TARDISbound: Navigating the Universes of Doctor Who 9780755697373, 9781845119256

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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he idea for this book germinated from conversations I had with Simon Barker and Derek Kompare in 2005. Although a co-authored study did not, as originally planned, result from those early discussions, I am grateful to both colleagues for providing the initial stimulus for this project, and to Simon in particular for providing characteristically crisp advice when I was in the ‘sagging’ middle stages of the writing process. Simon’s reflections on Doctor Who (and on other matters) have suffused my own for most of our lives, and it is impossible not to see him as hovering, Hermes-like, over much of the work I have done here. One of the great delights of my academic involvement with Doctor Who has been that it has led me over the years into encounters with creative individuals of extraordinary calibre. Two of these have made vital contributions to the life of this text. I am indebted to my dear friend June Hudson for the ravishing cover illustrations, and to Paul Magrs for supplying me with the book’s title, TARDISbound. I will add that both these artists have inspired me as much with their work at large as with their direct involvement in this book. A number of colleagues at the University of Redlands, and other members of the campus community, have influenced this book in one way or another through provocative suggestions, pointed questions and trenchant comments, including Priya Jha, Bill McDonald, Ted Pearson, Kelly Hankin, Kathy Feeley, Leslie Brody and Nancy Carrick. Eliza Rodriguez y Gibson has played a crucial supportive role, too broad in scope to define here easily, offering critique,

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conversation or cocktails as required. In the course of the book’s preparation, Liza’s and my research interests have come evermore fully into alignment, and it has been a privilege to enjoy with her the kind of scholarly camaraderie and reciprocation I always imagined the academy would supply but had never before actually experienced. I should like to acknowledge the support of former and ongoing colleagues in the erstwhile Department of Art and Art History at Redlands who in different ways encouraged or supported my work on this book during a very difficult period: Raúl Acero, Cara Cole, Ann Marie Leimer, Jacob Ristau and our administrative assistant Jo Nuño. I’m enormously grateful for the tireless and patient support (and the wicked humour) of Sandi Richey, Head of Circulation Services and Inter-library Loan at the Armacost Library – and indeed to all members of the library staff, not least former Director Jean Swanson. Thanks also to the staff of the University of California Riverside’s Rivera Library who administer the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and Utopian Literature; the ready accessibility of materials in this collection has been a great boon during the preparation of this volume. Via sundry online forums, email conversations, and Facebook posts I have benefited from support, comments and information from Kelly Hale, Stuart Douglas, Philip Purser-Hallard and Simon Bucher-Jones. I am grateful, as ever, for ongoing intermittent contact with Ian Potter who continues to complicate and upset my ideas in very useful ways. Siôn Gibson offered wonderful encouragement at two crucial moments. Students in recent seminars on visual culture, film and television costume and television aesthetics have significantly modified my thinking about much of the material in this book, especially Liz Brooks, Mia Buckland, Myranda Hunter, Molly Irelan and Michaela Petrovich. My commissioning editor, Philippa Brewster, has been a model of patience and a fund of common sense as this text shambled unsteadily towards belated completion. I am most grateful to her for encouraging me to submit the proposal which ultimately led to this book’s being picked up by I.B.Tauris, and for all mercies ever since, including the opportunity to revisit my text in the wake of the Eleventh Doctor’s arrival on screen.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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Without my student research assistant, Nicholas K. Zaharopoulos, this volume would certainly never have been finished. Nick was shrewd enough to anticipate my needs better than I could forecast them, and he calmly relieved me of burdens and removed obstacles in my path more times than I can remember. Words cannot express my relief that the manuscript was essentially complete before he graduated from Redlands. I never taught Nick in class, but I learnt a lot from him. Last, paraphrasing Hitchcock, I should like to acknowledge the four most important contributors to the successful completion of this book: the first is a dauntingly able and imaginative scholar; the second is a colleague of unswerving integrity and tenacity; the third is my spouse and co-carer for three dogs and a cat; the fourth is as fine a cook as ever performed miracles in a domestic kitchen (not least on nights when it was really my turn to make dinner) – and their names are Anne Cavender.

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INTRODUCTION

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octor Who was first the subject of a book-length scholarly study in 1983; this was Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text by John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado.1 The subtitle of the volume clearly signals the authors’ conception of their subject: The Unfolding Text implies both that Doctor Who was ongoing (it was to remain in continuous production on BBC TV until 1989) and – more importantly for my purposes in the present book – that it was a unified, monolithic phenomenon. This last point was hardly controversial at the time. Doctor Who had been devised for television and still principally existed in cultural consciousness as such. For some commentators, the claim that Doctor Who is primarily, if not exclusively, a television phenomenon still holds good. This has been the position of both James Chapman and Kim Newman who have published critical-historical studies of Doctor Who since its triumphant revival on BBC television in 2005.2 My book focuses on Doctor Who as a media phenomenon which is firmly established not only in the television cosmos but also, to borrow a well-known phrase from Doctor Who itself, in relative dimensions. For this reason it seems appropriate to begin by considering briefly the kind of text that Doctor Who was when Tulloch and Alvarado wrote their book, and to contrast this with its recent conditions of existence. In the early 1980s Doctor Who aired for thirteen weeks of each year. For the other nine months it existed only in memory, which could be rekindled in a number of ways. Chief among the consumer

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‘spin-offs’ from the series was a line of novella-length adaptations from Target Books, aimed at juvenile and teen readers. By the programme’s twentieth anniversary in late November 1983, this series of novelizations had encompassed over eighty of the Doctor’s broadcast adventures. There was also a monthly magazine from Marvel Comics, which contained production photographs from the series as well as original comic-strip narratives, and two commemorative publications appeared in 1983, one from Radio Times and the other from W. H. Allen, Target’s parent company. Both contained histories of the show and interviews with cast and crew, and both were lavishly illustrated. This was more or less the full extent of ‘secondary’ textual manifestations of the series, apart from special materials available to hard-core fans through one of the Doctor Who appreciation societies. Nor was it possible for many devotees to relive the pleasures of the television serials by reviewing them. In the UK at least, video recorders were still not the cheaply obtainable commodities that they were to become. Even for those affluent enough to possess one, Doctor Who episodes from the pre-home-video days of the 1960s and 1970s were not yet available on commercial cassettes. For the rest of us (if we were obsessive enough), homemade audio recordings together with one commercial LP of a screened adventure, Genesis of the Daleks (1975) could provide a partial surrogate when the television series was not airing. By the time Doctor Who celebrated its fortieth anniversary, the situation was very different. In 2003 Doctor Who was no longer a single text, unfolding along a trajectory defined by the production and consumption rhythms of real-time broadcasting. Although the television series had been out of production for nearly fifteen years, its archive was more accessible than it had ever been, through continuously cycling repeats on satellite and cable television and a near-comprehensive series of commercial video releases (gradually being superseded by a library of DVDs). Furthermore, the cancellation of the television programme in 1990 had led to the emergence of other officially sanctioned manifestations of Doctor Who. In 1991 Virgin Publishing, which had bought out W. H. Allen and its subsidiary, Target, was licensed to produce original Doctor Who novels. First came the New Adventures, which notionally took up where the television-series narrative had left off in 1989, and then in 1994, the

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Missing Adventures, which, as the name implies, interpolated stories among the original television episodes. The Doctor briefly flashed across television screens again in 1996 in a BBC/Universal TV film which was meant to inaugurate a series but failed to do so. Soon afterwards, the BBC revoked Virgin’s license and initiated another twin series of original novels, published in-house. The Missing Adventures gave way to Past Doctor Adventures, while a parallel sequence followed the exploits of the new television incarnation, as played by Paul McGann. In 1999, the BBC granted another licence, this time to Big Finish Productions, a company specializing in high-quality, straight-to-CD audio dramas. The company’s artistic directors coaxed three of the stars of the original series back to play the Doctor in serials which mimicked the television programme’s serial-within-a-series format. In 2001 Paul McGann renewed his currency as the official Doctor of the moment by also agreeing to feature in Big Finish’s monthly releases. His adventures were even issued in unbroken ‘seasons’ unlike the haphazardly released audios starring his colleagues (which thus became, in effect, audio equivalents of the Missing Adventures). When the new Doctor Who television series, starring Christopher Eccleston, began airing in 2005, he was therefore one Doctor among several. The same has been true for his successors, David Tennant and Matt Smith, since Big Finish continues to produce monthly audios featuring the Fifth to Eighth Doctors (and until the end of 2009 published quarterly short-story collections featuring the first eight Doctors), while in 2009 and 2010 Tom Baker has resumed the role in two BBC CD series written by Paul Magrs. Just as significantly, the new television programme shares its claim to authenticity with occasional BBC-published novels featuring the current Doctor and his companions. A more particular symptom of the new ways in which texts are circulated and recycled in the early twenty-first century is the ‘bleeding’ between forms. In conceptual terms, as should be evident from arguments throughout this book, it is difficult to make any hardand-fast claims for the primacy of the original television series as the point of departure for the new one: the Virgin New Adventures, the BBC books and the Big Finish audios had considerable influence on the tenor of the Davies/Moffat Doctor Who. Nor, in the age of easy cross-media communication, do the various forms of Doctor Who

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necessarily stay within their original contexts. For example, when it became clear that the Eccleston series was a hit in 2005, the BBC was quick to optimize media saturation, concurrently broadcasting a quartet of the Big Finish commercial CD releases (featuring the McGann Doctor) on the digital radio channel BBC 7. Among popular culture texts of the last half-century, Doctor Who is far from unique in migrating from its original textual world to others. To name three prominent parallels, secret agent James Bond had infiltrated media other than Ian Fleming’s books by the early 1960s, less than a decade after his literary debut, while the universes of Star Wars and Star Trek have, since the late 1970s, expanded far beyond their medium of origin. Yet in all these other cases, work in the primary medium alone tends to be considered ‘canon’ by purists. This may in turn explain why James Chapman’s and Kim Newman’s recent book-length studies treat the new television series of Doctor Who as the principal and legitimate heir to the classic series. While I do not discount the interest or importance of questions of canonicity – especially for some fans, and by extension for the systems of consumption, production and academic analysis that have grown up around fans3 – I have chosen not to focus much on these issues, or be limited by them. In principle I give equal weight to all the textual forms in which Doctor Who has materialized, whatever the intended audience or readership. In practice, for reasons mostly of personal preference, I concentrate on the television series, novels and audio-dramas, with a few supplementary references to original comic strips. On the other hand, this book is not meant as a comprehensive survey of Doctor Who in different media. In the course of my study I do tease out distinctions, primarily between Doctor Who on television and the licensed audios and novels produced between the end of the original or ‘classic’ series and the beginning of the new. However, I also stress commonalities and continuities across media, for example tracing some of the ways in which the licensed novels have influenced all subsequent texts in terms of tone and orientation. Because I am de facto offering a more wide-ranging account of Doctor Who than earlier commentators, a few other caveats should be entered. Unlike the recent, estimable volumes by Chapman and Newman, mine is not intended as a critical history of Doctor Who.

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So while I hope to offer a provocative complement to these earlier studies, I do not presume to supplement them. My own study of Doctor Who is not even organized chronologically: it consists of theme-based essays, most of which could, in principle, be read more or less independently of one another. Each of these ranges freely through and across the texts of Doctor Who: individual chapters only ever trace the linear ‘unfolding’ of those texts if this is a function of the discursive framework. For the most part, to borrow an apt phrase from Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, I treat the instantiations of Doctor Who in its different media universes as ‘elements of a vast fictional quilt.’4 Although the chapters of this volume are meant to work cumulatively, they could in principle be read separately since I use a variety of theoretical lenses. In Chapter One I offer an overview of patterns and inconsistencies in the fictional worlds of Doctor Who. The following four chapters are all to a greater or lesser degree structured by or around ideological analysis: I examine attitudes in the texts to class, otherness and ‘evil’, heroic masculinity, and gender relations between the Doctor and his fellow travellers. Chapter Six is concerned with defining aesthetic elements which unite the constituent parts of the unruly Doctor Who phenomenon, and Chapter Seven with the ethical potential of the texts. To some extent the variety of media encompassed in this study has inevitably structured aspects of my analysis. Audio dramas, and to a much greater extent novels, are ‘inward’ rather than ‘spectacular.’ One of my arguments throughout the book is that spectacle plays a crucial role in defining Doctor Who’s evocative and discursive scope on television. It is correspondingly important to acknowledge the ways in which key elements in the television texts help or hinder migration to other media. For example, sounds are at least as important as images in evoking plausibly alien or futuristic environments and entities. Doctor Who dramas constructed for audio alone can therefore carry a surprising amount of the evocative force of the television text, not least in their portrayal of alien creatures such as the Daleks, which might superficially seem to rely on visual presence for their impact. By contrast, Doctor Who on television always relies so heavily on the performance style and energy of its lead actor that the original novels invariably have to compensate, one way or another, for the absence of this element. Conversely the

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novels, with their potential for laying bare characters’ thought processes, and to a great extent also the dialogue-heavy audio dramas, encourage a more ruminative approach than the generally fastpaced, thrill-oriented television narratives. Yet while I reflect as appropriate on the discrepancies between the media of Doctor Who at various points in this volume, there is no attempt at consistency or parity in the book’s handling of different textual manifestations. Apart from the sixth chapter none deals comprehensively with Doctor Who’s various media universes, and some are heavily skewed one way or another. Chapters One and Four focus more on the two television series than the other texts, while Three and Five both focus principally on the BBC novels and Big Finish audios. Chapter Seven addresses texts which seem to me representative of patterns in the whole vast narrative rather than within individual media. Relations to past academic and popular criticism also vary, especially in chapters structured around ideological issues which have already figured prominently in critical appraisal of Doctor Who. Thus Chapter Two is meant as a challenge to earlier scholarly discussions of class in Doctor Who and especially earlier academic treatment of the Doctor’s notional class identity. Chapter Three is in part a rebuttal of claims that Doctor Who is in some straightforwardly demonstrable way a ‘text of its time.’ And Chapter Four, which concerns the Doctor’s masculinity, questions oft-rehearsed journalistic and fan claims about the extent of the character’s divergence from other male heroes in popular adventure fiction. As noted, the last two chapters are concerned with evaluating the texts’ aesthetic and ethical merits. The very idea of such evaluation has traditionally been at best problematic, at worst taboo, in the field of cultural studies, under whose broad interdisciplinary umbrella this book belongs. Although I discuss this matter in greater detail in the chapters in question, the issue is worth raising here because it leads me to another preliminary caveat. Although I understand the historical reasons for scholars’ queasiness about expressing faith in any given articulation of popular culture, I have approached my subject with the belief that it is inherently worth examining. I would stop short of echoing Kim Newman’s claim that Doctor Who is a ‘masterpiece’,5 but I do not attempt to disguise my enthusiasm for it any more than I hide my distaste and

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disappointment over certain aspects of the texts. With all the ideological problems and stylistic weaknesses that can be identified in Doctor Who, I ultimately argue that it has artistic value in that some, at least, of its texts can reward repeated, varied and nuanced reading. By the same token I argue that Doctor Who has ethical value by virtue of the way that it can stimulate imaginative engagement with vast and deep forms of otherness. Although my theoretical commitments are strong, I hope that my book wears its academic mantle relatively lightly. I have not ‘dumbed down’ complex ideas in this book, but I have tried to avoid burdening the text with name-dropping or unnecessarily opaque writing. While I think James Chapman sets up a false dichotomy when he claims that ‘popular culture can be taken seriously without recourse to the impenetrable critical language of high theory’,6 some of the scholarly practices which he implicitly dismisses do rather invite reproach. The tendency to use critical theory as a kind of academic ‘ready reckoner’ seems at last to be on the wane; its elimination should be actively sought. I have tried to use the names of particular intellectuals and the buzzwords of critical theory only where absolutely necessary and not as a convenience or crutch. Above all, I have eschewed the formulation, ‘what so-and-so calls x’ (e.g. ‘what Hills calls “endlessly deferred narrative” ’), which is all too often used without qualification as though it exempted the writer from trying to explain directly and plainly what so-and-so actually meant. This formula is not just hollow; it is also elitist by default, and incidentally does a disservice to the ‘authority’ being invoked.7 If someone’s ideas are worth quoting, they are also worth clarifying. My preference for elucidation over citation has also made me relatively sparing in my use of notes and references. Wherever there is real dependence on or dialogue with another, I felt it best to engage the source text as fully as possible in the body of my own. Endnotes seem to me useful and appropriate only insofar as they serve as a courtesy to the reader and the mark of a real debt to a predecessor; I see no good reason to tax readers’ patience with an endless succession of superscript numerals. Nor, frankly, do I wish to endorse the position, still all too prevalent in the European and American academy, which measures a study’s credentials by the author’s conspicuous consumption of (or at least lip-service

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to) other work in the field, and obeisance to supposedly overarching, ‘seminal’ texts. Such a system allows for far too many power abuses. Let me conclude with a few notes on some of the key conventions and some of the deliberate biases and exclusions which readers will encounter in this study:

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•

This book assumes some prior familiarity with Doctor Who. Although in most crucial cases I have glossed references to diegetic characters, events, peoples and worlds, and allusions to the names of those involved in the production of Doctor Who, this is not uniformly the case.

•

Readers will notice that I have mentioned certain stories, conceits and characters repeatedly from chapter to chapter, and those who are most familiar with Doctor Who in aggregate may see this as unreasonably exclusive. Yet with hundreds of texts in different media to represent, a certain measure of reiteration seemed desirable to ensure that my arguments are not dissipated in a mass of detail, or readers’ patience taxed by too cumbersome a range of data. For the same reason, I have not addressed any of Doctor Who’s many spin-offs (e.g. The Sarah Jane Adventures, BBC, 2007–; Torchwood, BBC, 2006–), except in passing references.

•

Students looking for information on Doctor Who’s various authors and producers or details of audience reception will be disappointed. For recommended studies of Doctor Who’s production history and chronological analysis of its unfolding texts, see the note on further reading at the head of the Bibliography.

•

Given the still-problematic status of fans and ‘fan knowledge’ in relation to academia,8 I want to be very clear that my use of the word ‘fan’, alone or in such terms as ‘fan producer’, should be understood as neutrally descriptive. I have frequently found it useful to distinguish between texts produced primarily for fans from texts aimed at a broader audience, but no hierarchical distinction is implied.

•

All Doctor Who’s constituent texts are cited within my study with their names in inverted commas; italics are reserved for the texts’ overall title, Doctor Who. Thus the usual practice of italicizing the titles of novels is not adopted here: for the sake of parity, the various BBC and Virgin books are treated in the same way as serials/episodes from the television and audio series.

•

NB: The following abbreviations, mostly derived from fan critical convention, are used throughout:

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INTRODUCTION

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I refer to the original run of Doctor Who on television (BBC, 1963–1989) as the classic series, and to the revival (2005–) as the new series.

ii.

NAs = Doctor Who: The New Adventures (Virgin Publishing, 1991–1997) – novels concerning the Seventh Doctor (and in one case, the Eighth). New Adventures (without direct reference to Doctor Who) was the umbrella title for later entries, and subsequently for the range concerning the Seventh Doctor’s companion Bernice Summerfield, which are not covered in this study.

iii.

MAs = Doctor Who: Missing Adventures (Virgin Publishing, 1994–1997) – novels concerning the first six Doctors, published concurrently with the later NAs.

iv.

TVM = Doctor Who (BBC/Universal, 1996–the feature-length television movie, featuring Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor.

v.

EDAs = ‘Eighth Doctor Adventures’ (BBC Books, 1997–2005) – novels concerning the Eighth Doctor, superseding the NAs after the TVM.

vi.

PDAs = ‘Past Doctor Adventures’ (BBC Books, 1997–2005) – novels concerning the first seven Doctors, published concurrently with the EDAs.

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vii. NSAs = ‘New Series Adventures’ (BBC Books, 2005–) – novels concerning the Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh Doctors, published concurrently with the new television series.

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I THE VERY FABRIC OF TIME-AND-SPACE Running Strands and Broken Threads in Doctor Who

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he purpose of this short chapter is to outline some of Doctor Who’s primary characteristics as a narrative and more particularly as a ‘vast narrative.’9 It introduces structuring motifs and patterns, cumulative thematic concerns, and also internal breaches or shifts in the texts. I shall argue here and in later chapters that ongoing elements in Doctor Who have been significantly recoded in texts produced since the demise of the classic series in 1989. This is true especially of the various series of novels produced between 1991 and the television revival in 2005. I do not mean to suggest that there is an absolute fissure between the classic series and later texts, or that Doctor Who cannot be theorized as a narrative whole. Yet it seems to me that what makes the different textual universes of Doctor Who interesting to study in tandem is the fact that the narrative has accommodated so many alterations in ideology and taste without recourse to such devices as Star Trek’s introduction

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of ‘next generation’ and ‘prequel’ series, and without any absolute rupture in consistency at a motivic level. It is particularly worth emphasizing that the apparently radical change in tone between the old and new television series seems much less dramatic if we take into account Doctor Who’s textual metamorphoses during the sixteen-year period between the two television series now often rather misleadingly called the hiatus. Any totalizing analysis of Doctor Who presents special problems: attempts to lump together its media-crossing constellation of texts are as fraught with difficulty as attempts to divide its history meaningfully into phases. To a greater extent than other transmedia fiction such as Buffy, the Vampire Slayer (WB, 1997–2001; UPN, 2001–2003) Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) or even Star Trek (NBC, 1966–1969), Doctor Who is an unwieldy skein of texts, partly by virtue of the fact that it has endured in one form or another almost continuously for forty years, but more particularly because there is no clear hierarchy within its various media manifestations. Had the BBC ever pronounced on which Doctor Who texts are ‘official’ and which are not, as Paramount and Lucasfilm have respectively done with Star Trek and Star Wars,10 the current study might in a sense have been a good deal less interesting to write. The lack of any such ruling means that both the novels and the audios have at various stages been understood as the official continuation of the classic series of Doctor Who, even if they are now all supposedly trumped by the new series. This has fundamentally defined what is at stake in Doctor Who storytelling in these licensed media and constrained the kinds of stories told, at least until Big Finish began issuing ‘What if ... ?’ (or ‘alternate-universe’) audio dramas under the collective title Doctor Who Unbound (which are clearly signalled as non-canonical by the choice of lead actors not previously associated with the role of the Doctor). Chronological analysis of the Doctor Who narrative is not particularly useful unless conditions of production and reception are the main focus as, ultimately, in studies such as Chapman’s, as well as factual books written by fan authors such as Howe, Stammers and Walker.11 It is true that changes of tone and narrative thrust in the television manifestation of Doctor Who have often accompanied changes in production personnel, which in turn often coincide with a change of lead actor (as has recently occurred again with Russell T. Davies

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and David Tennant yielding to Steven Moffat and Matt Smith). It is inherently problematic to imply that the Doctor Who narrative is defined by the imprints of its various transient stars or producers. Moreover, any analysis based around a ‘line-of-succession’ model clearly cannot accommodate the current multiplicity of textual universes, with six actors simultaneously playing the Doctor in licensed productions and original tie-in novels regularly being published. For present purposes, it is more useful to theorize Doctor Who’s narrative organization in terms of the recently developed critical model of the ‘vast narrative’, articulated in Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives.12 This can be usefully supplemented with aspects of Matt Hills’s model of the ‘cult text’ from his Fan Cultures.13 As I argue below, both approaches accommodate the essential multi-vocality of Doctor Who texts (which obtains even in the early 2010s, at a moment of massively focused branding), and both provide a context for understanding the transformations of narrative trajectory and ethos which Doctor Who has undergone in the last twenty years.

Structure and Format By way of a preamble it seems useful to sketch some of the stable structural characteristics of Doctor Who. I use the term structure to refer to two distinct but related things: on the one hand, the basic kinds of protagonist and plot functions in the Doctor Who narratives; on the other, the vehicle of storytelling itself. This latter, the ‘outward’ form as opposed to internal organization of narrative, seems to me peculiarly significant in Doctor Who’s case. One of the classic series’ chief formal characteristics – its episodic, ‘cliff-hanger’ narratives – has grown from a programming convention into an aesthetically meaningful element in its own right. If one of the consistent pleasures of Doctor Who has been that each plot is structured around a series of predictable moves and oppositions, then another has clearly been the episodic format itself. As regards Doctor Who’s internal narrative patterns, there are a number of clear baseline textual conventions and functions. Doctor Who is perhaps best characterized as melodrama, but closer still is its affinity with fairy tale, for all the narrative’s trappings of scientific

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rationalism and technology. The Doctor, an alien traveller with phenomenal mental acuity, explores the universe and travels backwards and forwards in time in his TARDIS. Outwardly, this appears to be a police lock-up box: inwardly it is impossibly spacious with an unspecified number of chambers. As in fairy tale and melodrama, there has typically been little room for moral ambiguity in Doctor Who. Everywhere we see him go, the Doctor encounters evil which is, or comes during the course of the adventure to be, in ascendancy. The Doctor invariably overcomes evildoers, whose vice generally takes one (or more) of four forms: oppressive power mongering, insane egotism, disdain for the value of life, or murderous hatred of the unlike. The Doctor models the reverse values: he travels with companions of whom he is for the most part paternally protective, and collectively he and they embody voluntary cooperation and liberty of thought and action. Yet the Doctor has seldom been a straightforward hero. He has often exhibited characteristics of the trickster, for he generally relies on wiliness and rhetorical skills more than martial prowess or physical force, and his character has frequently been tinged with antiheroism.14 Conversely – at least in the original television series – his opponents are usually more clear-cut in their villainy. The majority of the Doctor’s enemies are non-human: like the heroes of myth and fairy tale, the Doctor faces evil in overtly monstrous forms. The aim of these creatures is generally the assimilation, conquest or eradication of others. When he is not pitted against inhuman alien races, the Doctor may face destructive individuals who are human, or at least, like the hero himself, appear so. These lone villains always embody unchecked egotism or greed in one way or another. As such, they directly invert one of the Doctor’s key heroic (as opposed to tricksteresque) traits: his selflessness. Villains seek aggrandizement and manipulate or destroy those around them to further their interests or ambitions. The Doctor, by contrast, regularly shows himself willing to endanger his own life in the cause of justice and eschews accolades or rewards for his victories. The Doctor’s companions, mostly young and female, show a relative naivety which contrasts with his experience (and often also relative ignorance which contrasts with his wisdom). Apart from playing the role of pupil or sounding board, their main function within the narrative is to get divided from the Doctor at least once

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in almost every adventure. This invariably leads them into peril at the hands of the chief villain or some secondary menace. For companions, and indeed for the Doctor himself, separation from the TARDIS, incarceration, rescue or escape, and mortal jeopardy are mainstays of every plot. In the original television series, the most desperate situations would manifest predictably at the end of each twenty-five minute episode. Doctor Who began as a curious amalgam of series and serial (the latter term here understood as a multi-episode adventure of predefined length, as opposed to an open-ended, multi-stranded narrative like a soap opera).15 For its first three years on air, every episode was individually titled and ended with a cliffhanger. This slightly obscured the fact that each season was subdivided into eight to ten individual serials, the final cliffhanger of one serial being in effect a teaser for the next. From 1966, these multi-part adventures were given umbrella titles, and the individual episode names abandoned. Although the number and length of serials within each season decreased in 1970 and again in 1986, the serial-within-a-series format held until production ceased in 1989. It became such a defining feature of Doctor Who that the home videos released in the 1980s as edited and abridged feature-length presentations were quickly reissued with each episode’s opening and closing credits intact. The inauguration of the NAs in 1992 saw some measure of shift away from the cliffhanger, crisis-and-resolution format, in part reflecting the fact that these were avowedly ‘stories too broad and too deep for the small screen.’16 Exploiting the possibilities of the novel as a form, some of the NAs and EDAs are told in boldly nonlinear ways, Ben Aaronovitch’s ‘Transit’ (1992) and Paul Magrs’ ‘The Blue Angel’ (2000) being among the most notable in the respective series. Yet the appeal of the Doctor Who serial as a form proved tenacious. From their inception in 1999 to the present, the vast majority of the Big Finish Doctor Who audio dramas have been presented as four-part serials, with cliff-hangers and a truncated version of the television show’s evocative theme music framing each instalment. The novels, too, were sometimes connected together in what was, in effect, a grand-scale serial. The NAs, for example, began with four books which pitted the Doctor against a single adversary: the quartet of novels is in effect a protracted but unified quest, extending a narrative form used in Doctor Who as early as its first televised

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season in ‘The Keys of Marinus’ (1964). The serial format has even made the odd cameo appearance in individual novels. For instance, ‘Festival of Death’ (2002), a PDA by Jonathan Morris, is cast as one of the six-part adventures generally used as season closers in the late 1970s, the period from which this ‘missing’ story notionally hails. Every fourth of the eighteen chapters marks the beginning of a new ‘episode’, and even includes a recapitulation of the previous instalment’s last moments; this was a convention used throughout the classic series, which Big Finish also frequently mimics. Morris’s pastiche of the cliffhanger serial is the kind of motif which can only be appreciated by the knowledgeable fan. Unsurprisingly enough, all such nostalgic homage to the original format occurs in Doctor Who texts produced primarily by and for existent fans: the BBC books, among whose editors is long-time fan writer Justin Richards, and the Big Finish audios, which have been produced by two erstwhile fans, the writer Gary Russell and the writer, director and actor Nicholas Briggs. Big Finish has established itself as the chief custodian of format continuity, turning this into a taxonomic as well as an expressive device. For example, in 1985 the BBC briefly experimented with fifty-minute instead of twentyfive-minute episodes for Doctor Who, and Big Finish replicates this for serials which ‘belong’ in that year; likewise, entries in the Big Finish series which ‘follow’ the 1986 season use the new arrangement of the Doctor Who theme tune introduced in that year, and so on. More strikingly, Big Finish has used variation of format to create a transition where none existed on television. Early dramas featuring the Eighth Doctor are in the traditional four- or six-part structure. After the 2005 television revival featuring the Ninth Doctor, which mostly comprised the forty-five-minute stand-alone episodes now standard for television series, a season of Eighth Doctor audio plays – featuring an avowedly older, more tetchy version of the character – was cast in the new format. This structural shift, together with changes of tone, imaginatively serves, among other things, to stitch together the ‘classic’ and ‘new’ Doctor Who. If at one level this is trivia, at another it is an important index of the way in which fans have become managers of the Doctor Who legacy, an issue on which I shall focus heavily in Chapter Three. This is no small consideration since these fan professionals are also Doctor Who’s most copious licensed producers. Big Finish had released

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around a hundred and fifty Doctor Who audio adventures in different ranges by July 2009, the tenth anniversary of the monthly series’ inception. The original BBC Books series (EDAs and PDAs) ran to almost the same number of releases in the course of eight years (1997–2005), and the two Virgin lines (NAs and MAs) to nearly a hundred in six (1991–1997). In short, Doctor Who’s adventures in print and audio media (not including comic strips and graphic novels or short story collections) outnumber the television episodes produced to date by very nearly two to one. Although none of these licensed texts reaches audiences in anything like the same numbers as the television series, there can be no doubt that fan professionals have come to exert a predominant influence on the character and morphology of Doctor Who, even without taking into account their seminal role in shaping the new television series.17

Managing the ‘Vast Narrative’: Deferral and Hyperdiegesis Unsurprisingly, given its endurance and the enormous complexity of its diegetic universe, Doctor Who is one of the textual sets most prominently discussed in Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin’s collection of essays on the ‘vast narrative.’ As a ‘multi-authored cross-media phenomenon’ Doctor Who falls squarely within their (deliberately loose-knit) conceptual framework, which is designed to incorporate a range of recent fictions, textual forms and media interactions.18 Yet they rightly qualify Doctor Who’s status as vast narrative by noting that its universe is ‘fractured and contradictory’ in ways that other narrative worlds, especially those of more recent television series such as The Sopranos (HBO, 1999–2007) and Buffy, the Vampire Slayer are not. The latter, as Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin write, ‘maintain an ongoing structure, with narrative consistency and thematic coherence, throughout large numbers of episodes and sometimes seasons.’19 In comparison, Doctor Who has historically been, and to a great extent remains, more akin to comic and sitcom narratives in which ‘characters often find themselves each week placed back in a default situation little changed from the series’ outset.’20 However, in another way Doctor Who also thrives more than many series on the studied tension between change and continuity, and

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true to a now-venerable cliché it has shown a prodigious capacity for repeated self-transformation. Attempts to refresh the narrative have been regular and sometimes radical, from the time of the Doctor’s first on-screen physical ‘regeneration’ onwards. Hills has therefore suggested in his analysis of cult texts that Doctor Who represents a prime example of the endlessly deferred narrative. As the term implies, this storytelling form, proper to many television series, is as potentially limitless as soap opera; but Hills argues that unlike soap opera, with its diffuse serial structure, the endlessly deferred narrative is focused on a central theme or character which is inherently mysterious.21 Hills suggests that Doctor Who’s title is in effect a question addressed throughout the texts’ history in various ways and that the central character is ‘offered up as a mystery, or as “unfinished/ unknown.” ’22 This claim is essentially justified, but as I shall argue in the next section, the nature, extent and above all the tenor of Doctor Who’s narrative deferral has altered, especially since the late 1980s. Another key characteristic of the cult text, according to Hills, is the hyperdiegesis. This is the intricate universe of the text, a selfcontained world with its own laws and history, whose scale and complexity is hinted at but never fully explored. This hyperdiegesis serves as a conceptual anchor, a consistently implied, coherent framework for events, inspiring the audience’s or reader’s trust and ongoing interest in the narrative.23 Doctor Who certainly developed its own hyperdiegesis, but (as noted by Harrigan and WardripFruin) this has proven to be increasingly unstable. In spite of going through periods of obsessive reference to its own past, Doctor Who has much more often breached its own internal continuity. This is partly due to its sheer length of duration and proliferation, partly to the fact that its narrative has always been open and haphazard in nature. Yet, as I shall argue, the ‘failure’ of its hyperdiegesis also points to one of Doctor Who’s idiosyncratic strengths: its capacity for the rich and complex accretion of ideas in what amounts to a narrative palimpsest.

Modes of Permutation and Deferral If the classic series of Doctor Who proved in the long run to be a narrative of endless deferral, it does not follow that the closure it

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resisted was always the same, or even that the principle of deferral always applied with equal force. Doctor Who was never a series like The Prisoner (ITC, 1967–1968) or The Fugitive (ABC, 1963–1967), in which key questions were established at the outset, and ongoing delay in their resolution was the ostensible basis for the series’ continuation. In other words, it would be a mistake to overstate the extent to which Doctor Who was originally organized around the narrative question implied by the programme’s title.24 True, little was originally disclosed about the Doctor, except that he came from another world and apparently another time, but his role as a space- and time-travelling alien was much more a basis for the action than the explicit or even tacit focus of the narrative. If one central question has arisen to sustain Doctor Who as a narrative of endless deferral, it is less a teleological than an ontological one. There has never been any suggestion of a final goal for the narrative, any hint that the Doctor would voluntarily change his itinerant lifestyle or fulfil some ultimate destiny. Indeed, there is no real sense in which he is a mortal. Four years into the series’ run, the Doctor claimed in ‘The War Games’ (1969) that his people could ‘live forever, barring accidents.’ Although this assertion was modified a few years later in ‘The Deadly Assassin’ (1976) with the disclosure that a Time Lord is able to regenerate only twelve times, this hardly set a tangible limit to the Doctor’s wanderings, especially given that the very same serial demonstrated that a Time Lord could cheat ultimate demise. On the other hand, the texts of Doctor Who have repeatedly and increasingly made the character of the Doctor mysterious in terms of behaviour and motivation. His unpredictability has been renewed at regular intervals by his changes of bodily form, for the introduction of each new performer in the title role inevitably rendered the character strange again. Indeed, in one way the Doctor’s first regeneration placed the principle of endless deferral squarely at the centre of Doctor Who’s narrative, for it made him inexhaustibly unknowable. Beyond this, the last seasons of the classic series introduced the idea that the Doctor was more than ‘just another Time Lord,’ and the implication that in some prior life he had been one of the co-founders of his civilization was teasingly extended throughout the NAs, coming to fruition in the series’ culminating entry, ‘Lungbarrow’ (1997).

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Yet ultimately more significant than hints of an heroic origin for the Doctor, or even his changes of form, has been the ever-increasing emphasis on his unfathomable thinking and capricious behaviour, his sometimes-shocking attitude to life and death, his secrecy and deviousness, his emotional unavailability and isolation. Since the mid-1980s, the texts of Doctor Who have emphatically presented the Doctor as alien, a character largely incapable of sustaining intimate bonds with others or operating consistently within a human range of emotion. In the NAs and EDAs, and in the audio plays of the present decade, the tension between the Doctor’s humane tendencies and his essentially alien emotional life has provided much of the ongoing interest; it also formed the dramatic mainstay of the new series on television for the first four years of its run. This interplay of the human and inhuman within the Doctor’s persona(e) was certainly not an invention of the 1980s, but it is worth stressing that the motif was far from a constant in the classic series. Titanic egocentricity and deviousness were the Doctor’s strongest attributes for the first dozen or so episodes of the classic series – he thought nothing of placing his companions’ lives in jeopardy to satisfy his own whims – but these tendencies were quickly toned down. Throughout the 1960s and until the mid-1970s he became an increasingly avuncular figure, and the first serious and sustained shift back towards anti-heroism was only made with the Fourth Doctor, Tom Baker. In 1975 Baker and his producer, Philip Hinchcliffe, agreed that the Doctor should exhibit more ‘Olympian detachment.’25 In practice this often meant seemingly callous and unfeeling behaviour, laced with equally Olympian flashes of childishness. The character’s anti-heroism and emphasis on his frightening potential was eventually taken to new heights with the Sixth Doctor, played by Colin Baker. Quite apart from the fact that this Doctor was frequently arrogant, impatient and insensitive, the ‘dark’ side of his character was quite literally embodied in the Valeyard, an enemy who proved to be the Doctor’s own negative traits distilled into independent, corporeal form (‘Trial of a Time Lord’, 1986). In retrospect, the conceit of pitting the Sixth Doctor against the embodiment of his own frailties seems almost like a morality-play prologue to the long career of the Seventh Doctor on screen and in print. By Sylvester McCoy’s third season in the role, the Seventh Doctor was

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exhibiting an impish cunning and a willingness to manipulate those around him which exceeded anything seen before in the series.26 In the NAs he became yet more crafty, aloof and evasive, and his companions’ trust in him grew correspondingly fragile. The interest of this situation – on which a narrative of endless deferral was built – was that the Doctor expressed fear of loneliness and yearning for companionship, while simultaneously acting in ways which were guaranteed to alarm and alienate his friends.27 For the first time in Doctor Who’s history, companions routinely questioned his (and their own) motivation for travelling in the TARDIS; recriminations, unease and estrangements amongst the crew became commonplace. The ongoing exploration of the Doctor’s character contradictions and his edgy or angst-ridden relationships with his fellow travellers has proven inexhaustibly fruitful for Doctor Who writers over the last fifteen years in a way that the more epic elements of deferred narrative (such as questions about the Doctor’s true role in Time Lord history) have not. For all that the NAs, EDAs and the new series are discrete and even contradictory at the level of narrative premise and thrust, preoccupation with the Doctor’s mixture of superhuman heroism and emotional elusiveness has been a constant in all of them. I shall turn to some of the instances of interpersonal conflict or tension in recent texts of Doctor Who later in this book (especially in Chapters Three, Five and Seven). For present purposes it is enough to note that since 1989 Doctor Who texts have focused on problems of character barely ever touched upon in the classic series’ first quarter century. This is not the place to speculate on the reasons for the abrupt shift made around 1989 from an almost exclusively plot-driven to a more character-oriented narrative of deferral in Doctor Who. Suffice it to say that if the rapidity of the change was in one way startling, the fact of the change is not so surprising, at least if we compare Doctor Who with some of its generic cousins during the same period. Already by the end of the 1980s, Star Trek: The Next Generation was addressing personal relationships within the context of an epic space-travel saga, and its first two spin-offs in the 1990s, Deep Space Nine and Voyager, took this tendency further (CBS: 1987–1994; CBS, 1993–1999; CBS 1995–2001). By the time Doctor Who was revived on television in 2005, series such as The

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X-Files (Fox, 1993–2002), Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and Alias (ABC, 2001–2006) had made the ingredient of emotional resonance a sine qua non for genre fiction. Set pieces and special effects aside, much of the broad appeal of these narratives surely lay in their quasi-soapopera treatment of a core group of characters: dilemmas of professional ethics, sexual relationships or unresolved sexual tension, family dynamics, illness and loss, and so on. From this perspective, Doctor Who has simply demonstrated its famous adaptability: it has been successfully adjusted to the prevalent tastes of genre producers and consumers for whom some sort of dramatic development or exploration of character – however slight or trite – is now apparently de rigueur in fantasy narratives.

