Childhood memories of popular culture trigger the most vivid emotional landscapes. I recall my much bigger big brother introducing me to the world of science fiction; a vista populated by Outer Limits aliens, Twilight Zone time shifting, Star Trek phasers and Blake 7 bad humour. One programme was always more meaningful than the rest. I remember cowering behind my brother – concurrently frightened, curious and disturbed – watching a man in a flamboyant scarf and his shrieking companions battle cybermen, the Master and pepper pot Daleks.
Dr Who fandom has been the metaphoric embarrassing frock in my popular cultural closet. I own the books, the novels, the scarf, the videos, the DVDs and – quite magnificently – twenty miniature daleks. I saw a life-size one in London a few years ago and had to be physically restrained from buying it and taking my chances with excess luggage and customs. I still regret not having a go getting it through the authorities. It would have been a great object to remove from the carousel at Perth airport and wheel to the car park.
This unfashionable fandom has created odd and often inappropriate connections with the people I meet. For example, I once had my house burgled. Nothing important was stolen: a cheap video recorder and some compact discs were the only loses. When the policeman arrived to record the details of the crime, he was not terribly interested in me, my house or the video. Instead, he was drawn to the daleks on the shelves and tables. There was something quite disconcerting about seeing an adult male, let alone a policeman, on his hands and knees pushing daleks across my lounge room appearing to wage a pseudo-invasion of Earth. When I finally extricated him from my plastic pepper pots, he could only say, “Thank god they only took the video. They could have taken the daleks.”
I understand how he feels. October 2005 has seen the release of the final and fourth DVDs featuring the ninth Doctor, Christopher Eccleston. With this casting, we knew the rebirth of the character was going to be bigger than the simple rebooting of a children’s series. Earlier this year, the fashionable people were suddenly staying home on Saturday nights to watch the ABC screen these new episodes. People who would never have been seen dead laughing with Tom Baker’s Doctor or screaming with (or at – depending on your perspective) Colin Baker’s Doctor, suddenly became born-again Whovians. So for those who missed these remarkable twelve episodes, it is now possible to run a science fiction convention for one and play all the DVDs in a day. It is worth the time and effort. This is great television. This is thinking pop.
Everything was working against the new Doctor. It had been fifteen years since the series was cancelled. Yet the music (dumb dumb dumb – dumb dumb dumb – dumb dumb dumb – dumb dumb dumb – dumb dumb dumb – dumb dumb dumb – whooo eeeee whooo), the enemies and shoddy special efforts were all landmarks in popular culture. These rose-coloured ray bans did not bode well for the new series. Nothing can compete with childhood myths of fear and fascination.
Then – remarkably – this new series and the new Doctor re-imaged science fiction. He was Northern, the dialogue was whippet-fast, quirky and queer, and Eccleston was light, comedic and Cary-Grant charming. He’d created a pop miracle: the daggy Doctor became sexy. After living through forty years – 679 thirty minute episodes, 15 forty five minute episodes and a truly dire ninety minute television movie – Doctor Who was finally cool.
It was the combination of Eccleston and Russell T. Davis’s writing that remade a memory into even better than the real thing. Perhaps the hardest scriptwriting feat is to refresh old characters with style and make the clunky innovations of the 1960s look contemporary. Through all the talk of creative industries and intellectual capital, Davies has imagination to burn. Best known for Queer as Folk, his collaboration with Eccleston was predated by The Second Coming, a riveting and disturbing televisual drama where the son of God not only arrived back on Earth, but in Manchester. Miracles were performed at Maine Road, which is more difficult than it would be in any normal football stadium, considering the endless cycle of disappointments from Manchester City FC.
This actor and writer were always going to do the Doctor with a difference. As always with Davis, he attacks television through television. ‘Bad Wolf,’ the second last episode of the season, offered sharper commentary on reality television than five years of cultural studies courses have managed. Dropping The Doctor into the Big Brother house was a ruthless blading of mediocre television programming. Davis created a macabre twist to the conventional tale: instead of being expelled from these shows into a life of micro-celebrity, people were voted off and killed. The prize was to live. Amid such brutality, The Doctor diagnosed the problems of Earth’s future, and our present: “half the population’s too fat. Half the population’s too thin and the rest of you just watch television.”
Then, after these twelve episodes of speed, energy and laughter, it was over. What an ending they gave us. In ‘Parting of the Ways,’ the war of fundamentalisms that punctuates the 2000s also gutted our future. The daleks survived genocides and holocausts by discovering religion. Extermination was no longer enough. They quashed all threats of difference with cries of blasphemy. The Doctor was the heathen to be feared and killed.
The most evocative and devastating moment at the end of this new Doctor Who did not come from the title character, but his companion, the weeping Rose. On returning to her home – and our time – she was horrified at the banality of life, work, tasteless food and a quiet night in front of the telly. From the bud of this old science fiction show made new, a stark indictment and judgment ruptured our easy acceptance of mediocrity, boredom and stupidity.
In remembering the adventure, the challenge and the good fights in the TARDIS, Rose said – on behalf of so many of us – that “the Doctor showed me a better way of living your life. You don’t just give up. You make a stand. You stay no.” Ponder what we have blinding and blandly accepted in the last five years: detention centres, asylum seekers, war without justification and exhausted sympathy at the horrific waves of tragedy from a Tsunami, earthquakes and cyclones. There were so many moments where we should have screamed, raged, argued, fought, or just said no. Instead we got another glass of wine, immersed ourselves with the fascinations of frittata and feta cheese, and tittered endlessly about celebrities rather than debating about how – precisely – we could ever win a war against fundamentalism with another set of fundamentalisms.
Doctor Who was formed on the most basic of ideas: develop an interesting character and move them through space and time. From this simple premise, the programme has survived the changes of digitization, commodification, colonialism and masculinity. But he always fought the good fight, and was always tortured about the unpredicted consequences of his actions. The Doctor was talker. He was a traveller. He was also a learner and moved to act by the differences he met on the journey.