Monday 30 October 2017

Seriously, what is it with the Blink Love Affair?

Like every good Doctor Who Fan, I bought the Doctor Who Annual 2006, adorned with one-time hero Christopher Eccleston looking like he doesn’t want to be in the photo session very much longer and True Star of the Show Billie Piper looking like she’s in an audition for Top Shop’s next model.  (What a very odd pair of actors to put together.)

Unlike every good Doctor Who Fan, I actually read the Doctor Who Annual 2006 including the short story: What I Did on My Summer Holidays by Sally Sparrow. Seemingly however, I was the only person in the universe who, when Blink aired in 2007 thought all the way through the show, “I’ve already bought this once.” I didn’t see what a well-scripted piece of television it could have been because I was too busy thinking about being ripped off.

One could argue that Steven Moffat has been selling us the same Doctor Who story since Silence in the Library – or even before that, his story from the Virgin Decalogs Continuity Errors, set in a library and involving time travel. But that would be cruel. (And I am a keen advocate of Mr Moffat, who I think gets bashed far too much!)

But seriously. Blink? Blink? Blink? It came second only to The Day of the Doctor in the massive DWM poll in 2014. What is so special about it? Moffat on his own has written far greater, more expansive, more intelligent and more interesting scripts. Look no further than The Eleventh Hour, The Pandorica Opens, The Big Bang, A Christmas Carol, Day of the Moon, Asylum of the Daleks, The Snowmen, The Name, Night, Day and Time of the Doctor. I love much of his Capaldi work too but to mention that with reference to the DWM poll would be disingenuous as at that moment in time, they had yet to be made. (For the record though, Dark Water/Death in Heaven is a 10/10 knock-out classic for my money) All the listed stories above though are surely more ambitious and spectacular than Blink. Even Blink’s sequel The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone has more energy, narrative drive and tension and it’s never mentioned in the same breath. Moffat himself suggested he didn’t quite know why people loved Blink so much, it being the Cheap One Without the Doctor In It.

I wonder if the fan love affair is not actually with Blink but rather the weeping angels? Every returning foe inevitably incurs diminishing returns and the recurrence of the angels becomes less and less frightening, despite their undeniable impact. Perhaps it’s that first appearance, and in particular the scene at Blink’s climax in which Larry’s eyes fill the screen in abject terror, which lingers in the memory. By The Time of Angels, the lonely assassins have become old news, less to get excited about, despite the fact that they are used more imaginatively and arguably in more frightening and insidious ways.

Of course, there is much about Blink that is terrific: the dialogue for a kick-off. “Not sure but really, really hoping: pants?” There’s the glorious, beautiful and sad scene with Billy Shipton in the hospital bed. The inherent cleverness of the DVD extra that talks to Sally not once but twice in different scenes using the same dialogue (although I’ve never heard of a DVD player whose pause function keeps “slipping”). The last ten minutes in Wester Drumlin are extraordinarily tense. But still, there lingers the awful feeling that Blink is a little bit slight, that it is so small and insignificant. When I’m mentally listing stories from Season 3 – which of course, I do regularly – I often forget it’s there, sandwiched as it is between the Human Nature two-parter and the epic, world-shattering, three-part finale, which surely stand as better examples of Doctor Who?

