Such health issues wedded to big-business exploitation would reappear in the fourth-season premiere, Partners in Crime. The Doctor re-encounters Donna Noble (Catherine Tate), his one-off companion from the 2006 Christmas special, The Runaway Bride, while investigating Adipose Industries. The company distributes a mass-produced weightloss pill that, according to their company slogan, sees the ‘fat just walk away’. The pills cause human fat to be converted into an Adipose creature, spawning from the dieting human’s body. About the size of a bag of sugar, the lard-resembling Adipose simply waddle away from the sleeping human, who appears to have miraculously lost weight in their sleep. The seemingly beneficent company is, in fact, a front for an Adipose breeding programme, operated by the sinister Miss Foster.
Two episodes later, Planet of the Ood presented another evil corporation, this time involved in selling Ood creatures into slavery. The episode used spoof advertising to communicate the consumer benefits of owning a domesticated Ood. Where the Adipose breeding programme was getting out of control and threatening to destroy humans by converting them wholesale into new Adipose, the humans running Ood Operations in the year 4126 find themselves coping with an outbreak of Ood ‘red eye’. The conditions under which they are being kept (they are telepathic, but have been cut off from their collective unconscious) and their treatment by the humans are turning the normally docile Ood homicidal. Donna’s reaction raises the issue of slavery, in addition to the treatment of the Ood as essentially consumer goods (unfeeling domestic aides) rather than living creatures. The Doctor also makes a comparison between the Ood’s plight and that of the low-paid and illtreated foreign workers who make Donna’s affordable clothes.
Technology and gadgetry are the satirical focus of other stories. In the two-part adventure Rise of the Cybermen and The Age of Steel, the Doctor, Rose and Mickey find themselves trapped in a parallel universe in which the Cybermen are just emerging. The population of this world is controlled through the use of Bluetooth-style telephone earpieces. As the latest popular,must-have gadget, everyone has one, so everyone is susceptible to the signal that controls them and makes them head to Battersea Power Station to be converted into Cybus Industries’ Cybermen. The conversion is seemingly ‘sold’ to the population as a desire to ‘upgrade’, to access the latest life-extending technology. Like Germany during the rise of the Third Reich, the population of this Earth are sleepwalking to disaster through their faith in big corporations and shiny new technology, sold as a way of making their everyday lives easier. The viewing millions would recognise their own world exaggerated for dramatic effect and reflected back at them.
These two episodes also criticised the closeness of industry and government, something repeatedly explored by the 1970s incarnation of the show. The crippled John Lumic, whose personal interest in life extension drives his research into cyber-technology, controls Cybus Industries. Having illegally experimented on the homeless, Lumic knows that Britain’s president will not allow him to expand his technology into the consumer arena. He arranges the president’s elimination when he is a guest at Jackie Tyler’s birthday party, when the new Cybermen attack and ‘delete’ him. Lumic is then free to initiate his plans for the ‘ultimate upgrade’ of humanity.
A similar device to the mass-marketed EarPods was used as a front for the Sontaran invasion in the two-part The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky. In this case, it’s the ATMOS anti-pollution device, affixed to many cars (an ATMOS sticker can be glimpsed stuck to a taxi in Partners in Crime, foreshadowing these two episodes). The story postulates an alien race – the Sontarans returning to Doctor Who for the first time since The Two Doctors in 1985 – using a front to sell environmentally friendly devices to a mass population. They are then used to attempt to convert the atmosphere to a more Sontaran-friendly chemical make-up. This time, the must-have gadget is sold on the basis of a pro-environment message to tackle air pollution caused by cars. That the population can be fooled into participating in the downfall of their own planet while thinking they are taking action to save it is a clever twist on the big-business-andtechnology theme that recurs in a small-p political way throughout much of new Doctor Who. This not very subtle but actually quite clever satire is pitched at just the right level to engage a mass audience. They can be brought into the show through recognition of so much of the contemporary real world, but also enjoy the humour of the political, social and industrial satire that Russell T Davies and his team of writers can work into their Doctor Who scripts. If cleverly done, none of this interferes with the straightforward adventure that the younger audience expects.