Continuity, ‘Canonicity’ and Palimpsest Endlessly deferred narrative, though peculiarly accommodating to the enthusiasms of fans, is a property of many series or serials, whether or not they become cult texts. The device of endless deferral is calculated to secure audience loyalty without necessarily requiring intense engagement. In other words, it is quite possible to be actively curious about the way that the Doctor’s relationship with companions such as Rose Tyler or Sam Jones may turn out, or eagerly anticipate his next rematch with the Daleks, without sharing in the kind of affective play which characterizes fan interaction with the cult text. In Doctor Who’s case, at least, the same cannot be said of hyperdiegesis: the complex, self-suspending universe of a cult text, of which we only ever see portions in the narrative. The maintenance, ordering and enhancement of the Doctor Who hyperdiegesis have almost entirely been the work of fans. Nearly all sustained fictional exploration of the Whoniverse belongs to the phase of the texts’ history in which audience and authors were arguably most homogeneous, which is to say the lifespan of the NAs and MAs. The NAs became increasingly interdependent as the series progressed, but they also alluded to an array of details from the established history of the worlds of Doctor Who on television, sometimes picking up on the most fleeting of references or obscure of characters.28 The MAs by definition filled in some of the blanks and could even be

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designed specifically to paper over cracks in the classic series narrative.29 It was Lance Parkin, an author in both ranges and longterm fan commentator, who undertook the grandest encyclopaedic survey of Doctor Who’s fictional cosmos. A History of the Universe is a tour de force, its subject matter approached by Parkin with all the clinical precision and measured scepticism of a good philologist or mythographer.30 Subsequent editions of Parkin’s book have been entitled simply Ahistory, perhaps intentionally reflecting that Doctor Who is ahistorical in rather more than its narrative premise. In his introduction, Parkin notes baldly that the writers of various Doctor Who texts ‘shamelessly threw out the show’s established history in the name of a good story’, and his retroactive attempt to impose order was therefore fraught with obstacles.31 Some of the strands in Doctor Who’s skein of texts have proven too tangled or frayed to allow seamless repair or rectification, even (and sometimes especially) when a given story was conceived in part to clarify or consolidate the narrative’s internal historical framework. All this ultimately reflects the fact that until around 1980 continuity was barely a consideration for the authors of Doctor Who. In Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood’s neat phrase, ‘running themes rather than hard facts held the series together.’32 Nor has blithe inattentiveness to internal continuity really ever gone away, for all the historicizing efforts of fans and some cosmetic appearance to the contrary within the narrative itself: uncertainties and contradictions, even over matters as apparently easy to track as the Doctor’s age, persist even in the new series.33 Overall then, Doctor Who’s hyperdiegetic framework is at best rickety. With its time-travel premise, Doctor Who was not conceived with an eye to internal coherence; there was no need for it to be. Adherence to documented facts of Earth history aside, chronology and consistency in the Doctor Who texts only become a potential issue when recurrent characters and environments were involved, or when ongoing scenarios were devised. For some years, almost the only returning characters in the classic series were monsters, and as they tended to be eliminated at their first encounter with the Doctor, explanations inevitably had to be proffered for any reappearance. A prime example is the case of the Cybermen, in which the problem was handled easily enough and in a manner

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which was to become characteristic of Doctor Who: the accretion of new data which counterpoints or ‘thickens’ the old. The Cybermen were first introduced in ‘The Tenth Planet’ (1966) as the prosthetically augmented denizens of Earth’s wandering twin planet, Mondas. They and their world were utterly destroyed at the end of the serial, foiled in an attempt to leech power from Earth. When the Cybermen reappeared in ‘The Moonbase’ less than a year later, looking rather different, the perfectly reasonable explanation was that this particular troop came from another planet which they had colonized: Telos. Comparable let-outs can be used to resolve many later contradictions in Cyber history. The principle of retroactively shaping continuity around newly stated ‘facts’ is by no means peculiar to Doctor Who; in fact, one might argue that it is another common (if not quite leading) characteristic of cult texts. What is striking about Doctor Who is the extent to which the process of defining the texts’ internal universe is palimpsestic. In other words, key elements have not always simply been brought into alignment with existing ‘truths’, or vice versa; some of them have effectively overwritten earlier histories, albeit leaving the original elements partially visible. The most notable example of this is provided by ‘facts’ concerning the Doctor’s people, the Time Lords of Gallifrey. In ‘The Three Doctors’ (1973), a quasimythic figure called Omega was introduced as the originator of Time Lord technology. A few years later, in ‘The Deadly Assassin’ (1976), the previously unmentioned engineer and architect Rassilon was credited as the author of Gallifrey’s time-travel capability, and Omega apparently forgotten. Rassilon immediately and definitively eclipsed Omega, emerging as the linchpin figure of Gallifreyan history. In nearly every subsequent script or novel referring to Time Lord culture and lore, Rassilon is designated with tedious predictability as the proprietor of anything powerful, mysterious, venerable or merely first-rate in Gallifreyan culture, from the Black Scrolls of Rassilon to ‘Rassilon’s Red’, apparently a favourite wine in taverns beneath the Time Lord citadel.34 Although Omega is not only mentioned but also returns in later Doctor Who texts, he always stands in the shadow of Rassilon. The ritual allusion to Rassilon palimpsests the Doctor Who narrative in another way: the motif both depends on and partially hides its own basis. In ‘The Deadly Assassin’ the Doctor had to rely on a

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Time Lord archivist to tell him about Rassilon’s historical achievements. Yet in every subsequent story the Time Lords at large and the Doctor in particular are thoroughly conversant with stories of Rassilon and his powers. Once such an adjustment had been made to the mythos of Gallifrey, it was easy enough to layer on top of that, selectively re-inscribing or occluding elements each time. Thus, by the end of the classic series hints are being made concerning the Other, a third co-founder with Rassilon and Omega of modern Gallifreyan civilization, who is eventually revealed in the NAs to have been the Doctor in an earlier existence. Yet in the novel series that followed, the EDAs and PDAs, as eventually in the television revival, the Other is largely forgotten and the idea of his being in some sense identical with the Doctor is entirely jettisoned. From the time of the NAs onwards, Doctor Who texts began to acknowledge their own internal confusion, and authors started to use this to imaginative ends, a trend that fittingly enough reached its apogee in the final EDA, Lance Parkin’s ‘The Gallifrey Chronicles’ (2005). One of the most striking examples is ‘Unnatural History’ (1999), in which the principal villain is Griffin, a collector of curious creatures (the ‘unnaturalist’ hinted at in the title) who seeks to acquire the Doctor as a specimen. Yet Griffin regards the Doctor as a problematic because of the Time Lord’s paradoxically tangled personal history; Griffin attempts to iron out the more egregious inconsistencies in order to sustain his taxonomy. The gentle dig at more continuity-obsessed fans is clear. In the same novel the Doctor’s companion Sam reflects on the discontinuities in the Doctor’s TARDIS logs: ‘on one page they’d say he’d done something, the next he hadn’t, the page after that he’d done it a long time ago.’35 Amusingly enough, this is in itself a sly continuity reference, for it directly and deliberately echoes lines uttered in an episode of the classic series (‘The Keeper of Traken’, 1981), in which another companion is consulting the same TARDIS logs. This ludic approach to the potentially stifling issue of ‘canonicity’ typifies one of the stylistic strengths which have emerged in Doctor Who since the demise of the classic series: its capacity to absorb its own narrative properties into the world of the text, to revel in lore without being too circumscribed by ‘law.’ Another clear instance of meta-referential play with narrative is the figure of Iris Wildthyme, a time traveller whose very existence is a teasing critique of both

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the structural and ethical inconsistencies of Doctor Who (and whom I shall discuss at some length in Chapter Seven). Yet such poetic devices are the flipside of another important, if much cruder, narrative conceit in Doctor Who: the use of temporal paradox as the basis for ‘resetting’ the hyperdiegesis. In the recent texts of Doctor Who, this reset function took shape around the conceit of time war, which is a natural emanation of the whole narrative’s premise. According to the logic of the Doctor Who universe, a war between opponents both possessing time-travel capability could selectively alter the ‘true’ history of that universe. The time-war motif originally featured in the EDAs, but it was to take on watershed significance for Doctor Who in the 2005 television revival. Here we learn that Gallifrey has at some unspecified point been destroyed in ‘the Last Great Time War’ in which the Time Lords and the Daleks erased one another from history (more or less). The prominent fan writer Paul Cornell has argued in a blog essay on canonicity in Doctor Who that the Time War ‘puts all historical events [in the earlier Doctor Who narrative] up for grabs.’36 In effect, Cornell suggests that the Time War is the ultimate narrative ‘reset button’, foreclosing any discussion of whether or not there is substantive continuity between the various pre-2005 texts and the revival. By this reckoning, the fact that Cornell adapted one of his own NAs, ‘Human Nature’, for the new television series does not necessarily negate the original novel. Who is to say that the Time War did not erase the Seventh Doctor’s sojourn as a human being in pre-World War One England, allowing the Tenth Doctor to have a near-replicate experience? In the same way, the fact that in ‘School Reunion’ (2006), the Doctor’s former companion Sarah Jane Smith claims she has not met him since their parting in ‘The Hand of Fear’ (1976) need not belie her encounters with the Seventh and Eighth Doctors in the BBC novels ‘Bullet Time’ (2001) and ‘Interference’ (1999); those encounters may simply have been cancelled out by the war. In summary, Cornell contends that Doctor Who was always ‘one big and very complex story that rewrites and contradicts itself’; the only difference since the invention of the Time War is that it now ‘does it with purpose, rather than by accident.’37 For all Cornell’s insistence that the invention of the Time War is Russell T. Davies’s way of not ruling on the canonicity of other and

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earlier Doctor Who texts, to accept this ‘non-ruling’ is nevertheless to accept a hierarchy within the texts. Cornell argues that Davies has brought order to the disorderly Doctor Who hyperdiegesis by making its internal contradictions purposive and therefore legitimate. Logically this resolution of chaos only works if Davies’s version of Doctor Who is understood as paramount, as the single, commanding vantage point from which to survey past and parallel textual manifestations. By contrast, Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin’s metaphor of the vast narrative as ‘fictional quilt’ stresses non-linear and thus non-hierarchical relationships within sprawling, media-crossing texts such as Doctor Who. This model encourages us to understand seemingly illassorted or contradictory elements in the Who narrative as parts of a multifarious whole rather than problems requiring unification. In short, the quilt metaphor can serve to highlight not merely Doctor Who’s famous flexibility of narrative premise but rather its inherent and often productive lack of narrative constraint and coherence.

Navigating the Texts: Buoys, Daymarks and Charts There is yet another way of looking at the problem of narrative unity, or the absence thereof, in Doctor Who. The very idea that even the classic series constitutes a single text is, as Alan McKee has pointed out, something of a fiction in itself.38 The series was the work of many different authorial regimes over twenty-six years, producing often wildly divergent material, and such divergences have multiplied since Doctor Who’s migration to other media. Ultimately, it is safest to argue that the ‘wholeness’ in Doctor Who is maintained not at the level of narrative but through structuring icons such as the Daleks, the TARDIS and above all the Doctor himself. With this in mind, it is worth mentioning another critical category articulated by Matt Hills in Fan Cultures: the cult icon. In Hills’s model this is not strictly a property of the cult text. In fact, for Hills the overriding characteristic of the cult icon – implicitly always a human figure, such as Marilyn Monroe or Elvis Presley – is the fact that it eludes containment within a narrative. The Doctor may be fictitious and by definition bound within a narrative frame, but he

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exhibits one of the key properties of the cult icon outlined by Hills, namely, its capacity to move ‘across social-historical frames, being re-mapped and reworked in the process.’39 Perhaps more closely applicable to the Doctor is the paradigm of the popular hero as defined by Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott in their book Bond and Beyond: a figure which ‘floats between and connects ... texts into related sets.’40 It is the Doctor’s presence which guarantees a narrative as being Doctor Who, however remote that narrative might seem in all other respects from the originary 1963 television text or any other benchmark. Yet inasmuch as the Doctor is a constant, the character has been ‘remapped and reworked’ in ways that go far beyond periodic changes of physical appearance and demeanour: there have been significant shifts in the character’s political significance. This has been especially clear-cut with the advent of the new series. For example, the Doctor’s capacity for sexual attraction, a non-issue until the later 1990s in any of the texts, immediately became a central and ongoing theme in the new. As I discuss in Chapter Four, this had striking consequences for the politics of gender in the texts, reaffirming certain givens even as it seemed to override others. Conversely, some iconic and motivic elements of Doctor Who have been almost wholly undisturbed throughout the narrative’s sea changes and migrations, or at least they have quickly regained their original valence after being upset in some particular moment or medium. This has often led to the texts’ developing ethical blind spots since not all the fixed icons of Doctor Who are as ideologically neutral as, say, the fact that the TARDIS is always larger within than without. As I demonstrate in different ways in Chapters Two and Four, blind acceptance of the Doctor’s unbridled masculine agency and imperialist noblesse oblige in the classic series persisted well into the new, arguably stunting the narrative’s discursive potential. Sustained attempts to probe the Doctor’s patriarchal entitlement are mostly confined to the NAs and EDAs, which is to say, fanoriented texts produced between the two television series. Complicating the Doctor’s authority in the novels went hand in hand with giving his companions unprecedented critical distance from the Doctor, another innovation which has diminished since the termination of the EDAs, as I discuss in Chapter Five. By contrast, the growing tendency to question and mitigate binary distinctions

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between heroism and villainy may have first been strongly evident in the licensed texts of the hiatus (and was arguably at its most rewarding in those texts), but it has in some measure persisted in the new series. In Chapter Three I address the circumstances which have underwritten more or less permanent changes in the portrayal of such iconic traditional enemies as the Master, but also the limits of these changes in face of the need to satisfy a coalition audience rather than a specialist audience. The recurrent, structuring motifs of Doctor Who are ultimately not just markers of overall textual wholeness on the one hand or of nodal responses to the texts’ changing contexts on the other. The iconic and idiomatic elements in the vast narrative also work cumulatively – in all their repetitions, transformations and lapses – to help define the aesthetic scope of the Doctor Who universes, and the texts’ horizon of ethical possibilities. The Doctor, with his (to date) elevenfold persona, and the TARDIS, with its impossible, portmanteau nature, are apt metaphors for the nature of the Doctor Who narrative as a space of imaginative possibilities, a space within which notions of the ineffable can come into play. As I argue in Chapter Six, Doctor Who has proven itself aesthetically suited to representing grand spectacle in miniature, articulating epic events in synecdoche rather than in full. And as I argue in Chapter Seven, some of the most rewarding Doctor Who texts transmute this capacity to relate the expansive and the intimate into a very particular kind of ethical challenge, asking readers or audiences to reflect on concepts of personal and universal responsibility, setting these in often-disquieting juxtaposition.

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II IN A CLASS OF HIS OWN? Doctor Who and the Social Matrix

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n a line from ‘The Daleks’ Master Plan’ (1965–66), oft quoted in both the celebratory and critical literature of Doctor Who, William Hartnell’s testy and fastidious First Doctor makes a notable statement about his class affiliation. Vexed at being asked whether he is a British citizen, the Doctor describes himself rather as ‘a citizen of the universe, and a gentleman to boot.’ Amusing as it was clearly intended to be, the line probably did not strike contemporary viewers as particularly remarkable. By virtue of the TARDIS’s capacity to materialize anywhere in the cosmos at any time in a given world’s history, the Doctor manifestly had a degree of universal access that very few Earthly citizens enjoy even in their own countries. The first part of the Doctor’s assertion, therefore, was nothing more than a personalized restatement of Doctor Who’s narrative premise. The second part of his claim, which modifies the first, was a verbal articulation of something which must also have seemed self-evident to many viewers. In spite of his eccentric mane of long white hair, the Doctor’s bearing, manners and clipped speech made him easily recognisable as an old-fashioned gentleman or ‘toff’ by thennormative standards in Britain.

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This affirmation of a particular social status for its main protagonist overtly established class relations as a part of the Doctor Who text, even though there was no need to do so: no ostensible need in narrative terms, because by definition an extraterrestrial being exists outside British class structures, and no actual need because in affective terms the Doctor’s ‘gentlemanliness’ was already so strongly articulated that the claim was redundant. This overt, doubly unnecessary avowal of class as a defining aspect of Doctor Who’s main protagonist – and thus by extension a structuring element in the narrative – begs two questions: If the Doctor is a ‘gentleman,’ how does his portrayal as such relate to other elements of class specificity in the texts? Just as importantly, to what extent have the evocation and the significance of class relations changed over the course of the Doctor Who texts’ history? In this chapter, I should like to suggest that the Doctor is best understood not merely as a ‘gentleman’ but more specifically as an aristocratic figure. As I shall argue, recognizing him as such allows us to move beyond a dichotomous model of class dividing society into two groups – upper and lower, the classes and the masses – which are in an implicitly adversarial relationship. This dualistic model does not seem useful in the context of Doctor Who, the classic series of which consistently addressed the ideals and anxieties of a middle class aware of two kinds of pressure: from ‘above’ and ‘below.’ My contention, in essence, is that the Doctor is one of a number of essentially benign aristocrats created for 1960s television adventure fiction who, by virtue of being marked as archaic through dress and manners, could serve as figures for rehearsing and critiquing different kinds of class relations. Yet I shall also argue that the Doctor’s elite privilege has proven an exceptionally durable conceit, which – after an interlude during which the series’ paternalism was probed in the original novels of the 1990s and early 2000s – persists largely untroubled in the new series, cosmetic changes notwithstanding.

Defi ning ‘Upper’-Class Identity: Lords and Gentlemen Various generalizing claims and counter-claims have been made about Doctor Who’s social and class politics both by the texts’ producers and by scholarly commentators. Many of these revolve

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around the Doctor himself. One oft-repeated mantra, which seems to be at least partially at odds with the character’s self-definition as a gentleman, is that he is an ‘anti-establishment’ figure. This was the consistent position of Verity Lambert, Doctor Who’s first producer, who was later to bemoan the fact that the decidedly ‘clubbable’ Third Doctor, played by Jon Pertwee, was effectively co-opted by the establishment when he took on the role of scientific adviser to the military.41 In The Unfolding Text, Tulloch and Alvarado claim that the Pertwee incarnation Doctor is ‘essentially upper middle class’, noting more generally that ‘the “gentleman” image has always been a central part of the Doctor’s style.’ They further report that one hostile Australian audience member considered this ‘an extremely irritating and patronising South-East English self-indulgent shot at the rest of Britain.’42 Elsewhere, Tulloch and Alvarado quote Tony Skillen’s view that Doctor Who is ‘the last dilettante farewell of a ruling class culture.’43 Sounding a very different note, Chapman says that it is ‘entirely misleading’ to regard the Third Doctor as an establishment figure, suggesting that he is on the contrary a ‘loose cannon’ who is ‘often in conflict with both the military and the civilian authorities.’44 By the same token, while Tulloch and Alvarado categorize the bohemian persona of Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor as ‘upper class’, Chapman regards this later-1970s version of the character as non-conformist and anti-authoritarian; he identifies Baker’s incarnation with ‘the counter-cultural generation of the 1960s now grown to adulthood’, even seeing ‘the counter-cultural associations of fin-de-siècle Montmartre ... coded into the Doctor’s dress.’45 Commentators have also remarked on the way in which the Doctor’s companions and incidental characters figure in the series’ handling of class and regional identity. Nicholas Cull points out that ‘the original series plan called for the Doctor’s youngest companion to be “working class” ’ (neglecting to emphasize that this plan was not, in fact, brought to fruition), and adduces later companions such as the cockney sailor, Ben, and the refugee from the post-Culloden Highland purges, Jamie, as evidence of the ‘social inclusiveness’ of the text. Yet Cull also observes that the Doctor himself ‘remained upper middle class’, a figure of ‘whiggish interventionism’ in the affairs of working-class people who were ‘in need of leadership, or at the very least technical assistance.’46

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The above claims are remarkable as much for their unacknowledged assumptions as for their polemical force. Whatever their positions, the various commentators take it for granted that definitions such as ‘establishment’, ‘upper class’, ‘upper middle class’ and even ‘gentleman’ are stable and transparent. The mere fact that there is disparity in the unqualified claims that the Doctor belongs to the ruling or upper class on the one hand and the middle class on the other seems to suggest that the writers’ faith in the connotative stability of these terms may be excessive. In order to say something useful about class in Doctor Who, therefore, it seems important to try to clarify the language of class, with the caveat that this is not a topic on which definitive conclusions can be reached. A useful term with which to begin considering class in the context of Doctor Who is ‘gentleman.’ Quite apart from its centrality to debates about the Doctor’s status, the word ‘gentleman’ is unlike the more abstract categories of degree used to define class, such as ‘upper’ and ‘middle’, in that it once had concrete significance. In Britain the term originally denoted a man of gentle birth, which is to say someone who did not rank among the nobility but was permitted to bear arms. With social and political changes in the nineteenth century which definitively upset the vestiges of the old feudal order, the meaning shifted to connote less a specific social rank than a general sense of superior social standing, and the possession of chivalrous instincts, intelligence and fine feelings. While it could be applied to those working in commerce, the term generally suggested a person whose financial means, to quote the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘enable him to live in easy circumstances without engaging in trade’; in short, ‘a man of money and leisure.’ This more recent, looser connotation of the word ‘gentleman’ seems readily applicable to the Doctor, at least as regards the idea of economic freedom (for issues of superior conduct or refinement are again slippery ideas, unless they can be directly linked to concrete factors such as mode of speech). The Doctor manifestly lives in ‘easy circumstances’ in that neither he nor those who travel with him seem to lack creature comforts, and he is clearly not obliged to work for pay. On the contrary, during the period of his imprisonment by the Time Lords on Earth in the early 1970s, it was made quite explicit that his role as adviser to U.N.I.T. was to be unpaid (‘Spearhead from Space’, 1970). The Doctor’s ‘home’, the TARDIS,

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might sometimes be mechanically unreliable and its internal spaces are seldom represented as opulent, but it is exceedingly spacious and unimaginably sophisticated. Moreover, the Doctor appears not to have to worry himself with routine upkeep, at least in terms of such matters as domestic cleanliness. Within the context of the adventure narrative, of course, the Doctor is an essentially magical character for whom mundane chores such as housekeeping have no meaning. Yet, whatever the internal or generic justification, the alignment between his conditions of existence of those of the traditional leisured classes is undeniable. Of course, the gentry are not the only leisured class with which the Doctor could be associated. Much more unequivocally leisured, even today, are members of the aristocracy. The distinction between the aristocrat and the gentleman seems to me an important one if we want to discuss the Doctor’s class orientation in ways which have been meaningful during the lifetime of the Doctor Who texts. To think of the Doctor as an aristocrat is to locate him in historically tangible ways. As noted, the term ‘gentleman’ has increasingly come to connote a standard of refined manners and respect for others rather than a position within a particular social group. Aristocracy, on the other hand, is purely a matter of birth, traditionally carrying (for men, at least) the entitled expectation of participating in government or other forms of maintenance of the social order (as clergyman, soldier or lawyer). Skillen’s reported suggestion that Doctor Who is the ‘last dilettante farewell of a ruling class culture’ is much easier to sustain in relation to the aristocracy than the more nebulous category of ‘gentleman’, for the hereditary nobility were certainly more or less moribund as a ruling elite when Doctor Who began. The last British prime minister of noble birth, Alec Douglas Home, completed his brief tenure as premier less than a year after the programme’s debut. Changes to the constitution of House of Lords have been intermittently in train ever since.47 Moreover, the Conservative party, of which Home was a member, has changed its class affiliation with the rise of the New Right: the Heath, Thatcher and Major governments were increasingly dominated by self-made men rather than the landed classes.48 The Doctor himself has been explicitly associated with notions of aristocracy for most of Doctor Who’s history. While the First Doctor claimed only to be a gentleman in ‘The Daleks’ Master Plan’, he was

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clearly identified as a Time Lord four years later in ‘The War Games’ (1969). Even without learning – as audiences eventually did in ‘The Deadly Assassin’ (1976) – that ‘Time Lord’ was not the name for his whole race, but for its ruling class, the overtones of nobility are hard to miss. For example, the Pertwee Doctor’s aristocratic mien drew comment from at least one of the self-declared fans interviewed for John Tulloch and Henry Jenkins’s book Science Fiction Audiences.49 His ‘lordly’ status surely renders problematic the claim made both by Cull and by Tulloch and Alvarado that the Doctor is essentially ‘upper middle class.’ While the title ‘Doctor’ could be taken as professional and therefore indicative of earned rather than inherited status, there is little else about the hero of Doctor Who which suggests traditional middle-class values of sobriety, responsibility, thrift and hard work. Conversely, there is a great deal which suggests the casual entitlement of the ‘upper crust.’ For example, the often brusque manner which all the Doctors adopt in varying degrees is remote from the mealy-mouthed equivocation, euphemism and denial often regarded as characteristic of the ‘considerate’ middle class, and correspondingly close to the unrepentant bluntness of the upper crust (which is, ironically enough, something aristocrats supposedly share with the working class).50 This was certainly true at the outset of the classic series, with Hartnell’s prickly and uncompromising portrayal. Indeed, at its inception Doctor Who made a clear distinction between the narrative’s de facto heroes, the measured and reasonable schoolteachers, Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, who were embodiments of middle-class probity, and the selfish, impatient and contemptuous Doctor, correspondingly the (anti-heroic) embodiment of aristocratic hauteur. If there was an ‘establishment’ to which the Doctor was being opposed, as Verity Lambert claimed, it was surely envisaged as the responsible, war-generation, middleclass establishment, for this social group had attained unprecedented political dominance in the 1920s and 1930s.51 Both the level-headed and reliable Ian Chesterton and his successor in the role of commonsensical male companion, Steven Taylor, were apt heroes for the middle class as it imagined itself in the post-war decades. Both embodied the independence and responsibility which had so long been self-defined virtues of the middle class,

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and as such contained, defused and simultaneously underscored the Doctor’s excesses, rendering him safe and amusing.52

Markers of Class: Dress and Address As I shall shortly argue, the First Doctor’s air of aristocratic privilege and prerogative continues to play into the construction of the character in recent Doctor Who texts, including the new series. Other signifiers of class have changed, however, and it is worth briefly addressing them. Of paramount importance among shifting signifiers of class are speech and dress. Of these, clothing is arguably more difficult to place securely on the polarity between uppermiddle-class and aristocratic paradigms. What may usefully be said is that nearly all the Doctor’s first eight incarnations have worn outfits which were not merely redolent of the past but more specifically past modes of finery.53 The only exception is Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor, whose shabby and ill-fitting costume is often likened to that worn by Charlie Chaplin’s ‘little tramp.’54 Otherwise, until the advent of the ascetically clad Christopher Eccleston in the new series, silks, velvets, plaids and embroidery have been very much in evidence (all markers of the ‘foppery’ from which Eccleston was expressly keen to distance himself). So, too, have items of clothing strongly associated with the elite in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: smoking jackets and frock coats, Inverness cloaks, fancy waistcoats and golfing sweaters, Byron neckties and cravats, spats and cloth-top boots, and so on. If one were to try to code the first eight Doctors’ wardrobes simply as a function of class – as opposed to acknowledging the possibility that they might embody masquerade, irony or subversive appropriation – then Tulloch and Alvarado would surely be right in linking all these smart costumes with the ‘upper class.’ Less germane is their insistence on upper-middle-class status in Pertwee’s case. Neither his nor any other Doctor’s clothing bespeaks any of the signs of industry and sobriety which the self-identified middle class has traditionally valued. On the contrary, velvet is for reasons of expense and relative fragility clearly associated with non-strenuous leisure activities, while the natty glen plaids and Irish tweeds of Tom Baker’s Doctor chiefly evoke the country pursuits of the landed

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elite. Yet having said all that, even before we get to Peter Davison’s curious, scarlet-braided umpire’s coat or the patchwork horror foisted on Colin Baker, the overtones of eccentricity or decadence in the Doctors’ fussy attire complicate any straightforward association with class. So, too, do their frequent youth resonances, a matter to which I shall return at the end of this chapter. The Doctor’s mode of speech is a slightly different matter, for its class significance is unequivocal. The first six actors to play the Doctor all spoke using received pronunciation, a clear marker of the upper-middle and (with variants) landed classes. Indeed, in Watching the English Kate Fox writes: ‘a person with an upperclass accent, using upper-class terminology, will be recognized as upper class even if he or she is earning poverty-line wages, doing grubby menial work and living in a run-down council flat.’55 With this in mind, one has to question Tulloch and Alvarado’s claim that, by virtue of his scruffy dress, Patrick Troughton’s Doctor is somehow an exception to the gentlemanly norm. 56 Whatever his appearance might suggest, Troughton’s plummy drawl, no less than Pertwee’s lisp, strongly evokes the uppermost echelons of British society. In fact, the ‘classic’ Doctors (bar Sylvester McCoy) all use not merely received pronunciation but a conservative form of this accent. This becomes especially apparent when one listens to the ‘CD extras’ on the Big Finish audio releases. When Colin Baker and Peter Davison are being ‘themselves’ in interview, they both speak in a contemporary version of received pronunciation, quite distinct from the cut-glass tones which they use in their actual performances. It is only in relation to this old-fashioned model of ‘Queen’s English’ that faint traces of the northwest in McGann’s speech, the soft Scots brogue in McCoy’s, or even Tennant’s Estuary English seem to represent any kind of real departure from the Doctor Who norm. Yet, if accent trumps all as an indicator of class, I do not think it can conversely be said that the abrupt breach with received pronunciation and ‘upper-class’ speech patterns with Christopher Eccleston has in any substantive sense democratized the elitist Doctor. In his Ninth and Tenth incarnations he remained as highhanded and rude as ever the First, Third or Sixth Doctors were, and as menacingly overbearing as the Fourth could be. Nor has

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his mode of life changed in the new series, even if in the Ninth and Tenth Doctors had a more obviously beaten-up, Heath Robinson TARDIS, wore more casual clothing and supposedly sounded less ‘poncey.’ Even the faintly inept and scattered-seeming Eleventh Doctor is still ultimately the lord of all he surveys, sweeping into crisis situations to act as troubleshooter and moral arbiter and then sweeping out again. In the specific case of the ‘northern’ Ninth Doctor, it could be argued that actions and attitudes serve powerfully to recuperate his ruling-class identity, even as his accent seems to belie it. In his debut episode he dismisses humans en masse as useless entities who do nothing but ‘eat chips, go to bed and watch telly’ – a clear jibe at working-class stereotypes. Three episodes later he is openly contemptuous of the fact that, while history is being made (in the form of an alien spacecraft landing in central London), Rose’s family and friends are narrowly preoccupied with ‘where you can buy dodgy top-up cards for half price.’ All this loftiness tends to create the impression that his quasi-working-class persona is a Time Lord’s version of ‘slumming it.’

Class Systems, Class Struggles, and the Beleaguered Middle Ultimately, it is only a little more persuasive to claim that the Ninth Doctor is a man of the people than to suggest that Pertwee’s suave, velvet-and-silk-clad Third Doctor must really be an anti-establishment figure simply because he goes head to head with establishment figures. Pertwee’s Doctor is in fact an inveterate namedropper. For example, in ‘Terror of the Autons’ (1971) he has no qualms about putting a meddlesome civil servant in his place by invoking the name of the man’s Whitehall superior, Lord Rowlands. With studied emphasis, the Doctor reveals not only that Rowlands and he are members of the same club but that they are on sufficiently familiar terms for the Doctor to address Rowlands as ‘Tubby.’ By the same token, the Tenth Doctor apparently has no qualms about continuing to refer to himself – almost ad nauseam, in fact – as a Time Lord, even though this elite group was destroyed along with his home planet.

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My point here is not that it would be more politically correct and egalitarian for the Doctor to disavow his ruling-class roots or predilections, but rather that there seems to be a false dichotomy in critical attitudes to the character’s class status. Commentators insist that he is, for example, either ‘establishment’ or ‘anti-establishment’ but never adequately acknowledge that he might be both. It is worth stressing again that these attempts to place the Doctor tidily and definitively in a given class role always imply a binary and thus an essentially adversarial model of class. When it is posited that the Doctor is upper-middle-class, there must be a counterbalancing ‘working class’ to which he can condescend.57 The same applies to arguments over whether the Fourth Doctor’s ‘bohemian’ style of dress carries a traditionally counter-cultural valence or is simply ‘upper class.’ However the Doctor’s class is identified, there is always an implied opposite which he is not. In fact, as David Cannadine points out in The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain, the adversarial view of class, which sees society as polarized between the two extremes of ‘them and us’, is not the only model which has been deployed in the last two centuries. In seeking to define the ways in which ‘Britons saw and understood the manifestly unequal society in which they lived’, Cannadine convincingly argues that class experience has been defined in the interplay of three models, which may take turns in rhetorical ascendancy, coexist in tension or shade into one another at different historical moments.58 As well as the adversarial model, there is the triadic, in which class is understood in terms of three groups or estates, the most usual formulation in Britain being upper, middle and lower, and the hierarchical, in which society is understood in essentially individualist terms to be an almost infinitely graded ‘procession’ of status rankings.59 One good reason for stressing the Doctor’s aristocratic identity is to broaden the discussion of class in the Doctor Who texts beyond the upper-versus-lower-class dichotomy, and to acknowledge the threefoldness of the social order strongly implied in the classic series during the 1960s and early 1970s. The triadic model of class, which envisages an upper, middle and lower social group, not only provides better insight into the relationships between the Doctor and his companions but also seems relevant to many of the fears addressed in the series’ horror narratives. Here, as I shall argue, Doctor Who focused the anxieties of a managerial middle

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class which avowedly felt beleaguered from both above and below in the second post-war decade. By almost any definition the Doctor’s earliest earthly companions, the schoolteachers Ian and Barbara, fall squarely inside the (notoriously permeable60) perimeter of the middle class. The tensions between the schoolteachers and the Doctor can easily be read in class terms, and if there is a ‘victory’ in this class skirmish, it is initially to the responsible bourgeoisie. While Ian and Barbara increasingly defer to his superior knowledge, the Doctor is more notably affected in that his fellow travellers have a mellowing influence upon him. After their mutual dislike comes to a paranoiac head in ‘Inside the Spaceship’ (1964), he not only warms to them personally but also changes his own modus operandi. He presents himself increasingly as detached observer rather than selfish and self-willed agent in their adventures, at least when these adventures take place in Earth’s past, in which history is supposedly irrevocable. For much of the rest of Ian and Barbara’s incumbency the Doctor plays a customary role not only for the older generation but for the old-Tory, landed classes: he is the custodian of and spokesperson for tradition, standing for history. This is true even where he occasionally gets embroiled in notable historical events such as the fire of Rome in AD 64, for his intervention here contributes to recorded history rather than diverting it. The Doctor’s role in relation to his companions and others changed in the later 1960s and early 1970s, but I would argue that his aristocracy remained an important element in defining the ideological tenor of the programme. Patrick Troughton’s and Jon Pertwee’s incumbencies saw middle-class identity repeatedly troubled, and the Doctor was often the catalyst for this disruption. Shifts in attitudes to class were to some extent evident in changes to the TARDIS crew: in 1966, for the first time, the main protagonists collectively represented all ‘estates’ within the triadic model when the aristocratic Doctor was joined by Polly, an embodiment of swinging, middle-class youth culture, and a working-class, cockney sailor, Ben. Yet from the advent of the Second Doctor onwards, class identities were more often examined and negotiated within a broader narrative arena. To some extent it might seem that the seemingly middle-class orientation of Doctor Who is a function of its metropolitan bias.

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If we return to the matter of speech, it is notable that the dramatis personae in Doctor Who exhibited very little variation of accents during the classic series. Whatever the setting, speakers of anything but received pronunciation were in a tiny minority unless a specific British regional accent such as Welsh, Scots or Cornish was required by the narrative: otherwise, Thals, Roman guards and galley slaves, Saracens and giant moths could almost all be relied upon to speak ‘properly.’ This was partly a function of BBC hiring patterns, and indeed, in the 1960s and even the 1970s it was still to a great extent a function of norms in drama training and the theatre at large. Yet it was also, and for present purposes more importantly, a function of the way in which Doctor Who narratives of the period tended to be constructed around figures who had ‘middle-class’ occupations. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s the authority figures whom the Doctor encounters were frequently managerial or administrative. A survey of Patrick Troughton’s three seasons as the Second Doctor would amply demonstrate the point. Thus, in the Second Doctor’s debut story, set in the human colony on the planet Vulcan, he spends most of his time parleying with the deputy governor, chief scientist and chief security officer. The trend continues in almost all stories from Troughton’s incumbency dealing with Earth in the present or its satellites in the future: he has to reckon with the controllers of a lunar weather base and a leisure colony (‘The Moonbase’, ‘The Macra Terror’, 1967); an airport commandant and a police inspector (‘The Faceless Ones’, 1967); a gas refinery manager and his chief engineer (‘Fury from the Deep’, 1968), and so on. Many of these characters – like the ministerial, industrial and military managers later encountered in such numbers by Pertwee’s earthbound Third Doctor – are sceptical and anal retentive, and often obsessive if not actually possessed by some evil influence. In many ways, invasion and eco-threat horror stories seem to represent a crisis of the middle class, reflecting the anxieties of a social group which in the 1950s and 1960s avowedly felt itself crushed between an unwieldy state and growing trade union militancy.61 The figure of the unimaginative, ‘anally’ obsessive manager may reflect anxiety about expectations from above in a world in which leisure time had been reduced, taxation was high, and

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governmental rhetoric related to improving the lot of the masses rather than the middle class.62 One might well also argue that the ‘threat from beneath’ posed by the militant working class was metaphorically embodied in the various monstrous collectives which lurked underground or in the deeps of the ocean: Yeti in London’s Tube network, Cybermen in the sewers, a weed creature emerging from the sea into a gas refinery, reptile men from subterranean bunkers beneath a Derbyshire moor or the Solent, and so on. As a side note, it is interesting to see how international relations function in these stories. Some scenarios suggest nervousness about the British managerial class’s capacity to be competitive and effective on the world stage in a period when a post-imperial national identity still had not been forged. Given that 1968, the year of broadcast of ‘Fury from the Deep’, saw the formation of the European Economic Community, it seems significant that the cranky, workaholic, gas refinery chief, Robson, is especially hostile to Van Lutyens, an engineer imposed upon him by the Dutch Government. Although the next story, ‘The Wheel in Space’, concerns a cooperative international crew of scientists working happily together on a space station, it is striking that these events take place a hundred years in the future. As well as managerial characters embodying middle-class panic, stories from the Second Doctor’s era tend correspondingly to show measured figures of middle-class competence and good sense. In ‘Fury from the Deep’, for example, the refinery personnel includes the attractive and dependable Harris couple who end up being surrogate parents for the Doctor’s companion Victoria when she elects to remain on Earth at the end of the story. In ‘The Web of Fear’ the Doctor leaves reconstruction after the Yeti’s defeat in the hands of another kind of surrogate, though arguably less a middle-class than a late-imperial, colonial figure. This is Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart, an Anglo-Scots officer who, in comparison with the ‘anal’ military figures so common in post-war science fiction texts (such as the BBC’s own 1958 serial Quatermass and the Pit), proves adaptable and shrewd. Lethbridge-Stewart later returns as the embodiment of a forward-looking military, mindful of global responsibilities, promoted to brigadier and installed as the commanding officer of U.N.I.T., a taskforce created specifically to investigate and ward off alien menaces (broadly defined).

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If the principal characters in these stories are trying to chart a middle course in testing times, it is very much the Doctor who steers that course. The Troughton Doctor is deceptively mild-mannered, and deceptively scatter-brained too, for when a crisis is at its peak he almost invariably takes a commanding, and frequently hectoring, position. The Pertwee Doctor, on the other hand, never makes any pretence of being anything but a condescending dilettante, by turns aggravated and amused by the folly of bureaucrats, capitalists and overweening ‘experts.’

The Unexceptionable Aristocrat If, as I am suggesting, many of the Second and Third Doctors’ adventures are concerned with the probing and reforming of middle-class identity, then it remains to determine why an upper-class interventionist should have been an attractive or even tolerable hero to viewers whom the text assumes to be (politically) ‘moderate.’63 Does the Doctor’s appeal simply attest an ongoing, collective desire on the part of audiences for a familiar, traditional authority figure, unbrookable and unconstrained, flying into the midst of conflict and angst to offer decisive solutions for clearly defined problems? If so, how was the specifically aristocratic model sustainable for so long, even apparently enduring the ‘collapse of deference’ in the mid-1970s? The best way to answer this question is to consider the Doctor’s generic antecedents, and the role of nostalgia in the character’s formation and development. Nicholas Cull writes that the Doctor has incorporated a range of past ‘British types’ embodying the supposed national preoccupation with ‘brains over brawn.’ He cites not only fictional figures embodying intellectual prowess and arcane knowledge, such as Sherlock Holmes and Van Helsing, but also the real-life ‘back room boffins’ who ‘according to popular culture had won World War Two by inventing bouncing bombs.’ In this model, then, the Doctor, as his name suggests, is first and foremost a benignly professorial figure evoking a wartime or Victorian past. Apropos this last point, Cull sees the Doctor’s invariably ‘retro’ costumes as giving the series ‘a flavour of projecting something from a better past into an uncertain future.’64

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There are some useful suggestions in this analysis. Apart from Matt Smith, Troughton’s diminutive Doctor is perhaps the nearest of all to the conventional ‘boffin’ of screen science fiction, with his untidy hair, bow tie, and baggy, unflattering attire. Whether the Second Doctor would specifically have endeared himself to audiences by virtue of recalling World War Two seems to me questionable, but reference to the imagined past, whether of 1950s screen ‘boffinry’ or 1920s film comedy, is surely important to explaining his appeal. An interventionist the Doctor might be, but his paternalism was at the very least muted by his archaism. This applies even more strongly to the Third Doctor. His velvet smoking jacket, scarlet-lined evening Inverness cloak and glossy, black-silk, Byron necktie all pointed to the late Victorian era. Even the trendy note struck by Pertwee’s frilly shirts was historically allusive, since the fad for such shirts quite deliberately recalled Regency fashions.65 Quite apart from the fact that Edwardian style was ‘in’ among fashion-conscious men in the latter years of the decade,66 there was a context for Pertwee’s sartorial choices in popular media, furnished primarily by John Steed of The Avengers (ABC/ITV/Thames, 1961–1969) and the eponymous hero of Adam Adamant Lives! (BBC, 1966–7). While Steed was in some respects like James Bond in representing a sophisticated jet-age consumerism, he was also distanced from the contemporary world by the hyperbolic traditionalism of his dress. Apart from old-fashioned details such as the revered cuffs, braiding and velvet trim on his suits, Steed’s most immediately recognisable signifier was the bowler hat, an item which was ultraconservative in the early 1960s and rapidly becoming obsolete by the end of The Avengers’ decade-long run in 1969. The historicizing effect of Pertwee’s outfits as the Doctor was heightened by the fact that his costumes were, in effect, all evening dress. Breezing into a compromised international peace conference or a malfunctioning nuclear research institute in his vintage-style car, opera cape flapping in the wind, he gave the impression that saving the world was something he squeezed in between dinner at his club and an evening at the theatre. To drive home the point still further, Pertwee also adopted a deliberately outmoded way of speaking (‘Allow me to congratulate you, sir. You have the most totally closed mind that I’ve ever encountered’). In short, his aristocratic mien was tempered by the fact that he was so clearly not

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a rising middle-class plutocrat or meritocrat, but to all intents and purposes a chivalric visitor from a bygone era. He could safely be deployed as the gadfly to incompetent bureaucracy or the righteously indignant opponent of rapacious big business because in class terms he was a fantasy figure, not a contingent threat to the ‘reasonable’ ranks of the middle class who were ultimately understood in the text to be morally responsible for working out society’s problems. Comments by David Buxton on Steed and other generic kin from the period are pertinent here: No longer in the thick of class struggle, the liberal-minded aristocratic gentleman was henceforth a socially neutral figure, one who was au-dessus de la mêlée: another example of this 1960s prototype was Simon Templar (‘The Saint’ in the series of the same name) who deftly and elegantly intervened in the contentions of lesser mortals, putting distasteful petty-bourgeois greed back in its rightful place.67

The Third Doctor was also portrayed very much as a member of the old aristocracy who possessed the ‘common touch.’ This is especially true in relation to representatives of traditional, ‘good’ industry such as the miners in ‘The Green Death’ (1973), who are pitted against a chemicals giant, Global, the corresponding embodiment of new, ‘bad’ industry. With the miners, the Doctor is quite ready to muck in; patronizing quips and lectures are reserved for the managers and thuggish security men in the chemical plant. To this extent, the Third Doctor is also the embodiment of the increasingly untenable (though still oft invoked) third model of class identified by Cannadine: the continuous, subtly graduated hierarchy in which everyone comfortably inhabited a role within a given, stable social order. In this paradigm, social problems lay not with a particular class but with any narrowly vested interest which threatened the hierarchy’s collapse into the inherently antagonistic binary or triadic models.

The End of Deference, and Classlessness The Third Doctor was the last to embody, even nostalgically, such certitudes about the ‘appropriate’ social order. Quite different class

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attitudes began to emerge with the Fourth, whose tenure, beginning in 1975, coincided with widespread talk of the ‘collapse of deference’ towards old-established institutions, most notably royalty, state religion and aristocracy.68 The Fourth Doctor’s class identity, while clearly derivative of the manners and dress of old-fashioned landed classes, is not straightforwardly representative; its valence is shifting and imbued with a strong sense of irony and equivocation. It is striking that the connotations of Tom Baker’s attire for the role have been the basis for so much disagreement among critics. This seems to me to speak to the fact that Baker’s costume, like his performance, is inherently resistant to being taxonomized. His selfpresentation is much more studiedly erratic than is often allowed by the now-standard division of his era according to the period of influence of his two main producers, which envisages a ‘serious’ Baker under Philip Hinchcliffe replaced by a ‘camp’ Baker under Graham Williams.69 Elements of farcical humour were strongly apparent in the first year of his incumbency, just as gravitas was often to the fore during the supposed years of send-up. In fact, the most strongly distinguishing aspect of the Fourth Doctor’s screen persona was his unpredictable, near-bipolar swings in temper and demeanour. This made him an uncomfortably uncontainable figure, a trait which extended to his belying any fixed class identity. Commentators, generally seeking to distinguish the Fourth Doctor from his immediate predecessor, have tended to make questionable if not glib assumptions about the class or cultural connotations of his costume. Tulloch and Alvarado do not even trouble to qualify their statement that Baker’s ‘bohemian upper class persona’ comes ‘out of Toulouse Lautrec [sic].’70 True, costume designer James Acheson avowedly drew on a famous poster by ToulouseLautrec in envisaging Baker’s costume, a fact which had been well publicized by the time that Tulloch and Alvarado wrote their text.71 Yet without this piece of information there is no inevitable or ‘natural’ connection between the Doctor’s attire and the artistic source. It is even less safe to assume, as Chapman does, that the Doctor’s hat, scarf and velvet coat are automatically infused with whatever counter-cultural import Toulouse-Lautrec’s ‘bohemian’ milieu might retrospectively seem to denote.72 Some of the exegetical problems disappear if one dissociates what the Fourth Doctor wears from how he wears it. There is a

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studied disregard for ‘appropriate’ ensembles in all the Doctor’s outfits, for all the splendid fabrics and trims.73 This haphazardness is often matched by an equally studied sloppiness: brocade waistcoats are left unbuttoned, fur-felt fedoras are unceremoniously stuffed into coat pockets, silk ties are crudely knotted, and even the famous polychromatic wool scarf – itself always an affront to good taste – is eventually patched with a printed plaid fabric from one of the Doctor’s own waistcoats. None of this in itself necessarily belies the patrician identity that the rich quality of the clothes themselves might imply, for at the upper levels of British society there is considerable latitude for eccentricity. Yet in aggregate the effect is of clothing worn not merely with negligence but also irony or disdain, a tendency emphasized by the inclusion of broad visual jokes, such as a trio of badges formed in the image of the ‘naff’ flying-duck wall plaques once so common in suburban homes. There is a sense, in short, that the Fourth Doctor’s dress appropriates traditional forms for new, possibly subversive ends, and here the example of Harpo Marx, again often cited by more than one of Doctor Who’s creative personnel including Baker himself, seems telling. The idea of subversive appropriation fits comfortably with Philip Hinchcliffe’s comment, quoted by Tulloch and Alvarado, that this Doctor has a ‘ “student rebellion youth challenging authority” persona.’74 It fits more particularly with Chapman’s claim that the Fourth Doctor can be associated with counter-cultural trends of the 1960s, which were, after all, retrospectively defined in part by student activism. Hinchcliffe has said that he thought of Baker’s as the ‘Woodstock’ Doctor,75 and indeed the character’s itinerant lifestyle, operating outside the ‘rat race’, could as well be a hippie fantasy as a science-fiction variant on tales of the Victorian gentleman-adventurer. Yet ultimately I am inclined to think of the Fourth Doctor more as a noble ‘black sheep’ simultaneously exploiting and undermining aristocratic entitlement than as a fully counter-cultural figure; the nearest real-life cognate might be the notoriously bohemian Viscount Weymouth (now Lord Bath), painting ‘pagan’ murals in his family’s Elizabethan country seat at Longleat. Zany behaviour notwithstanding, Baker’s Doctor never relinquishes his air of entitled authority. Indeed, he is more of an interventionist know-it-all than any of his three predecessors.

