In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that I do know three of the contributors to this book. Two are acquaintances who I have not seen for years, but one is a regular commenter on this blog.
I should also explain the differing lengths and even styles in this review. I was aiming for concision, with brief, one or two paragraph sections on each essay. However, in some cases, I disagreed so violently with the views expressed that I wanted to challenge them in detail. In other cases I felt the author missed a point or did not develop it enough and so I expounded at length.
Time and Relative Dissertations in Space
David Butler (ed.)
How to pilot a TARDIS: audiences, science fiction and the fantastic in Doctor Who
David Butler
This is primarily a compare and contrast exercise on An Unearthly Child and the TV Movie. The results are not particularly surprising, as the same comparison has been made several times in Doctor Who Magazine over the last eleven years (is it really more than a decade?!). Rather more interesting is the technical examination of the direction of An Unearthly Child (and how much of that was changed at the last minute on Sydney Newman’s orders), as well as some research conducted by showing both episodes to an audience of people most of whom had never seen Doctor Who at all. The vast majority found the 1960s episode more interesting and engaging, although Butler seems to have missed the fact that they liked the alien-in-familiar-setting aspect of the story; one wonders what they would have made of the rest of the first series.
The child as addressee, viewer and consumer in mid-1960s Doctor Who
Jonathan Bignell
This started out as if it was going to cover the same ground as fan discourse, only with less depth and more jargon. I was pleasantly surprised to see it examining things fandom rarely, if ever, looks at, namely the way children experience television – experience being the operative word, given that this deals with toys and playground games based on television as well as actually watching it.
Bignell’s bibliography also has my second favourite academic essay title ever, namely, ‘Where is Action Man’s penis?: determinants of gender and the bodies of toys’. My favourite title, incidentally, is ‘If “Woman” is Just an Empty Category, Then Why Am I Afraid to Walk Alone at Night? Identity Politics Meets the Postmodern Subject’.
‘Now how is that wolf able to impersonate a grandmother?’ History, pseudo-history and genre in Doctor Who
Daniel O’Mahony
This essay raises some interesting points about genre and history in Doctor Who. Unfortunately (and not for the last time in this collection) it is not long enough to develop these ideas, ending up as food for thought rather than a real argument, although it is still worth reading. I was particularly glad to see I am not the only person who sees The Aztecs as primarily a science fiction story.
At the risk of concentrating on a minor point, I would reject O’Mahony’s contention that the ‘historical’ is the only genre recognised by Doctor Who fans. Aside from other genres (‘Gothic horror’ being the most obvious, even if the term is used in a way that would puzzle students of eighteenth century literature), divisions by production team can also sometimes serve as generic labels. Note that The Empty Child was praised by fans for being like a Hinchcliffe story, while the almost equally popular Bad Wolf was not. Likewise, Vanessa Bishop was able to criticise The Face of Evil for not being like other Hinchcliffe-produced stories. This indicates that the ‘Hinchcliffe story’ is rather more than a vague term of praise or a reference to the name on the credits, but a shorthand for a particular sub-genre of Doctor Who story.
Bargains of necessity? Doctor Who, Culloden and fictionalising history at the BBC in the 1960s
Matthew Kilburn
An excellent essay, containing a wealth of detail on early Doctor Who. I had no idea that even before the first episode aired, the production team had already realised, and even discussed at length, the fact they faced difficult choices between historical realism and dramatic licence. Nor had I realised that Chief of Programmes, BBC1, Donald Baverstock, had seen the first two stories as too verbose and recommended abandoning scientific and historical education in favour of “historical and scientific hokum” as early as December 1963.
The interesting conclusion is that the historicals were dropped because of competition with the Sunday serials (often literary adaptations set in the past) and because audiences found them too challenging. This opposes the recent fan interpretation that sees the jettisoning of the historicals as a product of a creatively bankrupt production team with no fresh ideas for historical fiction and/or who saw Doctor Who as primarily pure science fiction.
I know very little about Culloden, but I would question the extent to which it was originally intended to comment on Vietnam, if only because when Watkins began work on it in 1962, US involvement in Vietnam was still small and largely, if not entirely, non-military.
The empire of the senses: narrative form and point-of-view in Doctor Who
Tat Wood
Tat Wood attempts to answer the rarely posed question of why Doctor Who’s narrative style remained virtually unchanged throughout its run. This is interesting, but some parts (on museums, collecting, exploration and imperialism) are a little too theoretical for my liking.
