Timeless Adventures (30 page)

Several of the original Audio-Visuals productions were rewritten and remade for the Big Finish range, including
The Mutant Phase
(featuring the Daleks),
Sword of Orion
(Cybermen), and
Minuet in Hell
(rewritten for Big Finish to incorporate Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier). The series also featured a variety of companion actors and actresses (with many later featuring in a semi-dramatised audio-book spin-off series dubbed
The Companion Chronicles
), alongside returning monsters and other characters from the TV series’ rich history. Additionally, new companion characters were created just for the audio range. These adventures, like the early spin-off novels, were initially designed to fit into narrative gaps between broadcast TV stories. The success of the core range allowed for a series of limited-run spinoffs built around the popular character of Sarah Jane Smith, the complex politics of the Doctor’s home world of Gallifrey and the back-story of Dalek creator Davros. One spin-off series even experimented with recasting the central role, allowing other actors (like Derek Jacobi, David Warner and Geoffrey Bayldon) to play alternative Doctors in
Doctor Who Unbound
. Other, more minor characters have appeared in additional spin-off ranges, while yet more were built around the ever-popular Daleks and Cybermen.

From 1999, when the first CD teamed up the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Doctors in an adventure called
The Sirens of Time
, Big Finish has provided fans with a monthly fix of audio
Doctor Who
adventures. If nothing else, the fact that the range thrived on fan support (with many willing to pay up to £15 for each CD) showed that there was both a significant audience for new
Doctor Who
stories and that the series format itself was far from exhausted. The Big Finish range had more reason than the TV show under John Nathan-Turner to appeal directly to a dedicated fan base. Their audience were the diehard
Doctor Who
fans, rather than the wider casual TV audience, fans who were willing to pay regularly for further
Doctor Who
adventures.

Fan creative activity also extended to consensual retroactive continuity (retcon): fans would spot narrative gaps in the series and fill them (or fix them) with their own explanations. Primary among these was the concept of season 6B, the further adventures of Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor after
The War Games
, but before he changed into Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor. This fanciful notion was based on Troughton’s reappearance in
The Two Doctors
as an older version of the Second Doctor: he’d been co-opted by the Time Lords to carry out missions for them, or so the fan theory went. Others investigated the show’s past, as with
The Myth Makers
series of interview videos (and later DVDs) with the series’ cast and crew or Jeremy Bentham’s
In-Vision
series of in-depth ‘making of’ fanzines. Fan creativity also saw the creation of music videos (cutting images from the series to popular tracks), done by linking two video recorders together in the decades before digital editing and YouTube. Finally, the ongoing comic-strip adventures of the Doctor continued in
Doctor Who Magazine
and would go on to influence the returning TV series.

It wasn’t until September 2003 that the BBC realised that there was still a mass audience who’d respond to new
Doctor Who
on TV. Long the subject of nostalgia, jibes about cardboard sets and rubber monsters,
Doctor Who
had survived a decade and a half of being a nostalgic joke to become a postmodern format whose time had come again. Mal Young, the BBC’s head of continuing series, announced on 26 September that acclaimed dramatist Russell T Davies (a self-proclaimed fan of the show who’d even pitched how he would bring the series back in the pages of
Doctor Who Magazine
years previously) would be behind the revival: ‘It’s time to crank up the TARDIS and find out what lies in store for the Doctor, and we’re thrilled to have a writer of Russell’s calibre to take us on this journey.’

The announcement of the new live-action TV series aimed at a family audience totally overshadowed that same month’s launch of an online animated adventure called
Scream of the Shalka
by Paul Cornell and starring Richard E Grant as the ‘official’ Ninth Doctor (following previous Internet dramas starring Sylvester McCoy, Colin Baker and Paul McGann).
Scream of the Shalka
and Richard E Grant were quickly destined to become interesting footnotes in
Doctor Who
history, the obscure answer to trivia questions about how many actors have played the Doctor. All eyes were now on BBC1 and the 2005 re-launch of the TV series.

Doctor Who
returned to BBC1 on 26 March 2005, starring acclaimed actor Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor and former pop star Billie Piper as his new travelling companion, Rose Tyler. Those who’d re-created the show (now in 45-minute episodes containing standalone stories with some two-episode tales, rather than 25-minute four-to-six-part adventures) were unsure what reaction to expect. TV viewers had not seen a regular series of
Doctor Who
since 1989 and the casting was unexpected (and controversial with fans). A whole generation, the producers feared, had grown up knowing
Doctor Who
as something old-fashioned that their parents liked. BBC research, in advance of transmission, seemed to confirm this view, much to the BBC’s trepidation.

Showrunner Russell T Davies and executive producers Julie Gardner (head of drama at BBC Wales, where
Doctor Who
was now to be made) and Phil Collinson (the show’s practical line producer) needn’t have worried.
Rose
, the opening episode, was a rematch between the Doctor and the Nestene consciousness that controlled the plastic-based Autons (previously foes of the Third Doctor). It introduced Rose Tyler (and her mother and boyfriend) and drew an audience of just under ten million viewers. The series was credited with single-handedly reinvigorating Saturday night family viewing, a niche long since believed lost by most broadcasters.

The series – quickly dubbed ‘NuWho’ by a new generation of fans who saw the Internet and websites like Outpost Gallifrey as their home – was a successful reinterpretation of the classic
Doctor Who
formula, updated for the twenty-first century and carrying an overlay of the contemporary concerns that Davies had incorporated into his previous dramas, such as
Queer as Folk
and
The Second Coming
.

