I sent an e-mail to someone recently about the new Doctor Who. That is, the Doctor Who of Russel T. Davies. (One L or two?) I'm not going to look it up now.
Since I am well-known in my neck of the woods for being a Doctor Who fan, and have even played (very badly) Tom Baker's Doctor in a theatrical pro-ject, many thousands of people, androids, Sontarans, Silurians, Ice-Warriors (now there's a monster I'd like to see ressurected, have I already missed it?), Time Lords and robot dogs have asked my opinion on the new series. I see if I can remember now my first impressions.
Before I go on to say anything else, let me say that the entire world should be grateful to Russel T. Davies for renewing interest in the series, and for bringing the Daleks and the Cidermen to a new generation of children who I hope are not too cynical to hide behind the sofa, as of old, as that would be sad. So, the man done good. And I will now preface my observations further, and ominously, by saying that, of course, everyone has their own favourite Doctor, which is probably heavily influenced by which Doctor they grew up with. However, since I have been a Doctor Who fan for about ninety percent or more of my now 36 years, I think I have a right to express an opinion here.
So, my first impressions of the new series. Christopher Eccleston seemed a bit stiff, but had something. I liked him. One thing I immediately noticed was that the episodes were self contained stories (there have since been some longer stories stretched over a few episodes), which seemed to me to eliminate one of the great traditions of Doctor Who, which was the cliffhanger, and particularly the cliffhanger combined with the enticement of a slow build-up. Usually there were four episodes, though this varied. At the end of the first episode you would see, through the crack in a steel bulkhead in some underground lair, a green, mucilaginous claw made of hideous bubble-wrap, spray paint and sugar paper. And we were sore afraid. At the end of the second episode, you would see as far as the shoulder, if that thing may be called a shoulder. At the end of the third episode, there would be a whole army of mucilaginous claw monsters from an art workshop surrounding the Doctor while he grinned and offered them a jelly baby, as if he did not even realise he was in danger of his life, and Sarah-Jane Smith would cry, "Dotor, look out!" And at the end of the fourth episode the Doctor and his assistant would slip quietly away in the TARDIS, leaving behind people too dazed and relieved to question very closely who this man was, where he has gone, where he came from, and why he spoke with such authority.
I suppose I miss that format. I think a lot of the spirit of Doctor Who was contained in that. Why was the decision made to change this. I'm tempted to say someone at a meeting said, "Exucse me, two words, 'Attention span!' Two more words, 'Lack of'."
I felt somewhat let down with this, but I persevered and watched, I believe, every episode of the new series, taking care to see the repeats and so on when I missed one. There were some good episodes. My favourites, as I recall them, were The End of the World, The Long Game, and The Empty Child. Things seemed to be promising.
Some things did bother me, however. I didn't like the introduction of sex. To me, Doctor Who is a children's programme in the best sense of the word. There should be nothing denigrating about such a term. The Doctor, to me, had always been asexual, and this was part of his alien quality. Never mind that off-screen Tom Baker was somewhat like the Rasputin character he once so brilliantly played. He knew very well his responsibilities as a hero for children. The introduction of sex seemed like another thing put forward at a meeting. "Of course, it will all be done in the best possible taste," someone must have quipped, attempting to re-cross his or her legs dementedly in the manner of the one and only Kenny.
Then there came David Tennant. I really liked his performance in the introductory episode of his incarnation. Things were still promising. However, somewhere along the line I seemed to lose interest, and it doesn't help that I'm not living in a house with a television at the moment. There's a lot I could say on this, but I kind of feel like it's summed up in this article from The Independent, with a story that very much tows the public line. Here's the quote that struck me:
Why place [Russell T. Davies] higher than Stephen Fry, Sir Elton John or Peter Mandelson? Partly because of the status he has within his industry, achieved by doing the impossible: reviving the Doctor – turning a dusty old joke into a witty, sexy, slick and scary show – and making Saturday tea-time family telly compulsory again. But also because of what his critics call "the Gay Agenda".
