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Doctor Who
By Paul Booth Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78320-103-7
CHAPTER 1
Frock Coats, Yo-Yos and a Chair with a Panda on It: Nostalgia for the Future in the Life of a Doctor Who Fan
Ivan Phillips
[right arrow] THE DOCTOR AND THE PRESIDENT
When I think about my earliest awareness of Doctor Who in the early-to-mid-1970s I think, among other things, of textures, the imagined feel of material objects (see Figure 1). I think of velvet, silk, metal, wood, leather, wool, felt, paper.
The velvet of the Third Doctor's smoking jackets and Inverness cloaks; the silk of his ruffled shirts; the yellow paintwork and red leather upholstery of his vintage roadster, Bessie; the endless rainbow wool of the Fourth Doctor's scarf; the felt of his broad-brimmed hat and stiff herringbone tweed of his jacket; the rustling white or brown paper from which he offered his jelly babies (which were sometimes dolly mixture); the wood, or apparent wood, of the TARDIS exterior. I also think about hair, curly hair, at first white, then dark brown after the shock of regeneration. My own dad had curly hair, at first dark brown, then fading towards white as he approached the shock of his early death. The dark curls were enough, as a child, to enable me to associate my living dad with my fantasy Doctor. Perhaps they are enough, as a middle-aged man, to enable me to associate my fantasy Doctor with my dead dad. Nostalgia's a strange thing, after all; so intimately connected to the physical world but always occurring at the level of emotion.
Recollections of childhood experience are, inevitably, caught in the filters of adulthood – knowledge added, subtracted, modified, warped – and so, when I think about my earliest awareness of Doctor Who, the white and the brown curls of my 'original' Doctors become entangled with prior and subsequent Time Lord hairstyles, from the long silver wig of the First Doctor to the floppy 'not ginger' fringe of the Eleventh. The Second Doctor's Beatle cut is especially interesting from the perspective of this chapter. Iconic of the Sixties, it suggests the complex ways in which memory, myth and design have combined over time in the lives of the show. Doctor Who, like sexual intercourse (according to the poet Philip Larkin), 'began in nineteen sixty-three'. It also, strikingly, coincided with another emblematic happening of that decade, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on the day before its first transmission. Coincidence is, in some ways, the essence of nostalgia and the conjunction of these two happenings has long been written into the lore of Doctor Who. Take a random sampling of books about the series and it's a safe bet that most of them will mention events in Dallas, Texas, on 22 November 1963, in their early pages. Peter Haining's Doctor Who: A Celebration, a book published to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the programme in 1983, is typical in this respect, beginning with a personal reminiscence that consciously fuses incidents: 'I remember that day and those hours vividly. Like countless millions of others I can recall precisely where I was and what I was doing when news of that terrible event hit Britain on the Friday evening.' The original broadcast of An Unearthly Child (Hussein, 1963, Season 1, Figure 1.2) and the infamy of Lee Harvey Oswald are strangely, inextricably, linked.
Close association with the shooting in Dealey Plaza has become part of the mythology of Doctor Who and might be seen as fixing it in a distinctly 1960s epoch. Haining, for one, goes on to refer to Beatlemania, the Great Train Robbery and the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova. There is more to this, however, than a noting of historical coincidence and proximity to memorable cultural landmarks, a kind of significance by association. The post-war era in which Doctor Who was created has become a key aspect of its imaginative texture, a fused element within its narrative DNA and the collective awareness of both its fans and a more general audience. In this connection, it's worth recalling that Remembrance of the Daleks (Morgan, 1988, Season 25) took the myth back to its own beginnings for its 25th anniversary. Its setting in London, 1963, in and around Coal Hill School and the junkyard at 76 Totter's Lane where it all began, served as a reminder of the programme's rootedness in a particular and conspicuous period. It also indicated the extent to which both the show and the decade that produced it had moved, by then, into the realms of nostalgia. Perhaps suggestively, the first story to return to a contemporary setting after the initial broadcast of An Unearthly Child was William Hartnell's third-to-last adventure, The War Machines (Ferguson, 1966, Season 3), which made much of a Swinging London backdrop and the newly completed techno-cultural totem of the Post Office Tower. As Doctor Who neared the point at which it would build the possibility of endless renewal into its narrative format through the transformation of one actor into another, it also demonstrated an ability to merge a sense of topical 'nowness' with an anticipation of nostalgic spirit.
