The Doctors Who's Who (40 page)

During his seventh regeneration the Doctor surprises us with his mystique. In ‘Battlefield’ he seems to offer so much more than we’ve ever discovered about him, from the death of the Brigadier to the legacy of Merlin the Magician. The witch queen Morgaine perpetuates the King Arthur legend, again showing the divide between good and evil, and modern methods come into play as the Brigadier finally succumbs
to his age and looks on as a female brigadier takes the lead at UNIT.

There is so much legacy in ‘Battlefield’, it really shows how rich the history of the programme was in the original series, something that is still alive and well in the new series, but should perhaps have been handled better when the Daleks eventually fought the Cybermen. Such a wonderful showdown should have enjoyed a more sophisticated outcome, but great stories cannot always be short.

The watershed for
Doctor Who
came several stories, and a few years, after ‘Battlefield’. ‘Doctor Who – The Movie’ was a major leap into the new mindset that has endured since the show’s return in the Millennium. A doctor full of life, love and passion, with a larger, new-look TARDIS, is as radical as Jon Pertwee’s colour appearance and desire to drive/pilot anything mechanical, even a wheelchair in ‘Spearhead From Space’.

Paul McGann may have had only one television outing as the Doctor, but despite an over-loaded script, there were ideas and scenes that were important to the ongoing
Doctor Who
legacy. Yes, kissing his companion has something of Captain Kirk’s first (inter-racial) kiss on TV about it, because the Doctor didn’t do things like that. Tom Baker didn’t smoke or drink in front of children when he was the Doctor; he stated that the Doctor should be enigmatic and this gave him an alien-like quality that has never been replicated as well since.

In the new millennium, the Doctor gets involved in domestic issues, always seeming to upset the parents and grandparents of his feisty young companions. Life is lived at a much faster pace nowadays. Children don’t want to wait 12 weeks to enjoy the whole of a Dalek master plan, they want a quality action-packed drama in two segments if – frustratingly – we must, and that was also anticipated by ‘Doctor Who – The Movie’.

The
Doctor Who
legacy is populated by people who still remember seeing the very first episode on a dark and wet night, back in 1963, who remember watching episodes – stories – that no longer exist in the BBC archive. And perhaps that’s where so many ‘favourite stories’ polls can be slightly skewed. The poll is conducted by people influenced by the Doctor they grew up with and the stories they saw. So many of the older generation talk of William Hartnell as being the best Doctor; his food dispensing machine and complete mystery as to where he came from – Doctor Who? To appreciate this original concept and ignore all the thrills and spills that have come afterwards is difficult. The eeriness, the darkness, the not knowing who this alien genius is, alongside the whispering monks, dancing flames and baffled companions of classic stories lost, echoes the thrills of a totally different show; but there is a police box, a familiar – albeit unsettling – theme, and a character we can still identify as special and not of our kind.

There are stories such as ‘The Ice Warriors’ and ‘The Abominable Snowmen’ that were so popular in the black and white series they demanded a return of the famous enemies on TV and comic strip. Other stories, such as ‘The Power of the Daleks’, are taken for granted because we accept them as yet another Dalek story. We cannot fully appreciate the over-powering performance of Patrick Troughton coming to terms with his new body and convincing audiences to keep watching. The second Doctor’s stovepipe hat is legendary but we cannot watch him wear it in that very first adventure of his anymore. Conversely we now have an opportunity to enjoy the second Doctor’s lookalike foe Salamander from ‘The Enemy of the World’ – a truly excellent performance if a rather strange one. Sometimes those wonderful lost stories are returned to us. The soundtracks still exist; many photographs and reminiscences of the actors are available to us
too, for the ones that are still lost. Very occasionally a lost story returns to the archive (or a single episode) and oddly, these gems never cease to thrill. The return of ‘Tomb of the Cybermen’ was a monumental moment and rubber-stamped its position as a total classic when the latest – youngest – fans actually got to watch it. The joint return of ‘The Enemy of the World’ and ‘The Web of Fear’ in October 2013 made front page news – so important.