Another regular target for the new Doctor Who is the mass media. Since the twenty-first century is a much more mediated society than even the 1980s (when Doctor Who was last in regular production), it was inevitable that the media would feature regularly within the narrative. However, the series has gone one step further and satirised media conventions and organisations.
Many of the (monotonously regular) invasions of Earth in the Russell T Davies period have been communicated to the audience and the characters in the drama through the media. BBC news channels often feature (from Aliens of London onwards), covering the events of the story, while the media is also used to give such events a worldwide scale. A seemingly US-based news channel (AMNN) pops up regularly, presented by the same female newscaster in each case (giving an almost subliminal level of continuity). This offers a perspective on each ‘end-of-the-world’ scenario that is different from that of London (distinct from the approach in the 1970s, when alien invaders seemed to have little interest in anything outside the Home Counties).
Beyond the use of mass media to expand the repertoire of story-telling tools available to writers, media organisations were prime among elements of modern life in Britain satirised by the new Doctor Who. The Long Game sees Christopher Eccleston’s Ninth Doctor and Rose arriving on Satellite Five in the year 200,000, during the time of the ‘fourth great and bountiful human empire’. Satellite Five is a news broadcasting station, transmitting 600 channels across the Empire, run by the Editor (Simon Pegg), an almost albino figure, seemingly answerable to a higher power that’s manipulating the content of the station’s broadcasts. Teaming up with two rebellious journalists, the Doctor investigates the mysterious Floor 500 (perhaps modelled after the infamous ‘sixth floor’ of BBC Television Centre, notorious among Doctor Who fans as the location of the offices of the executives who interfered in, and eventually cancelled, the programme in the 1980s).
This human empire has been manipulated for 90 years by a creature called the Jagrafess, which has used its position of control over the news to create a climate of fear (Davies once again referencing contemporary politics, particularly the fallout from the war in Iraq and 9/11). The Doctor realises that the human race has been enslaved and is not even aware of it, living as it is in a degree of comfort, in a strictly controlled but extremely limited society. Of course, the Doctor defeats the Jagrafess and the Editor and believes he has set the human population back on its correct course to possible utopia.
The title The Long Game only becomes meaningful when the Doctor returns to Satellite Five later that same season in Bad Wolf (the use of the same space station twice in one season echoes the debut year of Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor). The Doctor, Rose and Captain Jack Harkness (who joined the TARDIS crew in The Doctor Dances) are separated and each finds themselves taking part in reality-television shows. Contemporary viewers would recognise Big Brother, What Not to Wear and The Weakest Link as the three TV shows spoofed, along with their iconography and presenters. Contestants are seemingly killed when they are eliminated or ‘voted out’, including Rose. The Doctor escapes the Big Brother ‘house’ and gains access behind the scenes, only to discover he’s back on Satellite Five at a later point in history. Now humanity has a different master: the Daleks!
Led by their Emperor (‘the God of all Daleks’), the Daleks have been harvesting humans to boost their numbers. In the opening to
the season finale, The Parting of the Ways, the Doctor declares these new post-time-war Daleks to be mad, driven insane by self-loathing as they have had to depend upon human organic material to create their new race. Indeed, the Daleks are depicted as a fundamentalist religious group, crying blasphemy when the Doctor suggests they’re half-human (this is also a fan in-joke on the part of Davies, as the 1996 Paul McGann TV movie postulated that the Doctor was half-human, a development decried by a subset of online fans as blasphemy). These mad Daleks are limited to their appearance in this one story, but their fundamentalist nature reflects a very precise point in time following the 9/11 attacks on the US in 2001 and terrorist activity in the UK. The episode was broadcast just three weeks before Islamic fundamentalists carried out the 7 July 2005 attacks on transport in London. Religion and the threat posed by its fundamentalist proponents has not often featured in Doctor Who, but The Parting of the Ways did a fine job of updating Terry Nation’s original space fascists to confront one of the most important contemporary issues concerning the mass audience now attracted to Doctor Who. Unfortunately, by the time of Journey’s End in 2008, the Daleks were back to being simple space fascists, an aspect of their character made literally evident by the scene in which the Daleks conquering Earth speak German!
