ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ART5 THE MAN IN THE BOX Fifty years of Doctor Who. BY JILL LEPORE ehind the door labelled Studio Four, Lewis Carroll, and typewriters with B where "Doctor Who" is filmed, it missing keys. smells of glue and paint. Industrial- On November 23, 2013, "Doctor gauge steel chains hang from the ceiling, Who" will celebrate its fiftieth anniver­ which is painted black and is so impos­ sary with a seventy-five-minute, 3-D sibly high that it feels more like a night special called 'The Day of the Doctor," sky than like the underside of a roof, the which BBC Worldwide is billing as a chains like falling stars. The only light is "global simulcast," meaning that it will artificial, slanted, and green. The con­ be seen at the same time in almost eighty crete floor is speckled and spattered. countries—a new frontier in the history Surrounding the set, cameras, lights, and of television. For many people around microphones stand on tripod legs of the world, "Doctor Who" is the face of smeared chrome like an army of giant the BBC. At the height of its first run, arthropod invaders, patiently waiting. In which ended in 1989, "Doctor Who" the stillness, a stagehand wearing a black was seen by a hundred and ten million hooded sweatshirt and black cargo pants viewers in fifty-four nations, including rummages through a Tupperware stor­ the United States, where, beginning in age box, making an awful clatter. He the nineteen-seventies, it was broadcast pulls out something metal and rusted, by PBS and watched by the kind of quis­ cradling in his tattooed hands the part ling American kid who hadn't the heart that would roll away if you were to guil­ for "Happy Days." lotine a robot. "This, this," he mutters in "'Doctor Who' is the story of a lovely quiet triumph, "is the head we need." world in which a kind man saves every­ "Doctor Who" is the most original one from harm," Steven Moffat says. science-fiction television series ever Moffat, a fifty-one-year-old Scot, made. It is also one of the longest-run­ started watching "Doctor Who" when ning television shows of all time. (Vir­ he was a little boy and is now its execu­ tually every other marathoner is a soap tive producer and head writer. He says opera.) It was first broadcast in 1963, that it has two things: "scary monsters three years before "Star Trek," and, with and a funny doctor." Every week, it's the apologies to Gene Roddenberry, is same: the Tardis lands; the funny doctor smarter and, better yet, sillier. The pops out; he meets scary monsters; and U.S.S. Enterprise, for all its talking then he defeats them, because he is very, computers and swooshing doors, is a very clever. A scene from the first season of "Doctor Who," in 1963, with William Hartnell as the Doctor, outside the Tardis, his time-and-space ship. crabbed and pious Puritan village; Doc­ From the start, "Doctor Who" was tor Who tumbles through time and meant to be a "loyalty program," a show dustry term "3G TV doesn't mean tele­ tory of television: the end of the age of sion and averts every atrocity, except ment in 1962. Newman, who'd created space in the Tardis, a ship that from the that people reliably tune in to every vision enjoyed by three generations of the box. In 1999, when "Doctor Who" when he can't. Doesn't that story ever "The Avengers," for ITV, in 1961, was outside looks like an early-twentieth- week. Lately, TV people schedule your family, it means television you can was off the air (if thriving in fan fiction) get old? brought in to produce television that century British police box, painted blue around what is known as "event televi­ watch on a mobile telephone with third- Moffat wrote a spoof called "Doctor could meet the BBC's remit as a govern­ and bearing a sign on its door that reads sion," and it's not necessarily a weekly generation wireless data service. "Doctor Who—The Curse of Fatal Death," star­ "An Unearthly Child," the first episode ment-owned broadcasting service as well "POLICE TELEPHONE. FREE FOR USE OF affair; instead, it's often a one-off, like Who" is BBC Worldwide's top-selling ring everyone from Rowan Atkinson to jtV. of "Doctor Who," was broadcast— as its need to win viewers from ITV, a PUBLIC. ADVICE AND ASSISTANCE OB­ the instant-to-internet Netflix release, iTunes download. In the United States, Hugh Grant, in which one character live, in black-and-white—from a BBC commercial rival that had begun broad­ TAINABLE IMMEDIATELY." Inside (it's earlier this year, of all thirteen episodes "Doctor