Sunday, October 10, 2021

Thoughts On The Occassion of the Appointment of Mr Russell T Davies to an Unprecedented Second Term as Producer, Chief Writer and De Facto Showrunner of Doctor Who

There was a red-haired man who had no eyes or ears. Neither did he have any hair, so he was called red-haired theoretically. He couldn't speak, since he didn't have a mouth. Neither did he have a nose. He didn't even have any arms or legs. He had no stomach and he had no back and he had no spine and he had no innards whatsoever. He had nothing at all! Therefore there's no knowing whom we are even talking about. In fact it's better that we don't say any more about him.

Danil Ivanovich Kharms





There is no reason for Doctor Who to exist; but it is impossible for it not to.

In 1989, Doctor Who was an embarrassment to the BBC: the fossilised remains of a Reithean Saturday night edu-drama which an Imperial College student society had successfully turned into a cult. As long as it existed, there was no particular reason to cancel it; but once Michael Grade had pulled the plug, there was no particular reason to bring it back.

Superman and Spider-Man can be endlessly deconstructed and reimagined around a narrow set of tropes. Exploding planet; childless farmers; sick Auntie; radioactive spider; dead uncle; glowing rocks; teenage side-kick; Irene Adler; Sheriff of Nottingham. 

Doctor Who can hardly be said to exist at all: its premise is so fluid that all fans can do is hallucinate minutiae about a lore that was never really real. The Doctor is a guy who travels in space and time. Except for the couple of seasons when he didn't.

"Doctor Who can be anything it wants to be" was a unique selling point in 1963: but an anthology series that can go from spoof Homer to camp Dan Dare to serious sixteenth century historical fiction in consecutive stories is a harder sell in the age of Netflix than it was in the days when your choice of viewing was the channel with the adverts or the channel without them






Why is there not a vast, interconnected shared universe of Doctor Who spin-offs, as big as Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe?

If you stare at a blank sheet of paper for long enough you start to see patterns. We have been staring at Doctor Who for a very long time, and no very coherent pattern has yet emerged.

The Mandalorian is a Frankenstein series, fragments of lore stolen from dead movies, stitched together and reanimated: and yet it manages to be fully itself. The show knows that Sand People always ride single file to conceal their numbers, but the viewer doesn't have to. It stands on its own feet. Lone Wolf and Cub meets the Magnificent Seven with aliens.

Why isn't The Adventures of Nyssa a thing? Why can't that in-joke about Ace starting a charity for orphans when she got back from the Time War be spun out into an entire series? Why aren't Martha and Mickey saving the universe on a weekly basis? 

Because no-one outside of a very narrow fan-elite has heard of these characters. Your Mum knows that Batman has a Butler called Alfred: she doesn't know that it was kind of implied in The End of Time that the Doctor's Mother was a weeping angel.

The Mandalorian and the Marvel Multiverse Phase 6 are constructed from pre-existing lore. Doctor Who does not, in the required sense, have any lore for us to work with.

(I don't know when the word "lore" was coined to mean "back-story, canon, and continuity". Some people think it comes from the World of Warcraft computer game. It is a very useful word and I propose to carry on using it.)

There have been four spin-offs from Doctor Who, and I am pretty sure you can only remember three of them. The Sarah-Jane Adventures was a vehicle for Elisabeth Sladen. And also some very decent child actors, but mostly Elisabeth Sladen. K-9 and Company, despite the title, was a vehicle for the same actor. Torchwood was a vehicle for John Barrowman, which means that we probably never have to watch it again. The Adventures of K-9, which you haven't seen and really, really don't want to was a vehicle for a piece of hardware. Bob Baker and Dave Martin didn't own the rights to the K-9 prop, but the BBC couldn't prevent John Leeson saying "affirmative" into a ring modulator. It may, for all I know, be canon and it may not have compared unfavourably with other Australian kid-friendly soft-cyberpunk soap operas of its day, but it has very little to do with Doctor Who.

"A strange lady and some schoolkids get into scrapes with space monsters" is an obviously good pitch for CBBC and if Lis Sladen is available you might as well cast her. Some episodes of the Sarah Jane Adventures clearly had very strong connections to Doctor Who. Others, not so much. If you want to say "The Death of the Doctor is canon in the Doctor Who universe" then I certainly can't stop you. But I can't help thinking that if you were watching a quite good kids TV show mainly to find out what happened to Jo Grant after she sailed down the Amazon on her blue crystal, you may possibly need to take a long hard look at your life.

Torchwood was a piss-poor sci-fi show that had been cross-promoted -- at best seeded -- in Doctor Who. You can barely even call Army of Ghosts a backdoor pilot: all it actually had in common with Barrowman's sex-and-aliens travesty was that they both had the word Torchwood in them. "What if the Victorian science fascists in Season 2 of Doctor Who had the same name as some sexually incontinent Men in Black scavengers in a completely different series?" doesn't amount to a premise. Mentioning the word Torchwood in Doctor Who is a fair enough way of getting people to tune in to the new show -- and god knows, there was no other reason -- but it doesn't amount to an expansion of Doctor Who lore. 

