Much has changed about Doctor Who during the last 50 years, including the personification of its lead character. Yet, much has remained the same; not least the show’s innate preference to place the strange and uncanny, the weird and alien, within a framework of everyday normality. Paul F Cockburn investigates.
“Thinking about it, if there was a new series, and if I was one of the writers, then I’d keep my own adventure on Earth. I’ve just got a gut feeling about this, but I think that if the moment the opening titles are over, you go into a Scene One that’s set on a purple planet with three moons, and some man in a cloak is making a villainous death threat… then the audience would just switch off in their millions. That’s just an instinct, but I think you should set all that high flown end-of-the-world stuff in a very real world of pubs and mortgages and people.”
So said the writer Russell T Davies, back in 1999, for an article in which Doctor Who Magazine brought together half-a-dozen TV writers who were also known fans of the show, to share their thoughts on what a 21st century resurrection of the show might be like. With hindsight, that article was certainly prescient; five years later, most of those questioned were writing scripts for new Doctor Who on television. However, Davies’ opinion shouldn’t have surprised anyone, as he had already very successfully staked out his vision of Doctor Who in his novel Damaged Goods (published by Virgin Books in 1996). Full of character and heart, it featured the Seventh Doctor and his companions’ attempts to track down an extremely powerful alien weapon which was causing increasing havoc within a typical working-class council estate in 1980s Britain.
Not that it was simply a matter of location. “I think the whole of television is becoming a bit more character-led. It (Doctor Who) would have to be more personal, more emotional–more ‘real’ in that sense,” Davies had added in that feature. “An emotional content has got to be stronger, more interesting, more open, to grab a wider audience.” So, it was hardly a surprise when Russell T Davies launched his take on Doctor Who with a episode set in present day London, immediately rooting the series in the lives of new “companion” Rose Tyler and her family–with the Doctor’s space-time machine TARDIS repeatedly returning, during that first series, to the fictional Powell Estate where they lived. Some fans were horrified, dismissing the new character focus on Rose, her mother Jackie and on-off boyfriend Mickey Smith as “soap-opera”, but Davies’ long-held hunch seemed proven, not least by the consistently high ratings the revived show attracted throughout its run.
Arguably, though, Davies wasn’t doing anything fundamentally new; he’d simply tweaked the emphasis of the show, ever mindful of the need to sugar the alien and strange with a large dollop of everyday normality for the benefit of the necessarily diverse, mainstream television audience demanded by the show’s prime-time Saturday evening time slot. That was as much the case in 1963 as it was in 2005; despite the show’s frequent trips to alien worlds and other dimensions, placing the “strange among the familiar” has been at the core of Doctor Who from the start.
For proof, look no further than the original preview article published in listings magazine Radio Times for the week of Doctor Who’s original launch on 23 November 1963. It very much introduces the new drama within the context of the “ordinary” world of its viewers:
“Dr Who? That is just the point. Nobody knows precisely who he is, this mysterious exile from another world and a distant future whose adventures begin today. But this much is known: he has a ship in which he can travel through space and time – although, owing to a defect in its instruments he can never be sure where and when his ‘landings’ may take place. And he has a grand-daughter Susan, a strange amalgam of teenage normality and uncanny intelligence. […] It begins by telling how the Doctor finds himself visiting the Britain of today: Susan has become a pupil at an ordinary British school, where her incredible breadth of knowledge has whetted the curiosity of two of her teachers […] and their curiosity leads them to become inextricably involved in the Doctor’s strange travels.”
Watching that original episode, An Unearthly Child, the ethos of the “strange among the familiar” is signaled from the start, not least by the show’s visual-feedback generated title sequence and the haunting, electronically-realized theme tune. Both were the choice of the show’s original producer, the late Verity Lambert, who later said: “I just wanted it to look familiar but odd, which is what the Doctor Who theme was.” Although both were disliked by the show’s instigator, BBC Head of Drama Sydney Newman, Lambert was proved right as both titles and theme tune quickly became iconic parts of the show.
The episode proper opens on a policeman shining a torch outside a junk yard, a sequence which would not have been out of place in then-contemporary British police series Dixon of Dock Green. As the policeman walks away, however, the strangeness begins; the gate opens seemingly of its own accord, giving viewers access to the interior–including the incongruous sight of a Police Box among the detritus. This being 1963, a Police Box isn’t an incongruous sight per se; they’re common enough pieces of street furniture in major towns and cities across the UK. Yet there’s clearly something strange about this one. Not just its location in a junk yard; it appears to be humming…
Nearly 25 minutes later, An Unearthly Child concludes with another shot of that same Police Box, now standing isolated (but not alone, as a foreground shadow suggests) on some desolate moorland. Between those two shots, the audience has journeyed from an ordinary school classroom to a futuristic, alien space-time machine that’s deliberately hidden within one of the most normal, everyday objects imaginable. As the academics John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado pointed out in their 1983 book, Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text, the narrative of that first episode “is driven along by a constantly shifting series of puzzles, all premised on the same opposition between the banal and the unknown”.