Doctor Who
has endured for 50 years and has a rich legacy to draw from. The visual effects have improved over the years and the Doctor’s face may have changed a dozen times, but the one thing that has stayed the same is the Doctor’s soul, the TARDIS and that menacing theme tune that harks back to a dark night in 1963, when The Beatles was just starting out and the world mourned a great American president. The Doctor still has some mystique about him, but audiences nowadays demand complete understanding and greater thrills; tiny nuances are lost, the time to build tension cut short, because communication is
now
, via cell phone, text, email, Skype, and many other multimedia tools. Technology moves on and so does our need for
Doctor Who
. We still need the show – perhaps more so now than ever before – to stimulate imagination in the young and teach the fundamentals of good and evil. If sometimes the aliens are compromised to grotesque caricature (see the new millennium Sontarans or the Eccleston/Tennant Cybermen), we accept it is a necessary evil for the show to endure and to appeal to a whole new generation, even though some may feel that it fails artistically as a consequence.

The
Doctor Who
legacy is far from over.

‘If heroes don’t exist, it is necessary to invent them.’

Cardinal Borusa to the Doctor
 
‘The Deadly Assassin’

CHAPTER FOUR

BLINK – QUALITY SCIENCE FICTION OR FLAWED MASTERPIECE?

ALTHOUGH ONE OF
the best
Doctor Who
stories ever, ‘Blink’ includes scenes that make little sense and are only included for dramatic effect. Does this make it an edge-of-the-seat quality SF story or a flawed masterpiece?

The most important scene to analyse is the opening teaser: Sally Sparrow breaks into a deserted house and peels wallpaper from a wall to reveal a message telling her to duck by the Doctor. So dutifully – and not knowing who the Doctor is - she ducks and a rock sores over her head and bounces off the wall, supposedly thrown by a Weeping Angel; why on earth would they want to throw stones, and why would the Doctor want to warn her? It’s a mystery we can’t reconcile, it doesn’t make any sense; but it is a great teaser and starts one of the most atmospheric stories ever.

And that’s the paradox about ‘Blink’. It
is
one of the best
Doctor Who
stories ever; that is not in question, what is
being questioned however, is how an audience – or film maker – can allow so many inconsistancies (irrelevant scene or missing explanations) in order to invoke a higher sense of mystery and drama.

The next odd scene in ‘Blink’ is when Kathy Nightingale has disaapeared and Sally walks back upstairs to be comfronted by the Weeping Angels. How did they get the TARDIS key and why would it be on offer to Sally when they wanted the TARDIS themselves? Later we see them trying to get into the TARDIS in the police underground car park, so why give away the key beforehand? We are told by the Doctor on the DVD Easter Egg that the ‘Angels have the phone box’; but they don’t, do they?

We know the TARDIS was left outside the spooky house (Wester Drumlins) and then taken by the police to the underground car park, where all the abandoned vehicles from Dumlins are kept; so the angels didn’t have the police box; but they knew where it was, and tried to get into it after giving away the key.

A little bit stupid don’t you think?

Billy Shipton falls victim to the Weeping Angels in the police car park, just as quickly as when Kathy was taken; but why wasn’t Sally taken as quickly? In the TARDIS key scene there is ample time for an Angel to touch Sally and send her back in time; but it doesn’t happen – now that’s interesting favouritism!

A lot of inconsistency is put down to the Doctor’s ‘timey-wimey’ excuse; but how does he know that Billy would die on a certain night, the very night he would meet Sally Sparrow again, and how did he know what DVD’s to put the Easter Egg on? Was it all from the pack of photos and letters Sally gave the Doctor? We are led to believe so; but it’s a bit of a leap of faith surely? Would Sally put the whole stone throwing incident in there, would the Doctor go to the house
and write the message on the wall and wallpaper over it? Would anyone else leave the message there if they were wallpapering such a once-quality property? At the very least, all this speculation stretches the glimmer of reality an audience will put up with in a drama. Martha Jones helped paint and decorate a house with the Doctor? Come on now!

