Timeless Adventures Read online

  BRIAN J. ROBB is the New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling biographer of Leonardo DiCaprio, Johnny Depp, and Brad Pitt. He has also written books on silent cinema, the films of Philip K. Dick, Wes Craven, and Laurel & Hardy, as well as Star Trek and Star Wars. He is the co-editor of the Sci-Fi Bulletin web site and lives in Edinburgh.

  Dedicated to the God of all fanwank, Craig Hinton.

  In Memoriam: Barry Letts (1925–2009)

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Several people have been of great assistance in the process of writing (and rewriting) this book. I’m greatly indebted to Paul Simpson for reading the whole thing (several times) as a work in progress and helping me focus my thoughts (as well as catching the occasional factual error: any remaining errors or omissions are entirely my own).

  Thanks are also due to Brigid Cherry who read and commented on the manuscript, and to the Titan Magazines’ Doctor Who ‘brains trust’ of Jonathan Wilkins, Simon Hugo and Adam Newell for many hours of Who-chat (that must have endlessly annoyed our colleagues).

  Additional gratitude is due to all those I’ve known across more than 20 years of involvement in and around British Doctor Who fandom, from the Glasgow Braindead gang through to the late-1980s DWAS crowd and the DWB/Dreamwatch group (comprising far too many people through the years to name individually).

  Special thanks are also due to Barry Letts, Philip Hinchcliffe and Andrew Cartmel.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  1. Adventures in Time & Space

  2. Black & White Heat

  3. Colour Separation Overlay

  4. Gothic Thrills

  5. Time Lord on Trial

  6. The Fandom Menace

  7. Regeneration

  8. Space-Time Fairytales

  9. Half-Century Hero

  Resources

  References

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  Doctor Who is an amazing television phenomenon. Any 50th birthday is a momentous occasion, all the more so for one of a mere handful of popular TV shows (outside of soap operas) to have made it to the half century and still be on air, as exciting and as fresh as ever. In 2013, Doctor Who reached that half-century milestone, just as it was refreshing itself again with the arrival of the twelfth actor to play the mysterious Time Lord title role.

  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 2013, the show’s fiftieth-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 50 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 50-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 the celebratory 50th anniversary special in 2013.

  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 50-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 likeminded 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 oneshot 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.

  The 50th anniversary year saw Doctor Who refresh itself once more, as Matt Smith hung up his sonic screwdriver after a hugely successful four-year run as the Eleventh Doctor, making way for Peter Capaldi to step aboard the magical TARDIS space-time machine as the twelfth version of the renegade Time Lord. It may have been seen as another moment of crisis for the show, but the fact is Doctor Who’s very strength lies in such change. The show thrives on renewal and every new lead actor or showrunner brings something different and unique to this uniquely long-lived series. 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.

  1. ADVENTURES IN TIME & SPACE

  Who created Doctor Who?

  Reading the credits of the current incarnation of the series will not tell you the answer to that question. If you rely on an early edition of the quiz game Trivial Pursuit, which claimed Doctor Who was created by one-time Tony Hancock scriptwriter Terry Nation, you’ll be no better informed. That assertion has continued to surface, even in the Guardian obituary of the first Doctor Who producer Verity Lambert late in 2007. Earlier histories of the show often credited the 1960s Head of BBC Drama, Canadian Sydney Newman. The truth, however, is that the national institution that is Doctor Who was the product of a committee working within another national institution, the BBC itself.

  Hugh Carleton Greene became BBC Director General at a crucial time of change in the corporation’s history. Brother of author Graham Greene, he’d been a war correspondent for the Daily Telegraph before joining the BBC in 1940. In and out of the BBC throughout the next two decades, Greene held a variety of important posts that allowed him to succeed Ian Jacob to the top position in 1960. He was now running an organisation with a unique history. Founded in October 1922 by John Reith, the British Broadcasting Company (later Corporation) had a responsibility (as stated in the BBC Charter of 1927) to ‘inform, educate and entertain’ the nation. The BBC was – and still is – funded through a licence-fee scheme, paid by all who own a television. This often left the organisation open to political manipulation by the government of the day. Experimental television broadcasting had begun in 1932. A regular service started in 1936, but was interrupted by the Second World War before resuming in June 1946. The BBC established many of the basic ‘ground rules’ of television broadcasting, and has often evinced a very paternalistic attitude, resulting in the nickname ‘Auntie’.

  As Director General, Greene had a clear mission statement: to drag the BBC out of the complacent 1950s (some might say the 1940s) and to ensure that the Corporation’s output kept pace with the dizzying social and political change of the 1960s. The big threat the BBC faced was ITV, the independent commercial broadcaster started in 1955, which had found popular success and acceptance as the 1960s began. In comparison with this dynamic young commercial operation, the bureaucratic and hidebound BBC appeared to be a relic from a bygone age. Deference was out and protest was in as the 1960s began to truly swing. It was Hugh Carleton Greene�
�s job to reflect this sea change in British culture in the programmes that appeared on the BBC.

  Among the innovative programmes that debuted on his watch (which extended until 1968) were melancholic situation comedy Steptoe and Son, gritty police drama Z-Cars, and late-night biting political and social satire That Was The Week That Was (or TW3). All were long-running (except TW3, axed amid electoral controversy, although its satiric approach to news and politics lived on through the work of David Frost and others) and significantly developed their respective evolving genres. These three shows all began in 1962. They were to be joined by another groundbreaking series in 1963: Doctor Who.

  In order to compete with ITV, Greene approached one of the rival broadcaster’s key creative figures to become the BBC’s new Head of Drama. Sydney Newman had come to ITV from a successful career in his native Canada where he’d started out as a film editor for the National Film Board. After working in American television in the early 1950s in New York, Newman returned to Canada to take up a post with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation where he became Supervisor of Drama Productions in 1954. By 1958, Newman was in Britain, having been hired by ITV regional franchise ABC (serving the English Midlands and the North) as a drama producer. Newman, brash and forthright like the independent broadcaster he was joining, rapidly rose to become ABC’s Head of Drama. He was directly responsible for the creation of Armchair Theatre, a weekly show that presented the work of a new breed of ‘angry young men’ playwrights to large audiences, and gritty drama Police Surgeon, which developed into the more fantastical The Avengers.

  Looking to revitalise the BBC’s moribund drama department and under instructions from Director General Hugh Greene, the BBC’s Director of Television Kenneth Adam hired Newman to become Head of Drama at the BBC. He took up the post as soon as his ABC contract expired in December 1962. Resented by many in the BBC – due to being younger, better paid, outspoken, and (maybe worst of all) ‘foreign’ – Newman was quick to make his mark. He split the unwieldy drama department into three units – series, serials and plays, headed by Elwyn Jones, Donald Wilson and Michael Bakewell respectively. All three reported directly to Newman, whose arrival was a sign of big changes to come at the BBC throughout the 1960s.