Happy Birthday Doctor Who!

If you’d been scanning the Radio Times on the 23rd November 1963, you might have noticed this item:

It’s difficult to imagine how strange this programme must have seemed on its first broadcast. While Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass had paved the way for science-fiction broadcasting, those serials insisted on a knowable reality, a quantifiable world that could be righted.

What’s notable about the first years of Doctor Who is their frightening unpredictability. Poor Ian and Barbara are abducted by a mysterious time traveller (“Doctor who?”) who offers no assurance that they will ever be returned. In those early episodes, he is as much a danger to them as the monsters they encounter.

That sense of undefinable terror extends to the pioneering title sequence which, unlike the more literal examples of recent years, is visually experimental and utterly mesmerising. Set to Delia Derbyshire’s electronic rendering of Ron Grainer’s score, it’s a TV opening unlike any other.

Doctor Who was very important to me as a child growing up. I can dimly remember seeing some of the late Sylvester McCoy’s on their first broadcast – Battlefield, Curse of Fenric and Survival. Just my luck, as soon as I got interested in the show, it was cancelled! But there were still the Target novelizations to read and the BBC began bringing out the old serials on VHS, so that I soon amassed quite a collection!

The first Who book I ever read...

...and the first VHS I bought!

While I disliked Russell T. Davies’ conception of Doctor Who, I’ve become re-enthused by the episodes produced by Steven Moffat. I really do think that Matt Smith is a great Doctor, and I’ve got a feeling that the best is yet to come!

Happy Birthday, Doctor Who!

 

 

Doctor Who series 5 episodes 1-3

Tom Steward continues his look back at this year’s series! Read his overview here.

The Eleventh Hour

This deliberately lightweight introduction to the new series smoothed the transition from the madcap farce of the Davies era. It’s been traditional in Dr. Who for the first episode under a new producer and actor to be a tribute to the departing crew and cast. For example, the debut of fourth Doctor Tom Baker and producer Philip Hinchcliffe – Robot – was a serial set in the familiar world of UNIT, paying tribute to the Pertwee and Letts Earth-bound era of hard action.

For the majority of this episode, Smith’s Doctor was dressed in Tennant’s clothes, his performance still couched in the floaty-eyed wonder of his predecessor. Rather than doing an impression, though, Smith was thoughtful and surprising where Tennant was grating and increasingly predictable.

Successful Who premieres also make significant breaks and their intentions clear straight off. The Eleventh Hour‘s comedy was predominantly verbal not visual. The settings were mundane and classically British (a quiet rural hamlet), and the Doctor came out not entirely sympathetically. As sharp a contrast as Tom Baker failing to karate-chop a brick Pertwee-style in the final scene of Robot!

The Beast Below

Although the challenges of a second episode (maintaining pace and performances) were ably met by Moffat and his brilliant actors, this episode exposed some of the new series’ weaknesses. The shift to Davies-like sentimentality in the latter stages tried too hard to pigeonhole the relationship between the Doctor and Amy as romantic before it had time to develop. This was a shame as the early part of the episode defined the dynamic more plausibly as one of teacher and student.

Moffat’s script was plot-heavy and reduced potentially fascinating characters, in particular Terrence Hardiman (The Demon Headmaster) as a shadowy government official, to mere exposition devices. The episode’s heart-stopping momentum made some plot elements (cryptic rhymes, unknown threats) almost incomprehensible.

However, Moffat’s horror credentials were shown off by one of the most terrifying introductions to a TV programme I can remember. The sequence, involving schoolchildren, subterranean elevators and the ventriloquist dummy-like Smilers, was a buffet of scares. Playing on basic but potent fears (dummies coming to life, slow-turning heads), it was nuts-and-bolts British horror par excellence. I haven’t been this chilled by the series since 1989′s Ghost Light, the underrated Sylvester McCoy’s disquieting and intangible haunted house chamber drama.

Effortlessly dopey and likeable, like his oft-cited favourite Patrick Troughton, Smith also displayed a genuinely awful temper, recalling the more abrasive William Hartnell. It was a magnificent performance, reviving the ambiguity and uneasiness lacking in his predecessor.

Victory of the Daleks

There was great fan animosity towards this episode, as there usually is to more historically-oriented serials. Criticism focused on the re-design of the Doctor’s most popular and established adversaries, the Daleks, as distended New Minis available in all pupil-burning colours.

I was equally nonplussed by the makeover, although it certainly reflects how the Daleks have been pop art design icons since the height of ‘Dalekmania’ in the mid-1960s. It’s a shame that this episode was so easily dismissed, as it’s a ripping yarn reminiscent of post-war comic strips like Eagle’s Dan Dare, with a very British sense of the mundane (the Daleks carrying box files and serving tea).

