I made my excuses and left after the Doctor hit the TARDIS with the giant hammer: although my heart hasn’t been in it since the stand-in First Doctor threatened to spank Bill Potts. So I probably have no right to an opinion. But you probably want to know what the opinion that I have no right to is.
I recall the long death of Doctor Who between 1985 and 1989. It was suspended for eighteen months: the fans made a huge fuss and the BBC caved and said that it would only be suspended for eighteen months.
It is fair to say that Colin Baker’s first Season wasn’t very well received, but I don’t recall any “fans” gleefully crying “go Baker, meet your maker” or “go Nathan-Turner, get put in the waif and burn her” when the show was put on hold.
It came back, of course, in 1986 (Trial of a Time Lord) and in 1987, 1988 and 1989 (in a grave yard slot opposite Coronation Street.) And then it somehow, without a fanfare, went on permanent hiatus. The producer, John Nathan-Turner must have known that the writing was on the wall, dropping the lacklustre “come on Ace, we’ve got work to do” epilogue into the final story at the last minute.
We remained in denial. I remember feeling mildly shocked when, three years later, an irreverent compilation of clips (Resistance is Useless) referred to the series in the past tense.
The final season had been laying the groundwork for a big story arc. Some fans feel we were robbed. Some feel we had a lucky escape. Seven years later Paul McGann appeared in an American thing that had no discernible similarity to Doctor Who. Then there was radio silence until 2005.
So: where are we now? At the point when Michael Grade can truthfully say “Stop being so hysterical: there is just going to be a slightly longer gap between seasons than usual”? Or at the point where we haven’t quite admitted that the show is dead, even though no-one is actually making it any more? Perhaps in 2033 there will be a 70th anniversary special in which the surviving Doctors run round and round in circles wearing 3-D glasses.
I do not say that Doctor Who couldn’t form the basis for an enjoyable CBeebies cartoon or puppet show. Neither do I say that if someone pitches an adult, hard-science remake of the Clangers I will refuse to watch it. But we wouldn’t be talking about this if anyone thought the grown-up series had any kind of future. I look forward to arguments about canonicity.
Where are we? In Timeline A, a show called Doctor Who appears on Iplayer in, say, September 2027, following on directly from whatever the hell it was that happened in Ncuti Gatwa's swan-song, with a note in the credits saying that it was outsourced to HBO or Prime rather than to Bad Wolf. In Timeline B an entirely new series premiers on Netfux in 2028 carrying a small print rubric: “based on the BBC series Doctor Who”. It features a tough scientist from the Bronx who travels through space and time preventing homicides before they happen; or a member of the Time Lord Corps who is sent out by the Guardians of the Gallifrey to fix irregularities in the time flow. It begins with a handsome young scientist putting his baby son on board a Time Machine to escape the destruction of his planet. His evil brother the Master survives by being imprisoned in the Matrix when the planet explodes.
My money is on Timeline C: nothing at all happens until 2040. I hope there will be streaming TV in whatever old folks home Nigel Farage has consigned me to.
I forget who said that Doctor Who fans are much more concerned with linearity than they are with continuity. We accept that the series will woefully contradict itself in every particular, but we insist that everything — everything which appears on TV, at any rate — must follow on sequentially from everything else, so that we can continue to think of Doctor Who as one infinitely long tapestry that is unrolling in front of us.
Possibly the weirdest decision in the show's history was hiring Sylvester McCoy to appear in the American TV special, simply in order to be written out. I get what it was trying to do. Seven years on, the Doctor that we left behind was still on board the TARDIS. This is still the Doctor, the actual Doctor, the real in-canon Doctor and no-one can gainsay that. The torch, or at any rate the sonic screwdriver, was being passed.
Russel T Davies was much cleverer; introducing us to the Doctor from the point of view of a human meeting him for the first time; making it clear that he had had previous adventures, but only gradually and tentatively making them part of the narrative. But there was no question that this was the same fellow who used to hang out with K-9 and Romana. Indeed, we eventually got to see, albeit as a “minisode” Doctor Eight (who had enjoyed precisely ninety minutes of screen time) regenerate into the very confusing Doctor Eight and A Bit; and eventually, the Eight and a Bit-th Doctor turning into Christopher Eccleston.