The tone is rather odd. Parts assume a fair degree of knowledge of cultural studies (understandably, given this book’s target audience), but parts were very flippant (“the programme’s most articulate and witty megalomaniac machine [BOSS] is also the most overtly gay character in the entire run of the series (excluding the Master, obviously)”), like an extended About Time essay. This made it more readable, but I would hate to have it on my university reading list, especially if I was not UK-based – explanatory notes would be required for some of the cultural references.
The ideology of anachronism: television, history and the nature of time
Alec Charles
Charles’ thesis is that Doctor Who, far from being politically neutral or moderately left of centre, is steeped in “the stagnant decadence of postcolonial nostalgia”. Moreover, “Doctor Who’s – and indeed the entire BBC’s – covert project (disguised beneath a host of liberal platitudes) is to restore and sustain the greatness, or the dregs, of the British Empire.” This is ‘proved’ through some highly selective examples (and in some cases downright errors, such as his assertion that Light in Ghost Light is a colonialist, something not stated or even implied in the story, where he is simply a travelling explorer) and a lot of cultural studies theory. Theory is the key word here, as theory is more important than actual historical facts. For example, his claim that imperialism (which is tacitly, but inaccurately, assumed to mean no more or less than all modern Western empires) seeks to impose an anachronistic, postmodern, non-linear interpretation of history (Charles is unperturbed by the fact that speaking of postmodernism in relation to Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini, let alone Cortes, Napoleon and Mr Kurtz, is itself grossly anachronistic) is supported almost entirely by theory, with no primary research and just half a dozen secondary sources, some highly controversial among real historians. This does not deter Charles, who goes on to state, “imperialism itself has… always been a sexual activity”. This leads to the following claim: Doctor Who was imperialist, therefore only the anti-imperialist Kinda and Snakedance dealt with adult sexuality, contrasting with “Tom Baker’s extravagantly adolescent responses to alien dominatrices” (WHAT?!!). Maybe Bailey’s two stories did deal with sexuality, on a purely symbolic level, but if you want open adult sexuality in the original series, look at The Crusade, The Androids of Tara, Enlightenment, The Caves of Androzani or Revelation of the Daleks. And are Rose and Jack really “adult”?
It does not help that the entire essay is written in unreadable jargon. Here is a sample:
This invisibly sutured conceptual montage bereft of counterpoint, this theme park of flashbacks to better days, this halcyon fantasy, came to recall what you get when you take the dialectical disruption out of the work of Sergei Eistenstein [sic]: all that remains are, in Robert Stam’s words, ‘the commodified ideograms of advertising’ (Stam, 2000: 41).
He is actually referring to Remembrance of the Daleks and Silver Nemesis. The jargon, the irrelevant examples (what does Eisenstein have to do with it?) and the mixed metaphors (I’m not convinced you can suture a montage and you certainly can’t go to a theme park of flashbacks) all serve to obscure rather than clarify his meaning (if he has one). This is the academic equivalent of dogs urinating to stake out territory. It says “I’ve read more books than you have, so I’m better than you are. Don’t even dream of understanding anything I say.” The irony of using such language to complain of self-appointed elites maintaining their power-bases is apparently lost on such people.
Basically, this essay shows why cultural, media and television studies are still seen as ‘Mickey Mouse’ subjects. I’m a great believer that they should be taken as seriously as the study of cultural history, sociology and literature, but while they continue to be hijacked for political purposes, rejecting genuine research in favour of projecting neo-Marxist, post-colonialist and postmodernist theory on to reality (Derrida, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Barthes, Sontag and Said are all mentioned, unsurprisingly, and any essay claiming that liberal imperialism seeks to end history would be incomplete without Fukuyama), they are never going to gain acceptance away from academia, or even among the more established humanities and social sciences. If historians can hold views from across the political spectrum and still attempt to disinterestedly pursue the truth together, there is no reason why cultural studies theorists should not be able to do the same.
Alec Charles was the person who started the ‘Kate Bush wrote Kinda’ fan myth, as a joke. I can only conclude that this is another example of his strange sense of humour, but the suspicion remains that he actually takes all this seriously – and even if he doesn’t, rather more than fifty-seven academics will.
Mythic identity in Doctor Who
David Rafer
This is a bit bitty and waffles in places, but, counter-intuitively, I suspect the problem is that it needs more space. This is far too big a topic for a single short essay. It still raises some good points.
The human factor: Daleks, the ‘Evil Human’ and Faustian legend in Doctor Who
Fiona Moore and Alan Stevens
The essence of this is good, if a bit repetitive, but there are some big problems. Firstly, I would question whether the ‘evil human’ is unique to Dalek stories. The authors cite The Invasion as a possible flaw in their argument. I would add The Tomb of the Cybermen, Revenge of the Cybermen, Earthshock, Attack of the Cybermen, Silver Nemesis, The Seeds of Death, The Deadly Assassin, The Keeper of Traken and many more. The Master is a much more convincing Mephistopheles than the Daleks.