The Captain Jack who appears in the One With the Gas Masks was an interesting and appealing character; but he has very little to do with the immortal camp pantomime turn on BBC 3. This was before we knew about John Barrowman's zip fastener related issues.

But when Russell T Davies talks about spin-offs and a Doctor Who Universe, this is the kind of thing he seems to have in mind. He used Doctor Who to float ideas for unrelated programmes he'd quite like to have made. The one about the  Time Travelling lady aviator; the one about the underdeveloped Doctor-clone played by Peter Davison's daughter for another; Billie Piper and, er, Noel Clarke running a parallel Torchwood on a parallel earth for a third. Poor David Tennant actually had to look into camera and pitch the title with a straight face. "Rose Tyler, Defender of the Earth and the Video Rangers".

In 1977, the BBC seem genuinely to have considered rehiring Christopher Benjamin and Trevor Baxter to do a series of Victorian sci-fi horror yarns: not because That Corner of the Whoniverse needed development, but because Jago and Litefoot were obviously funny characters who the viewers enjoyed. 

That's what spin-off means. It occurs to someone that the snooty landlady from Man About The House, or the pretentious shrink from Cheers, could sustain a series on their own. I seem to remember that the one where Ronnie Barker's burglar from Porridge went straight, imaginatively called Going Straight, was quite funny.






Before the Great Hiatus, Doctor Who could be said to have existed as a kind of Heraclitian tradition.

William Hartnell might have been dead, but Terrence Dicks, Robert Holmes and the Doctor Who office were on hand to provide the illusion of continuity, though not, of course Continuity. Nicholas Courtney was not the only man on earth who could have played a comic English army officer. But he had been doing it for so long that he acted as a kind of golden thread from Survival back to Mission to the Unknown. There was still a torch of some kind that was capable of being passed. But once the axe fell and the dynasty dissolved what was left? A series without a lead actor, without a consistent supporting cast, without a setting or a plot; and increasingly without even a format.

But Doctor Who refused to die. When Virgin ran out of TV stories to turn into novellas it just continued to churn out novellas which had never been TV shows in the first place. The final script editor had had a vaguely interesting idea for a story arc (or as people called it in those pre Straczynski days, a masterplan) and some of that arc worked its way into some of the novellas. It didn't have much to do with the TV show, and it wasn't that original, but it was lore, and some people liked it.

Meanwhile some semi-pro fans started to hire actual ex-actors to read out pastiches of old Who scripts. Some people liked these, as well. (I did, for a while, before they overwhelmed me.) There are currently two hundred and seventy five of them, with twenty or thirty more coming out each week. For maybe six years, the Big Finish CDs and the Virgin Novels existed in more or less contented mutual contradiction. It would be a gross over simplification to say that Virgin was creating fiction and Big Finish was creating fan fiction, but I am going to say it anyway. Peter Darvill-Evans' writer's guidelines specifically prohibited writers from using lore as a jumping off point for stories. Yes, it would be possible to tell a spy story or a war story which just happened to have an old monster in it, but "What if Sgt Benton met a Draconian at Devils's End and the consequence was the Key of Time" was off limits. 

This was the view that the production team invariably took at conventions when Doctor Who was still on the telly: no, we are not planning to "bring back" the Daleks, yes, if someone comes up with an excellent story which happens to have the Daleks in it, we might well use them again. The very first Big Finish disc said "What if Colin Baker, Peter Davison and Sylvester McCoy went on an adventure together" and kept being drawn into the orbit of questions like "What if Romana were President of the Time Lords?" and "What if Davros, or Omega, or some version of the Master did something that interests fans a good deal but not really anyone else?"

At the time of Trevor Baxter's death, Big Finish had published seventy Jago and Litefoot stories on CD. 





Russell T Davies went down neither path. His reboot of Doctor Who was neither fan-friendly pastiche nor a hypothetical Season 27 that followed Sylvester McCoy and Paul McGann down unexpected narrative pathways. 

It would be tempting to say that he created a new thing that had little or nothing to do with Doctor Who. A cool but safe YA show about an asexual alpha male who had a succession of doomed courtly romances with impossible women. He told us that it was Doctor Who, and we believed him, because we desperately wanted it to be.

But maybe, just maybe, he chewed up forty years of Saturday evenings (and a few Tuesdays) and spat out the core concept. 

He travels in time and space. 

She's his human friend. 

Everything else is up for grabs. 

You could have sold the premise (of a time traveller and his platonic girl-friend) to the BBC even if Doctor Who had never existed. Hell, you could have sold the pitch without the premise because Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper made such beautiful sparks together. 

It all comes down to the sparks. If not for Tom Baker's personal charisma, we would not be talking about Doctor Who today.






William Hague will never not be the little boy who stood up at Tory party conference and told Mrs Thatcher off for not being right wing enough. Chris Chibnall will never not be the little boy on Points of View telling Pip and Jane Baker precisely what he thought of Terror of the Vervoids.

