Why ‘Doctor Who’ isn’t a Television Series

Doctor Who is not a television series or, at least, a single television series. This is an outrageous statement and is clearly debatable – in fact on the surface it’s clearly wrong. But I’m going to argue it anyway.

A short time ago I decided I’d give up and write the obvious article – what, in my opinion (IMHO for twitter users out there), is the greatest Doctor Who story ever made. So I sat down – I stood up – I paced for a while – I went to the toilet. I discovered to my astonishment that I didn’t know – I didn’t have an answer.

I decided the following: first that my favourite depended on my mood. When whimsical I like ‘Spearhead from Space’, when nostalgic I like ‘The Daemons’, when I’m in the mood to assess the quality of production (and possibly feeling slightly racist) I like ‘Talons of Weng Chiang’ when I’m going through one of my clinically depressed periods I like ‘Time Flight’ when I’m thirsty I like ‘Warriors of the Deep’. In fact I have a different favourite story for every mood: anger: ‘Deadly Assassin’, lust: ‘Planet of Fire’, asleep: ‘The Krotons’. The second thing I decided was more controversial – and that was that to compare ‘Blink’ with ‘The Aztecs’ or ‘Evil of the Daleks’ with ‘The Twin Dilemma’ or even ‘Horns of the Nimon’ with ’the Leisure Hive’ was pointless. The differences in style, cast, production team, format, narrative and visual sophistication or budget are such that the stories effectively exist in different television series.  Doctor Who is not a television series – it is the umbrella title for a collection of television series, each with their own identity. So why is this thought so concerning to fans? Why is this idea likely to get me a kicking.

What I want to do in the following article is to highlight why fans (and the BBC) like the see Doctor Who as a creatively unbroken run – why it is so important in fandom to think of the Doctor played by William Hartnell to be the same character as the Doctor played by Matt Smith. I also want to pinpoint some of the moments throughout Doctor Who (which, paradoxically and slightly hypocritically, I’ll refer to as a ‘series’ as shorthand) in which the format ‘rebooted’. Some of these moments may be surprising…

So while I’m being lightly controversial I might as go the whole way and do a religious analogy. A fans relationship with Doctor Who (or any text) is a religious one. One part of being a fan means to know a lot about the production history of the text – to know who wrote, directed and produced what and what happened behind the scenes. Another part is a more creative aspect. A fan likes to fill the gaps between the stories – they like to resolve narrative continuity problems, to construct intricate histories of characters, monsters, planets. In this context, it’s important for a fan to think of Doctor Who as a coherent series – to believe that ‘The Daleks’ Masterplan’ takes place in the same ‘universe’ as ‘Victory of the Daleks’. A fan needs faith therefore: faith not in the knowledge, abilities or the integrity of the producers of the series but in the series itself. This is true across the board – think about Lost .Watching that first season, or even that first episode, viewer needed to have faith that the series had a direction, that J. J. Abrahms had a plan and was not just throwing narrative curveballs at the audience with the assumption that he could tidy it all up at a later date. With Doctor Who it’s more complicated.

So this faith is essential for a fan to be a fan – we need to have a single series to be a fan of – to dissect and analyse – we need to be able to connect ‘The Romans’ with ‘The Fires of Pompeii’. To do this, we need to believe that the series orbits fandom rather than the other way round. We’re naturally fearful of a Galilean scenario in which we discover that the series has been happily sitting in the middle whilst we orbit it. This is the reason many fans crave spoilers or are catty and aggressive on the web fora. We desire to be in control or to at least have access to those who are in control. This is easier with the new series as the show-runners have been time served fans themselves – we trust them to share our obsessions and quirks. But retrospectively considering the old series is more problematic. Verity Lambert was initially planning a matter of weeks in advance; Barry Letts didn’t look to Innes Lloyd’s version of the series every time he made a decision; Philip Hinchcliffe was actively trying to change the series to make his own mark. Only when John Nathan-Turner planned the twentieth anniversary season and discovered the commercial opportunities in fandom did the series begin to reference the past. In the context of the series itself, narrative continuity was born in 1983. Doctor Who is best defined as a text that slowly evolve but, in true X-Men style, occasionally leaps into a new phase of being.

So is it possible to identify some of these leaps? Let’s give it a go.

‘The Daleks’. It may seem odd to suggest that the second story saw a shift in the style of the series – but famously, the series as Sidney Newman (and a focus group lead panel of creative BBC types) devised it was primarily intended to use the science fiction format in an educative sense. ‘The Daleks’, ‘The Dead Planet’, ‘The Mutants’ or whatever you want to call the second story, saw Verity Lambert taking the series in a different, more commercial direction. ‘An Unearthly Child’ set the narrative template for Doctor Who, ‘The Daleks’ confirmed its potential for longevity and fixed the series in the popular imagination. It also acts visually and textually as a template for those first few years – the Hartnell stories recorded in tiny studios in Lime Grove took the audience to more alien planets and depicted more aliens than Russell T Davies ever did with his resources and budget, and ‘The Daleks’ demonstrated how this could be achieved.

‘The Tenth Planet’. This story ended with the dramatic change of the lead actor from Hartnell to Patrick Troughton, but it is really the narrative setup that suggests a shift in the format of the series. The ‘base-under-siege’ narrative has become something of a laudable cliché in fandom, but for the best part of two seasons it was the preferred type of story. ‘The Moonbase’, ‘Tomb of the Cyberman’, ‘The Abominable Snowmen’, ‘The Web of Fear’, ‘the Wheel in Space’ all feature variations or even simply rewrites of this formula. For a time in the late 1960s this became what Doctor Who was about – a monster of the week attacking a team of humans holed-up in a space station or monastery or moon-base or the London Underground. It became about tension ratcheting up in slow increments, of aliens obscured by darkness or fog. This period was and is popular with those who saw it at the time, but it is partially because so little of it still exists in the archive that it has retained a mystique. ‘The Tenth Planet’ gave us a new Doctor, but also a new template for the series that perfectly suited the studio-bound monochrome series. As the 1970s approached, however, the makers of Doctor Who decided they wanted to play outdoors and the series came down to Earth with a bump. But it was not the first Jon Pertwee story ‘Spearhead from Space’ that saw the next reboot – Producer Derrick Sherwin had already done a trial run for the format with…