What Blink lacks are characters we can truly invest in. I know that Sally and Larry and Kathy and Billy are only around for 40 minutes so they always feel like they’re standing in for the Doctor and Martha. We come to resent them a little bit. When Kathy is transported to Hull, we’re supposed to care. Sally cries as she reads the letter from Kathy but there’s no investment there from the audience. We’ve only known Kathy for a few minutes and frankly, she was a bit annoying. This is no fault of Steven Moffat’s. It’s foreknowledge. It’s knowing what Doctor Who usually serves up. Because Sally isn’t going to suddenly become a recurring character and we’re not going to bump into Larry again, their story feels isolated, and although it’s shamelessly romantic, it’s also unbelievable. Larry hasn’t got anything about him. He’s cowardly, geeky and like his sister, a bit annoying. Sally is a walking archetype: confident, cheeky, almost superhuman and all men fall at her feet. We do get a hint of hidden depths in her “[Sad is] happy for deep people” but any exploration of Sally’s character is on a hiding to nowhere in such a short runtime. That the two oddballs get together at the end is, in the spirit of Doctor Who, uplifting but also a bit saccharine and the moment when the couple hold hands doesn’t really land. The weeping angels in the end are far more memorable and affecting than the Sparrow and Nightingale romance, yet they get surprisingly little screen time in comparison.
To me, Blink is a perfectly efficient story. As a Doctor-lite adventure, it works. It does its job. But it’s by no means a masterpiece. Even the plot, which purports to be clever, doesn’t really work. How does the Doctor use a few photographs to put together the clues for Sally? How does he know that Billy will go into DVD manufacturing? How does he know which house the weeping angels are hiding in? And why are they hiding there anyway? Are we left to assume that Sally wrote the whole story down in that plastic wallet she hands him while he’s chasing a lizard?

Yes, the weeping angels make an impact: they are a tremendous Doctor Who villain, brilliantly conceived and perfectly shot. But this is Sally Sparrow’s story and that isn’t how Blink is remembered. It’s The One With The Weeping Angels. Not The One With Sally Sparrow. And that ultimately is it’s failing. It’s ace card – the angels – are not used as well as they would be in future adventures. Because Steven Moffat really loves time travel. That’s what the story is really about: time travel. It’s a story about plot and the plot doesn’t quite hold together. Of course, it has its set pieces but in terms of the whole of Doctor Who, Blink is a bit average. Its characters are weak and its emotionally flat. What fans really love is to be scared and Blink’s heightening to classic status is surely due to those few terrifying minutes with Larry and the angel. And most annoyingly of all, to escape the angel, in the end, he simply walks off into the next room fairly safely.

Despite its successes, I can never get away from the fact that I’d already experienced the story in the Annual and that one had a better leading lady. Not only is Blink slight, it’s rehashed slight. Like any fan, I can enjoy it for what it is. But I can’t convince myself it’s the best. As Moffat himself said, “The Doctor’s not even in it.” Maybe if Moffat had used a little girl rather than Superwoman Sally Sparrow, it might be more effective? Ironically, a couple of years later, he’d have the best of both worlds in Amelia and Amy Pond, the little girl and the Superwoman being one and the same person and for the next seven years, he’d give us more and more rehashes of the same time travel plot. I jest of course. If Blink is an average episode of Doctor Who then we are looking at an extraordinary series indeed, and in Steven Moffat a great, great writer.

JH

Learning to Love: Silver Nemesis

When I was a boy I was the proud owner of a mere eight Doctor Who stories: Remembrance of the Daleks, The Happiness Patrol, Silver Nemesis, The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, Battlefield, The Curse of Fenric, Ghost Light and Survival. I adored each of those creaky VHS recordings. Deeply. Beyond measure. I watched them over and over again. Had my Doctor Who viewing experience begun a year earlier, perhaps I wouldn’t be here writing now (my crushing disappointment at seeing Syl’s first season on video a few years later was also similarly deep and beyond measure).

So for a long while that run from Remembrance to Survival represented the Very best. Doctor Who. Ever. In fact, for a long while, to my very young self, it represented the Only. Doctor Who. Ever. And it was only a few years later when I started collecting videos with The Five Doctors and City of Death that the chinks in Seasons 25 and 26’s respective armours started to reveal themselves, namely in Silver Nemesis.

