The Man Who...

Over the past few years, while I’ve had a problem with the BBC’s revitalized Doctor Who, more people seem to have had a problem with me having a problem with the show. To not love it, apparently, is very wrong. In fact, it would probably be easier if I mentioned that I tore the front legs off kittens for a joke or catapulted OAPs onto the northbound carriageway of the M1.

Without poring over the previous posts in minute detail, I’m sure I’ve given my reasons quite plainly and explained my opinions quite well, rather that simply shout, “It’s a load of cocking shit!!” before rapidly moving on to something else. But there have still been the odd comments from obvious avid fans who still can’t quite comprehend my reaction the show.

It may be that if I start off a post by saying that watching whichever episode is in question is like having my face pushed into a bowl of lukewarm fucktard stew, they go into shock, meaning that the reasoning that follows becomes inane chatter in their heads that they simply cannot compute. So maybe this needs a different approach.


The first memory of me watching Doctor Who isn’t my own. Instead my mother tells of the time she stood in the doorway and watched my older sister and me leap up off the sofa in fright as Cybermen burst out of crates at the end of an episode. I brought that particular nugget up in conversation once and was informed the story in question was The Invasion. Patrick Troughton was playing The Doctor, with Frazer Hines and Wendy Padbury as his assistants, Jamie and Zoe.

The transmission dates put it about three months shy of my fourth birthday. I certainly don’t remember watching it. Back then I was probably just as interested in The Woodentops or whatever else was on Watch with Mother at the time. I don’t really remember any of the further stories until the appearance of the Autons – which would be either Spearhead from Space or Terror of the Autons.

Either way, Jon Pertwee was ensconced in the role as The Doctor, exiled on Earth, working with UNIT to challenge whatever new threat that came calling, including Roger Delgado’s The Master. Looking at the story titles, The Curse of Peladon and The Sea Devils clearly ring a bell, as do Three Doctors and The Green Death, and The Monster of Peladon and Planet of the Spiders from Pertwee’s final year.

But I guess what’s actually more important is when I stopped watching Doctor Who regularly. Perhaps surprisingly that would have been the end of the fourteenth series, which finished with Robert Holmes’ Conan Doyle/Sax Rohmer pastiche, The Talons of Weng-Chiang (if indeed I even saw that adventure). I was quite surprised by that, expecting to have watched for much longer, but reading further story synopses drew a blank. Then I looked at the dates and things started to make sense.

Simply put, later that year we moved. Instead of living on the fringes of Dartmoor we relocated to the south coast of Devon. From being in the middle of fucking nowhere I found myself in a decent town that, back then, had three cinemas. The Saturday ritual soon became working at my folks’ new business in the morning and then catching a movie in the afternoon. Rushing back indoors, in time for Doctor Who, was no longer a priority.

Though I stopped watching regularly, I must have caught the occasional episode over the next few years. For instance, I remember the half-robot captain and his rubbish robot parrot in The Pirate Planet and thinking it was complete bollocks. (And that alone reminds me of a friend who is of the opinion that having Douglas Adams as story editor is what tipped the original series into decline).

Because of course, by then, Star Wars had come out. Certainly it would have an affect on the show. I don’t think I’m wrong is saying that not long afterwards the series became inflicted with a desire to pile on special effects, but ones done with whatever spare change was left over from the miniscule budget. Obviously they put a lot of effort in, but the results still looked pretty risible.

Watching Doctor Who when Barry Letts and then Philip Hinchcliffe were the series producers, there were physical effects and the various monsters, but the emphasis was on story because they knew their limitations. With location filming shot on film and studio-based scenes shot on videotape, watching it, at that age, the series didn’t seem any different from other adult-oriented dramas of the time like Colditz, The Pallisers, or Bagpuss.

Once John Nathan-Turner took over as producer, I’m sure I tried to watch The Five Doctors special, simply because it had been promoted as an event, but gave up. By then it was virtually unrecognisable to what I remembered. And what the fuck would I want to watch that nonsense when the 1980s was serving up the likes of Brideshead Revisited, The Barchester Chronicles, Edge of Darkness, The Singing Detective and Fortunes of War.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the people wildly applauding the return of Doctor Who back in 2005 had been there in the late 1980s, watching the fag end of the series run itself into the ground. Compared to those final years, you could probably have a new show consisting of a ferret wearing a top hat pissing into a metal pail and people would applaud its genius.

So the oohs and aahs of an excitable audience, rolling over onto its back to have a tummy tickle because the money truck has backed up to the front door of The Mill, which means there are spaceships crashing through Big Ben or a sky full of Daleks, or the stunt casting pulls in little Kyle, means absolutely fuck all to me.

I’ve been perfectly happy to watch Doctor Who it when it’s been good, generally annoyed when it’s been not so good, and utterly pissed off by Russell T' Doofus’ scripts. I remember having an uneasy feeling from the very first episode, Rose, when it became obvious that (as I mentioned back near the beginning of Thought Wad) “[he] so wants to be Joss Whedon writing Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it makes his sack ache.”

He certainly has to be applauded for writing nice little character moments, but a story with a satisfactory beginning, middle and end seems to be beyond his grasp. If his utterly nonsensical, deus ex machina-heavy narratives were transferred to a different, more viewer-friendly genre, viewers would be up in arms. To wave it aside as “being science fiction”, thereby allowing narratives to be utterly preposterous, is the excuse of complete cunts.

It should be about story. It should always be about story. That may be difficult for the younger generation of viewers suckled on shooty bang-bang computer games and repeated viewings of The Little Mermaid. Growing up, the television programme I probably watched the most in those early, formative years was Jackanory. Airing daily, there may have been the odd illustration on screen, but primarily it was just an actor in a chair, facing the camera, reading a story. Nothing else was required.