Audience (and fan) nostalgia also played a major role in School Reunion, the episode that saw the return of Elisabeth Sladen as Jon Pertwee/Tom Baker companion Sarah Jane Smith and the robot dog K-9. This was a direct appeal to viewers who remembered the show at its 1970s peak, although Sladen and K-9 were never teamed up on the regular show, only in the 1981 spin-off special K-9 and Company (and briefly in The Five Doctors). The return of these characters was part of a publicity boost for the series, especially K-9. Davies strongly believed that K-9 would appeal beyond fans and older audiences who remembered him to the new younger audience attracted to the revitalised version of the series. The gambit was so successful that the characters returned again to Doctor Who (in Journey’s End). Elisabeth Sladen went on to star in her own amazingly successful children’s spin-off series called The Sarah Jane Adventures, 30 years after she first boarded the TARDIS. The spin-off series is even structured like the original Doctor Who, in 25-minute episodes, with each two-part story enjoying an end-of-episode cliff-hanger. The character of Captain Jack Harkness also enjoyed a spin-off series of his own. Torchwood saw Jack heading up a team of Cardiff-based investigators who confront alien incursions and other odd occurrences. Both spin-offs would be reunited with the parent show in the two-part, season-four finale The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End.
Having successfully revived the Daleks, the return of other popular monsters was inevitable. Each season would see at least one prominent monster reinvented for the new show. Season two had the parallel universe Cybermen in Rise of the Cybermen /The Age of Steel (again drawing on a Big Finish audio-drama precedent: Marc Platt’s Spare Parts), with further reappearances in Army of Ghosts/Doomsday and the 2008 Christmas special The Next Doctor. Season three saw a dramatic reinvention of the Master (John Simm) in Utopia. Unexpectedly (for most viewers), Derek Jacobi’s mysterious ‘Professor Yana’ regenerated (in a similar style to the Eccleston/ Tennant regeneration in The Parting of the Ways, a gambit adopted so viewers would recognise the change that was happening) into Simm’s new, younger, more dynamic Master. This led into the two-part season finale The Sound of Drums/The Last of the Time Lords, which saw the Doctor and Master fighting for the future of mankind.
Season four’s returning monsters were the 1970s clone warriors the Sontarans in The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky (the Sontarans had also recently reappeared in the long-running Doctor Who comic strip, another influence on the new TV series). The creatures had a dramatic redesign and their behaviour had changed significantly, with this supposed warrior race attempting to take over Earth by stealth using a front company run by a teenage genius. The end of season four saw the return of Dalek creator Davros (introduced in 1975’s Genesis of the Daleks) in another two-part season finale, the epic The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End.
Each of these returns was carefully stage-managed, with publicity stills of the reinvented monsters released to the media long in advance of the episodes, and often accompanied by Radio Times covers priming the viewing audience for the episode during the week of transmission. The huge interest in the new Doctor Who by tabloid newspapers, once it had proved to be a hit, resulted in several key storylines and character returns leaking (itself sometimes a useful publicity strategy). The Sun had reported the Cybermen/Dalek battle almost a full year before the episodes aired, while the returns of both the Master and Davros proved to be open secrets in the world of online fandom long before the characters actually appeared.
The new series also saw dramatic changes in fandom. Printed fanzines were few and far between, as most comment had migrated online in the form of authored blogs or forum postings. Fans participating in Doctor Who’s online culture were just as likely to be female now (partly down to the casting of Tennant, but also due to the show’s new emotional intelligence). Creating work like music videos illustrated with clips from the new series was far easier than it had been back in the 1980s, and the audiences for such YouTube postings was far larger than local fan groups or conventions. Exhibitions up and down the land attracted families, while a brand-new young audience bought the merchandise (or more likely had it bought for them). The Internet had also created a new fan hierarchy, illustrated by the growing spoiler culture (as wittily addressed by Steven Moffat in his script for Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead). Fans in possession of advance story details, or who were in a position to spread leaked information, became notorious (in both positive and negative senses), while misinformation and rumour was easier to spread than ever before.