Will Doctor Who Mark Three be a linear extension of Classic Who and New Who? Or will it be, in the parlance, a reboot: a new cycle of stories about the same fictional character.
Russel T Davies was being mischievous; and he has every right to be a bit miffed; but he pointedly asked whether the next version of Doctor Who would still have a TARDIS, still have the same theme music, and whether a very obscure monster (the Drashigs) might be revived. He’d previously said that Doctor Who was like Robin Hood, and that even if he disappears for a while, someone will always tell new stories about him in some new form. This doesn’t seem to suggest a great deal of confidence that the saga will simply pick up from where it left off.
I don’t think my advice to any incoming producer or showrunner would be any different to the advice I gave Lorraine Heggessey in 2002. Get the Doctor right. Tell us old fashioned thrilling yarns. Ignore the backstory and the canon, and keep the Time Lords at arms length. Don’t over-use Daleks, Cybermen and Ice-warriors. Get the special effects as good as you can afford, but don’t sell the show on spectacle.
The next version of Doctor Who can’t afford to be a pastiche, either of the post-RTD revival, or of the old classic show. It can’t assume that the average viewer knows or cares about sixty year old “lore”. Doctor Who has never had “lore” in the way that Star Trek or Star Wars has lore: the most it has ever had is a lucky-dip of iconography. Daleks are inhuman cyborgs that want to take over the universe, whereas the Cybermen are nasty inhuman cyborgs that want to take over the universe. It is quite cool that Daleks don’t have legs and it is quite cool that Cybermen have handlebars on their heads, but this is not the kind of thing you can hang a franchise off.
James Bond is a great big action franchise, which carries with it a set of assumptions: car chases, gadgets, exotic locations, mildly risqué scenes with glamorous co-stars, a certain charmingly toxic masculinity. All of which, you could perfectly well find in a tin which didn’t say “James Bond” on the label: but you can see why Amazon wants to do something with the brand. If nothing else, the 007 logo signals very clearly to the ticket-buyer what he is going to get for his money.
But wouldn’t it be more interesting to rethink Bond from the ground up? Maybe this version will be female and liberal, and maybe the next movie will accurately reflect the career of a real MI5 agent: a story primarily about paperwork and forensic investigations and decades long infiltrations.
To which the reply is of course “Much more interesting Miss Bennett; but not nearly so much like a James Bond movie.”
"But why shouldn’t a future series explore a different or unexpected aspect of the Whoniverse?" Why shouldn’t Doctor Who become a kind of franchise, like the MCU. Space is big: why do we focus entirely on one particular Time Lord knocking about in one particular Time Machine?
But what could that possibly mean? You could tell a story about a planet which the Doctor hasn’t visited yet; but you’d just be telling a story about a planet. You could tell a story about a period in Earth’s past which the Doctor never visited: but that would just be a piece of historical fiction. You could tell the story Terry Nation wanted to tell, about plucky humans fighting a backs-against-the-wall war against the Daleks, but that would be the same as a story about plucky humans fighting any other kind of heroic last stand. (With, admittedly, the Daleks in it.) Would a story about an alien and her human lover trying to rebuild earth in the wake of an alien invasion automatically become interesting if it said The Susan Foreman and David Cameron Adventures on the title page?
There has been one (1) successful Doctor Who spin-off, namely, the Sarah-Jane Adventures, and that didn’t depend on it’s connection with Doctor Who in the way that, say, Obi Wan depends on its connection with A New Hope.
