Some of the TV movie’s thunder had been stolen by the death of Third Doctor actor Jon Pertwee in the week before transmission. The BBC tagged a dedication to Pertwee onto the UK transmission of the show (Russell T Davies paid similar tribute to Doctor Who’s original producer Verity Lambert on the credits of the 2007 Christmas special, Voyage of the Damned, following her death that November).
As well as reclaiming the novel range from Virgin, the BBC produced a range of tie-in material to the 1996 TV movie, with Doctor Who merchandise being re-branded using the TV movie’s logo (itself a reworking of the Jon Pertwee early-1970s logo). They were clearly hopeful that the one-off film would help launch a new TV series starring McGann, but the viewing figures were simply not enough for the American partners to proceed. As a result of the deal, though, the rights to Doctor Who were caught up with Universal for many years, hampering additional attempts by the BBC (and even the BBC’s film arm) to mount a revival of the show following the McGann TV movie.
It is ironic that Paul McGann’s introduction in the 1996 TV movie is in the form of a voiceover, as his role as the Doctor would develop in the audio field rather than on TV. Starting in 1999, a company called Big Finish began producing officially licensed audio adventures (issued on CD and later available as Internet downloads) of Doctor Who starring three of the four living original TV Doctors: Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy. Tom Baker consistently refused to take part (although he agreed to play the Doctor for BBC audio drama releases in 2009), while, from 2001, TV movie Eighth Doctor Paul McGann brought new depth to his character by featuring in an annual series of audio dramas (many of which were later transmitted on BBC7, giving them an extra seal of authenticity).
Big Finish continues to be a fan-driven (though professional profit-making) enterprise, reflecting its origins as a series of amateur, fan-produced audio tapes from the 1980s called Audio-Visuals. These unlicensed, home-produced audio tapes were the dramatic equivalents of fanzines (there were also non-fiction audiozines available), an outlet for fiction writers who wanted to dramatise their own version of Doctor Who. Many of those involved at the time, primarily Gary Russell and Nicholas Briggs, would go on to steer the Big Finish range (and have significant involvement in the TV Doctor Who when it returned from 2005). Of the fan-produced 1980s tapes, Russell said: ‘We were fans doing some stuff for a handful of people. We never advertised in professional magazines, we kept ourselves to ourselves. In doing so, we broke every copyright rule in the book. [John] Nathan-Turner was certainly aware of us, but he didn’t care. Why should he? We were no more [harm] than any other fan product.’
Several of the original Audio-Visuals productions were rewritten and remade for the Big Finish range, including The Mutant Phase (featuring the Daleks), Sword of Orion (Cybermen), and Minuet in Hell (rewritten for Big Finish to incorporate Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier). The series also featured a variety of companion actors and actresses (with many later featuring in a semi-dramatised audio-book spin-off series dubbed The Companion Chronicles), alongside returning monsters and other characters from the TV series’ rich history. Additionally, new companion characters were created just for the audio range. These adventures, like the early spin-off novels, were initially designed to fit into narrative gaps between broadcast TV stories. The success of the core range allowed for a series of limited-run spinoffs built around the popular character of Sarah Jane Smith, the complex politics of the Doctor’s home world of Gallifrey and the back-story of Dalek creator Davros. One spin-off series even experimented with recasting the central role, allowing other actors (like Derek Jacobi, David Warner and Geoffrey Bayldon) to play alternative Doctors in Doctor Who Unbound. Other, more minor characters have appeared in additional spin-off ranges, while yet more were built around the ever-popular Daleks and Cybermen.
From 1999, when the first CD teamed up the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Doctors in an adventure called The Sirens of Time, Big Finish has provided fans with a monthly fix of audio Doctor Who adventures. If nothing else, the fact that the range thrived on fan support (with many willing to pay up to £15 for each CD) showed that there was both a significant audience for new Doctor Who stories and that the series format itself was far from exhausted. The Big Finish range had more reason than the TV show under John Nathan-Turner to appeal directly to a dedicated fan base. Their audience were the diehard Doctor Who fans, rather than the wider casual TV audience, fans who were willing to pay regularly for further Doctor Who adventures.