‘The Invasion’.  – A Cybermen story launched a narrative template for much of the Troughton years so it’s fitting that another would launch a template for Jon Pertwee’s time as the Doctor. To suggest ‘The Invasion’ is a dry run for the Earth-bound stories of the following season would be an understatement. The story moves the template narrative from base-under-siege to London-under-siege. In many ways, a clutch of stories can be seen as having a part in the evolution of this transition: ‘The War Machines’ and ‘The Web of Fear’ are both set in contemporary (or near-future) London and both feature recognisable landmarks, but ‘The Invasion’ begins a trend of combining humans and technology, it refines the relationship between the Doctor and human authority by creating the benign but militaristic UNIT. So ‘The Invasion’ is the first step in the grand reboot of the series in the following season – and when most people watched Pertwee’s first story ‘Spearhead from Space’ on their black and white television sets, it would in many respects have seemed like a sequel to the seven part Troughton story.

‘The Ark in Space’. If ‘The Invasion’ brought the Doctor down to Earth, then ‘The Ark in Space’ finally set him free. That first episode which features only the Doctor, Sarah and Harry feels like a reboot, like Holmes and Hinchcliffe grabbing the series and branding it. After the hangover of Baker’s first story ‘Robot’, one that features UNIT, mad scientists, human bureaucracies, ‘Ark’ seems like a new series, it seems alien. Everything changed with ‘Ark’, suddenly the narratives became preoccupied with bodily transformation, hypnotism. If the Troughton years were preoccupied with a ‘base-under-siege’, and the Pertwee years repeatedly featured ‘Earth-under-siege’, then these first two or three seasons of tom Baker can best be described as concerned with ‘bodies-under-siege’ . Think about it – count how many stories revolve around human mutation, deformation or occupation. ‘Terror of the Zygons’, ‘Planet of Evil’, ‘Pyramids of Mars’, ‘The Brain of Morbius’, ‘The Seeds of Doom’, ‘The Hand of Fear’, ‘The Talons of Weng Chiang’. All these are not just the best Doctor Who has ever offered – they all follow a template or a way of treating the human body – and ‘The Ark in Space’ was the first, the Holmes/Hinchcliffe manifesto.

‘The Leisure Hive’. On the surface this seems the safest bet to be on a list of reboot stories. John Nathan-Turner propels the series into the 1980s with a new title sequence, a new logo, and a new sombre Doctor and the introduction of computer aided electronic effects. The fact that Tom Baker was either ill or lovesick throughout this season helped JNT’s redesign. So dramatic is the change to the visual styling of the series that the change to the narrative styling is often ignored. Nathan-Turner and his script editor Christopher Bidmead spend much of the season trying to disassociate the series from what they famously perceived to be the ‘undergraduate humour’ of Douglas Adams. This, they achieve by simply removing all the jokes and making Tom Baker unhappy and isolated. But this change also paves the way for Peter Davison’s more stable and more innocent Doctor. ‘The Leaisure Hive’ also points the way for the direction of the series for five or more years – a repeated battle between an increasingly media conscious producer and an increasingly disillusioned script editor. It’s not until Bidmead’s main replacement Eric Saward leaves that we see the final evolution of the original series:

‘Remembrance of the Daleks’. The final form of the series comes as new script editor Andrew Cartmel takes control. After one season of finding his feet, Cartmel gains confidence and begins to shape the series to his ideas and his preferred style. The story also sees the beginning of a clear attempt to try and recapture the mystery of the character of the Doctor, the so called ‘Cartmel masterplan’. Much of this has since turned out to be retrospective – the main impact of the ‘masterplan’ was on the Virgin New Adventures in the 1990s, but it is certainly apparent in ‘Remembrance’ and the following two seasons of stories that a change has happened. Perhaps not a reboot as such – the series ended possibly before the questions raised in these stories could be answered. These final seasons can be seen as an attempt to prepare the audience for another major shift to come. John Nathan-Turner offered a 1980s Doctor Who that was, compared with 1970s Doctor Who a new series. Before he left (as he had been trying to do for a number of years) he seemed determined to do the same into the 1990s. So what ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’ really gave us, aside from  a staggering jump in quality from the previous two years, we a taste of a reboot. In retrospect it now can be seen as a brief televised prologue to the novelisations that appeared after the cancellation of the series.

‘Rose’. Russell T Davies opening episode to the 2005 series really was a restart. On all production and marketing levels this new series is seen as entirely separate to the old. For example if they so wished they could happily remake any ‘classic series’ story without the BBC or the average viewer batting an eyelid. It is really only fans (including, somewhat paradoxically, those working on the series) who see the new series as a narrative continuation of the old. So ‘Rose’, more than any other story, is a reboot in terms of plot, style, format, cast, crew. The ‘time war’ backstory is both an attempt by Davies to create an exciting new mythology for the series and to give the character of the Doctor an ‘edge’, but it is also a self-reflexive acknowledgement that the series has restarted. Thus, the age of continuity is over – the producer of Doctor Who has the freedom to ignore or destroy or even reuse anything that has occurred before. It’s not surprising, therefore, that Steven Moffat closes his first season with the ‘reboot’ of the entire Universe paving the way for…

‘The Impossible Astronaut’. After a whole season of preparing the ground, Moffat completes the restyling of the series. ‘The Impossible Astronaut’ is in many ways as removed from ‘Rose’ as ‘Rose is removed from ‘Remembrance’. Moffat acknowledges that the time has come to accept, and embrace, the fact that Doctor Who is now a success. Since 2005, Davies had sneaked into each season a teasing concept or word that was revealed to be significant in the final episodes. These were unobtrusive and mostly subtle suggestions however. In this latest season, Moffat has abandoned this technique and is, instead, using a central narrative to shape the season. For the first time, stories are blurring into one another, characters histories are becoming more important than the monsters, aliens and adventures. ‘The Impossible Astronaut’ suggests a new way of constructing the narrative of Doctor Who, one which demands, rather than requests, committed and repeated viewing. It remains to be seen how successful this will be in terms of viewing figures and appreciation. It also remains to be seen where Doctor Who will go next…

So Doctor Who is clearly two series – one that ran from 1963-1989, the second that has run from 2005 until now. For once the BBC and the fans agree – but for different reasons. For the BBC Doctor Who was in continuous production for those twenty seven years – for fans, the Doctor was one character and Doctor Who was, and is, one narrative. But the producers, writers, script editors and directors, the people who actually made the series, made each story or perhaps season as new. They thought nothing of restarting or rebooting the series in their own style. For an incoming producer it was almost essential to think of Doctor Who as a blank slate and for the stories they were responsible for as taking place in a different series. So, as usual, it depend on how to read it – but by thinking of Doctor Who as a number of series rather than just one – it’s surprising which stories stand out as being significant.