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Be all that as it may, what is clear is that the Fourth Doctor both embodied and in his actions repeatedly performed the ‘collapse of deference.’ While one of the series’ most oft-cited satires from Baker’s incumbency, ‘The Sun Makers,’ had the Doctor overtly opposing a capitalist plutocracy, Doctor Who was more heavily preoccupied in the mid-1970s with attacking ancient hierarchies and notions of born privilege. The Fourth Doctor encountered his fair share of anal-retentive administrators, self-important scientists and trigger-happy security men, but he increasingly confronted (and lampooned) princes and nobles, emperors and even quasi-divine beings. Whereas the name-dropping Third Doctor had more than once proven himself happy to play the role of diplomatic delegate or privy councillor to royalty, the Fourth Doctor showed either distracted indifference or sardonic contempt for the plethora of dignitaries who crossed his path, even when they were relatively sympathetic characters. Struck with a gauntlet by the psychotic Graff Vynda-K, a deposed former dictator, the Doctor wasted no time in snatching it and striking the Graff’s cheek in response; knocked off his feet by the brutal manservant of Count Scarlioni in ‘City of Death’, he proceeded to walk around the count’s elegant drawing room on his knees, chatting breezily as he went; lectured by a vampire king on the benefits of a feudal society, the Doctor replied with the acid quibble ‘Quite Trite’, and so on. The Fourth Doctor’s impertinent attitude to the great and the good (or bad) was not the only indication that the ideological tenor of Doctor Who had shifted. In the mid-to-late 1970s, the show’s allusiveness assumed watchers’ knowledge of a range of texts, from Greek myth to Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda, from Forbidden Planet (Fred M. Wilcox, 1956) to Marx’s Das Kapital, and its winks at the audience invited a sophisticatedly detached response to the storytelling. There was still plenty of horror in the ‘gothic’ Hinchcliffe years, and the adventure genre was never abandoned, but the tone was overall more comic in the widest sense, even when the narrative was not actively courting laughter. For adults, at least, Doctor Who could barely any longer serve as a text which rehearsed collective fears in metaphorical form. However, for the educated, acute and broadly liberal spectators whom it primarily addressed the show offered plenty of permission to remind

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themselves, in a diverting way, why the ancient hierarchies and fealties were so passé. In a sense the ‘moderate’ middle class, though now an increasingly absent presence in the texts, was still tacitly endorsed as the normative social group, simply by virtue of the fact that the Doctor consistently opposed extremism.76 Nowhere is Doctor Who’s assault on hereditary privilege more evident than with the Time Lords, who appeared during the Fourth Doctor’s tenure with increasing frequency.77 He twice had cause to go back to his home planet, and on the first occasion (‘The Deadly Assassin’, 1976) his irreverence and righteous indignation both had plenty of free rein in face of the connivance, hypocrisy and ruthlessness of the Time Lord government. As I shall discuss further in Chapter Six, Time Lord society was palpably conceived as a collective satire on ancient seats of authority in Britain: legal, ecclesiastical, courtly and academic. This is a world in which only ‘middle-class’ functionaries – the amiable archivist and hard-bitten security officer who help the Doctor clear himself of supposedly assassinating the Time Lord president – are likable or reasonable. Ultimately more significant yet than the periodic vignettes of Time Lord culture itself was the arrival in 1978 of a female Time Lord, Romana, as the Doctor’s new companion. With a chilly hauteur which surpassed that of the First Doctor, the original Romana (Mary Tamm) could match Baker’s manic figure in wits and in putdowns, even though (in another pot-shot at British academia) her intelligence was understood to be hobbled by her excessive dependence on theory and her lack of practical knowledge. Although not the first, she was the series’ most marked example of a female professional whose intellectual competence and clear reasoning were at odds with, and ultimately shown to be less valuable than, the Doctor’s inspired amateurism. Yet while the Doctor ultimately still commanded respect as Romana’s mentor in the ways of the universe, his own casual, improvisatory position was increasingly a source of comedy. This became more marked with the introduction of Romana’s second incarnation (Lalla Ward). She kept her predecessor’s acumen and force of personality, but was a cheekier, more effervescent figure, mirroring rather than contrasting with the Doctor. This meant that while his flashes of inspiration were still a necessary component in many adventures, Romana became a co-heroic figure. Moreover, in

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teasers and tag scenes, and sometimes within the body of a story (e.g. ‘Meglos’, 1981) the Doctor’s amateurism frequently shaded into comic amateurishness. Botched repairs to the TARDIS and the robot dog, K-9, were frequent subjects for jest, and Romana was usually the one to highlight the Doctor’s bungling and irresponsibility. For perhaps the first time, doubt was cast on the idea that the aristocratic amateur could be simultaneously harmless and effective. In effect, it turned out that the Doctor himself was not immune to the effects of the collapse of deference. In the 1980s the Doctor’s class status ceased to be such an ideologically rich element in Doctor Who – ironically, just as Thatcherism was proclaiming the advent of a classless society in Britain. The series became even more hostile to the ‘upper ten’, this negativity manifesting in various ways. On the one hand there were villains such as the evocatively named Monarch, ineffectual triumvirs, ancien régime parasites, bickering consuls, effete princelings and two oft-recurring evil Time Lords, the Master and the Rani (the latter’s name being the Hindi for ‘queen’). On the other, there was a change in narrative attitudes to the Doctor’s ‘upper-class’ companions. Of the two remaining aristocrats to appear in the series after Romana, the first, Nyssa, a young noblewoman from the planet Traken, was a consistently marginal figure, while the exiled alien princeling Turlough, who came next, was a study in perfidy. Nyssa and Turlough have to date proven to be almost the last of their kind. The only aristocratic companion to be introduced since is Charley Pollard, the self-styled Edwardian adventuress created for the Big Finish audios. Charley’s character is far from a nostalgic throwback to a British golden age. Writers have not hesitated to place her in circumstances in which her 1920s manners seem both amusing and crass, as in two adventures set in the seedier parts of Manchester and Salford, where she is laconically slow-timed by a nononsense woman police officer, D. I. Menzies (‘The Condemned’, 2007; ‘The Raincloud Man’, 2008). Nor, more importantly, have the Big Finish producers balked at bringing Charley face to face with some of the more distressing consequences of her patrician selfabsorption, as in ‘The Chimes of Midnight,’ in which she discovers that she was the indirect cause of a former domestic servant’s suicide (2002).

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In the 1980s, with Doctor Who enjoying modest success overseas, class-consciousness was to some extent displaced by preoccupation with national identity. The Fifth Doctor’s ‘Englishness’ was highlighted and probed first by Tegan Jovanka, a stereotypically mouthy Australian, and then Peri Brown, a stereotypically whiny American. The adversarial nature of the Doctor’s interactions with these characters was wearyingly repetitious and served to emasculate the Fifth Doctor in ways which were not particularly interesting. Often unfairly called bland, Davison’s version of the Time Lord might more aptly be described as the only self-effacingly ‘middle-class’ incarnation. He seemed permanently flustered by Tegan’s merciless sarcasm (‘Call yourself a Time Lord? A broken clock keeps better time than you. At least it’s right twice a day!’) and later by Peri’s persiflage (‘You’re such a pain, Doctor ...’), where his less sensitive, lordly predecessors would have responded with a biting putdown. And of course the next Doctor, Colin Baker’s Sixth, did frequently respond to Peri with such put-downs, representing as he did a hyperbolic reversion to the arrogant, patrician type. The fact that this particular Doctor’s career was so unceremoniously curtailed after two seasons may in part reflect the untenability of the antiheroic ‘sahib’ model in the mid-1980s. It is interesting that when Baker agreed to reprise his role for Big Finish in 1999, he made it known to the producers that he would welcome some softening of the character in the scripts.78 This revision seems to have contributed to the fact that ‘Old Sixie’ quickly became the most popular Doctor in the range. More corrosive to ideological piquancy of the classic series in the 1980s was the fact that it became more and more self- referential, a situation which the bewilderingly inward-looking 1996 American/ British TVM did nothing to redress. Peter Davison’s performance was quite deliberately modelled on aspects of the two earliest Doctors, especially Patrick Troughton. After his departure, allusion to the series’ past became more frenetic as audience figures declined, and this obsession with internal continuity actually served to undercut watcher support. The self-quotation manifested power fully, not to say overpoweringly, in Sylvester McCoy’s and Paul McGann’s costumes. McCoy’s outfit seemed like a childlike conflation of past Doctors’ dress: the Fifth’s panama hat, the Second’s check trousers, the First’s spectator shoes, and so on. McGann’s velvet frock coat,

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satin waistcoat and loosely-tied cravat made him a virtual carbon copy of Tom Baker’s, sans hat and scarf, and frankly also sans ‘bohemian’ panache. Doctor Who seemed caught in an uroboric loop, and when its attention was occasionally turned outwards, as in an aggressively stylized satire on Thatcherism (‘The Happiness Patrol’, 1988), this only depleted its audience further.79 Even stories revolving around the angst-ridden figure of Ace, the series’ first bold attempt at a portrait of working-class disaffection, could not spur a recovery.

Subversion and Masquerade In the original novels of the 1990s and early 2000s social politics enjoyed some resurgence. For one thing, diverse class subjectivities and the exploration of other kinds of socially specific experiences were increasingly a given within the texts. Moreover the Doctor’s paternalism was frequently under scrutiny and under attack, especially in the NAs. Yet with their greater emphasis on both ‘hard’ science fiction concepts and the mythic resonances of the Doctor Who texts, to an extent the NAs deliberately disavowed a class framework for defining the Doctor’s actions. Instead his exploits became the site for of exploring larger, ontological questions. In the NAs, the Doctor’s alienness – his status as a ‘complex time-space event’ which only happens to look human – is increasingly a cherished theme, as is his role as ‘Time’s Champion’, a being with responsibilities to higher powers which extend beyond the conceptual horizon of humans.80 However, the motif does not serve as an exemption clause. The Doctor’s companions seldom tolerate his ethically questionable actions simply on the grounds that he is not bound by human standards, and by extension readers are encouraged to be interrogative rather than merely accepting of his essentially imperialist entitlement. To an extent, the questioning tone of the NAs persisted in the EDAs, albeit with some change of emphasis. The Doctor’s status as an ultimately aloof, unfathomable and unaccountable superbeing was given new, dangerous potency by the fact that Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor appeared so deceptively human, with his youthful impulsiveness and seeming emotional openness. The EDAs to

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some extent belie this innocent joie de vivre, but they also explore some of its interesting possible ramifications. For example, this more ‘touchy-feely’ Doctor cheerily enters the traditionally feminine world of housekeeping: ‘Vampire Science’ (1997), ‘The Scarlet Empress’ (1998) and ‘Unnatural History’ (1999) find him enthusiastically cooking omelettes or greasy breakfasts and washing dishes; in ‘Camera Obscura’ he works out his frustration over an impasse in his investigations by baking a cake in the TARDIS kitchen, and so on. This quietly but neatly upsets his status as an out-of-touch aristocrat whose only sphere of operation is cosmic diplomacy. The Doctor’s hitherto patrician persona is also implicitly critiqued in other ways in the EDAs, as for example in relation to his dress. Periodic reference is made in the earlier novels in the series to the fact that the Eighth Doctor is wearing the fancy-dress outfit he ‘borrowed’ from the San Francisco hospital in which he regenerated; its deterioration is duly noted (‘Option Lock’, 1998), as is its final replacement with a copy in less tawdry fabrics (‘Seeing I’, 1998). All this serves to emphasize the extent to which his sartorial image is the result of ‘dressing up’ and the extent also to which his Victorian/Edwardian haut ton style is formulaic. In other words, an interesting discursive point is made out of the costume’s inherent derivativeness. This leads me, in conclusion, to a broader observation about the Doctor’s dress which must serve to qualify any foregoing arguments about its class overtones and therefore, in one way, temper all my arguments in this chapter. As noted in passing above, a costume’s capacity to suggest masquerade, its ironic potential, and its proximity to youth fashions are all likely to undermine or confuse class resonances. To the question of masquerade I shall return in Chapter Four, but the issues of irony and youth orientation are important to address here. Consider David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor, in his sweeping, fauxsuede polo coat and faintly thirties-style suit with its half-belted, high-gorge jacket. Had it not been for the interlude provided by Eccleston’s severe dress, this outfit would more obviously reveal its family resemblance to earlier Doctors’ costumes since, like the wardrobes of several predecessors, it is at once contemporary and historicist. Of course, the trendy character of Tennant’s dress is more apparent than its antique overtones because Tennant was relatively youthful, and his style – especially by virtue of the combination of

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suit and sneakers – begged to be compared with Jarvis Cocker or Alex Kapranos. Conversely, the ‘fashion forward’ aspects of previous Doctors’ dress are in retrospect subsumed into a pageant of seeming Victoriana, and belied by the fact that most of them were middle-aged rather than young men. Yet it is important to remember that there was good sartorial reason for Philip Hinchcliffe to refer to Tom Baker’s ‘student rebellion youth challenging authority’ persona: a long scarf was a cliché of student fashions in the 1960s like the capacious corduroy jacket and scarf tie which Baker originally wore. Similarly, Pertwee’s Doctor was quite as closely dependent on the boutiquey, swinging-London fashion scene of the early 1970s as his Biba-dressed companion, Jo Grant (Katy Manning). By the same token Troughton’s Doctor would have been entirely at home amidst the beats and hippies of Haight-Ashbury, with his suede shoes and checked, drainpipe pants, his untidy sideburns and fringe, and his obviously appropriated, ill-fitting, black morning coat. Beyond these basic observations some fine distinctions might be made: for example, it is notable that Pertwee’s trendiness was consumer-oriented; this does not hold for either Troughton or Baker. For present purposes two other issues are more important to pursue. Firstly, it should be noted that youth fashion, whether counter-cultural or otherwise, tends to subvert or redirect the ‘traditional’ dress images which it absorbs. These are then coded and read in ways not automatically intelligible outside a given youth or style group, and once in this new context, they are not necessarily politicized in straightforward ways. Secondly, if we reflect again on McGann’s Doctor in his fancy-dress clothes, it is important to stress that the mere act of assuming a ‘costume’ implies theatricality; it is an act of pretence. Eight of the eleven Doctors to date were seen choosing new attire in their debut stories. While none apart from McGann have actually donned a party costume, the fact remains that they have quite literally dressed the part within the narrative. This on-screen avowal of the artifice – surely no less telling than the First Doctor’s on-screen self-identification as a gentleman – is highly suggestive. It places the Doctor’s persona between inverted commas, as it were. Each occurrence offers a reminder that the Doctor himself is a kind of playful framing device for all the events in the narrative.

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None of this is to suggest that the theatricality, the irreverence or the ‘youthfulness’ of the Doctor’s dress override the consistent signalling of his aristocratic entitlement. Class signifiers and other kinds of redolence exist in tension, and to claim the primacy of one over the other is not only unnecessary but also potentially misleading. When dealing with phenomena as sprawling and slippery as the Doctor Who texts, not all of which have been meant for a wide, inclusive audience, it is especially dangerous to assume too strong and exclusive a connection between the ‘meaning’ of narrative or visual conceits and the historical circumstances within which they are created. This is a matter to which I shall return in the next chapter.

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III ‘EVIL? NO ... I WILL NOT ACCEPT THAT’ Rewriting and Reworking the Monstrous

I

n July 1982 a repeat season of old Doctor Who serials, each featuring one of the Time Lord’s best-known adversaries, aired under the umbrella title of Doctor Who and the Monsters. I clearly recall more than one family friend calling to make sure I knew that a new series was beginning, a misapprehension which, it transpired, was based on their belief that Doctor Who and the Monsters was nothing more than the extended title of Doctor Who itself. The mistake was in many ways a reasonable one. Since the arrival of the Daleks one month into Doctor Who’s original run in 1963, Doctor Who on television has been very much defined by monstrous creatures, and to some extent this is true also for the novels and audios. Significantly enough, one of the earliest highly illustrated, non-fiction volumes ever produced for fans was The Doctor Who Monster Book (1975), just as one of the first non-fiction texts accompanying the revived series was Monsters and Villains (2005).81 In short, if science fiction

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is always concerned with exploring difference, in Doctor Who the conceit of ‘otherness’ has become overwhelmingly associated with images of the grotesquely inhuman. Just because monsters are so central to the narrative, they might seem to offer a rich basis for analyzing the ways in which Doctor Who is a ‘text of its time.’ There is indeed no shortage of studies identifying monsters, and the Doctor’s conflicts with them, as expressions of social-political concerns at given moments in the texts’ history. A nuanced recent example is Anne Cranny-Francis and John Tulloch’s analysis of the deployment of Daleks and Cybermen in the new series. Avowedly setting out to show how recent Who narratives ‘speak from within the social and political context of our time,’ Cranny-Francis and Tulloch note that a 2005 episode concerning the torture of a lone Dalek prisoner, held by an unscrupulous American collector, was understood by the British press as an allusion to the enormities committed at Guantanamo Bay. The authors also suggest that the Cybermen in the 2006 episode, ‘The Rise of the Cybermen’, serve as ‘a figure for ... the uncritical consumption of technologies’ in the Bluetooth age.82 More boldly, Alec Charles asserts that the epic conflict between Daleks and Cybermen in ‘Doomsday’ (2006) is in effect a battle ‘between fundamentalist terrorists and neoconservative technomilitarists.’83 Surveying the whole of the classic series, Nicholas Cull sees the Daleks, Cybermen and other totalitarian invaders as reflecting Cold War fears, but also reads the Doctor’s repeated defeat of these adversaries as a means for audiences to relive Britain’s ‘finest hour’, the nation’s successful resistance of and victory over the Nazis.84 While I do not mean to suggest that this kind of contextual analysis is necessarily without value, the approach can be deceptively tendentious. Careful practitioners such as Tulloch are shrewd enough to focus primarily on Doctor Who texts in which some kind of political reflection or critique is concrete and often demonstrably accessible to audiences. Yet there is an inclination among cultural historians studying Doctor Who to treat contemporary ideological referents as the natural, even inescapable, basis for finding irreducible meaning in the Who texts. Cull, for example, offers sweeping generalizations about the ways in which Doctor Who served as ‘an arena for exploring emerging issues of British life between 1963 and 1989.’85 Yet he does not say whether there is evidence that the programme makers

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consciously undertook this exploration or whether he believes it was some kind of instinctual articulation of national fears and preoccupations welling up out of the collective unconscious. If it is problematic to assume that a contextual reading is selfevidently meaningful, a larger problem for present purposes is that such readings can belie internal disparities within the vast narrative. Not all Doctor Who texts are alike in terms of intended audience or, by extension, narrative tenor. As I shall argue in this chapter, there are important divergences between the treatment of monsters in the two television series and in the licensed novels and audios produced between 1991 and 2005, which were essentially fan produced and consumed. Fans may vary widely in their political affiliations and ethical commitments, sharing little in common other than their enthusiasm for the world of the Doctor Who texts.86 Yet this common interest, this affective investment in the Doctor Who hyperdiegesis, has produced a literature in which the hyperdiegesis itself must sometimes be understood as the primary contextual referent. Many of the Doctor Who novels and audios produced between 1991 and 2005 are concerned with amplifying, complementing or correcting conceits from the classic series, in one way or another strengthening the credibility and emotional density of the worlds of the text. Sometimes this results in the probing of ideological norms in the classic series: exploration of gender relations between the Doctor and his companions in the NAs and EDAs provides a prime example, as I shall discuss in Chapter Five. However, fan reorientation of motifs can also privilege affective, moral and philosophical problems over any social-political resonances. This may amount to the ideological evacuation of key motifs. Such shifts in tone in the fan-driven Who texts of the 1990s and early 2000s are perhaps best analyzed in relation to Henry Jenkins’s classic theorization of fan fiction, Textual Poachers, on which I shall draw extensively in this chapter.

Expansion, Intensifi cation, Realignment: ‘Fan Fiction’ and the Re-imagining of Doctor Who Monsters Although many of the authors of licensed Doctor Who of the last eighteen years are avowedly fans,87 applying the idea of fan fiction

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to their professionally produced texts might seem questionable in certain respects. Fan authors of non-licensed print or internetpublished fiction are surely in a different category from those commissioned to write BBC-sanctioned books and audio-drama scripts. This second class of authors is certainly not a ‘powerless elite’, to invoke John Tulloch’s term for fandom.88 Certain now-influential figures have made the transition from hobbyist to paid expert,89 including Paul Cornell, Nicholas Briggs, Russell T. Davies, Steven Moffat and David Tennant. This inevitably complicates the definition of what it means to be a fan.90 It is certainly no longer straightforwardly possible to uphold Jenkins’s claim that fans’ ‘relationship to the text remains a tentative one’, or that all fans’ pleasures ‘exist on the margins of the original text and in the face of the producer’s own efforts to regulate its meanings.’91 There is another reason why fan fiction might seem an inadequate paradigm for the NAs and subsequent licensed Doctor Who texts. Traits which Jenkins identifies as proper to fan fiction, such as emotional intensification, eroticization and genre shifting, are no longer confined to unofficial fan literature. As I indicated in Chapter One, mainstream fantasy television narratives in the last fifteen years, from later entries in the Star Trek franchise to The X-Files, Buffy, Battlestar Galactica (Sci Fi, 2004–2009) and the new series of Doctor Who itself, have placed a greater emphasis on narrative layering, ambivalence and emotional intensity than older texts such as the classic series of Star Trek and Doctor Who. Yet there is also a clear axis between these texts and fandom. For example, Ronald D. Moore was a Trek fan before he became a staff writer for the franchise in the 1990s (and later chief writer on Battlestar), and several of the writers of Buffy, including the show-runner Joss Whedon, have repeatedly acknowledged being fans of various media texts. Lance Parkin has argued that Buffy was very deliberately constructed as a cult text, ‘consciously [seeking] to create a fandom for itself’ and ‘asking “fannish” questions within the text’ (my italics).92 Licensed and BBC-produced Doctor Who texts of the last fifteen years have incorporated the same kind of fannish questioning. While not ‘fan-fic’ in the traditional sense, they are still very much organized around concerns first articulated by media fans. In the present context I draw on two main strands of Jenkins’s argument about fan fiction and fan attitudes to ongoing narrative;

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both seem to me to be especially pertinent to the altered portrayal of Doctor Who monsters and villains in the licensed novels and audios produced between 1991 and 2005. Firstly, Jenkins argues that media fans are inclined to envisage an ideal meta-text for a given television or film series, a benchmark (often associated with a supposed ‘golden age’ for the text in question) against which new entries in the textual set are judged. In other words, fans aver that there is a ‘right way’ to do Doctor Who or Star Trek.93 In the case of the Daleks, in particular, fan writers contributing to Big Finish and the new series have avowedly sought to correct perceived transgressions in the handling of these key adversaries during the classic series. The Daleks have been ‘restored’ to coincide with a version of the Doctor Who meta-text which enjoyed considerable currency among influential fan writers in the waning years of the classic series. Secondly, Jenkins argues that fan fiction exhibits an array of overlapping or related traits which almost all enrich the source text’s emotional resonance. (Jenkins uses Ien Ang’s term ‘emotional realism’ but, for reasons discussed in Chapter Six, I want to avoid the problematic word ‘realism’.) Of Jenkins’s set of ten characteristics, several can be readily applied to the portrayal or deployment of monsters in the Doctor Who novels and audios: ‘expanding the series timeline’, ‘moral realignment’, ‘emotional intensification’ and even ‘eroticization.’94 Expanded timelines have been developed for Davros, the Master and the Cybermen (among others) in postclassic Doctor Who texts, with a variety of stories turning back to events which predate enemies’ original encounters with the Doctor, or at least their original appearance on screen. In each case, this has entailed either examining the causes for these characters’ ‘evil’ or exploring watershed moments which defined their later existence: the vicissitudes which led the people of the planet Mondas to succumb to wholesale conversion into the Cybermen, the pivotal events which drove the Master down his path of megalomaniacal destructiveness, and so on. These stories are examples of moral realignment in that they complicate the ethical valency of the characters, and examples of emotional intensification in that they typically incline towards high drama, charting a psychological rite of passage or transformation. Increasingly there has also been a willingness to consider ‘evil’ characters as gendered or sexual beings,

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with passions, an erotic compass and frailties beyond the lust for power. It is striking that this has applied as much to ‘ugly’ villains such as Davros as to the typically suave and handsome Master, who might seem a more obvious candidate for eroticization.

Perverted Bodies, Displaced Minds In order to appreciate how the valence of these monsters has altered in recent fan-produced texts, it is clearly necessary to understand their original roles and significance in the classic series of Doctor Who. In this section of the chapter I briefly outline the motivic and ideological context within which the Daleks, Cybermen and other recurring adversaries were defined, and even more briefly sketch the monsters’ vicissitudes in the later years of the classic series. Broadly speaking, the Daleks and their creator, Davros, are respectively synecdochic for trends which defined the first and second decade of Doctor Who’s original run on television: the Daleks are the primary example of the massed, ‘faceless’ menaces which, in the later 1960s in particular, were endemic to the series, while Davros epitomizes the kind of verbally articulate and hyperindividualized single villain more frequently seen in the 1970s and thereafter. If there was a single dominant pattern in the classic series’ treatment of the monstrous it was a preoccupation with the dangers of cybernetics, typically linked with anxiety about the loss of individuality. Doctor Who’s most enduring and oft-recurring monsters are creatures whose bodies and psyches are not inherently bad but made bad: cyborgs, such as the Daleks and Cybermen, who were comprehensively changed by some kind of design rather than by accident or supposed neglect of the body. As already noted, Nicholas Cull suggests that the classic series was an extended elegy on Britain’s triumphant role in the Second World War and subsequent loss of international prestige.95 It is certainly true that the writer who devised the Daleks, Terry Nation, made it clear that he intended them to evoke the Nazis. This resemblance initially took the form of murderous xenophobia with the Daleks seeking to eliminate other races on their planet. A quest for lebensraum on a galactic scale began with their second adventure, ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’ (1964), and persisted for almost two

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decades. The Nazi analogy was to be reaffirmed in ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ (1975), a ‘prequel’ to earlier Dalek stories in which, as the title implies, their antecedents were revealed. The Daleks’ ancestors, the Kaleds, proved to be warmongers whose military elite was very clearly modelled on the S.S. Yet significant as the Daleks undoubtedly are in the texts’ history, Cull’s insistence on the paramount importance of the Third Reich as a model for the monstrous in Doctor Who is excessive. Nor was it the fascistic aspect of the Daleks which was most often, or most eerily, developed among later adversaries who shared a family resemblance with them. Massed monsters wishing to control and willing to eliminate the unlike were commonplace from the mid1960s to the mid-1970s, but their evil was generally speaking less a simple threat of death than of displaced or subjugated selfhood. Active anxiety about communism rather than preoccupation with the past trauma of fascism is surely a more plausible contemporary stimulus, as Cull briefly acknowledges.96 Allied with fear of politically enforced homogeneity, technophobia (often allied with environmental concerns) was a strongly emergent theme around the time of William Hartnell’s departure from the series in 1966, and this persisted well into the 1970s. The Cybermen are the most prominent examples of massed, technological monsters which seek to enforce their values on others. They first appeared in ‘The Tenth Planet’ (1966) with four return appearances in the following three years. Augmented in terms of physical strength with mechanized prosthetics and body-part replacements, the Cybermen are correspondingly characterized by psychic diminution: they have altered their brains to suppress emotional responses. The horror of dehumanization is overtly associated with reliance on and finally abuse of technology, but it is easy to read the Cybermen’s emotional impoverishment in relation to the portrayal of inhuman and excessively cerebral communists in other adventuregenre texts of the period, ranging from John Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold 97 to episodes of The Avengers such as ‘The Town of No Return’ (1965). It is also noteworthy that two of the Cybermen’s schemes in ‘The Moonbase’ (1967) and ‘The Wheel in Space’ (1968) involve attacks upon international cooperatives of scientists, both serials taking place in a twenty-first century apparently free of bilateral international tensions. In stark opposition to

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the uniformity of the Cybermen, the crews of the lunar base and the ‘Wheel’ space station are ostentatiously varied in terms of nationality (though there is a predictable bias towards Western European countries among the principal characters). Loss, erasure and theft of identity were horrors repeatedly invoked in Doctor Who during the years immediately following the Cybermen’s debut. Fear of the dissolution of individuality tended to be evoked primarily via creatures which were overwhelming in numbers and marked by their physical homogeneity. During the later 1960s mass monsters were often dissociated from humanity by being physically gigantic, signal examples being the Cybermen themselves, the robotic ‘Yeti’ and the Martian Ice Warriors, who between them populated five out of seven serials during the 1967–8 season, and a more-than-human-scale aquatic weed creature, which featured in a sixth (‘Fury from the Deep’). Except for the Ice Warriors, which were distinct from one another in terms of the shapes and details of their bio-mechanical shells, all these monsters were studiedly undifferentiated and more or less literally faceless, an uncanny element amplified by the fact that they always appeared en masse. Each of the stories built around these dehumanized or subhuman, ‘faceless’ creatures involved their use of infiltration or mind control. This again resonates with Cold War fears about brainwashing, which were also rehearsed in popular cinematic espionage texts such as The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962) and The Ipcress File (Sidney J. Furie, 1965). Throughout the 1970s horror in Doctor Who still frequently focused on the destabilization of identity. Indeed, articulation of the device became more extreme: it was no longer necessarily a matter of short-term hypnotism, but often of mental possession, sometimes irreversible and often accompanied by the definitive loss of bodily autonomy. In ‘The Ark in Space’ (1975) an insect larva develops within a still-living man, his tissue and consciousness gradually being transformed and assimilated; ‘The Seeds of Doom’ (1976) replicates this with a sentient vegetable parasite. In ‘Planet of Evil’ (1975), this contagion motif – which could be linked with contemporary anxieties about immigration – is at its most intense: contamination from anti-matter turns a scientist into a regressive, hostile hominid, capable of creating semi-corporeal copies of itself and polluting others through touch.98

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Yet perhaps the most important development in this pattern during the early to mid-1970s was the conceit of possession by a powerful individual, a function of the fact that the solo, often humanoid, villain came to prominence in Doctor Who at this time. The Doctor’s fellow Time Lord and erstwhile friend, the Master, was the locus classicus of this kind of adversary, first appearing in 1971. His prowess as a mesmerist shaded seamlessly into lethal personal charm, and he was also portrayed as the Doctor’s equal in intellect and experience. Other such figures quickly followed the precedent established with the Master; though few were such prodigious hypnotists, the capacity to exert coercive or persuasive control over the psyches of others was a recurrent theme. The single villain not only became prevalent in stories featuring entirely new situations, but also effectively eclipsed the uncanny uniformity of ‘mass monsters’ when they made return appearances. For example, in adventures of the 1970s and 1980s, the Cybermen spoke principally through a single representative, the Cyberleader. Significantly, this character was now aurally distinguished from his subordinates by an expressive baritone voice, where previous Cybermen had all spoken in the same one-note, high-tenor drone. While practical considerations may have played a part in the shift towards individual rather than collective menaces since monsters en masse are costly to make, a dramatic justification is more often advanced within Doctor Who’s documentary meta-narratives. In principle, essentially human villains can interact with the heroes in more sophisticated and dramatic ways than massed menaces. This is a point frequently made apropos Davros, most recently by David Tennant at the time of the villain’s return in ‘The Stolen Earth’ and ‘Journey’s End’ (2008).99 In practice, the one-to-one interactions between the Doctor and single adversaries have actually tended to be rather narrow in dramatic range. Apart from the trading of threats, barbs and pleas, the Doctor’s conversations with humanoid adversaries all too frequently offer little but lengthy plot exposition and (with Davros especially) the opportunity for the villain to indulge in ranting soliloquy. The gloating-and-disclosure formula is nicely sent up in the new-series episode ‘Utopia’ (2007) when the Master steals the Doctor’s TARDIS, scorning the Doctor’s entreaty to stay and talk: ‘Why don’t we stop and have a nice little chat while I tell you all my plans and you can work out a way to stop

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me – I don’t think.’ Yet there is no question that villains such as the Master and Davros lend themselves to both melodrama and this kind of witty banter in ways which the cyborg hordes of the 1960s, with their blank masks and droning voices, did not. Both campy oratory and ironic quips ultimately reflect a larger change in tone and purpose for Doctor Who in the years where single villains rose to predominance. As I suggested in Chapter Two, during the 1960s and early 1970s Doctor Who had been an assertively modern text, hyperbolically depicting and critiquing perceived malaises of contemporary life. By the mid-1970s, the series was arguably ‘almost “postmodern” ’, as Matt Hills notes, its pleasures less to do with the rehearsal of current anxieties than with the ironic, multi-valent appropriation of the literary and cinematic past.100 Yet the next sea change in Doctor Who’s deployment of monsters had less to do with tone, either dramatic or ideological, than with the series’ changing attitude to its own history. In the 1980s Doctor Who became increasingly – and before long cripplingly – self-referential. Whereas there had been only four stories with returning adversaries in the second half of the 1970s, such reappearances dramatically increased in number in the following decade, with fourteen rematches between 1981 and 1985. These re-encounters seldom offered anything very original; indeed, their principal purpose seemed to be comfortable reiteration as opposed to renovation. Even in the earlier years of the classic series, this reiterative tendency was evident. By their third television appearance the Daleks had become little more than the sum of their physical and aural attributes, and the plots of Dalek serials in the early 1970s were blatant rehashes of earlier stories. The Daleks’ ambition to increase the scope of their influence and their ultimate wish to exterminate all other races were restated over and over again, with little or no variation from story to story. This predictability – most crudely and obviously embodied in their infamous war chant ‘Exterminate!’ – was likely perceived as a selling point, and rightly so: from the mid-1960s onwards the Daleks’ presence often boosted overall viewing figures for a serial by around a million. So, while Doctor Who’s time travel premise allowed for changing perspectives on the Daleks, successive producers evidently saw little virtue in meddling with a winning formula. Although one serial witnessed the

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Daleks’ self-destruction in a supposedly final civil war (‘Evil of the Daleks’, 1967) and another the annihilation of their home planet (‘Remembrance of the Daleks’, 1989), the sense that they are an ineradicable presence in the Doctor Who palimpsest overrides such grandiose ‘historical’ gestures in the storytelling. Yet, as I shall argue in the next section, studied unoriginality in the handling of the Daleks and other traditional enemies did not preclude various kinds of drift and slippage. Audios and novels produced by fan professionals in the 1990s and early 2000s served to recuperate as well as to enrich the identities of Doctor Who’s most iconic adversaries. In metaphorical terms, these texts served either to remove layers of tarnish from an imagined ideal or add lustre to a dull prototype.

Daleks: ‘As Cunning, Ruthless, Frightening and Unpredictable as They Ever Were!’ The Daleks were the only recurring villains in Doctor Who to be retroactively given an origin story during the classic series’ run in the descriptively named ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ (1975). Here, the Doctor is sent back in time by the Time Lords to avert the Daleks’ creation by the geneticist Davros, or at least to make them less hostile. In a predictable anti-climax, the Doctor fails to do more than delay the Daleks’ development by a thousand years or so, but the run-up allowed for unprecedentedly vivid debate about the rights and wrongs of changing history through pre-emptive violence. If the Daleks’ future and the Doctor’s moral probity were largely undisturbed at the end of the story, ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ led to one significant change in their subsequent narrative portrayal, though in many ways it was not an enriching one. The Daleks were, in effect, relegated to the status of satellites to Davros who was to prove as resilient and as predictably recurrent as the Daleks themselves. In every subsequent Dalek story from the 1970s and 1980s the creatures seemed reliant upon, obsessed with or fugitive from Davros, when they were not actually in servitude to him. Increasingly often, too, they seemed to be on the brink of final defeat or extinction, a tendency which persisted in the new series until it was emphatically overturned in ‘Victory of the Daleks’ (2010).

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The revitalization of the Daleks began with their last appearance in the classic series, ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’ (1988). The Daleks’ origins as figures for Nazism had been over time obscured by the fact that they had come to evoke nothing so much as themselves. ‘Remembrance’ heavily underscored their fascist roots. Set in 1963 in Shoreditch, at I. M. Foreman’s junkyard and Coal Hill School, the sites of the series’ origin in ‘An Unearthly Child’, the story represented internecine conflict between two forces of Daleks disputing their relative claims to racial purity. The story also found them allying themselves with British neo-fascists whose rise in the early 1960s formed the cornerstone for Ben Aaronovitch’s script. In short, ‘Remembrance’ restored the Daleks’ ideological significance by turning Terry Nation’s Nazi metaphor into a simile. Over a decade later the producers of the Big Finish audio dramas recuperated aspects of the Daleks’ origins in a quite different way. Dalek audio serials focused primarily on affective rather than ideological precedent, selectively winnowing away or emphasizing aspects of the Daleks’ history and character. Significantly, the Daleks made their Big Finish debut without Davros, and they have appeared without him in the majority of subsequent audio releases. No less importantly, the styling and tenor of their early audio outings deliberately recalled aspects of Dalek serials before Davros’s advent in 1975 and more particularly Dalek serials of the mid-1960s, a period which was thus in effect identified as a ‘golden age.’ Mike Tucker, a special-effects artist and long-time fan who had written a number of BBC-published novels and short stories in the late 1990s, was author of the first Dalek release from Big Finish. This was ‘The Genocide Machine’, issued in 2000. Tucker expressly wanted ‘to present the audience with a Dalek story of a type that we hadn’t had since Pertwee’s era’ (i.e. before Davros’s introduction).101 ‘The Genocide Machine’ portrayed the Daleks as creatures of guile and tactical brilliance, as they had been in the more sophisticated serials of the mid-1960s, rather than the inept, blustering brutes they had increasingly become in the following two decades. Significantly, there are a number of scenes in which Daleks converse at length not only with the Doctor, his companions and allies but also with each other, rather than merely squawking clipped instructions or chanting battle cries. ‘The Genocide Machine’ also invoked an array of conceits suggestive of earlier Dalek stories, calculated to

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evoke nostalgia in long-term fans. Tucker prominently featured the Daleks’ use of duplicate humans as infiltrating agents, a device first seen in Terry Nation’s 1965 story ‘The Chase.’ In terms of atmosphere, Tucker honoured one of the clichés of Nation’s Dalek scripts by setting his story on a jungle planet, and even allowed himself an in-joke by naming an incidental character Tarrant after a protagonist in the 1974 serial, ‘Death to the Daleks.’ ‘The Genocide Machine’ also followed a well-worn tradition of the sixties and early seventies by leaving it to the end of the first episode to reveal the Daleks.102 While it is easy to isolate the elements in ‘The Genocide Machine’ which are distilled from Doctor Who’s past, it is less easy to demonstrate that, to paraphrase Cranny-Francis and Tulloch, the narrative speaks from the social and political context of its own time. Indeed, it seems clear that Tucker and his collaborators were primarily concerned with Doctor Who’s internal history and ethos rather than external referents. In other words, the Doctor’s struggle with the Daleks does not really ‘stand for’ anything here: the story’s prime function is to embody an ideal meta-text, correcting perceived deficiencies of the later Dalek serials in the classic series. By extension, if Tucker’s script does represent a particular historical moment, then this cannot be defined in terms of a contemporary national imaginary. Rather, ‘The Genocide Machine’ reflects the historical moment when a group of professionalized fans ceased to be textual poachers of Dalek narrative and became textual gamekeepers.103 If, as Jenkins suggests, fan writing does not so much reproduce the primary text as ‘rework and rewrite it, repairing or dismissing unsatisfying aspects’, then ‘The Genocide Machine’ marks the point at which Tucker and his collaborators were for the first time able to rework and repair the Dalek narrative under license.104 The three Dalek audio releases following ‘The Genocide Machine’ all contributed to the embodiment of the ideal Dalek meta-text in a variety of ways. The monsters were consistently presented as consummate and ruthless strategists, and there was also continuing, nostalgic homage to motifs or atmospherics from Dalek serials in the early years of the classic series. For example, the marginal conceit of a time machine built with mirrors in ‘The Evil of the Daleks’ became central to ‘The Time of the Daleks’ (2002), which finds the Daleks appearing incongruously in different periods of human

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history, as they had done in ‘The Chase’ (1965) and ‘The Daleks’ Master Plan’ (1965–66). Big Finish’s Doctor Who producer, Gary Russell, also took the opportunity to consolidate the hyperdiegesis. For example, ‘The Apocalypse Element’ for the first time brought the Daleks into direct conflict with the narrative’s other primary time-travelling race, the Time Lords, culminating in a brief Dalek invasion of Gallifrey. Moreover, all the first four Dalek stories were linked at a conceptual level and to some extent in terms of internal Whoniverse chronology, not only with each other but also with Big Finish’s concurrent Doctorless spin-off audios, Dalek Empire.105 One of the primary traits identified in Jenkins’s analysis of fan fiction is ‘recontextualization,’ the device whereby fan writers fill in gaps in the primary narrative in order to increase its coherence or redolence, especially at the level of emotional credibility.106 A version of this motif appears frequently in licensed Doctor Who texts, most closely adhering to Jenkins’s model in the several short stories which reflect on the experiences of the Doctor’s companions after they have left the TARDIS. The device could also be applied, in modified form, even to such unpromising objects as the Daleks. ‘The Mutant Phase’ (2000) includes key scenes in which the Fifth Doctor visits Dalek-occupied Earth in 2158, a few years before the events of the second Dalek narrative from the classic series, ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’ (1964). However, in ‘The Mutant Phase’ the TARDIS sets its passengers down in rural Kansas rather than London, where the original story took place. In this case it is not really a chronological gap which is filled; rather the new vignette offsets the Anglocentrism of the classic-series narrative, strengthening the sense of a truly worldwide Dalek occupation. Any perceived social-political significance in the original choice of setting – such as the collective need to revisit Britain’s resistance to Nazi tyranny, inferred by Cull – is here thoroughly subjugated to increasing the cogency and richness of the hyperdiegesis. It is worth noting that nostalgic allusion to ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’ also takes the form of a specifically aural homage in ‘The Mutant Phase.’ Daleks in the scenes set during the twenty-firstcentury occupation are distinguished from those in the narrative’s ‘present’ (from our perspective, the far future) by meticulous recreation of the staccato speech patterns used in their earliest screen appearances, which had gradually been modified after ‘Dalek

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Invasion.’ The suggestive layering of ‘inherited’ tonal and narrative elements in ‘The Mutant Phase’ epitomizes the way in which many Big Finish Dalek audios have been built primarily around expressive rather than political concerns. Yet I am not suggesting that there is rigid homogeneity in either the writing of professionalized fans or the taste of fan audiences. The various traits outlined above – the appeal to an ideal meta-text, the ‘inward’ focus on the hyperdiegesis, the privileging of the affective over the allegorical – represent a strong but by no means exclusive pattern in the licensed audios dealing with the Daleks. In fact, this pattern was abruptly broken with the fifth Dalek release from Big Finish, ‘Jubilee’ (2003). Robert Shearman’s script was avowedly intended as ‘an aggressive attack on contemporary culture’, reflecting the author’s declared view that ‘we have turned everything of power and passion into plastic collectables.’107 With its portrayal of a jaded, militaristic English Empire, ‘Jubilee’ is exceptional among Big Finish’s Dalek audios in the ferocity of its social satire, but it has certainly not been marginal in terms of fan approval. Although the majority of subsequent audios featuring the Daleks (and for that matter the Cybermen) have inclined more to the internally focused paradigm of ‘The Genocide Machine’, ‘Jubilee’ was from the outset a fan favourite, topping a reader’s poll in the Doctor Who Magazine the year that it was released. Strikingly enough, Shearman was invited to develop one of the most unexpectedly affecting elements in ‘Jubilee’, the curious friendship between a captive Dalek and the Doctor’s incumbent companion, in the new series script ‘Dalek’ (2005). This leads me to one further point about the ongoing influence of fan preoccupations in the most recent Doctor Who texts, the new series and NSAs. It would be a serious mistake to imply a radical break between the licensed texts of the so-called hiatus and the new series which debuted in 2005. As I shall argue in the next two sections of this chapter, the trend towards ‘asking “fannish” questions within the text’ has been just as evident in the new television series as in the audios and novels of the hiatus, most notably in the revival’s treatment of the Master and the Cybermen. Certain scripts for the new series even stray into the realm of ‘fanwank’108 through such scenarios as the unprecedented on-screen conflict between Daleks and Cybermen in ‘Doomsday’ (2006) and the consortium

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of old adversaries who form an alliance against the Doctor in ‘The Pandorica Opens’ (2010). What has necessarily been abandoned in the revival, as I shall argue below, is the leisurely exploration of ideas drawn from the classic series narrative and the layered recombination of tonal and motivic elements from the past, both of which are only likely to be interesting to committed and knowledgeable fans.