Sally tells us that she’s intelligent and feels a commitment to the Doctor and is determined to see the intricacies of her adventure through, to do her best for her dead friends (Kathy and Billy), then she has closure; and she gets it too. We trust that all the information has been given to the Doctor and he will go off and do all the background stuff (like painting and decorating) and only then the cycle is complete. Only then can she move on.

So all that happens and she gets the closure she needs and then instantly decides that she can now commit to her dead friend’s brother, not only do they have their own business, they have a deep relationship. Sally can at last get on with her life and that life is with the man who found the DVD Easter Eggs.

And everyone wants to know what happens to them next…

Don’t they?

The conclusion is that the general audience don’t want to think too deeply about a great drama. Like the viewer of an action film, they are willing to suspend belief for a while, to escape and enjoy a fantasy outside the pattern of their everyday life, to let the story send spine-tingling shards down their back and let the chill wash all over them. And ‘Blink’ delievered that beautifully with characters we hardly know; but care for, and a new foe of pure quality.

So ignore the inconsistancies; just blink and you’ll miss them; but the story will stay with you forever.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE PERSONALITY OF THE DOCTOR

‘In my case, real life was something I was only very tenuously connected to. The hardest thing of all was to be aware that I was no longer a hero to children.’

Tom Baker’s recollections on leaving
Doctor Who
from
Who On Earth is Tom Baker?

THIS BOOK HAS DISCUSSED
the many actors who have played the role of Doctor Who in context to the rest of their careers. Each has played the character differently, but how has the character evolved over the years and how have those individual interpretations moved the character away from Sydney Newman’s original conception?

The original character outline for the Doctor stated that he was a Doctor of Science and over 60 years old. It went on to say that ‘He is frail-looking, but wiry and tough like an old turkey’. An odd thing to say maybe but then it goes on to state that he has ‘watery blue eyes’, that he is ‘bewildered’ and ‘suspicious’ and ‘can be enormously cunning’. He has flashes of brilliance but can also be sometimes vague. Perhaps this describes William
Hartnell’s Doctor very well, but what about Patrick Troughton? What did he add to the Doctor’s complex personality?

In appearance, Troughton’s Doctor was not much different to Hartnell’s, with a black frock coat and check trousers. He also wore a woolly hat at times, something Hartnell’s Doctor did in the very first episode, but Troughton’s stovepipe hat and recorder gave him the appearance of a wandering minstrel. He also confessed to hamming up his early performances, but he was always more humorous, taking the sting out of frightening scenes with a hint of comedy.

Hartnell’s Doctor always took notes, which is good practice for a scientist, but Troughton favoured his 500-year diary, using his experiences more than the acquisition of facts. In that respect, Troughton was more self-assured, worldly – or rather universally – wise, and that self-assurance generated the humour. Those ‘bewildered’ and ‘suspicious’ eyes took on more conviction, but could be almost childlike sometimes, especially when he was caught out when being a little too cunning.

Jon Pertwee’s Doctor leapt into action. Extrovert – but still Edwardian in dress sense – the second Doctor’s flowing clown-style pocket handkerchief turned into a frilly shirt and dashing cape. The recorder vanished and the sonic screwdriver became the instrument of choice. Where the second Doctor kept reasonably cool when confronted by ignorance, the third Doctor showed his distaste to the individual in question with outrage, often needing a mediator to calm things down (Brigadier or companion).

The third Doctor was much more physical than his predecessors. Venusian Aikido and a passion for cars, hovercraft and, well anything mechanical (even taking the TARDIS to pieces), was the order of the day. Of course throughout his first three generations the Doctor was
mechanically minded, taking consoles to pieces and even robots on occasion, but with the third Doctor it was more of an excuse to get his hands dirty.

The fourth Doctor brought out more of the eccentricity of the Doctor. His long, multicoloured scarf, big eyes, curly hair and toothy grin, and, not least, his love of jelly babies and yo-yos, enhanced his nonchalance when confronted by anything remotely scary. While the third Doctor could be a little egotistical, the fourth Doctor grew quite arrogant and even sulked more than his second incarnation. His serious moments could turn to anger – not the outrage of the third Doctor but out-and-out fury.