Doctor Who and the Critical Backlash

I'm now back in the UK, and all too aware that I didn't write much live from the States. My excuses are that a) I'll deal with such things later, this being more of an occasional column than realtime e-gawpfest, and b) time moves much more quickly in Northern California than it does in Britain, so much so that I feel I've returned even before I departed. So in lieu of American adventures and thoughts (which will be forthcoming, have no doubt), I invite you to browse an equally informative website about what is increasingly becoming my US home, Woodland CA:

http://insidewoodland.com/

In the meantime, let's discuss British stuff, and in particular Doctor Who. I hadn't seen any of the new series until "Gridlock," the third episode. Unfortunately, it didn't make me feel particularly bereaved to have missed the first two instalments, nor did it make me excited about the 'pleasures' to come. This is not something I say (or rather, write) easily, being a Who enthusiast well before it was cool. I never went so far as to attend a convention, but I do have a fantastic range of Target novelisations in a box downstairs, most of which I bought in Mevagissey, a Cornish fishing village which in the late eighties boasted not one but two remaindered bookshops, an unnaturally high fishing-village-to-remaindered-bookshop ratio. This was back in the days when remaindered bookshops sold things one might want to buy, rather than cheap stationery and synthesizer albums. I presume this historical shift indicates an increased restraint in the publishing industry, now that editors have learnt the bitter lessons of printing half a million copies of The Twin Dilemma (incidentally, if any Who minded rare book dealers are reading, I also bought a copy of The Sontaran Experiment, the contents of which turned out to be The Armageddon Factor. Does this make me rich?). Even at the age of eleven, I was already enough of a Victorianist to realise that Ghost Light was conceptually flawed in its treatment of Darwinian theory, and also that it just wasn't a very good story. So, when I heard that Who was making a sustained return to the screen (and I don't mean the 1996 telemovie, in which the Doctor did a lot of wandering around San Francisco with an attractive woman - how could I have known that, eleven years later, I too would be a doctor doing a lot of wandering around San Francisco with an attractive woman?) I had that strange combination of excitement and "don't mess it up."

Two years on from the revival, and the gloss of excitement has worn off to reveal... not very much. Firstly, there's David Tennant. Hearing Tennant was going to take over from Christopher Eccleston was good, since I'd liked him in Blackpool in 2004, and even more so in a touring production of Comedians (where, in a before-he-was-famous style, he was lost in the billing behind Ron Moody and Martin Freeman). Ah, I thought, Tennant will do just fine, and in any case, anybody can play the Doctor. To be proved wrong on both counts, however, is not just disappointing but embarrassing. Eccleston may have seemed eccentric casting to some (and even he seemed surprised by it well into the first series), but he was convincing and could carry the weaker moments. Tennant can't - in fact, quite often he is the weaker moments. Shouting isn't an alternative to authority.

Secondly, there's Russell T. Davies, whose reputation as one of our best television writers is baffling. I can't think of any Davies script or project that hasn't included some major flaw. 1991's Dark Season was passable, but being two stories shoehorned into one series gave it the appearance of being broken-backed. Two years later, Century Falls made hardly any sense at all. I'll admit I didn't see any of Queer as Folk or Bob and Rose, although I know some people were vaguely offended by the latter's intimation that "hey, maybe gay men can like women as well! Wouldn't that be whacky??" The Second Coming in 2003 was interesting, but like so much of Davies' work, unravelled itself in yet another conclusion that made no sense and was based in the most embarrassing kind of atheism, one that refutes religion not on ontological but ethical grounds, where lack of belief in god stems not from the fact that he doesn't exist, but that he's fairly useless to humanity and so not worth bothering with. It's the kind of dogmatism that gives writers like Terry Eagleton the opportunity to make such nonsensical remarks (in his After Theory) that atheism is really just inverted religion. (While we're on the subject of religion, it's intriguing to see the extent to which the Daleks have been reshaped. In the seventies, they were Nazis; now they're religious fundamentalists, with gods, cults, and marytrs). My main problem with Davies, however, is that he can't tell a self-contained story, since much of his creative idiom is in soap opera, a genre concerned less with narrative than with providing imaginary friends for the undemanding (in a year which gave us Life on Mars and a new series of Peep Show, in a Radio Times interview Davies chose Hollyoaks as the televisual highlight). Doctor Who is the opposite of Coronation Street - in fact, that's the precise reason it was cancelled in the 1980s. It also means that this revival is oddly parochial, revisiting the same people and places in a similar attempt to create some kind of fictional community. Star Trek is science fiction about community; Who is essentially "Anchorite in Space", a weird bloke in a box.

Thirdly, and I'll leave it here for now, nu-Who is just a bit too glossy. I've always wondered why, in terms of scenery, it's acceptable to guffaw "It's just a quarry in Surrey!" but not "It's just the inside of a computer!" At least the quarry exists, and since I know they haven't actually gone to the moon, I don't see why realising that should be so unpalatable. But one of the distinguishing marks of classic Who was the challenge of creating universes and narratives on comparatively limited resources. It was the televisual equivalent of the literary group Oulipo, trying to create under severe restrictions (as in George Perec's novel La Disparition, without using the letter 'e') which would in turn create something intriguing. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't, sometimes it had startling consequences (such as Warrior's Gate, for instance). Nu-Who has no such restrictions, being able to CGI almost anything into existence and so eliminating any of the material challenges that only good writing and a theatrically imaginative approach can meet. Instead of grimy corridors, we have glossy sheen (remember the station in The Impossible Planet? For a desolate outpost in the very pit of hell, it seemed awfully shiny and well-lit). The rejigging of the theme music is a perfect example. The Who theme gained its considerable fame through sounding like nothing else, yet at the same time having been produced by two or three people and a lot of ingenuity (again, creative restriction). It sounded weird and perfectly matched the content of the show. Today, we have the National Anthem of the State of Doctor Who, something that sounds exactly like something else - an orchestra on Earth. I'm fairly sure more demented fans than me actually stand up for it now, which is not the point - it should leave us shaken, not stirred.