What Once You Were: Enriching the ‘Biographies’ of Davros and the Master If the Daleks’ renaissance in licensed audios embodied nostalgic and rationalizing leanings within fan cultures, the case was slightly different with Big Finish’s reinvention of Davros. This exemplifies another trend in post-classic-series Doctor Who texts – namely, the tendency to complicate villainy, probing its psychological modalities and causes rather than merely setting it in play. This process of complicating or destabilizing the monstrous can be understood in light of Henry Jenkins’s term moral realignment. The serial entitled simply ‘Davros’ (2003), the character’s Big Finish debut, reaffirmed what had been achieved in ‘The Genocide Machine’: for the first time Davros was separated from his creations, which did not appear at all in the serial. Moreover, both this and later stories (which eventually led into another spin-off series, I, Davros, in 2006) explored the character’s background, contextualizing his pathology through vignettes of his past. Davros did not thereby become a sympathetic figure in any sentimental sense, but he did become a comprehensible one, rather than remaining ineluctably ‘other.’ Crucially, his villainy was for the first time dissociated from, and shown to be antecedent to, his extreme physical disfigurement and handicap. Beyond the fact that they were caused by an accident, the circumstances of Davros’s appalling injuries, which left him with no eyes, no legs and only one functioning arm, had never been disclosed in the classic series. The resemblance between his own life-support machine and the lower half of a Dalek was a blatant metaphor for his own dehumanization, and also for his role as a kind of technological demigod, able to craft a race of beings essentially in his own image. Davros’s evil had therefore been from the

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first coextensive with his appearance. His rhetorical virtuosity and evident lively-mindedness did little to mitigate the portrait of a psychologically as well as physically twisted ‘cripple’ seeking to live vicariously through creatures who represented a new kind of wholeness; the Daleks could be understood as living expressions of Davros’s resentment towards those who were not incapacitated. In short he embodied, and even exaggerated, a number of media clichés of the disabled villain.109 By contrast, the audio serial bearing his name not only stresses Davros’s considerable plausibility and charm after the accident, but also establishes that his ruthlessness, egotism and a corresponding insecurity were already defining features before he was injured. In the course of a number of flashbacks, the story shows the still ‘whole’ Davros perfectly willing to betray friends and colleagues in order to ensure his own pre-eminence among his people’s military scientists. Specifically, and shockingly, he is shown taking murderous steps to avoid being outstripped in his achievements by a woman with whom he clearly had a romantic attachment, a nice counterpoint to the fact that in the ‘present day’ portion of the story he manipulates another woman, his almost adoringly uncritical biographer Lorraine Baynes, into furthering his latest plans to amass galaxy-wide influence. ‘Davros’ is by no means devoid of the adventure-story thrills which are normal for Doctor Who: it has the Doctor facing killer robots, disposing of a nuclear bomb, escaping from a flooded underground mine, and so forth. Yet this serial, like its two companion pieces, ‘Master’ (2003) and ‘Omega’ (2003), represents a notably unhurried exploration of the pathology of evil. Even by Doctor Who standards, ‘Davros’ is dense in terms of dialogue. It is doubtful that such leisurely and intricate storytelling, with its intimate, quasinaturalistic tone, would ever have been attempted in the essentially melodramatic classic series. Moreover, the story seems to require an audience already sufficiently interested in, if not necessarily knowledgeable about, Davros to relish slow and introspective exploration of his psyche. The author of ‘Davros,’ Lance Parkin, apparently envisaged his story from the first in terms of moral realignment, stressing in his pitch that ‘the “viewpoint” will be that of Davros’, and playing with ideas of motivation, personal suffering and the possibility

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of redemption.110 The exploration of Davros’s moral stance and increasingly ambivalent sense of self recurs in ‘The Juggernauts’, which finds him posing with some measure of sincerity as a philanthropic scientist. The trend reaches its apogee in ‘Terror Firma’ in which Davros’s mind, torn between idealism and egotism, collapses into schizophrenia. Both of these stories are as densely discursive as ‘Davros’ with large portions of ‘Terror Firma’ being devoted to Davros’s conversations with the Doctor and, in his increasingly distrait condition, with himself. Davros lent himself to this kind of dramatic development in part because he had been defined from the first as a philosophizing figure. Davros’s debut, ‘Genesis of the Daleks’, featured a long scene in which he and the Doctor debate the ethics of intentionally releasing a potentially lethal force into the universe. Similarly long and portentous discussions have been structured into most of his subsequent screen appearances. Even amidst the frenetic action typical of the new series, Davros’s reappearance in ‘Journey’s End’ (2008) was the cue for yet another such philosophizing turn. Here, in another striking moment of moral realignment, Davros offers a trenchant judgment of the Doctor: he taunts the Time Lord over the contradictions in his alleged pacifism, calling attention to all those who sacrifice themselves for the Doctor’s cause and take up arms in his name. The decision to delve into the history or psychology of villains has almost invariably reflected their perceived historical importance within the Doctor Who narrative. Importance is here measurable chiefly in terms of their frequency of appearance in the classic series, not their inherent richness as characters. In other words, while Davros may have been well suited to dramatic amplification, this does not apply to all villains whose stories have been elaborated. For example, the Master, as the most oft-recurring solo villain in the classic series, was a prime subject for exploration in recent texts simply on the grounds of his longevity. In fact, his turn to evil was the subject of two distinct, if not necessarily irreconcilable origin stories in the licensed texts of the hiatus: one in an MA, ‘The Dark Path’ (1997), a story of shattered idealism set not long prior to his first television appearance, and one in the Big Finish serial, ‘Master’, harking back to a traumatic turning point during his and the Doctor’s adolescent years. More recently, a brief vignette

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offering a childhood cause for the Master’s psychosis was offered in the finale to the 2007 season of the new series. One might well argue that not only the fact of this rash of explanations for the Master’s evil but also their lack of clear internal consistency derive precisely from his inherent dullness as a character and the lack of any prior establishment of interesting parameters for his villainy. His gleeful wickedness and suave brutality, worthy of the moustache-twirling villains in silent movies, can be very entertaining in performance; yet, in want of the kind of concrete ‘historical’ roots which provided coordinates for remapping Davros’s villainy, the Master is a purely formulaic figure. Precisely because he is not particularly distinctive as a character, the careful attempts to ‘humanize’ him, to provide grounds for his apparently insatiable destructiveness, underscore the importance placed by fan writers on intense emotional engagement with moral issues. Yet the Master also offered other kinds of temptations to the writers of the MAs and PDAs, by virtue of the original conditions of his incorporation into the classic series. While menaces such as the Daleks and Cybermen generally reappeared once a year or so during the early years, the Master is unique in that he featured throughout the entirety of the 1971 season. He was, in short, a fixture of what is now often referred to by fans as the ‘U.N.I.T. era,’ the three-year period of the classic series during which Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor was trapped on Earth and working for the military. As such, the Master lent himself to becoming the chief protagonist of ‘The Face of the Enemy,’ a PDA also featuring the Doctor’s U.N.I.T. colleagues but not the Doctor himself. In fact, the premise of the story is that Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart must consult the incarcerated Master in face of an alien threat because the Doctor is temporarily absent and therefore unable to advise. ‘The Face of the Enemy’ is a prime example of moral realignment since, while not minimizing his villainy, it tells a story largely from the Master’s point of view. It is also a prime example of recontexualization, because it takes place in effect ‘during’ a classic-series episode set on another planet (‘The Curse of Peladon’, 1972). What the story does not offer is much emotional intensification; the Master’s flatness as a character is actually highlighted by the Doctor’s absence, since in the last analysis he is defined primarily in relation to the Doctor.

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Conversely, because it was established in the classic series that the Doctor and the Master were erstwhile friends, there has always been potential for a relational intensification of emotional issues and moral questioning. Like Buffy’s disastrous love affairs with the vampires Angel and Spike, two of her supposed quarries, the Doctor’s relationship with the Master has overtones of self- destructive codependency. The new series episodes, ‘The Sound of Drums’ and ‘Last of the Time Lords’ which together constitute the finale to the 2007 season, are unusual for the new series in making interactions between hero and villain both dramatic (as opposed to formulaically plot driven) and protracted. Throughout the two episodes, the Master’s and the Doctor’s mutual obsession is telegraphed as perversely erotic on the former’s side, and as intensely (not to say egregiously) compassionate on the latter’s. Flirtatious banter from the Master in their early conversations gives way to blatantly phallic sadism as he repeatedly hurts the Doctor with his ‘laser screwdriver.’ Yet the Master is all the time more focused on the Doctor than on the beautiful woman he has taken as a wife, or his other casual sexual conquests. The Doctor, by contrast, consistently exudes fraternal and eventually even quasi-paternal love, sternly admonishing or calmly reasoning even when reduced to weakness and incapacity. The coup de grâce is that he eventually takes it upon himself to forgive the Master for the holocaustic enormities committed against Earth’s population in ‘Last of the Time Lords’ (before going on to reverse the damage). The dysfunction in the relationship is grotesquely fascinating, played out as it is on the global scale. If ‘Last of the Time Lords’ offers emotional intensification of the relationship between the Doctor and the Master, it does so rather crudely, again ultimately flattening rather than complicating both the Doctor’s heroism and the Master’s villainy. In part this may be simply a reflection of Russell T. Davies’s preference for swagger and romanticizing, but in part it also reflects the subordination of character study to satirical themes played out in the story. The Master, who becomes prime minister of Britain at the beginning of ‘The Sound of Drums’, has been identified as a ‘palimpsest of the presidential premier’ Tony Blair, still incumbent when the episode was written.111 The Master’s imperialist project, which includes the creation of a massive coastal nuclear arsenal, is easily accessible to

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the casual viewer as a cautionary reflection of the British slide into American-initiated militarism under Blair. Engaged non-fans who could negotiate with ease the heady cocktail of personal and political conflict in ‘Last of the Time Lords’ might well have less tolerance for the protracted and intricate exploration of evil offered in the Big Finish audio entitled ‘Master’ (2003). In the course of a conversation piece catalyzed by the arrival of a stranger (the Doctor) at an old house during a dinner party, the listener is treated to a number of startling revelations about the protagonists’ past, very much in the manner of J. B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls. Among other disclosures, we find that the adolescent rite of passage on Gallifrey which made the Doctor a ‘hero’ and the Master a ‘villain’ was the voluntary manslaughter of a bully, committed not, as might be expected, by the Master but by the Doctor. It transpires that this deed placed the Doctor in the thrall of Death, and that he then compounded his felony by offering the Master to this supernatural being in his place. This set his former friend on the road to depravity, and perhaps partially explains the Doctor’s own unceasing restlessness. It would be hard to imagine a more chilling enrichment of the ongoing emotional entanglement of these two men than this disclosure of the Doctor’s past frailties and his very direct ethical responsibility for and to the Master. The point is driven home by the fact that throughout almost the whole of the audio drama the Master is an amnesiac, living as a respected surgeon and philanthropist; his ‘evil’ is therefore powerfully denaturalized. The premise and dramatic shape of ‘Master’ are predicated wholly on that which does not need to be said, by virtue of an implicit contract between the text’s producers and consumers. In other words, the Master’s villainy need not be rehearsed – indeed, his ‘true’ persona does not have to manifest for more than the few seconds of air-time he is allowed in the script, when his amnesia momentarily falls away – because it is assumed that listeners are thoroughly familiar with his history in the classic series. ‘Master’ is constructed for seasoned fans: it is understood that their reading of the text will be shaped by close acquaintance with the originary Who texts. No such expectation would be sustainable for the broader (and substantially juvenile) audience of ‘The Last of the Time Lords.’ The similarities between the stories in terms of emotional resonance may reflect the way in which ‘fannish questions’

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have come to the fore in recent media texts, but the differences just as powerfully bespeak the different orientation for specialist audiences as opposed to coalition audiences.

Cybermen: ‘How Did This Start?’ The devices of emotional intensification and moral realignment – as in a different way the expansion of a series timeline – have essentially entailed asking previously unasked questions in the Doctor Who texts. This typically involves revealing, and compensating for, lack or one-sidedness in the original series narrative. ‘Davros’ and ‘Master’ re-read the title characters somewhat against the classicseries grain, rendering ambivalent that which had always been portrayed as straightforwardly ‘bad.’ Yet in the case of certain recurring alien races now designated as ‘traditional enemies’,112 addressing the unasked is less a matter of revision than of actualizing latent potential. This is pre-eminently true of my last case study in this chapter, the Cybermen. From their inception the Cybermen were creatures embodying a range of ambiguities; they were amoral rather than conventionally ‘evil’. In terms of narrative motivation for their seeming belligerence, the emotionless Cybermen were sharply distinguished from the Daleks at their inception by the fact they sought conquest not out of hatred for other species or desire for dominance but out of logical necessity. Denizens of Earth’s former twin planet, Mondas, displaced from its orbit and wandering out of the reach of solar warmth, their survival tactic is in certain respects a reasonable one: to augment ailing and prematurely ageing bodies through extensive prosthetics, and to increase stamina and single-mindedness through suppression of potentially debilitating emotions. By extension, since as cyborgs they could not reproduce by biological means, there is clear logic in the Cybermen’s attempts to assimilate others. In one of their early appearances (‘Tomb of the Cybermen’, 1967) it is explicit, and in subsequent stories implicit, that they intend to annex Earth not only in order to acquire energy resources but also to increase their numbers. What makes the Cybermen pitiable and awful in equal measure, then, is their sheer need to survive, a need expressed in technological vampirism.

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This survival conceit was gradually muted and undercut during the 1980s as the Cybermen were retooled to resemble American competitors, hovering somewhere between the Cylons of Battlestar Galactica and the storm troopers of Star Wars; as Simon Barker and I have noted elsewhere, their leaders even became vocal clones of Darth Vader.113 In ‘Earthshock’ (1982), the Cyber-race seemed to be just another galactic Reich, jealously protecting its territories and apparently concerned about alliances against it. By ‘Silver Nemesis’ (1988) the grim implications of the Cybermen’s stated intent to turn Earth into ‘a new Mondas’ were entirely obscured by the fact that they behaved like a band of sadistic, trigger-happy thugs on a killing spree. To some extent, fan-driven licensed narratives concerning the Cybermen served to recover an ideal meta-text, as with the Daleks. In the case of the Cybermen the Vaderesque trappings, and the incongruous displays of emotion, were rapidly stripped away. However, the Cybermen’s original potential was rich enough that their recuperation in novels, audios and the new television series went far beyond nostalgia for a golden age in Doctor Who’s textual history. While the Cybermen’s actions are by normative standards ‘bad’, they are frightening by virtue not of their evil but their neutrality and by extension, as I shall argue, the fact that they were conceived as studiedly neuter. Above all, the obvious metaphor of their being inhabitants of Earth’s twin planet stresses the immediacy and contingency of the peril they represent, a fact repeatedly rehearsed in contextual critiques examining their redolence in terms of party politics and the politics of embodiment. All these qualities have lent themselves easily to being explored and recast in recent texts. Two origin stories for the Cybermen have been written in the last decade. The first was the audio serial, ‘Spare Parts’, which had the Fifth Doctor arriving on the planet Mondas immediately before the population’s wholesale cyber-conversion. The more recent treatment of their prehistory, in the new series, involved a journey ‘sideways’ into another dimension rather than back in time. This latest account of the Cybermen’s beginnings in an alternative reality is the less interesting of the two, in part because it is perilously close to a retread of ‘Genesis of the Daleks.’ ‘Rise of the Cybermen’ even revolves around a Davros-like creator figure, John Lumic – once again, alas, a wheelchair-bound baddie – intending to convert

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humanity wholesale into his new super-race. Yet clichés aside, ‘Rise of the Cybermen’ (2006) has two major strengths. First, it insists on the contemporaneity of the threat it explores. The Cybermen’s distinctive ‘earhandles’ are shown to be cognate to the Bluetoothlike ear pods worn by all the citizens of this alternative world. These pods are ostensibly sources of news and information, but also the means whereby Lumic initially gains control of the populace prior to transforming them. In a neat touch, the Cybermen refer to themselves as ‘Human.2’ and speak of ‘upgrading’ candidates for conversion or ‘deleting’ those who are unsuitable.114 The story is also notable as the first Cybermen adventure which viscerally actualizes the horror of conversion. Although gore is kept off screen, the conversion process is elliptically represented by the screams of its victims, and by a worms-eye view of conversion apparatus, which seems in the main to consist of whirring drills and saws. The second episode of the adventure (‘The Age of Steel’, 2006) also provides a specific reason for the suppression of emotion in the cyber-conversion process: it is meant to prevent the Cybermen from going insane when they realize what has been done to them. This motif is framed in a prime example of emotional intensification. The Doctor encounters a processed subject which, briefly regaining its normal consciousness, turns out to have been a young bride, converted on what should have been her wedding day. The juxtaposition of sentiment and horror is powerful. As attested by an acknowledgment in the closing credits, this conceit is drawn fairly directly from ‘Spare Parts’ (2002), Big Finish’s powerful account of the rise of the Cybermen on Mondas. In other respects ‘Spare Parts’ could not be less like ‘The Rise of the Cybermen’ (or, for that matter, ‘Genesis of the Daleks’). As with ‘Master’, this is again a function of the fact that ‘Spare Parts’ was calibrated to fan audiences and assumptions about extensive fan knowledge rather than serving as a reintroduction of the Cybermen for a less focused and informed audience. The Mondas of ‘Spare Parts’ seems to fit somewhere between the dystopic literary worlds of John Wyndham and George Orwell. The Fifth Doctor and Nyssa arrive in the planet’s underground settlement to find the sparse and sickly population hurrying to observe a curfew, which is enforced by partially cybernetized policemen. During the hours of darkness these same dehumanized

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police exhume corpses from the city cemetery, intending them to serve as a civic cache of body parts. Meanwhile, under the auspices of the all-powerful Committee – actually a gestalt Cyber-mind – the decidedly anti-heroic, hard-drinking surgeon Doctorman Allen struggles to ensure her peoples’ survival through a haphazard cyber-augmentation program. With ghoulish logic, Allen’s chief selector, the nun Sisterman Constant, chooses the terminally ill for early conversion, though, to hide the details of the process from the public, the selection is couched only as a military call-up. One ‘recruit’ is the tubercular Yvonne Hartley, daughter to an amiable cyber-rodent catcher, who befriends Nyssa. Yvonne’s father, meanwhile, is reluctantly involved in one of the more ghastly manifestations of Mondas’s ‘spare part’ economy: he is seeking an advance on the posthumous value of his own body from the devious organ dealer Thomas Dodd. The whole scenario begs to be illustrated by Edward Gorey. The affective force of ‘Spare Parts’ derives to some extent from specific moments of horror or poignancy. For example, during one of the city’s rolling blackouts, a partly cyber-processed and dying Yvonne Hartley drags herself home on newly augmented limbs, clad in her all-encompassing life-support suit. Her befuddled mind still recalls a wish to show her father her ‘uniform’ before she is posted. Yet more generally, the story’s profound pathos stems from the fact that the people of Mondas are shown to be stumbling ad hoc into wholesale cyber-processing. There is no clear-minded and scheming Lumic figure at the helm, just the chronically fatigued and self-medicating Doctorman Allen, the overseer of an unperfected process which only becomes a survival gambit in response to the steady failure of the city’s resources. ‘Spare Parts’ is surely one of the most striking and successful examples of moral realignment in Doctor Who texts. This is in part because it not only eschews the ‘threat-from-without’ clichés of most monster-invasion narratives but also complicates the ‘threat-fromwithin’ motif represented by stories such as ‘Genesis of the Daleks.’ The latter, like ‘Rise of the Cybermen’, is essentially a straightforward coup narrative in which a fascist figure uses technological force to overthrow existing political structures in an egotistical attempt to reshape the destiny of his race. By contrast, ‘Spare Parts’ is a tale of well-meaning communal folly in face of appalling adversity.

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But I would argue that it is the treatment of gender which ultimately makes ‘Spare Parts’ so powerful, as the homage in ‘The Age of Steel’ attests. Yvonne Hartley’s fate, which is eventually shared by her ‘selector’, Sisterman Constant, serves to underscore a previously unacknowledged point: the Cybermen are not in any useful sense men at all. The cleverness of Platt’s device (echoed in ‘The Age of Steel’) is that it capitalizes on untapped potential for probing gender which was clearly available from the creatures’ inception. Throughout the 1960s the Cybermen represented gender instability both in terms of their physical form and through the tension between their visual and aural presence. As Cynthia Fuchs has persuasively argued, cyborgs always trouble gender norms, and especially conventional action- and adventure-genre tropes of indomitable, self-contained and selfsufficient masculine identity.115 Even a ‘macho-cyborg’ figure, such as the titular character in Robocop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987) combines conventional, ‘hard’ masculinity with a feminizing ‘body permeability’, for the organic tissue of the policeman who becomes Robocop is massively penetrated by prosthetics even as he is rebuilt in his impenetrable cyborg form.116 Moreover, cyborgs ‘contradict sociobiological constructions of paternity and maternity’ in that the cybernetic body may be mechanically self-replicating – as in the case of the Cybermen and their more recent counterparts in the Star Trek texts, the Borg – but it lacks biological reproductive capacity.117 To an extent, the Cybermen visually incorporate the kind of gender paradox to which Fuchs calls attention. Their weapon-bearing chest control units, for example, like Robocop’s integral gun holster, could be considered phallic extrusions (counterpoising their evident genital lack).118 Yet these chest units are also the Cybermen’s vulnerable area, periodically torn open by opponents or penetrated with solvents and other substances which can destroy the creatures. In ‘The Tenth Planet’ and most subsequent television appearances (excluding those in the 1980s) gender paradox has been still more clearly embodied in the contrast between the massive physical stature of the Cybermen and their ‘feminine’ voices. Originally, they spoke in a syncopated, counter-tenor trill, modified in immediately subsequent appearances to an alto monotone. Although the basic pitch has sunk slightly in the new series (and recent Big Finish audios) the electronic overtones and undertones of these latter-day

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Cyber-voices continue to suggest unstable or plural gender identities in a way that the low tenor-and-bass chant of the Borg, for example, does not. In view of this last point, it might seem slightly surprising that the dysphoric implications of the Cybermen’s conflated/absent gender were not explored before ‘Spare Parts’ and ‘Rise of the Cybermen.’ It is particularly ironic that in the 1980s, at the historical moment when science fiction narratives such as the Alien series and Star Trek: The Next Generation were increasingly focused on issues around the problematics of gender, sex and subjectivity, the Cybermen were perverted into gun-toting macho ‘baddies.’119 Yet gender, like class (and for that matter like the ‘monstrous’ itself), is a category which was left almost entirely undisturbed during the classic series’ run; nor has the new series redressed this with any consistency, notwithstanding the revisions and challenges posited in the NAs and EDAs. In spite of the possibilities inherent in a text where the principal character can change bodily form, gender norms in Doctor Who have been overall fixed and relatively conservative, as I shall show in the next two chapters.

Conclusion: Black and White Re-Read In this discussion of metamorphoses of the monstrous, I have distinguished between narratives organized for different conditions of reading, focusing on the shifts in tone and tenor which occurred with the advent of licensed texts written by and for fans, especially the Big Finish audios. In making this distinction, my chief aim was to suggest that the ‘text-of-its-time’ account of Doctor Who may be useful but is not always as all-encompassing in its import as it might tacitly claim to be. Yet in arguing that many fan-driven texts focus on the emotional and historical ‘reality’ of the hyperdiegesis rather than speaking out of some broader social and political zeitgeist, I do not mean to reaffirm a stereotypical image of fans narrowly preoccupied with and absorbed in the imaginary world of their favoured text. As ‘Jubilee’ attests, there is no hard-and-fast subordination of the ideological to the affective in fan-produced narratives. Nor are the universes of the licensed Doctor Who novels and audios necessarily always comfortable realms to navigate, even

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if they offer a ‘trusted environment for affective play,’ as Matt Hills suggests.120 As I have argued vis à vis the Master and the Cybermen, some of the ludic tendencies in fan-produced texts involve avoiding comfortable narrative patterns. Simple definition of the monstrous as ‘other’ is staunchly resisted in both ‘Master’ and ‘Spare Parts’, and this, surely, is an ethical position with a wide application, pertaining to much more than the immediate conditions of our ‘post 9/11’ world. There is one kind of resolute fan engagement with uncomfortable possibilities in the texts of Doctor Who which lies outside the scope of this chapter. Fan-driven narratives (not least the new series) have frequently complicated notions of villainy and monstrosity by throwing into question the correspondingly ‘given’ nobility of the Doctor. Like the reworking of the personae and history of Davros or the Master in Big Finish audios, this may involve reading against the grain, exposing some of the more objectionable ideological assumptions which underlie the construction of the Doctor’s heroism. It is to some of these ideological underpinnings and the ways in which they have been rhetorically obscured in the classic and new television series that I turn next.

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IV ‘WHO DA MAN?’ The Doctor’s Masculinities

Introduction: A Queer Kind of Hero?

T

he last chapter was in essence a study of transformations and conditions for transformation in the Doctor Who texts. Here I am concerned less with ruptures and reinventions than with continuity, not to say rigidity, primarily within and across the two television series. My point of departure is an example of what might be called ‘Doctor Who exceptionalism.’ Both fans and the popular press have repeatedly advanced certain claims about the ways in which Doctor Who differs from (and is therefore implicitly superior to) other mass-media adventure texts. Many of these claims revolve around the Doctor, and relate to the kind of masculinity he embodies, which is allegedly remote from the potentially or actually violent, macho model typical of adventure and suspense narratives in television and film. My purpose in this chapter is to probe these assumptions. One of the justificatory mantras routinely used by apologists for Doctor Who is that it is a ‘gay-friendly’ fictional phenomenon. This might seem indirectly to be endorsed by the fact that artistic

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control of both the new television series and the Big Finish audios was initially in the hands of two openly gay men, Russell T. Davies and Gary Russell, both of whom were avowed Doctor Who fans in their youth. Under Davies’s tutelage, the new series introduced at least one pansexual character, Captain Jack Harkness, who famously shared an on-screen (albeit ‘chaste’) kiss with the Doctor. The audio dramas have not taken a comparable path, but Gary Russell has gone on record with an explanation of what he believes to be the reason for the show’s ‘gay appeal’, reported by the Rainbow Network in August 2000: It was a programme in which romance, conquest and sex played no part whatsoever. I think that is why it appealed to the kids that were going to grow up gay. It didn’t force something upon them that said you had to be Captain Kirk and get the girl or anything like that. It was a programme [in which] sex of any [kind] didn’t play a part. I think that’s why it has a large gay following.121

In essence, then, Russell implies that the appeal of Doctor Who for gay men is vested primarily in the character of the Doctor; it is a function of his lack of overtly paraded heterosexuality or other conquest-oriented markers of conventionally ‘red-blooded’ maleness. Russell’s position is strikingly expanded in another entry on the Rainbow Network by Daniel Judd, one of its regular columnists: What is it about [Doctor Who] that appeals to gays? One aspect is the non-violent nature of the lead character. The Doctor is a resourceful Gallifreyan using wit and charm to disarm the enemy and builds Mcguffins [sic] to prevent universal annihilation. Whilst probably a broad, sweeping statement gay people tend to avoid violent confrontations and so can empathise with the Doctor as he strives to find another way ... Another plus is the ambiguous nature of the lead’s sexuality. Unlike other heroes in the genre the Doctor doesn’t shag everything in sight but just concentrates on the matter in hand; saving the universe. I’m not saying the Doctor is gay but he does have gay appeal. In common with a lot of gay men, most of his companions are women; they are his best friends and he is fiercely protective of them and in the case of Peri he even risked his life to save her.122

Looking back on the classic series of Doctor Who from the vantage point of the late 1990s, Judd and Russell both identified the

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Doctor as asexual. One could also extrapolate from Judd’s statement that the character’s non-combative approach to resolving conflict and preventing universal annihilation makes him a type for the sensitive, feminized, ‘new man.’ While such a view is in part sustainable, it is one-sided, obscuring the ways in which the Doctor is also the linchpin of a continual process of reinforcing values associated with ‘old’ patriarchy. Indeed, for all its emphasis on post-Buffy girl power in the spunky figures of Rose Tyler, Martha Jones and Amy Pond, one of the most striking aspects of the new Doctor Who television series is the fact that the Doctor’s patriarchal authority remains intact, if not quite unquestioned. His encyclopaedic knowledge, his unencumbered independence and potent agency in the classic series are still inscribed into the heart of the new. Similarly, the largely unreflective celebration of his acts of intervention, and of the virtuosity with which he accomplishes them, was again central to the programme formula during David Tennant’s incumbency. In itself it is no very remarkable claim to say that the Doctor embodies a dichotomy: he is not so wholeheartedly a figure for inclusiveness, so shining an embodiment of the liberatory, as some commentators might like to believe. It is in the nature of a fictional hero conceived for popular, primetime television that any radical tendencies he or she may exhibit will be circumscribed by consensual social values which organize the text at a deep level. There is therefore little virtue in simply exposing ideological tensions in the text, for they are predictable if not inevitable. There is value in examining the peculiar ways in which ideological inconsistencies collide and coalesce in the figure of the Doctor. In the following two sections of this chapter I offer an overview of two main ways in which the Doctor’s masculine authority has been expressed in the text, the more stable embedded in the narrative (i.e. the Doctor’s actions, attitudes and the events in which he is involved), the more volatile expressed in spectacle (i.e. sartorial and performative display). In the final section, I examine pendulum swings in the Doctor’s portrayal in the new series: first, the move towards an unprecedentedly sexualized, straight identity for the Ninth and more especially the Tenth Doctor, and then a sharp move away from this, to a calculatedly unstable, queer positionality for the Eleventh. Throughout all the narratives of Doctor Who, one aspect of the Doctor’s identity has been wholly unvarying (except during the years

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of his exile on Earth in the early 1970s): he has always been the maverick wanderer who intervenes in, or occasionally provokes, crisis situations, only to resolve them and then promptly remove himself from the scene. In narrative terms, then, he is a Peter Pan character who maintains his power, his claim to be unique and special, and his ‘wholeness’ by remaining an ageless, asocial enigma, constantly elusive. Among the consequences of this, as I argue in the first main section of this chapter, is that certain male characters around the Doctor have been given complementary roles which serve to confirm his particular form of authority. Socialized male protagonists are necessary ciphers in the narrative, ‘responsible’ figures to whom the Doctor bequeaths part of his Promethean power. Parallel to this narrative expression of masculine power is a visual counterpart, albeit a counterpart which complicates the underlying thrust of the Doctor’s narrative presentation. The Doctor’s displays of agility and legerdemain make masculine patriarchal authority legible, or rather visible, in a form as persuasive as the series’ deliberately repetitive storytelling. Yet, whereas the Doctor’s masculine power within the narrative has been consistent and ideologically coherent, the visual presentation of this power has not. As I shall argue below, the ‘feminizing’ tendencies of exhibitionism and masquerade, especially in his dress and affect, have not only served to uphold the Doctor’s male authority but have also frequently – and sometimes simultaneously – complicated it. My aim here is not to establish the Doctor’s ‘gay’ credentials (or lack of them). Rather, I seek broadly to characterize the axes along which his gender and sexual identity have been built and rebuilt within the texts of Doctor Who. Since gender has historically been conceived in binary terms, it is important to note at the outset that this is a matter which cannot be exhausted with sole reference to the Doctor: I shall necessarily revisit it from a different perspective in the next chapter, the subject of which is his mostly female travelling companions.

Walking in Eternity: The Omnipotent Outsider Notwithstanding claims for his divergence from the Kirkesque, macho male, the Doctor’s presentation corresponds in many ways

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with conventional standards of masculinity. The character does not always embody popular models of ‘good’ masculinity (a matter to which I shall return in the next chapter); far less has his masculinity been coherent or untroubled. To be sure, the Doctor is superficially unlike the gruff, gun-toting heavy who has gained ever-greater prominence in fantasy adventure film and television since the 1980s, even making a somewhat unlikely Rambo clone of Patrick Stewart’s ascetic Captain Picard, as he marched sweaty and tank-topped to an ultimate confrontation with the Borg in Star Trek: First Contact (Jonathan Frakes, 1997). Yet it must be stressed that this superficial difference is in certain ways deceptive. One particular myth concerning the Doctor’s supposed difference from conventional male heroes can be dismissed at once. The idea that the he is somehow essentially non-violent, relying primarily on wit and reason to defeat his opponents, has frequently been advanced, as for example in Daniel Judd’s musings for Rainbow Network, above. Yet this assertion, which seems to be linked to the much-vaunted fact that the Doctor does not (usually) handle a gun, belies a massive weight of contrary evidence. I do not propose to dwell unduly on the matter of the Doctor’s use of violence, but it would be inappropriate entirely to neglect it. In particular, the glib equation between the Doctor’s disavowal of firearms and his alleged aversion to fighting cannot be allowed to pass, for it belies the fact that there are other classically ‘masculine’ forms of violence which he has frequently practised. While these may be subtler, or at least obfuscated with moral posturing, they still endorse the idea that violence has its uses, or at least that in certain circumstances it is unavoidable. Almost all of the incarnations of the Doctor have been involved in fisticuffs at one time or another, and more than one has exhibited proficiency in martial arts, albeit ostensibly only in self-defence. More significantly, the Doctor has repeatedly instigated, or at least winked at, massive violence against adversaries. Death abounded in the original Doctor Who television series, even if it was only monsters which were (‘legitimately’) being slain. The scope of havoc and destruction increased in the novels, culminating in the Doctor’s apparent genocide of his own people, the Gallifreyans (‘The Ancestor Cell’, 2000). Needless to say, this desperate action was presented in the narrative as a necessary evil serving a greater good, and nearly

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all the Doctor’s acts or sponsorship of aggression can be similarly justified. Yet for present purposes, this does not erase the fact that the Doctor has consistently had thoroughly ‘masculine’ recourse to violence as a means of resolving conflict, notwithstanding rhetoric to the contrary both within and without the narrative. Even putting aside the question of violence, it is hard to sustain claims for a clear-cut distinction between the Doctor and genre heroes whose masculinity is more overtly paraded. The most that can be safely said is that the tensions in gender construction have been greater in the Doctor’s case than, for example, in the cases of Kirk, James Bond or even the somewhat hapless Indiana Jones. In some ways the Doctor’s divergence from convention is superficial, serving only to deflect attention away from more deeply entrenched similarities. While the Doctor has for the most part been constructed as a maverick anti-establishment figure, his status as a perpetual outsider actually places him within a masculine paradigm well established in screen narratives: the self-contained loner. Much play has been made over the years of the fact that the Doctor is an outsider; predictably, this has been another factor adduced to the explanation of his gay appeal.123 Although the degree of narrative emphasis on this outsider status has varied, it has been one of the immutable, central conceits of the texts of Doctor Who. At the end of all his adventures the Doctor retires from the situations in which he has intervened. Although he has usually helped to create or recreate the conditions for a ‘just’ society, he never lingers, far less does he settle down. All his companions, too, are ultimately left behind, and almost all return to an established social context, or elect to help establish a new society or social network while the Doctor continues his wanderings. Beyond this, the text’s narrative formula of endless deferral has required that the Doctor periodically be rendered strange again, whenever too much information about his origins and character has been articulated. This generally entailed stressing his difference, his alienness, his remoteness even from the ‘normal’ members of his own super-race, the Gallifreyan Time Lords. The ultimately solitary and nomadic Doctor does in fact adhere to a perfectly conventional model of masculinity in screen fiction – namely, the type identified in film scholarship as the ‘narcissistic hero.’ Steven Neale has argued that this fantasy figure of supreme

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self-possession and omnipotence is common to a range of genres, from the Clint Eastwood anti-heroes in Leone Westerns, via Charlton Heston in El Cid (Anthony Mann, 1961) and Mel Gibson in the Mad Max movies (George Miller, 1979 and 1981; George Miller and George Ogilvie, 1985), to Batman and Superman.124 Such characters maintain their hyperbolic form of male autonomy by declining full entry into society.125 Neale stresses the way in which images of narcissistic authority are opposed to social authority, the ‘narcissistic function of the anachronistic social outsider’ being set against ‘the civilizing functions of marriage, social integration, and social responsibility.’126 Neale also emphasizes that there is an element of nostalgia within such oppositions; thus, for example, in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962) the (socialized) Ranse Stoddard literally mourns the ‘doomed’ figure of (narcissistic) Tom Doniphon, whose funeral provides the framing device for the movie’s flashback-based narrative.127 The role of the Doctor as a figure of nostalgia has already been addressed in an earlier chapter in relation to class and national identity. Theorists such as Neale and Laura Mulvey have a more particular kind of nostalgia in mind: a yearning for the ‘wholeness’ characteristic of the narcissistic condition, which in a Freudian theoretical framework is the developmental phase of play and fantasy prior to a child’s socialization. Undue extension of this narcissistic phase expresses itself in adults as ‘resistance to social standards and responsibilities, above all those of marriage and the family, the sphere represented by woman.’128 While in certain respects similar to other do-gooding itinerants and fugitives from popular television series, such as John Drake in Danger Man (ITC, 1960–1966), David Banner in The Incredible Hulk (CBS, 1977–82), and Dr. Richard Kimble in The Fugitive (ABC, 1963–1967), the Doctor is a more exaggerated example of the narcissistic outsider. His resistance to social integration is not only a repeated feature of the ongoing Doctor Who narrative but also a part of the premise. At the outset of the classic series the Doctor had already turned his back on his own society and presumably most of his immediate kin. It was not long before he parted from his granddaughter, and thereafter only ever referred once more to a family who were already apparently no more than a vague memory (‘Tomb of the Cybermen’, 1967).

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The Doctor’s rejection of a place within society is routinely recapitulated. Yet, significantly, when the Doctor abandons the recuperated or newly defined social order at the end of an adventure, he often leaves a designated representative of law, truth and justice (frequently but not always male) in a position of authority. Very occasionally this is a subversive figure: a prime example is the reprobate showman Vorg in ‘Carnival of Monsters’ (1973), the Doctor’s ally in foiling a coup on the strait-laced world of Inter Minor, who is last seen teaching a senior official the pleasures of gambling. For the most part, though, the Doctor’s ‘legatee’ is the thoroughly socialized counterpart to his narcissistic isolationism. His long-time friend and associate Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart is the locus classicus of this type, being not only an officer of two major bastions of AngloAmerican democratic values – the British Army and the UN – but also (at least by the time of his final screen appearance in the series in 1989) a married man. Yet, ultimately, Doctor Who upsets one of the principles which Mulvey sees played out in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. This is the resolution of the ‘irreconcilable contradiction ... between narcissism and the law’ in favour of the latter. Apropos these relative roles, Mulvey notes that ‘the issue at stake is [not] how the villain will be defeated, but how the villain’s defeat will be inscribed into history, whether the upholder of law as a symbolic system ... will be seen to be victorious or the personification of law in a more primitive manifestation.’ In Liberty Valance it is the socialized Ranse Stoddard who is ultimately shown to be ‘victorious’, for all that he did not in reality kill the outlaw Valance. The legend that he did so has been enough to propel him to political and financial success, and these rewards in turn validate the social contract of which he is the upholder. The socialized hero is the one who ‘becomes history’ while his narcissistic counterpart, Tom Doniphon, ‘has to bow himself out of the way of history.’129 Except in the diegetically literal sense that the Doctor bows out of every historical situation he enters, Mulvey’s analysis does not map directly onto the relationship between the Doctor and socialized authority figures such as the Brigadier. The only real history in any of the Doctor Who series is the Doctor’s own chronology. So while the Doctor is at one level a travelling trouble-shooter in the mould of John Drake in Danger Man, he is a skewed variation on

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the type. In Mulvey’s terms, both represent the kind of narcissistic hero who ‘gain[s] in stature by ... remaining alone’, or at least in the Doctor’s case, aloof.130 Yet, unlike Drake, the Doctor does not travel within one coherent world but between different planets and times. His detachment from every locale he visits is correspondingly exaggerated. Bereft of the consistent social parameters which operate in the diegetic world of texts such as Danger Man, overdetermining the actions of its hero, the Doctor’s narcissism is unchecked. He travels and intervenes not as a function of paid work, as is true for Drake, but for pleasure, not because he must but because he can. He is subject to no restraint, except occasional and largely ineffectual discipline by his own (corrupt) people, the Time Lords. The inherently fragmentary nature of the Doctor Who narrative also ensures that the authorization of incidental socialized heroes is dilute. Nor are these authority figures even shown to be consistently reliable within the series’ moral compass. For example, entrusted with a colony of dormant reptile men in ‘The Silurians’ (1970), the Doctor’s army colleague, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, destroys their hibernation chambers with explosives. Given the reptile men’s great power and inimicality to humankind, this could be construed as a socially responsible act. Yet the Doctor’s opprobrium as he leaves the scene at the end of the adventure gives the viewer the definitive moral stance with which to identify. Doctor Who’s capacity for endlessly recuperating the pleasures of narcissism – which the makers of the classic series milked unremittingly – became a self-affirming pattern in the classic series narrative, its potency cumulatively increasing. Time and again the Doctor resolved crises, but the long-term consequences of his acts were almost never examined. Incidental characters’ stories usually and increasingly ended in more or less abrupt iterations of the ‘happilyever-after’ formula. Once the immediate threat had been allayed, the real focus was upon the Doctor, and more particularly on what the Doctor was going to do next. At a fundamental level this next action was predictable: he would repeat his display of mental agility and flair for brinkmanship in a new context and in slightly different ways. Masochistic as his courting of danger may superficially have been, he seldom met a ‘castrating’ peril, nor did he ever ultimately have to cede or compromise his power. The well-nigh impregnable

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world-unto-itself of the TARDIS is among other things a nice continuing metaphor for the Doctor’s self-contained wholeness. Periodically, this wholeness was breached by some exceptional threat. At these moments, Doctor Who offered its own version of the motif of ‘narcissism transfigured (rather than destroyed) by death’, characterized by Steve Neale.131 In the classic series the Doctor’s third, fourth and fifth regenerations were all occasioned by self-sacrifice in which he took sole responsibility for either saving a friend’s life or preserving the welfare of the whole universe. Yet in the Doctor’s case, transfiguration in ‘death’ does not draw a line under his history: it is the basis for renewal, perpetuating rather than altering his mode of adventure. None of his three selfsacrificial acts significantly changed the Doctor’s habits or curbed his authority. In texts produced since the end of the classic series the Doctor’s narcissism has been probed, his omnipotence and self-possession thrown into question, or sometimes even into disagreeable relief. For example, he realizes in the new series episode ‘Bad Wolf’ (2005) that his earlier, supposedly helpful interference in Earth’s history (‘The Long Game’, 2005) has created a worse world, inadvertently exposing the planet to the malign influence of the Daleks. On a different tack, a partial process of socialization even briefly occurred in the new series through the Doctor’s relations with Rose Tyler’s extended family. This was one logical terminus for a process which was initiated not on screen but in the NAs and EDAs. In the novels the undermining of the Doctor’s narcissistic authority was achieved by bringing his companions’ experiences and above all their degree of trust in him into sharper focus. To this matter I shall return in the next chapter. For the present, I should like to focus on a more inherently unstable expression of masculine authority in Doctor Who, namely that which is vested in the hero’s spectacular potential.

