Inside the Tardis

INSIDE THE TARDIS The Worlds of Doctor Who A Cultural History James Chapman LB. TAU RI S LONDON - NEW YORK J \ PN DOT Published in 2006 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com In the United States of America and in Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St Martin's Press 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright © James Chapman, 2006 The moral rights of the author have been asserted. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. HB ISBN 10: 1 84511 162 1 HB ISBN 13:978 1 84511 162 5 PB ISBN 10: 1 84511 163 X PB ISBN 13:978 1 84511 163 2 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress catalog card: available Typeset in Minion by Steve Tribe, Andover Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International * i J 5' Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 1. A Space-Age Old Curiosity Shop (1963-1966) 12 2. Monsters, Inc. (1966-1969) 49 3. Earthbound (1970-1974) 75 4. High Gothic (1975-1977) 98 5. High Camp (1977-1980) 118 6. New Directions (1980-1984) 134 7. Trials of a Time Lord (1985-1989) 153 8. Millennial Anxieties (1996) 173 9. Second Coming (2005) 184 Appendices I. Lost Episodes 203 II. Production Credits 207 Notes 219 Bibliography 243 Index 249 Acknowledgements This book would have been impossible to research were it not for the BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham, Reading, a delightful archive in which to work, and I am indebted to its staff, most especially to Jacqueline Kavanagh, Julie Snelling and Karen White, who did so much to make my extended research into the Doctor Who production files throughout the long hot summer of 2003 such a pleasurable and rewarding experience. Other libraries that I have used in the preparation of this book are the National Library of the British Film Institute and the Open University Library. Many of the ideas explored in this book have taken shape through conversation with friends, colleagues, fellow Doctor Who aficionados and casual acquaintances in the Caversham tea room, including, but not limited to, Philip Chaston, John Cook, Nicholas Cull, Steven Gregory, Matthew Hilton, Nathalie Morris, Eric Peterson, Thomas Ribbits, Oliver Redmayne, Jeffrey Richards, Susan Sydney Smith and Michael Williams. A special note of thanks to Steve Tribe for his eagle-eyed copy-editing, and for saving my blushes regarding certain fan myths. It was my commissioning editor at I.B.Tauris, Philippa Brewster, who suggested I should write this book - an offer I was delighted to accept - and do for 'The Doctor' what I had already done for James Bond (Licence To Thrill) and the British adventure series of the 1960s (Saints and Avengers). In this sense Inside the Tardis completes a triptych of studies of British fantasy-adventure narratives in which I have argued that popular culture can be taken seriously without recourse to the impenetrable critical language of high theory. The Doctor may have viii INSIDE THE TARDIS conquered Daleks, Cybermen and Ice Warriors, but would he survive an encounter with Foucault, Derrida or Deleuze? This book will also be the last I write while teaching at The Open University. It seems an appropriate time to acknowledge the role of my colleagues in the History Department in fostering a climate in which I have been able to pursue my own research interests and for tolerating my obsession with secret agents, Avengers heroines and Time Lords. For their friendship, as much as for their generous support at the outset of my academic career, I am particularly indebted to Tony Aldgate and Arthur Marwick. This book is dedicated, with love, to the memory of my grandmother, Priscilla Mary Ruthven (1911-2004). Introduction Let me get this straight. A thing that looks like a police box, standing in a junk yard, it can move anywhere in time and space? Ian Chesterton (William Russell) in 'An Unearthly Child' In a 1999 British Film Institute poll of television critics and professionals, Doctor Who was voted the third-best British television programme of all time.1 While this is testimony to the series' special place in British television history, the fact that Doctor Who should be chosen ahead of more ostensibly prestigious fare such as Boys from the Blackstuff, Brideshead Revisited and 7, Claudius is also indicative of the growing legitimation of popular culture as a subject worthy of serious attention. Doctor Who belongs to the genre of science fiction (SF), which remains largely beyond the pale of critical respectability. Can we really take seriously a series in which a benevolent alien travels around the universe in a space-and-time machine that outwardly resembles an obsolete Prussian blue police telephone box? No less remarkable about the BFI's selection of Doctor Who as the third-best series is that at the time of the poll it had not been in regular production for a decade and appeared to all intents and purposes to be consigned forever to that ethereal afterlife of 'classic' television that is the cable channel UKTV Gold. The BBC's announcement in the autumn of 2003 that Doctor Who was to return in a new series - and, furthermore, that it would be accorded the level of production resources that it had always deserved but had rarely received - was greeted with much jubilation by the series' legions of fans. 2 INSIDE THE TARDIS Doctor Who is often described in such terms as the 'longest-running TV SF series' in television history.2 It may even be the longest-running popular drama series, other than soap operas, ever made. Doctor Who was in continuous production at the BBC for some twenty-six years, from 1963 to 1989, running longer than the police series Dixon of Dock Green (1955-1976) and the American Western series Gunsmoke ( 1955— 1975) - probably its closest two rivals in terms of longevity - and over taken in recent years only by the comedy series Last of the Summer Wine (beginning in 1972), which, however, has been produced in shorter sea sons and has notched up barely a third of Doctor Who's 695 episodes. Certainly in comparison to Star Trek - which remains the only SF ad venture series to rival it in international popularity and the extent of its fan base - Doctor Who was both the first and the longest in production. How can we account for the longevity of Doctor Who'? To answer this question we need to consider both the series' production strategies and its content. In their cultural studies analysis of the series, Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text, John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado describe Doctor Who as 'a text that unfolds according to a wide range of institutional, professional, public, cultural and ideological forces'.3 These include, but are not limited to, the production practices of the BBC, the competing demands of 'educational' and 'popular' television, the narrative and discursive strategies of the SF genre and the different modes of performance associated with the various 'stars' who have appeared in the series. Tulloch and Alvarado argue that 'in terms of the production context, range of characters and characterisations, generic form, range and size of audience, Doctor Who represents a site of endless transformations and complex weavings as well as a programme of increasing institutional stability and public popularity.'4 Ironically, those words were written just as the popularity of Doctor Who began to decline in the mid 1980s. Within a few years, the hostility towards the series of Michael Grade, at the time Controller of BBC1, would reveal a level of institutional instability that Tulloch and Alvarado could not have foreseen. Although, on that occasion, Doctor Who was spared extermination, its eventual demise in 1989 - and its successful resurrection in 2005 - are useful reminders that the history of any long- running television series involves not just the internal history of the programme itself but also the external history of the television industry that produces it. INTRODUCTION 3 Perhaps the key to the longevity of Doctor Who has been its format, which has proved malleable enough to respond flexibly both to changing broadcasting ecologies and to cultural determinants from inside and outside the BBC. Doctor Who is - or rather was for most of its history - a hybrid of the episodic series (like the police or Western series) and the continuous serial (like the soap opera) in that it was a series of serials: each production season comprised a number of different individual stories that would run for, typically, four or six weeks. This format allows greater flexibility than either an episodic series (where each episode has to be more or less complete in itself) or a continuous serial (where individual storylines remain subordinate to the overall narrative). Doctor Who has thus been able to utilise a wider range of narrative devices and thematic motifs than most other SF adventure series. During its first three production seasons, indeed, Doctor Who alternated SF adventures with historical stories. It is not tied to the space opera format of, say, Star Trek or Babylon 5, or to the existential 'human nature' theme of other time-travel series such as Quantum Leap.

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