He wasn't wrong: it was shite. After Tom Baker departed, Doctor Who became a zombie show, continuing because it had to continue, running on the fumes of old memories. The Cybermen are back. The Daleks are back. UNIT is not back, but it has been alluded to. A tolerably decent Roger Delgado impersonator is appearing in practically every story. Earthshock was pretty good and Kinda was very good and Caves of Androzani was very good indeed. But everything after Logopolis -- everything after Talons of Weng Chiang -- was a bonus.

Chris Chibnal grew up in the declining years. Peter Davison was "his Doctor"; it is those zombie years that he now seeks to revive. Doctor Who is like the Ur-Ru, the Muppet Jedi mystics from Dark Crystal, endlessly repeating formulas and rituals which no longer give the slightest comfort. 

There is a card game called Flux in which the rules are endlessly redefined: the number of cards you draw, the number of cards you discard, the number of cards you may hold in your hand, the values of the cards and the end-game conditions: all are subject to change each time a card is played. I believe a game exists which takes this a stage further: the rules consist of nothing but a set of conditions under which the players can redefine the rules. 

Doctor Who doesn't even have a meta-rules. It is defined by the absence of a definition: the only thing which stays the same is the fact that it is always changing. The Doctor. Her companions. The format. The title sequence. The logo. The TARDIS (interior and exterior). The Sonic screwdriver. Not one thing about the show stays the same for more than three seasons. 

Chibnall has admitted this. He has rewritten the lore to make it a feature. We no longer have a periodically regenerating main character, but infinite iterations of the main character spread throughout Time and Space. The Doctor can now be anyone; so the Doctor is now no-one. But perhaps he never was. When everybody's somebody then no-one's anybody.

What does it matter? Why do we care?






People on the nastier fringes of the internet (hereafter "Twitter") have taken to saying that the fault lies not in Jodie Whitaker's genitals, nor in her DNA, nor even in her pronouns. The problem with Jodie Whitaker is that she stands outside the Great Tradition.

If she had been worthy to occupy Saint Peter Davison's throne she would first have familiarised herself with two thousand years of Whovian dogma. She would have watched old episodes of Doctor Who and built her characterisation out of that. The worst people say say, in so many words, that her refusal to study the sacred scriptures is evidence of her feminist entitlement. Peter Capaldi, a man, knew that he had to know about the old Doctors before he could take up their mantle. Jodie Whittaker thought that just being a woman was good enough.

This, it goes without saying, is deeply offensive bullshit. There are a lot of deeply offensive bullshitters on Twitter.

But like most offensive bullshit, it contains an interesting grain of truth, if you are prepared to get your hands filthy rummaging through it.

If Doctor Who can no longer be said to exist as a format, a character, or a production office -- and if it never was a body of lore -- then in one sense all it can be is a text. Doctor Who can only be defined as everything which has ever been published under the banner of Doctor Who. The only way to play the role of Doctor Who is to watch other people playing the role of Doctor Who and follow them, round and round in ever decreasing circles until you finally disappear up your own canonicity. 

William Hartnell was irascible. Patrick Troughton was eccentric. Jon Pertwee was patrician. Tom Baker was eccentric and patrician. Peter Davison was eccentric, patrician, irascible and had a stick of celery. Colin Baker was eccentric, patrician, irascible and had a pin on cat. The Fourteenth Doctor will have celery and a cat and an umbrella and rainbow braces and say "Fantastic" and "Fam" and "Jelly Baby". Jodie and Peter and Matt and Dave and Chris and Sly and Colin and Peter and Tom and Jon and Pat and Bill.... 

I am not at all sure I know what irascible means, but I am jolly sure William Hartnell was it. I suppose it means the same as crotchety. That is another word which no-one ever uses.

Colin Baker said that he watched videos of his predecessors , not with a view to copying them, but with a view to absorbing what he called their Doctor-ness. The Doctor-ness of the Doctor being, presumably "whatever the actors who have played him up to now have in common". The spot on the Venn Diagram where William Hartnell intersects with Tom Baker and Tom Baker intersects with Jon Pertwee. Theatricality, I suppose: a certain predilection for vaudeville and the wireless; a belief that you are a Legitimate Character Actor. Each time you add an actor, that intersection becomes smaller and smaller. The addition of an infinite number of Timeless Children takes us to a homeopathic level of dilution. What the Infinite Doctors have in common is a null-set; a mathematical point.





Jodie Whitaker's job is to say "Do you have any idea where those planets might be?" or "Hey Daleks! Over here!" in a convincing manner. Would she be better at this job if she had watched every single Tom Baker story before filming The Woman Who Fell To Earth? Is it clear that she would even do it differently?

Christopher Eccleston, by his own admission, didn't watch Doctor Who. Tom Baker didn't watch TV at all, even when he was in it. Matt Smith's persona clearly is influenced by that of his predecessors, particularly Hartnell and Troughton, but he is most like the Doctor when he is most like Matt Smith. Jon Pertwee was a radio star and reputedly asked Barry Letts which of his six hundred funny voices he ought to use. Barry Letts told him to play it like himself.