To be blunt, Silver Nemesis is astonishingly bad. There are so many tiny things that irritate throughout, and that’s before the crimes of Keff McCulloch are even mentioned. (While I’m at it though, how ironic and face-palmingly wonderful that the Master of Straight-Blowing Jazz Courtney Pine and the Master of Nothing at All Keff McCulloch share a credit on a Doctor Who episode. But seriously, what is with that awful, awful Nee-Naw, Nee-Naw awfulness synthing its way across Windsor as Lady Peinforte and Richard take an awkwardly costumed stroll in Part Two?) The plotting is utter madness: Why do the Doctor and Ace visit Windsor Castle twice in Part One either side of a trip to Lady Peinforte’s house? Why are the Cybermen having a Musical Statues competition in the middle of the woods before DeFlores and his lover arrive nonchalantly before asking if they can become bosom buddies? Why does Lady Peinforte show Richard his grave and why does she then go mad? Things in Silver Nemesis simply happen. In quick cuts. Suddenly, Ace and her Professor are having a little whistle in a field. Suddenly, the skinheads have been all but skinned. Suddenly, some duff policemen get gassed.

A few years ago, I decided to attempt to find something to like in Silver Nemesis. I sat down with a mate to see if we could learn to love Silver Nemesis.  Because Silver Nemesis had become that most dreadful of things: a soiled childhood memory. It had once been just as affecting and exciting as The Greatest Show in the Galaxy. Once, I had absolutely thrilled to see Ace racing through the hangar in Part Three dodging fireworks and firing golden nuggets. Now, it had become just what is was: a dreadfully written, cheap-looking mess. An embarrassment. And I wanted that childhood memory back. I wanted to see the Silver Nemesis I saw so long ago.

How we laughed at it.

I found that I’d missed the point. Surely, Silver Nemesis is an out and out comedy. I mean, surely it is! By accident or design, we asked ourselves? Truthfully, we didn’t care; we were in hysterics.

My new favourite thing in the world has got to be the absolute earnestness with which Gerard Murphy utters the line, “On my life Ma’am, I guarantee it” to her mad question: “You’re sure the poison is well mixed?” He gives such enormous weight to the first half of the line, “On my life, Ma’am.” There then follows a huge dramatic pause before he almost whispers the message he is actually attempting to relate: “I guarantee it.” Such mental line readings are prolific in Silver Nemesis. It positively hums with mental line readings. Anton Diffring is as incoherent and indecipherable as George Pravda in The Mutants. “It vill be decisive,” he blurts out in Part One with all the passion of a wet trump. This is followed by “I give you the Fourth Reich” which neither the character nor the actor make any attempt to believe in.

“Dorothea Remington did bribe away my cook,” is another crazed favourite. In fact, that whole scene in the limo, apart from being entirely pointless is such enormous fun. Gerard Murphy becomes the star of the episode again in his emphatic delivery of the rejoinder to Remington’s, “I just came over from London,” when he sincerely drives through with a breathy “Two days ride.” And later on, when Remington tells us she’s “checking out [her] roots,” Gerard Murphy gives his sage, earnest advice: “Tis wise with crops this time of year, Ma’am.” What makes these instances of Gerard Murphy’s sincerity so priceless is the fact that Kevin Clarke’s attempt at Shakespearean dialogue is so cod, so dire, so massively inadequate that Murphy’s delivery seems even more ill-matched. He doesn’t even try to send up such poor material: like a good, old pro, he goes for it. With full abandon. And it’s gloriously funny. “As my Lady knows, before I entered your service I was found guilty of a large number of offences!” he cries wildly in Part One. Indeed you were, Gerard. To the acting profession. Most beautifully of all, Gerard Murphy is given the show’s last gag: “We have none of this jazz whereof you speak but I think you will like this.”

My brothers and I continue to act out the glorious skinheads scene. What the hell is it all about? What were Messrs Clarke and Cartmel thinking when they wrote, read and presumably re-read this:

SKINHEAD 1:      “You looking at me?”
LADY P:                 “Stand aside.”
SKINHEAD 2:      “What are you, social workers?”
RICHARD:            “Out of my lady’s way.”
SKINHEAD 1:      “We want to tell you our problems.”
LADY P:                 “Would you be turned into rats?”
SKINHEAD 2:      “We already have been.”
SKINHEAD 1:      “Poor ones.”
SKINHEAD 2:      “That’s our problem.”
SKINHEAD 2:      “Money!”