Next up – toast isn’t really food – discuss.

Learning to Read with Doctor Who

About Time, Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles’ masterful six volume (and rising) set of guides to Doctor Who tread a fine line between catty rumour and gossip and academic level analysis. The essay ‘How Important Were the Books?’ from the first volume of the series, is a particularly fine example of the quality of their writing. In the essay they explore how the literature of Doctor Who both informed and intellectually shaped fandom. They convincingly suggest that a particular generation of fans brought up before the availability of videos or DVDs and when repeats were rare to non-existent, relied instead on the Target novelisations of the stories to complete their knowledge of the history of the and mythology of the series. They go further to suggest that unlike fans of Star Wars or Star Trek, fans of Doctor Who were for the most part deprived of toys, making the books even more crucial to the fan in developing an imaginative connection with the series. This literacy, they suggest, is one of the reasons that a good number of Doctor Who fans become academics or creative writers. You can see this when considering how easily the new series has recruited writers, directors, producers and actors from within its own fan-base. Indeed a surprising number of the most esteemed television writers of the last twenty years are self-professed Doctor Who fans and many are, or have been, actively involved in the series itself.

Wood and Miles’ essay chimed particularly with my own experience of growing up with the series. Being a fan of Doctor Who during the 1980s and 1990s has given me the critical ammunition and imagination to achieve three degrees including a doctorate. And here’s how:

The ‘Target’ novelisations were a long running set of adaptations of Doctor Who adventures that ran from the early 1970s until the end of the original series in the late 1980s. Most were direct retellings of the stories based on the scripts and a few photographs and most were extremely simple. As the series reached its end, however, the novels became more complex, the adaptations of stories such as ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’ and ‘The Curse of Fenric’, for example, were far richer than had been seen before. Writers such as Ian Briggs, Marc Platt and Ben Aaronovitch enhanced and added to the televised stories, played with different narrative techniques and built up a new mythology for the series that still survives today. As I grew older, the novels grew with me. When the videos began to be released I collected them, but the novels already had me in their grasp.

By the time I was moving through GCSEs and A-Levels, the television series had finished. Oddly, this had a positive effect on the literary side of Doctor Who. As Wood and Miles suggest, the ‘New Adventures’ series of original novels published by Virgin in the 1990s were an indication that the target of Doctor Who merchandise was getting older. Without the television series fandom was getting older so the New Adventures were pitched at the mid-to-late teen market.  At the same time, the Doctor Who Magazine became more reflective and more critically dense. As I was preparing to start my first degree the magazine included articles about genre, canonicity, structuralism, Ferdinand de Saussure, Jean Baudrillard and Roland Barthes. Without a current series to preview, review and promote, the writers of the magazine became more ingenious, more inventive with their analyses of Doctor Who. In the mid 1990s this was a useful preparation for an English degree. Although the articles lacked academic rigour, the application of critical theory to a series that I knew back-to-front was both inspiring and informative. At university, Doctor Who and the literature surrounding it in the 1990s and early 2000s became the sweetener that helped the sometimes impenetrable concepts I was struggling with go down more easily.

All this is perhaps analogous to J K Rowling’s approach to her Harry Potter books. As her readership aged, her novels increased in complexity and emotional depth (if not in quality of plot). Likewise my academic development was coincidentally matched by a development in the critical qualities of Doctor Who writing. But with the revival of the television series a curious, but not unexpected thing happened. To cater for the new younger audience, the magazine understandably reverted back to promoting the programme in simple and uncomplicated articles oddly often mimicking the style and language of the show – reading some of the articles I can still detect the stylistic quirks of both Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat. The depth of the novels published by Virgin and BBC Books was replaced with a shorter form, also closer in texture and format to the television episodes.

But the popularity of the series also gave rise to a corresponding area of academic research in Britain and America. Academics such as James Chapman, Matt Hills and Piers Britton have all produced recent analyses of the series that consider Doctor Who in the light of the 2005 revival. To this list I would add Wood and Miles’ guides (particularly the revised editions) – though they are unburdened by the need for academic rigour. Prior to this, Doctor Who had rarely been seen as an academic subject of itself. Aside from the famous and famously impenetrable Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text, a study written by Manuel Alvarado and John Tulloch in 1983, the series had mostly been written about as a part of a wider discussion of cult texts, fandom or the history of the BBC. The 2005 series coincided with a growing appreciation of cult television as a subject worthy of a case-by-case analysis, so the materialisation of a sub-discipline entirely devoted to Doctor Who is hardly surprising. Once again, however, for me wrestling with a doctorate, it was a case of the right place at the right time.

When preparing for my doctoral viva on a subject unrelated to Doctor Who I found myself reading these recent academic studies. I found them an extremely useful way of revising some familiar branches of critical theory and of learning entirely new theories. As before, my nerdy, all-encompassing knowledge of the series made reading these critiques much easier than it would have been if they were focussing, for example, on Beowulf or an obscure 17^th century witchcraft play. So – fully armed with the now comprehensible critical theory, I was able to approach my own subject with more confidence.