A Dandy and a Clown: Masquerade and Theatricality In one of the wittiest lines from the classic series, the Doctor claims to be serious about what he does but not necessarily about the way he does it.132 This bon mot might have been designed to express the ongoing tensions in the Doctor’s construction as a hero in the classic

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series, and more specifically the tensions in his gender identity. In the foregoing section I dealt almost exclusively with the Doctor’s agency within the narrative, but hardly at all with how he is visually presented; in other words, I focused on what the Doctor does as opposed to how he is seen to do it. In this section my concern is primarily with spectacle rather than storytelling. While it would be an exaggeration to say that the Doctor’s comportment in the classic series actually undermined his narcissistic ‘wholeness’, his actions and self-presentation certainly complicated his status as the self-contained outsider hero. Indeed, if anything justifies the claims by Gary Russell and Daniel Judd that the Doctor departs from normative masculinity, it is not his lack of violence or overt sexuality but the friction between gravitas and camp in the character’s portrayal. This friction reached its apogee with the last actor to play the Doctor in the classic series, Sylvester McCoy, whose increasingly manipulative ‘dark’ tendencies in the narrative were belied by his clownish attire and demeanour as well as his slight physique. Yet throughout the classic series, the Doctor was in one way or another remote from a macho masculine ideal. The Hartnell, Troughton and McCoy Doctors were physically unimposing; the others, though in varying degrees tall and striking in physique and physiognomy, were all dressed in a manner calculated to set them apart from conventional notions of manliness in twentieth-century Britain. As noted in Chapter Two, a ‘retro’ dress norm was established for the Doctor with William Hartnell’s curious costume ensemble, and when Doctor Who made the shift from black and white to colour recording, the ‘retro’ quickly metamorphosed into the spectacular. Sporting Barrymore-collared shirts and knotted paisley ties, velvet smoking jackets and silk-lined Inverness cloaks, Jon Pertwee made the Doctor flamboyant for the first time. While no successor matched the lavishness of his costume palettes (king’s blue with nut brown, sea-pine green with rust, plum with rose and cinnamon, and so on), all later Doctors up to and including Paul McGann dressed in garments which were chromatically either high intensity or high value, or both. It was Pertwee’s costuming, too, which set a more or less inviolable precedent for the use of ornament such as covered buttons, embroidery and braiding. Like the prevalence of sensuous fabrics such as velvet and silk, vivid colour and finicky

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detail served to position the Doctor in that tradition of theatrical showiness which riffs extravagantly on upper-crust fashions, the dress of circus ringmasters and clowns, music hall and nightclub performers, and conjurers. This was a far cry from the neutrality and conformity which characterized sartorial stereotypes of the ‘real man’ during the same period, both in the world of fashion and in screen fiction set in the contemporary world. In relation to almost all his incarnations, interpretations of the Doctor’s dress were likely to be filtered by audiences through the cultural stereotype that, as Jennifer Craik neatly apostrophizes it, ‘men who dress up are peculiar (one way or another).’133 It must be acknowledged that the degree of perceived theatricality in any one of the Doctors’ costumes will depend to some extent on the moment from which it is viewed. For example, the campiness of the Third Doctor’s persona probably seems greater to audiences in the 2010s than it did to Jon Pertwee or contemporary watchers in the mid-1970s, who were accustomed to seeing bouffant hair, embroidered shirts and boot-cut flares on middle-aged men. Even so, the Doctor’s dress consistently represented deviance from the norms of properly socialized masculinity, for even at the most flamboyant fashion moments of the early 1970s, men’s dress in mainstream culture was kept within carefully policed boundaries. The Third Doctor’s day-in, day-out preference for evening dress, like the Fifth’s for cricketing gear and the Fourth’s for a stripy, floorlength wool scarf, is unequivocally ‘peculiar.’ From time to time the sheer force of this peculiarity is even acknowledged in the series’ dialogue: for example, in ‘The Daemons’ (1971) a village squire mistakes the Third Doctor for a member of the television crew filming in the area, assuming that he has on a costume and wig; and in ‘Carnival of Monsters’ (1973) the luridly dressed Vorg takes it for granted that the Doctor is also a showman, addressing him (much to the Doctor’s puzzlement) in the parlare of carnival folk. While the Doctor may have been in narrative terms a good example of the narcissistic loner, sartorially he was anything but. During the period of the classic series’ run, the ‘outsider’ hero in popular film moved between minimalist dress and partial undress. The former is exemplified by the extreme austerity of Steve McQueen’s attire in Bullitt (Peter Yates, 1968) and the steely sobriety of Clint Eastwood’s in Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971), while

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the latter is most infamously embodied in Stallone’s Rambo in First Blood (Ted Kotcheff, 1982) and Bruce Willis’s bloodied, barefoot John McClane in Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988). By contrast, the Doctor’s outfits were always heavy and ostentatious. They generally consisted of an agglomeration of items which in the later twentieth century would be eye-catching even in isolation (velvet coat, figured waistcoat, top boots, silk cravat, and so on), and they seldom exposed much skin or even defined the form of the body beneath. In short, in the classic series the Doctor was generally overdressed in one way or another. This overdressing, and the Doctor’s correspondingly stylized or comic deportment, could at times destabilize not only the character’s heroism but also the generic integrity of the series itself. The costume designer June Hudson once commented on the proximity of Doctor Who’s bold, operatic visual style to that of light entertainment, which is to say revue, pantomime and musical comedy.134 This is doubly applicable to the principal character. In sartorial terms, the Third Doctor in his evening dress related as much to the band members of the Rolling Stones and Cream, or to the dandyish Fred Astaire in his polychromatic outfits for Easter Parade (Charles Walters, 1948), as to genre peers such as the extravagantly clad Jason King of Department S (ITC, 1969–70). By the same token, the Fourth Doctor’s manic physical humour and untidy appearance had their closest analogue in Harpo Marx, while the Seventh Doctor’s circus-clown-derived costume and business-oriented dexterity recalled Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. It is important to stress that each of these incarnations of the Doctor also made a spectacle of agility, whether this was put in the service of humour or action: the Third Doctor felled opponents with Venusian aikido; the Fourth tripped villains with his scarf; and the Seventh deftly prevented acts of violence with the crook of his umbrella. Like musical comedy stars, through agility and dandyism the Doctor presented an alternative mode of spectacle to that of handsome, taciturn and well-built action/adventure heroes from Wayne to Stallone. As Steven Cohan has suggested apropos Fred Astaire’s post-war movies, part of the then middle-aged dancer’s appeal was the juxtaposition between his grace on the dance floor and the fact that, like almost every other musical performer, he was otherwise markedly ordinary. Virtually no musical comedy stars, Cohan notes,

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were ‘likely candidates either for pin-ups or action heroes.’ Thus, he argues, ‘Hollywood musicals re-imagined American masculinity for post-war audiences in the kind of spectacular terms that would later come to dominate a televisual popular culture.’135 The implication is that a model of masculinity privileging talent and ‘ordinariness’ over looks and muscular athleticism was to become the norm for television. The classic series of Doctor Who might well be adduced in support of such an argument, for among the lead players only Peter Davison and Colin Baker were conventionally handsome. There is one major difference between the spectacular potential of musical comedy stars such as Astaire, as theorized by Cohan, and that of the Doctor. While the song-and-dance man literally has show-stopping powers, halting narrative flow for the duration of a number, such disruptions to a suspense-serial narrative are not usually acceptable. Yet Doctor Who did come close to such showstopping effects in the occasional moments of pure comedy, pure action or soliloquy which slowed or distorted narrative flow, and these were almost invariably built around the Doctor. A striking example is the fencing duel between the Doctor and the Master which leads to the cliffhanger at the end of the second episode of ‘The Sea Devils’ (1972). The cliffhanger itself – in which the Master pulls a knife on the Doctor – relies in no way on this attenuated build-up. Except insofar as it affirms the Doctor’s sportsmanship and the Master’s lack of it, the duel itself is a narrative redundancy, pure diversion, notable primarily for the way in which it privileges the Doctor as a spectacular figure. In a sequence of almost two minutes and twenty-seven shots, the Doctor dominates: fifteen of the shots favour him, including all the longest. Most are either close-ups or over-the-shoulder shots (only three of which accommodate the practical need to insert a stunt man as the Master), but a few are lingering half- or three-quarter-length shots and several, strikingly, show the Doctor in repose. For example, in the thirteenth shot, having slipped behind a curtain and then doubled back behind the Master, the Doctor leans against a wall with languid ease, watching as his opponent maniacally hacks at the curtain. More emphatic still is the nineteenth shot in which the Doctor lounges atop a table casually eating a sandwich while pinning his adversary to the wall with his rapier (the Master is seen over-the-shoulder and his partially visible body confined to the right

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third of the frame). The emphasis on the Doctor’s grace and facility is rendered yet more spectacular by the fact that he is elegant and demure throughout the fight, his smoking jacket, frilly shirt and carefully spread sailor’s knot tie still undisturbed at the end. By contrast, the Master’s face is contorted with effort and rage, his movements are ungainly, and his usually slick hair and (unflattering) white polo-neck sweater slightly dishevelled. Outside the ‘Bondian’ Third Doctor’s incumbency, showslowing moments more often revolved around comedy than displays of balletic grace and sangfroid. The Fourth Doctor’s scarf was frequently the basis for comic business, and by virtue of its absurd length could be used quite literally to extend a humorous vignette. In ‘The Creature from the Pit’ (1979) the Doctor is pitched into the pit of the title at the end of the first episode, but the first moments of the second find him hanging by his fingers from a ledge a little way down. Suspense – the very idea of the ‘cliffhanger’ – takes visual form in a sight gag, or rather a series of sight gags, each capping the one before. The Doctor pulls pitons and a hammer out of his famously capacious pockets, but succeeds only in bruising the thumb of the hand from which he is suspended. He seeks to improve his mountaineering skills with a beginner’s guidebook, also produced from one of his pockets, but finds it is in Tibetan. Next up, therefore, is ‘Teach Yourself Tibetan.’ When the action returns to the Doctor after an intervening scene, a long vertical pan reveals that he has successfully pinned both books to the rock-face, has looped his scarf through the eye of a large hook, and is using the scarf to shimmy down the pit wall, knocking in pitons as he goes. Here the Doctor may be discomfited within the narrative, but the humour he embodies serves to distance the viewer from the narrative flow. A rather different example of the interplay between spectacular action and sartorial display occurs in ‘Black Orchid’ (1982). The choice of cricketing gear as the Fifth Doctor’s habitual costume, and the well-publicized fact that Peter Davison was a competent cricketer, demanded some kind of display of the Doctor’s prowess in the game early in his tenure. His fifth outing, ‘Black Orchid’ (1982), starts with a cricket match; almost needless to say, the Doctor is shown to be a prodigious all-rounder. Although the match is arguably significant as a catalyst for the action that follows, the spectacle

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of the Doctor momentarily overwhelms any narrative thrust. Rapid editing of the Doctor in action both in the seam and the outfield – accompanied by an ongoing ripple of applause on the soundtrack, and inter-cut images of the ever-rising numbers on the scoreboard – privileges his remarkable physical coordination, focusing the watcher’s attention purely on his skill. The spectacular conjunction of extravagant dress and lithe or deft action relates the Doctor directly to Cohan’s critical model of the song-and-dance man. Cohan identifies exhibitionism and masquerade as key elements out of which the star’s charismatic persona is built. He suggests that exhibitionism defines the male dancer’s performance in terms of self-conscious spectacle and stylishness, while masquerade defines male identity in terms of theatrical play or artifice. Cohan duly notes that both exhibitionism and masquerade are normally coded ‘feminine.’ Yet he argues that such ‘highly theatricalized’ maleness as Astaire’s gained importance in the years after World War Two because it offered an alternative to the ‘oppressive, often hysterical, depiction of post-war America’s restoration of binarized gender roles in film noir.’136 In many respects, this idea of an alternative, ‘theatricalized’ masculinity provides an attractive paradigm for interpreting the spectacle of the Doctor in the classic series. This is not to suggest that the device was unproblematic, or that it was always acceptable to either the texts’ consumers or its producers. Science fiction and suspense – the genres to which Doctor Who is notionally affiliated – are not permissive in the way that the musical is; they may be elastic in terms of narrative premise, but not in their inexorably forward-moving narrative structure. As attested by longstanding disagreements among fans about the role of comedy in Doctor Who, moments of humorous spectacle have the potential to unsettle the Doctor’s authority and the credibility of the action in which he is involved. And as I have noted, the Doctor’s theatrical, ‘peculiar’ dress also troubled the coherence of his heroism in the classic series, as scripts sometimes slyly acknowledged. With this in mind it is interesting that comedy has been thoroughly integrated into the 2005 revival, while the theatricality and ‘peculiarity’ of the Doctor’s dress were notably absent during the first four seasons of the new series’ run. When Christopher Eccleston took the role of the Doctor in 2005, he explicitly distanced himself

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from prior Doctors’ foppishness, and from elements of the classic series which might appeal to a ‘camp sensibility.’ One could argue that there has been no shortage of camp in the new series. It has been manifest not only in monstrous adversaries such as the Slitheen – who masquerade as well-fleshed humans, farting regularly and spoofing the behaviour of those they impersonate – but also sympathetic characters such as the Doctor’s on-again, offagain queer companion, Captain Jack. Yet overtones of camp were largely deflected from the person of the Doctor himself during Russell T. Davies’s five years as show-runner. The Tenth Doctor, in particular, was reconstructed along evermore generically normative lines. This went well beyond reaffirming the wholeness of the outsider hero, for the Doctor was also sexualized and more specifically coded as heterosexual. It is with this ‘straight’ trajectory, and its sudden disruption when the Eleventh Doctor replaced the Tenth, that the final section of this chapter is concerned.

You Never Quite Know What You’re Going to Get: The Turn to Heteroerotics, and the Queering of ‘New Who’ The disavowal of theatricality in the Doctor’s dress for the new series was immediate and decisive, but elements of masquerade still persisted in Christopher Eccleston’s portrayal of the Time Lord’s ninth incarnation. At first glance, Eccleston’s Doctor seemed closely aligned with conventional examples of the ‘loner hero.’ In dress and grooming he was as assertively butch as previous Doctors had appeared effete, with an ultra-severe buzz cut complemented by a battered leather U-Boat commander’s coat, dark v-necked shirt, straight-cut black trousers and heavy boots. Yet the Ninth Doctor’s masculinity was still much less stable than this urban-macho ensemble might suggest: his propensity to wear his angst on his sleeve disposed of any illusion that he neatly conformed to the strong-and-silent stereotype. As Chris Holmlund writes, the studied performance of hypermasculinity on screen always relates to ‘the multiple masquerades of ambiguous figures like the gay butch clone, the lesbian femme, or the passing black.’137 Given his unpredictable bipolar swings from tortured grief to jack-o-lantern grinning, the Ninth Doctor seemed

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to be protesting his butchness rather too much through his dress, trying to ‘pass’ and not quite managing. There was no such ambiguity, no trace of masquerade, in the persona of the Tenth Doctor, but he was unquestionably, not to say unprecedentedly, a spectacular figure. Off screen, Tennant’s Doctor was the focal point of a multi-million-pound brand, the linchpin of a series envisaged and publicized as ‘event television’. On screen, the Tenth Doctor was unequivocally a romantic action hero, albeit one quirky and irreverent enough to be accessible to the Britpop generation. This redefinition of the Doctor was a radical departure. Eccleston’s furniture-chewing performance may have helped to recast Doctor Who as ‘must see TV’, and his plain-spoken persona may also have made the Doctor unprecedentedly accessible to young people growing up in working-class neighbourhoods, but his portrayal stopped well short of turning the Doctor into a pin-up. Indeed, the Ninth Doctor’s rudeness and self-absorption rivalled the First Doctor’s antisocial behaviour, and part of the appeal of Eccleston’s performance, like Hartnell’s, surely lay in his embodiment of misrule. The Tenth Doctor, though frequently abrasive and ruthless, maintained a jokey irony and cool even as he outstripped his predecessor’s capacity for manic intensity. This cool was embodied sartorially in his adoption of an indie rockstar’s ‘geek chic’: mussed quiff, skinny-fit rumpled suit, Converse high-tops and a calf-length polo coat supposedly given to him by Janis Joplin. For all the early scripted insistence on his being ‘so old’, the Tenth Doctor for the most part embodied an all too recognizable cliché of metropolitan Anglo-Saxon youth: he was a feckless charmer and fast talker, only ever tongue-tied when characters such as Sarah Jane Smith or Rose Tyler faced him with his inability to sustain intimate relationships. Yet, in spite (or by virtue) of his emotional unavailability, the Tenth Doctor was also very clearly identified within the narrative as desirable, as to a lesser extent his predecessor had been. An ongoing theme of the new series was the Doctor’s attractiveness to successive companions Rose and Martha, in each case conveyed first through hints and then a fully fledged confessional statement from the young woman. The Doctor’s attractiveness to an array of nubile incidental characters was just as clearly telegraphed. This was mostly expressed in flirtatious banter, though significantly some of these characters instigated brief but passionate kisses with

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the Time Lord. Among them were not only his ‘guest companion’ for the 2009 Easter Special, Lady Christine de Souza, but also Madame de Pompadour, a figure historicized in terms of both her sexuality and her discernment. That both were played by ‘it girls’ – respectively Michelle Ryan and Sophia Myles – clearly underscored the point. In short, the new series radically transformed the Time Lord’s spectacular potential; his to-be-looked-at-ness, especially during Tennant’s incumbency, was in large measure a function of his notional (hetero-) sexual appeal. Erotic attraction, whether mutual or not, is always ineluctably relational. Quite apart from redirecting the Doctor’s spectacular potential, his companions’ attraction to him necessarily redrew aspects of his role within the narrative. Perhaps because of Russell T. Davies’s avowed interest in Buffy, the Vampire Slayer,138 the Doctor came to occupy a position very similar to that of Buffy’s sometime amour, the vampire Angel. In both series a narrative of ongoing deferral was built around a young woman’s desire for a much older man and his ultimate inability to engage in a long-term, intimate relationship. In a curiously lop-sided fashion, the portrayal of the Tenth Doctor and Rose tapped into the romanticized conventions of dyadic love almost as strongly as the portrayal of the star-crossed Buffy and Angel. The Doctor never quite acknowledged reciprocation of Rose’s feelings for him while they travelled together, implicitly because they could not have a ‘normal’ relationship. Yet he did make the unprecedented vow that she could spend her whole life with him if she chose (‘School Reunion’, 2006). After her enforced departure in ‘Doomsday’ (2006) it was even more clearly suggested that the Doctor returned Rose’s exclusive, romantic feelings. This was conveyed through the hyperbolically wistful manner in which he spoke of her; through his taciturn rejection of Martha Jones’ subsequent advances; through an eventual, bittersweet reunion with Rose, which even exploited the cliché of lovers running to each other’s arms, and finally through the device of the Doctor’s bequeathing Rose a half-human clone of himself to serve as the lifelong sexual partner he could never be. This last motif combined renunciation and consummation in a way which could only be achieved in a fantasy text. One further important parallel between Angel and the Tenth Doctor remains to be addressed. The centuries of age difference

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between Rose and the Tenth Doctor, as between Buffy and Angel, are visually belied by the actual ages of the actors playing the characters. Indeed, without this convenient cognitive dissonance the motif of a young woman’s love for an inordinately older man would arguably be untenable; Rose Tyler’s doe-eyed worship of the Doctor would surely have seemed very different had a late-middleaged actor – even suave fan favourite Anthony Head – been cast as the Time Lord.139 One might speculate whether the programme makers’ wish to eroticize the Doctor/companion relationship directly informed the choice of Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant, or for that matter Paul McGann before them. Yet it is more interesting to turn that question around: what might be the longterm effects of presenting the Doctor as emphatically heterosexual? Might Tennant’s replacement with a still-younger man, Matt Smith, indicate that the equation between the Doctor’s heroism, his apparent youth and his attractiveness to women is now an entrenched part of Doctor Who’s brand identity?140 As Matt Hills has stressed in a recent critique, many staples of the new series established by Russell T. Davies have been maintained by the new show-runner, Steven Moffat, evidently with a view to maintaining brand equity.141 These ongoing elements range from the overall structure of the Eleventh Doctor’s debut season, which closely adheres to its predecessors (a season opener set in contemporary England, followed by a story set in the far future, in turn followed by an historical adventure, and so on), to individual motivic elements and matters of tone. Superficially it seems that the sexualization of the Doctor and his companion’s attraction to him are among the motifs which Moffat and his colleagues felt it necessary to preserve. Thus, the spectacle of the new Doctor’s somatic appeal is clearly signalled in his first episode, ‘The Eleventh Hour’, when his new companion, Amy Pond, shamelessly watches him strip and change. His attractiveness to her is further confirmed in the tag scene of a later episode, ‘Flesh and Stone’, when she makes a pass at him (as I discuss further in Chapter Five). Yet the seeming continuity is deceptive: heteronormative themes are rehearsed in the new season only to be queered. I should like to clarify at once the way in which I am using the contested term ‘queer’ since I rely on it not only here but also in the next chapter. By queer I do not mean an experience or condition

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which is opposed to the heterosexual. Many exclusions in contemporary societies can only exist by virtue of an entrenched faith in the binary ‘switch’ model whereby something is defined by possessing an opposite, and the two are always seen as mutually exclusive: high/low, on/off, wet/dry, and so forth. David Halperin (among others) has argued that the queer inherently resists restrictive definition within a binary; he regards the queer as ‘an identity without essence’ marking ‘whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant.’ 142 I characterize the Eleventh Doctor as a queer or ‘queering’ figure here not because I want to suggest that he embodies a particular form of non-straight sexuality, but because his persona throws into question an array of givens about the supposed interdependency of normative sexual and gender identity. I am not necessarily arguing that Smith’s is the queerest incarnation of the Doctor yet. My argument, more narrowly, is that the Eleventh Doctor queers the new series precisely because of the potency of the ‘straight’ precedent established under Russell T. Davies’s tutelage. The silence maintained over the Doctor’s sexuality in the classic series can only be read as counter-hegemonic through comparison with figures in other texts, such as the adventure-story heroes of Star Trek and the James Bond 007 franchise (Eon Productions, 1962–) mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. By logical extension, the degree of the Doctor’s seeming divergence from generic norms will vary according to the choice of external referent: for example, adducing Jeremy Brett’s celebrated portrayal of Sherlock Holmes (Granada, 1984–1994) or David Suchet’s performance in the title role of Agatha Christie’s Poirot (LWT/ITV, 1989–) will obviously not yield so satisfying a sense that the Doctor is exceptional. The new series, on the other hand, provided its own internal coordinates for understanding the Eleventh Doctor as a queering figure, for the array of cues marking the Ninth and Tenth Doctor as clearly if chastely heterosexual set a benchmark against which the Eleventh would inevitably be judged. Like McGann, Eccleston and Tennant, the broadly good-looking Matt Smith seems to lend himself to normative sexualization, to the spectacle of the young, athletic male which is endemic to contemporary television fiction from Lost (ABC, 2004–2010) to The Tudors (TV3 Ireland, 2007–2010). Yet rather than belying the character’s

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venerability, as with Tennant, the Eleventh Doctor’s youth has perversely become the core of his queering potential. His elbowpatched tweed jacket and bow tie hyperbolically evoke the ‘boffin’ or ‘nutty professor.’ Because these stereotypes are associated with seniority – Smith’s Doctor has significantly enough been likened to both Magnus Pyke and Patrick Moore143 – the effect is to draw attention to Smith’s almost prepubescent boyishness, amplifying cognitive dissonance. The dichotomy has been comically highlighted in scripts. For example, at one point in ‘The Vampires of Venice’ the Doctor contemplates posing as Amy’s father; her response is to observe drily that the Doctor looks ‘about nine.’ A more frequent target of Amy’s persiflage in scripted dialogue is the Doctor’s bow tie. Whenever she teases him, the Doctor earnestly responds that ‘bow ties are cool’, at one point ingenuously trying to support this by comparing himself with an ageing, bow-tie-wearing art historian played by Bill Nighy (‘Vincent and the Doctor’). Comic narrative focus on the tie underscores Smith’s rejection of his predecessor’s sartorial cool and more specifically the youth resonances in Tennant’s outfits. Interestingly, in spite of a sprinkling of reports that Smith’s costume choices were boosting sales of Harris Tweed and bow ties,144 media response to Smith’s outfit has frequently tended towards the negative, stressing his costume’s unflattering, unfashionable character, and often making adverse comparison with Tennant’s modishness. One of the fashion pundits called upon to comment on Smith’s new costume after its unveiling remarked waspishly that it is ‘a curiously British idea to make the lead character in a prime time TV show look purposely and perversely less attractive than they actually are.’145 Another pointed out that while many fans liked dressing up as David Tennant because of his ‘very accessible look’, Smith’s would be ‘more difficult because it doesn’t fit in as well, especially the bow tie.’146 Focusing specifically on the tie, yet another expert noted that it is ‘a hard item to wear; you have to try and avoid looking like Pee-wee Herman.’147 The anxiety surrounding this last comment is palpable, for Peewee is a figure of camp gender destabilization. What is less clear is that avoiding the supposed pitfall of ‘dorkiness’, or camp, was a consideration for Smith, who apparently argued successfully to adopt the bow tie in face of resistance from Steven Moffat. The show-runner tellingly described his initial objection in terms of the

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bow tie’s being ‘a pantomime idea of what Doctor Who is like.’ 148 Still more tellingly, Moffat characterized Smith as ‘halfway between Indiana Jones and Stan Laurel’, suggestively linking an infamously hapless action hero with another bow-tie wearing comic character who, like Paul Reuben’s Pee-Wee, is feminized and ‘hysterical’.149 While the Eleventh Doctor is not feminized as such, he does share some of Pee-Wee’s and Laurel’s child-like and therefore stereotypically ‘less-than-manly’ tendencies which stand in marked contrast to the Tenth Doctor’s air of cool self-assurance.150 Smith’s nerdy, ageing dress complements a quasi-adolescent mixture of physical awkwardness and grace. His swooping arm movements and loping walk, which Moffat infamously likened to a ‘drunk giraffe’,151 can shade into an almost balletic delicacy, most obviously when he performs neat, twisting jumps on the steps of the TARDIS control room. Yet the sense of teenage gawkiness can also give way to bumbling, an aspect of the Doctor’s persona which is meta-narratively traced to Smith’s own clumsiness. For example, according to jovial testimony from Steven Moffat, the actor’s accidental breakage of part of a prop during rehearsal for ‘The Time of Angels’ was recreated for the camera because of its humorous potential.152 In short, both the Doctor’s diegetic behaviour and the treatment of Smith in publicity and press coverage point strongly away from the Tenth Doctor’s cool self-presentation, epitomized in the aggressively confrontational, spread-legged stance and knit-browed intensity which Tennant so often adopted both for publicity photographs and on screen. In light of the cheerful disregard for cool in the presentation of Smith’s Eleventh Doctor, it is useful to consider a seeming echo of the cricket scene in ‘Black Orchid’ in the new series, this time built around the Doctor’s skill as a footballer. As the press reported when Smith was cast, the actor formerly played on Nottingham Forest and Leicester City’s youth teams. In ‘The Lodger’ this accomplishment is utilized when the Doctor’s new landlord in suburban Colchester, Craig Owens, takes him to play for his local pub team. In spite of some initial confusion (‘Football’s the one with the sticks, isn’t it?’), the Doctor turns out, needless to say, to be phenomenally nimble. Yet the queer way in which this display of prowess is contextualized sets it apart from the straight-ahead, Boy’s Own storytelling of ‘Black Orchid’.

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‘The Lodger’ as a whole epitomizes the growing tendency to present the Eleventh Doctor as a figure whose relationship with sexuality is elusive if not actually unknowable. The comic premise of the episode is straightforward: the Doctor must pass as an ordinary human being, doing ‘what normal blokes do’ until he has unravelled the sinister goings-on in Craig’s apartment building. Humour is extracted equally from the ‘normal bloke’ stereotype, embodied by the doughy and unadventurous Craig, and from the Doctor’s seemingly wilful inability to internalize this stereotype even for a short time. The football game sequence is organized in essentially the same way as the cricket match in ‘Black Orchid’ with rapid intercutting between the Doctor’s feats of skill and the cheering audience. Yet the surrounding scenario serves to privilege not the Doctor’s prowess but the comedy of his overall failure to pass as a ‘normal bloke.’ He arrives at the match still incongruously wearing his tweed jacket over his kit, and he greets all the team members – as he had greeted Craig at their first meeting – with continental-style air kisses, having for some curious reason evidently decided that this is standard for the date and milieu. In wake of the Doctor’s triumphant performance on the field, the team captain predicts that with the Doctor’s participation they will ‘annihilate’ the Crown and Anchor in their next match. The Doctor promptly launches into a diatribe against violence until he realizes, slightly abashed, the harmless point of this laddish hyperbole. The Doctor’s mixture of earnest incomprehension and what Craig calls ‘weird’ behaviour is not confined to the football match sequence; it is a feature of his interactions with Craig throughout the episode. Especially telling are their conversations relating to sexuality and romance. For example, the Doctor is bemused when invited to give ‘a shout’ if he wants Craig ‘out of his hair’, forcing Craig to spell out the possibility of the Doctor’s bringing home a girlfriend – or boyfriend. Conversely, when Craig offers a standard disavowal of his crush on a workmate, Sophie, by professing that she’s just ‘a friend who’s a girl’ and that ‘there’s nothing going on’, the Doctor replies without a hint of irony, ‘Oh, that’s completely normal; works for me.’ It would be a mistake to read the Doctor’s miscalculations and misunderstandings in ‘The Lodger’ as ‘gay’ jokes at his expense,

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and far less at the expense of non-straight sexualities at large. The episode clearly lampoons Craig’s (straight, repressed, parochial) normality, which is, after all, abnormal in the context of the fantastical adventures of Doctor Who. Besides, the Doctor’s role as queer provocateur is articulated elsewhere in the season in a variety of ways, which always present a heterogeneous rather than monolithic sexuality. Perhaps the densest single example occurs in the teaser for ‘The Vampires of Venice’, which takes place at the stag party for Amy’s fiancé, Rory Williams. When a giant paper cake is wheeled in to burlesque music and suggestive whooping from Rory’s friends, it is the Doctor who bursts out. The immediate humour of the gender inappropriateness is complemented by a slow-fuse joke, for the season opener had revealed that Amy works as a kissogram. The Doctor’s address to the horrified Rory massively compounds the inappropriateness, twisting and turning from one gender positionality to another: Rory! That’s a relief. I thought I’d burst out of the wrong cake. Again. That reminds me, there’s a girl outside in a bikini. Could someone let her in and give her a jumper? Lucy. Lovely girl. Diabetic. Now then, Rory, we need to talk about your fiancée. She tried to kiss me. Tell you what, though, you’re a lucky man: she’s a great kisser.

The Doctor’s ‘feminine’ concern for the unseen Lucy, and his confiding account of her medical condition, might seem to identify him as a ‘new man’. Conversely, his announcement of Amy’s attempted kiss could suggest blokish one-upmanship were it not undercut by Smith’s counter-intuitive delivery and demeanour: the Doctor’s splendidly crass disclosure that Amy is ‘a great kisser’ is accompanied by a mild, avuncular smile at his audience, as though he had just told a heart-warming anecdote. And any hint of masculine hubris is thoroughly upset at the end of the sequence as the Doctor lapses into Laurelesque bumbling. At the moment that he begins to realize his faux pas (‘Funny how you can say something in your head and it sounds fine ...’), he discovers that his hand is stuck to the torn paper surface of the giant cake. In short, the whole sequence mingles camp, farce, stereotype, and the transgression of taboo in an almost impenetrable melange. That the destabilization of straight masculinity has proven so useful in rendering the Eleventh Doctor strange is hardly

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surprising: ambiguous sexuality and gender powerfully signify the ‘alien’ precisely because our society is so rigidly heteronormative. However, the fact that this destabilization could have occurred at all is less easy to explain, at least within the context of the new series and its relentless branding. Considered en bloc, Eccleston and Tennant established a powerful precedent for presenting the Doctor as a supremely authoritative narcissistic hero, so powerful that this paradigm might seem to preclude any mainstream success for Smith’s more theatricalized and queer version of the character. Expanding the critical frame to encompass the classic series yields suggestive, if ultimately slippery, precedents. The extremity of the shift from Tennant to Smith is certainly much less startling when set against the classic series’ frequent alternation between Doctors who inclined strongly to the anarchic or ‘weird’ and those who were closer to the patriarchal heroic norm. While the wildeyed Tom Baker has in retrospect become central to mainstream perceptions of the classic series, his predecessor, Jon Pertwee, was in his own time as popular as David Tennant; and like Tennant, Pertwee ultimately embodied traditional masculine authority. Yet to speak of a pendulum swing between modes of masculinity in the texts of Doctor Who is in itself a simplification. As I have argued throughout this chapter, presentation of the Doctor’s gender identity has always been riven with contradictions and instabilities; and there is ultimately no algorithm for predicting shifts in the Doctor’s masculinities, either between incarnations or within the incumbency of a given performer. Far less is it possible to forecast audience reaction to such changes. In his efforts to ‘colour’ the role of the Doctor, Tom Baker veered dramatically from studiedly childish antics to the overbearing sobriety of the ‘real man’ without alienating viewers. By the same token, in spite of the Tenth Doctor’s enormous popularity it apparently ‘took just minutes for nostalgic memories of David Tennant to melt away’ after Matt Smith’s debut, according to Dan Martin, writing in a Guardian blog.153 Whether critical plaudits will be matched by consistent audience support for Smith’s Doctor remains to be seen, but Martin’s comments do highlight the contingency as well as the volatility of responses to Doctor Who’s various changes. Indeed, in the context of the Doctor Who palimpsest, tonal re-inscriptions and erasures are arguably only surprising in the moments in which they occur.

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This is not to suggest that representation of the Doctor’s masculinity is in some way arbitrary and rudderless, or that the more things change the more they stay the same. On the contrary, I should like to suggest in conclusion that in wake of the 2010 season Doctor Who stood at a very distinctive, if not unique, juncture. In this chapter I have suggested that in the classic series the Doctor’s narrative portrayal and spectacular potential were generally in tension with one another. Whereas the character’s scripted role adhered to a well-established model of masculine authority in screen fiction, his performance and sartorial presentation destabilized it with overtones of ‘feminized’ theatricality. During Tennant’s incumbency this tension substantially abated, as the Doctor’s spectacular potential was reorganized to serve rather than undercut the paradigm of the narcissistic hero, the paradigm upon which scripts under Russell T. Davies so emphatically insisted. With Smith and Moffat the tensions are not ironed out but on the contrary very deliberately highlighted. In episodes such as ‘The Lodger’ and ‘The Vampires of Venice’ the Doctor’s queer identity is perhaps for the first time on television not merely an unacknowledged attribute, or the basis for a comical interlude, but intrinsic to storytelling as well as spectacle.

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V ‘I’M NOT HIS ASSISTANT!’ Being the Companion

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s a narrative, Doctor Who is overtly structured around the celebration of difference and non-conformity, around notions of personal liberty and ideals of individualism. Yet while the Doctor himself may be seen to represent such values, however unevenly, this does not hold for many of his companions, or ‘assistants’ as they have often been called. Overall, the texts have been marked no less by the normative treatment of these characters (who were mostly women) than by the correspondent treatment of the Doctor as the unfettered, narcissistic hero. Nicholas Cull has suggested that the treatment of female companions ‘shifted considerably’ over the classic series’ quarter-century run, and James Chapman has claimed that the Doctor’s companions typified the texts’ ‘liberal’ ethos by embodying class, regional and ultimately also racial diversity.154 These claims are shaky on two counts. First, as already noted in earlier chapters, there is a massive imbalance in the social-geographic distribution of companions in favour of London-based, middle-class, white characters. Second, and more importantly, any movement to include stronger women

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in the classic series was compromised by the lack of real change in their relationships with the Doctor. In other words, the assertion that certain companions challenged gender norms is sustainable only if prior companions represent the benchmark; it ignores the ways in which women continued to be shown as dependent on or ancillary to the male hero. The tendency to slippage between the terms ‘companion’ and ‘assistant’ in describing the relationship between the Doctor and his friends is interesting precisely because the latter so clearly suggests lack of parity. Use of the word ‘assistant’ came to prominence at the moment in the classic series when the Doctor, as an earthbound advisor to U.N.I.T., had salaried female colleagues rather than travelling companions under his aegis. Yet the term still occasionally surfaced in the series after he had left his post on Earth; its usage persisted still longer in the British popular press, and even in academic texts.155 In many ways, the idea of ‘assisting’ accurately reflects a prevailing asymmetry between the roles of the main characters throughout the classic series, even where a fellow traveller or workmate was explicitly portrayed as the Doctor’s equal in one or more areas of proficiency. In the revived series this has supposedly changed, with companions being less sidekicks than complements or foils to the Doctor. The quotation forming the title of this chapter is an indignant rejoinder made by the Tenth Doctor’s fellow traveller, Rose Tyler, to a former companion from the classic series, Sarah Jane Smith, who innocently referred to Rose as the Doctor’s assistant. Yet in certain respects this overt rejection of the classic series’ values is at best lip service to a new ideal. One of my arguments here will be that under Russell T. Davies the new series was disturbingly close to the old in its enforcement of heteronormative roles for women, an unfortunate reversal of the change in the gender dynamics between the Doctor and his female companions which occurred in the last years of the classic series, and more thoroughly in the licensed novels, audio serials and comics. It is on licensed texts of the period between the two television series that I primarily focus in this chapter. My main argument is that companions were used in the audios and novels, especially the latter, as figures for probing Doctor Who’s patriarchy. I focus primarily on the treatment of three characters in these texts: Ace, Sarah

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Jane Smith and Fitz Kreiner. Ace, a linchpin figure by virtue of the fact that she straddled the classic series and the NAs, is arguably the pivotal companion in terms of a developing critique of the Doctor’s paternalism. Sarah Jane Smith, a popular recurring character, has been reinvented several times in texts of the last decade. Because of her long association with Doctor Who, she has proven especially useful for pointing up both entrenched and shifting gender norms in the texts. I contrast her return in the EDAs and PDAs with the more worrisome way in which she was handled in the new series. Finally, towards the end of the chapter, I examine the portrayal of Fitz Kreiner, the longest-running companion in the EDAs, in the context of queer dynamics in the Doctor Who texts. I argue that Fitz is a figure whose bond with the Doctor destabilizes the normative by virtue of its own fluidity and internal contradictions.

Heteronormative Patterns: ‘Marriage’ and ‘Family’ in Doctor Who In attempting to characterize the relationships between the Doctor and his companions in toto, it is worth briefly revisiting the issue of the show’s supposed ‘gay-friendliness.’ Claims for this have been based not on the Doctor’s espousal of a non-straight sexuality, but on the absence of any strong hints – until the 1990s – that he possesses any sexuality at all. For the purposes of critical evaluation, this obviously puts the Doctor in a very different category from closeted or openly homosexual characters in other popular-culture texts recently considered in light of queer theory, such as David Fisher in Six Feet Under (HBO, 2001–2005) and Willow Rosenberg in Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. True, the Doctor’s succession of apparently sexless friendships with girls in the original series can be understood as aligning him with gay men (or at least a gay stereotype), but there are other possible readings of this ongoing attachment to young women. After all, for any viewer/reader really intent on imagining that the Doctor is sexually involved with his various girl companions, absence of evidence is hardly compelling evidence of absence. Even before excuses were constantly being found for the Doctor to kiss his companions, there was a sprinkling of ‘soft’ cues to read some of the Doctor’s close friendships as sexually charged

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or intense. A prime example is Sarah Jane Smith’s repeated capitulation to the Doctor’s disarming invitations to travel in the TARDIS; another, his evident disappointment when Jo Grant leaves her position as his assistant in U.N.I.T. to marry a younger man; and yet another, his alternately acerbic and mutually admiring banter with the second incarnation of Romana. Even without such cues, one could argue that if the Doctor were assumed to be sexual, a straight identity would be the obvious one, just because heterosexuality is the ‘given’ in contemporary culture. So what aspects of the Doctor and his close relationships serve to confirm heteronormativity? Heteronormativity is that cluster of institutional practices which enjoy authority as unquestioned norms in contemporary societies. Taken together, these practices valorize and exalt sexual (and implicitly procreative) relationships between male and female to the exclusion of all other kinds. In the heteronormative worldview, it is understood that male and female are stable, absolute categories which do not need to be explained or qualified because they are ‘natural.’ By the same token, the two sexes are seen as complementary, each having its own gender roles to play out in child rearing, the life of the family and wider society. In short, heteronormativity goes far beyond characterizing the sexual desires and predilections of a supposed majority. It defines the ways in which behaviours in the developed world, and especially Europe and North America, are constrained by a set of expectations, mandates and proscriptions.156 Inherent in the principle of heteronormativity is that few texts of any kind, and certainly few popular texts, will be devoid of heterocentric tendencies. What follows is a brief an attempt to summarize the main ways in which Doctor Who has expressed heteronormative values, however incidentally or faintly, through the Doctor’s relationships with his companions. It is striking that, with four exceptions, the Doctor’s fellow travellers in every medium have been under forty (and most under thirty). Moreover, until Bernard Cribbins’s turn as Wilfred Mott in ‘The End of Time’ (2009–10), all the companions seen on television have been conventionally attractive, i.e. slim, curvaceous or well toned, with ‘regular’ features. Since the heterosexual model tends to show partiality towards youth, nubility and attractiveness in women, opposing these to worldly wisdom, experience and ‘character’ in men, it is clear that the normalizing tendency exists in Doctor Who at a systemic level. Furthermore,

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while within the narrative the Doctor may have been sexless in his serial monogamy, it can be argued that he and his companions have tended to play out aspects of the roles conventionally assigned to men and women in marriage. Marriage denies women power: they are economically dependent, and their typically confining labour in the home is unpaid. The model of heterosexual masculinity, by contrast, situates the man as naturally inhabiting the wider social sphere, and enjoying relative autonomy and independence in his role as the breadwinnerprovider. Doctor Who presents relations between the sexes which, for all its radical displacement from mundane experience, tends broadly to replicate these values. The Doctor has almost always been an embodiment of masculine independence and protectiveness. His companions (including some of the males, such as Adric and Fitz Kreiner) have correspondingly epitomized dependent, vulnerable femininity. This dichotomy takes its crudest form in one of the most notorious constants of the Doctor Who texts: the Doctor’s female companions have all too often been screaming damsels in distress; he, their champion and rescuer. Yet there are more pervasive, and subtler, expressions of the quasi-marital power imbalance. The narrative premise of Doctor Who gives authority to the Doctor as patriarch, and denies it to most of his companions. He may not always be able fully to control the TARDIS, but it responds primarily to him. Moreover, as the Doctor’s expansive and well-equipped home, the ship furnishes not only security but also an unlimited supply of clothing and, one presumes, food and other amenities for those who travel with him: it is an expression of his role as provider. These bounties can also be taken away by the Doctor at will, as attested by his abrupt dismissal and exclusion from the TARDIS of two of the characters to whom he was apparently closest, namely his granddaughter Susan and Sarah Jane Smith (‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’, 1964; and ‘The Hand of Fear’, 1976, respectively). Apart from these unspoken ‘economic’ matters, there are more rarefied distinctions between the Doctor and his companions. The Doctor tends to be knowledgeable, in terms either of broad expertise and wisdom which guide him to enlightenment in any given situation, or prior acquaintance with the worlds and peoples he meets. Either way, his demeanour is marked by savoir faire and entitlement. His companions, on the other hand, tend to be

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ignorant and timid, even if intellectually curious; and those who match the Doctor in acumen and attainment, such as Romana and the computer genius, Zoë Herriot, have to be schooled by him to temper their abstract learning with the fruits of real-world experience. Companions are also for the most part cast in the role of carer, attentive to the Doctor and tolerant of his vagaries. One or two have been allotted a level of patience which might well be considered dangerously excessive: Peri Brown and Charley Pollard, companions to the Sixth and the Eighth Doctors respectively, both chose to remain with him in spite of his abusive behaviour, in the case of Charley only verbal, but in that of Peri an actual physical attack during post-regeneration trauma. If the Doctor’s relationship with individual companions echoed the hegemonic model of marriage, then what of Doctor Who’s portrayal of that inextricably related phenomenon, the family? Again, commentators on social theory have noted that ideas of procreation and parental responsibility condition attitudes to marriage among newly wed or childless couples as an absent presence.157 By the same token, single parents and gay couples are excluded from definitions of ‘proper’ family because of their deviation from the heterosexual norm.158 The imprint of the idea of (nuclear) family is, in other words, endemic to Euro-American culture, and it would be surprising not to find it expressed, however summarily, in a ‘loyalty’ series such as Doctor Who. In fact, notions of family, whether biological or surrogate, structured the central relationships in Doctor Who for the first six years of its run on television and in concurrent comic strips. At the opening of the television series the Doctor was travelling with his actual granddaughter, and after her departure he acquired a succession of wards to fill her position: Vicki Pallister, Dodo Chaplet, Victoria Waterfield and Zoë Herriot. (In TV Comic strips of the same period, two pre-teen siblings, John and Gillian, travelled with the Doctor, initially being introduced as his grandchildren.) As long as the Doctor’s appearance was that of an old man, a mature male (Ian Chesterton, Steven Taylor), and initially also a mature female (Barbara Wright), bridged the age gap between him and his wards, serving as ‘parent’ figures. The younger-seeming Second Doctor needed no such intermediary, and his chief male companion (Jamie McCrimmon) therefore became another dependent youth.