What about the people who write the words for her to say? Knowledge of the text clearly has more potential affect on a writer than it does on an actor. Someone who is "just a writer" asks "What if the Doctor met Van Gogh?" or "What if the Doctor went to India at the time of the petition?". Someone who is a Doctor Who writer says "What if there were a Dalek we could feel some human sympathy with?" or "What if the TARDIS were a person who the Doctor had a relationship with?" I don't think that lore-steeped scripts are necessarily better than those written in a vacuum: but the difference is there. Robert Holmes and even Douglas Adams didn't show much sign of caring what David Whitaker had said about the TARDIS and the Time Lords and the Daleks in the previous decade. They didn't particularly care what they themselves had said the previous week. Fans despaired; and yet the programmes was as good and successful as it has ever, ever, ever, ever been.

Fans, nasty and nice, have said that the Timeless Children amounts to a vandalisation of Doctor Who lore, which, in one sense, it definitely does. But only someone who cared about Doctor Who lore could have damaged it in that particular way. No-one but a fan boy would think it was fun to make the Morbius Doctors canon. No-one but a fanboy would know what "the Morbius Doctors" even meant.

Is the Archers written by an Archerphile who knows and cares who was staying at the Bull in October 1957? Or is it written by someone with a knack for coming up with soap opera storylines and then checked for consistency by someone who has listened to all 20,000 episodes? That approach makes sense to me: a writer writing stories and a consultant worrying about canon. But if Ian Levine had been breathing down Terry Nation's neck would we ever have had a Davros?





Who, in your opinion, should become show-runner when Chris Chibnall relinquishes his death grip?

Should it be the man who wrote Good Omens; who likes Doctor Who; who knows about rebooting moribund properties, has show runner experience and a track record for Making Good Art?

Should it be the man who created Babylon 5, who positively wants the job, and has a track record for making, er, Babylon 5?

Should it be the lady who created Gentleman Jack, who knows about smart historical fiction, the current UK TV scene, gender-fluid characters and who would presumably commission a stonking theme song?

No. Let's give the job to the guy who has already produced four and a half seasons and who was generally felt to have run out of steam by the midway through the third.

We agreed. We agreed that I would save Doctor Who, but that when I returned I could reclaim your first born. We agreed that I would be show-runner and you would be Chancellor of the Exchequer but after two years I would step down. Doctor Who is mine. My birthday present. My precious.

And so, Doctor Who is over. Again.

The endless, ever-regenerating chain of producers and show runners goes running back to one man: the one man who admittedly brought the show back from oblivion and defined what it is, but who it can now never grow beyond. New Who belongs to Russell T Davies. Its power is bound up in him and it will last only as long as he will last.

New Who has always, to some extent, been a metashow: always primarily interested, not in being itself but in being a commentary and a celebration of the old show.

From 1963 to 1987, the BBC's Doctor Who was multiple and polyvocal. It had been many different things and might have been many more things. From 2005 to 2010, we saw what that multifaceted show looked like from the point of view of one particular fan who happened to end up in the TV trade. From 2010 to 2017 we saw what it looked like from another point of view. 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021 have given us what for want of a better word we must call Chris Chibnal's vision. And if by common consent that era has failed, then there is nothing to do but accept that RTD's vision is the only vision which matters. He will, I don't doubt, produce something entertaining and compelling and incredibly irritating. (Did I mention that It's a Sin was very good indeed?)  But it will be very hard to move on. Not in this life time. John Nathan Turner saved Doctor Who in Season 18 and killed it in Season 24. It became John Nathan Turner's show; incapable of mutation or evolution, content to lurk in it bunker and define itself as the supreme being in the universe.





So why not let it die?

Why not, at any rate give it a rest? Why not let Doctor Who go out with a bang on November 23rd 2023, and leave open the possibility of a revival, a reboot, a reimagining, a regeneration ten years down the line. Why not stop making Doctor Who until there is a good reason to start making it. Why not wait until some hot twenty something producer who watched Jodie Whitaker at the age of twelve wants to show us what Doctor Who looks like to him.

We live in an age of franchises; of cinematic universes; and reboots. Star Trek: The Next Generation followed Star Trek at a discrete interval of two decades; Deep Space Nine overlapped with it for a couple of seasons and gave way to Voyager which begat Enterprise. A simple exercise in torch passing. But since then we have had three big-screen movies, part pastiche, part parody; taking place in their own universe connected to the old one by the ghost of Leonard Nimoy. We have three season of Discovery and threats of a fourth one, spinning off into a prequel about that guy who lost out to William Shatner in the original auditions. We have a second series of a sequel predicated on the continuing youthfulness of 81 year old Patrick Stewart and a cartoon which is definitely a parody but respects the material more than the cinematic abomination. And it is all canon, unless it isn't. 

Cancel Doctor Who at sixty and there wouldn't be an absence of Doctor Who; there would be competing visions. There would be novels and comics and computer games and action figures and CDs and a Netflix series. Sit down for a moment and contemplate a world where there are two films about a Spider-Man villain, Venom, without Spider-Man. The universe itself could never bear to be without the Doctor.





So what would you have done if they had made you show-runner? 














28 comments:

Pete Ashton said...