And the remarkable hero that Gerard Murphy is ends the scene with a lurid reading and a half smile of, “Money, say you?” It’s blisteringly good television. I wonder if Clarke or Cartmel had ever met a skinhead. Presumably, they’d met a couple who greeted them with the declaration that they wanted to tell the two gents their problems? Who can be sure?

Speaking of poor dialogue, I love the Cybermen in this. They are so unlike Cybermen they might as well just be… well, men. “The fact of her death will drive her insane,” the Leader intones mechanically in an uncharacteristic off-day for David Banks. And later, his namby-pambying curious underling asks politely, “Is this the human condition known as madness, Leader?” The Leader replies with, “It is.” Yeah, of course he recognises madness. He’s a Cyberman, for heaven’s sake. Why wouldn’t he? And how stupid is his curious underling if he doesn’t recognise madness when he hears a woman shouting “Where?!” from across a field through a castle wall? In fact, it’s a good job they spent ages planning for Peinforte’s madness as the Leader’s very next instruction relies completely on her being mad. “Kill them.”

There is so much to enjoy in Silver Nemesis that it’s become almost preferable to The Curse of Fenric. Almost. And whilst that childhood memory of excitement and derring-do has not quite been rekindled, I have come to fall in love with it again albeit in a different, more ridiculing kind of way.

In conclusion, as Gerard Murphy would shamelessly exclaim, without the slightest hint of embarrassment: “It sounds like a bear. BUT WORSE!”