I agree with Wood and Miles’ thesis that Doctor Who is a series that both encouraged and fostered literacy. It didn’t teach me to read – but it taught me to understand the depths and nuances of literature, film and television. Crucially it also made me immune from the opinion that still infects the academic world: that television is somehow a disposable and irrelevant cultural form. Television studies have always been treated with disdain and ignorance by both the general public, the press and by academics in other disciplines. The reaction in the 1980s to Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text is a testament to this – although the study was indeed dense and complicated, criticism to it seemed to focus on why such a study should take place of a mere cult television series. But just as the academic study of film has now rightfully become a branch in its own right – the study of television continues to gain a unique identity. The recent surge in ‘Doctor Who studies’ and the success of the work that comes out of it can only support this movement and can only help to continue the tradition of indoctrinating fans into the academic world.

The TARDIS is a Television Set

Television critic Nancy Banks-Smith, expanding on the idea that the Dalek represented the pernicious, mechanical ubiquity of the car, suggested further that: ‘the TARDIS was, in fact, a television set’. What did she mean by this? What does it mean now, looking back on fifty years of Doctor Who?

“you say you can’t fit an enormous building into one of your smaller sitting rooms?” says the Doctor to Ian Chesterton, one of the first human characters we see entering the bigger-on-the-inside ™ TARDIS.  “You’ve discovered television haven’t you?” he continues, “yes” Chesterton replies. “then by showing an enormous building on your television screen you can do what’s humanly impossible”

Reason one: the TARDIS is a dimensionally transcendental yet cosy object just like a television set.

The TARDIS distorts – it compresses or elongates space. But as an object of fantasy it is also incredibly domestic and reassuring. Today, the image of the police box has become dislocated from how it was seen in the 1960s. Nowadays it means the comfort and security of Doctor Who, back then it meant the comfort and security of knowing that even in the smog-bound city streets the policeman was nearby. The TARDIS, both inside and outside, signifies home: either the safe impregnability of the console room or the cosy familiarity of the blue box. From the beginning of the series it is defined as a place of refuge. In the early stories, separation from the TARDIS is a major factor in the drama. ‘The Daleks’, ‘Marco Polo’, ‘The Keys of Marinus’, ‘The Daleks’ Masterplan’, countless other episodes all somehow contrived to lock the Doctor out or isolate him from his home. The TARDIS, in many stories is both the first and last domestic destination of the characters and the object of desire during the adventure. It is an artefact of escape, of resolution, or rest and of information. It is an object that somehow seems to be simultaneously incongruous and yet also at home in the study of Professor Chronotis in ‘Shada’ or the bedroom of Martha Jones in ‘The Sound of Drums’.

Reason two: the TARDIS contains a television set.

So the TARDIS physically reflects a fantasy version of the television with its skewed dimensions and its domestic familiarity. But the TARDIS crew are often seen watching television within the time machine. From the Beatles and other notable historical figures on the Time-Space Visualiser in ‘The Chase’ to the junk mail advert for ‘The Greatest Show in the Galaxy’ the TV always seems to be on in the TARDIS. But it doesn’t stop there – when demonstrating to Zoe Herriot the dangers of travelling with him, the Doctor even puts Doctor Who on showing her all seven episodes of ‘Evil of the Daleks’. From the beginning the scanner is more than just a window to the world outside the TARDIS. In ‘The Edge of Destruction’, the scanner shows images of disaster to warn the occupants of a fault; in ‘The Mind Robber’, the scanner shows the TARDIS crew images of home to entice them out; in ‘The Keeper of Traken the scanner shows a tourism video for Traken. The scanner, like the television, offers images of fantasy in the 1960s and 1970s and, in the days before dedicated computer monitors, acts as a display of information in the 1980s. The technology of television and the technology of the TARDIS mimic one another. It is only after the TV movie that the screens leave the TARDIS – instead we get holographic displays and light shows like a planetarium. The notion of the TARDIS as a platform for viewing is embedded deeply in the mythology of the series. We are told repeatedly that the Doctor escaped from his home planet because he was frustrated at the inactivity of his people. Before ‘The Deadly Assassin’, the Timelords are explicitly defined as observers, watchers, cataloguers of history – they even watch episodes of Doctor Who from their courtroom in ‘The Trial of the Timelord’. It’s not difficult to see the TARDIS as a machine packed with the apparatus of this tele-observation – and to think of the average Timelord, sitting in his console room watching events unfurl on the scanner or the Time-Space Visualiser or watching reruns piped through from the Matrix, the repository of experiences and information (a videotape library) on Gallifrey. In a way, in this context the Doctor becomes aligned with fandom: the Doctor is not content to watch the universe from his TARDIS, like a fan he wants to break through to the events he sees on the scanner, he wants to get outside the TARDIS, he wants to get involved.

Reason three: the TARDIS doesn’t travel through time, it travels through genres.

From the beginning of the series the TARDIS hasn’t really travelled in time. Instead the TARDIS travels through a mediated, televisual concept of time. Once the pitfalls of changing time is removed from the series following ‘The Aztecs’, adventures in the past followed the more conventional  narrative form that mimicked the ITC approach to history such as The Adventures of Robin Hood and (starring William Russell) The Adventures of Sir Lancelot.  The Doctor travels not through time but through cultural genres. The writers of Doctor Who are poachers, borrowing elements (or entire plots) from popular movies and other television series.

In the early 1970s the TARDIS gets stuck on Earth whilst the television gets stuck on reruns of Quatermass: ‘Spearhead from Space’, ‘Ambassadors of Death’, ‘Inferno’, ‘The Claws of Axos’ and ‘The Daemons’ all offer twists, or direct retellings, of the three 1950s serials. This is not a criticism however. Before the advent of videos and DVDs or regular repeats on BBC3, old television series took on a mythic, semi-remembered status. Quatermass in the 1970s was something older viewers vaguely remembered being terrified by, so the Doctor Who stories that drew on them also drew on a kind of Nigel Kneale-esque ‘race memory’ of televised fear. The important thing to note is that by exiling the Doctor to Earth and by taking the TARDIS out of action, the producers of the series limited themselves to a particular type of narrative: when the TARDIS gets stuck and so does the television. After this, the series begins to draw on cinema as well as television. When the Hammer movies begin to be shown on the box, Robert Holmes famously starts to mine them for stories and imagery. When Star Wars hits the cinema, the TARDIS actively avoids any location or situation that could be said to resemble or compete with the ‘galaxy far, far away’.