The new nature of ‘NuWho’ fandom, however, had not removed strong fan criticism. In fact, the Internet provided a venue that made such criticism easier (and easier for those who criticise unthinkingly). Accused by fans of recreating Doctor Who in the image of a soap opera (by including the companion’s families and allowing the Doctor to have emotional involvements), Russell T Davies countered by claiming such things were simply the basis of good modern TV drama. However, Davies set out deliberately to create a new mythology for his version of Doctor Who, one that would culminate in Journey’s End.
Eccleston’s Doctor is revealed to be the last of the Time Lords, the sole survivor of a grand ‘Time War’ that has wiped out his home planet Gallifrey and the Daleks. He’s suffering survivor’s guilt, and the four years from 2005 to 2008 play out the consequences of his (unseen, offscreen) actions as the Time War is woven into the unfolding narrative of the series. The arrival of each new companion (after Rose there was Captain Jack, Martha Jones and Donna Noble) allowed for the basic set-up to be restated to the audience in a natural and engaging way (a simple trick that the writers and producers of 1986’s The Trial of a Time Lord totally failed to understand).
Beyond this, there were the storylines assigned to each individual companion. It was always Davies’ intention for a version of the Doctor and Rose to end up together, but the first-draft plan saw a split-off human version of the Doctor settling down with Rose following the Tenth Doctor’s regeneration (this was somehow tied up with the return of Gallifrey, the resolution of the Time War and the ‘human Doctor’ storyline of Human Nature). Changing production priorities (the departure and return of Billie Piper, uncertainty about when David Tennant would be leaving the role) saw the grand plan revised to become the storyline that unfolded in The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End. The final outcome of the relationship was the same, however: a half-human version of the Tenth Doctor ends up with Rose Tyler.
This epic romance defined the other companions. The return of Sarah Jane Smith was played (in soap-opera terms) as the return of an old girlfriend (Rose’s boyfriend Mickey calls the meeting between Sarah Jane and Rose a clash between ‘the ex and the missus’). Martha Jones’ storyline was one of unrequited love: she falls for the Doctor in much the same way that Rose did, but he’s not in the right place emotionally to reciprocate (as he’s still pining for Rose, trapped in a different dimension after the events of Doomsday). Finally, there’s Donna Noble, a no-nonsense, older (although possibly less sophisticated) companion who eventually proves to be the most significant companion of all, saving not only this universe but all of reality when caught up in a ‘human-Time Lord metacrisis’ in Journey’s End.
Davies’ revolving roster of characters included Rose’s family members, specifically her dead father, Pete Tyler (who plays a major role in time-travel paradox adventure Father’s Day, with an alternate-universe version of Pete appearing in Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel and Army of Ghosts/Doomsday), as well as her mother, Jackie, and her boyfriend Mickey (who also travels with the Doctor, maturing as a character as he does so). Again, Martha’s entire family are caught up in the Doctor’s world, especially in the ‘year that never was’ of The Sound of Drums/The Last of the Time Lords. While Donna Noble’s mother also regularly appears, she is more critical of her daughter than either of the other companions’mothers we see. Donna’s significant family connection is to Wilf, her grandfather (played by Bernard Cribbins, whose Doctor Who connections stretch b
ack to the second Peter Cushing Dalek movie). The episode Turn Left allows audiences to see a version of Donna’s life that might have unfolded if the Doctor didn’t exist, and how the familiar characters that surround her would react and be changed by events. Cribbins, in particular, is given an opportunity to shine when local people are rounded up for despatch to internment camps and he recalls the similar events of the Second World War (so that old Doctor Who standby proves it is still useful).
As well as these characters, who recur on and off throughout the series, providing the audience with an ensemble cast among whom they can choose favourites, Davies also built a mythology set around the year five billion, with returning characters like the Face of Boe, Cassandra, the last human and Novice Hame, one of the cat people. The unfolding stories of these characters, across the first three seasons, provided a more subtle serial narrative that paid off for regular viewers of the series, who could connect episodes across a number of years. The revelation that immortal Captain Jack Harkness would eventually become the Face of Boe (seemingly inspired by fan speculation and intended by Davies as a joke) connected the two ongoing narrative strands together.