I wonder if there is a freemasonry of old folk who are anxiously waiting for the BBC to “bring back” Doctor Finlay’s Casebook after its fifty year hiatus. There may well be. There are certainly nostalgists who think that all changes to broadcasting schedules are the result of malicious conspiracies and that a future messiah will restore On The Buses, Fanny Craddock, the Potters Wheel and especially The Black and White Minstrel Show. But what is it that these Finlayvians want to restore? An exact pastiche of the old show, with artificial intelligence bringing, er, Andrew Cruickshank, back from the dead? A modern take on the same kind of story, with a similar setting, similar supporting characters, and a new arrangement of the theme tune? Or a bold reimagining in which Finlay is a junior doctor on a drug ridden Glasgow estate? Or is it just a religious imperative that there must at all times be a TV show about a medical practitioner with a Scots accent? (When ITV did, in fact, revive Doctor Finlay’s Casebook in the 1990s, they went for “linearity”, imagining the young John Finlay of the 1930s as an experienced medic in post 1945 Scotland.)
A rebooted Doctor Who will certainly consist of stories. But what in particular will make them Doctor Who stories? A Blue Box, some swirly lines, and a retro electronic theme tune?
Almost everyone agrees that the Timeless Child was a stupid idea. Turning inward and delving into the Doctor's origins was not in the spirit of the show: and there is something hubristic about a show-runner thinking that he can retrospectively obliterate established canon with a stroke of the pen. (“In an astonishing twist, it turns out that James Bond was a SMERSH double agent from the beginning.”)
Did people who saw The War Games in 1969 feel that the show they grew up with had been casually overwritten? Or did they say “Well, we have always known that the Doctor is an alien; and now someone has decided that his people are called the Time Lords. Well, that tracks." Changes to mythoi happen: but they happen incrementally and arise naturally from what has gone before.
Chibnall's all-consuming ret-con established that the Doctor could be — and indeed, probably had been — anyone: that there were potentially infinite Doctors knocking around the universe with infinite ethnicities, genders and orientations. And I can see why that might look like a good idea. It was always fun, in the weeks following a Regeneration Story, to explore and speculate what the New Doctor was going to be like; so why not tweak the format so that fun happens more frequently. Stephen Fry isn't going to commit to playing the Doctor for a full seven years, but he might well take on the role for a single episode.
But if absolutely anybody can be the Doctor then the Doctor isn’t anyone at all.
And that seems to be where we are. Any story in the universe can be a Doctor Who story, the Doctor can be any person in the universe.
Doctor Who is hereby defined as "a format in which things happen to someone, but definitely with an Old English Police Phone Box.
Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker’s Doctors were charismatic figures, much loved by their companions; and in some cases, their actions made them legendary figures on the planets they had visited. But New Who developed a quasi-religious framing in which the Doctor was uniquely amazing, and by virtue of his amazing uniqueness, enabled everyone he comes into contact with to live unique and amazing lives. So perhaps the pitch you would present to HBO would be something like "Doctor Who is the story of a godlike being who transforms the lives of everyone he touches, but who never finds happiness himself.”
Certainly, "the idea of the Doctor" would have to be at the heart of any revamp or reboot. And clearly the Doctors of the classic era were amazing and wonderful. But I rather think that "I am special because I met the Doctor" is generally code for "We are special because we are Doctor Who fans": and there are fewer and fewer "boomers" for whom watching Doctor Who was a formative experience. The original Doctor was not amazing by virtue of some Christ-like glory intrinsic in his being. We loved him for who he was, not for what he was. The Doctor was awesome because Bill Hartnell, Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker and Sylvester McCoy were awesome.
If you want to get me interested in Doctor Who all over again, you'll need to find an actor with the charisma and gravitas of Tom Baker; a Royal Shakespeare Company support actor who isn’t afraid of clowning around. But with this caveat: he can’t be anything like Tom Baker. If you can find a decent actor who can do a fair impression of Tom, he should be utterly debarred from the role.
The fan obsession with linearity often encompasses a desire to wind the show backwards — a desire slightly indulged by RTD when he gave David Tennant a second bite of the cherry. I read someone today saying that Sean Pertwee should be allowed to impersonate his father; I read someone else saying that the older Sly McCoy should wake up in the TARDIS at the end of Survival and say “what a strange dream”. That thinking tacitly acknowledges that Doctor Who is dead or moribund.