I'm actually good friends with an Archers writer, if you want me to ask them.

Mike Taylor said...

"It all comes down to the sparks. If not for Tom Baker's personal charisma, we would not be talking about Doctor Who today."

I'm increasingly of the opinion that this is the heart of the matter. For all that I love some of RTD's moments, and some of Moffat's plots, when I think about Doctor Who, what I think about is Dr. Tom's big grin, Dr. Chris's barely concealed impatience, and Dr. Matt's quizzical moments of realisation. What I don't even think about is Dr. Peter, the other Dr. Peter, or Dr. Jodie.

Maybe it all comes down to whether or not you have an actor who can convincingly sell being both irredicibly alien and deeply lovable; both super-competent and fallible.

Mike Taylor said...

"No. Let's give the job to the guy who has already produced four and a half seasons and who was generally felt to have run out of steam by the midway through the third."

I certainly share your ambivalence here; but it's worth noting that RTD did his last work in the role 2009, and will start his second period in 2023. You can gather a lot of new steam in 14 years.

Andrew Rilstone said...

This is true. And It's A Sin was very good (albeit very good in a very Russell T Davies way.)

Andrew Ducker said...

"New Who has always, to some extent, been a metashow: always primarily interested, not in being itself but in being a commentary and a celebration of the old show."

This feels rather unfair to me. I'm aware of many people who have watched lots of NewWho and haven't seen any OldWho. Sure, there are things that add a frisson of "Oh, it's that thing from Ye Olden Days!" - but none of it is necessary to enjoy the show. And there are many many episodes which have no references to the olden days in them.

Andrew Rilstone said...

That was covered by the “to some extent” part. :)

Gavin Burrows said...

"So why not let it die?

"Why not, at any rate give it a rest? Why not let Doctor Who go out with a bang on November 23rd 2023, and leave open the possibility of a revival, a reboot, a reimagining, a regeneration ten years down the line."

I hereby second the motion.

Mike Taylor said...

"I hereby second the motion. "

Yeah, as if. Whether or not it's actually any good, Doctor Who is probably the BBC's most recognised and lucrative project worldwide. There is no way it's going to be allowed to die if it can be kept on life support. The finances alone make it impossible.

SK said...

Whether or not it's actually any good, Doctor Who is probably the BBC's most recognised and lucrative project worldwide

Is that even still true? I know it was around, say, 2012; but now?

I know that in about 2012 they made a big attempt to crack the US market (sending the cast over to New York for a week, premiering episodes in the States (JN-T tried that one too), etc) but I was under the impression that — apart from a few friendless nerds, basement-dwelling geeks, internet-users and other such low-lives, they comprehensively failed, and 99.5% of the American TV-viewing audience remain utterly unaware of what a Dalek even is. (It's just that every one of that 0.5% has a YouTube channel).

The finances alone make it impossible

How does the BBC make money from Doctor Who? I can think of:

* Foreign TV sales

* Selling the episodes on disk (or whatever internet delivery mechanisms the kids use nowadays)

* Toy licenses (and other merchandise, like colouring books / T-shirts)

* Tie-in licenses (comic books, novels)

The first two are the only ones that actually require new content, year on year. You don't actually need to be making a TV show to make comics of the TV show (Star Trek did that possibly for literal decades). But more to the point: have you not noticed how much less of the second two there are about than, say, in 2009-2012? Back then there were entire aisles of Doctor Who toys in Toys R Us, there were bookcases filled with tie-ins in Waterstones or Tescos. There was the most ridiculous toy ever: https://twitter.com/russelldavies63/status/1266795912505982977

Now? Not so much. Maybe one shelf of the toys in a toyshop, if you're lucky. Maybe a couple of tie-in books, around Christmas. And that's in the UK. Can anyone in the USA report back on when the last time they saw anything Doctor Who-branded for sale was?

Getting Davies back strikes me as an act of desperation. You can tell the budgets have been slashed, year on year, but it must still be pretty damn expensive to produce (presumably why it's becoming an external co-production for the first time), and the income it's been generating has been falling steadily.

Of course, because of the unique way the BBC is funded (by us!) it can quite happily continue to subsidise a loss-making programme that no one wants to watch, for decades, potentially. But somehow I don't think Doctor Who has quite the prestige that will get it many defenders around the Trust table when the red ink on its ledger continues to mount.

Note that it's already been taken off the Christmas Day schedules. They don't take Call the Midwife off the Christmas Day schedules.

So I reckon this is Doctor Who's last chance. Viewing figures have been falling. Income has been falling. Budgets have been cut but there's a level below which they can't go or it just gets embarassing, these days — we can't go back to wobbly sets and rubber monsters, no, anything but that. So this is the plan: get Davies back. See if he can work his magic again, whatever it was, nobody really understands, or they'd have repeated it themselves. See if he can put it back in the black. If not, I think the conclusion will be that if he can't, no one can, and that'll be that.

The only question is how long they give him to turn it around.

voxpoptart said...