The new series, with its budget and CGI effects draws more confidently from this wider gene pool. The new TARDIS still travels in genres, so far bringing its crew into ghost stories, whodunits, disaster movies, swashbucklers, sand-and-sandal epics, apocalyptic dramas, future dystopias and romanticised renaissance comedies. The TARDIS is still our way of viewing, of seeing, but instead of showing us television, it’s showing us DVDs and downloaded movies.

It distorts dimensions, it compresses and expands time, it gives both the characters and us a way of viewing, not the past, but the past as told through screen-fictions. So the TARDIS is both metaphorically and at times literally a television set.

Who and Holmes

When Doctor Who returned in 2005 and turned out to be a tremendous success, Russell T Davies suggested that the series had moved from being an enclosed phenomenon such as Blakes 7 or Quatermass to being an eternal mythology such as Tarzan or Sherlock Holmes. The implication of this suggestion is that Davies sees Doctor Who as, effectively, an immortal fictional text, a series that has demonstrated that it can come back, that has longevity. The best way of understanding what the state of Doctor Who might be at the end of the next fifty years may be to consider the state of the Sherlock Holmes mythology.

The releases of Guy Ritchie’s movie in 2009 and Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’s TV series in 2010, coupled with a series of pastiches release by Titan books and the publication of Young Sherlock Holmes: Death Cloud by Andy Lane in 2010, are suggestive of a strong and fertile mythology. Unlike Doctor Who, however, this mythology is incredibly diverse (some would say fragmented), crossing genres, engaging in real history, playing with Conan Doyle’s original creations, twisting them into new shapes. So can these different approaches to Holmes be codified in any way, in what ways do they represent Holmes fandom and how might they help us in understanding the future of Doctor Who?

First challenge: summarising the different ways of telling a Holmes story. The difficulty with this is the sheer volume of material out there: short stories, novels, films, television series, radio series, plays, Holmes stories have been told in almost every available narrative format. In addition to this are the books about Holmes: fictional biographies, geographical studies, encyclopaedias, chronologies. Many of these peripheral text could easily be classed as works of narrative fiction of themselves, for example William Baring Gould’s Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street. Equally many of these studies have informed the pastiches, giving them a mixture of fan credibility, a taste of canonicity and an overall sense of authenticity. So how might we go about categorising this monstrous tangle of texts? Perhaps the best way is to position the pastiches in relation to Conan Doyle’s original stories, charting the ways in which they diverge from the canon.

The first branch of non-canonical Holmes story is the direct pastiche. A line can be drawn from the founding essays of Holmes fan writing and this approach to pastiche. ‘The Great Game’, a creative branch of fan writing that took as its basis the premise that Holmes and Watson were real people, was inspired by pseudo-academic studies of Conan-Doyle by notable figures (and crime writers) such as Dorothy L. Sayers and Ronald Knox. The Great Game lead to a long series of analyses of the original stories, picking them apart, trying to reconcile the holes in the plots and attempting to put them into chronological order. This activity tellingly mimicked the central tenet of the Holmes stories themselves. Holmes fans who engage in the Great Game are, essentially, role-playing Holmes himself and applying his techniques to the stories themselves.

The direct pastiche is almost a by-product of this exercise: an attempt not only to mimic Conan Doyle’s distinctive style but to creatively fill in the gaps. These stories seek to blend in with the original canon and are expressly intended to offer a continuation. Ironically, the direct pastiche includes plotlines that Conan Doyle never used – sequels to The Hound of the Baskervilles, stories (like Bert Coules’ radio series The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes) built out of the characteristic, throwaway references to other adventures, stories that flesh out the antagonistic relationship between Holmes and Moriarty.

With Doctor Who, out of the three this approach is perhaps the most recognisable: the Virgin published ‘New Adventures’ riffed on Andrew Cartmel’s designs for the seventh Doctor, the ‘Missing Adventures’, the ‘Past Doctor Adventures’ and the Big Finish audio productions  slotted stories into holes between televised adventures and the ‘Eighth Doctor Adventures’ hugely expanded on the 1996 television movie. Each branch of non-televised story broadly adopted the stylings of the series, both mimicking and adding to the core of the mythology. As such, the notion of ‘canon’ is far more complex with Doctor Who than with Sherlock Holmes. With Holmes, the canon is explicitly defined as any story written by Conan Doyle, with Doctor Who, the number of different writers involved makes this distinction impossible.

The next branch of pastiche is more distanced from the source material. As well as pastiches that strive to seamlessly fill the gaps in the canon, there are others that attempt to expand the mythology – allowing Conan Doyle’s original characters to engage in either real historical events (such as the Jack the Ripper killings) or with other fictional characters (such as Dracula). The former type has a rich, semi-mythological source to draw on: the Victorian era, pre-electricity, pre-car, when Britain was still an empire and when London was wreathed in fog. The latter is equally rich in the neo-gothic tradition and the burgeoning popularity of horror fiction: vampires, ghosts, werewolves, supernatural serial killers. Ironically, The Hound of the Baskervilles set a popular template for the Sherlock Holmes pastiche that saw him and Watson combat these fantastical adversaries. Ironic because the original stories, when dealing with the preter- and supernatural, always fell on the side of rationalism. Holmes is the arch-rationalist: cool-headed, analytical, immune from superstition. A possible reason for this conflating of Holmes with the fantastical is the character, particularly in his later years, of Conan Doyle himself. Doyle was a Spiritualist, a member of the Ghost Club and the Society of Psychical Research (think Sea of Souls and Ghost Busters but real), and notoriously because involved in the case Cottingley fairy photographs in the 1920s. Doyle, in a sense, reacted to the emerging technologies of the modern world, the telephone, the photograph, the cinema, with a default position of ‘more things in Heaven and Earth’, as much a believer as Holmes is a sceptic. These beliefs have become fused with the Holmes mythology to the extent that it is now almost a cliché to find Holmes suspending his concrete, rationalist views and engaging in a battle with the forces of darkness.