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Although a shift of role for the Doctor’s main companion occurred at the beginning of the 1970s with ‘wards’ giving way to ‘assistants’, the Doctor’s status as father figure persisted for a while. At this point, the (Third) Doctor was affiliated with the military organization U.N.I.T., and the model for key interactions in the narrative was ostensibly professional rather than familial. Yet for most of his tenure with the organization, the Doctor’s assistant was another naive youngster, Jo Grant, whom he could take under his wing. A number of oblique comments help to cement her identity as a dependent figure. For example, while going incognito in one episode, she calls the Doctor ‘Uncle’ and encourages the assumption that she is his ward. Even more tellingly, when Jo becomes romantically involved with Professor Clifford Jones, a figure overtly presented as a younger counterpart to the Doctor (and therefore his ‘appropriate’ replacement within the heteronormative order), the Doctor observes quietly to himself: ‘So, the fledgling flies the coop.’ The familial model resurfaced more than once in the 1980s: the decade opened with the Fourth Doctor and his female companion, Romana, effectively playing ‘parents’ to the precocious but immature maths whizz Adric, and closed with the Seventh Doctor as protector-cum-mentor to the rambunctious Ace. (In the Doctor Who Weekly/Monthly comic strips of the very early 1980s, the Fourth Doctor also had another teenage charge, Sharon, who after a freak accident in the TARDIS quite literally and precipitately grew up aboard the ship.) When Peter Davison took over as an exceptionally boyish-looking incarnation of the Doctor in 1982, and the apparent age gap between the Time Lord and his companions thereby narrowed, he occupied the role of eldest brother rather than paterfamilias. A similar model was used nearly twenty years later for another youthful Doctor, the Eighth, in the BBC books: in ‘The Year of Intelligent Tigers’, for example, Anji Kapoor specifically reflects on the Doctor and Fitz as being like brothers whom she loves in spite of their foibles.159 Since Doctor Who has not been much concerned with family life – or for that matter with exploring relationships between the main characters, which are for the most part simply ‘given’ – the heteronormative framework has generally been obscured. Yet there is another layer of occlusion, for the familial model has ironically

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enough also been used to suppress any hint of the quasi-marital. In other words, whether cross-generational or intra-generational, the most important way in which overtones of family inflect the chief relationships in Doctor Who is in defusing overtones of sexuality. If the kinds of friendship which the Doctor enjoys with his companions suggest sibling or parent/child interactions, they are correspondingly difficult to construe as actually or potentially sexual. The idea of family, then, is a resource which is deployed indirectly if powerfully in most Doctor Who texts, its purpose to ensure that the asexuality of the principal character is sustainable. Yet, invocation of familial camaraderie is not the only means of maintaining the Doctor’s celibate mystique. Another approach is to address the issue of sexualization head on: to establish the Doctor as a subject of erotic attraction and then insist on his inability to reciprocate affection or desire. This device has come to the fore a good deal in the era of the ‘young’ Doctors, which is to say since the TVM, being manifest first in the Doctor’s interactions with Sam Jones in the books, then in his friendship with Charley Pollard in the audio serials, and finally in his partnerships with Rose and Martha Jones (and less straightforwardly Amy Pond) in the new television series. Under Russell T. Davies’s tutelage, unresolved sexual tension became a key part of Doctor Who’s narrative of ongoing deferral in the new series. One consequence of this move – deftly avoided in the novels and the audios, and subsequently upset by Steven Moffat – is that it creates a new form of heteronormative imbalance even as it overtly belies the Doctor’s sexuality. In this new, erotically charged situation, female companions are placed at an emotional as well as an intellectual disadvantage to the Doctor, ‘soft’ vessels of feeling to his ‘hard’, thoughtful agent of social improvement and change. In short, there is a danger that the relationship will be naturalized in terms of the stereotypical contrast between masculine seriousness and feminine sentimentality.

Ace In this and the section that follows, I should like to turn to Doctor Who texts whose producers have directly addressed the power

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dynamics between the Doctor and his companions. The process began, almost hyperbolically, with the last companion in the classic series and first in the NAs: Dorothy Gale McShane, or Ace, as she insisted on being called. It is probably something of an exaggeration to call Ace a ‘watershed’ figure in the Doctor Who texts. Her creation has led to no final dissolution of heteronormativity, no new era of unequivocally progressive gender relations. Yet the development of Ace as a character does mark a time of change which in one way or another has had longstanding influence, as I shall discuss here. Whatever has happened since, Ace is crucial as the first companion in Doctor Who to embody a deliberate shift away from the unreflective patriarchy which had previously been endemic to the classic series. Ace’s relationship with the Doctor was developed in such a way as to highlight the fact that he can be a ‘bad father’ as it were, something which had scarcely been acknowledged as a possibility since early in the classic series’ first season. In other words, Ace laid bare the ways in which the overtly liberatory aspirations of the narrative can be in conflict with the hero’s air of untroubled prerogative. What the final two seasons of the classic series consistently emphasized was one particular aspect of the Doctor’s patriarchal entitlement: the fact that he has superior knowledge which he only dispenses piecemeal – often leaving his companions at a dangerous disadvantage – ostensibly because he is playing a longer game than can be revealed to them (or, of course, to the viewer, given the demands of suspense narrative). With Ace, he became unprecedentedly manipulative, forcing her to confront painful aspects of her past and identity without telling her that he was doing so, in both ‘Ghostlight’ and ‘The Curse of Fenric’. In the latter he also feigned contempt for her in order to get the better of an enemy and, more devastatingly, admitted knowing that their initial meeting had not been the coincidence it seemed, but that she was, in a sense, a pawn in his ongoing battle with cosmic forces. Other facets of the Doctor’s assumption of authority might equally well have been thrown into relief, such as his recklessness in involving his friends in potentially dangerous situations, or his (and the text’s) oblivion of the social ramifications of whisking people away from their social setting, sometimes never to return. After Ace’s tenure, all these issues gradually became points of interest or

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tension within the texts. The Doctor’s unawareness of his friends’ domestic commitments and interests is touchingly explored in both the first season of the revived television series with Rose, and one of the Big Finish audios, ‘The Reaping’, with Peri. Similarly, the Doctor’s willingness to endanger, manipulate or sacrifice his companions (and others), first seriously raised in the final season of the classic series, was intermittently addressed throughout the NAs and EDAs. Finally, his seeming inability to comprehend his companions’ emotional vulnerability, so shocking in the case of Ace, became a recurrent theme of the Big Finish audios. Quite apart from raising questions about the Doctor’s behaviour and outlook, Ace also served to highlight a problem never addressed in earlier, more ‘innocent’ days of the classic series: why, in light of the enormities and horrors they routinely witness, travelling in the TARDIS, would anyone remain with the Doctor for choice? In Ace’s case a near-pathological restlessness and a propensity for violence make her a logical long-term companion for the Doctor in ways that few earlier characters were, even where there was the ostensible justification that they had lost family members and consequently accepted the Doctor as a protector. For example, Tegan Jovanka’s aunt was murdered at the very outset of her travels with the Doctor and in a sense because of him, but this did not deter Tegan from quite quickly deciding to join him for the long haul. She ostensibly left the TARDIS, following a massacre by the Daleks, because her travels had ceased to be ‘fun’, but as Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood have implied, it is hard to imagine how any potential for fun was not eclipsed by Tegan’s initial bereavement.160 By contrast, Ace’s readiness not only to overlook such horrors but also to shrug off the Doctor’s manipulative behaviour and selfishness is a disturbingly plausible function of her self-destructive tendencies. Since Ace, companions’ investment in travelling with the Doctor has again been a subject repeatedly investigated in the novels and new series, and to some extent in the audio dramas. This is not to say that reasons for taking up with the Doctor are ultimately very different from those offered in the classic series. One of three considerations tends still to justify characters’ initially becoming the Doctor’s travel companions: wanderlust and curiosity (as with Jamie, Zoë and Sarah Jane, so with Sam and Rose), loss of a parent or guardian (as with Vicki, Victoria and Nyssa, so with Fitz), and an

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unpremeditated entry into the TARDIS, generally compounded by the Doctor’s inability to return them home (as with Ian and Barbara, so with Anji). What has changed is that the narrative actively examines companions’ reasons for remaining TARDIS crewmembers, and scrutinizes their expectations of the Doctor. On an unprecedentedly positive note, the new series has more than once made it clear that travelling with the Doctor is essentially wonderful, and that the experience is punctuated with, rather than being defined by, the suffering and violence we so often see on screen. Another recent innovation is that, in the case of several companions in all three media (Sam, Charley, Rose and Martha), attraction to the Doctor has explicitly emerged as a motive for staying with him, one which can override other considerations, though proving to be fraught with its own problems. Conversely, with characters such as Donna Noble and Fitz Kreiner, it has been made disquietingly clear that chronic insecurity or aimlessness make a life of cosmic struggle and brinkmanship alongside the Doctor enticing in part because it is preferable to being a ‘nobody.’ The open, narratively meaningful acknowledgement of companions’ sexuality was also initiated with Ace, and represented another kind of move away from perfunctory, ritualized performance of human relations in the classic series. It had been relatively common from the outset for female companions in particular to be the subject of amorous attention from incidental characters, and a number, including the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan, parted from him as a result of becoming affianced to one of these characters. Yet there was very little sense that the companions themselves had any meaningful sexual agency. All this changed with Ace who was already becoming sexually assertive by the end of the original television series’ run. More crucially, her first serious affair became the basis for her initial – and in Doctor Who terms, epoch-making – break with the Doctor in the novels. In ‘Love and War’ he withheld what amounted to foreknowledge of her lover Jan’s death in order to ensure the defeat of an especially lethal enemy, to her understandable fury, and she left the TARDIS for some time thereafter. Having said all the above, Ace neither represented a radical divergence from stereotype, nor for that matter did she represent an unbreakable new standard. For all the ‘butchness’ of her persona, Ace was really no less classically attractive than her generally

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willowy or petite predecessors and successors. In other words, no attempt was made to break the screen convention of ‘to-be-lookedat-ness,’161 which has obtained for female characters in the Doctor Who television series from the arrival of the hip ‘dolly girl’, Polly Wright, in the mid-1960s until the present. As already noted, it was not until the advent of Evelyn Smythe, a late-middle-aged university lecturer, that we had a companion (of either sex) well past normatively nubile age. There has been only one since, in the form of Wilfred Mott, sometime fellow traveller Donna Noble’s grandfather who briefly accompanied the Tenth Doctor in his final screen adventure at the end of 2009. Ace is to date the only companion who went through a seismic transformation as a result of meeting the Doctor. True, there are some rather negative hints in MAs and short stories that certain companions have suffered mental breakdowns after parting from him, but Ace’s transformation is played out within the course of the NAs. Three years after the events of ‘Love and War’ she rejoins him as an emotionally blocked soldier from the Dalek Wars of the twenty-sixth century. Ace continues to nurse a simmering anger against the Doctor for several further novels, and takes still longer to shake off the casual attitude to violence which has clearly become an evermore important coping mechanism for her. While the Doctor’s propensity to harden his companions was mentioned pejoratively within the narrative as recently as in Davros’s searing critique in ‘Journey’s End’ (2008), in no single case has there been the clear, ongoing evidence of negative consequences for a companion’s emotional life and moral compass that there was with Ace. So much for characterizing the shift in tone and focus which seems to occur with Ace. It remains to consider what, if anything, can usefully be said about the ways in which the figure of Ace focused and distilled contemporary ideological concerns. In other words, why was there such a shift in 1989, rather than at any other (earlier) point in the text’s history? It also remains to determine how far the subsequent persistence of interest in the companions as characters rather than ciphers really points to the establishment of a new paradigm. Did the invention of Ace genuinely mark a point of no return in Doctor Who, or is the apparent consistency thereafter deceptive? As with other attempts to situate Doctor Who as a text of its time, it is difficult to explain in the portrayal of gender relations without

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recourse to wild generalizations. In hindsight, the mid-to-late 1980s does not seem to have been an especially propitious moment for the invention of strong or complicated female figures in fantasy series. In science-fiction feature films some slight inroads had been made into the engulfing patriarchy of the action movie, most notably with the woman heroes of the Alien and Terminator franchises (20th Century Fox, 1979–1997; 20th Century Fox & Fox TV, 1984–). Yet it was the better part of another decade before warrior women (such as the eponymous heroine of Xena: Warrior Princess), assertive female intellectuals (such as Dana Scully in The X-Files) and tough female leaders (such as Captain Janeway in Star Trek: Voyager) seriously dented the patriarchal norm in television. When Ace first appeared in 1987, Doctor Who had just gone through a period of unprecedented objectification of women. Girl companions in the early 1980s were given little to do other than stand around in everscantier outfits, with Peri Brown, incumbent companion from 1984 to 1986, being rendered not only ‘to-be-looked-at’ but also hapless and helpless to an extent which had not been seen in Doctor Who for over a decade. Ace arrived less than two years before the classic series was cancelled, and not long after an eighteen-month suspension which had already put Doctor Who’s future in question.162 It is tempting to think that her character, and her interactions with the Doctor, reflected programme makers’ anxieties about the purpose and tenability of Doctor Who. Yet it is equally possible to see the Ace/Doctor relationship as simply a new means of energizing the series’ patriarch. ‘Dark’, anti-heroic protagonists enjoyed considerable popularity in the 1980s in fantasy texts, from Snake Plissken in the John Carpenter movie Escape from New York (John Carpenter, 1981) to Kerr Avon in Doctor Who’s BBC stable-mate, Blake’s 7 (1978–1981) and the refashioned Batman of Frank Miller’s 1986 graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns and Tim Burton’s 1989 blockbuster Batman. At the crudest level, the much put-upon Ace was a device for making the Doctor enigmatic and intriguing again. Whatever the details, there is no doubt that the stakes were high in the creation of Ace, just because the television series’ fate was so precarious. Yet this does not apply to the ongoing development of her story in the NAs. Virgin’s line was devised to appeal to established fans with disposable incomes, not to a broad coalition

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audience of fans and casual viewers. It is not surprising that more adult themes and motifs quickly surfaced and remained a feature of the NAs, nor that the editors were able to take such liberties with the existing ethos of the Who narrative. After all, as I have noted more than once in preceding chapters, producers and consumers at this point belonged to heavily overlapping demographics. The majority of NA authors were long-term fans in their twenties or early thirties, who had come of age recently enough to make Ace’s passage to adulthood a potentially intriguing theme. Whether popular with all readers or not, there was limited risk involved in developing Ace in provocative ways (or, for that matter, introducing the hard-drinking Benny Summerfield as a new companion) because the books were capitalizing on an essentially secure market at a time when there was virtually no other licensed new Doctor Who to consume. By extension, the generally more nuanced, adult treatment of both new and returning companions in the BBC novels and Big Finish productions of the late 1990s and early 2000s seems clearly to be a function of the texts’ being directed towards established, adult (indeed increasingly middle-aged) and generally liberal or even leftist fans. In one way, the situation was clearly very different again when the revived television series placed Rose Tyler and her family at the forefront of the narrative. The series was no longer being pitched to a select, established readership but to television audiences who were used to a new breed of hybridized fantasy text which had emerged in the period when Doctor Who was out of production. Buffy, the Vampire Slayer is the oft-touted benchmark for the new series in journalistic criticism, but Buffy is only one among a number of fantasy television series, including The X-Files, Babylon 5 (CFMT, 1994–1998) and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which featured ongoing personal story arcs or soap-opera-like ensemble narratives. Having said that, Davies’s vision for Rose was surely at least in part informed by the ethos of NAs. Quite apart from the fact Davies had penned one of the novels himself,163 as show-runner he commissioned scripts from several other NAs authors, even asking Paul Cornell to adapt directly one of his novels, ‘Human Nature.’ For present purposes, the extent to which treatment of companions represents an intertextual link between the revived Doctor Who and non-television forms is of peripheral interest. In the next section

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I concentrate on texts produced mostly by fans for fans, which is to say the novels and audios. Here, experiment was relatively unencumbered, in the case of the books even by the practicalities of casting. As a consequence of this, and the fact that a relatively small group of writers sustained much of the output, certain internal patterns are clearly discernible. One of these is the fascination with revisiting or developing established companions, a trend which resonated with the essentially deconstructive concerns of the NAs.

A New Angle: Sarah Jane, Sex and Death A number of companions from the classic series have been reintroduced into more recent texts in light of what might be called the ‘Ace effect’. In other words, stories have addressed issues about the characters’ emotional lives and relationships with the Doctor, issues which were studiedly overlooked or suppressed in the classic series. Since all companions before Ace embody the original text’s unquestioning endorsement of patriarchy, the mere act of probing their relationships with the Doctor is productively disconcerting. Renewed engagement with a companion from the classic series has inevitably been most powerful when it placed the familiar figure in altered circumstances. There have been a number of reunions between the Doctor and old friends in recent texts. With the exception of meetings with the comfortably conservative Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, they almost always entail some kind of reassessment of the Doctor’s (and more broadly Doctor Who’s) values. The potency of this device inevitably varied according to the established significance of the companion in question, and in no case were the stakes higher than with Sarah Jane Smith, arguably the best loved of all the female protagonists in the classic series. Since 1999 Sarah has featured in an array of encounters with the Seventh, Eighth and Tenth Doctors, as well as appearing in both audio and television spin-offs. It is on three of these, ‘Interference’, ‘School Reunion’ and above all ‘Bullet Time’ that I principally focus in this section. Sarah Jane Smith was conceived as a dauntless investigative journalist and the first overtly feminist character in the classic series, a no-nonsense foil to the paternalistic Third Doctor. Yet it was not long before she had become the quintessentially compliant girl

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companion in Doctor Who. In her travels with the Fourth Doctor, which accounted for more than two-thirds of her on-screen adventures, she was very much a nurturing figure who managed her increasingly moody and volatile travelling companion with good cheer and forbearance.164 By contrast, her returning cameos have tended to reinstate her as a tough professional (and in her own spin-off series of Big Finish audio plays she exhibits a ruthlessness which overrides conventional femininity, ironically making her more like the Doctor). Even so, it is her status as the exemplary classicseries companion, feminine but also essentially sexless, which has provided the basis for her critical deployment in recent Doctor Who texts. Given that the Fourth Doctor and Sarah approached their adventures, as Dale Smith has delightfully expressed it, like ‘two children exploring a particularly interesting sandbox’, Sarah might seem the least likely female character in the series to be sexualized.165 As a result, pointed allusions to her sexuality in two of her recent appearances have served both to trouble longstanding assumptions and draw attention to changes in the Doctor Who ethos. In the new series episode, ‘School Reunion’ (2006), the youthful-looking Tenth Doctor meets a Sarah Jane who, by her own admission, has ‘got old.’ She then confesses that she has remained single in effect because she is still in love with him, and further implies that during the years since he took her home she has been waiting for him to return for her. Part of the purpose of these rather disturbing disclosures is to point up the plight of the very young Rose Tyler, clearly enamoured of the Doctor and expecting to travel with him indefinitely. Rose is shocked by the account of his abandonment of Sarah whom he has never mentioned to her and by the realization that she herself is the latest in a long line of companions. The critique of the Doctor’s ‘serial monogamy’ would surely not have been so potent with any companion but Sarah (though one wonders whether it was really worth compromising her agency and self-possession in order to make this particular point). The novel ‘Interference’ offers a subtler portrayal of a mature Sarah who is much more self-sufficient. Lawrence Miles’s treatment of the character is not really a rebuttal of the classic series’ values. It merely serves to stress, without overt judgment, the distance that Doctor Who texts had travelled into the realms of sexuality since

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the end of the 1980s. For one thing, it is clear that Sarah has a boyfriend, Paul Morley. In the research notes and interior ruminations which form two of the many different narrative strands in ‘Interference’, Sarah periodically reflects on Paul, even hinting that in her relationship with him she is sexually assertive and adventurous.166 This frank acknowledgement of Sarah as a sexual being represents a more complete volte-face from the ‘child in the sandpit’ image than that accomplished in ‘School Reunion.’ If this is discomfiting for some readers, there is nice symmetry in the fact that Sarah suffers comparable discomfiture over the Doctor’s unprecedented degree of physicality, another controversial new departure of the 1990s, in this case initiated in the TVM. We are privy to her mixture of curiosity and unease when, at the moment of parting finally from his young companion Sam Jones, he unselfconsciously engages in a long embrace with the girl: ‘This Doctor, thought Sarah, was so much more tactile than either of hers had been.’167 David McIntee also played with the problematic notion of Sarah’s sexuality in ‘Bullet Time’ (2001), but in a quite different fashion, and as part of a wide-ranging, trenchant but ultimately also non-judgmental exploration of Doctor Who’s moral compass, which calls for an unusually high degree of imaginative engagement from the reader. The Doctor whom Sarah encounters in ‘Bullet Time’ is the ultra-manipulative Seventh, playing arbiter between humans and aliens, Chinese and British police, competing factions within U.N.I.T. and even gangsters in volatile pre-transfer Hong Kong. Sarah is the central character in the book, but very much a pawn in the Doctor’s long game, and again it is her status as the archetypal devoted companion which makes his manoeuvring and seeming betrayal of her so distressing. Having embroiled Sarah in his affairs, piquing investigative instincts which get her into trouble with his alien allies, the Doctor decides to discredit her as a journalist in order to convince the aliens that she is not a threat worthy of elimination. The eventual disclosure that he has involved Sarah in his doings simply because he believes she will always ‘do the right thing’ underscores her standing as a figure of trust for Doctor Who audiences and readers. Yet, horrifically enough, doing the right thing turns out to entail her (apparently) committing suicide rather than being used as a hostage in order to deflect the Doctor from his course.

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In fact, the only character who clearly articulates his belief in Sarah’s supposed death is an incidental figure, American special agent Tom Ryder. Ryder is established throughout the novel as a wholly unreliable, if not actually deluded, narrator: he envisages himself as a Bond-like superhero and stud, variously saving Sarah’s life and seducing her in passages which seem set up to be read as patently bogus. Sarah’s falling into Ryder’s arms on short acquaintance must surely strike even the least prudish and conservative fans of the character as improbable.168 McIntee therefore leaves the issue of her death ambiguous. Yet the device is not merely sensationalizing: it forces reflection on the relationship between interpersonal and impersonal forms of social responsibility. If Sarah survives it is because she is astute, not because of her boundless confidence in the Doctor’s cause, nor conversely because his stage-management of events extends to preventing her suicide once he has put her in the line of fire. One other returning cameo by a companion is worth noting here. The Fifth Doctor’s longest serving companion on television, Tegan Jovanka, returned as a middle-aged woman in a Big Finish audio serial which signalled a further shift towards the autonomy of the companion. In ‘The Gathering’ the Doctor (again played by Peter Davison) arrives in Brisbane 2006, following up a lead in one of his investigations, only to run into Tegan. She is celebrating her forty-sixth birthday over two decades after she left the TARDIS crew. Produced in the same year as ‘School Reunion,’ this two-part audio could not provide a more studied contrast of a re-encounter between the Doctor and one of his companions. In every key respect, ‘The Gathering’ represents Tegan as emotionally unencumbered by her experiences with the Doctor, a far cry from the hamstrung Sarah of ‘School Reunion.’ Much to the Doctor’s embarrassment, Tegan’s new boyfriend blurts out his jealous impression that Tegan has been carrying a torch for the Time Lord. Yet, when the Doctor sheepishly asks her about this, Tegan laughs at the idea, making it clear that her affection for him, though strong, was wholly platonic and, crucially, that their friendship and shared travels have not overshadowed her subsequent life. Moreover, she angrily rounds on the Doctor when he implies that she should have made more of herself than taking over her father’s animal-feed company. She makes it quite clear that a ‘normal’ life is not a poor substitute for cosmic

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derring-do. Although it transpires that Tegan has a brain tumour of alien origin, which developed as a result of her travels with the Doctor, she dismisses his offer to take her to a future world where it could be cured. Instead, she chooses to live out whatever life she has left without the benefit of deus ex machina. In short, ‘The Gathering’ presents a former companion who in no way pines for or feels unfulfilled after her sojourn in the TARDIS. Tegan is quite explicit in saying that she relishes her day-to-day routine all the more because of its contrast with the wonders and horrors she saw while travelling. She serves as an aptly blunt spokesperson for female characters whose lives are not defined, either for better or for worse, solely by their experiences with the Doctor. Tegan’s cameo reappearance echoes a trend in the portrayal of current companions in both audio dramas and novels between the McGann television movie in 1996 and the series’ revival in 2005. This trend is best characterized in terms of these characters’ increasing critical distance from the Doctor. Importantly, this distance is no longer expressed in terms of antagonism or mistrust, as it had been in the rollercoaster relationships between Ace, Benny and the Doctor in the New Adventures. Rather, characters such as Evelyn Smythe and Anji Kapoor have exhibited both scepticism and affection for the Doctor, and exhibited also a self-determination which goes well beyond ignoring his ‘words of wisdom’ or defying him.

In the Bosom of the Family: Rose, Martha and Donna The unfulfilled young woman, attracted to the life the Doctor offers as an escape or distraction from her own, returned to dominate the new series under Russell T. Davies. Indeed, though frequently lauded as one of the revival’s triumphs, the treatment of female protagonists was one of its most worryingly retrogressive aspects until the advent of Steven Moffat as show-runner. This applied particularly to the Doctor’s fellow travellers (including, to some extent, the returning Sarah Jane Smith), but also to incidental female characters in many episodes. And interestingly, the Doctor’s queer male companion, the pansexual Captain Jack Harkness, was also to an extent obliged to play a submissive, involuntarily ‘feminized’ role.

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While this gender inequality between the Doctor and his fellow travellers was no greater than in the classic series, it was certainly more prominent, for companions’ emotional lives were the focus of narrative attention in a way that had never been true for their predecessors. The gender asymmetries in Davies’s Doctor Who took two main forms. First, and more importantly, female protagonists were either denied agency or else their defining moments of autonomy were acts of self-sacrifice or obedience to institutional expectation.169 Second, conventionally nubile female characters were frequently in the Doctor’s erotic thrall; they were defined, that is to say, primarily in terms of his sexual desirability and their consequent emotional dependency on or yearning for the ‘hero.’ In short, patriarchal values, which had frequently been thrown into question in the novels and the audio dramas, were very thoroughly recuperated in the new series. As I shall argue, Davies’s season-finale episodes, especially those in which companions’ incumbencies ended, were key moments for the upholding of compulsory heterosexuality. The figure of Rose was in many ways central to the discourse of friendship and love between the Doctor and his companions in the seasons made under Davies’s direction. Rose established the standard against which comparable characters – Martha Jones, Donna Noble and Sarah Jane – were explicitly measured. In particular, Martha’s and Donna’s interactions with the Doctor were cast in contradistinction to Rose’s, and her shadow fell over the third and fourth seasons even before her long-hinted return in the latter. A comparison of Rose’s debut in 2005 with her return in the 2008 series starkly reveals the extent to which the series lapsed into unreconstructed patriarchy over the course of its first four seasons. The opening episode of the revived Doctor Who was simply entitled ‘Rose’. For those familiar with Doctor Who, this suggested a deliberate differentiation of tenor and tone from the classic series, story titles for which invariably related to the threat which the Doctor and his companions faced. To a great extent the implied emphasis on character rather than action, and more specifically the emphasis on a central female character, was borne out both in ‘Rose’ and later episodes of the revival’s first season. ‘Rose’ portrays a girl whose vividness and intellectual curiosity are circumscribed by her working- class milieu. She proves able to negotiate the violent events

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catalyzed by the Doctor’s presence whilst managing the vagaries of her demanding, widowed mother, Jackie, and self-absorbed boyfriend, Mickey Smith. It is her capacity for empathy and quick thinking which enable her to adjust to the Doctor’s bizarre life. Indeed, the story shows her to be more emotionally mature and astute than Jackie and Mickey and for that matter also the erratic and abrasive Doctor. The kind of dense attention to a companion’s family and social life offered in ‘Rose’ was not wholly unprecedented in the texts of Doctor Who, but it was unusual. Still more so was the fact that Jackie and Mickey were recurrent presences throughout the first season. Rose’s several return visits to her family constituted a rite of passage. In the course of three further home-based episodes, Rose became more and more independent of her mother and Mickey, convincing them to accept her new, itinerant mode of life. Over the same span of episodes Rose was also instrumental in helping the emotionally damaged and aloof Doctor towards a more humane mode of behaviour, even to some extent socializing him into her family circle. In this first season Rose’s personal concerns and growth were more central to the drama than was ever true for companions in the classic series. Yet, though spirited and increasingly self-assured, Rose in herself was hardly a figure who troubled gender norms. On the contrary, she exhibited all the traits of the well-socialized woman in heteronormative society: she was caregiver, peacemaker and voice of compassion and tenderness.170 And while Rose learned to exert her own autonomy and authority, this often ran counter to the Doctor’s paternalism which inevitably proved to be based on ‘right’ judgement. The first season finale, ‘The Parting of the Ways’, represents the acme of this tendency, with Rose first bucking the Doctor’s authority and then finally proving dependent on him. Realizing that he must sacrifice himself in order to defeat the Daleks, the Doctor tricks Rose into the TARDIS, having already programmed it to take her home and shut down when it arrives. Yet, Rose is unable to settle back into her old life. She persuades Jackie and Mickey to help jumpstart the time machine, and returns to save the Doctor. He repays the compliment by purging her of the dangerous quasi-magical power unleashed on her from the heart of the TARDIS.

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At one level, Rose’s rescue of the Doctor in ‘The Parting of the Ways’ affirmed her status as joint hero, a capable and determined figure who is able to make choices for herself and to inspire even her co-dependent mother to support those choices. Yet at the same time the episode set a precedent for the Doctor’s supposedly benign and wise manipulation of his companions’ fate, a motif which was to be recapitulated more forcefully in subsequent series. With each recapitulation, the heteronormative resolution became more heavy-handed. Rose’s ostensible swansong in the finale of Season Two, ‘Doomsday’ (2006), directly repeats motifs from ‘The Parting of the Ways.’ Here again the Doctor tricks Rose at a moment of danger into returning to the ‘safety’ of her family circle, this time in an alternate reality from which there is supposedly no return. The Doctor’s actions are even more problematic on this occasion, since Rose makes it quite clear that she wishes to remain with him, even if it means losing contact forever with her mother. Rose again finds her way back to the Doctor, but forces beyond their control pull her once more in the alternate world, this time with the gateway between realities seemingly sealed for good. Within the narrative, Rose’s ultimate restoration into her familial setting is portrayed as the result of bad luck, not the Doctor’s interference. Yet in merely denying Rose her choice, Davies’s script tacitly legitimates the Doctor’s initial decision to send her back to her family, and such a conclusion seems doubly justified by Davies’s bizarre coda to the Rose saga in ‘Journey’s End’, the finale of the fourth season in 2008. Nor is Rose alone in being ‘managed’ by the Doctor in this particular episode: the fate of another companion, Donna Noble, amplifies the pattern of manipulation established with Rose. In ‘Journey’s End’ the Doctor’s assertion of patriarchal authority over Rose is much more direct and unchallenged than before. Not only does he yet again blithely disregard her wishes but also endorses and indeed enforces her role as caregiver. After yet another struggle with the Daleks, who have opened the barriers between different realities, the Doctor returns Rose to her alternate world in derogation of her strenuous efforts to rejoin him. He also leaves in her charge a half-human clone of himself, who was accidentally created during the battle with the Daleks and later responsible for

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destroying their fleet. Noting that the clone was ‘born in battle, full of blood and anger and revenge’, the ‘real’ Doctor charges Rose to ‘ma[k]e him better.’ This bare-faced imposition is supposedly sweetened by the twin facts that the clone Doctor will age like a normal human, establishing him as a suitable sexual partner for Rose, and that this version of the Doctor verbally and physically demonstrates his affection for Rose, which the ‘real’ Doctor remains unable or unwilling to do. If this were an isolated narrative conceit, its implications would be unsettling enough, but in fact an exaggerated analogue is provided by the case of Donna Noble, the Doctor’s main companion in the fourth season. Donna is established in her first appearance as emphatically unremarkable, ‘just’ a temp from Chiswick, despised even by her mother for her lack of ambition. Whereas Rose’s escape from her hum-drum life was based on an impulsive decision to join the Doctor, we find in ‘Partners in Crime’ (2008) that Donna has been obsessively searching him out for over a year after their first, chance encounter. In the course of the fourth season, there are increasingly broad hints that Donna is in fact not so commonplace, but on the contrary, at some cosmic level, important. In ‘Journey’s End’ these hints are borne out, as she is in effect the one to save the universe from the Daleks. The cost is that she is relegated permanently to her unsatisfying earthbound life. Donna’s fall comes rapidly on the heels of her apotheosis; both are entirely contingent on the Doctor. She becomes ‘special’ after a freak occurrence in which she gains the Doctor’s knowledge and memories: it is his intelligence, tempered with a human capacity for lateral thinking, apparently lacking in Time Lords, which allows her to defeat the Daleks. Yet Donna is not permitted to keep her newfound wisdom. The infusion of the Doctor’s knowledge and memories is too much for her own brain to bear and starts to affect her wellbeing. The Doctor ‘saves’ Donna by wiping out the thoughts and knowledge she has absorbed, together with all recollections of him, in spite of her importuning, in the course of which she says explicitly that she cannot bear to lose the gifts she has gained. Thereafter, in a now-predictable manoeuvre, he returns her to her mother and grandfather. This scene of mental rapine is tacitly justified in terms of the threat to Donna’s life. There is not the slightest acknowledgement

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that Donna should be able to control her own fate and her own body, a fact which places this scene in the strongest possible contrast with the narrative treatment of Tegan in ‘The Gathering.’ Tegan’s brain tumour is no less a product of unearthly adventures with the Doctor, and no less susceptible of correction by his intervention; yet she chooses to live out her life on her own terms, and the Doctor does not attempt to overrule her. In Donna’s case, his unchecked interference is validated by her family’s approval. Her doting grandfather, Wilfred Mott, the family patriarch, even becomes the surrogate for her memories, promising to look up each night at the sky ‘on her behalf’ and think of the Doctor. Donna’s loss is also ultimately eclipsed by the Doctor’s loneliness, as he is shown making his forlorn departure in the TARDIS. Donna’s relegation emphasized one of the de facto messages of the new Doctor Who under Russell T. Davies’s guidance. Excitement, freedom, power and knowledge are accessible to women only via masculine patronage, in this case offered by the Doctor. When he thinks it best to remove this freedom, they have no choice but to accept the role he assigns them, usually within the bosom of the nuclear family. The seeming exception to this rule was Martha Jones, the Doctor’s fellow traveller throughout the third season, who left him of her own volition, ostensibly to complete her medical training. Yet Martha’s case was deceptive. Throughout her incumbency she epitomized the other standard form of subordination to the Doctor: she was subject to a seemingly irresistible attraction to him. This ultimately defined her, often belying other clearly articulated personality traits. This motif of female powerlessness in face of the Doctor’s charisma was certainly not new with Martha. In many ways it found its most powerful expressions in the new series in Rose and Sarah Jane, whose love for the Doctor was repeatedly telegraphed to the audience both in dialogue and in reaction shots. Moreover, as noted in the previous chapter, a number of incidental female characters showed a strong attraction to the Doctor, generally matched by an unquestioning, self-sacrificial trust. This tendency reached its apogee with the character of Astrid Peth in ‘Voyage of the Damned’ (2007); Astrid, played by ‘sex symbol’ Kylie Minogue, was expressly constructed as a potential companion, only to die saving the Doctor and the day. Even so, Martha’s case is clearly a special one, because

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her unreciprocated crush was the basis for an ongoing, unresolved sexual tension, or at least, for a motif of deferred resolution. In an example of Doctor Who characterization at its least interesting, Martha’s unrequited love for the Doctor was articulated in almost every episode of the 2007 season without ever being developed. Closure of a kind was achieved only in the season finale, when Martha announced her intention to part from him. Although she first explained this to the Doctor in terms of her commitment to her profession and her family, her ultimate justification was that she recognized the need to move beyond her crush. At least this strength of feeling does make some kind of narrative sense of Martha’s repeated willingness to be discomfited by the Doctor in earlier episodes. In ‘Human Nature’ and ‘The Family of Blood’ she is doubly humiliated: first, obliged to take on the role of a housemaid in order to look after him while he is in a state of temporary, self-induced amnesia, and then forced to endure his growing passion for someone else. In the following episode, ‘Blink’, it transpires that she is working in a shop in order to support him financially while the two of them are temporarily trapped in the 1960s. Consistent it may be, but Martha’s enthrallment sits uneasily with the quick-witted, intellectually curious, independent persona carefully established in her debut, ‘Smith and Jones.’ While the Doctor does not overtly deprive Martha of her agency, the narrative heavily circumscribes her capacity to act ‘in character.’ The circumstances of Martha’s departure, though ostensibly attesting her feistiness and self-reliance, actually also underscore her subordination to the Doctor. While she in effect saves the world from the Master in ‘Last of the Time Lords’, she is the instrument of the Doctor’s messianic plan. In the course of a year’s proselytizing trek over the globe, Martha inspires others with her own devotion to him. It is the combined telepathic energy of millions which, at an agreed hour set by the Doctor, transfigures him into a kind of demigod so that he can overcome the Master. For all that Martha’s cameos in Doctor Who after ‘Last of the Time Lords’ show her to have fulfilled her professional ambitions, the narrative does not exempt her from taking on caregiving responsibility for family. The first few minutes of her debut episode establish her as mediator, the voice of calm and common sense among volatile siblings and battling parents. There is an inevitability,

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therefore, in her ‘settling down’ to act as the support to her emotionally scarred family after they have spent a year being tormented by the Master in ‘Last of the Time Lords’, a role that she returns home to play for her mother a year later in ‘Journey’s End.’ And with classic heteronormative symmetry this obligation to existing family is complemented by a productive courtship with a man. When she returns for a cameo in ‘The Sontaran Stratagem’, she is sporting an engagement ring, and in ‘The End of Time’ it transpires, with improbable tidiness, that she has married Rose Tyler’s ex-boyfriend, Mickey Smith. For both Martha and Rose, time spent aboard the TARDIS in effect serves as a transition into responsible adult life, their tutelage by the Doctor functioning as the prelude to an ‘appropriate’ relationship with a socialized or needy male. This pattern was temporarily broken with Donna (though even she finally wed during the denouement of ‘The End of Time’, her marriage bankrolled through the Doctor’s secret gift of a winning lottery ticket). Yet Donna’s enforced oblivion in ‘Journey’s End’ implies the bleakest of all possibilities: that magical travels with the Doctor are at a personal level finally meaningless, a dream forgotten on waking.

Mad, Impossible Amy Pond With the arrival of the Eleventh Doctor in 2010 came a new companion, Amy Pond, whose story arc in the fifth season represents a studied subversion of patterns established with Rose and Martha. In fact, Amy is in many ways a palimpsest of past companions both in the new series and in the licensed novels: her portrayal recalls the more progressive image of female agency and sexuality developed first with Ace while preserving key ‘brand’ attributes by seeming to adhere to the immediate precedents of Rose and Martha. Amy also proves to be central to the narrative of the fifth season in ways quite different from any of her new-series predecessors: she is ultimately not just the subject of the story but is clearly marked as a figure for the imaginative potential of Doctor Who itself. Amy’s debut, ‘The Eleventh Hour’, presents her as a broadly Rose-like figure in that she elects to travel with the Doctor partly out of curiosity and wanderlust and partly because of equivocal feelings

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about her day-to-day life. Like Rose she leaves behind a slightly ‘wet’-seeming boyfriend, Rory Williams. (In fact, she ‘elopes’ with the Doctor on the eve of Rory’s and her wedding, and in due course admits to having reservations about this impending commitment.) Later in the season, in ‘Flesh and Blood’, Amy makes a declaration of attraction to the Doctor, which – as with Rose and Martha – he repulses. And in the finale, ‘The Big Bang’, Amy not only finally weds Rory but is also magically reunited with her long-lost family, echoing scenes of domestic reconstruction in ‘Doomsday’ and ‘The End of Time.’ Yet strong tonal contrasts and narrative twists belie these apparent similarities. Amy is far less conventionally ‘romantic’ than Rose and Martha. She is also both confident and frankly unsentimental about sex, and more specifically about her sexual attraction to the Doctor, in a way that her predecessors were not. Finally, her family is not a given but on the contrary an absent presence until ‘The Big Bang’, and here her parents’ return is a direct function of Amy’s agency, not the removal of that agency. Amy’s sexuality is in many ways a defining element in her persona simply because it is overt and unapologetic – indeed, controversially so. The disclosure in ‘The Eleventh Hour’ that Amy works as a kissogram drew some fire from the media, as did the prevalence of micro-miniskirts in her wardrobe and the fact that the script for ‘Flesh and Stone’ saw her making a pass at the Doctor in her own bedroom on the night before her wedding.171 Negative or sensationalizing critiques in the press have generally been justified in terms of moralizing concerns about the supposed unsuitability of Amy’s behaviour in a show aimed at children.172 It seems to me that such responses actually point to unacknowledged, heteronormative anxieties about portrayals of women which depart from an image of ‘nice’ subordinate femininity.173 It is worth noting in this regard that while Captain Jack Harkness’s pansexuality has been adduced to reactionary critiques of Davies’s so-called ‘gay agenda’, Jack’s sexual assertiveness per se was not subject to negative scrutiny in the same way as Amy’s.174 If we compare the bedroom scene in ‘Flesh and Stone’ with prior instances of a companion’s declaring attraction to or love for the Doctor, a striking shift in the balance of sexual power is evident. For one thing, the humour of the scene deflates rather than affirms the Doctor’s ‘cool’ (though, as noted in the previous

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chapter, this deflation was already thoroughly developed in Matt Smith’s portrayal). His response to Amy’s brazenly trying to kiss him and unbutton his shirt is a flustered variant on the disclaimer he had made to Rose in ‘School Reunion’: ‘I don’t get older, I just change; you get older, I don’t. And this can’t ever work.’ Amy’s pawky response is, ‘Oh, you are sweet, Doctor, but I really wasn’t suggesting anything quite so ... long term.’ This immediately undercuts any inference that Amy may have shifted her primary affections from Rory. Beyond the Doctor’s discomfiture, then, the bedroom scene is significant in that Amy’s implied proposal of a one-night stand foregrounds her desires rather than the object of those desires. Her matter-of-fact attitude to sex, and her dissociation of sexual pleasure from any romantically dyadic notion of love, could not offer a more startling inversion of Rose’s and Martha’s maudlin pining for the Doctor. The playful twist on the declaration-of-love conceit in ‘Flesh and Stone’ is broadly comic, whereas much of the ludic engagement with Amy’s gender identity and agency elsewhere in the fifth season is more lyrical in tone. The climax of the season finale epitomizes this, and also accords Amy an unprecedented level of influence for a female companion. In diegetic terms it turns out that she alone has the ability to rescue Rory, her parents and even the Doctor quite literally from oblivion. In meta-textual terms, she becomes a figure for belief and delight in the beauties of the vast narrative about a ‘daft old man who stole a magic box and ran away.’175 A recurrent motif in the fifth season is forgetting and remembrance. Amy is presented early on as an advocate for the affective – and effective – power of both. In ‘Victory of the Daleks’ she enables an android to defuse an inbuilt bomb in his chest by helping him believe in his constructed humanity, and this entails encouraging him to remember a perhaps-invented woman called Dorabella on whom he recollects having a crush. Conversely, Amy chooses to forget unpalatable truths in ‘The Beast Below’, and her ‘misbehaviour’ with the Doctor in the bedroom scene itself represents a momentary forgetfulness of Rory. She later forgets her fiancé in a more profound and seemingly final way. He falls through a crack ‘in the skin of the world’ which erases him from history and by extension from all memory. In ‘The Big Bang’ it transpires that Amy’s long-lost parents vanished through a similar crack in Amy’s bedroom wall, and

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even the Doctor passes through that same crack before it finally closes, as part of the price he pays for helping to preserve all history from destruction. In ‘The Big Bang’ Amy’s remembrance becomes a creative act, for she proves able quite literally to re-call her lost parents and fiancé, to call them back by effort of memory from the nullity beyond the cracks in the universe. Thus the family scenes and the wedding in ‘The Big Bang’ are not a matter of Amy’s restoration to her parents, but rather Amy’s restoration of her parents and Rory from immemorial nothingness. Crucially, Amy also recalls her ‘imaginary friend’, summoning the Doctor back from oblivion and thereby perpetuating his fairy-tale narrative from within the narrative itself. In enlivening contrast to the fate of Donna, the conclusion of Amy’s fifth-season arc identifies her as a wonderfully affirmative figure, an embodied paean to the productive role of memory and imagination, and, in a sense, an ‘author’ of Doctor Who.

