Doctor Who and the Scourge of Time

The Doctor is an alien: a Time Lord. He is over 900 years old. When death approaches he has the ability to regenerate. He may well live for another 900 years. He will enjoy countless victories. He will suffer immeasurable loss. His lifespan is both a blessing and a curse.

Doctor Who – the TV show – shares a similar fate. Aired from 1963 to 1989, with a phenomenally successful re-launch in 2005, Doctor Who is blessed because it is the longest-running science fiction television programme in broadcast history. It is cursed for that very same reason. Sci-fi, on the whole, does not age well; sci-fi on a BBC budget, even less so.

Time is far kinder to other TV formats. Coronation Street first screened in 1961, and early episodes have always been praised for their acute social observation. Strong scripts grounded in the realism of working-class Manchester set the bench-mark for the British soap-opera in the years that would follow. Yet episodes of Doctor Who from the same period draw unfavourable comparisons amongst modern viewers. There are perhaps two reasons for this. The first is genre snobbery, which is still prevalent on television today. Take, for example, the 2004 revival of BattleStar Galactica. Critically acclaimed though it was, the show could never achieve the same level of credibility as say, The Sopranos; a fact reflected in its relatively poor performance during awards seasons. Many of the viewing public still regard sci-fi as a self-contained world which has little to say about their own. North Jersey gangsters may be relatable but robots and alien planets present a barrier that many are reluctant to cross. Forty years post-Kirk, space is still the final frontier.

The second reason for classic Who’s lack of appeal to a modern audience is more obvious; as obvious as a wobbly set, or a boom mike in shot. As obvious as green spray-painted bubble-wrap passed off as infected skin; or a toy car, piloted by two action figures under assault from a papier-mâché fly. To anyone who hasn’t seen the Third Doctor, John Pertwee’s serial ‘The Green Death’: apologies for the spoilers. While it is a celebrated classic amongst followers, the production values are typical of old school Doctor Who. And therein lies the problem.

Consider ‘The Talons of Weng-Chiang’. Russell T. Davies, producer of the 2005 revival, has praised Robert Holmes’s script for the first part of the 1977 serial as ‘the best dialogue ever written… up there with Dennis Potter’. Fan polls consistently rank this as one of the most popular stories. And yet, to the modern viewer the great writing will count for very little when at the end of the episode the Doctor and his assistant are to be seen being chased through the sewers by a giant rat bearing all the hallmarks of a novelty slipper. It is hard for today’s younger, hyper-aware consumers to imagine living at a time when filming practices such as these were routinely accepted. The past is often likened to a foreign country; this was a different planet altogether.

At present, Doctor Who is very much the jewel in the BBC’s crown: the corporation is investing more money year on year, and the latest series was the first to be filmed in HD. However, money will always hamper the producers and, as long term viewers will have noted, in many of the newer episodes, dodgy prosthetics have simply given way to dodgy CGI. The very nature of sci-fi TV demands that it sits at the cutting edge of technology. But technology costs, and when there is limited funding there is a danger of toppling over that edge into the abyss, becoming little more than a punch-line in television history.  Blake’s 7. Doomwatch. Sapphire and Steel. Doctor Who, although often ridiculed, has escaped the fate of these similar low-budget sci-fi shows. So what sets it apart from the rest? Undeniably, its charm.

Any piece of work which aspires to offer a window into future technology runs the risk of becoming outdated very quickly. Here we are in the year 2010, and still schlepping around on terra firma despite what The Jetsons led us to believe. Flying cars and silver hair feature nowhere near as prominently in our day-to-day lives as we might like. So while we may have accepted the sonic screw-driver forty years ago, when people were still looking forward to holidays on the moon, public perception of technology has caught up and we can now see the cure-all plot device for the hollow concept that it is. But that’s not all it is.

The sonic screw-driver may be outdated and camp, like so many aspects of the classic series, but that is part of its appeal. Take the Daleks, for instance: the Doctor’s greatest enemy, designed by their creator to be the ultimate killing machine, superior to all other forms of life. So of course, he would have to include a plunger in their design. It might seem laughable, but then consider current show-runner Stephen Moffat’s controversial re-imagining of the Daleks. They are bigger, fatter and come in a range of colours. They have something of the iPod about them. Yet despite the redesign, the plunger remains. Divisive as the iDaleks are amongst fan communities, Moffat would undoubtedly face their collective ire if he removed it: The Wrath of Comic-Con.

It speaks volumes that in an age of constant revamping and reimagining of past programming, of slick reformatting and constant cutting of the fat from earlier incarnations, that neither the makers nor the fans could let that piece of ostensibly pointless apparatus go. It stands as a symbol, as do the Daleks themselves (tragically ludicrous as they are), of a show that has no interest in glossing over the naff aspects of its chequered past. Instead, it celebrates them. The dodgy graphics, risible FX and camp performances are the requisite baggage of a show which has had to push the envelope in terms of innovation, for the past forty years; a show which has been, and still is, as thrilling, exuberant and eccentric as the man himself.

Each generation and regeneration will inevitably appear odd on reflection. Even now, scheduled prime-time on a Saturday night, between two equally derivative game-shows, the show stands out like a sore thumb. Like the stick of celery pinned to Peter Davison’s lapel, or Tom Baker’s offer of a jelly baby in times of crisis; as conspicuous as the TARDIS’s broken chameleon circuit, permanently frozen on the 1950s style police box. So many aspects of the show seem anachronistic, so continually at odds with its surroundings and contemporaries that it is hard to pin it to any one specific time or place. In that respect, Doctor Who will never age, because it never really belonged to any particular age in the first place. It is timeless.

John Gibb