The Doctor Who Serials: Geek Life

Welcome to the first of my bi-weekly retrospective of the geeky, nerdy, and flat out awesome things I grew up loving.  My first topic is the awesomeness of the classic Doctor Who serials that ran from November of 1963 until December of 1989.

Sunday Afternoons Behind the Sofa

Ask any fan of Doctor Who what the first image that pops into their mind and you will likely get a myriad of responses:  The TARDIS, a long scarf, curly headed guy with a huge smile, Daleks, the logo or the “time corridor” opening, and, of course, the theme music.  Ask any non-fan of Doctor Who and you’ll likely get only one response – bad special effects.  I’ll get into more about the effects later, but for now let’s focus on the positives.

The longest running, and best known actor to play the role of the Doctor was Tom Baker.  In his seven years in the role, the fourth Doctor became the face of the entire original series.  I start with him because, when I was little, he was the first Doctor I ever saw on television.  His appearance was what he was remembered for.  He had curly brown hair, with a big, toothy grin and generally wore a long overcoat.  But what made him most recognizable was his impossibly long scarf that he always wore.  The multi-color accessory is something that every Who fan, including myself, sees whenever they see a striped scarf around someone’s neck in the winter.

When I first saw the series, it was on a UHF station in Indianapolis that would later become our FOX affiliate built around series like Married with Children and The Simpsons, but back then, it was just a channel that barely came in with a set of rabbit ears.  My oldest brother would invite his friends over to watch the episodes.  I saw very few of these episodes because it usually came on right about the time I was supposed to go to bed.  But I remember laying in my bed listening to that theme music before drifting off to sleep.  I must have been able to see it from time to time because I distinctly remember segments of the sixteenth season’s epic “Key to Time” serials as being part of my older memories – especially that one pirate guy with the thing over his eye and “The Stones of Blood” which is still one of my more favorite episodes.  That station, though, would not be where I’d find myself parked to watch the show every time it aired.

By the mid-80s, the local PBS station would be the home of Doctor Who and where I would be able to see every episode that still existed.  Most commonly, the serials would run in their entirety on Sunday middle afternoons.  There were periods where the individual episodes would play during the week, or the full serials would play late night on Saturdays, but Sunday afternoons would be where I would remember the show being found into the 90s.

Tom Baker might have been my first Doctor, but it would be on a trip to Philadelphia that I got my first look at someone else in the role as the Doctor that would become my favorite.  The episode was called “Death to the Daleks” and on a fuzzy hotel room tv, I saw Jon Pertwee playing the role that I had only known one other person playing.  I had known other actors played the part, but never had I seen another person in the role.

Pertwee’s Doctor was a much more debonair man.  Someone you might think had fine tastes.  He spoke with flair and always seemed to be cool in every situation.  When I got to see the rest of his stories a little while later on my local PBS station, I realized that this Doctor was much more action oriented.  He could get his way out of a particularly sticky situation by delivering a quick karate chop to the back of a person’s neck.  This guy was much more like James Bond than any other actor who played the part.  With my own love of James Bond movies, this really appealed to me and he remains, to this day, as my favorite of all the Doctors.

As the weeks and years went by, I became very well acquainted with each of the Doctors.  As mentioned above, Pertwee was the debonair one.  Tom Baker’s Doctor was a bohemian.  William Hartnell, who played the very first incarnation of the Doctor, was a grouchy man who I always thought saw himself as better than everyone else.  The second Doctor, Patrick Troughton, was more of a clown who was a little more of a bumbling man with low stress tolerance.  Peter Davidson, who took the role from Tom Baker, was a young hero, but at times introverted and sad.  Colin Baker, the sixth Doctor, was, for a lack of a better word, insane and a bit of a jerk.  Finally, Sylvester McCoy harkened back to the Patrick Troughton Doctor as a very unassuming man who seemed more silly than dangerous to the bad guys.

