This is the longest single piece I’ve stuck on the site this year. But that’s what happens when you try to talk about 26 years’ worth of anything.
On Saturday (the same evening as my appearance on A&E’s City Confidential), Tacoma PBS affiliate KBTC will air its last four reruns of Doctor Who, the venerable BBC science fiction serial.
KBTC has cycled through some 500 DW episodes repeatedly since 1987. But now, BBC Worldwide Americas is letting the show’s syndication contracts expire. Only six other US stations (all PBS affiliates) still carry it. (It was never carried on the PBS network feed.)
I first became a “Whovian” (fan) when the show first aired locallly in the early ’80s, on Bellingham commercial station KVOS. I was initially attracted to the show’s simple premise: The Doctor (the only name he uses) is an eccentric genius of a humanoid space alien. He crosses time and space in his TARDIS (“Time and Relative Dimension in Space”), with assorted short- and long-term sidekicks. Together, they confront assorted mad scientists, wannabe dictators, evil robots, bug-eyed monsters, and scientific impossibilities. The show comprised half-hour episodes, which formed four- to six-part stories.
I soon became hooked on the show. I found its spirit of good-natured adventure a welcome break from the quasi-militarism of Star Trek, the ironic self-consciousness of Star Wars, and the arcane geekiness of many sci-fi books. Star Wars was a PoMo tribute to oldtime cliffhanger serials; Doctor Who was an oldtime cliffhanger serial, made for contemporary audiences.
I also loved the sheer Britishness/Europeanness of the show. Even though the Doctor’s from another planet, he’s a thorough heir to the H.G. Wells/Jules Verne tradition of the eccentric inventor. The show’s cliffhanger format owes lots to the Dickens/Conan Doyle tradition of serialized magazine fiction. Where Captain Kirk and company tried to export the American Way to the universe, the Doctor and his motley sidekicks simply tried to defeat the monsters and promote intelligent anarchy.
And the show’s brand of sci-fi/horror was informed not by the US/USSR cold war but by the UK’s experiences in WWII. The first important DW villains, the Daleks, are essentially Nazis as bug-eyed monsters, clad in robotic body machines.
The show was even one of the few things my father and I both liked. (Though he became impatient with the “movie” format KVOS used, editing together the half-hour segments).
I eventually hung out for a while with a local DW fan club, the “Society of the Rusting TARDIS.” I’d been aware of sci-fi fandom before, but Who fandom was a quite peculiar corner of an already peculiar subculture. DW is so vast, with so many episodes and so much arcana, that it’s inherently more chaotic, and more entertaining, than Trek fandom.
Around the time Seattle’s cable systems dropped KVOS, KBTC picked up the show. It ran all the Doctors’ existing stories in chronological order. Rusting TARDIS members often appeared on camera during DW-related pledge drives.
Note the phrase “all the Doctors.” What I’d first seen of DW was what most US viewers first saw, the seven-year reign of Tom Baker in the lead role. He was the one who had the curly hair, the beady eyes, the floppy hat, and the 20-foot scarf. I soon learned he’d been the fourth Doctor, and that the show had already been running for eleven years before he joined. It had debuted in black and white, shot live-to-tape, on November 23, 1963, the day after JFK was shot.
The first time the show switched stars, from William Hartnell to Patrick Troughton in 1966, the writers explained that the Doctor’s alien physiology could “regenerate” into a new body. Troughton quit in 1969, the same time that the show moved to color. He was replaced by Jon Pertwee, who five years later asked the BBC for more money but was instead replaced by Baker.
Each of these recasts gave the Doctor a different personality as well as a different face. But the character was always a bemused outcast, an outsider everywhere he went. He was as out of place among Earthbound bureaucrats as he was among giant ant-people. But his wit, his resourcefulness, and his take-charge attitude usually saved the day, usually without the aid of weaponry. He was a hero for smart loners, eccentric computer fanatics, and plain old nerds everywhere.
The plots, within their heroes-and-villains structure, encompassed real history, fantasy history, space opera, gothic horror, fast action, scheming treachery, and broad humor.
And the production values ranged erratically from breathtaking to sufficient to laughable. Yes, there were rubber-suit monsters in front of wobbly sets. There were obviously fake chroma-key montages (like those that stick weathermen’s bodies in front of satellite maps, only more primitive). There were flubbed lines, especially in the earlier episodes. It was cheaply shot on video, except for the visually jarring switches to location scenes shot on film.
But that just added to the fun of it all.
When the US discovered Who, it was already in decline back home, both in creative quality and in the ratings. And its decline was at least partly due to its new US audience, and to attempts to please that audience.
Producer John Nathan-Turner had taken over the show in its 18th season. He wanted to make it more credible to the young-adult sci-fi “fanboys” who were its biggest US fans. He tried to tone down its fun-adventure aspects and ratchet up the “serious” science fiction. The theme song, which had only been slightly remixed since 1963, was replaced by a new disco-fied arrangement. The opening credits switched from an abstract “time tunnel” to a more pedestrian star field.