Secondly, their attack on Remembrance of the Daleks is nonsensical. I would be the first to admit that Remembrance has some serious flaws, largely stemming from Ben Aaronovitch’s writing. However, it is absurd of Moore and Stevens to blame him for not following their interpretation of the writing styles of Nation, Spooner, Whitaker, Marks and Saward! Likewise, Aaronovitch clearly advances the Dalek civil war storyline from Saward’s stories. While it had been about internal politics, Davros’ alterations to his Daleks had introduced an element of racial conflict. This is made perfectly clear in the script, but Moore and Stevens ignore it.
I would also question whether Resurrection of the Daleks and Revelation of the Daleks can truly be seen as postmodern. True, they feature a variety of ‘evil’ characters, but they do not show us a variety of perspectives on evil (indeed, a truly postmodern interpretation would not just blur the distinction between the actions of the heroes and villains, but even argue (like Sutekh) that ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are just a matter of taste). Revelation does have a self-referential approach to the nature and manipulation of the televisual image that might be considered postmodern, but this is not addressed by the authors and is tangential to their argument.
I would also question their use of ‘amoral’ throughout, when ‘immoral’ would seem to suit the topic much better.
Still, it isn’t every day that a non-professional fanfic story I have a copy of somewhere turns up on the bibliography of a serious academic study.
The Filipino army’s advance on Reykjavik: world-building in Studio D and its legacy
Ian Potter
This did not say much that I did not already know, but it is worthwhile for its emphasis on the extent to which Doctor Who’s style and format was dictated by economic and technical considerations as much as by artistic ones. The concluding remarks (on the remarkably little change in shot length during the series’ run, until the final few years, when the editing became significantly faster) are worthy of more detailed investigation.
I share Potter’s irritation at the DVD ‘restoration’ of certain episodes to better than their original quality. Marc Ayres is a particular offender, although the most infamous example (which I have not seen) is the removal of an accidentally visible crew member from Earthshock. I don’t know about the examples Potter gives (partially contradicted in his notes, incidentally, I think as the result of a typo) of episodes transmitted from film nevertheless being VidFIREd to look videoed, but the filmed location footage in The Abominable Snowmen episode two looks suspiciously similar in quality to the video studio scenes. CGI optional extras are one thing, but improving on what was achievable at the time is pointless and ultimately detrimental, because it causes the audience to impose modern expectations that were neither feasible nor desired at the time of recording. This further encourages the teleology that all Doctor Who/television/culture would be like their contemporary counterparts if that had been possible, that this is the ideal and everything else is an aberration. Something like The Aztecs was made, according to this view, because audiences did not like science fiction or because CGI werewolves were not possible, not because both audience and programme makers felt it was worth doing.
Similarly, William Hartnell’s fluffs are often mocked by fandom, giving him an unjustified reputation for being a bad actor (Troughton also fluffed his lines from time to time, not that it has ever done his reputation any harm). However, given the nature of recording sixties Doctor Who, with only a few days for line-learning and rehearsal and a whole episode shot in one evening with only a couple of recording breaks (usually for effects or costume changes) and no retakes unless something truly disastrous happened, what is really notable is not just how rarely anyone fluffed, but the way they all, including Hartnell (who not only had the bulk of the dialogue, but who had almost all the technical dialogue*), managed to carry on and produce something transmittable, rather than corpsing or swearing. Compare any given Hartnell episode to the out-takes from David Tennant and Billie Piper on the series two box set; I doubt either of them could have coped under the conditions of the Hartnell era.
* Incidentally, note the way the technobabble increases as the opportunities for retakes increase.
Perhaps oddly, Potter does not note the mistaken perception of Hartnell’s line-recall resulting from this ignorance of the technicalities of television production of the day. He does, however, remind us that Hartnell’s mannerisms (and, I would add, his delivery), while criticised for being exaggerated and theatrical these days, were suited to the television sets of the era, which had only a tiny, blurry picture and a poor-quality speaker.
There is, however, an irritating little error in the footnotes, which talk of Innes Lloyd becoming producer in 1967. From the context, I presume he means 1966, although it is possible that he means Peter Bryant. In addition, throughout the book, but most obvious here, VidFIRE is written as ‘VIDfire’.