Each Doctor had their really good stories and great character moments, but none lasted as long as Tom Baker or Jon Pertwee (who had a solid five-year run).  Having originally be exposed to Tom Baker’s Doctor, it was much easier for me to enjoy Davidson’s serials as the same mood and feeling seemed to carry over.  Most of Hartnell and Troughton’s stories were slower paced and entirely broadcast in black and white.  For a young kid, sometimes those were difficult to really get too interested in, but most of the recurring villains had their deepest roots with those two Doctors.  Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy would have their issues that I will get into shortly.

I constantly read about how the show faced much criticism for being too scary or violent.  In fact, the name of this article is a take on the famous British saying “Behind the Sofa” which is how many English children remembered watching the show because they were scared of some of the monsters.  I never thought of the show that way.  Yes, there are tense moments and people died all the time, but maybe because I generally saw the series in their full formats instead of broken into the individual episodes, I have a different view than that of the kids who watched the series in Britain as each of the episodes were new.

For me, the action was exciting and having villains like the Daleks or Cybermen constantly bent on destroying the human race and never seeming to run out of soldiers thrilled me to no end.  Every single moment the Doctor was anywhere, there was danger about and innocents were going to be caught in the collateral damage.  As a child, that sort of situation seemed more logical than anything.  Maybe I had grown beyond my years, or more likely, having watched many R rated movies thanks to my older brothers, but I could see in other movies and news programs that innocents often died and that was just the way of life.  So, seeing it on Doctor Who made a ton of sense to me!

Death toll brings up another aspect to the show.  This has been very briefly mentioned in the series since the 2005 revival starting airing.  Either the Doctor was drawn to deadly threats or threats became more deadly because the Doctor was involved.  I guess when someone tells a Dalek that he will stop them and begins acting like a hero, bad guys tend to shoot back and try to kill or hurt everything in sight.  When I got older, I began to realize that the Doctor didn’t like when people were killed, but usually went about his business like all was honky dorey when the bad guys were vanquished.  I guess a part of me should be wondering exactly how much of a hero the Doctor was by using these people as human shields until he could figure out a way to kill the bad guys.  Oh what’s the fun in questioning that?  Besides, I subscribe to the idea that was used in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan – the good of the many outweigh the good of the few, or the one.  So, sorry U.N.I.T. guy…  You gotta take one for the team until the Doctor can figure out how to kill those Sea Devils.

During the height of the run on my local PBS station, it wasn’t too hard to find novelizations (or novelisations as those crazy Brits would call them) at the local bookstore or even a comic book store here and there.  There were a few books in particular that I looked through so much the binding can hardly hold the books together anymore.  The first two was a program guide and an accompanying character guide.  The program guide listed every story produced up to the publication date and offered a detailed synopsis of each episode (even the ones the BBC had long erased from their library).  The character guide was the real prize.  You could find out who was who, what was what and for recurring characters, they listed a way to find out what serials they appeared in.  The other two books were quiz books.  More than anything, it helped you learn more about the different happenings, but the quizzes on the first two Doctors were nearly impossible since we hadn’t seen those stories yet.  Either sets of books, though, could fill your brain bits with all the Doctor Who info it could handle.

There were other books out there too that had varying degrees of quality.  One was a technical guide that talked about some of the more technological things like Daleks, Cybermen, or K-9.  The two coolest things about this book was a layout of the TARDIS console with a guide as to what each button, knob, level, or screen did and a cut out that allowed you to build your own TARDIS!  I would stare at that layout of the console for hours on end in the hopes that I could someday build one of my own.  It’s just too bad that I never learned how to build anything.  Other books covered certain periods or the companions or the bad guys.  Back then I thought all of them were awesome, but nowadays I’m not so sure each and every book was actually all that great.

One thing that no book seemed to cover back then was what happened to the series.  We all knew that the series was put on indefinite hiatus in 1989, but a lot of the behind the scenes information was nowhere to be found.  You have to remember there was no such thing as the internet back then, so we had to assume that either the series was canceled due to poor ratings or simply all good things must come to an end.  It wouldn’t be until the DVDs were released that I could find out more about the true story behind the end of the series.

