Doctor Who?

Over at Den of Geek, which is one of those pro-bloggy sites which I can't seem to stop reading and would probably quite enjoy working for, I found a thought provoking article about Doctor Who.

It's here, and it's a critique of New Doctor Who. I enjoyed reading it, I also enjoyed disagreeing with it on a couple of points. Rather than attempt a fannish evisceration of the article - where would the point be? The writer isn't wrong - I thought I'd put together a counter argument.

The darkest days of Doctor Who came in the 1980s. As a fan, it was one of the staples of my life. I would ritually settle down in front of a title sequence that I was getting less and less happy with (the one I grew up with is probably still my favourite), listen to the theme music that had drifted away from the spine chilling electronica that to this day I can't get out of my head, and try to pretend that it hadn't all gone a bit wrong.

In the 1980s, Doctor Who was being torn in about three different directions at once. Some of the writers and script editors wanted the show to be a bit more grown up. Some of the fans did too, because by this point it had been on for something like twenty years. The kids who had been introduced to the Doctor in a Totters Lane junkyard now had families of their own, who were seriously unimpressed with the low budget, effects-poor fare that compared rather unfavorably to TV shows from across the Atlantic, and those parents now wanted a show which reflected their changing priorities.

The BBC didn't want the show at all.

The Producer wanted to try for some popularity. John Nathan Turner is often lambasted for his time on Doctor Who, and very unfairly so, given that without him the show wouldn't have lasted as long as it did. His decisions on guest stars, and on some of the directions the show would take, have made him a byword for all that fans thought was wrong with Doctor Who at the time.

What really happened was this: Doctor Who was in no position to move with the times. The BBC didn't want to spend time and money looking at the programme and the format. They had no interest in giving it the budget it needed to look as though it was punching at the same weight as the competition.

All of these things aside, us fans got something close to what we wanted with Sylvester McCoy's last two seasons. We got what appeared to be final stories for the Daleks and the Cybermen. We got a Doctor who started out a clown and became something very much more complex. And then the whole thing got handed off to Virgin Publishing, where a series of 7th Doctor novels would show what Doctor Who was capable of.

I read them. I think I read all but a couple. Some of them were brilliant. Others, not. They all had one thing in common: they were not suitable for children.

The show as it stands now is back with its roots. It is a TV show you can sit a 12 year old down with (or a bright younger child) and be reasonably assured that they will be entertained and that their imagination will be fired. This is what Doctor Who did for me, it's what Doctor Who does best and it's what Doctor Who is busily engaged in.

Aspects have moved on. The kids that started watching in 2005 are now six years older. Some of them will be turning 12. Some will be turning 18. To keep those viewers interested, stuff changes a little. But not much, and certainly not enough to - for example - alienate the new generation of viewers.

Doctor Who can be dark, because fairy stories are dark, and scary because a lot of children's tales are scary. It can be quite callous and hard, if it wants to, because children aren't the lovely bundles of fluff that some parents have decided they should be. Are you kidding? Listen to children playing some time. Children are so empathy-challenged that you can sit them in front of the Disney Channel for 12 hours - an experience that would make even the most ardent BNP supporter want to investigate how good it can be to share things with people who aren't like us - and they will still be selfish, capricious little shits at the end of it.

The call, by some older fans, to make Doctor Who grow up and be something different is never going to be heeded. To survive, the show needs to recruit new viewers and - paradoxically for a show that completely changes every couple of years - it needs constants.

In his article, Mark Reed said that the show suffered from a poverty of vision and that it could be so much more than 50 minutes of fast-paced lightweight scifi. It could be something like The Wire.

It could. And that would mean it stopped being Doctor Who.

Things do change. Companions come and go, there's continuity (of a sort) over years...decades, even... and the style of the show changes. Watch something from the first year of Doctor Who, then have a look at the Patrick Troughton story The Invasion. Then watch something like The Silurians. Treat yourself to Talons of Weng Chiang, and then watch Frontios. It's a completely different style of show, and yet exactly the same. Like the Doctor himself.

The thing that keeps us coming back to the show is not a desire for it to be as dense or complex as The Wire. It's different for all of is fans, but it hinges on the show saying something important to us when we were younger and continuing to say it today.

The Moffat Era is still talking to me, and although I really would like a network and a writer to take a science fiction idea and do with it what was done to The Wire, or The West Wing, I don't believe Doctor Who is the show to do it with.

Perhaps the new incarnation of Torchwood might have what people are looking for. It's a TV show for adults.