Part of me feels like re-hiring Russell Davies is a retreat. But part of me knows that "Years and Years" (the greatest miniseries I've ever seen) is the work of a vastly better writer than Davies was in 2005-2009. So to some extent is "It's a Sin"; and even "Torchwood: Children of Earth" (the furious 5-hour Davies-penned third season of that show, no relation to its first two seasons), while contemporaneous with the end of his Who tenure, showed skills and perspective he never unleashed on his main show. He's a better writer overall, so why wouldn't he be a better writer with new things to say on Who as well?

Especially since, you know, it's just not true that Tom Baker's Who was the most popular version of the show. It was immensely popular in Britain, especially among males. Stephen Moffatt's 2010-11 Doctor Who was popular worldwide, as much among girls and women as boys and men, and to me was self-evidently a better show. Moffatt, like Davies, ran out of steam doing that sort of show; but he stuck around, hired a new Doctor, and from "Kill the Moon" through "Hell Bent" produced a different run of Who that imho was just as brilliant, and said new and different things. It's very sad that all *you* saw in either case was a romantic comedy (a frankly bizarre, to my mind, reading of the Capaldi/ Clara years), but it was definitely a second version of Moffatt Who, as e.g. any number of Elizabeth Sandifer's readers would be happy to tell you. Making a second version of Davies Who seem fully plausible to me.

I wanted the BBC to move past the single-showrunner idea, personally; to replace Moffatt with two of the best writers in his stable (I nominated Jamie Mathieson and Sarah Dollard, assuming they'd be able to work together), and figured together they'd have the skills for one demanding oversight job. I'd be just as happy to make Vinay Patel a co-showrunner; "Demons of the Punjab" was excellent in a way Who had never been before, and "Fugitive of the Judoon" was too for a few minutes until it got hijacked by Chibnall's incredibly irritating masterplan. But sure, Russell Davies: he'll be 14 years older and he's in his prime. I don't mind seeing what he's got.

Doctor Who is about a weird, kind, brave troublemaker who travels in time and space uprooting everything in the hopes of making things better. It *is* a flexible concept. Chris Chibnall should never have been in charge of it, but most of us will be happy to forget he was, I think.

Mike Taylor said...

I wish I had said that, voxpoptart.

SK said...

"Years and Years" (the greatest miniseries I've ever seen)

Well, that makes your discernment questionable, to say the least. But leaving that aside…

So to some extent is "It's a Sin"; and even "Torchwood: Children of Earth" (the furious 5-hour Davies-penned third season of that show, no relation to its first two seasons), while contemporaneous with the end of his Who tenure, showed skills and perspective he never unleashed on his main show

…it's very noticeable that all those are multiple-episode serials (five for It's a Sin and Torchwood: Children of Earth, six for years and Years); as are the other serials which made Davies's name (Queer as Folk, eight episodes; Bob & Rose, six; Mine all Mine, five). The Second Coming was only two, but they were over an hour; the shortest was Casanova at three episodes.

Add to this the fact that the biggest criticism of Davies-era Doctor Who is the pacing of its episodes, with their rushed, nonsensical deus ex machina conclusions, and it's clear that the Doctor Who format of individual self-contained episodes, or at most two times fifty minutes, really hits Davies's weaknesses as a writer: when he succeeds, even if for the sake of argument you (wrongly) think that Years and Years was a success rather than a total mess, it's when he can spread a story over a long running time, to give space for the kind of whimsical dialogue scenes that are, really, what he does best. When he's forced to compress things — which note he never does except in Doctor Who where the format requires it — that's when the wheels come off and everything falls apart.

Therefore I don't see any reason to think that new Davies Doctor Who will be substantially different to the way the programme was from 2005 to 2009, with all the same strengths and all the same weaknesses.

So the question is simply, can the lightning be caught in the bottle twice? Will the same thing, in this new context where it's not fresh and new and exciting but simply the next series of a programme that's been on for by that time seventeen or eighteen years (so very nearly Peter Davison in old money), catch the nation's imagination the way the previous one did?

I suppose it might, but I for one wouldn't bet the house on it.

and from "Kill the Moon" through "Hell Bent" produced a different run of Who that imho was just as brilliant, and said new and different things

But that, sadly, was designed almost entirely to appeal to the sort of people who instead of real-life friends have internet pages on which they post screen captures with captures like 'Permission to squee!', while actively alienating the general audience, who are not on the Tweeter and who do not Tumble or Live Journal, which is why by the end of that period precisely none of them were watching it, which is a large part of how it got to the stage of bringing Davies in as a Hail Mary in the hopes of attracting some of the real people back.

Mike Taylor said...

In among all the snark, SK makes some good points, notably about how RTD's best work has taken the form of short, constrained series with beginnings, middles and ends. I wonder whether he could run a dozen-episode season of Doctor Who as two consecutive six-episode miniseries?

SK said...

I wonder whether he could run a dozen-episode season of Doctor Who as two consecutive six-episode miniseries?

What is this 'miniseries'? The word for what you are describing there is a 'serial'.

It's an interesting thought. And certainly the BBC is no stranger to putting serials on on, say, a Sunday evening: just recently there's been Ridley Road, Vigil and Line of Duty, and no doubt others I've forgotten.