To my surprise, the reason for the show coming to an end was due to the actions of perhaps the biggest Doctor Who fan of them all – the producer John Nathan-Turner.  NOTE: The following section is my interpretation of how things came about and maybe not entirely how things went down.

1980 would mark two major changes for Doctor Who.  First, there was a new producer for the show (Nathan-Turner).  Second, it would be the final season for Tom Baker, by far the most recognizable Doctor of all time.  Tom Baker had been in the role for a long time and a new producer was coming in which also meant new ideas and a different direction was coming to the show.  After six years, Baker didn’t seem to be as much in control as he had been.  My suspicion was that Baker and Nathan-Turner never really got along.  Thinking this was the right time to bow out, Baker did so (his last serial “Logopolis” is one of the best episodes I’ve ever seen).

With Baker out, Peter Davison came along.  His series was a bit grittier than what was seen before.  It was much more serious than Baker’s run.  Davison would only last three seasons.  Colin Baker took over and had an incredibly rocky run starring in the fewest number of stories than any other Doctor.  Sylvester McCoy became the seventh Doctor and the actor in the lead role when the series was ended.

All of that seems pretty normal for a show like Doctor Who, and one could certainly imagine that no one would be able to live up to Tom Baker’s time in the role.  So it only made sense that with a slight change in the stories and the absence of the actor who was by far the most popular the show would lose some viewership.  But there was a ton more going on behind the scenes.

As the story goes, then-Script Editor Eric Saward became increasingly frustrated with the constant meddling of Nathan-Turner.  Saward would turn in scripts that he felt was as good as they could get and Nathan-Turner would return them as declined or with a ton of changes.  Saward claims that Nathan-Turner was entirely too hands on and this constant interference and, at times, poor judgment took a toll on Saward and irritated several writers.  But the worst thing that could happen to the series came to pass – the new head of programming at the BBC totally despised the show.

It’s very true that the serials done by Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy weren’t of the same quality as they were in the past, but Nathan-Turner’s decision to make Colin Baker the new Doctor after Peter Davison was odd.  As some would later reveal, Nathan-Turner hired Colin Baker because he found the actor quite entertaining during a party the producer threw for people who had worked on the show and personal friends.  Many associated with the show found that decision to be so strange because the decision wasn’t made on merit, but from being entertained in what I would say was a non-professional setting.  It wasn’t that people didn’t think Colin Baker could pull off the role, but it was more of a “This guy?  This way?” sort of choosing.

The only way I could compare it would be as a Washington Redskins fan, I end up hanging out and having a drink with Daniel Snyder (the owner of the team).  We talk for hours about past Redskins glory and I tell him about some of the plays I remember that were so cool and effective.  We even eventually sing karoke together before the night is done.  The next morning, I get a phone call from Danny-boy and find out he’s hired me as Head Coach of the team because he enjoyed the night before so much.  As much as I’d love for that to happen, even in imagining the situation, I have to shrug my shoulders as to why he thought I was capable.

Anyway, Colin Baker had dreams and aspirations of being the longest running Doctor in series history, but those dreams would crash and burn when he was effectively fired so the series could continue.  As for his replacement, Sylvester McCoy, I really didn’t care much for his stories.  I didn’t even really care much for his Doctor.  I know they were in the process of making his Doctor more of a force to be reckoned with and extremely powerful, but he just didn’t do it for me.  He didn’t possess the qualities I loved in some of the earlier Doctors.  I don’t know if McCoy was the reason, or the stories, or if it was his companion, Ace that I didn’t like.  Oh man, I really thought Ace was about as annoying as any one character in any television show could ever be.  It’s hard to hear how popular she was because I just thought she was bad.  Really, really bad.