JH

Big Finish and the Troughton Years

In the DWM Special Edition on The Second Doctor from way back in 2004, Dave Stone argued that it was a very tricky affair trying to recapture Patrick Troughton’s era in print. Not just the mannerisms of the Doctor but the types of stories that would have fitted in to the series between 1967 and 1969. Since the birth of The Companion Chronicles, The Early Adventures and The Lost Stories, Big Finish have ploughed headfirst into the Troughton years and done their best to rekindle that particular fire from almost 50 years ago. How successful have they been in their emulation of, what many consider to be, a golden age of Doctor Who?
Firstly, we must ask ourselves what it is we expect of such a nostalgia trip. What were the Troughton years actually like? Arguably, the three seasons on television are quite distinct. The first is a curious mix of eclectic tales which struggle to settle down into a recognisable show. This is actually quite a fun, freewheeling approach much like Hartnell’s last season. There is nothing very similar about The Highlanders and The Macra Terror aside from the regular cast. The Faceless Ones feels very modern and The Underwater Menace like a B-movie. Troughton’s second season is famous for its monsters and bases under siege and this cannot really be argued against apart from the anomaly that is The Enemy of the World. The third feels a little featureless. Lots of grey sets and dull stories such as The DominatorsThe Krotons and The Space Pirates. Like his first series though, this one cannot decide what it wants to be: The Dominators tries to launch a new monster in a political parable. The Mind Robber literally inhabits the realm of fantasy. The Invasion is a Web of Fear retread with more hardware. The Krotons feels like a very traditional story but Doctor Who wasn’t really about this sort of thing from Day One. In fact, there are very few stories quite like The Krotons, only The Savagesspringing to mind. The Seeds of Death is a return to the bases under siege. The Space Pirates is a space opera and The War Games a pseudo-historical epic. There is no real stylistic link between any of the tales on offer here, apart from the fact that they all, bar perhaps ironically The Mind Robber, feel overlong.
Given the above, what do we expect a Big Finish Troughton era CD to be like? Perhaps it depends precisely when the story is set in terms of the three seasons? Even with that in mind though, very few have felt particularly authentic. I wonder if Big Finish are running into the same problems of evocation met by the BBC and Virgin Novels.
To take The Companion Chronicles first: We now have a great wealth of stories from the Troughton era thanks to this fabulous series of narrated readings. The most celebrated examples of The Companion Chronicles output do not come from the Troughton era though. The Hartnell stories are the real gold dust of the series: The Sara Kingdom trilogy, the Oliver Harper trilogy and the fabulous two-handers (The SufferingThe Anachronauts and The Flames of Cadiz) stand head and shoulders above the rest of the stories, aside from perhaps James Goss’s Pertwee tales. The Troughton stories are a mixed bag and struggle to emulate the series from which they spring.
Perhaps closest is Jonathan Morris’s The Great Space Elevator, a true base-under-siege which only slips up with its anachronous title. Morris’s The Glorious Revolution is similarly successful but only really feels like The Highlanders in its presentation which is hardly indicative of the era. Other tales don’t quite feel like true Troughton stories, despite the flexibility of the late 60s tales. The Memory Cheats is a little too dark and political. The Emperor of Eternity is a historical story from a season completely without them. The Jigsaw War sets out to make the most of The Companion Chronicles format rather than the Troughton era and The Dying Light is part of a trilogy of stories featuring other Doctors and a Gallifreyan character. This is not to say that those stories are poor – far from it – but they really don’t feel like they have much to do with the period of Doctor Who from which they purport to originate. The Selachian Gambit comes close. It is a fun romp not a million miles away from The Underwater Menace or The Macra Terror but still feels rather like a base-under-siege story from the following season complete with stomping monsters. The Zoe stories contain a framing device which sets them absolutely after the era in question. The recent stories in the Second Doctor boxset all deal with hard science fiction ideas which the series wouldn’t have dreamt of investigating at the time, aside from The Mouthless Dead which feels like a historical oddity in itself. What can be noted of The Companion Chronicles though, is the incredibly high standard of writing across the board. They are a fabulous testament to the quality of the Big Finish writers, and in Jonathan Morris, John Dorney, Steve Lyons and especially Simon Guerrier, these releases make the writers the real stars of the show, even considering Frazer Hines’s incredible Patrick Troughton impersonation.
The Early Adventures are a little more successful. Simon Guerrier’s The Yes Men sits happily alongside The Macra TerrorThe Forsaken feels like it could sit pretty well in a season including The Highlandersand does something interesting with Ben’s character. The Black Hole is a peculiarity, taking into account much of the entire series’ continuity including notably The Two Doctors and the machinations of the Meddling Monk. Most successful of all is paradoxically, the incredibly tiresome Isos Network. Nick Briggs waxes lyrical on the CD extras about how he wanted Isos to feel like a narrated soundtrack of a missing story, complete with longueurs where we cannot see what is happening. In itself, that is a very peculiar thing to set out to do and one which doesn’t reap any rewards, the whole story ending up feeling like listening to The Space Pirates, which is a task for the insane in itself. In its extremely slow, languorous approach, The Isos Network ends up feeling like a typical example of a very poor Season Six story.
Hardly surprisingly, The Lost Stories feel like the most authentic Troughton tales Big Finish has produced. Again, unsurprisingly, it is 1960s veteran writer Donald Tosh who provides the truest evocation of the period in The Rosemariners. A deserted base, a truly effective monster: it is perhaps surprising that this story was dropped from production schedules at the time. Likewise, Lords of the Red Planet truly feels apiece with The Ice Warriors and The Seeds of Death. Its network of tunnels can be very easily imagined and despite a few set-pieces on the planet’s surface – which could actually be imagined as Ealing filming akin to The Moonbase – there is very little about it that can’t be visualised in glorious 405 line black and white. Prison in Space too is very evocative and very funny, using the regulars to great effect. It is understandable how the production team may have lost their bottle at the time given certain aspects of the script but the female dominatrices are used tastefully and are really quite funny to boot. One can easily imagine Frazer Hines and Patrick Troughton absolutely loving the dynamics at play in Prison in Space. Even though the stories are presented as narrated dramatisations, they really do evoke the period in a way that the Companion Chronicles and Early Adventures don’t quite manage. It is perhaps in their boldness, simplicity and singularity of narrative purpose that these stories feel truer.
Perhaps, in the end, the only real way to write a 1960s Second Doctor script proper was to have actually been there at the time? Even so, Big Finish have produced scripts which, even if they don’t quite manage authenticity, stand up extremely well to their television counterparts and provide incredibly good material for the actors and listeners as well as originality, incredible authorly skill and a cartload of adventure. Maybe authenticity doesn’t matter in the end: maybe it’s the quality of the script-writing and in the case of something like The Black Hole or The Jigsaw War, innovation that we ought to be thinking about. Is authenticity outdated? Is authenticity backward looking? I think that perhaps if we’re looking for perfect authenticity, the DVDs are always on the shelf.
Still to come in June 2018: The Second Doctor Companion Chronicles Volume 2! At £20 it’s a steal!
JH