‘Who done it’: discourses of authorship during the John Nathan-Turner era
Dave Rolinson
In this provocative essay, Rolinson stresses the roles of script editor, director and especially the producer ahead of that of the writer in Doctor Who’s creative hierarchy. While this is a worthwhile corrective to the fan emphasis on the writers, it ignores the fact that chance, necessity and contingency may have formed some of the patterns he sees as being imposed on writers by the production team. Rolinson stresses that ultimate creative authority lies with the producer, which may be true, but is not quite proven here. While Rolinson points out patterns attributed to Nathan-Turner and his successive script editors, he does not even attempt to explain the huge variation in quality on every conceivable level even between consecutive stories, for example The Caves of Androzani and The Twin Dilemma or Silver Nemesis and The Greatest Show in the Galaxy.
Between prosaic functionalism and sublime experimentation: Doctor Who and musical sound design
Kevin J Donnelly
The music of machines: ‘special sound’ as music in Doctor Who
Louis Niebur
I have put these two essays together, because not only do they deal with similar subjects, but I am going to make similar remarks about them. I have often thought that the sound effects Doctor Who, especially in the sixties, were very important, at times more so than the visuals. I am glad to see that other people agree with me. It is fitting that an area so neglected by fandom finally gets a double-helping here.
Alas, I know so little about music that I can not really judge the accuracy of these essays, except to say that even as a layman I was interested in them. I will definitely be re-reading the sections on The Wheel in Space and The Dominators when I reach them in my ‘in order’ cycle.
The talons of Robert Holmes
Andy Murray
It is nice to see Holmes getting some serious academic consideration, but this could be one of a dozen fanzine or Doctor Who Magazine articles. It would have been improved with greater consideration of Holmes’ weaknesses as well as his strengths. For example, he produced few memorable female characters, and several of the stories he wrote or script edited had no female characters at all (Pennant Roberts cast women in parts written for men in The Sun Makers to make this less obvious). Another fact rarely pointed out is that his characters, like Dickens’, tend to be grotesques and caricatures rather than real people (The Caves of Androzani being the main exception here) – not a criticism as such, but it gives a rounder, more accurate picture of his work than the usual reverent ‘he was good at everything.’ The perceived failures of Holmes’ two scripts for season six are here put down to inexperience, but the flaws in Terror of the Autons (a series of set pieces with no plot and no memorable characters aside from the Master) and his Colin Baker scripts (The Two Doctors is a mess, with Patrick Troughton (the whole reason for this story) given less to do than Fraser Hines, and while I think The Trial of a Time Lord parts 1-4 is a reasonable script ruined by a terrible production, part 13 feels like a tired retread of the best bits of earlier stories, not all of them Holmes’, although given Holmes’ illness, this is perhaps understandable) are just ignored.
It would also be nice to see some more critical analysis of the Hinchcliffe/Holmes partnership. How praiseworthy was it to push the boundaries of acceptable horror and violence on children’s television against the desires of their superiors and when the programme was scheduled in a children’s timeslot? Is a stream of endless horror pastiches really Doctor Who living up to its greatest potential, as fan legend claims? Note the way the About Time books criticise Lloyd, Davis, Bryant and Sherwin for stifling the creativity of the programme’s first three years, while later praising Hinchcliffe and Holmes for doing basically the same thing, a piece of cognitive dissonance that seems to be the norm in fandom these days.
I agree that Holmes was almost certainly the greatest Doctor Who writer ever and that many stories he worked on as writer and script editor are amongst the greatest in the programme’s history, but an academic work should be less hagiographic.
Why is ‘City of Death’ the best Doctor Who story?
Alan McKee
I am tempted to say much the same about this as I did about the last essay. However, such repetition of fan debate is more defensible here, as McKee’s self-confessed aim is less to analyse this particular story and more to show that, despite the postmodern destruction of the traditional hierarchy of aesthetic values, away from academia, people have developed their own means of cultural assessment. City of Death becomes a case study of how such value judgments are made. Nevertheless, this feels oddly out of place in this collection, using Doctor Who as a test case for a wider argument about cultural values, rather than analysing City of Death.
Canonicity matters: defining the Doctor Who canon
Lance Parkin
Parkin provides a guide to the evolving concept of ‘canon’ as well as the related question of fan ‘ownership’ and emotional investment in Doctor Who. Again, this useful to academics, but familiar territory for fans. In his use of an extended quotation from The Simpsons to show that fans’ emotional attachment to the show gives them a feeling that the programme-makers owe them more entertainment, rather than feeling gratitude for what they have already received, Parkin falls victim to one of the more subtle misconceptions in contemporary fandom. While American viewers (not to mention those who download episodes from the internet) get the programme for free, UK viewers have to pay for it, in the form of the licence fee. I hate the attitude, encouraged by Russell T Davies, but endemic in the BBC regarding all its programming, that the public know nothing about television and should be grateful for whatever they get. We pay good money for the BBC and have a right to receive high quality services in return, and it is disingenuous to suggest this is simply fan arrogance. If you went to an expensive restaurant and were given reheated leftovers from the previous week – or from thirty years ago – you would be justified in complaining regardless of whether or not you could cook a gourmet meal yourself.