Four decades later, Rose opens with a lively montage introducing us to shop-girl Rose Tyler, her mum Jackie and boyfriend Mickey; it’s all far more quickly paced, but the mysteries begin soon enough once Rose enters the basement of the department store where she works, discovering animated mannequins and a mysterious stranger who calls himself “The Doctor”. Rose’s curiosity echoes that of schoolteachers Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, all those years ago; it, too, leads to the TARDIS.
During the first couple of years of Doctor Who, returning to present-day Britain wasn’t on the cards, in order to justify Ian and Barbara staying on board; so it was more a case of placing “the familiar among the strange” rather than the other way round. There were some glaring exceptions, though: the supposed 22nd century London seen in The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964-65), for example, is more post-Second World War than Brave New World, and the show’s production team take full advantage of the opportunity to placing the show’s most successful monsters against some of Britain’s most famous landmarks.
This has proved to be a trick that’s worked repeated down the decades; arguably, many of Doctor Who’s most memorable episodes at some point feature an alien menace set against a recognizable world, whether it’s the Cybermen emerging from the sewers, the Loch Ness Monster swimming up the Thames or giant maggots crawling out of an old mine. As current show runner Steven Moffat pointed out early in 2013, other TV SF shows might have come up with something like 1967 serial The Abominable Snowmen (a story set in Tibet in which the Yeti are revealed to be alien-controlled robots), but only the makers of Doctor Who would then bring the Yeti back in a story (The Web of Fear, 1968) set in the London Underground! Hence Jon Pertwee’s declared belief that finding a Yeti sitting on your toilet in Tooting Bec (a London suburb) would always be far more strange and disturbing than finding one in the Himalayas!
Of course, there have been periods when Doctor Who has strayed far from having any obvious connection with present day Earth, not least those occasions when the Doctor was accompanied by alien, robotic or non-20th century human companions. Repeatedly, though, the series has renewed itself by returning to the familiar; this first happened towards the end of William Hartnell’s reign as the Doctor, when he touched on Swinging Sixties London in The War Machines (1966), in the process picking up a couple of new “contemporary” companions, Polly and Ben.
Even when the Doctor was accompanied by one of his own race, the Time Lady Romana, it’s interesting to note how often she opted for recognizably Earthly costumes which, while distinctive, were familiar enough to help contrast with the decidedly science fiction fantasies of the aliens they encountered. In that sense, she was simply following the Doctor’s own habit of dressing his “strangeness” in the familiar, albeit usually with some twist–be it William Hartnell’s long hair or Tom Baker’s long scarf.
Arguably, the strangeness of the Doctor was most deliberately hidden in the plain, worn leather jacket appearance of Christopher Eccleston’s ninth Doctor. Yet, if it was a deliberate tonal step away from the expected costume eccentricity, Davies’ choice of debut alien menace for his new Doctor was absolutely on the money as far as displaying his understanding of the show. In the course of Rose (2005), we saw the alien Nestene Intelligence, plotting to conquer Earth through its natural affinity with all forms of plastic, once again opt to use animated shop-window mannequins (aka Autons) as its terror-inspiring foot-soldiers.
Actually, this is also a prime example of the show going one step beyond placing the strange among the familiar; instead, actually making the familiar strange, alien and frightening. Life-long fan John Barrowman, about to join the show as Captain Jack Harkness (later of Torchwood), well remembers the Nestene’s original appearance back in 1970’s Spearhead from Space, when the Autons had provided a baptism of fire for the Doctor’s third incarnation. As Barrowman’s older sister Carole later explained in an interview for the Io9 website: “While shopping in Glasgow one Saturday morning, I insisted–and when I say insisted I mean forced with my arms clamped tightly around his chest–he stand outside a department store window for two or three minutes to make sure the mannequins weren’t really Autons and that they were not poised to crash out of the display and follow us home. They were not and they did not, but baby brother checked his back the entire trip.”
Admittedly, making the familiar alien frequently got the show’s makers into trouble, especially after the Autons’ second appearance in Terror of the Autons (1971). Disguising Autons as police officer drew a polite word of complaint from the Metropolitan Police; suffocating one character in a large plastic chair probably didn’t help, while introducing a killer troll-like toy figure inspired many children to suddenly distrust their teddy bears. Knuckles smarting, that particular production team drew back, but this didn’t stop some of their successors from trying something similar. One wonders just how many younger viewers will always now retain a suspicion about what might be lurking in the Wi-Fi after having watched The Bells of St John (2013). And who will be able to relax in any 1980s-styled hotel after having watched the world of nightmares placed there in 2011 episode The God Complex?
Doctor Who revels in—indeed demands—change. Yet, as the show prepares for its 2014 series with new star Peter Capaldi, one thing is pretty certain; Doctor Who will undoubtedly continue to delight and entertain with its own unique ability to take the strangest, uncanny ideas and place them up against the familiar and mundane.
First published in Jamais Vu: Strange Among The Familiar (#1 Winter 2014)