Is it Sexist?

With the hugely increased emphasis in the media on diversity, BAME casting and roles for women, it seems that the only group of actors not represented by Equity divisions or movements are White British males. The casting of Jodie Whittaker as our hero, or rather heroine, perhaps represents the apotheosis of this modern obsession.
Alison Graham in the Radio Times:

"...isn’t it simply marvellous that a woman will be heading a drama that won’t involve her looking sad in the rain as she investigates murders and grapples with a complicated personal life (see In the Dark and every crime drama of recent years). Nor is she a body discovered in a shallow grave in woodland or stuffed into bin bags or tortured (again, pretty much every crime drama of recent years)..."
This quotation feels, in this moment, extremely disingenuous. In recent months, the big shows across television have been the aforementioned In the DarkThe LochBrokenTop of the LakeChina GirlFearlessVictoria, Happy Valley and Broadchurch. Only Broken can be said to be truly led by a male actor and the character lives up to the name of the series entirely in that he has been utterly damaged. Broadchurch essentially has two leads, one a mature, virtuous and strong woman, the other a man who can’t get on with most people, especially women and his own daughter. Fearless features an incredibly strong female lead in Helen McCrory, Happy Valley boasts the unassailable Sarah Lancashire, Top of the Lake stars Elizabeth Moss as a fiercely independent woman, Victoria speaks for itself.
To take The Loch as a microcosm of what is actually going on here: Laura Fraser’s Annie Redford is a strong police officer. She may be facing issues with a problematic daughter but she works through them professionally and is nothing short of absolutely honourable. Siobhan Finneran plays her boss, DCI Lauren Quigley who is cast in the role traditionally played by a male. Like Redford, Quigley is utterly professional and nothing short of absolutely honourable. Let’s think about the male characters: The Radio Times review asked, “Wait a minute – the jogger guy... is he the teacher guy too? Who was in the pub with Annie? Are we meant to remember? Baffling.” Not one of the male guest stars is remotely memorable. In fact, they are all, to a man, insipid. John Sessions plays a deficient DCI Frank Smilie who makes a whole host of policing mistakes. Don Gilet plays a psychoanalyst with women problems. The male students all seem to need counselling and are either bullies, mentally ill, fawning over the “plucky” Shona McHugh’s Evie Redford or psycho-killers. One male character is bedbound with no lines, another is a twice-murderer on the mend and another is a husband whose biggest sin, and source of self-destructive guilt, is lying about seeing the Loch Ness Monster.
I am absolutely all for strong roles for women. What I am aggressively opposed to is the sidelining of strong male characters for this to happen. Why can’t we write strong parts for all characters, whatever the gender? Are we as a nation, feeling guilty after all the years of female emancipation and making up for it by making our male leads weak? If The Loch is anything to go by that is exactly what seems to be happening.
This female uprising has been present in Doctor Who since its new inception in 2005. Fans bemoaned the fact the Doctor never saved the day in Series One. Instead, Rose was our leading character and the Doctor someone who helped her and others grow. Under Steven Moffat, the show arguably became more about the Doctor, with more and more episodes even named after him. The Doctor, The Widow and The WardrobeVincent and the DoctorThe Doctor’s WifeThe Doctor Falls, even The Return of Doctor Mysterio! Of course, the Doctor saves the day many, many times and is more prone to rabble-rousing speeches about himself: See The Pandorica OpensA Good Man Goes to WarThe Rings of AkhatenDeath in Heaven and The Doctor Falls. What is perhaps problematic however, is the way in which as the Doctor has become older, he has paradoxically become increasingly immature and emasculated. He cannot read relationships, is insulting to Clara’s boyfriends, struggles to admit to his own anxieties and fallibilities (his impending destinies on Lake Silencio and Trenzalore, his inability to locate Gallifrey; his blindness; the summoning from Davros) and by every turn needs a female character to show him how to behave. It is Clara who is ultimately responsible for the saving of Gallifrey and indeed, the saviour of the Doctor in millions of aspects of his life, even if he doesn’t know it. The fact he needs cue cards in Under The Lake and gentle prodding from Clara throughout their time together is not because the Doctor is an alien but because he is a man. It is almost as if Moffat, a writer bafflingly criticised for his inability to write strong women (River Song, Missy, Amy Pond, Clara Oswald: Hello?!) feels the need to not just write strong women but rubbish men too, perhaps as a result of his own characteristic good-natured self-deprecation.
