returning, forever.