That was the line, the one seemingly inserted incidentally between dashes. "[T]urning a dusty old joke into a witty, sexy, slick and scary show". Now, let's have a little think about what is meant by 'dusty old joke'. The show that the BBC cared so little for that many of the old episodes are lost forever, carelessly archived, or perhaps just thrown away. The show whose first episode was broadcast the day that Kennedy was assassinated, so that if anyone actually saw that first episode when it was first broadcast, he or she is my hero forever. The show that has become one of the longest-running television shows in the world. The show where the hero is an alien with two hearts who is far more intelligent than humans and never carries a gun. The show that refused to die, kept alive by fans and writers who wrote Doctor Who books that were never made into TV episodes. The show in which Jon Pertwee dressed as a dandy, Tom Baker wore a ridiculosly long scarf and claimed not to be a fashion expert, and Peter Davison (who once sat in the same Barnstaple pub as me at the same time) wore a set of cricket whites. The show that gave us stories with Tibetan buddhism and giant spiders. The show that was only ever scheduled in the first place as a schedule-filler. The show that made a kind of robot without legs, driven by a blob of nuclear war-mutated slime, the most terrifying thing in the galaxy. The show that had the best theme tune ever, from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (hello Ron Grainer and Delia Derbyshire). The show in which the Doctor refused to destroy the Daleks when he had the perfect chance to (twice, I believe, correct me if I'm wrong), saying at some point that out of their evil would come a greater good. The show in which Tom Baker met Lalla Ward and gave us one of the finest ever television double acts. The show for which Douglas Adams wrote a story about the Mona Lisa being faked by a malicious alien trapped in splinter-selves throughout history, giving John Cleese a great cameo in the Louvre. The show that dared to cast Bonnie Langford as an assistant. The show that had ecological themes expressed in terms of giant, mutated maggots. Image of the Fendahl (the Doctor offers a jelly-baby to an ancient glowing skull). An Unearthly Child (a strange girl leads her teachers into a police call box that is bigger on the inside than the outside, "But that's impossible!"). The Seeds of Death (Patrick Troughton's Doctor utters the immortal lines, later to inspire a song by The Dead Bell, "You can't kill me… I'm a genius!"). The Ark in Space, (one of my earliest memories, and still, to me, quintessential Doctor Who, even now making me thrill as I watch it again; when I first saw it, in the nextdoor neighbour's house {there was community in those days, and we didn't have a telly in our house}, I didn't just hide behind the sofa, I actually ran all the way back to my own house, and then went back again to watch more). Terror of the Autons (my memory grows hazy, but I believe that this story received a number of complaints that it would give children nightmares because it had familiar objects, such as dolls and sofas, being used as instruments of death by aliens; also, in one of the Auton stories, Jon Pertwee wrestles with a rubber octopus-thing).
This is the dusty old joke. I'm actually not going to let that lie. I'm going to comment further. When I hear people say something like, "Oh, Doctor Who. That was so ridiculous. You could see the sets wobble", and so on, and laughing about the show having a low-budget, what I immediately think is, "You have no imagination. That's why you need CGI, to fill the gaps that your own imagination won't supply. Is lack of money really the harshest criticism that you can come up with? Perhaps you should try going to the theatre, take in a play, see what people can do with a script and a few props, and without CGI?"
And now we have "a witty, sexy, slick and scary show". I have no objection to witty or scary, especially in combination, but "slick" and "sexy" sounds to me like a Justin Timberlake album.
All this is brought on by a number of things, but in particular by my catching the episode The Wasp and the Unicorn this weekend. I suppose I wasn't hugely impressed. However, I thought Catherine Tate was okay. I hear a lot of people are pissed off with her. No, I'd say she's one of the better assistants. At least she doesn't seem to be a device for teenage soap opera.
Well, I'm going to attempt to finish the first draft of my novel Susuki tonight, so I'll wrap up here, even though there's more to say.
Oh yes, this one goes out to Lawrence Miles. I've never met you, but I'm willing to bet you're a good bloke.