The male emancipation doesn’t end with the Doctor. Rory is continually the butt of a joke. When Steven Moffat introduced the character on Doctor Who Confidential, he said, “He’s the guy who wanted to be a doctor but ended up being a nurse.” Admittedly, he could have worded that better. But to put such a drip of a character next to the bloody-minded Amy ends up making him look even more like a doormat and her to seem even more irritating. The recurrent character Craig is allowed an entire episode devoted to proving to himself that he can look after his own baby. That season is full of stories of ineffectual dads too. The Curse of the Black Spot, with no female characters outside the siren, features a particularly loathsome band of male characters. Perhaps Listen is the strongest example of the Doctor being afraid of his own shadow and Clara sorting it all out for him. Whilst this is an extremely trite way of describing the episode and by no means does it justice, it can’t really be argued that the story doesn’t illustrate a particularly childish Doctor, who interrupts Clara’s evening to sort out a personal problem. Whilst this makes him utterly charming and Doctor-y, it can’t be denied that it is yet another tale which takes great glee in emasculating our hero.
So what does the Doctor represent? What does he mean to us? Ultimately, it’s in Moffat’s latest, The Doctor Falls, that it becomes most apparent. He does what he does “because it’s right.” He is the cleverest person in the room, gives fun lectures at the drop of a hat, saves people he doesn’t know and does the right thing not with a gun but with a screwdriver and a smile. Now, of course, to cast a female in the role doesn’t mean she can’t be all of those things too. Of course, she could, and the rest! But with so many drippy male characters prevalent on television it feels sad that boys are about to lose one of their last remaining role models.
When I was a boy, the Doctor was my role model. My only role model aside from my Dad. I didn’t have many friends, I didn’t meet many people of great imagination, I didn’t see a great deal of intelligent thinking outside my living room, both in my Dad and the Doctor. Would I have been drawn to the Doctor had he been a she? I don’t know. What I do know is that he was utterly vital to me, in making me see the wonder outside the small mindedness of my school peers and the ability to win through flights of fancy and imagination rather than football and fighting. In short, as a boy growing up in Rochdale and Oldham, the Doctor showed me that there were other ways of thinking, other ways to live. And he was the only person on television who did that. Batman didn’t. Superman didn’t. In fact, no other hero was as interesting. Even Mulder, who I loved, would be quick to pull a gun or bust someone’s nose in his pursuit of the truth.
So it feels confusing, odd, discomforting and weird that the Doctor will now be played by a woman.  Is the last truly great male role model gone forever? Were my Dad to turn around after 54 years and pronounce himself a woman, I’d feel betrayed. Now the Doctor hasn’t done this; Chris Chibnall has. And it feels even more like a betrayal. In the end though, I’d love my Dad all the same, despite being angry, confused and irritated. Of course, we’ll love the Doctor too.
But I wonder where the need for a female Doctor has come from. Where were the huddled masses surrounding Parliament begging for this to happen? Or was it a small but vocal minority of people flying the diversity flag? A friend of mine who works in the media said to me that the backstage crew on television programmes was almost universally white as if that were a magnificent problem that needed to be overcome. Why and how?