Doctor Who has lived long enough, and variously enough, for nostalgia in the show to merge with nostalgia for the show – never more so, perhaps, than in the years when it was 'off air'. From a fan point of view, this means that the 50th anniversary in 2013 celebrates a phenomenon that enables adults to feel a continuation of childhood obsessions, thrills and reassurances, and children to have an enthusiasm that they feel distinct ownership of but can also share with their parents. In the age of social media, video sharing and massively multiplayer online games, this means that Doctor Who is able to tap into an ideal nostalgia for family television at the same time as encapsulating the transmedia tendencies of twenty-first-century storytelling.
Junkyard tales
Let's think about that junkyard for a while, because the aim here is to do more than merely restate the 1960s genesis of Doctor Whho. This is, after all, a show that has limitless travel in time and space as the starting point of its mythology. Part of its genius, and undoubtedly a crucial factor in its longevity and capacity for regeneration, is its fundamental and profound character of unsettlement. In plain terms, Doctor Who can never be settled in any specific location or era, not even during the main character's exile to twentieth-century Earth in the early 1970s. So, the date of 23 November 1963 – or of 6 December 1989 or 26 March 2005 – is as significant or insignificant as the fans choose to make it. It took nearly twenty years for the first episode to be novelized but Terrance Dicks's description of the low-key opening scene is richly suggestive: 'Just an incredible mixture of broken-down objects, old cupboards, bits of furniture, dismantled car engines, chipped marble statues with arms and legs and heads missing.' The shadowy clutter and jumble of cultural fragments picked out by the London Bobby's torch might be seen as symbolic of the phenomenon that it introduced, the next item discovered – 'the familiar shape of a police box' – being just another mundane object that somehow doesn't seem mundane any more.
The junkyard tableau with which Doctor Who began its 50- year history seems, in retrospect, like a vivid representation of the series itself. The enigmatic hero and his fantastical ship are first encountered in a setting of muddled relics and discarded remnants, an ultra-futuristic concept hidden in an environment primed with a spirit of elegy and nostalgia. This indicates the distinctly 'intertextual' nature of the show, its inherent tendency from the pilot episode onwards to mingle disparate elements, jostling the space-age with the antique. The First Doctor's Edwardian costume is consistent with this and later incarnations have simply varied the theme, with outfits assembled from an eccentrically shuffled wardrobe of western gentlemen's fashion. Tellingly, the costume often presented as the least popular – the Sixth Doctor's garish, mismatched patchwork – is the one that strays furthest from this practice, although even this retains the essential outline of an Edwardian frock-coat, cravat, waistcoat and spats.
Doctor Who has always been as close to costume drama as it is to science fiction. Where it has adhered to the traditions of the latter genre, it has been the traditions as defined by Mary Shelley and H. G. Wells. The Gothic aesthetic of the Philip Hinchcliffe years (1974–77), epitomized by 1976's The Brain of Morbius (Barry, Season 13), is Frankenstein (Shelley, 1818) channelled via Hammer Horror. More generally, these tales from a time machine have a clear indebtedness to the kind of science fiction embodied in the original novella The Time Machine (H. G. Wells, 1895). Significantly, Wells has a cameo role in the oft-derided Timelash (Roberts, 1985, Season 22), the events of which story supposedly inspire the young Herbert to write his time-travel yarn in the first place. Mary Shelley has herself become a companion of the Eighth Doctor in several recent Big Finish audio productions.
In the context of fandom, these features of the mythos ensure that its appeal is always based, in part, on a sense of prior acquaintance, an awareness of known or half-remembered components reassembled and reimagined in delightfully skewed and idiosyncratic ways. It's revealing, with this in mind, to consider how the trope of the junkyard – the founding trope of the series – has been revisited at least twice since An Unearthly Child. In Steve Parkhouse's 'Junkyard Demon', a two-part Doctor Who Monthly comic strip from 1981, the Fourth Doctor encounters interstellar scrap merchants, fittingly named Flotsam and Jetsam, who are reprogramming inactive Cybermen as domestic servants.
For the readership of the magazine at the time of publication, the thrill of seeing the celebrated metal monsters from the television programme was considerable, especially as they had been absent from the screen for over five years. Within six months they would make their surprise return in Earthshock (Grimwade, 1982, Season 19), but – beyond its apparent prescience – the most striking feature of 'Junkyard Demon' is its visual representation of its principal cyber-protagonist (Figure 3). The illustrations, by Mike McMahon and Adolfo Buylla, show a Cyberman that is a curious hybrid of design elements from the early evolution of the species, combining the soft face and flash-lamp head-piece of The Tenth Planet (Martinus, 1966, Season 4) and the chest unit and distinctive limb tubing of The Moonbase and The Tomb of the Cybermen (both Barry, 1967, Season 4 and Season 5, respectively). Reassembled and revived in the dilapidation of an outerspace scrapheap, the Cyberman here seems to embody something of the programme itself. A jerry-rigged version of an amalgamated race, it responds to the nostalgia of the fan community, an increasingly powerful and controversial influence during John Nathan-Turner's period as producer. Authors such as James Chapman, in Inside the TARDIS (2006), and Brian J. Robb, in Timeless Adventures (2009), have suggested that this 'fandom menace' (often personified in the figure of Ian Levine, Nathan-Turner's 'continuity advisor' from 1979 to 1986) was a major contributing factor in the decline and demise of Doctor Who in the 1980s. This isn't the place to reopen the discussion, but it's worth considering that the success of the revived series, albeit in a markedly different production context, has been very much a result of (professional) fans rummaging through the figurative junkyard, much as Levine rummaged through actual skips in the late 1970s to recover discarded episodes of the show.