Fan creative activity also extended to consensual retroactive continuity (retcon): fans would spot narrative gaps in the series and fill them (or fix them) with their own explanations. Primary among these was the concept of season 6B, the further adventures of Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor after The War Games, but before he changed into Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor. This fanciful notion was based on Troughton’s reappearance in The Two Doctors as an older version of the Second Doctor: he’d been co-opted by the Time Lords to carry out missions for them, or so the fan theory went. Others investigated the show’s past, as with The Myth Makers series of interview videos (and later DVDs) with the series’ cast and crew or Jeremy Bentham’s In-Vision series of in-depth ‘making of’ fanzines. Fan creativity also saw the creation of music videos (cutting images from the series to popular tracks), done by linking two video recorders together in the decades before digital editing and YouTube. Finally, the ongoing comic-strip adventures of the Doctor continued in Doctor Who Magazine and would go on to influence the returning TV series.
It wasn’t until September 2003 that the BBC realised that there was still a mass audience who’d respond to new Doctor Who on TV. Long the subject of nostalgia, jibes about cardboard sets and rubber monsters, Doctor Who had survived a decade and a half of being a nostalgic joke to become a postmodern format whose time had come again. Mal Young, the BBC’s head of continuing series, announced on 26 September that acclaimed dramatist Russell T Davies (a self-proclaimed fan of the show who’d even pitched how he would bring the series back in the pages of Doctor Who Magazine years previously) would be behind the revival: ‘It’s time to crank up the TARDIS and find out what lies in store for the Doctor, and we’re thrilled to have a writer of Russell’s calibre to take us on this journey.’
The announcement of the new live-action TV series aimed at a family audience totally overshadowed that same month’s launch of an online animated adventure called Scream of the Shalka by Paul Cornell and starring Richard E Grant as the ‘official’ Ninth Doctor (following previous Internet dramas starring Sylvester McCoy, Colin Baker and Paul McGann). Scream of the Shalka and Richard E Grant were quickly destined to become interesting footnotes in Doctor Who history, the obscure answer to trivia questions about how many actors have played the Doctor. All eyes were now on BBC1 and the 2005 re-launch of the TV series.
7. REGENERATION
Doctor Who returned to BBC1 on 26 March 2005, starring acclaimed actor Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor and former pop star Billie Piper as his new travelling companion, Rose Tyler. Those who’d re-created the show (now in 45-minute episodes containing standalone stories with some two-episode tales, rather than 25-minute four-to-six-part adventures) were unsure what reaction to expect. TV viewers had not seen a regular series of Doctor Who since 1989 and the casting was unexpected (and controversial with fans). A whole generation, the producers feared, had grown up knowing Doctor Who as something old-fashioned that their parents liked. BBC research, in advance of transmission, seemed to confirm this view, much to the BBC’s trepidation.
Showrunner Russell T Davies and executive producers Julie Gardner (head of drama at BBC Wales, where Doctor Who was now to be made) and Phil Collinson (the show’s practical line producer) needn’t have worried. Rose, the opening episode, was a rematch between the Doctor and the Nestene consciousness that controlled the plastic-based Autons (previously foes of the Third Doctor). It introduced Rose Tyler (and her mother and boyfriend) and drew an audien
ce of just under ten million viewers. The series was credited with single-handedly reinvigorating Saturday night family viewing, a niche long since believed lost by most broadcasters.
The series – quickly dubbed ‘NuWho’ by a new generation of fans who saw the Internet and websites like Outpost Gallifrey as their home – was a successful reinterpretation of the classic Doctor Who formula, updated for the twenty-first century and carrying an overlay of the contemporary concerns that Davies had incorporated into his previous dramas, such as Queer as Folk and The Second Coming.