The Daleks’ rivals for the position of top Doctor Who monster were not about to be left out of the media spotlight. When the Cybermen returned again, in Army of Ghosts, their attempts to break through from their universe to ours cause them to appear as ghost-like figures. Once again satirising media conventions, the appearance of these ghosts across the world is shown to be a media sensation. The ‘supernatural’ events happen at the same time each day, with television providing a countdown. Rose’s mum, Jackie, is shown waiting for Rose’s dead grandfather to appear during the daily ‘ghost shift’. Clips from programmes like soap drama EastEnders or talk show Trisha reveal to the Doctor how the ghost phenomenon has been absorbed and normalised by the culture. Investigating, the Doctor realises the ghosts are Cybermen, pushing themselves through a breach between universes to become material in our reality. The full materialisation of the Cybermen (represented by reports from Indian, Japanese and French newsreaders) is topped by the opening of the mysterious Void Sphere captured by Torchwood. This reveals four surviving Daleks who escaped the Time War (the Cult of Skaro), setting the stage for a Cybermen-Dalek face-off in the following episode, Doomsday.
The uses of, and satirising of, the media has become an intrinsic part of the audience’s experience of new Doctor Who. With the media forming such a large part of most viewers’ lives, its reflection within the narratives of the show and the use of tricks and techniques seen in other media is further evidence of how the series has been successfully updated to appeal to a new mass audience.
In the 1980s (in response to tabloid speculation), John Nathan-Turner had declared that there would be ‘no hanky-panky’ in the TARDIS. With an attractive and young cast, and the tendency in the 1980s to dress the female companions in revealing outfits (a situation that reached its climax with Peri’s introduction in a bikini and her regular outfit of tight-fitting leotards), it was no surprise that some observers wondered about the Doctor’s relationship with his young, female travelling companions.
One of the most radical changes that Russell T Davies brought to the revitalisation of the show was to explore the emotions of the Doctor in relation to his companions. Both the Ninth and Tenth Doctors have enjoyed grand romances, primarily with Rose Tyler, but also with Madame de Pompadour (The Girl in the Fireplace) and (when the Doctor is in the guise of human, John Smith) Joan Redfern (Human Nature/The Family of Blood). Despite these events, Davies was always keen to return the character to the status of ‘the lonely Doctor’, as seen at the conclusion of Journey’s End. He may be interested in his companions and others he meets along the way (dating back to Cameca in The Aztecs), but being a long-lived Time Lord (the last remaining, so excluding relationships with one of his own species), he can never sustain a conventional relationship.
Sex has a much more prominent role in the new Doctor Who than it ever had in the old show, reflecting the era in which the show is now made. Beyond some sudden and very chaste romances (like those between Susan and David Campbell, and Leela and Andred, concocted as exit strategies for both companions), the original series’ approach to sex was simply in the guise of the glamorous assistant or ‘Doctor Who girl’ of tabloid fame. Katy Manning (who played Jo Grant) infamously took this one step further by posing naked with a Dalek for men’s magazine Girl Illustrated, but only after she’d left the show.