The writing was sharp, witty and minimalistic, with a historical rigour now sadly all too infrequent in the series. Ian McNiece’s Winston Churchill and the sub-plot of a pilot and servicewoman whose love is torn apart by war have also been subject to criticism. For my money, the portrayal of Churchill as essentially an underworld boss of dubious morality was bold and revisionist, avoiding the jingoistic hagiography usually associated with the historical figure. The restrained and de-personalised treatment of the romantic couple was totally appropriate to a story set during the collective effort of wartime.

It was also an episode that acknowledged the history of the series, with affectionate reprises of Troughton-era Dalek serials, reflections on how the Daleks used to look, how they used to be filmed and even how they found an afterlife as toys.

Who Dares Wins

I’m thrilled to introduce a new feature today, the Squeezegut Alley guest blog. We’re starting off with an absolute corker, as well. Here’s Tom Steward, with the first in a series considering the latest run of Doctor Who.

Who’s got the best show on television? Dunno. The Sopranos, probably. But only a matter of weeks after producer Steven Moffat and actor Matt Smith took over the programme, Dr Who is now eminently watchable again and could be a thing of greatness once more.

I’d become completely disenchanted with the direction the series had taken with Russell T Davies and David Tennant at the helm. It wasn’t simply enough to enjoy the Doctor’s adventures, you now had to worship the character and lead actor, whether you cared to or not. That combined with a limited range of storytelling and a stasis in characterisation brought the programme to the brink of credibility, almost as severely as producer John Nathan-Turner did with the series in the mid-1980s.

It’s a testament to the endlessly malleable format of Who that these worrying trends were reversed so quickly, and to Moffat and Smith that this was done without losing audience figures or denting the popularity of the central character. Moffat drastically improved the quality of drama, comedy and, in particular, horror of the programme over the last five years when he was an occasional writer. Though not a faultless producer (as some would have it!), since he took that role the series has regained many competencies. The pacing of episodes and series is now much more skilful, with a proper grasp of what it means to do long form storytelling, and not just cosmetically as a branding device as it was wielded under Davies.

The increase in the level of wit and successful comic writing since Moffat took over is undeniable (though writers Mark Gatiss, Gareth Roberts and Simon Nye need to take some credit here too), the show no longer relying on embarrassing slapstick to fill its funny quota. Moffat’s teleplays are, however, too densely plotted and overcomplicated on the whole, typically mistaking elaborate writing for complexity. Though this occasionally works well, with scenes involving the threat of the unknown and the horror that comes from it, it can often swamp the actors’ fine work and fog up the storytelling. Moffat has done an amazing job, however, in unwriting the mistakes of the Davies/Tennant era; letting characters be critical of the Doctor rather than standing around and admiring him, not trying to force the Doctor to be self-consciously fashionable or zeitgeist, disproving the necessity of a Doctor-companion love interest, and making the Doctor mysterious in motives and character again.

Undoubtedly the best decision Moffat made (or will ever make) as a producer was in casting Matt Smith. He’s the best thing to happen to the show in literally decades and could be the best character actor of his generation. He ranks amongst the finest portrayals of the role (and has probably already surpassed Tom Baker – most people’s default ‘favourite’ Doctor) and has re-invested the part with a genuine oddness that it has lacked at least since the re-launch in 2005.

The great Doctors have always known, seemingly instinctively, where to pitch their performance; when to overact, when to be measured etc. and Smith has that impulse. He can ham it up when being electrocuted by alien weaponry but knows when to brood or play the role (in the immortal words of Jon Pertwee) ‘straight down the middle’ – a quality sadly lacking in Tennant’s portrayal of the role, which was permanently wide-eyed and breathless. Not only is Smith’s performance a touching tribute to previous Doctors (especially Patrick Troughton – at one time the most lovable man on television!), it’s also a completely original interpretation of the role. Smith plays the Doctor as a socially awkward fish-out-of-water, something that (surprisingly) the show has only ever really hinted at before. Smith’s Doctor is a gangly twine ball of bad manners and inappropriate behaviours, rude or naive social conduct, completely unsettled when talking to the average human adult.

One of the delights of the new series is the introduction of more child actors into the main cast. Smith’s rapport with children is fantastic and we get a genuine sense of the show wanting to speak directly to children, something it did only intermittently in the previous five years despite concessions to kids’ TV (Barrowman, Piper et al.). It’s no coincidence that Smith’s Doctor talks to children like adults and adults like children. Once again, Dr Who shows that nothing about it is irrevocable and that new producers, actors and writers can thankfully turn the screws on old ones.