While succeeding as ‘family entertainment’, this new version of Doctor Who still managed to tackle a whole series of social and sexual issues in a way reminiscent of the Barry Letts years, but with the 1980s event-television showmanship of John Nathan-Turner. Over the five years that Russell T Davies would run the revived franchise, Doctor Who would delve into politics (right in the middle of a UK national General Election), consumerism (repeatedly used as a front for alien invasions, despite the revived series’ own seemingly endless merchandise spin-offs), the media and popular television (satirised several times) and romance and sexuality (the Doctor’s relationships with his companions, Rose and Martha, were a little different than those of old, while Captain Jack brought a whole new orientation to the series).
Being Doctor Who, and with 40 years of history behind it, the new show could not ignore the series’ own past. Major monsters and characters would return over the years to come, but each return was handled in a much more successful and mass-audience-friendly way than any of those attempted by Nathan-Turner. Creatures and characters were rethought so they’d work as new for an audience un-familiar with them, but would also play to an engaged audience (much like the late-1960s version of the show) who remembered them from first time around or who were familiar with them from satellite TV repeats or DVD releases. However, an in-depth knowledge of the past was not necessary to enjoy the new Doctor Who.
Davies could not resist building his own mythology, introducing a series of characters and events that would pay off only at the end of the initial four-year run of the new Doctor Who. Seeds sown in Rose would later mature in 2008’s final regular episode (until 2010), Journey’s End. This seemingly complicated back-story required little more from a mass audience than an awareness of key characters who’d appeared in the show over the past two to three years and their relationships to each other and the Doctor. Audiences well used to the ongoing developing narratives of domestic soap operas were comfortable with such character recall, so Doctor Who fitted right into the modern TV landscape (even if this aspect of the series saw many fans criticise it as ‘too soapy’).
To many people’s surprise, not least some of its most die-hard fans, the new series of Doctor Who became the biggest hit the BBC had enjoyed in a long time. It successfully re-energised a timeless format, making it relevant to a contemporary mass audience. It successfully captured the attention of a whole new generation of young viewers who saw Doctor Who as part of an entertainment landscape that included Harry Potter and High School Musical. In fact, the audience who seemed to be most upset about the return of their favourite show was a sub-section of the series’ own longest-serving fans.
During the first season of the new Doctor Who, long-term viewers may have felt there was something familiar about the series’ satirical engagement with contemporary politics. Just as Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks had tackled the contemporary political reality of the 1970s in their fantasy-driven stories, so did Russell T Davies in the 2005 version.
There is much wrong with the new series’ first two-part story, Aliens of London/World War III. The new production crew had to learn how to make Doctor Who after such a lengthy break. However, the satirical engagement with the then-imminent UK General Election was a masterstroke. The story depicted the infiltration of the highest power in the land, Number 10 Downing Street, by the alien Slitheen family in a plot to destroy Earth. The Slitheen were intent on provoking a nuclear conflict and selling off the resulting ruined planet for a profit. The Prime Minister (possibly intended to be Tony Blair) has been killed and key ministers replaced by fat, yellow-green aliens disguised in human ‘skin suits’ that make them appear to be obese humans. They’ve additionally faked an alien spaceship crashing into the Thames in order to gather the world’s experts on alien life in one place to eliminate them, so they don’t uncover the Slitheen plan. The most notorious ‘expert’ snared by the trap is the Doctor.
These two episodes aired in April 2005, immediately preceding the election of 5 May in which Prime Minister Tony Blair was seeking a third consecutive term in office (something that had previously eluded Labour). One of the main issues was the conduct of the war in Iraq which the US and UK had been engaged in since 2003. Part of the justification for war was Iraq’s supposed possession of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (primarily taken to mean chemical or biological weapons, and possibly developing nuclear capability), despite the failure of UN weapons inspectors to find any evidence of such weapons on the ground. A government dossier from September 2002 had been compiled to justify the invasion on the basis of weapons of mass destruction that could reach Europe ‘within 45 minutes’, according to a notorious BBC report. That led to an explosive row between the BBC and the government, resulting in the Hutton Inquiry finding against the BBC in January 2004 and the subsequent resignation of Director General Greg Dyke.