Retaining viewers through character loyalty (harking right back to the establishment of the series in the 1960s) was taken to its ultimate extreme in the 2008 season finale The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End, with the last episode especially extended to 65 minutes to accommodate the story and a huge number of returning characters. These episodes featured all the previous companions from this four-year period, characters from The Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood, and other incidental recurring characters like Penelope Wilton’s Harriet Jones, ex-Prime Minister. (‘Yes, we know who you are,’ say the Daleks, prior to exterminating her, paying off a running joke that began in Aliens of London, three years previously.)
This sort of long-term planning (albeit revised, changed and altered as the series developed due to production realities) was a clever strategy, making Doctor Who part of a modern TV experience and drawing on the soap-like elements of the twice-weekly Peter Davison episodes and the event-television-driven John Nathan-Turner approach. The difference was that Davies never forgot the mass audience. Where Nathan-Turner got caught in the trap of pandering to fans, Davies largely ignored the ‘ming mongs’ (as he rather rudely dubbed engaged Doctor Who fandom, of which he had been a very active part in the past) and wrote the new Doctor Who for the family audience watching TV at (roughly) 7pm on a Saturday night.
Russell T Davies’ reinvention of Doctor Who has been an unalloyed triumph. Like it or loathe it (and many dedicated fans seem to alternate between these two positions depending on what’s happening on screen in any given week), Doctor Who is now one of the BBC’s most important programmes. Regularly drawing audiences of between six and ten million, the show has created an entirely new young fan base, while appealing to adults and parents as well as to most fans of the original series. Many of the episodes of the Eccleston- and Tennant-starring series have featured in the week’s top ten TV programmes, often only beaten by the daily soap operas. Journey’s End achieved a first for the show, topping the chart for the first time in the series’ 45-year history with 10.57 million viewers.
To achieve this, Russell T Davies brought all his event television tricks to bear on the series. Having hoped to keep the Eccleston regeneration a secret until it happened on air, the high-profile nature of the actor’s departure from the series had thwarted that plan. However, at the climax of The Stolen Earth, David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor is exterminated by a Dalek and appears to begin to regenerate (the dramatic scene was missing from preview discs distributed to the media to preserve the secret). This phenomenal cliff-hanger ending fed into endless media speculation about Tennant’s departure from the show, speculation that had started almost the moment he was announced as the new Doctor following Eccleston. That the threatened regeneration was a bluff was not clear to the mass audience until the beginning of the following episode, Journey’s End. The resolution of the cliff-hanger sees the Doctor’s regeneration energy siphoned off into his severed hand (kept in the TARDIS since Last of the Time Lords), resulting in the creation of a half-human Doctor that, in turn, allows for the long-running Rose romance story to be paid off. It may have struck many viewers as a cheat. A good proportion of the 11 million viewers (up from 8.7 million for The Stolen Earth) tuned in following media coverage during the week solely to see a potential new Doctor revealed (a very similar trick was ill-advisedly used for the 2008 Christmas special, The Next Doctor). Whatever the motivation, viewers stuck with the episode through the defeat of Davros and the Daleks to the interminable sequence of goodbyes that saw the long-brewing Rose–Doctor romance finally concluded as she departed back to her alternate universe with a half-human clone of the Doctor.
Just before Hallowe’en 2008, David Tennant finally announced (live on TV, after winning a National Television Award for the third year running) that he would be vacating the TARDIS following the 2009 ‘specials’. This left the way open for a fresh start to the series by new 2010 showrunner Steven Moffat (winner of three Hugos – science fiction’s Oscars – for his acclaimed Doctor Who episodes).