Tom Baker quit at the end of that season, in 1981. Three other actors (Peter Davison of All Creatures Great and Small, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy) successively took over the role over the course of eight more seasons, during which Nathan-Turner and his staff improved the special effects but dumbed down the scripts. The jokey asides got lamer; the sidekicks got duller; the stories increasingly rehashed villains and plot elements from the show’s past. By 1989, DW had been cut from 26 to 14 episodes a year, buried in a suicidal time slot opposite the commercial ITV network’s prime time soap tCoronation Street. The BBC then put the series on indefinite “hiatus,” then licensed it to Hollywood, where it spent a half decade in “development” purgatory. (More on that a little later.)
For a show with a quasi-immortal hero, it had a comparatively limited afterlife since its cancellation, at least on this side of the pond. Over the ’90s, American DW fandom dwindled in its size, if not intensity. (The Society of the Rusting TARDIS still holds regular screening parties, but the meetings’ focus has shifted to British comedy shows.) Fewer US TV stations kept the reruns. BBC America ran the Tom Baker episodes for a while, before that cable channel junked half its schedule for home-decorating shows.
But Who fandom remained a strong niche market, around the world.
The BBC has licensed and/or published several hundred original DW paperback novels in the 15 years since the show’s end. When combined with the novelizations of the original TV stories, the Doctor’s become one of the book world’s most prolifically-published fictional characters, right up there with Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan. (One of the sidekick characters from the novels, Professor Bernice Summerfield, was even spun off into her own book series.)
Other official DW products have included old-time-radio style audio dramas on CD and online Flash-animated cartoons.
Then there are the unofficial, not-for-profit fan productions: Short movies, zines, computer-animated Dalek images, websites, and, of course, long scarves for your costume party.
Who fandom is such an involving hobby, in part, because of the sheer volume of material to learn and love. Nearly 700 episodes were made over 26 seasons. All the existing episodes have been released on video, but they’ve never all been in print at the same time.
Note the phrase “existing episodes.” BBC Enterprises (predecessor to BBC Worldwide) had thrown out half of the early black and white episodes in the ’70s, when foreign stations ceased to buy them, before anyone realized there was still a potential market for them in this newfangled home video thang.
Some of these shows have since been found, as kinescope films recovered from foreign TV networks and private collectors. But 108 of the 253 monochrome Whos remain missing today. (In addition, a few of Jon Pertwee’s color episodes now only exist in b&w.)
Fans eventually discovered, and recovered, all the soundtracks. It turned out that when the shows originally aired, several young viewers had recorded the audio portions on reel-to-reel tapes. BBC Records has issued digitally-cleaned versions of the soundtracks on CD.
Fans also found off-air stills for 72 of the missing shows (comprising about 60-70 shots per episode), taken by a professional freelance photographer who used the trade name “Telesnaps.”
Groups of fans have produced slide-show style “reconstructions” on VHS, combining the soundtracks with the Telesnaps. For the episodes without Telesnaps, the reconstructors have used publicity stills, behind-the-scenes photos, and appropriate shots from other DW episodes. When even those weren’t enough to visually represent a story, the reconstructors have contrived Photoshop montage shots. Some of these latter images incorporate face shots of original DW guest actors, “borrowed” without permission from other TV shows and movies these actors had been in. It takes a lot of love for a show to inspire the reconstructors to work so hard on videos that are so unauthorized, they can never be sold for profit. (The BBC’s reportedly to start releasing official reconstructions on DVD-ROM next year. These would only include BBC-owned visuals, unlike the fan reconstructions.)
But all these products, official and unofficial, across such a broad range of media, left Doctor Who still off the small screen. There was only a 1996 TV movie, filmed in Vancouver by Universal Studios for the Fox network. The movie combined a confusing number of story references to the old show with failed attempts to “Americanize” the Doctor by adding chase scenes and a love interest. It never appeared on video or DVD in the US, but can sometimes be seen on one or more of the Starz! digital-cable channels.
Finally, in the autumn of 2003, around the 40th anniversary of the original show’s debut, the BBC announced the TARDIS would materialize again. Its co-executive producer and head writer, Russell T Davies (no period), previously created the original UK version of Queer As Folk. Its star, Christopher Eccleston (28 Days Later), previously worked with Davies in The Second Coming, a hilariously irreverent TV movie about a Manchester pub crawler who proclaims himself, truthfully, to be the new Messiah.
Davies and Eccleston promise the new Who will have all the fancy new digital effects now expected in fantasy media. They also insist it’ll be a smart, robust, straightforward adventure show for young and old alike, unlike the niche-audience geekfest of the old show’s latter years. The new show will appear on British screens this spring. Seattle cable viewers can see it on CBC sometime thereafter.
BBC Worldwide’s reportedly in negotiations to bring the old show’s reruns to the Sci-Fi Channel, as part of a package deal with the new show (which has no official US home yet). That would give the old episodes a higher profile, and might even help fund the needed restoration of a few of them.
Already, BBC Video has commissioned several episode restorations, for VHS and DVD release. In the process, it’s funded technological innovations available now to the whole industry. These include “VidFIRE,” a digital process that makes off-air kinescope films look more like the original video images.
Another “restoration” project has been contemplated on DW fan websites—remaking the missing episodes in computer animation, using the cleaned-up original soundtracks. It’s not been officially mentioned by the BBC, and it’d take years to complete. But some Whovians love these shows so much, they want to see ’em come back to life.
Other fans will simply be happy to see the new series bring the Doctor back into the telefantasy pantheon.