Justin Isis writes:
“The ___ and the ____” titles are hot right now because proper nouns with direct articles are hype.”The Wasp and the Unicorn” (Doctor Who episode)”The Squid and the Whale” (film)”The Pineapple and the Watermelon” (Xiu Xiu song)”The Red and the Black” (Stendhal novel)Try to think of some more.No one has yet claimed “The Peanut Butter and the Jelly”Bukowski should retroactively change his novel “Ham on Rye” to “The Ham and the Rye”; same with Lovecraft and “The Mountains and the Madness” and “The Charles Dexter Ward and the Case.”Also big are titles that are like the following:”Nobody Belongs Here More Than You” (Miranda July book)”People Like That Are the Only People Here” (Lorrie Moore short story)”Good News for People Who Love Bad News” (Modest Mouse sellout album)These titles attempt to sound clever but actually make readers, watchers, and listeners want to empty semi-automatic ammunition into their own faces.I have a longer post that crashed; I might try to rewrite it later.
Yes, please try again later. What strikes me, actually, re-reading that article in The Independent, is that the real Doctor Who fans have been deliberately stabbed in the back. Why else refer to them as “mosquitoes”? In other words, those who have been loyal and cared about the show all this time have been told to fuck off. So, really the show has been hijacked by people who despise the original fanbase. There’s something here that I can’t quite articulate at the moment to do with the renewed social exclusion of all those who are a little bit different. Russell T. Davies doesn’t seem to want the show to be associated with anoraks and sci-fi fans, instead pandering to the prejudices of boring, sensible, sexy, trendy people who have always derived a huge and groundless sense of their own superiority from the fact that, unlike sad anoraks, they are not socially/sexually inadequate. This is really beginning to piss me off. The current show is a show made for those who don’t actually care about the show. And that seems to be the way things are going. So, as a mosquito myself, I’m really less and less impressed with Russell T. Davies. Perhaps they should do an episode called something like The Smug Producer and the Smarmy Journalist, or Doctor Who Fans Can Fuck Off and Stop Watching Doctor Who.
Justin Isis writes:
My original post, saved it with the copy function before it crashed:”The new show is emo – falsely dramatic. A good example of this is like when the Master is dying in the Doctor’s arms and the Doctor is about to cry, if they wanted to take it that level, they could have really shown a real level of desperation there, but they stopped short of it. If you were really the last member of a species and watching the other last member die, you wouldn’t react that way, I don’t think – or at least the way Tennant played it. I think it’d be a lot more desperate scene than the way they made it out. It also ignored the history of the two characters. I don’t know. I feel there’s something wrong with the new show, but I don’t know how to explain it. If they showed emotion in the old series, it meant so much more because they did it sparingly. If you bring in soap opera elements, it makes things less meaningful because there’s an emotional crisis every week. The best emotional parts of the old show, off the top of my head:1) Sarah-Jane leaving the TARDIS; the way they played that was really great.2) The Doctor tries to justify himself to the Time Lords in “The War Games,” I still think this is probably the best story, especially the last two episodes. There is a really serious philosophical idea behind this, the idea of non-action or detachment (the Time Lords) vs interference or getting involved in life (The Doctor). Also the level of acting is ridiculously high; Philip Madoc’s acting in this story is far better than 90% of acting including the new show. 3) The Doctor and Romana in ‘City of Death’4) The scene at the end of The Chase (I think?) where Ian and Barbara leave and there is a montage scene of their lives.5) ‘Planet of the Spiders’The books were sometimes this good; mostly books by Ben Aaronovitch, Lawrence Miles, Daniel O’Mahony, and Lance Parkin are worth reading. Everything else…not so much. “
“If they showed emotion in the old series, it meant so much more because they did it sparingly. If you bring in soap opera elements, it makes things less meaningful because there’s an emotional crisis every week.”This is something I’ve just been thinking about. I remember an interview with Tom Baker, looking back on the episodes he was in, and he commented on the episode where Romana left with K9 to remain in E-space. Their parting of ways was conducted with the briskness necessary to the lifestyle of those who spend their time bouncing around between galaxies, from one crisis to another, but, as if as an afterthought, the Doctor shouted out after the disappearing Romana, “You were the noblest Romana of them all!” And that was it. Tom Baker referred to this as “playing against the lines”, and I think there was a lot of this in the old Doctor Who, and it was very effective. It felt as if you were the only one who found it unbearably sad. Just as in life, the universe at large didn’t care, the sadness remained private and personal, and was not advertised like in some Victorian weepy, or, yes, some tawdry soap opera.