Steven Moffat (who took over from Russell T Davies as showrunner for the 2010 fifth season) has paid close attention to the Doctor’s love life. The two-part story The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances introduced both the omni-sexual Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman), a time agent from the fifty-first century, and the metaphorical concept of ‘dancing’ as a family-friendly euphemism for sex. He wrote The Girl in the Fireplace, giving the Doctor his first romance other than that seemingly being enjoyed with Rose. Moffat was also the writer of Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead, the fourth-season, two-part story that introduced River Song (Alex Kingston), seemingly a future romantic interest for the Tenth Doctor (strongly hinted at as ‘the Doctor’s wife’, itself a spoof episode title written on an office noticeboard by John Nathan-Turner in the 1980s in an attempt to track down the source of information leaking to fans). The casting of the young (under 40) and photogenic David Tennant helped build the growing female audience for new Doctor Who (the perception being that the audience for the original series was largely male, while the core of organised fandom was largely gay). For his Doctor to be played asexually, as most others had been, would simply not have been possible in a modern television environment. Giving the Doctor an emotional life ensured a higher level of engagement with the series among the casual, especially female, audience that had abandoned the show in the late-1980s. It was the casting of the ‘young and dashing’ Peter Davison as the Doctor in 1981 that led to the ‘hanky-panky-in-the-TARDIS’ tabloid speculation. However, Davison’s Doctor was never invested with the same emotional range as Eccleston’s and Tennant’s characters. Casting a young, attractive Doctor showed that, in many ways, Russell T Davies had learned the right lessons from the misguided 1980s when John Nathan-Turner was producer. Like Nathan-Turner, Davies is a firm believer in event television as part of a strategy to grab a larger-than-usual audience. Likewise, as a longstanding Doctor Who fan, Davies was keen on maintaining the series’ internal continuity and in refreshing successful elements and characters from the show’s past. The new production, however, took a lot more care in reintroducing key things from the past, communicating clearly to an audience who perhaps didn’t recognise them why they were important and worth bringing back. Davies’ opening episode had used the Autons, mainly for the recognisable moment of showroom dummies breaking through a shopgiving the Doctor his first romance other than that seemingly being enjoyed with Rose. Moffat was also the writer of Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead, the fourth-season, two-part story that introduced River Song (Alex Kingston), seemingly a future romantic interest for the Tenth Doctor (strongly hinted at as ‘the Doctor’s wife’, itself a spoof episode title written on an office noticeboard by John Nathan-Turner in the 1980s in an attempt to track down the source of information leaking to fans).
The casting of the young (under 40) and photogenic David Tennant helped build the growing female audience for new Doctor Who (the perception being that the audience for the original series was largely male, while the core of organised fandom was largely gay). For his Doctor to be played asexually, as most others had been, would simply not have been possible in a modern television environment. Giving the Doctor an emotional life ensured a higher level of engagement with the series among the casual, especially female, audience that had abandoned the show in the late-1980s. It was the casting of the ‘young and dashing�
� Peter Davison as the Doctor in 1981 that led to the ‘hanky-panky-in-the-TARDIS’ tabloid speculation. However, Davison’s Doctor was never invested with the same emotional range as Eccleston’s and Tennant’s characters.
Casting a young, attractive Doctor showed that, in many ways, Russell T Davies had learned the right lessons from the misguided 1980s when John Nathan-Turner was producer. Like Nathan-Turner, Davies is a firm believer in event television as part of a strategy to grab a larger-than-usual audience. Likewise, as a longstanding Doctor Who fan, Davies was keen on maintaining the series’ internal continuity and in refreshing successful elements and characters from the show’s past. The new production, however, took a lot more care in reintroducing key things from the past, communicating clearly to an audience who perhaps didn’t recognise them why they were important and worth bringing back.
Davies’ opening episode had used the Autons, mainly for the recognisable moment of showroom dummies breaking through a shop window (a well-remembered incident from Spearhead from Space that was not actually seen on screen, instead being simply heard as a sound effect, an oversight Rose rectified).
The big question, in the run-up to the series’ debut, was whether the show would feature the Daleks, following a protracted negotiation with Terry Nation’s estate. With the rights to the Daleks secured, Davies took a cautious approach to their reintroduction, aware that the Doctor’s biggest foes had become the butt of many jokes in the years when the show was off air. Although Daleks had been seen to fly (or hover) twice towards the end of the original series (in Revelation of the Daleks and Remembrance of the Daleks), they were still considered by comedians and the popular press to be creatures who could be foiled by simply running up a set of stairs. Drawing on a Big Finish audio by Robert Shearman (Jubilee, in which a captured solo Dalek is tortured), the episode Dalek saw Rose become sympathetic to a chained and abused lone Dalek. The episode goes on to unleash the creature, showing the deadly power it is capable of. The significant ‘media moment’ the episode builds up to is when the Dalek announces its intention to ‘elevate’, and is then seen hovering up stairs in relentless pursuit of its quarry.
Timeless Adventures Page 23