In some respects, Doctor Who has already made this shift into genre pastiche on its own. Stories such as ‘The Daemons’, ‘Pyramids of Mars’, ‘State of Decay’, ‘Curse of Fenric’, ‘The Unquiet Dead’, ‘Tooth and Claw’, ‘The Shakespeare Code’ and even ‘A Good Man Goes To War’ combine the basic plot of Doctor Who with the tropes, imagery and narratives of ghost stories, of Victorian and Edwardian horror and, fittingly, of the mythologised depiction of London found in so many of the Holmes pastiches. The Holmes and Doctor Who ‘universes’ have already collided in Andy Lane’s (the same Andy Lane who wrote the recent Young Sherlock Holmes novel) New Adventure, All-Consuming Fire. Thus far, Doctor Who hasn’t strayed into genre pastiche to such an extent that the central narrative of the mythology has shifted – the ghost, witch or vampire in Doctor Who is nearly always a stranded alien or alien force and the Devil in ‘The Daemons’ or ‘The Satan Pit’ is a long buried extra-terrestrial around whom a mythology has accrued. The shift is almost bound to happen, however, as the series continues to play with in-vogue mythologies.

It is with the production of the 2009 BBC series Sherlock by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, that the possibility of a blending of the Holmes and Doctor Who mythologies came even closer – and this leads us to the third layer of pastiche, the…

Remake or ‘reimagining’ of the Sherlock Holmes mythology is not a new exercise. The Basil Rathbone movies that Moffat claims influenced he and Mark Gatiss with their latest series gradually morphed from being adaptations of Conan Doyle, through genre pastiche to a completely new take on Sherlock Holmes. Towards the end of the series, after America entered the Second World War, Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Watson are shown battling Nazis in London, Switzerland, Washington. The Holmes mythology is retooled as a device of contemporary propaganda entirely at odds with and anachronistic to the original stories. With these movies, Holmes became a mobile mythology, still clinging to the fog of Victorian London, but frequently twisting to accommodate the modern world. See the Adam Adamant/Buck Rogers-esque animation Sherlock Holmes in the 2 Century, the timely but unsuccessful references to psycho-analysis and serial killers in the BBC story Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking, or even the pleasingly ‘mockney’, hard-bodied Holmes in the recent Guy Ritchie movies. With these reinterpretations all bets are off – writers and directors can cherry pick, strip down, condense and modernise at will. Only the central character traits and, possibly, the presence of a Watson character are required. Quite often, it is only with these that we get a clear picture of what Sherlock Holmes really is – following these complete deconstructions can a complete map of the mythology be made. For example, the Ritchie movie unpacks the physicality of Holmes, his compulsiveness and restlessness, in a way that no other interpretation has. Moffat and Gatiss’s series exposes the dynamics of a relationship built around a love of danger and adventure. The Rathbone movies, showing Holmes in opposition to 1940s fascism, demonstrate the position of the character as a national icon, an emblem of Empire, tradition and Englishness.

The fear amongst Doctor Who fans is presumably that a similar trend towards rebooting would lead to a break in the cherished continuity. Doctor Who fans bask in the illusion (mostly created by themselves) that the Doctor Who mythology is a single, coherent narrative and that the character played by Matt Smith is exactly the same character played by William Hartnell.  So what would happen if, as Gary Russell suggested in an article in the Doctor Who Magazine, the series was remade from scratch in America? What if a movie was made that jettisoned the BBC endorsed back-story and that retained only the central idea of a benevolent alien travelling in time? This remains to be seen but the position of those central, canonical Holmes stories possibly gives us a clue. The Holmes stories have developed a kind of hub and spoke model in which the canon is sacrosanct and all peripheral texts are accepted and even embraced, but are also defined by their distance from it. In recent years (since 1989) Doctor Who has made the first step towards this model with the steady expansion of independent and BBC endorsed productions. The New Adventures, Bill Bagg’s spin off dramas, the Big Finish audio adventures, Scream of the Shalka (which features an alternative, but BBC sanctioned, Ninth Doctor), Torchwood, Sarah Jane, even the new television series itself, all, depending on your perspective, muddy the water or enrich the mythology of Doctor Who. They all exist (or perhaps co-exist) in relation to the hub of the original BBC series.

Perhaps as we enter the next fifty years we are standing on the brink of an explosion of reboots and reinterpretations as we can see with Sherlock Holmes – but there is always the original.

Iconoclastic Approaches to Doctor Who

In my last blog entry I made the claim that the closest parallel to Steven Moffat in the classic series was Robert Holmes, and that Holmes’s depiction of the Time Lords in the series was similar in its playful manipulation of the series mythology to Moffat’s fiftieth anniversary trilogy of stories. In short, the conclusion I reached was that iconoclasm was, in general, a good thing in the context of Doctor Who. This view isn’t one that digests easily in the lower intestine of fandom. Fans, generally, like consistency and coherence – they like to feel in control, to catalogue and rank and collect. The worst thing you could do to a fan is to release a DVD with a different design, or to cruelly slot another, previously unknown Doctor between two previous ones. They like order, and they particularly like to have some feeling of control over that order. Iconoclasm, particularly in the degree manifested by Moffat and Holmes, is guaranteed to bait fans, and this is only emolliated over time.

So – what implications does this have for the series in general? Have iconoclastic moments in the series really been the strongest? You only need to look at iconoclastic stories (those that have attempted to rewrite the series mythology without a great deal of concern over the mythology that precedes them) to see that the previous statement is a contestable one. ‘The Deadly Assassin’, ‘Power of the Daleks’, ‘Spearhead from Space’,  ‘Genesis of the Daleks’, ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’, ‘Rose’, ‘Day of the Doctor’ and ‘Time of the Doctor’ have all to varying degrees rewritten the mythology and are all (arguably) highly regarded stories and are all (contentiously) from highly regarded periods of the series. Compare this with the reverse approach, a story that doesn’t rewrite the mythology, but obsessively and ostentatiously dwells within it such as ‘Attack of the Cybermen’, a story that is both poorly regarded and comes from a period of the series that is generally regarded as weak. But the interesting thing is that there are actually different types of iconoclasm in the series.