One acclaimed recent story scripted by a fan, Neil Gaiman's 'The Doctor's Wife' (Clark, 2011, Series 6, Episode 4), returns the series to a junkyard location. The Eleventh Doctor follows a distress call to an isolated asteroid which turns out to be a sentient and parasitic being known as House. House is home to Auntie and Uncle, creatures patched together from the remains of travellers lured to the asteroid, and there's a sense in which the story itself is a kind of patchwork homage to the history of the show. Another inhabitant, Nephew, is an Ood, effectively a displaced strand within the mythical fabric of the New series – especially interesting when it is considered that he was not an Ood in Gaiman's original script. The final House-dweller, Idris, is a young woman of Victorian appearance who takes on the matrix or 'soul' of the TARDIS.
House is characterized as an intelligent, malignant rubbish dump, composed from the accumulated, plundered debris of millennia. It can be seen, perhaps, as a perverse and nightmarish metaphor of fandom, including as it does a cupboard full of Time Lord message cubes – the ghostly voices of an extinct race – and a vast TARDIS graveyard. Gaiman's indication during an interview for Doctor Who Magazine (DWM) that early drafts associated House with the Great Intelligence, from the Troughton era stories The Abominable Snowmen (Blake, 1967, Season 5) and The Web of Fear (Camfield, 1968, Season 5), tends to reinforce this impression. Interestingly, the Great Intelligence has now been reintroduced to the series, initially in the 2012 Christmas Special, 'The Snowmen' (Metzstein, 2012, Series 7, Episode 6), and subsequently in 'The Bells of St John' (McCarthy, 2013, Series 7, Episode 7) and 'The Name of the Doctor' (Metzstein, 2013, Series 7, Episode 13).
At the heart of the episode the Doctor and Idris – a walking, talking, emoting and dying embodiment of his 'old girl' – construct a homemade and temporary TARDIS from cannibalized components. The ersatz console was designed as part of a Blue Peter (Blair, BBC, 1958–present) competition by a schoolgirl fan, Susannah Leah, working to a brief focused on the use of 'household objects' (Figure 4). That a toy version of Leah's improvised junk console should have been marketed subsequently as one of the popular Character Options range of playsets is a further indication of the rich, complex dialogue between the show, its history and its fans that distinguishes 'The Doctor's Wife'.
Chance encounters
Gaiman's tale exemplifies the steampunk aesthetic that has come to typify Doctor Who since Steven Moffat took over from Russell T. Davies as lead writer and executive producer in 2008. Evident in Edward Thomas's 'Heath Robinson' re-design of the TARDIS console for 'The Eleventh Hour' (Smith, 2010, Series 5, Episode 1) – incorporating a typewriter, hot and cold taps, a bakelite telephone, a telegraph and a gyroscope – this is taken to an extreme of absurdity in 'The Lodger' (Morshead, 2010, Series 5, Episode 1), in which the Doctor constructs a scanner from components including a bicycle wheel, a lampshade and an umbrella. Relishing the theatrical incongruity of juxtaposed objects, this recalls the famous line from Lautréamont's Les Chants de Maldoror (The Song of Maldoror, 1869) in which a young boy is described as being 'as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table'. Often used as a shorthand for the spirit of surrealism, the phrase has considerable resonance in the history of Doctor Who, notably in relation to moments such as this, from The Time Meddler (Camfield, 1965, Season 2):
STEVEN: Look, Doctor, I've seen some spaceships in my time – admittedly, nothing like this, but ... Well, what does this do?
DOCTOR: That is the dematerializing control and that over yonder is the horizontal hold. Up there is the scanner, those are the doors, that is a chair with a panda on it. Sheer poetry, dear boy! Now, please stop bothering me.
This exchange sparkles with an early and witty celebration of the show's essentially absurdist mise-en-scène (Figure 5).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Doctor Who by Paul Booth. Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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