Ultimately, I think the series was inevitably due to come to an end.  It didn’t matter who was playing the Doctor.  Jack Nicholson playing the Doctor couldn’t have saved the series.  So many things had changed from the time of Pertwee and Tom Baker to the end of the 80s.  The Star Wars and Star Trek movies had advanced special effects and makeup forward in ways that had never been seen before.  Science Fiction felt more like Science Fact.  The tight budget conditions of Doctor Who made the series unable to keep up with the new ideas from Spielberg and Lucas.  Aside from the budget, it didn’t help that Doctor Who seemed to suffer a bit in the 80s from a producer who seemed unwilling to try new things.  It just seemed that John Nathan-Turner was more like a kid playing with Doctor Who figures more than a man who made the right choices to advance the series for new audiences.  Instead, he protected the show too much and tried to push too far to keep Doctor Who what he wanted instead of what we deserved.  And that’s really a shame because someone who loved Doctor Who so much should have been able to realize what fans wanted.

Remember at the start of the article that I said most non-fans of the series would generally look at bad effects as to why they didn’t like the series?  This is because it is really hard to grow up watching some of the movies that Hollywood was cranking out with huge budges and awesome effects and then turn on an episode of Doctor Who and not notice the really low budget quality.  The BBC was having a hard time with it too, hence the eventual cancellation.

I’ve always defended the series by saying that it isn’t the effects that makes Doctor Who so good, but the stories.  These classic serials were so dense and detailed that it seemed more like you were watching a novel play out.  The writers went to great extent trying to make the worlds the Doctor visited as much alive as possible.  Small, background characters were given depth even if they died in the first five minutes.  Doctor Who was such a complexed and detailed show.  Every serial was so deeply written that each seems like a movie played out in weekly segments than a television show.  I will always contend that great sci-fi isn’t made through fancy effects.  Truly the best sci-fi is rich in story and immersing the viewer or reader in a world that is recognizable to ours but shifted in fantasy.

Doctor Who would make two returns after the 1989 cancellation.  The first was a television movie that aired on FOX and starred Paul McGann.  This movie had some weird stuff in it.  The Doctor claimed to be half human.  O…kay…?  That was new.  He also entered into a romantic relationship with his companion.  That doesn’t really bother me.  I mean it was always kinda assumed that his relationship with his companions was a little more than just a partnership in the platonic sense of the word, but it was something we never saw on the tv screen before and felt weird seeing it play out.

The second return is the series that is currently airing on BBC America.  We’ve already gotten to our third Doctor on that series, so that officially makes Matt Smith Doctor #11.  Christopher Eccleston was the ninth Doctor and, I feel, did a fantastic job as the angry and brooding Doctor who was responsible for ending a war between the Time Lords and Daleks by destroying both of them.  He would only last one year before bowing out and giving way to Doctor #10 David Tennant.  Tennant is the current series’ most popular actor.  Whereas Tom Baker was the embodiment of the original series, Tennant has become the embodiment of the new series.

The new series has a more adult feel to it.  The Doctor has, on more than one occasion, had romantic scenes with companions.  I’m still not used to it, though.  Don’t get me wrong, the current series is quite good and has much better effects.  People who had never liked the original series, or never watched it for a multitude of reasons, like the new series.  It makes me proud to see Doctor Who be a popular series again.

Though I like many of the new episodes, it really isn’t my Doctor Who.  No, it really belongs to the new generation of viewers.  My Doctor had a plain white console room in the TARDIS and sparingly used his trusty sonic screwdriver.  My Doctor Who was less quirky and more like a college professor than the really smart attractive guy.

Fittingly, my Doctor Who belongs to my childhood of all those years ago.  I can watch as many of the serials as Netflix can send me, and still feel the pull to those stories that I’ve always enjoyed.  The feeling I had watching some of those stories as a child, and for the first time, is still a part of me.  I don’t doubt that I will still be watching them as I grow old.

Join me again in two weeks for another installment of Geek Life!

To find out more about what this series of articles are all about check out What is Geek Life? To see what other topics I’ve written about, check out the Geek Life tag!

Tags: Doctor Who Geek Life