Aliens of London and World War III were broadcast in the aftermath of these important political events and in the immediate run-up to an election in which these issues were still playing a major part. The mere replacement of key government figures by corpulent, flatulent aliens may have been an obvious (though no less effective for it) form of satirical caricature of politicians, but Davies went further in his clever script. Dialogue references included comments on the Slitheen plan to use ‘massive weapons of destruction’ that could be unleashed ‘within 45 seconds’. Any alert viewer among the seven million who watched the episodes would have enjoyed a quiet chuckle at these references. This was the kind of thing that Doctor Who used to do regularly in the 1970s (often satirising Whitehall), but had abandoned (along with its appeal to the mass audience) in the 1980s. Davies firmly believed that political, social and even sexual comment belonged in a modern version of Doctor Who.
Other passing dialogue references contained material aimed at the culture of ‘New Labour’, who’d been in power since winning the 1997 General Election. Aliens of London introduced the character of Harriet Jones, MP for Flydale North (and future Prime Minister), who says of the war, ‘I voted against it,’ a common refrain from those MPs who opposed the conflict.
The following week saw the broadcast of the episode Dalek, reintroducing the Doctor’s oldest foes. Mere days before the election, the Radio Times combined the return of the Daleks with that week’s election coverage in their acclaimed fold-out ‘Vote Dalek!’ cover, which saw a trio of Daleks patrolling in front of the Houses of Parliament. In September 2008, the cover went on to a surprise win as the best British magazine cover of all time in a poll run by the Periodical Publishers Association. The cover triumphed over 40 other contenders, including striking and influential covers of such top-selling magazines as (among others) Empire, Nova, Oz, Private Eye, The Face and Vanity Fair. One of the magazine professionals who’d nominated the cover was Adam Pasco, editor of the BBC’s Gardener’s World magazine. ‘It’s May 2005, the General Election is looming, and the public is wondering who to vote for: Labour? The Tories? No – vote Dalek!’ He went on to justify his choice: ‘This Radio Times cover captures the essence of the mood of the nation in a brilliant and original way, and delivers on every level. The cover is totally unexpected and brings a contemporary twist to the iconic image of a Dalek to grab readers of all ages at the newsstand. Radio Times really made a statement with this cover that is simple, to the point and encapsulates that quirky British sense of humour.’ The Radio Times cover, overtly linking Doctor Who and national poli
tics (and by implication all that goes with it) was a natural outcome of the fact that the show had returned to serious political engagement for the first time in over 25 years.
Another thematic preoccupation of the new version of Doctor Who that echoed concerns from the 1970s version of the show was an interest in satirising consumerism and the influence of big business. Several episodes see giant corporations acting as fronts for various alien invasions, often connected to a consumer product or gadget.
The opening episode, Rose, may have missed an opportunity by not returning to the consumerism issues raised by Spearhead from Space and particularly Terror of the Autons, but plastic was not such a thrilling material in the twenty-first century as it had been in the 1970s. The following story, however, tackled rampant cosmetic plastic surgery. The Doctor and Rose travel to the year five billion in The End of the World and encounter the ‘last human’, Cassandra. All that remains of her is a piece of skin with a face stretched across a metal frame, and her brain contained in a container below. Described as both a ‘bitchy trampoline’ and ‘Michael Jackson’ by Rose, it’s clear that Cassandra is a satire on modern society’s health and beauty concerns, taken to an extreme.
Public health and well-being fads are a recurring theme of new Doctor Who, reflecting one of the primary preoccupations of the media in Britain. Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s campaigns to encourage school children to eat healthily figure in the episode School Reunion. The school meal chips (coated in Krillitane oil) are being used to condition the children to solve the Skasis Paradigm. This will allow the Krillitane control over the fundamental building blocks of the universe. While this plot takes a back seat to the nostalgic return (the first of several) of Sarah Jane Smith and K-9, the school meals and poisoned chips element struck a chord with the younger audience (along with the idea that their headmaster and teachers might be aliens, which feels like a story idea Doctor Who should have tackled long ago).
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