Who" airs on BBC America, tells the Doctor, "You're like Father studio in London on November 23, casting in 1955. By 1960, the BBC had bigger on the inside), the Tardis has of the first season of the American adap­ but here and around the world viewers Christmas, the Wizard of Oz, and 1963, one day after John F. Kennedy was not a single program among the top ten something of the character of the tation of the BBC's "House of Cards." watch the series on platforms that defy Scooby Doo!" But Doctor Who is also shot in Dallas. The BBC had never be­ ratings earners. Newman had an idea programming schedules and that don't reading room of the British Library, if "Doctor Who" began as family televi­ | Great Britain. The world's longest-run- fore done anything like it. for something that could be both educa­ require families or sofas, or even TVs. the British Library had a swimming sion: a show that kids and their parents | ning science-fiction television series is, "Doctor Who" was the brainchild of tional and entertaining: science fiction. pool and were a pub designed by and grandparents can all watch, maybe The fiftieth anniversary of "Doctor I among other things, a fable about Brit- Sydney Newman, a Canadian who be­ His department commissioned a re­ someone who adored Frank Gehry, even together, on the sofa. But the in- Who" marks an end to an era in the his­ u ish history: the Doctor halts every inva­ came head of the BBC's drama depart­ port on the state of the genre. It proved 56 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER II, 2013 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER II, 2013 57 where Barbara, a history teacher, and Ian, of twenty-first-century terrorism. Super­ chedelic kookiness. Its corridors are sized discouraging. "Several facts stand out a least one character capable of giving the children, and to revolve around a hero a science teacher, are puzzled by one of man, who first appeared in 1938, thwarted to accommodate, side by side, two mile," the report began. 'The first is that explanation." It might not be a bad idea if who is a fully realized dramatic character, their students, fifteen-year-old Susan: she gangsters and thugs and criminal master­ Daleks, the half-robot, half-mutant SF is overwhelmingly American in bulk." this character were to have something "of not a disembodied idea. A flying saucer knows a great deal more about history minds. But Doctor Who, created in the monsters from the planet Skaro who Also, "SF is not itself a wildly popular the feeling of Sherlock Holmes." But, if was proposed and rejected. "Bug-Eyed and science than they do. Following her postwar, postcolonial, atomic age, inher­ have been stalking the Doctor since Lyn­ branch of fiction—nothing like, for ex­ so, he ought to have a female Watson, Monsters" and "Tin Robots" were dis­ home after school, Barbara and Ian dis­ ited the agony of helplessness: he believes don B. Johnson strode the halls of the ample, detective and thriller fiction." In because "S.F. is deliberately unsexual; couraged (a suggestion not always hon­ cover that Susan lives with her grandfa­ he can use his power to travel through time White House. And some of the build­ particular, "It doesn't appeal much to women are not really necessary to it"— ored). And a narrative structure was ad­ ther inside the police box. and space to undo unspeakable slaughter, ing's porthole windows are frosted so that women." Then, too, "SF is largely a short and so it would be wise to "add feminine opted that allows not only for extended Why a police box? It was bizarre. It only to find that, very often, he cannot. the fans can't see into the ground-floor story medium," in which, as Kingsley interest." but for infinite treatment. needed explaining. "Therefore here is "Imagine you were in Pompeii and you cafeteria, where, I hereby report, actors Amis had pointed out, the heroes are A time machine was first suggested at Newman hired Verity Lambert as a some phoney science," one of Lambert's tried to save them but in doing so you dressed as the metallic cyborgs known as ideas, not people, and the ideas are often a meeting held on March 26,1963. From producer. He'd worked with her on staff wrote, offering the sort of gobbledy- make it happen," he says, trying to explain Cybermen can indeed be found eating "so bizarre as to sustain conviction only an educational point of view, this device ITVs acclaimed Armchair Theatre (a gook you'd come across in an Arthur C. to a woman who is about to die in a nuclear Cornish pasties.