However, they tend not to be aimed at the general, causal audience as Doctor Who was when it was successful: you can imagine children watching (especially Davies-era) Doctor Who, but they'd be bored to tears by Line of Duty.

So, I doubt it. It would mean a total volte-face in the approach of Davies and the BBC to how they last approached Doctor Who, which was almost aggressively against any attempt to build up viewer loyalty in favour of making (almost — series finales are a special case) every episode accessible to the most casual viewer who just happened to have a free hour on Saturday evening and tune in.

If you were going to do that volte-face, why get Davies back in? It wouldn't make sense.

But I think what really puts the nail in the coffin of that idea is that it was trying to build up viewer loyalty through about 2012 - 2018 that saw the series shed audience like rats deserting a sinking ship, and put it in the dire straits that it is now in. Sure, they managed to build up viewer loyalty: they built an insanely loyal core of viewers who wrapped their whole identities up in Doctor Who. But though they were insanely loyal, there just weren't that many of them. And there's a limit to how much merch each one can buy, even if they buy far more than your average casual viewer; so the economics of going for a super-loyal viewership rather than a general audience don't actually work, at least, not for the BBC (they do for something like, say, the producers of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer).

By the way, I've just been reminded of what probably is actually the BBC's most lucrative project worldwide: Strictly Come Dancing. Apparently more than sixty countries are now making their own versions of the format under various titles, all of which will be paying licensing fees to the BBC.

voxpoptart said...

We all agree that it would be better for Davies to engage in longer-form storytelling this time. (Although my top priority even beyond that would be for him to no longer threaten the existence of space & time in increasingly tedious "epic" finales.) But then, Doctor Who always *was* a source of longer-form storytelling until he came along and changed that. Perhaps we should all be writing to Mr. Davies, and urging him to play to his strengths this time.

SK said...

We all agree that it would be better for Davies to engage in longer-form storytelling this time.

Speak for yourself. I'm long adopted a 'not my circus, not my monkeys' attitude to the television programme that shares the title of the one I used to watch called Doctor Who. I comment on it only as a disinterested observer; I myself have no preferences or advice.

(Although my top priority even beyond that would be for him to no longer threaten the existence of space & time in increasingly tedious "epic" finales.)

By my count that was… twice? The Parting of the Ways it's Earth of the future that is at risk from Daleks; Doomsday it's the Earth of the present at risk form Daleks and Cybermen (plus anyone who has been to the parallel Earth getting sucked into the rift); Last of the Time Lords again it's present-day Earth which is at risk (the Master plans to transform humanity into his army to rampage across the cosmos, true, but there's no direct threat to 'the existence of time & space').

It's only Journey's End which has the Reality Bomb which first puts all of time & space at risk; and then in The End of Time the explicit threat is just the return of Gallifrey, and it's not spelt out what this will actually mean for the existence of space & time though it's heavily implied — not least by the title — that it won't be at all healthy.

So while I know Davies has the reputation that he was constantly and tediously putting the existence of all of space and time on the line, it's a criticism not actually based in reality.

But then, Doctor Who always *was* a source of longer-form storytelling until he came along and changed that.

True, and back when I cared it annoyed me. But with distance it's clear that that wasn't the aim, at least to start with; they were going for the widest possible range of casual viewers, which is a valid aim, and not one that will be served by requiring an up-front investment of time in order to get the full story. That sort of thing works for Line of Duty but not when you're trying to be as accessible as possible.

And it's not like the series (2015? 2016?) where every story was a two-parter wasn't absolute shite, so clearly just lengthening the stories by itself is no guarantee either of quality or success.

Perhaps we should all be writing to Mr. Davies, and urging him to play to his strengths this time.

For the reasons above I don't think that would make any difference.

Gavin Burrows said...

Mike, the first Chibnall season brought the ratings back. (Proving the antipathy to a female Doctor was only ever a minority pursuit, as if we hadn’t already guessed.) But then they dropped off quite badly after that. This show isn’t a cash cow right now. And they want to turn it back into one.

The first part of that seems clear enough. Long, convoluted storylines assuming you knew about Mondassian Cybermen were jettisoned for something much more accessible, which was presumably his brief. The subsequent dip seems less clear. Though I suppose one of Andrew’s regular correspondents is already blaming it on the historicals. I know why I don’t like Chibnall’s writing, in fact a yawning gesture really sums it up for me, but the great British public’s feelings presumably differ from mine.

I’d be quite happy for me to be proved wrong, and yourself and Voxpoptart right, of course. But it makes me think of what you do when you’re lost. Of course you try and retrace your steps to the last point you knew where you are. The Beeb seem to have decided that was 2005.

“I'd be just as happy to make Vinay Patel a co-showrunner; "Demons of the Punjab" was excellent in a way Who had never been before”

I’m not sure that being a showrunner requires precisely the same skills as a writer. But I confess I had thought the same thing. If not someone brand new altogether, as Davies once was. Not to be, though.

“In among all the snark, SK makes some good points”

I am perfectly willing to take your word for it.

voxpoptart said...