Unnameable Love: Fitz At the end of ‘The Big Bang’ the Doctor is once again travelling with a young woman and a young man as he did so often in the classic series. What is new in this case is that Amy and Rory are married (actually as opposed to figuratively). The fact that the married couple embark on more fantastic adventures rather than settling down to ‘real life’ is, in its own small way, a disruption of the heteronormative patterns in Doctor Who which I outlined earlier in this chapter. At the time of writing it remains to be seen how this curious ménage à TARDIS will function. Suggestively, at the end of ‘The Big Bang’ the Doctor persuades Rory to accept that he is now ‘Mr. Pond’ just as he previously endorsed Amy’s claim that the Doctor and Rory were ‘her boys.’ Even so, Doctor Who remains fundamentally androcentric, and a despairing view might be that its gender bias is insoluble unless the oft-rumoured casting of a woman as the Doctor comes to pass. Having said that, heteronormativity has been troubled and upset in recent Doctor Who texts through the portrayal of more than one male companion. Traditionally feminine virtues of unswerving faith, caring and nurturing take on new significance when they are ascribed

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to a male character, especially when he is actively self- conscious about his received attitude to gender roles and, if not actually fluid in his sexuality, susceptible to experiencing queer moments. This is the case with Fitz Kreiner, the Doctor’s most enduring companion in the EDAs, whose strong but ultimately category-defying love for the Time Lord forms my main subject in this last section of the chapter. Fitz is neither the first nor the most obvious example of a queer companion in Doctor Who texts. The earliest explicitly gay character was Izzy Sinclair. She appeared in the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip in the late 1990s at a time when not only the erotic life of companions but also the establishment of the (Eighth) Doctor as an object of attraction had been thoroughly incorporated into Doctor Who texts. An androgynous late teen, Izzy superficially mirrors Sam Jones, her opposite number in the EDAs. Yet unlike Sam, Izzy articulates her sexuality – which is to say comes out as a lesbian – not through a crush on the Doctor but through her interactions with the alien Destrii. After a kind of mind-meld with Destrii in which she sees herself from without, Izzy is able to confront her repression of her lesbianism, and thus resolve other longstanding problems such as her ambivalence towards her adoptive parents. In Izzy’s case, acknowledgement of sexuality is clearly seen as liberatory, and also in a sense establishes her travels with the Doctor as a rite of passage, for with this self-acceptance she realizes that she is ready to return home. The explicit avowal of Izzy’s sexuality was a late move, even though the strips’ writers say that they envisaged her as gay from the first.176 It was also reticently conveyed, with a single-frame image of a female-female kiss being coupled with discreetly abstract comments about self-acceptance. By contrast, the Doctor Who texts’ most recent and most flamboyant queer character, Captain Jack Harkness, casually disclosed the fact of his attraction to both sexes within the first minute of his debut scene. Jack hails from a future era in which sexuality is not circumscribed by gender, or even by species, and in which the acknowledgment of attraction is not constrained by convention. As such, he is arguably the embodiment of an inclusive, non-judgmental ideal, in which heteronormative proscriptions no longer apply and sexuality itself is no longer a topic for prudery or prurience.

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As noted in the previous chapter, Jack was the first male character to share a kiss with the Doctor on screen, which is of no small importance given the amount of attention which understandably surrounds such precedents in GLBT media communities. However, to focus only on the kiss is to simplify the ways in which Jack troubled sexual norms in the series. Importantly, his nonchalant sexuality encompassed both the Doctor and his companion Rose, as well as a host of other characters, as objects of attraction. Removing focus from Rose’s adoration of the Doctor, and breaking the exclusive sexual tension between them, Jack disrupted the heteronormative binary (which perhaps accounts for his being rapidly dropped as a regular character). Yet Jack’s intermittent role as queer companion in Doctor Who is not quite as affirmative as it might seem. For one thing he represents the new series’ pattern of privileging sexually charged relationships over other kinds of friendship and intimacy, and underscoring that these relationships are proper to youth (or, in his and the Doctor’s case, the appearance of youth, since both are near-immortal). That all connections between the Doctor and his companion must be at least potentially sexual is indirectly confirmed in the repellent ageism of ‘Voyage of the Damned’ (2007), in which the Doctor is all too ready to take the nubile and clearly smitten Astrid Peth on board the TARDIS as a new companion, but declines out of hand a request by an old man, Mr. Copper, to be allowed to join the Time Lord in his travels. Jack largely mirrors the Doctor’s age bias in his supposedly catholic sexual tastes. Beyond this, Jack is himself another figure for patriarchy in the series, though at the same time paradoxically emasculated. On the one hand, as indirectly noted in relation to Amy, sexual assertiveness of the kind that he exhibits has long been a property of conventional masculinity. How different the effect would have been with a sexually assertive woman expressing her attraction to both Rose and the Doctor, and enjoying some measure of reciprocation from the former. On the other hand, the Doctor repeatedly limits Jack’s agency. At each of their periodic encounters he disables the captain’s ‘vortex manipulator’ bracelet which would enable Jack to travel beyond the confines of twenty-first-century Earth. Whether one reads the Doctor as asexual or, as the new series seems to demand, sexually repressed, the dominance of the

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frigid, allegedly responsible male over the sexual, allegedly feckless male is striking. Fitz Kreiner presents a quite different array of problems. Unlike both Captain Jack and Izzy, he is never designated as gay or bisexual within the narrative, and his several chronicled sexual relationships are all with women. Indeed, Fitz’s frequent objectification of the opposite sex is plausibly and painfully crass, given that he hails from 1963. Yet there is an abundance of queer moments which complicate Fitz’s sexual identity. As I shall argue, this is less a matter of simply undercutting his straightness than blurring the boundaries between different kinds of intense emotional connection. Fitz’s gender identity is also complicated. Far from being, like Jack, another putative alpha-male in the TARDIS, Fitz is by temperament passive, for all his periodic fantasies of being Sinatra, Bond or a Marlowe-like private eye. More importantly, he consciously takes on the role of carer for the Doctor. This might be dismissed as simply a way of maintaining the Doctor’s primacy, were it not for the fact that the Eighth Doctor is more than once also the object of Fitz’s desiring gaze or erotic contemplation. Ultimately, the gender roles of both characters, and the interplay between them, are interesting because they are defined by contradictions and instabilities. Among the Doctor’s companions, Fitz is probably the most clear-cut expression of the potential for mismatch between a character’s idealism and actuality. This plays out most excruciatingly in his sexism. For all his good intentions, he exhibits an embarrassing knee-jerk coarseness towards women: he repeatedly ogles breasts and bottoms, silently assesses female travelling companions and incidental characters alike as potential sexual partners (even when ostensibly not attracted), and periodically makes passes at them. Yet, some ill-fated romances and brief affairs notwithstanding, Fitz is not the Lothario he would at some level like to imagine himself: his overtures frequently meet with indifference and even occasionally disgust. Nor is this the only way in which Fitz is the deflated patriarch. At his introduction, though nursing vague ambitions of becoming a nightclub musician, he is in essence a grumpy and bored retail worker. Yet unlike the broadly similar Rose Tyler, he does not become a figure of proficiency and resolution on the basis of short acquaintance with the Doctor. Very much the slacker, the

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chain-smoking Fitz is constantly overshadowed in acumen, competence and energy by his successive female travelling companions during his long sojourn in the TARDIS. For all his prominent foibles, Fitz is not presented as a grotesque or a figure of fun. Nor is he portrayed as a ‘loser’, for all the anxieties which still periodically plague him even in his swansong novel, ‘The Gallifrey Chronicles.’ On the contrary, he is shown to be capable of delicacy and devotion, which are all the more striking because offset by his misogyny. Apart from real tenderness towards Sam at her most vulnerable,177 these qualities express themselves chiefly in his wholehearted support of the Doctor. Fitz’s faith and loyalty to the Time Lord barely waver, weathering even the Doctor’s momentous decision to destroy his own home planet, Gallifrey.178 Indeed, following this event and his discovery that the Doctor has become amnesiac, in ‘Earthworld’ Fitz explicitly makes it his purpose in life to look after his damaged companion.179 Nor is there any shortage of evidence elsewhere of his desire to tend to the Doctor in the wake of suffering, whether that suffering is physical or emotional.180 The bond between Fitz and the Doctor is characterized in several overlapping or sometimes contradictory ways, and it is the points of unresolved tension that make the relationship so rewarding. There is an extent to which Fitz’s devotion marks him as a willing acolyte, and as such an apt proxy for the Doctor Who fan who continues to believe in the Doctor as a hero in spite of all his vagaries of character. The conceit of quasi-familial bonds is also advanced more than once, and the two motifs sometimes intertwine, as in a discussion between Fitz and Anji in ‘The City of the Dead’ (2001). ‘Why does he inspire such loyalty? Why do we think we ought to be helping him and looking out for him?’ ‘Because he’s good,’ Fitz said simply. ‘He’s bigger than we are, somehow. More full of life.’ ‘If he’s so big, why do I feel like he needs protecting? You do, too. Sometimes it’s like he’s your little brother.’ Fitz smiled at the idea of being an elder brother to the centuries-old Doctor, but he didn’t contradict her. ‘Well, things that are good – they’re always vulnerable, aren’t they? Rare. Easy to destroy.’181

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Yet, elsewhere, there are also clear indications that Fitz’s preoccupation with the Doctor cannot be categorized as a mixture of noble disinterestedness and fraternal affection. Confronted by attractive teenage triplet princesses in ‘Earthworld’, Fitz’s musings portray ambiguity both towards the Doctor and to his own heterosexual lasciviousness: Early teens, blonde, bobbed hair and big blue eyes (a bit like the Doctor’s, said the bit of Fitz that was forever consumed with the Time Lord – and then he mentally kicked himself for not even being able to look at a babe without thinking of the Doctor – and then mentally kicked himself extra, extra hard for thinking of an adolescent as a babe).182

This is not an isolated instance of Fitz’s sexual desires being complicated by a mental image of the Doctor. During ‘The Blue Angel’, in the midst of his unfolding infatuation for another Gallifreyan time traveller, self-proclaimed glamour-puss Iris Wildthyme, Fitz’s erotic attentions are even more clearly bifurcated. No sooner has Iris acknowledged him to be sexy than Fitz’s mind drifts to the Doctor, to ‘all that power and intelligence, that charming intensity’, and he realizes that he is contemplating not only ‘his chances of getting laid by Iris ... [but] even of getting laid by the Doctor.’183 Towards the end of the EDA series, in ‘Halflife’, Fitz also memorably has a dream in which he finds himself in an uncomfortable, sexually charged position with the Doctor. This device, within the context of a book in which the two characters become infused with aspects of one another’s personalities – a fairly clear metaphor of the closeness which they have achieved in their travels – is particularly rich in its suggestive range. [Fitz] was standing in the TARDIS console room ... And he was naked. That wouldn’t normally have bothered him, apart from the fact that he could feel something cool touching his buttocks. The fact that he knew it was another pair of buttocks was slightly disturbing. Yet knowing – in the way that you do in dreams – that they were the Doctor’s buttocks was just too much. [ ... ] ‘Don’t worry, Fitz’, said the Doctor, a hint of a smile in his voice, from behind Fitz’s head. ‘I don’t think it’s what it looks like. Or feels like.’

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‘That’s a relief’, said Fitz. ‘Not that you don’t have a very nice bottom, but ... you know ...’ ‘It’s OK, Fitz. I don’t think this is your subconscious telling you anything about your sexuality.’184

Later in the novel, in a neat counterpoint to Fitz’s usual appraising response to women’s bodies, he finds himself ‘trying not to look at the Doctor’s bottom’ but suspects that he is thereby ‘drawing even more attention to it.’185 This resonates nicely with the paraliptic denial of homoeroticism in the dream; the part of Fitz’s unconscious which takes the form of the Doctor serves less to diffuse than to emphasize the implied sensuality of the buttock-touching scenario. I do not want to insist here on a straightforwardly ‘gay’ reading of these events, or use them to organize any other element of Fitz’s relationship with the Doctor throughout the texts. Yet conversely, I cannot agree with Lars Pearson that when in ‘The Book of the Still’ Fitz speaks of his love for the Doctor as being ‘the real thing’, this is not in itself ‘indicative of a romance with the Doctor.’186 There seems to me no justification for foreclosing either the platonic or the erotic possibilities implied in the relationship, which is to say, to fix Fitz at a single point on the Kinsey scale between hetero- and homosexuality. Pearson’s need to define the nature of Fitz’s relationship with the Doctor is telling. It is hard to imagine comparable need to clarify or situate the relationship between a character such as Rose Tyler and the Doctor, either in terms of differentiating friendship from sexual desire, or reconciling her attraction to him with other dalliances. Viewers are likely to accept that their camaraderie can shade into love, and accept equally that Rose’s interest in Captain Jack does not preclude an attraction to the Doctor. Heteronormativity allows for slippage between modes of engagement between men and women, or rather it always supposes the possibility that a man and a woman could form a sexual (and implicitly procreative) bond. Conversely, the reason Fitz’s erotic connection with the Doctor seems to demand categorical explication is because he is male and supposedly straight. Yet if Doctor Who offers a space of possibility, then one such possibility must surely be not to have to classify relationships in terms

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of the heterosexual binary. In other words, with a TARDIS traveller such as Fitz, dislocated from the constraints of his society of origin, there should be no reason why new, fluid and inclusive forms of emotional tie should not arise. Fitz’s relationship with the Doctor is ultimately more of a challenge to the texts’ patriarchy than most of the Doctor’s overtly agonistic or critically oriented male-female relationships. It breaks the bounds of heteronormativity (which is always already tied to patriarchy) in ways which are powerful because ultimately indefinable. The heterosexual matrix would be preserved if Fitz were understood ‘simply’ to be an uncloseted gay man because heteronormativity defines itself in part through oppositions to other, non-straight sexualities which are constructed as deviant. I should like to suggest in conclusion that Fitz’s erotic connection with the Doctor is best considered within a critical framework which Adrienne Rich developed for characterizing close femalefemale relationships. Rich’s model of the ‘lesbian continuum’ acknowledges ‘a range ... of woman-identified experience’; it is meant to accommodate different kinds of intense mutual interest and shared experience, and ‘not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman.’187 Although there are a number of good reasons why Rich’s argument was originally woman-specific, I think that it is an apt model for Fitz’s relationship with the Doctor, and the way in which this relationship troubles sexual norms. Fitz’s love for the Doctor is perhaps the texts’ only seriously progressive portrayal of a companion’s sexuality. It posits an erotic continuum in which a powerful bond between two men, both of whom are in their own ways ambivalent in gender and sexual terms, can be understood not so much to transcend as to incorporate sexual and platonic potential, without settling definitively within the notional compass of one or the other.

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VI TOWARDS AN AESTHETICS OF DOCTOR WHO

PART I: AESTHETICS AND THE FANTASY TEXT

I

s Doctor Who any good? Is it valuable, aesthetically speaking? Is it art? To some readers the very idea of characterizing Doctor Who as art may seem faintly absurd. A common-sense approach to the issue might be articulated as follows: as Doctor Who originated on television its other textual manifestations are ‘TV tie-ins’, which makes them aesthetically questionable at best; and in any form Doctor Who is science-fiction fantasy, a genre which, like the television medium itself, has not historically been much associated with the highbrow or elevated. I suspect that few academics would identify Doctor Who as art either, albeit for different reasons. As recently as a decade ago debate on the artistic merit of any television programme or comparable artefact of popular culture would have been almost unthinkable, not least among those seriously

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studying such texts as Doctor Who within the framework of cultural studies or television studies.188 Whether because of egalitarian principles or a strong commitment to politically grounded analysis, scholars in these fields would likely have found the subject of Doctor Who’s possible ‘artistry’ irrelevant if not actually objectionable. Even today, when matters of quality within such texts are being vigorously discussed, there is an evident anxiety that we might be taken back to a time when ‘unchallengeable and unchangeable canons were allowed to be subjectively and arbitrarily constructed,’ as Glen Creeber recently expressed it.189 Academics remain cautious in identifying television fiction, however highfalutin, as art; and I am not aware that issues of aesthetic worth have ever been raised in relation to TV tie-in novels or straight-to-CD audio dramas. With so much academic and popular prejudice militating against it, one might counter my opening questions by asking whether there is really anything to be gained from an aesthetic evaluation of Doctor Who. Yet it seems to me that the issue is worth addressing precisely because it forces us to question existent models of aesthetic value, many of which automatically exclude Doctor Who from ‘art’ status. For example, lingering Romantic notions of art as an emanation of individual genius place the Virgin and BBC Doctor Who novels beyond the critical pale because of their collaborative production process.190 More damningly still, a deeply entrenched suspicion of spectacle, which is traceable ultimately to Aristotle’s Poetics, taints Doctor Who as a whole. In spite of some useful work done in the past few years, such as Catherine Johnson’s germinal study, Telefantasy,191 there is still a paucity of tools for the aesthetic evaluation of non-realist texts such as Doctor Who which conform to virtually no established criteria for ‘serious’ drama. One purpose of this chapter, then, is to stimulate broader discussion about the aesthetics of vast fantasy narratives. However, I do not want to suggest, even by default, that an aesthetic evaluation of Doctor Who is justified only insofar as it forms the basis for making some broader point. I worry about the still-too-prevalent assumption in cultural and screen studies that a mass or popular text can only be legitimately discussed in terms of something ‘bigger’ and never in its own right. It seems to me that detailed analysis of the kind I am offering here, through examples drawn from all three of Doctor Who’s principal media,

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should bespeak some kind of faith in the text under consideration. I ultimately want to suggest that Doctor Who is – in its own terms, rather than in some abstract hierarchy of aesthetic value – capable of being rich and sophisticated, rewarding sustained or repeated engagement.

Defi ning the Aesthetic Object One side effect of longstanding scholarly reluctance to undertake aesthetic evaluation of mass culture is that new debate on the subject, emerging as it does from a vacuum, often shows a rather worrying imprecision in the use of inherited aesthetic terminology. Unwitting, rote endorsement of old biases – those elitist prescriptions and proscriptions so troubling to Glen Creeber, among others – can best be avoided by identifying exactly what one means by ‘aesthetic value’ and what constitutes an object of aesthetic study. The question of whether something is aesthetically valuable and whether it is art (or has artistic merit) are inextricably intertwined, both in common parlance and philosophical discourse. Today, art is generally treated as the prime object of aesthetic experience. For Susan Feagin, writing in the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, aesthetics is first and foremost ‘the branch of philosophy that examines the nature of art and the character of our experience of art’; that aesthetics is concerned also with ‘the natural environment’ is tacked on almost as an afterthought.192 By the standards of the inherently normative Cambridge reference book, defining the nature of art as aesthetic object is inevitably a central problem for the aesthetician. I began this chapter by asking, ‘Is Doctor Who any good?’ Although perhaps intuitively understood by many readers, this question, at once loaded and vague, needs to be qualified. In one of the most oft-cited (and contested) warhorses of academic aesthetics, Monroe C. Beardsley’s Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism, the author offers a useful discussion of the adjunctive use of the word ‘good’ in phrases such as ‘a good play’ or ‘a good book.’ To claim that something is a good aesthetic object is, according to Beardsley, to assert more than personal preference, much as when one speaks of a good spanner or a good pen. In such formulations we imply that there is an objective basis for liking – namely,

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the spanner’s or the pen’s fitness to particular ends – ends that are already understood to be proper to that kind of object.193 In other words, the good pen and the good spanner are identified as satisfactory examples of a function-class, meaning that they have the capacity ‘to serve in a certain (desirable) way.’194 The question remains, of course, whether an aesthetic object can be justifiably considered a function-class, which is to say, whether there really is some desirable purpose which an aesthetic object should be able to serve. Beardsely suggests that this is actually just a variant on the much older question, ‘Is there such a thing as an aesthetic experience?’195 Unsurprisingly, he believes that there is. He claims that the aesthetic object itself directly causes this experience, which is always characterized by unity, intensity and complexity.196 Yet the object’s success as an example of its function-class is not, for Beardsley, simply a matter of evoking a set of interesting sensations. He ultimately seeks to establish whether aesthetic objects have inherent worth for humanity in the sense of giving rise to desirable effects within society.197 While such effects will necessarily differ from those of purely utilitarian objects (e.g. the spanner or the pen), Beardsley argues that aesthetic experience contributes in its own way to human welfare: it refines perception and discrimination, develops the imagination, fosters mutual sympathy and understanding, quiets destructive impulses, and offers an ideal for human life.198 In summary, then, for Beardsley a good aesthetic object is one which exhibits certain properties (unity, intensity and complexity) but whose actual value lies in the transferable benefits of the experience it promotes. This is certainly not the only way of understanding aesthetic value, and it could be argued (as I do in the next chapter) that some of the potential virtues Beardsley lists are more usefully defined as ethical rather than aesthetic. Yet the inclusive approach championed by Beardsley is pertinent here because it resonates with current aesthetic debates on mass culture. In the recent upsurge of texts on television aesthetics, relatively few scholars focus as unabashedly as Sarah Cardwell on the formal and stylistic merits of a text, which she forthrightly describes as ‘artistic achievements.’199 Most, following the critical norms of cultural studies, at least indirectly take political implications into account. For example, Robin Nelson, in characterizing ‘good’ television fiction, decries pleasures

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which may come at the expense of challenging viewers ‘to recognize that their accustomed mythologies are inadequate accounts of the world.’200 In other words, Nelson’s is an essentially instrumental model of value: questions of style are ultimately absorbed into questions of social worth, whether that is defined in ethical or (as is now more usual) political terms. This is not the place to pursue the major objection to the (historically leftist) instrumental approach to evaluation generally adopted in the field of cultural studies – namely, that such an approach puts all its objects to work, validating them only in terms of how and how far they ‘matter’ politically.201 For present purposes I should like to stress that this commonplace elision of formal and political critique has helped lend excessive weight to certain stylistic categories. Foremost among these, as I discuss below, is the loaded term ‘realism.’ In television studies especially, realism has become an extraordinarily powerful standard, being invoked even where, as in the case of series such as Doctor Who, it might superficially seem to be irrelevant. Yet the alternatives to instrumental criticism are certainly not without their pitfalls. Take, for example, Sarah Cardwell’s claim that ‘good’ television is marked by coherence at the level of ‘stylistic integrity.’ She argues that the aggregate of stylistic choices, from camera movement and framing to the scoring of the soundtrack, ‘can be found, upon repeated viewing, to be coherent with the programme as a whole and the moment in which they are contained.’202 There are two difficulties here. For one thing, the claim is deceptively tendentious, for it almost inevitably favours television fiction made in a particular, quasi-cinematic way, as I discuss at some length later in this chapter. More broadly, the term ‘stylistic integrity’ (like Beardsley’s ‘intensity’ and ‘unity’) is so nebulous as to be slippery in application. What security do we ever have for judging degrees of integrity? Who sets the benchmark against which we can recognize a harmonious relation of whole to parts? How can this be usefully analysed in any given instance? Finally, how could this model accommodate studiedly loose-knit vast narratives such as Doctor Who, which often flaunt their lack of stylistic integrity? Neither the political/instrumental nor the formal/stylistic poles of aesthetic criticism has much inherent flexibility: both are organized around absolutes. To the Marxist instrumentalist for whom

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good art must be infused with critique, resistance or activism, Doctor Who may simply typify the way in which hegemonic values are articulated through the not-so-harmless pleasures of popular mass culture. To the formalist seeking stylistic integrity, unity and intensity, Doctor Who’s array of eclectic and curate’s-eggish texts is unlikely to impress. Either way, Doctor Who is a fish out of water in the context of these critical paradigms. It is clearly necessary to establish a more relevant discursive framework for this unashamedly sprawling and untidy mass of texts. A number of scholars, including Jason Jacobs, Christine Geraghty and Sarah Cardwell, have advocated an approach to evaluation which is rooted in specific characteristics of the text under consideration.203 By this reckoning, a fair aesthetic discussion of Doctor Who must focus on its structural and generic (or idiomatic) traits, and compare it primarily, or only, with similar texts.204 This is the approach I adopt here. Of course, this sets the evaluative bar much lower than the formalist or instrumentalist approaches. For example, the most that can be claimed for Doctor Who within a genre- or structure-based rubric is that it is ‘good science fiction.’ Yet ultimately, it seems to me that limited aesthetic expectations will yield more interesting results. To pursue the question ‘Is Doctor Who any good?’ without qualifying it would be in effect to apply a (totalizing) model of aesthetic value which is already skewed against texts such as Doctor Who. Instead I want to address the question, ‘What does Doctor Who do well?’, or, to invoke a customary concern of aesthetics, ‘What kinds of beauty can be seen in Doctor Who?’

The Problem of Realism Before looking at the generic and idiomatic criteria by which Doctor Who may reasonably be evaluated, it is worth clearly setting aside one of the standards to which it should not be held: that of realism in the sense of psychological authenticity and truth to lived experience. To enter such a claim may seem redundant, and it ought to be; but realism casts an excessively long shadow in the evaluation of fiction, especially in film and television.205 Its critical pervasiveness is hardly to be wondered at, given the unquestioning tribute it receives from many (mostly ‘serious’, male) critics. For

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example, Robert Thompson made an especially striking genuflection in his influential text Television’s Second Golden Age. Among the dozen listed characteristics by which he identifies ‘quality television’, Thompson’s claim that ‘Quality TV aspires to “realism” ’ is the only one which stands alone with no attendant paragraph to gloss or clarify it, indeed, nothing to suggest it might need qualifying at all, except the inverted commas around the term realism itself.206 Clearly this particular standard and the value of aspiring to it require no elucidation. Given the critical dominance of realism, it is no surprise that some scholars working on texts with a high fantasy quotient seem to be looking for a toehold on the realist bandwagon. A signal example is Rhonda Wilcox’s chapter-length discussion of the Buffy, the Vampire Slayer episode, ‘The Body’ (2001), in her book Why Buffy Matters.207 The essay is subtitled ‘Quality Television and the Supernatural in “The Body”,’ and Wilcox’s stated aim is to examine the episode as a ‘confrontation of the realistic and the non-realistic in Quality TV.’208 At the end of her essay she enters a plea that ‘we work to expand the still generally accepted definition of Quality TV so that work such as “The Body” will be honoured as it deserves.’209 Yet Wilcox’s argument reads overall like an apologia for what she unfortunately chooses to call an ‘intrusion of the supernatural’ in the last few minutes of this otherwise realist episode.210 Significantly, most of Wilcox’s essay is taken up with discussing the realism of ‘The Body’: the episode’s heart-rending representation of the disorientation which follows bereavement. Only in the last quarter of her piece does Wilcox address the fantastical ‘intrusion’; this is the episode’s sole vampire attack which takes place in the morgue where the corpse of Buffy’s mother, Joyce, has been placed for autopsy. Even here, Wilcox stresses the comparative realism of Buffy’s fight with this particular vampire.211 True, she does go on to advance the promising idea that, within the context of the episode’s emphatic realism, the vampire attack can be more specifically understood as ‘metaphor attacking the real.’212 Yet, then, as her essay draws to a close, Wilcox effectively overturns this, asserting that the different stylistic elements ‘all [work] together, realist and supernatural elements alike.’213 This claim for the synthesis of realism and metaphor in ‘The Body’ erases or at least bypasses the ‘confrontation of the realistic and non-realistic’ which Wilcox ostensibly

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set out to tackle. Critics’ supposed strictures on the vampire scene as ‘the single flaw in an otherwise uninterrupted realistic surface’ are implicitly dismissed as failure to recognize that ‘ “realistic” texts are not so far from the symbology of fantasy after all.’214 There is a larger difficulty with Wilcox’s argument. To speak of the vampire attack in ‘The Body’ as a generic intrusion is in the context of Buffy odd. After all, the wholly realist portion of ‘The Body’ is in itself a kind of intrusion into Buffy’s established series aesthetic. The generic fluidity which characterizes most episodes of Buffy – the multiple coding, the quicksilver shifts across the spectrum from satire to melodrama, and so on – is temporarily suspended, and surely much of the potency of ‘The Body’ stems from the abruptness and totality of this suspension. Yet, in her essay, Wilcox only ever places the episode within the larger series context in order to discuss the ‘realistic’ development of character in Buffy.215 Such is the power of the realist paradigm, it seems, that even an avowed sceptic can end up treating it as a benchmark where it is merely one idiomatic component of a television series. The temptation to think of Doctor Who in terms of realism is admittedly smaller than in the case of Buffy. Forays into psychological and social ‘truthfulness’ were never any part of the classic series’ idiomatic make-up, and the situation has not changed that much in more recent Doctor Who texts. True, the NAs brought psychological drama to the fore in the breakdown of trust between Ace and the Doctor, and in the subsequent waxing and waning of tensions between each of them and Benny. Similarly, more recent Doctor Who texts have given substantial weight to companions’ friends, family and personal history. Yet Doctor Who has never had anything like the ongoing, ‘soap-opera’ narrative which ran through Buffy from first to last. On the contrary, its time-and-spacetravelling premise, which is almost exaggeratedly episodic, severely restricts the possibility for ‘realistic,’ dramatic development. This is not to suggest that all characters within the Doctor Who narrative are two-dimensional in the depreciatory sense. Touching vignettes are to be found aplenty in novels, television and audio fiction alike, but emphasis must rest here on the word vignette, a term of which I am going to make extensive use in the second half of this chapter. ‘Good’ character writing has become a key marker of realist excellence; indeed, the two are inextricably entwined. It is therefore

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worth being very clear about the ways in which character operates in Doctor Who, for nothing more clearly reveals the inappropriateness of realist criteria for evaluating these texts. Ultimately, as I have already indicated in earlier chapters, characterization of the Doctor and other ongoing protagonists is largely ‘flat’ rather than ‘rounded’: these figures tend to repeat their actions rather than exhibiting growth or change.216 Where the focus is upon a crisis or rite of passage for a given character, as in a few of the novels and Big Finish audios, the predicament is generally resolved within the span of a single episode or serial and seldom has any longterm consequences. For instance, ‘Scherzo’ (2003) is built entirely around an estrangement between Charley Pollard and the Doctor. Charley’s teenage infatuation with the Time Lord is quashed as the Doctor harshly reveals the full extent of his emotional unavailability. The two ultimately reach a rapprochement, but the intensity of their conflict might seem to demand some aftershocks in subsequent stories. In fact, Charley’s jocular, easygoing relationship with the Doctor is restored in the next serial; and thereafter there is only ever the slightest of nods to her having struggled to overcome her crush on him. Even at its most character oriented, Doctor Who is overtly driven by plot: exploration of personal drama is framed within a suspense narrative, with the usual complement of plot twists and startling revelations, and generally with some element of action and adventure, even if it is only breathless pursuit down corridors. To take just one example, ‘The Gathering’ (2006) is, as noted in the last chapter, essentially devoted to Tegan’s attempts to come to terms with incurable illness and its effects on her attitude to work and friends; yet all this is structured around a hostage scenario and the machinations of a deranged medic. In short, while stories concerned heavily with character and ‘emotional resonance’ have become much more common since the 1990s, the vast majority of Doctor Who’s texts are still primarily adventures, meant to excite ‘big’ emotions of curiosity, wonder, fear and surprise. As is typical for the adventure genre, protagonists are routinely placed in weird and perilous situations and must rely on their wits and a measure of good fortune to prevail. It is to the unfolding and resolution of these thrilling challenges that the audience’s or reader’s attention is primarily directed.

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Adventure has always been Doctor Who’s primary generic anchor: when it was first broadcast on television, the series was explicitly billed in Radio Times as ‘an adventure in space and time.’217 Even today, I suspect that few people approach the texts of Who with the expectation of encountering intricate, nuanced and sustained dramatic development of character. Anyone exclusively favouring seriousness and inwardness over escapism and spectacle is unlikely to want much truck with Doctor Who – if such a singleminded reader really exists. So the salient question here is not why Doctor Who ‘fails’ to be like supposedly serious (realist) fiction, but how Doctor Who might have enriched the generic arena in which it was nurtured.

‘Telefantasy,’ and the Idiomatic Traits of Doctor Who No less important a generic category for Doctor Who than adventure/suspense is fantasy, for all that the implications of the word are in a sense broader still. The term fantasy originally denoted a faculty of the mind, the process of mentally fixing images from the sensuous world, and the ability to combine such images to produce new, imaginary creations. Doctor Who, an adventure whose hero voyages across space and time, represents just such a feat of the imagination. From its inception, Doctor Who brought together disparate ideas and images to produce strange new syntheses of the real and the imagined, starting with the wonderful motif of the police telephone box which impossibly houses a giant time-and-space ship. The term ‘fantasy’ has a more specific valence in relation to Doctor Who, for it has long been used as a flexible signifier by fans of certain television programmes. The term allows for the clustering of cult series which share certain common ground and appeal to certain common (fan) tastes, but which cannot easily be marshalled into the same generic category. In her important book Telefantasy, Catherine Johnson co-opts her title term directly from fan discourse: in fanzines and elsewhere, the word ‘telefantasy’ has traditionally been applied to series and serials as diverse as The Avengers, Blake’s 7, Sapphire and Steel (ITV, 1979–1982) and The X-Files. Johnson argues that the term usefully points to shared devices and aesthetic concerns, which transcend normative grouping by genre or tone. Chief

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among these characteristics is a concern with seeing and representation themselves, and more specifically with the means by which a fantastic (i.e. ‘unreal’) fictional world can be evoked and sustained. Thus, telefantasy provides a basis for examining the morphology of various programmes which address ‘the problem of how to represent that which “doesn’t exist”.’ Telefantasy programmes transgress generally accepted notions of truth to the ‘real’ rather than upholding them.218 The notion of telefantasy can clearly only serve as a springboard for further discussion in this context since my concern is with Doctor Who as a whole cluster of texts in different media. Yet using telefantasy as a paradigm seems to me justified in two ways, one general and one specific. First, some of the most striking work on the aesthetics of popular and mass culture has been done in the field of television studies, its implications often extending beyond the medium. Second, and more importantly, Doctor Who’s origins as spectacular television have inflected or provided the whetstone for all its subsequent manifestations. Catherine Johnson’s concept of ‘intimate spectacle’ in telefantasy is peculiarly apposite for Doctor Who.219 With this conceit she both challenges and complements a deep-rooted position in television studies – namely, that the medium is suited to intimate address and correspondingly unsuited to spectacle. Johnson indicates the ways in which telefantasy can simultaneously incorporate both. Significantly, she points out that this applied even in the 1950s, when television technology was relatively cumbersome and primitive and most dramatic productions static. The BBC’s Quatermass serials (1953, 1955, 1958), science-fiction narratives of alien invasion, infection and possession, were in Johnson’s view notable for the ways in which they produced spectacular effects by capitalizing on and pushing the boundaries of television’s intimacy. Conversely, she argues that visually intensive moments (e.g. cliffhanger episode endings) not only evoke wonder, horror or shock but can also serve to establish an intimate connection between viewer and characters.220 In short, the Quatermass serials were ‘both expansive and intimate, spectacular and character-driven, suspenseful and familiar.’221 To varying degrees, those three polarities could be used to characterize Doctor Who in toto: not just on television but also in its other textual manifestations. In other words, I should like to

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suggest that traits emerging from 1960s telefantasy, with all its constraints, persisted even after Doctor Who made the transition to the comparatively ‘unfettered’ media of novels and radio plays. Building on Johnson’s useful and elegant conceit of ‘intimate spectacle’, I shall focus on three primary idiomatic attributes in Doctor Who in this chapter, arguing that they are strongly evident in many of the most nuanced or inventive Doctor Who texts. The first of these idiomatic mainstays, already mentioned in passing, is the motif of surreal apposition. This trait emerged in the very first episode of Doctor Who, ‘An Unearthly Child’ (1963), which is built around a set of powerful contrasts. Two young schoolteachers meet an eccentric old man in Edwardian dress who apparently lives inside a junkyard in an old police box, and at the episode’s climax this improbably disguised time-ship vanishes from 1960s London and reappears on the Palaeolithic tundra. Such juxtapositions were to become ever more flamboyant and inventive: in one story a meddling time traveller wants to give atomic weaponry to the Saxons so that they can ward off Viking attacks; in another, giant spiders from another world teleport to Earth by way of a Buddhist mandala; the Loch Ness Monster turns out to be a kind of dairy cow for aliens living in a defunct spaceship beneath the loch; Noël Coward time travels by cutting through the very fabric of time and space with magic pinking shears, and so on; the list could be extended a hundredfold. Closely related, but arguably less a function of Doctor Who’s premise than its conditions of production, is the epic vignette, whereby dialogue and action within the narrative hint at, distil or focus much larger events, struggles played out on a global, interplanetary and even cosmic scale, the whole lifetime of an individual, or relationships across generations. What we see, hear or read is, in other words, a synecdoche for epic occurrences. This is not to say that Doctor Who has not made occasional forays into grandiose, dioramic spectacle, at least in the novels. Yet out of the practical need to limit such spectacle during the original television series’ run (a need which to a great extent holds for the new), Doctor Who has developed a tendency to evoke rather than demonstrate. Rich dialogue combines with localized elements of strong visual imagery to call upon the audience/reader’s imaginative participation. For example, set pieces of massed Cybermen on the march or fighting soldiers in ‘The Invasion’ (1969) and ‘Doomsday’ (2006) are

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memorable but brief montages, sprinkled at crucial moments into the domestic-scale scenes which account for the bulk of each episode. By the same token, it is through finely honed verbal evocation that we learn of interplanetary power struggles within the Cyrrhenic Empire in ‘The Ribos Operation’ (1978), of the Filipino army’s march on Reykjavik during a fifty-first-century war in ‘The Talons of Weng Chiang’ (1977), and so on. The magnitude of these unseen happenings is underwritten by the presence of major ‘historical’ figures – tyrants, generals, ministers and rebel leaders – within the screened narrative; for better or worse, these figures stand in for unseen, massed populations. Indeed, even in the (relatively few) narratives in which none of the protagonists possesses authority or high social rank, they tend to be synecdochic for a whole people, a historical struggle, or a way of life. The third main idiomatic trait of Doctor Who pertains mainly, though not exclusively, to its hero. If the epic vignette has its roots in Doctor Who’s production history, and surreal apposition in its narrative setup, then the harlequinade motif is primarily a matter of performativity, and a function of ‘flatness’ of character in Doctor Who. As Tom Baker often used to say, the Doctor is essentially predictable, and the trick of playing the part is to ‘colour’ that predictability. Each actor has in effect created the character in performance, inflecting the Doctor’s repertoire of recurrent attitudes and actions: his nobility and willingness for self-sacrifice; his displays of brilliance; his soliloquizing; his clowning or banter with enemies, his running down corridors. As my term ‘harlequinade motif’ is meant to suggest, the best analogue is to be found in commedia dell’arte performers who individualize established but mutable, improvisation-based roles such as Scaramouche, Harlequin and Pierrot. In short, the Doctor has become a stock character who is entertaining in large measure by virtue of his colourful quirks and mannerisms, which is to say, less in terms of what he does than the performative ways in which he does it. Much the same is true of recurrent characters such as the Master, Davros, and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. In a single chapter it would clearly be impractical to track even three aesthetic properties throughout all the texts of Doctor Who, and the following discussion is of necessity highly selective. As a consequence it may seem that I am implicitly enshrining certain texts as the best that has been said and done in Doctor Who. This is

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an occupational hazard for anyone engaging in aesthetic judgment, and it would be absurd for me to claim that either my sampling or my evaluative criteria are in any ultimate sense objective. I should like to stress, therefore, that my examples are meant primarily to be illustrative, not exclusive. I do not claim that the three motifs outlined above are the only significant aesthetic properties of Doctor Who, far less that they are unique to Doctor Who. Although (again for reasons of space) I offer little comparison between Doctor Who and other fantasy fiction, it should be possible for readers to identify texts in which similar stylistic axes converge in comparable ways. Part of my intention, then, is to help enlarge the vocabulary available for the aesthetic evaluation of texts which are multifarious and fanciful rather than unified and realistic. The traditional markers of aesthetic excellence – harmony and unity, integrity and intensity, sophistication and depth, seriousness and difficulty, and so on – are all ultimately code for the highbrow and the ‘classy’ and serve to reinforce longstanding European and Euro-American elitism. As should by now be clear, this chapter is in its own way meant as a counter-thrust to these entrenched values.

PART II: MOTIF AND MEDIUM The aesthetic analysis of Doctor Who cannot be built in any simple way around a single representative story or even a series of case studies. Short of the literalism of invoking ‘An Unearthly Child’ as Doctor Who’s urtext, there is no baseline, no ‘ground zero.’ While the aesthetic traits I noted above are endemic to Doctor Who, so is stylistic instability. In itself this does not militate against the kind of aesthetic analysis I am attempting here. On the contrary, to claim that a particular serial or episode discretely embodies Doctor Who’s excellence would be to replicate the inflexible, monolithic model of aesthetics that I am trying to avoid. For one thing, not all the aesthetic pleasures of the texts are bounded within Doctor Who’s individual micro-narratives. This is pre-eminently true for what I have called the harlequinade motif. For example, throughout the season-long ‘Trial of a Time Lord’ Colin Baker’s performance as the Doctor is consistently dazzling, and the colourful writing for

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his grandiloquent, acerbic incarnation of the character supports his virtuosity. Yet it might well be argued that the presentation of the Doctor is cumulatively much more distinctive and delightful than any one of the more or less awkward suspense and adventure narratives around which the trial scenario is built. Any search for Doctor Who’s ‘excellence’ directed purely at self-contained stories within the textual set would inevitably minimize, if not bypass, such achievement. Having said all that, the other two key aesthetic motifs I have identified do inhere more or less consistently within particular scenarios. This clearly applies to the epic vignette, and while weird juxtapositions in one way obtain as much between as within Doctor Who’s micro-narratives, the most striking effects of contrast are achieved in a single serial/episode or novel rather than via the contiguous placement of stories. Consequently it is useful to select exemplary texts for detailed attention here; but it still remains to determine how these should be chosen. I have already stated my intention to use a broadly genre- and idiom-based approach and thereby avoid unduly nebulous or ex cathedra claims about quality in Doctor Who. There is a second limiting factor, namely the fact that I am addressing a narrative which exists in several media. In the remainder of this chapter I therefore sketch nodal points in all three, identifying narratives and trends which use key, recurrent aesthetic motifs in ways which are attuned to the limitations and possibilities of the medium in question. In the first of my medium-specific discussions below, I address Doctor Who on television. Here a difficulty immediately arises in trying to identify a particular text or pattern which might exemplify optimal use of that medium. The differences between screen fiction, radio drama and the novel are relatively clear-cut; it is more problematic to isolate the properties of television per se. One strict definition of television might refer to the means of recording, which is to say the electronic video camera, and by extension to the multi-camera techniques used in the television studio. Yet a legitimate counter-argument is that television is really no more than a delivery system, with no inherent visual properties except that until recently the definition of the broadcast screen image was vastly inferior to that of film projected in the movie theatre. This latter view is supported by the fact that from the 1960s to

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the 1980s many programmes were for practical reasons made with ‘tele-cine’ inserts; in other words, pre-edited material shot on more easily portable film cameras was projected and re-recorded by a video camera for interpolation into the final tape. Moreover, whole series were often made entirely on film, and re-recorded on video for transmission, so in certain respects these were qualitatively no different from pre-existent feature films taped for broadcast. Today, when an increasing number of movies are, ironically enough, being shot on video rather than film, the distance between the two media seems to be measurable only in terms of mode of exhibition and the expense and length of the production process. If we cannot legitimately speak of ‘pure’ television, certain episodes of both classic and new Doctor Who do capitalize on the medium’s traditional limitations in terms of scope and variety of dramatis personae, action and settings. There was always a practical need to restrict action demanding complex stunts and special effects when Doctor Who was shot mainly in the electronic studio. Although the exigencies of multi-camera recording no longer apply in the new series, scheduling constraints still militate against heavy reliance on time-consuming action sequences or pyrotechnics. Fabrication costs (and, latterly, the cost of creating virtual environments) have also of necessity limited the scale, if not the number, of sets, especially where existing stock elements could not be used. Consequently, Doctor Who tends to be predominantly wordy and static. As I suggest below, brilliancy in the writing and delivery of dialogue, clever conceptual elements in the plot, and rich interpretative work by costume, scenic and lighting designers have therefore been crucial to establishing much of the motivic richness in the series, especially in its evocation of the epic and the surreal. After discussing Doctor Who on television, I turn next to the Big Finish audios. While I do not wish to endorse the grossly one-sided argument that television is a primarily an aural medium,222 there can be no doubt that sound has always played a central role in sustaining Doctor Who’s imaginative worlds. Both the wordiness of the scripts and the prominence of aural effects created by the Radiophonic Workshop facilitated transition to purely sonic storytelling in the Big Finish audio adventures. Thus, for example, the various special sounds associated with the Daleks – their voices and guns, the electronic ‘heartbeat’ sound used as background noise

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for their command headquarters, and so on – are as ineradicably memorable as their appearance. Much of their frisson can therefore be evoked without visual stimulus. Similarly, much of the Doctor’s appeal as a character resides in his verbal wit and agility: the radio medium actually enhances this key element in the original series. In short, Doctor Who’s audio producers inherited a tradition of sonic richness which enabled them to mitigate and even profit from the ‘loss’ of visual stimulus. Audio Doctor Who serials should not be viewed as merely ‘television without pictures.’223 The elements of continuity from the classic series – central among which is the reassuring, authenticating presence of the lead actors – provide a secure anchor for experimentation, and a number of writers have embraced the possibility to play with the very idea of the aural. The invisibility of action has allowed for various kinds of conceit meant to tease or selectively direct the listener’s responses. As I discuss, it has also led to the ‘doubling’ of the medium, with certain stories built primarily around sound recordings, radio broadcasts and even telephone conversations. One basic similarity between Doctor Who stories in video and audio form is that they are recorded dramatic productions. The novels clearly do not share this property. Because of this fundamental difference I address the original Doctor Who books last here, examining both the stylistic freedoms allowed by the medium and authors’ responses to the idiomatic constraints imposed by the original television series. The NAs were originally styled as stories too broad and deep for the television screen. Increased breadth may be understood as panoramic scale and epic scope, and to an extent the various Doctor Who novel series have featured sweeping vistas and casts of thousands in a way that the television series could not. Yet the novels have also, and in my view more importantly, perpetuated the intimacy of the series in new forms. As the NAs’ editors presumably meant to signal, there has been a greater ‘depth’ of narrative penetration, with the mental and emotional life of characters a rich source of narrative interest in a way that it had not been on television. Beyond matters of content alone, authors’ exploitation of the different narrative modes available in the novel allow for a ‘deepening’ of engagement by readers. Yet, lest we get too carried away with notions of depth, it is important to enter a caveat. Novels, unlike television series, have

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long been subject to aesthetic evaluation within the academy. Resilient standards in the critical tradition would make it all too easy to identify moral and conceptual depth and complexity as prime criteria of excellence in the Virgin and BBC Doctor Who lines, and to treat innovative storytelling as an automatic marker of (desirable) sophistication. To avoid falling into – or even tacitly confirming – such assumptions, it is important to focus appropriately on the ways in which the Doctor Who novels deliberately echo and pastiche aspects of the television series. If harlequinade pleasures are endemic to Doctor Who as performed text, literary analogues to these performed motifs furnish many of the delights of Doctor Who novels. As I shall show, in the MAs and PDAs the evocation of on-screen performance also allows for a new form of striking juxtaposition: certain authors have brought the series’ protagonists into scenarios studiedly at odds with the style of narrative proper to the ‘era’ of Doctor Who from which those characters hailed.