During my school years, I was heavily involved with local amateur societies. We were putting on a production of Alan Bleasdale’s No More Sitting on the Old School Bench, a brilliant play tackling racism in comprehensive schools in the 80s. My school had a population of 80% Asian children, mainly from Pakistan and Bangladesh. There were also a notable percentage of the school taking drama. I put out an advert for teenagers wanting to get involved in the play to come along and audition. This was pushed by the drama teachers and department. The result: not one person wanted to get involved. The play was, in the end, unsuccessful as the community of diverse children it tried to depict was not represented. But the problem here wasn’t one of a failure to reach out but a lack of cultural interest. Whilst 80% of the children in the school were from Asian backgrounds, only 2 or 3 white kids wanted anything to do with theatrical societies. The problem still persists. A society in Shaw struggled to cast To Kill a Mockingbird. A company in Bury struggled to cast the black singer in The Full Monty. We cannot combat this problem simply by casting more BAME actors because the fact is, there aren’t as many. We are a country whose population and culture is, by quite a huge margin, white.
In writing this, I find myself becoming afraid of labels: racism, sexism. I wonder if that seems to be why it is so easy to actively promote diversity: the fear of being labelled racist or sexist? I also feel a guilt in that I am a white male wanting to see more white male role models. The BBC stated that they were on a mission to ensure that 1/7 of their TV hosts and hostesses were BAME. But why have such an arbitrary aim? Yes, their remit is to be representative but is 1/7 representative? Are 1/7 of the British public BAME? Where has this information come from and why is it so important? The token female in every BBC panel show often feels like just that, such is the merit they bring to the programme. I saw a production of Little Shop of Horrors at the Royal Exchange which was astonishingly good apart from the astonishingly poor performance of the black dentist. Surely we should employ the best actors and comedians, rather than reserving seats for inferior ones because of their lineage.
So in the casting of a female Doctor, I can’t help but think this is yet another example of an arbitrary decision based on the need to diversify. I’m not sure that diversifying for its own sake is particularly creative. If a writer wants to write about five working class bin men, because they have a history of being a white working class bin man, why should one of them be a woman or black? What’s perhaps worse is the thought of what comes next: A black Doctor because diversity? A disabled Doctor because diversity? A gay Doctor because diversity? It actually rules out more actors than it invites to the part and potentially misses the best Doctor we will never have? And if the next Doctor is a white male will that then be racist? Will it be seen as proof that a female Doctor doesn’t work? In an age of equality, it seems perverse that not one male actor was auditioned. Surely if the message is equality, the chances of getting the part should be equal? More disappointingly, it does make the casting of Jodie Whittaker look like a gimmick, a chance to get more bums on seats as Doctor Who stops being water cooler conversation in its antiquity?
In an age of Scott and BaileySilent WitnessVeraTop of the LakeIn the Dark and The Loch, and their cavalcade of confused, cheating, emasculated men, do we really need one less male role model? Is this sexist? Is this racist? I don’t know. The more I think about it, the more confused and confusing, guilt-ridden and apologetic the argument for a male Doctor becomes. Perhaps that is, in the end, the point.
Hopefully, Jodie Whittaker will be a superlative Doctor because of her abilities as an actress, and not because she is a woman. But I fear, if she is successful, that the headlines will read: ABOUT TIME. A FEMALE DOCTOR WAS JUST WHAT WHO NEEDED. As if the very fact that Jodie is female makes the show better. When asked in The Doctor Falls if the future would be female, the Doctor answered, “We can only hope.” I’m not sure what the message is here. Is the show headed where it seems to have been for a while? In the direction of the “All men are rubbish” slogan? That’s not equality, feminism or diversity. That’s an irresponsible message and one that doesn’t allow those little boys like my 7 seven-year-old self anyone at all to look up to. Let’s hope the British public simply accept it without the need to fall on any side and without feeling the need to write an essay about it.
JH