Tennant felt he was leaving the show in good shape: ‘I think the cross-generational, cross-cultural appeal of Doctor Who is pretty unique. I can’t think of anything else that has fans who are seven and 70 in almost equal measure.’ Russell T Davies had already announced his own departure from the series he’d so successfully reinvented: he’d also step down from the show at the conclusion of the 2009 specials, making his and his star’s departures simultaneous. Davies saw this moment of change as a positive step that would help ensure the revived show’s long-term future (as if being number one in the ratings wasn’t enough in that department). ‘[Change] is always good for the programme,’ said Davies. ‘It will keep up a new head of steam and there’s lots of excitement about the new Doctor Who and that’s brilliant. It’s still going to be a television programme about a man who fights aliens. It’s still going to be Doctor Who on a Saturday night, just like it has been for 45 years.’
Doctor Who’s forty-fifth-anniversary year was capped with the announcement of a new Doctor, 26-year-old Matt Smith. His surprise casting was revealed in a special episode of Doctor Who Confidential, broadcast on BBC1 on 3 January 2009 to six million curious viewers (beating ITV’s live coverage of the FA Cup). Speculation about who would win the coveted role had mounted since Tennant’s announcement, with press coverage suggesting actors as diverse as Paterson Joseph (Survivors), Michael Sheen (Frost/Nixon), Chiwetel Ejiofor (Kinky Boots) and James Nesbitt (Steven Moffat’s Jekyll). Moffat had previously expressed his own preference for an older actor to play the Doctor, a ‘grandfather’ figure, so it came as a shock to some fans when he cast the youngest actor yet in the role.
The series’ new executive producer Piers Wenger, who made the choice of Smith alongside Moffat, noted: ‘It was abundantly clear that he had that “Doctor-ness” about him. You are either the Doctor or you are not.’ For his part, Smith was looking forward to working closely with Moffat in developing the Eleventh Doctor. ‘The script is where it starts, it’s always about the words, and luckily we’re in the hands of Steven Moffat, who has this show ingrained in his soul and searing through his blood. We’re going to discover it together, who the Doctor is in Steven’s mind and words, coupled with pockets of my personality, my history, my life. There’s Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, and Doctor Who. It has resonance in our cultural fabric.’
As filming began on his first series in July 2009, Smith commented: ‘The scripts are brilliant and working alongside Karen [Gillan, new companion Amy Pond], Steven [Moffat] and the rest of the crew is an inspiration because their work ethic and passion for the show is so admirable. I’m excited about the future and all the brilliant adventures I get to go on as the Doctor.’
Unveiling the Eleventh Doctor’s tweed-jacketed new look, showrunner Steven Moffat recognised the latest instance of rene
wal in Doctor Who’s long and on-going history. ‘Here it is, the big moment – the new Doctor, and his new best friend. And here’s me, with the job I wanted since I was seven – 40 years to here! If I could go back in time and tell that little boy that one day all this would happen, he’d scream, call for his mum and I’d be talking to you now from a prison cell in 1969. So probably best not then.
‘Matt and Karen are going to be incredible, and Doctor Who is going to come alive on Saturday nights in a whole new way – and, best of all, somewhere out there a seven-year-old is going to see them, fall in love and start making a 40-year plan…’
Although the new Doctor in the shape of the relatively unknown Smith had been announced in January 2009, excited viewers would have to wait over a year until they got their first glimpse of the new man in action. First there was a year of four ‘specials’ running throughout 2009, following the regeneration tease of the 2008 Christmas special, The Next Doctor.
Repeating the trick pulled on The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End, Russell T Davies and his crew capitalised on Tennant’s announced departure by featuring David Morrissey in The Next Doctor as a possible future incarnation of the Doctor in a Victorian-set, Steampunk-tinged romp. The casting seemed plausible to the media and viewers, as it’d be another few weeks before Matt Smith would be named as the genuine ‘next Doctor’. In that brief window, with viewers aware Tennant was leaving and a new incarnation was due to arrive, the games played in The Next Doctor largely succeeded. The downside was that, following that adventure, and with Tennant still firmly playing the lead, the remaining ‘specials’ (offered in lieu of a full series of 13 episodes) would appear far less ‘special’ than promised. For many viewers, Tennant was now yesterday’s man and with the announcement of Smith’s casting, there was perhaps an impatience to move on to the real ‘next Doctor’.
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