Who Remembered Hills (6)

So. 

We have the people who, as Michael Grade put it, watch Doctor Who every Saturday like a High Mass. 

We have the ones who watch Doctor Who because it reminds them of how they felt when they watched Doctor Who. 

We have the one who treat Doctor Who as a secular scripture and perform various kinds of exegesis on it. 

And we have me, who thinks the Daleks are cool. 

Do any of us have anything useful to say about New Who?

The first lot have no difficult in talking about the new series. The first lot's approach was created specially to talk about the new series. The new series is brilliant and perfect by definition because everything with the words "Doctor Who" printed on them is brilliant. Even the TV movie. 

The second lot are impaled over the cleft stick of their own petard. The second approach isn't and can't be a way of looking at new Who: because it's how new Who looks at itself. Russell Davies and Paul Cornell and Steven Moffat are all convinced exponents of the Second Approach; they just happen to pour their nostalgia into making a highly successful television series, rather than into writing snarky blog posts. It comes though in all sorts of ways. Amy knew the Doctor when she was a little girl. Babies and children have a special ability to call out to the Doctor for help. The Doctor is a story who remains real only as long as we remember him. There are secret cults dedicated to asking the question "Doctor Who?". Practically every story is about how the Doctor is remembered, or how he will be remembered; or what stories are or will be told about him. 

An approach which is all about memory and nostalgia can't very easily talk about a show which is all about memory and nostalgia. Neither can it incorporate last week's story into its biographical narrative. Maybe we are just getting to the point when "How I felt when I first heard that Doctor Who was coming back" and "How I felt when I first saw 'Rose'" might be elements in our own, personal histories. Old Fans were delirious with amusement when Radio Times printed an unselfconscious letter from a viewer who thought that Doctor Who wasn't as good as it used to be when Christopher Eccleston was the star. But if you tried to say "How I felt when I first saw the Angels Take Manhattan, three hours ago" you wouldn't be taking the Nostalgic Approach: you'd either be reading it as text, or "just watching it." 

If New Who is increasingly an argument or a thesis or a critical essay about Old Who, we can easily see why Lawrence Miles is so antagonistic towards it. He isn't just watching the programme: he's in direct competition with it. 

So, maybe the Third Approach is the only game in town. Fear Her and the Doctor, the Witch and the Wardrobe may have been a load of old tosh; but so was War on Aquatica [*]. But they are still part of the Who-Text. Texts aren't there to be liked or disliked: they are there to be read and interpreted. I am sure that Andrew Hickey's will incorporate "new Who" stories into his "fifty stories for fifty years" series, and I am sure he will say very interesting things about them. As I'm sure he could about Rentaghost or Sugar Puffs Boxes. 

My approach, on the other hand, rapidly collides with a brick wall. Of course, I can and do watch New Who for its texture and atmosphere, and I can and do find stuff there which I like, as well as stuff which I don't like. But then I find stuff I like in Merlin as well, and that has nothing to do with my liking for Old Who, or indeed for the Morte D'Arthur. It's a coincidence. 

I suppose New Who might have been done as a pastiche of the old programme -- corridors and quarries and spaceships and all -- and some of us old fans would probably have enjoyed it. But that would have sealed it in a sarcophagus of nostalgia. In the very early days, the Big Finish audio plays tried to recreate the texture of Old Who, to the extent of being recorded in 25 minute chunks with fake Radio Times listings on the interlinear notes; but after a very few discs, they had grown, organically, into something that might have been "Big Finish Doctor Who" but wasn't simply "Doctor Who" and wasn't trying to be.

If there is a thing called Doctor Who to be a fan of, then "Doctor Who" must mean "whatever the Happiness Patrol has in common with A Good Man Goes To War" and it starts to look very much as if that's a null set. 

continues....

[*] I'm sure you know what that is so I'm not telling you.