That aside, the essay is thorough, but I wonder whether the notion of ‘canon’ still has the same relevance as when Parkin presented this paper. Not only do many new series fans (real fans, involved in on-line fandom) have little interest and knowledge of pre-Davies Who (and, in some cases, sheer contempt for it), Davies himself seems to have shifted the aims of Doctor Who, altering what is significant. It may be important to note that a recent series of posts on the doctorwho community about ‘personal canon’ seemed to produce roughly as many comments on the sexual preferences and relationship pairings of the characters as it did more ‘standard’ continuity points about the Time War or the books and audios – and, so far as I could see, few, if any, about some old chestnuts, like the UNIT dating problem or the pattern of Dalek history.
Broader and deeper: the lineage and impact of the Timewyrm series
Dale Smith
This is the standard defence of The New Adventures, according to which they were not fanfic. Of course The New Adventures were fanfic. All Who post-1989, and a fair amount eighties Doctor Who, is fanfic (once again, see my ‘second generation Doctor Who’ post). Why can’t we admit what The New Adventures really were: a series of middlebrow airport thrillers aimed at people in their late teens and early twenties. At their best, they were similar to John le Carré on a bad day or Agatha Christie. At their worst, they were utterly unreadable. They were more ‘adult’ (however you define the term) than some TV stories and less adult than some others. They were never particularly profound, whether emotionally, politically, philosophically or even in terms of Doctor Who continuity. ‘Ace has sex, then her boyfriend dies and she is upset and angry (for umpteen books)’ is not in and of itself actually Shakespearian in its commentary on the human condition. I would not labour the point, were it not for the way New Adventures apologists tend to brush off criticism with “oh, only fanboys who don’t like reading and can’t understand complicated ideas or emotions don’t like the books” – Paul Cornell has said that in slightly more polite language, Lawrence Miles, I think, has said it in rather less polite language.
Here, Smith takes the view that The New Adventures must have had some artistic merit, because they sold well. However, he also points out that Virgin Publishing’s other successful line was erotica. The obvious comparison is not just satirical: ‘niche’ books may involve other pleasures than the purely literary. Presumably people who buy erotica want to read about sexual fantasies that they would not otherwise be able to experience. Likewise, people buying a spin-off novel may well want to have their own pet continuity theories enshrined in print, to read about things they wished to see on television but could not (for reasons of money, practicality or timeslot), or to have favourite TV moments repeated and improved.
Televisuality without television? The Big Finish audios and discourses of ‘tele-centric’ Doctor Who
Matt Hills
This is a parallel text to the previous essay. If that deals with the ‘rad’ approach to post-1989 Doctor Who, this deals with the ‘trad’ approach. Hills admits that “the audios seem instead to focus on recreating an archetypal fan experience [italics in original] or ‘popular memory’… of the TV programme.” However, he goes on to elaborate that this has not prevented a degree of stylistic experimentation.
To be honest, there is little I can say about this, because I soon gave up on the Big Finish stories as too expensive, too derivative, too much like 1980s Doctor Who and poor value for money because (unlike the television stories) I found that few of the CDs repaid repeated listening. It is nice to see both the audios and the novels being dealt with by academics, though, as they do represent an important fan subculture.
My Adventures
Paul Magrs
This was cute, but I have no idea what it is doing in an academic book.
Overall, this is a patchy collection. I am not entirely sure how media/cultural/television studies courses work, so I am unable to tell whether this is a useful academic reference book, as it is clearly intended to be. I can, however, regard it from the perspective of a fan. Certainly anyone wanting to catch up on several decades of fan discourse very quickly (a new fan, for example) would do well to read this, although as my remarks on Parkin’s essay indicate, fandom itself has changed to such an extent that I suspect few new series fans would be interested in old ‘rad vs. trad’ debates, Dalekmania or the contributions of Robert Holmes. For veteran fans, there is much that is new, interesting and useful here, especially in the first half of the book, although there is also a lot of repeating old arguments. Unfortunately, like the many of the four-part stories whose structure it jokingly emulates, it starts well and maintains interest for a while before becoming very repetitive and clichéd and finishing with a decidedly poor conclusion.
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