While succeeding as ‘family entertainment’, this new version of
Doctor Who
still managed to tackle a whole series of social and sexual issues in a way reminiscent of the Barry Letts years, but with the 1980s event-television showmanship of John Nathan-Turner. Over the five years that Russell T Davies would run the revived franchise,
Doctor Who
would delve into politics (right in the middle of a UK national General Election), consumerism (repeatedly used as a front for alien invasions, despite the revived series’ own seemingly endless merchandise spin-offs), the media and popular television (satirised several times) and romance and sexuality (the Doctor’s relationships with his companions, Rose and Martha, were a little different than those of old, while Captain Jack brought a whole new orientation to the series).

Being
Doctor Who
, and with 40 years of history behind it, the new show could not ignore the series’ own past. Major monsters and characters would return over the years to come, but each return was handled in a much more successful and mass-audience-friendly way than any of those attempted by Nathan-Turner. Creatures and characters were rethought so they’d work as new for an audience un-familiar with them, but would also play to an engaged audience (much like the late-1960s version of the show) who remembered them from first time around or who were familiar with them from satellite TV repeats or DVD releases. However, an in-depth knowledge of the past was not necessary to enjoy the new
Doctor Who
.

Davies could not resist building his own mythology, introducing a series of characters and events that would pay off only at the end of the initial four-year run of the new
Doctor Who
. Seeds sown in
Rose
would later mature in 2008’s final regular episode (until 2010),
Journey’s End
. This seemingly complicated back-story required little more from a mass audience than an awareness of key characters who’d appeared in the show over the past two to three years and their relationships to each other and the Doctor. Audiences well used to the ongoing developing narratives of domestic soap operas were comfortable with such character recall, so
Doctor Who
fitted right into the modern TV landscape (even if this aspect of the series saw many fans criticise it as ‘too soapy’).

To many people’s surprise, not least some of its most die-hard fans, the new series of
Doctor Who
became the biggest hit the BBC had enjoyed in a long time. It successfully re-energised a timeless format, making it relevant to a contemporary mass audience. It successfully captured the attention of a whole new generation of young viewers who saw
Doctor Who
as part of an entertainment landscape that included
Harry Potter
and
High School Musical
. In fact, the audience who seemed to be most upset about the return of their favourite show was a sub-section of the series’ own longest-serving fans.

During the first season of the new
Doctor Who
, long-term viewers may have felt there was something familiar about the series’ satirical engagement with contemporary politics. Just as Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks had tackled the contemporary political reality of the 1970s in their fantasy-driven stories, so did Russell T Davies in the 2005 version.

There is much wrong with the new series’ first two-part story,
Aliens of London/World War III
. The new production crew had to learn how to make
Doctor Who
after such a lengthy break. However, the satirical engagement with the then-imminent UK General Election was a masterstroke. The story depicted the infiltration of the highest power in the land, Number 10 Downing Street, by the alien Slitheen family in a plot to destroy Earth. The Slitheen were intent on provoking a nuclear conflict and selling off the resulting ruined planet for a profit. The Prime Minister (possibly intended to be Tony Blair) has been killed and key ministers replaced by fat, yellow-green aliens disguised in human ‘skin suits’ that make them appear to be obese humans. They’ve additionally faked an alien spaceship crashing into the Thames in order to gather the world’s experts on alien life in one place to eliminate them, so they don’t uncover the Slitheen plan. The most notorious ‘expert’ snared by the trap is the Doctor.

These two episodes aired in April 2005, immediately preceding the election of 5 May in which Prime Minister Tony Blair was seeking a third consecutive term in office (something that had previously eluded Labour). One of the main issues was the conduct of the war in Iraq which the US and UK had been engaged in since 2003. Part of the justification for war was Iraq’s supposed possession of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (primarily taken to mean chemical or biological weapons, and possibly developing nuclear capability), despite the failure of UN weapons inspectors to find any evidence of such weapons on the ground. A government dossier from September 2002 had been compiled to justify the invasion on the basis of weapons of mass destruction that could reach Europe ‘within 45 minutes’, according to a notorious BBC report. That led to an explosive row between the BBC and the government, resulting in the Hutton Inquiry finding against the BBC in January 2004 and the subsequent resignation of Director General Greg Dyke.

Aliens of London
and
World War III
were broadcast in the aftermath of these important political events and in the immediate run-up to an election in which these issues were still playing a major part. The mere replacement of key government figures by corpulent, flatulent aliens may have been an obvious (though no less effective for it) form of satirical caricature of politicians, but Davies went further in his clever script. Dialogue references included comments on the Slitheen plan to use ‘massive weapons of destruction’ that could be unleashed ‘within 45 seconds’. Any alert viewer among the seven million who watched the episodes would have enjoyed a quiet chuckle at these references. This was the kind of thing that
Doctor Who
used to do regularly in the 1970s (often satirising Whitehall), but had abandoned (along with its appeal to the mass audience) in the 1980s. Davies firmly believed that political, social and even sexual comment belonged in a modern version of
Doctor Who
.

Other passing dialogue references contained material aimed at the culture of ‘New Labour’, who’d been in power since winning the 1997 General Election.
Aliens of London
introduced the character of Harriet Jones, MP for Flydale North (and future Prime Minister), who says of the war, ‘I voted against it,’ a common refrain from those MPs who opposed the conflict.