And now I risk sending you all to sleep (or worse to find out where I live and attack me) – but stick with me for two hundred and twenty words.

Film academic (stay with me) Jim Collins developed a theory that he applied to a rash of 1990s movies that depicted historical events. He suggested that they could be divided into two critical genres: New Sincerity and Eclectic Irony (wake up!). The former were movies that treated their subject matter with utter unmediated seriousness, unsullied by playfulness or influences of other genres, the latter were movies that depicted history as seen through the lens of other movies, a kind of cultural history (stick with it – nearly there). The quickest way to get an idea of what Collins is talking about is to consider the differences between two movies that might be considered ‘westerns’: Dances with Wolves and Back to the Future part 3. Dances is focused on presenting the ‘true’ west, unaffected by the hundreds of westerns that have come before it, whilst Back to the Future 3 does the reverse, happily referencing Clint Eastwood movies (even the non-western ones) in its recreation of history as a ‘theme-park’ filled with cultural tropes and in-jokes. Quentin Tarantino is the master of the Eclectic Irony genre: think Saving Private Ryan compared with Inglorious Basterds or 12 Years a Slave compared with Django Unchained. So, how, you may be screaming at your computer screens, does this relate to Doctor Who?

It strikes me that the iconoclastic periods of the series could be divided along the lines of Collins’ genres.  I would also take it further (and this may be a matter of personal opinion – but it is somewhat backed up by historic fan opinion) that one version of iconoclasm works better in the context of the series than the other. Consider, once again, Robert Holmes. His use of source material, of horror and science fiction B movies, of the Quatermass serials and, crucially, of the mythology of Doctor Who itself could easily meet the criteria of the Eclectic Irony genre. Playful, irreverent, teasing, but with an awareness of the form, attractiveness and sheer creative power of the texts he selects for pastiche, Holmes elegantly toes the line (as Moffat does years later) between comedy and drama. His iconoclastic approach towards the history of Doctor Who is similarly playful and irreverent: he gives the Doctor two hearts simply to get the plot of ‘Spearhead from Space’ from A to B, he first presents the Time Lords as otherworldly Magritte-esque figures then changes them into very worldly political conspirators so that Gallifrey becomes an acceptable setting for a pastiche of The Manchurian Candidate, he creates the Master as a Svengali-manqué and then twists him into the Phantom of the Opera. Robert Holmes was the Quentin Tarantino of Doctor Who: boisterous and with the ability to mine the B movie genre for gold.

Andrew Cartmel’s approach to the series in the 1980s was similar to Holmes. Like Holmes, Cartmel and his writers mined genre literature and movies for their inspiration, and like Holmes, Cartmel was, by inclination, an iconoclast. The ‘Cartmel Masterplan’ is something that has been retrospectively imposed on the final two seasons of the original series, but it’s clear that writers seeded moments in stories such as ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’, ‘Silver Nemesis’, ‘Battlefield’, ‘Curse of Fenric’ and ‘Ghostlight’ that attempted to reconstruct the character of the Doctor as ‘more than just another Time Lord’. The intention was to reintroduce a layer of mystery over the title character, to return the series to its basics by jettisoning, or arguably simply adding to, the chaff of previous Time Lord mythology. This intention continued into the 1990s with the ‘New Adventures of Doctor Who’, a range of original novels some of which were written by Cartmel era writers (and Cartmel himself) and reached a conclusion with Marc Platt’s baroque and slightly impenetrable story ‘Lungbarrow’. In many ways, Cartmel’s alleged plans were more extreme than Holmes’ changes to the mythology of the series, but his brand of iconoclasm is different to that of the 1970s script editor. Cartmel’s approach is based not around B movie twists but instead around the penchant in the 1980s towards reboots of superheroes in comic strips. Cartmel is more influenced by Alan Moore than Nigel Kneale. Ironically, although Alan Moore is perhaps the ultimate proponent of Eclectic Irony (see League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and then compare it to Holmes’s Victoriana mash-up ‘Talons of Weng Chiang’), Cartmel’s emulation of these comic strip reboots is more straight forward and reverent – the brief snatches of dialogue in the television episodes seem to be an attempt to inject more depth into the character. One problem with Cartmel’s approach is that, unlike Holmes’s tweaking of the mythology, his additions are more based in an attempt to create an atmosphere than a narrative. This may be a result of the cancellation – and ‘Lungbarrow’ suggests the narrative conclusion of the ‘Masterplan’, but unlike ‘The Deadly Assassin’, Marc Platt adds a layer of obfuscating mysticism. ‘Lungbarrow’ is as opaque and fantastical and ‘Deadly Assassin’ is transparent and gritty. I’m not saying that I dislike Platt’s novel – in fact, I find the Mervyn Peake stylings to be both enchanting and absorbing, but it hasn’t sent the same ripples through the Doctor Who mythology as ‘Assassin’. One reason for this is that it was a niche text – but another is the nature of the changes. ‘Lungbarrow’ doesn’t have the same space for expansion in narrative terms.  ‘The Deadly Assassin’ left room for extensions to the mythology in future stories, it changed Doctor Who stealthily, whilst the Cartmel approach offered a curious dead-end, a slightly po-faced, serious narrative line that ended with a whimper. I’m not saying that Cartmel’s ‘New Sincerity’ iconoclasm is less satisfactory than Holmes’s cheekly ‘Eclectic Irony’ version, but it certainly had less of an impact when the series returned, and I think part of the reason for this is not only that sincerity dates, whilst playful insincerity is more timeless, but also that Eclectic Irony is simply more ‘Doctorish’. Holmes’s way of writing matches the motivation of the character of the Doctor and his reason for traveling the universe.

The myth of the Doctor isn’t a sincere one, it’s an eclectic and an ironic one, beautifully constructed not using mysterious and dark secrets, but using inconsistent, continuity-busting new ideas and random, wonderful leaps of baseless imagination. And Robert Holmes recognised this. The character of the Doctor isn’t, as Cartmel suggests, like a distant mountain, it’s more like a sand dune that shifts and eddies with the wind and with time.