Justin Isis writes:
I’m not against them injecting Naturalistic emotion into Doctor Who – again, this is something I feel that the best of the New Adventures and BBC novels succeeded at doing. I’m just saying I don’t buy it in the new show, most of the time. There are a few things I thought were really well done, like the “Girl in the Fireplace” episode. I believed that, but usually anything Russell T. Davies does, I can’t believe. His writing really is melodrama as opposed to drama – he tries to force emotion from characters we’ve just met and so can’t be expected to identify with; he gives people false/exaggerated reactions; and he tends to use predictably “epic” story arcs which aren’t really built up to well enough and so don’t have the desired impact (again, it took TWELVE episodes for them to get to the Time Lords in “The War Games,” that’d be like a season-long story in the terms of the new show).When it succeeds, I think it’s really down to the actors rather than the writing. But yeah, the Romana/Doctor period seemed far more adult for some reason. I mean can you imagine either of them losing their shit or the Doctor crying because Romana left? They probably just assumed – being time travellers – that they’d meet again at some point anyway. I keep imagining the Master at the end of “Utopia” yelling out”If the Doctor can be young and emo, then SO CAN I!” before regenerating into Sam Tyler.
Robin Davies writes:What did you think of Blink? For me that was far and away the best episode of Nu Who.
I’ve just been checking the episode guide. I forget which series that was now. Three, was it? Anyway, it looks like I saw most of the episodes in that series, too, and saw the episodes before and after Blink, but not Blink itself. Always the way. I’ll have to look it up. I note that it’s by the same bloke who wrote The Empty Child and also The Girl in the Fireplace, which, if it’s the one I think it is, wasn’t bad. Apparently he’s to succeed Russell T. Davies as producer/writer. I’ve heard the name (Steven Moffat), but I can’t remember in what connection now, unless it’s only in the Doctor Who connection.I thought Derek Jacobi and John Simm were both very good as the Master. In fact, I wanted the Doctor to regenerate into John Simm in a bizarre twist, or something. I’ve just been thinking that The Hand of Fear is an underrated story:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4HhXEuQ3Schttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4l78oAgh60&feature=relatedHere's a strange clip with the new titles and the old show:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vB7jWENnDzk&feature=related
“and he tends to use predictably ‘epic’ story arcs which aren’t really built up to well enough and so don’t have the desired impact”I think this is a good observation. There does seem to be a sense of trying to make things work. A lot of things seem to get conveniently glossed over with a wave of the prestidigitator’s hand. Often there literally is sparkly stuff like a magic wand being waved to indicate that things have suddenly worked out. I say often – I can think of two examples off-hand.
“How the hell did William Shakespeare just use rap battling skills to put the witches inside a crystal ball?”Excellent!
Justin Isis writes:
“Often there literally is sparkly stuff like a magic wand being waved to indicate that things have suddenly worked out.”I know what you mean. A lot of the time I’m watching it, and they’ll be building to the conclusion, and then the sparkly shit comes out and suddenly the Doctor starts cheering and everyone looks happy and I’m like “What the fuck happened?! How did they just defeat XXXXX villain / bring a dead person back to life / suddenly blow up a giant structure?!” In a lot of the episodes, there really does seem to be a kind of free-floating cloud of CGI magic which somehow acts as rubber cement to patch up plot holes. Do children now notice this kind of shit? I remember when I watched the old show when I was like ten years old, I often had no idea what was happening, but if I go back and rewatch it now, the stories for the most part DO make sense and have resolutions that can be followed comprehensibly. Whereas with the new show, even if I rewind, I usually just end up being like “How the hell did William Shakespeare just use rap battling skills to put the witches inside a crystal ball?”