I want to avoid easy labels like trickster or maverick and the Harpo Marx comparison has been done to death. The closest I can come to describing my Doctor is wise clown or clever idiot. One of the many sad what-ifs in the show's history is that Sylvester McCoy had so little time and so few decent scripts: in the brief moments that were allowed to him, he seemed to achieve the perfect synthesis of frivolity and seriousness. Matt Smith is the only actor in the revived series to engage with that literally sophomore persona. I think — I am not sure but I think — that Smith's first two seasons justify the whole revival project.
So is that our pitch? “Doctor Who is a series in which a completely inappropriate hero can be dropped into any storyline”. Or: "Doctor Who is a series in which a comedic, theatrical, cartoon loony falls into a series of essentially serious science fictional scenarios - and turns out to be the cleverest and wisest person in the room."
I will now tell you what I truly think.
I truly think that Doctor Who is a format from a bygone age. I don't think it was ever really true that the show could go anywhere and do anything. The minuscule budgets made most places and most times technically unvisitable. If you look at the actually-existing episodes, Doctor Who is a format in which all the worst cliches from 1950s science fiction are replayed over and over again with minor variations. Doctor Who as it existed on our screens and not in our heads was about alien invasions, evil computers, mad scientists, perpetually besieged bases, savage inhospitable planets, revived dinosaurs threatening cities, giant rats, carnivorous mushrooms and sentient slime.
It might be argued that the series consumed the science fiction cliches of the day; so that a revived series would have to riff on The Expanse and Hail Mary and The Three Body Problem rather than It Came From Outer Space and the Day The Earth Stood Still: but I am not quite sure. I think that there may still be an “idea of science fiction” which encompasses ray guns, flying saucers and slightly comedic robots, and it is only in that universe that the Doctor makes sense.
And I think that the Doctor is a character who can only really exist in a BBC studio. He is a creature of the theatre who loses his essential nature when obliged to conform to movie logic. How many of us saw Paul McGann careering through modern day San Francisco on a motorbike and thought "That is simply not the kind of thing that the Doctor does."
I think that actors best embody the Doctor when interacting with other actors and physical special effects, as opposed to lines of computer code and blue screens. I do not say this because I am nostalgic for quarries and corridors; although twenty years after the failed revival, it is astonishing how many people do still think of Doctor Who in terms of quarries and corridors. I say this because the wit and charisma of Troughton and Baker and McCoy is essentially improvisational. They don’t necessarily respect the script: they ad lib and put on silly voices and generally piss about in front of the camera. None of the life-changing magic of Tom Baker could have emerged on a set where he had to hit his mark and where each expensive shot was carefully set up in advance.
And I really do wonder how much of the Elusive Magic depended on the format. I do not insist on Basil Brush. I do not insist on Larry Grayson. But I do think that the twenty five minute weekly format, with the often pointless cliffhanger and the often unconvincing escape is an irreducible part of what the series was about.
I have just watched Tom Baker's penultimate season right through. It is not very good. It is much worse than I remembered it. But throughout the rewatching process I had a strong spiritual sense that I was watching Doctor Who; albeit a rather bad iteration of it. And that I couldn’t find the point of crossover with the show that had just been cancelled.
Apart, obviously, from the Blue Box.
Do I think Doctor Who should be consigned to oblivion? Whatever I write here, I don’t think it will be. If there can be a big screen revival of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, I don’t think a show with a sixty year history is going to moulder in limbo forever. Sooner or later someone will look at the late 20th century TV show, or even the early 21st century sequel, and say “That quaint ol' thing gives me a fine idea for a high budget 3D Imax Saga, see if it doesn't.”
It might have as much in common with Doctor Who as the Big Finish pastiches; or as little as the Paul McGann spin off. It might be as much fun as Matt Smith or as annoying as Jodie Whittaker. It will be called Doctor Who but it won't be Doctor Who.
And who knows: perhaps I will even be alive to see it.
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