Steven Moffat and the Magic of Doctor Who

What has happened to the magic of Doctor Who?

These words were famously written at the end of a excoriating review of ‘The Deadly Assassin’ in which the president of the DWAS, Jan-Vincent Rudzki picked the now well regarded story apart, highlighting the breaches in continuity, bemoaning the changes it was imposing on the myth of the series and generally attacking the ethos and cavalier approach of Robert Holmes to writing Doctor Who. It’s also a good indication of the grand cycle of history. After the recent, unofficial, trilogy of stories by Steven Moffat (‘Name of the Doctor’, ‘Day of the Doctor’ and ‘Time of the Doctor’) I was shocked to find that many fans positioned themselves at polar extremes. Half were praising the Moffat era as the greatest in the life of the show, the other half were claiming that Moffat was engaged in an insidious and monomaniacal attempt to destroy the series. This, perhaps, is indicative of the general polarisation of fandom in social networking sites such as Twitter populated, as they are, by such single minded, fame-blinded monolithic  groups as ‘Beliebers’ or ‘Wand Erectioners’ and their corresponding ‘haters’. Needless to say; I’m sceptical as to the social or cultural merit of such extremist views and prefer, where possible (‘Time and the Rani’ excepted) to take the middle, measured, some would say, safe road. The point of this blog entry is that over the last few months I wouldn’t have been surprised to read the phrase ‘what has happened to the magic of Doctor Who’ plastered all over the internet and directed towards Moffat’s interpretation of the programme. So – what does this say about the current state of the series and about the ‘Grand Moff’s’ running of Doctor Who?

I’m not going to dismantle Rudzki’s review, Phil Sandifer did that in his excellent article on ‘The Deadly Assassin’, by which this post is inspired. Suffice to say Rudzki felt that Holmes had corrupted the depiction of Time Lords from their arch god-like status in ‘The War Games’ and ‘The Three Doctors’ and turned them into a mixture of Machiavellian political mandarins and fusty, comic OAPs. Over four episodes Holmes rewrites the mythology of the series, tweaks the character of the Doctor and introduces a whole new set of iconoclastic tropes for future stories. In a display of self-aware nerdery, Sandifer ticks off all of Rudzki’s objections and demonstrates how the story has become a key turning point in the series. He also, rather convincingly, presents a rather interesting thesis. In many ways, ‘The Deadly Assassin’ is, if not a sequel, then a thematic successor to ‘The Brain of Morbius’. Both feature renegade Time Lords and both stretch the Gallifrey mythology further than it had been in the Troughton and Pertwee years. Also; both were written (or at least heavily rewritten) by that flagrant teaser of fans and ignorer of the sacred history of Doctor Who, Robert Holmes. Looking at these two stories and positing that they may be linked, Sandifer suggests a theory that is, by any consideration, on the edges of possibility but is also extremely compelling. Towards the end of ‘Morbius’, the Doctor and the renegade Time Lord engage in a mental battle. On a screen between them, the previous incarnations (I’m refusing to use the mot just ‘iteration’ just yet) are displayed – each competitor dragged back through their past lives. This moment allowed the production team an opportunity to tease the viewer as Baker was shown regressing into Pertwee and then Troughton and then Hartnell and then… further faces appear. The tease here is that Hartnell is revealed to be the ninth Doctor making Baker the twelfth. It has since been retconned by fans who claim that these were previous faces of Morbius, but the scene clearly intends them to be the Doctor. Is it a coincidence then that later that year in ‘The Deadly Assassin’ the limit of twelve regenerations is imposed by Holmes? Possibly – although both stories were substantially written and edited by Holmes, and he has a habit of introducing running themes and jokes in his scripts. The implications are intoxicating: for one thing, the stakes in ‘The Deadly Assassin’ are raised when the ‘Fourth’ Doctor is revealed to be the final, and thus ‘mortal’ version. Also – this aligns the Doctor with the Master, a fellow renegade also at the end of his cycle. ‘The Deadly Assassin’, when read in this way, becomes literally a fight to the death. What I find interesting , however, is how it reflects what has happened in the fiftieth anniversary year.

Holmes, in a series of flagrant and egotistical fan-baiting acts, rewrites the central mythology of the series, changes the whole character of the Time Lords, imposes a limit on the number of the Doctor’s lives and tacitly suggests that the ‘fourth’ Doctor is no longer the ‘fourth’ Doctor at all. At the time, despite the fact the series was riding on a critical and popular high and was beginning to become popular in America, Holmes was accused of destroying the ‘magic’ of the series and jeopardising the fundamental nature of the programme. And as I’m writing this, I’m aware at just how obvious the parallels are: just replace Holmes with Moffat and ‘fourth’ with ‘eleventh’ and you have an exact description of the current polarisation in fandom. Holmes is now celebrated as one of the number of creative talents to have made a profound and positive contribution to the series. Along with his producer Philip Hinchcliffe, Holmes steered the series away from the Earthbound Pertwee years, he dispensed with the comfortable UNIT family, he introduced dangerously edgy plots and scenarios and he created numerous, enduring villains, including the Zygons who reappeared in ‘The Day of the Doctor’.

So is this really a defence of Moffat, that he adopts an approach to storytelling and to Doctor Who history that seems to be an elegant combination of Holmes and the equally notable Douglas Adams? My point is that Holmes was an iconoclast – derided by some fans (later to be in such a minority that they seem now to be almost like a misguided cult) for his disregard of myth and his tendency to introduce major ideas (such as the regeneration limit) seemingly for minor plot purposes. These are exactly the strengths that have made him such a popular figure in Doctor Who history, and exactly the aspects of Moffat’s episodes that the current showrunner is being criticised for.

John Nathan Turner always used to say the ‘the memory cheats’, that fans have a way of nostalgically raising old episodes of Doctor Who beyond their actual level of quality. He was wrong.  Now that we can see most of these stories on DVD, we know that for the most part, history doesn’t act hagiographically, instead it gives us a clue as to how the present might be interpreted in the future. Moffat isn’t destroying the series, he’s Robert Holmes reborn.