Gavin: I agree that the hiring of Davies smells of desperation. I just think it might result in excellent television, so I'm choosing to be happy about that possibility.

The ratings failure of the Chibnall second season seems logical in your own framework (which feels like a good framework). His first season was an anthology of brand-new stories: varying in quality, but welcoming to a newcomer. His second season was fanwank. I love the Capaldi era, and I think it had a lot to say about the world we live in, but its canon play seems to have been bad for ratings. (Or maybe a curmudgeonly old man wasn't going to get the ratings Tennant and Smith did by nature.) Chibnall played with canon more, and did it like a 7-year-old making up dialogue for his action figures.

Mike Taylor said...

I thought the second Chibnall/Whittaker season was rather less bad than the first, and have several straight-up good episodes in it.

As for the way ratings went: it seems pretty clear in retrospect that lots of people tuned in for the first episode with The Girl One, either because they were genuinely interested to see how a female Doctor would work or just to support a gesture that they were in favour of. Then they tuned out when it became apparent that Chibnall can't write and Whittaker (however good she may be in other shows) is not a very good Doctor. I don't think it need by any more complicated than that.

SK said...

As for the way ratings went: it seems pretty clear in retrospect that lots of people tuned in for the first episode with The Girl One,

Never underestimate the value of novelty for grabbing attention.

Of course if you want to keep attention, then you ned something else…

Then they tuned out when it became apparent that Chibnall can't write and Whittaker (however good she may be in other shows) is not a very good Doctor.

Yes, except that 'tuned out' makes it sound more active than it is. I doubt anybody thought, 'right, that's it, this guy can't write, I'm not watching this any more!', or even, 'why cast a girl if she's just going to do an impression of the guys? And fo rthat reason, I'm out!'

Rather, they just weren't grabbed and so just didn't bother to watch the next one. I don't think there was anything to turn people off; more like there just wasn't enough — enough new, enough fun, enough clever, enough amusing, enough exciting, enough anything — to make them want to tune in again. So they didn't.

A very different flaw from the later Moffat episodes, which I think did actively cause normal people to tune out as they realised that they couldn't follow what was going on and just ended up baffled and confused.

Me, I watched all the episodes — it's just a habit by now — and found most of them just boring, though I must admit I loved the one with Space Amazon, because as soon as the twist came in the last act that Space Amazon was the victim, not the baddy, I was beside myself with glee just imagining how Sandifer the Mad was going to react (I was not disappointed).

Andrew Ducker said...

I doubt anybody thought, 'right, that's it, this guy can't write, I'm not watching this any more!'

That's exactly what I thought. Albeit I made it most of the way through the series, but eventually I got fed up with terrible writing and just couldn't bear the thought of watching another episode. Which was frustrating considering how many episodes I've seen and how much I'd been looking forward to this season.

Andrew Rilstone said...

I said I was going to give up after the desecration of Hartnell’s corpse at the end of Peter Capaldi. In fact I found myself uninterested in the actual episodes, but still caring about the show , which is a bad head space to be in, Was there a Christmas special with Daleks? I literally can’t remember if I watched it,

Misogynist neo Nazis tweeting shit takes the fun out of it as well of course,

SK said...

Was there a Christmas special with Daleks?

There were two. The second one was Power of the Daleks, but with John Barrowman in. I wouldn't try to remember if I were you.

In fact I highly recommend not caring at all.

Mike Taylor said...

Power of the Daleks was a Troughton serial! You are thinking of (and you have my sympathy) Revolution of the Daleks. It certainly gets hard to keep them all straight!

Andrew Rilstone said...

I think that this is an amusing and witty way of saying that Revolution of the Daleks had some plot overlap with the Troughton story.

Mike Taylor said...

All right, all right already, I get it!

Gavin Burrows said...

I don’t quite know how i became the resident ratings analyst on Andrew’s blog. But I was sad enough to go and look this up. And there’s pretty much a slow, steady, even decline across the two seasons. Bizarrely, the second Chibnall season didn’t get any initial bounce, none at all.

So while Mike’s because-he’s-crap theory may feel intuitive to us, I’d have thought that scenario would have led to more of a sudden drop. (“There’s something about this, but I… oh I know, it’s shit!”) Voxpoptart’s theory may have more weight. The second season was much less fanwank than later Moffatt, but people could have been alert to the signs by then, and ready to bale. But the drop was from his first series, so it can’t be just that.

Of course it’s possible to over-articulate motivations over something like this. Mostly, people don’t need a reason to stop watching a show. It’s more they need a reason to be watching it.

Like Mike, I thought the second season better than the first, faint praise entirely intended. The Timeless Child was an absolutely terrible idea. But it was at least an idea. Precious sign of anything like that before.

“Misogynist neo Nazis tweeting shit takes the fun out of it as well of course,”

I don’t know. I tended to think “this is dire, but at least it’s winding up a few arseholes who fully deserve to be wound up.” I mean, it had a function…

SK said...

Of course it’s possible to over-articulate motivations over something like this. Mostly, people don’t need a reason to stop watching a show. It’s more they need a reason to be watching it.

Is there an echo in here?