Suggestion and Spectacle: The Classic Series In a recent essay, ‘The Filipino army’s advance on Reykjavik,’ Ian Potter underscored the fact that the vast majority of the classic series of Doctor Who was recorded in the electronic studio. World building therefore had to be done in restricted time with limited spatial, financial and technological resources. Potter’s title is derived from a fleeting reference to a future war in ‘The Talons of Weng Chiang’; it is meant to sum up ‘Doctor Who’s treatment of epic throughout much of its original run,’ where ‘grand spectacle ... generally features only in dialogue as the trigger or consequence of the more compact, television-shaped, stories that unfold on screen.’224 While Potter’s claim is in many ways justified, it is worth stressing that visual elements can work in tandem with verbal to offset the ‘television-shaped’ limitations upon Doctor Who’s epic tendencies. Without extensive recourse to location inserts, matte paintings or overlay effects, the content of the small-screen image can be manipulated to act upon viewers’ imaginative forces in two polar ways. Costumes and sets can be made replete with visual incident, suffusing the screen image with evocative detail which emphasizes the physicality of objects, furnishings and architectural surfaces,

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thus creating a visual ‘overload.’ This was a technique already well established in the BBC’s period productions from the 1950s. Conversely, visual data can be massively simplified and even suppressed altogether, dissolving space into light, colour, pattern or shadow to suggest the infinite or unknowable. Two contiguous serials from the classic series, ‘Warriors’ Gate’ and ‘The Keeper of Traken’ (1981) neatly illustrate these two stylistic extremes. ‘Warriors’ Gate’ takes place in a grey void on the threshold between two universes, and a fair proportion of the action therefore has the cast members superimposed onto off-white nothingness. The void is also a threshold which allows access to past times. For scenes set in this lost antiquity, actors are matted into a series of black and white stills of an Elizabethan-style palace and formal garden, seeming to move through the photographed spaces. In addition to these effects, which were explicitly demanded by the screenplay,225 the serial’s designers found other ways to increase both stylization and abstraction. Apart from the TARDIS, and the composite interior of a studiedly dreary spaceship, almost the only ‘real’ set is the great hall of a deserted castle, its dark grey walls and buttresses a series of massive, simple forms almost unrelieved by surface articulation. Costumes consist mostly of garments in highvalue and saturated hues, which increases the sense of disjuncture between characters and their ghostly, generally monochrome environments. ‘Warriors’ Gate’ is, in short, an essay in the sublime, suggesting the limitless through extreme visual austerity and absence. ‘The Keeper of Traken’ by contrast is laden with visual detail almost too dense to register. ‘Keeper’ was comprehensively designed in homage to a familiar style from the history of the decorative arts, the Art Nouveau. The gorgeously coloured outfits and the elaborate coiffures of the people of Traken belong amidst the sartorial fantasies of Aubrey Beardsley and Henry van der Velde, while sets and furniture for the consular court where the action takes place variously evoke Gaudí, Majorelle and Mackintosh. In all areas of design, from sets to hairdressing, intertwining and imbricate elements are the norm. Coiffures consist of lattices and clusters of braids and ringlets; costumes are layered and panelled in velvets, silks and gauzes, while scenic design is inundated with sinuously overlapping architectural forms and with carved, stencilled or tessellated surfaces. This riot of detail would be hard to absorb even it were

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shot with a wide-angle lens and exhibited in the cinema. Within the confines of the 4:3 television screen the melange of visual incident powerfully implies the ‘off-screen’ existence of a rich, vital culture of which we glimpse only a teasing hint. In practice, relatively few Doctor Who stories can be situated quite so clearly at either end of the stylistic spectrum as ‘Warriors’ Gate’ and ‘The Keeper of Traken.’ Nor are the script and the visual imagery of a production necessarily interdependent in terms of scope and tenor. For example, the Art Nouveau décor in ‘Keeper’ is ultimately separable from the story’s scripted content: indeed, the serial would not be a particularly memorable example of the epic vignette without the densely suggestive costumes and sets. Yet Doctor Who frequently relied on both word and image in the worldbuilding enterprise, and in some cases a production juxtaposed different modes of visual evocation. It is to one example of this kind of evocative intricacy, ‘The Deadly Assassin’ (1976), that I should now like to turn for a more extended analysis. Given the key aesthetic elements I have identified in Doctor Who, stories exhibiting straightforward ‘harmony’ or ‘integrity’ of written and visual evocation are for present purposes less interesting than those in which script and design imagery embody not only richness but also internal contrasts or dualities. In other words, epic overtones in Doctor Who are at their most intriguing when they are infused with another of the text’s defining aesthetic features – namely, surreal or sometimes ironic apposition. ‘The Deadly Assassin’ is by no means unique in offering such a combination (or collision) of aesthetic elements, but it is particularly elaborate. Dialogue, costume and sets combine to create a powerful impression of both strangeness and familiarity in the civilization of the Time Lords, and part way through the narrative the scenario changes altogether, the world of Gallifrey being left behind for an alternate reality. The writer of ‘The Deadly Assassin’ was Robert Holmes. In this chapter I have already obliquely mentioned his capacity for gorgeously evocative dialogue: Holmes wrote both ‘The Talons of Weng Chiang’ and ‘The Ribos Operation,’ in each deftly sketching an epic historical backdrop for the necessarily limited action played out on screen. The same suggestive power is very much to the fore in ‘The Deadly Assassin.’ Indeed, as well as introducing us to the petty and corrupt world of the contemporary Time Lords, the

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serial’s importance lies in its verbal evocation of Gallifrey’s ancient past which massively affected subsequent Doctor Who storytelling (as noted in Chapter One). Allusion to Time Lord history in ‘The Deadly Assassin’ does not merely consist of hints and throwaway lines. Rather it is presented to us – as it is presented to the Doctor within the narrative – in extracts from the audio ‘transgram’ of an epic historical text, the Book of the Old Time. The snippets we hear from this recorded history are positively Spenserian in their grave, heightened language, and voiced by a mellifluous female computer voice. By contrast, dialogue for the Doctor’s (exclusively male) peers in present-day Gallifrey is for the most part irredeemably trivial: their exchanges are rife with pomposity, mean spiritedness, wool-gathering, cynicism and deceit. Thus, a witness at a trial is more interested in offering a litany of his ailments than cogent evidence; a senior official worries that reassigning guardsmen from a public ceremony to the search for a supposedly dangerous fugitive will result in a loss of ‘pomp and circumstance’; a powerful cardinal, faced with the revelation that a murdered officer of state was himself a scheming assassin, decides to ‘adjust the truth’ for public-relations purposes; and so on. It is not merely dialogue but also names, both proper and titular, which make the world of the Time Lords so vivid, and so resonant with ossified elements of British society. The Gallifreyan ruling class consists of ‘chapters’; its senior members, ‘cardinals’; the second-tohighest office is the ‘chancellery’; and the Time Lords’ police chief is a ‘castellan.’ All these overtones of medievalism combine with the stuffiness of the Gallifreyans’ behaviour to evoke clichés of Britain’s backward-looking intellectual and social elites. The Capitol is a kind of cross between the House of Lords and the most conservative of cathedrals or Oxbridge colleges, its denizens preoccupied with ritual, etiquette and precedence, and correspondingly lacking in sensitivity or imagination. Individual characters’ names, too – such as Goth, Spandrell, Hilred and Runcible – suggest either the medieval world or a Trollopian parody of collegiate and Episcopal institutions. Overtones of British academia and clerisy are carried through into James Acheson’s designs for the Time Lords’ dress. Their daily fatigues hover in form between cassock, surplice and dalmatic, while their ceremonial robes are grotesquely bloated variants of

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academic regalia: gowns with voluminous sleeves, skullcaps, and monstrous collars which somehow seem to synthesize aspects of the academic hood and mortarboard. Similarly, the red, cream and gold dress uniform of the Time Lords’ Chancellery Guard resonates with that of the Queen’s Guardsmen. In short, the visual ‘grammar’ of the Time Lords’ dress is at some level familiar even where its ‘idioms’ may be foreign. Medievalism is also echoed, albeit more abstractly, in Roger Murray Leach’s remarkable sets for the Time Lord Capitol. Quasimedieval pointed arches are everywhere in evidence, and a monstrous gloom prevails in all the sets, as in some vast Byzantine basilica. Indeed, apart from the sheen of the chromium fasciae on arches and buttresses, what is most memorable about the sets in ‘The Deadly Assassin’ is their eerie spatial indeterminacy; the places we see mostly seem to be open catwalks or platforms in a much larger, darkened architectural container. In some scenes, the extraordinary visual richness of costume dominates the screen: the state ceremony in which Gallifrey’s president is eventually assassinated is, clearly by intent, an oppressive welter of colour and pattern, as the Time Lords mill in their vivid-hued robes. In other scenes, much as in ‘Warriors’ Gate,’ characters stand out against severely stylized architectural forms or empty space, albeit in this case dark rather than light. In short, ‘The Deadly Assassin’ deploys both saturation and suppression of visual detail. ‘The Deadly Assassin’ also contains one of the series’ boldest surreal appositions, though in purely narrative terms it is not a particularly novel conceit. One whole episode of the four-part serial is given over to a psychomachic struggle, and thus removed from the ‘real’ world of Gallifrey. This struggle takes place in a digital nightmare environment created by the villainous Chancellor Goth within Gallifrey’s supercomputer, the Matrix. Here, Goth’s avatar takes the form of a hunter on safari, tracking the Doctor through jungle and marsh, with every conceivable cliché of ‘tropical’ adventure interpolated. (For example, Goth poisons a watering hole; the Doctor, spotting this, uses residual poison from the discarded bottle to make a toxic dart with which he hobbles his enemy; and so on.) Even before Goth manifests as the hunter, the Doctor fends off attacks from a Samurai and a World War One biplane, a psychotic surgeon, and a runaway train. This nightmare scenario is visually unified by

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one particularly sinister motif: as long as the identity of the Doctor’s opponent is unknown both to him and the audience, all the beings the Doctor encounters have their faces hidden – many, including a horse, wearing gas masks. The fast paced, action-oriented dream sequence is rendered doubly arresting by the fact that it is stylistically so far removed from the alternately satirical and noiresque sequences in the Gallifreyan Capitol. As James Chapman has noted, there is a certain irony in the fact that the ‘reality’ of Gallifrey was constituted in the studio, whereas the ‘unreal’ virtual world of the Matrix was shot on location.226 Yet, it is not merely the relative expansiveness of the nightmare sequence which makes for a powerful contrast with scenes in the Time Lord citadel. The bizarre, surreal use of recognizable, earthly, historical paraphernalia in the dreamscape – samurai armour, gas-masks, biplane and railway – serves paradoxically to increase the sense of contingency and actuality of the ‘real-world’ scenes set on Gallifrey, for all that Time Lord society is ostensibly alien.

Picture Quality and ‘Quality TV’ If much of the force of the contrast between the two environments of ‘The Deadly Assassin’ was clearly intended, one divergence was beyond the programme makers’ control. The grain difference between location footage shot on film and studio material recorded on video was always palpable and sometimes glaring in television made during the 1970s and 1980s. Moreover, the multi-camera technique used in the electronic studio led to a sense of ‘liveness’ in a way that a shot-by-shot approach to filming did not. Until the later 1980s, when video cameras became more portable, few Doctor Who serials incorporating location work were made wholly in one medium, and internal shifts such as that in ‘The Deadly Assassin’ were therefore inevitable. Indeed, even when video was used in both environments, as in ‘Battlefield’ (1989), the bright, flat lighting in the studio still often compromised visual coherence. Internal contrasts in picture quality do not persist in the revived Doctor Who, which is shot entirely using the single-camera technique on high definition video, and then ‘filmised.’ Some might

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argue that this elevates the new series in aesthetic terms. To be sure, during the first series of the revival the critical plaudits for superior production values and visual style were as loud and long as the praise for richer characterization. Yet these claims for a seismic change in quality are at best partially justified. As I have already indicated, key aesthetic motifs within the texts of Doctor Who have survived many stylistic transformations over more than forty years, including changes in production techniques. It seems to me that, far from being useful indicators of aesthetic value, picture standard and technical sophistication are at best red herrings and at worst fodder for specious hierarchization. Yet, just because they so strongly influence contemporary viewers – one of my students, tellingly enough, described the ‘filmised’ screen image in the new Doctor Who as being ‘more professional looking’ than the old – these issues warrant further discussion here. There is no doubt that the new, widescreen Doctor Who series often looks cinematic and expensive, and by contrast the bulk of the classic series, recorded in the electronic studio, exhibits the harsh lighting and the low-definition screen image now generally associated with ‘cheap’ programming such as daytime soaps or sitcoms. Yet to assert the improvement in picture quality as de facto an improvement in aesthetic quality is absurdly one-sided. One might as well say that a television series shot on 16-millimetre film is automatically of lower aesthetic quality than one shot on 35-millimetre, or (more unthinkably) that a black-and-white film must be aesthetically inferior to a movie shot in colour. Ambitions of ‘aspiring’ to the filmic – and I use the scare quotes very deliberately – have certainly been nursed by television directors since the late 1970s, if not earlier. This aspiration has been implicitly championed by academics who tend to exalt the allegedly superior production values associated with the use of film. Both tendencies have been to the critical detriment of television fiction shot with multiple cameras in the electronic studio. Although the prejudice in favour of television series shot on film is not directly acknowledged, it is frequently implied in scholarly writing. In a broad survey of the development of ‘quality TV’ on both sides of the Atlantic, Robin Nelson opines that digital technologies have ‘undoubtedly blurred the boundary between film and television in terms of both production processes and technical quality of product.’ While he does enter

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the caveat that ‘technology is never solely determinant of value’, he slightly undermines this by going on to say that improved picture quality has ‘fostered an aesthetic dimension in television that approximates the visual aesthetics of cinema’; the word ‘approximates’ implying a nisus to a ‘higher’ standard.227 An interesting parallel claim comes from within the television industry itself: Lost (ABC, 2004–2010) producer Jack Bender is quoted as declaring that ‘episodic television [now] has to look like a feature film’ (my italics), while the same show’s assistant director, Allen DiGioia, points out that the programme makers are ‘using the same elements, the same equipment and camera’ as filmmakers would.228 The academic bias towards film and the filmic is demonstrable in very concrete, statistical terms. Almost without exception, scholarly discussions of ‘quality TV’ known to me focus on programmes made either on film or ‘filmised’ video, from thirtysomething (ABC, 1987– 1991) and Ally McBeal (Fox, 1997–2002) to The West Wing (NBC, 1999–2006) and Six Feet Under.229 True, most commentators agree that quality TV is less an aesthetic category than a generic classification. Yet there is considerable slippage between ideas of ‘quality’ and the aesthetically ‘good’; this is a fact which few critics acknowledge as frankly and thoughtfully as Sarah Cardwell.230 Either way, the classic series of Doctor Who falls short of the implied technical standard for ‘quality TV’: it is studio-bound, flat-lit and arguably spoilt by now-risible special effects and sometimes by palpably cheap sets. Yet by this reckoning a celebrated array of ‘serious’ (and often realist) BBC dramas, from Elizabeth R (1971) and The Pallisers (1974) to When The Boat Comes In (1976–1981) and Tenko (1981–1984), must be excluded from the quality category, too. To me, there is neither logic nor virtue in a standard which cannot accommodate some of the early television plays of David Mercer or Dennis Potter because they are less easy on the eye than Life on Mars (BBC, 2006–2007) or The Inspector Lynley Mysteries (BBC, 2001–2007). Once issues of picture quality and recording techniques are put aside, the stylistic differences between the old and new Doctor Who series are less marked than current hyperbole suggests. This is borne out by direct comparison of broadly similar narratives from the old and the new series. One of the earliest adventures set in Earth’s past, ‘The Aztecs’ (1964), is constructed in very similar ways to an episode from the new series, ‘The Fires of Pompeii’ (2008).

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From a British viewer’s point of view, both stories deal with historically and geographically ‘remote’ cultures as opposed to, say, the Victorian era or the 1920s in England. True, there is a greater number of rapid edits, more varied shots and camera angles, and more running around by the Doctor and his companion in ‘Fires.’ Yet the stories are essentially both small-scale dramas, in which the fate of a few individuals stands for the fate of a whole city or people. The bulk of each teleplay takes place in two or three interior sets, and concerns a small cast of around a dozen speaking characters. As well as the time travellers, ‘Fires’ revolves around a four-strong nuclear family and a small group of soothsayers, while ‘The Aztecs’ is populated with two priests and a small clutch of other dignitaries, soldiers and civic leaders. In each case, the drama is a rite of passage for some of the characters, including the Doctor and his companions. Thus, in ‘The Aztecs’ Barbara Wright learns that substantively changing the course of past history is not possible and in ‘Fires’ the Doctor discovers that he himself is sometimes, whether he likes it or not, the catalyst for notorious historical disasters. Both productions are relatively thrifty in their use of spectacle. Locations and back-lot exteriors in ‘Fires’ appear for only a few minutes, while in ‘The Aztecs’ simulated exteriors – all created in the electronic studio – are confined to a handful of scenes, and for the most part shot in fairly tight focus. The principal difference lies in the larger number of special-effects shots in ‘Fires’ including CG-intensive sequences featuring the episode’s monsters, the Pyroviles, and panoramas of the destruction of Pompeii. Yet most of these are short (never more than ten seconds’ duration), and though they undeniably contribute to the visual richness of the episode, they do not significantly change the ratio of spectacle to intimacy. The central focus is on a domestic drama, with the story following the fortunes of the family who, by virtue of the Doctor’s intervention, survive the eruption of Vesuvius; we understand the epic events unfolding around them primarily through their reactions, and those of the Doctor’s companion, Donna Noble. Of a later episode in the 2008 season, Russell T. Davies commented: ‘For all the spectacle, it’s about character, in the end.’231 While this is perhaps an overstatement, strongly telegraphed emotional response – always heightened and sometimes artificial – is essentially what sustains the bulk of each Doctor Who episode, now as it was in 1963.

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Character and Emotional Resonance in the New Series If any claim for aesthetic shift in the new Doctor Who is justified, it is the assertion that character has become much more important, if not central, to storytelling. Since there is no shortage of psychologically credible protagonists in the classic series, it is important to qualify this. Today, character seems to be conceived quite specifically in terms of psychodrama: quasi-realist pathos and angst are much more in evidence than in the classic series. Nor is it only the tenor of character delineation which has to some extent changed. Characters’ roles within the construction of narrative have altered, too. Apart from a handful of the episodes featuring Ace, the classic series barely made an ongoing character’s personal growth or selfrecognition crucial to the unfolding of a storyline. Without wishing to privilege the supposedly more ‘serious’ characterization in the revived series, I should like to explore some of the ways in which the self-consciously new approach to character has modulated key aesthetic traits of Doctor Who. Surreal apposition is deployed as fully in the new series as the classic, but it is more often used to heighten the emotional force of a dramatic situation than simply to excite wonder or create frisson. One of the most densely fantastical of all Doctor Who texts is ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’ (2006), yet it is first and foremost a touching story of frustrated hopes and ill-starred love, which represents a new kind of epic vignette in Doctor Who (at least on television). ‘Girl’ is set in part in eighteenth-century France, at the various homes of Madame de Pompadour, and in part on a moribund spaceship in the far future which turns out to be named the Madame de Pompadour. Having cannibalized the crew’s bodily organs to restore its failing systems, the ship’s computer has decided, with the flawed reasoning of machine logic, that its self-repair can best be completed by incorporating the brain of the real Madame de Pompadour. To this end, the ship opens up ‘magic doors’ to the past – portals which, in a Lewis Carrollesque touch, typically emerge in fireplaces and mirrors – and sends clockwork repair droids to harvest the vital organ. ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’ has an abundance of surreal spectacle: the grisly sight of human body parts grafted into the ships’ systems, the abrupt shifts from hi-tech to Rococo surroundings, and the uncanny presence of the clockwork men in both worlds. Yet there

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are also disjunctions in the flow of time between the two environments, which make for another kind of surreal contrast. From the point of view of the Doctor and his companions, the story unfolds almost in real time, but the episode also offers a telescoped account of the life of Madame de Pompadour, or Reinette, as she is generally called in the script. The time portals created for the clockwork men emerge at various points in her life, as they search for the most favourable moment to take her fully matured brain. The audience, like the Doctor, experiences Madame de Pompadour’s life through a series of vignettes from childhood through her years as Louis XV’s mistress to her early death. The creepy clockwork men give physical form to the conceit upon which the whole story is an extended reverie. The story is about time, and more particularly about the rapid passage of time, the fragility and evanescence of life. Ultimately the play of surreal conceits and the bewildering shifts across centuries and light years serve to bring this sobering theme into sharp relief. If the confused spaceship computer is living a half-life, so in a sense is Reinette: she is constrained by her gender, and lonely in spite of all the extraordinary power and influence she wields as mistress to the King of France. And perhaps for the first time in Doctor Who’s television history the events of an episode serve to highlight the Doctor’s own lonely half-life. Although he too is a powerful being, who walks in eternity, all human existence is correspondingly fleeting for him and all intimacy with humans painfully transient. The contrast between the Doctor’s experience of time and that of his human friends is poignantly clarified at the denouement. Having left Reinette’s world only for a moment, the Doctor finds at his return that the other side of the ‘magic door’ has moved on in time again; he arrives to witness her funeral cortège leaving Versailles. Here, then, the epic vignette does not adumbrate the rise or fall of civilizations, the fates of empires or the outcomes of wars, but rather the life of a particular individual. Steven Moffat’s dialogue and Sophia Myles’s delicately judged performance as Reinette evoke a complex, witty, intellectually curious and perceptive woman who in her thoughts, at least, exceeds the limitations imposed upon her by her society and its worldview. While it is exceptional even among new-series episodes in encompassing almost a whole lifespan, in other ways ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’ typifies the propensity of

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writers for new Doctor Who to construct plot around character. It would be a mistake to imply that all or even the best of the new series depends on ‘depth’ of characterization, but it seems fair to say that motifs of this kind represent the new series’ most distinctive variation on the established aesthetic of the original television series.

Sound Worlds To some extent, the Big Finish Doctor Who audios have also often focused more on the intimate and interpersonal than the epic. In addition to serious attempts to investigate relationships between the Doctor and his companions, perhaps best sustained in the case of Evelyn Smythe, the audio plays have also, as noted in Chapter Three, incorporated powerful character studies of some of the Doctor’s best known enemies such as Omega, Davros and the Master (2003). This emphasis on character in part reflects the demands of the radio medium. The evocative potential of the Big Finish productions clearly depends on their appeal to a single sense – namely, hearing. For the action to be involving and transparent, the cast of characters must be strongly drawn and their dialogue discreetly informative. Spectacle, in the strict meaning of the word, is by definition always ‘off-stage’ in audio plays. Moreover, the intelligibility of the drama is potentially compromised if there is too much action without explanatory, or at least correspondent, dialogue. Consequently the wordiness of the original television series is inevitably amplified in audio productions. Yet this is not to suggest that words, or sound at large, cannot be used in suggestive rather than expository ways. The aesthetic tours de force of the Big Finish range are texts in which the Doctor Who idiom is in its essential features upheld and sometimes extended in purely auditory terms, epic vignettes and all. One of the most compelling Doctor Who narratives in any medium is ‘Spare Parts’ (2002), the ‘prequel’ to ‘The Tenth Planet’ (1966), which charts the decline of Mondas and the consequent rise of the Cybermen. The story plays to Doctor Who’s traditional strengths, and that of the audio medium, by portraying the collapse of a whole

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society via the experiences of a handful of boldly sketched characters. The power of the epic vignette here derives from the way in which ‘Spare Parts’ appeals to a queasy form of nostalgia: the story evokes a familiar past by drawing selectively on representations of contemporary Britain in 1950s and 1960s radio, film and television, not least Doctor Who itself. ‘Spare Parts’ begins with a pastiche of 1950s news broadcasts in which a stiltedly cheery, Movietone-style newsreader seems to be celebrating a cosmonaut’s first foray into space. Yet it quickly becomes clear that the pioneer is travelling not into space but onto the surface of Mondas, evidently from beneath. In one of the most stunning examples of surreal apposition in Doctor Who, writer Marc Platt set the action of ‘Spare Parts’ in what is, to all intents and purposes, a Victorian-cum-post-war city built in a gigantic cave. Since the denizens of the supposedly wandering planet could not have survived on the surface without solar heat, Platt’s logic is impeccable, but the real delight of the device lies less in its narrative credibility than the expressive possibilities it affords. The comfortingly ‘traditional’ trappings of trams and cinemas, churches and grand municipal buildings are repeatedly rendered strange by verbal allusions to the rock ceiling above them. Unsurprisingly, the makers of ‘Spare Parts’ did not shy away from post-war media stereotypes in differentiating the cast of colourful characters. Thus the salt-of-the-earth working-class Hartley family who befriend the Doctor and Nyssa have ‘northern’ (i.e. hybrid Lancashire-Yorkshire) accents. By sharp contrast both the cynical Doctorman Allen, mastermind of the cyber-conversion program, and her chief selector, the sanctimonious nun Sisterman Constant, speak ‘the Queen’s English.’ There again, the sly dealer in bodily organs, Thomas Dodd, has a wheedling cockney drawl appropriate for his ghoulishly Dickensian character. Starkly set against this nearcaricatural array of accents and timbres are the deadpan tones of the Cybermen. The vocal effects for the Cybermen contribute to another strand of the uneasy nostalgia in ‘Spare Parts.’ Rather than use the booming baritone which had become standard for the Cybermen in the 1980s, Nicholas Briggs recreated two distinct, ‘historic’ Cybermen voices from the mid-1960s (as he had done with the Daleks in ‘The Mutant Phase’ and elsewhere). Appropriately enough, the singsong

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‘Tenth Planet’ intonations were used for the rank-and-file-suited Cybermen, while the electronic monotone of the Cyberplanner from ‘The Wheel in Space’ was adapted for the all-powerful Committee. On television much of the Cybermen’s impact had always derived from their dominating physical presence. Yet the sheer strangeness of the vocal effects makes the Cybermen in ‘Spare Parts’ unprecedentedly chilling. Furthermore, the ‘period’ character of their voices compounds the pervasive motif of the familiar colliding with the unfamiliar. Lushly evocative as ‘Spare Parts’ is in so many ways, the difficulty with an audio drama such as this is that some of the epochmaking incident almost inevitably has to be reported by one or more of the characters in a manner which may all too easily seem crudely expository. For example, the partial collapse of Mondas’s city roof – the kind of epoch-making disaster essential to an ‘end-ofdays’ story – is described for the listener in dialogue which cannot help but seem awkwardly dry and stilted in comparison with the Grand Guignol luxuriance of the rest of the sonic experience. While this does not detract much from the effectiveness of ‘Spare Parts’, it does highlight the fact that in these audio dramas the majority of action ideally needs to derive from dialogue rather than the other way around. In other words, where there is no overt excuse for pure description – as there is for example in ‘LIVE 34’ (2005), which is cast in its entirety as a radio news magazine – the epic vignette must be primarily a function of character. Whereas ‘Spare Parts’ pushes to the limits that which can be achieved without visual imagery, there are a number of Big Finish productions like ‘LIVE 34’ in which writers have played with the possibilities and limitations of sound within the narrative itself. Perhaps the most brilliant exploitation of the audience’s ‘blindness’ is that in ‘The Natural History of Fear’ (2004). Here it seems that the Eighth Doctor and his companions have been brainwashed into becoming members of a hidebound, authoritarian society. In fact, it turns out in the last couple of minutes that the characters voiced by Paul McGann et al are not our heroes at all, but members of an arthropod species who have become invested with aspects of the Doctor’s and his companions’ personalities. Meta-narrative and narrative allusions to sound itself were introduced very early in the monthly series, and have remained a

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consistent motif. The third and fifth releases, ‘Whispers of Terror’ (1999) and ‘The Fearmonger’ (2000) are concerned respectively with an archive of recordings in a sound library and with radio broadcasts. The ‘monster’ in ‘Whispers of Terror’ is actually the consciousness of a murdered man who lives on purely within sound waves. ‘Invaders from Mars’ (2002) is built around Orson Welles’s infamous ‘panic’ radio broadcast of War of the Worlds (CBS, 1938), and as already noted ‘LIVE 34’ (2005) is cast entirely in the form of a round-the-clock radio news programme with the Doctor and his companions being heard only as interviewees. On a slightly different tack, the extraordinary ‘... ish’ (2002) is concerned wholly with words. It is set in a lexicographer’s conference, a sentient book is among its chief protagonists, and the universe-threatening entity which the Doctor must ultimately overcome is the Omniverbum, a transcendental word so dense in meaning that it can warp the fabric of reality. Of the audio adventures in which sound itself is a central motif, the most economical and surely the most affecting is ‘Urgent Calls’ (2007), written by Eddie Robson. This was the first of Big Finish’s irregularly issued miniature plays, cast in the form of a single, halfhour instalment of the classic series. Robson’s prototype is an especially nice exercise in vignette building and in strikingly original use of Doctor Who’s key aesthetic conceits. ‘Urgent Calls’ consists almost entirely of telephone conversations between the Doctor (Colin Baker) and a young woman named Lauren Hudson (Kate Brown). Their first interaction appears to be coincidental. Lauren misdials her mother’s number and the Doctor, who is outside the public phone box she has inadvertently rung, decides to answer. When a second misdial puts Lauren in touch with the Doctor again, he realizes that none of this has happened by chance. Both he and Lauren have an engineered virus of alien origin, which is transmitted along the phone lines. This virus causes its sufferers subconsciously to make a mistake when next using the phone, generating apparent coincidences. Surmising that it was designed for military application, the Doctor stamps the virus out, his success tacitly indicated by the fact that his periodic telephone encounters with Lauren cease. Steve Foxon’s sound editing in ‘Urgent Calls’ clearly places the listener ‘beside’ Lauren, while the Doctor is heard only as she would hear him, a little fuzzily at the other end of the line. For all these

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self-imposed restrictions, ‘Urgent Calls’ possesses remarkable evocative richness. Indeed, were one making claims for ‘intensity’ as an aesthetic criterion for Doctor Who, this deceptively dense episode might well be adduced to support the argument. It is a prima facie example of the small-scale vignette with epic overtones: within the first five minutes the Doctor has given Lauren advice which prevents her from being killed by a cybernetic parasite and by the end he has eliminated the alien telephone virus. There is also surreal apposition of the commonplace and the unexpected: not only is the virus spread by telephone, but it has the effect of bringing good luck to those who contract it. Above all, ‘Urgent Calls’ offers a gorgeous example of Doctor Who’s harlequinade pleasures, for it is a particularly well-honed vehicle for the Sixth Doctor. Indeed, it is hard to imagine this scenario working so well with any other performer in the role. Colin Baker’s buoyant performance style and crisp delivery ensure that his character is a powerful dramatic presence even though his aural presence is necessarily muted. The script abounds with opportunities for Baker to explore all the verbal nuances and mannerisms of his Doctor: the impatience and sharp putdowns, the unrepentant oblivion of social niceties, the love of literary quotation and the interludes of gruff kindliness are all to the fore. In particular, Robson captures the Sixth Doctor’s abrupt shifts from incisive reasoning to infuriating literalness, as in this delightful exchange:

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Lauren:

You can’t catch a virus from someone by talking to them on the phone.

The Doctor:

No virus from Earth, no; but this is an engineered virus, created by technology far in advance of anything you can imagine.

Lauren:

But how can it be?

The Doctor:

Well, can you imagine how technology like that might work?

Lauren:

Well no, but ...

The Doctor:

Well there you are then.

Lauren:

No, I mean if it’s not of this Earth, how did I catch it? What’s it doing here?

The Doctor:

Oh – oh, I see. I don’t know. That’s what I intend to find out.

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While it makes concentrated use of recurrent aesthetic motifs in Doctor Who, ‘Urgent Calls’ is also unusual by virtue of its sonic austerity. There is no incidental music apart from brief cadential phrases on guitar and vibraphone between phone calls. More significantly, perhaps, there are none of the weird, uncanny or quite simply loud sound effects associated with Doctor Who. Apart from diegetic music in two scenes, the audience only hears mundane noises, such as the rattle of Lauren’s keys and the sound of the telephone being dialled. The extra-terrestrial menaces – the aliens responsible for the virus, and those who had infected Lauren with a cybernetic parasite – play no direct role. Even the parasite is not an aural presence: Lauren merely describes what she saw after it was surgically removed from her spine. The parasite is therefore doubly removed from the audience, out of earshot as well as sight. Part of the epic element in ‘Urgent Calls’ is displaced to events reported rather than heard, but in another sense the play merely emphasizes the fact that the Time Lord himself is Doctor Who’s primary embodiment of the epic. Here, more insistently than in almost any of the television episodes or even the novels, the audience is asked to identify with the wonderment of a character who is encountering the Doctor for the first time, as Lauren is afforded her tantalizing glimpse of the otherworldly. ‘Urgent Calls’ powerfully evokes the sense that the Doctor, no less than the TARDIS, is a kind of ‘gateway’ to realms of the imagination and adventure.

The Novels and Short Stories In television and audio productions the evocation of the Doctor’s magical persona is primarily a shared responsibility for performer and writer (albeit with interpretive filters and inflections by costume designer, director, and so on). In printed Doctor Who texts, this is clearly not the case: the writer alone must bring the Doctor to life. This may seem to be a truism, but its importance as a factor in the aesthetic formation of Doctor Who novels and short stories cannot be overstated. Whatever their variations in tone and tenor, the print narratives’ distance from Doctor Who’s medium of origin means that they must all the more insistently acknowledge that source. Ironically, the harlequinade motif is in many ways more central

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to the aesthetic character of printed than performed Doctor Who texts. There is a corollary point, which will form much of the basis of my discussion in this final section of the chapter. Because the re-establishment of character or the tone of a particular ‘era’ of the television series, past or present, is so important in the Doctor Who novels and short stories, they are always in some measure homage or pastiche. By virtue of the fact that key cast members have crossed from television to audio, the same cannot apply to the Big Finish productions in toto. Except in a few notable cases such as ‘Spare Parts’ the audios are better described as supplements to the original series than as homages. This distinction is not meant to be one of value: indeed, I should like to stress at once that I do not use the terms homage and pastiche in a remotely judgmental sense. Drawing on Richard Dyer’s recent critical reassessment of pastiche, I am going to suggest that novels making extensive use of this mode are among the most richly nuanced examples of Doctor Who in print fiction. Even so, it is necessary to enter a caveat. Homage and pastiche are both inherently derivative, and the latter, in particular, generally has negative connotations. True, under particular, rarefied conditions homage has served as the basis for legitimate ‘high’ art during the modernist period, and postmodernist literature has to some extent embraced pastiche. Yet imitation generally runs counter to a still-powerful critical expectation for originality in the arts. In particular, formal sophistication and innovation, variously defined, have been prime criteria for evaluating any fiction with literary pretensions throughout the last century, and thus for separating the good or worthwhile from the merely popular. Nor are such values any longer just a matter of academic or peer prejudice; fan criticism of print Doctor Who now increasingly addresses the quality of prose as well as plot.232 In this discussion of the Doctor Who short stories and novels I have very deliberately not adopted formal innovation as an aesthetic standard. The equation between excellence and originality is grossly exclusionary, for it in effect relegates to secondary significance (or oblivion) anything but highly original and ‘progressive’ works. Even putting aside the difficulty of defining originality – which always necessitates defining a pedestrian or conservative antipode – such

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a standard is almost meaningless in relation to narratives such as Doctor Who, which are inherently repetitive or serial. Doctor Who stories are always already part of a larger textual set, and there are many ways in which they can be effective (and beautiful) entries in the extended chain of narrative without espousing formal difficulty or daring. Yet the novels and short stories have inevitably depended on some measure of narrative innovation, or at least departure from the television series’ precedent. The tempo, rhythms and cadences of ninety- or forty-five-minute stories are not constraints for the novelist, nor have they generally proven useful structural parameters for the writers of these stories. Beyond the fact that an author’s flights of imagination are not circumscribed by practicalities, the novels allow for new kinds of density and complexity. By the same token, the short stories demand a particularly focused intensity; among the performed texts of Doctor Who, this intensity has been approached only by a few of the half-hour miniatures in the audio series. The short stories may be inherently brief, but their length does not necessarily limit their conceptual or structural scope. On the contrary, they can be effective vehicles for playing not only with Doctor Who’s convolutions of time but also its internal contradictions, paradoxes and uncertainties as a narrative. An especially captivating example of this is Paul Magrs’s ‘Femme Fatale’ (1999), which places the maverick time traveller Iris Wildthyme in late 1960s New York in the ambit of Andy Warhol’s Factory. Amplifying Iris’s established status as an unreliable narrator,233 the story presents us with non-chronological, seemingly jumbled variations of the same events. The Doctor and Sam Jones encounter Iris at the Factory and later in Paris both as themselves and, in perplexingly parallel passages, as a pair of ultra-suave, crime-fighting heroes à la Steed and Cathy Gale of The Avengers. Both pairs get caught up in Valerie Solanas’s attempted murder of Warhol. Mostly told in the first person by Iris, it is unclear which ‘reality’ in ‘Femme Fatale’ is the central one, since one (or perhaps more) of the strands involves the Doctor’s rewriting Iris’s memoirs with the assistance of the Marquis de Sade, Gustave Flaubert and Gertrude Stein. At heart, the story is a journey between genres and images representative of the 1960s, an engrossing palimpsest in which the trajectory is as unimportant

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as it is uncertain. The story serves as a reminder that one of the delights of Doctor Who is the way in which its texts can embody unforeclosed possibility. The kind of playfulness embodied in ‘Femme Fatale’ is ideally suited to the short-story form, where grand narrative architectures do not have to be supported. This is not to suggest that boldly signalled self-awareness is out of place in the novels. On the contrary, I shall argue below that pastiche, which of its nature draws attention to itself, is a defining aesthetic feature of some of the most engaging novels in the various ranges. Yet it is conversely important to stress that the majority are classically seamless and unobtrusive in their style of narration and that there is no dichotomy between the power of the narrative to involve and its capacity to be thoughtprovoking. One of the most intricate and demanding of the EDAs, Mags L. Halliday’s ‘History 101’ (2002) is based upon a taut, simple conceit which is played out in different ways and developed for the most part through carefully managed passages of description. The premise is that ‘if the perception of history is controlled or changed ... it’s as dangerous as changing history itself.’234 The point of departure for ‘History 101’ is Picasso’s Guernica, which the Doctor and his companions view in its originally intended context, the Spanish Pavilion at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1937. Experiencing it as somehow ‘wrong’ (and, ironically, less powerful than a mass-print copy on the cover of a paperback history book), the Doctor realizes that some force is altering the perception of the event which formed the basis for the painting, and thus also perception of the painting itself. Taking the TARDIS to civil-war-torn Spain, the Doctor sends Fitz to observe the bombing of the town of Guernica firsthand, while he and Anji become involved with a communist circle in Barcelona. This loose-knit group is being menaced by an insane ‘Absolute’, an alien being intent on restrictively cataloguing historical events. In a nice paradox, the catalyst for the Absolute’s derangement is the untimely presence of the Doctor, but the creature is further – and maddeningly – confused by the multiple differing perceptions of events among the Spanish populace. Consequently it is seeking to influence perceptions, and thereby the course of the struggle, in order to make history consistent and orderly. The Doctor, in his own memorable phrase, has to restore anarchy to history.

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Halliday’s core conceit comes to expression in her dense and involved story in various ways. I should like briefly to pursue just one here, namely the manipulation of conflicting historical narratives of the Guernica event within the novel’s own narrative. This depends for its impact on the fact that the story is print rather than screen fiction. In the case of the Guernica episode, Fitz witnesses three versions of the event simultaneously, though for comprehensibility these are separated out into three separate passages. Appropriately, the last of these – in which (following German propaganda) retreating Republicans rather than German bombers destroy the town – is the perception favoured and therefore forced by the Absolute. The recurrence of a ‘cue’ phrase (‘He glanced at his watch. 4 p.m.’) signals each recapitulation of Fitz’s experience, and the effectiveness of the variation depends in part on the reader’s not only recognizing its purpose but also being able to turn back to compare each variant with the others.235 In short, this is the kind of slow-fuse device that depends on the conventions and possibilities of reading as an act. ‘History 101’ digs deep into the heartland concerns of Doctor Who: the flow of time and possibility. Yet, to return to the point I made at the beginning of this section, what defines this and any other novel idiomatically as Doctor Who is ultimately not the concerns and conceits of the individual story. Rather it is the combination of those story-specific motifs with credible portrayal of the recurring main characters, above all the Doctor. Whatever the particularities of a novel’s scenario, it is always first and foremost the Doctor’s adventure; events are primarily engaging because they happen to or around him, and it is as a believable instance of his exploits that a Doctor Who novel will succeed. The challenge of realizing the Doctor as he appeared on screen varies a good deal in nature, and import, from performer to performer. In the case of the Eighth Doctor, there is a peculiar difficulty. On the one hand, EDA writers enjoyed unprecedented freedom since this incarnation’s character was relatively undeveloped in Paul McGann’s sole, brief screen appearance. Yet conversely, authors had to work within the constraint that every portrayal should in principle relate discernibly to that single performance, and this challenge inevitably increased as time went by. Later authors had to portray an Eighth Doctor who somehow came across as older but still credibly possessed the most ‘essential’ of his mannerisms

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and traits – above all, perhaps, his intangible aura of melancholy and his flashes of disarming and seemingly unselfconscious charm. Particularly successful examples include Halliday’s text and Simon Bucher-Jones and Kelly Hale’s ‘Grimm Reality’ (2001) discussed in the next chapter. The need to make the Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh Doctors of the ‘New Series Adventures’ as evocative as possible of their screen personae has been driven not by lack of source material but by the fact that the NSAs are being published concurrently with broadcasts rather than superseding them. Since the Doctor Who ‘brand’ is more prominent and thus more tightly reined than ever before, there is clearly an expectation that the novels be tonally commensurate with the television series. Furthermore, in the earlier NSAs the enormously popular Rose Tyler was subject to the same imperatives as the Doctor, whereas the Seventh and Eighth Doctors’ companions, even in the few cases where they hailed from the television Doctor Who, could in principle (as with Ace) be radically altered as the book series evolved further and further away from the television programme. Ironically, then, the NSAs have to be conceived in much the same spirit of reconstructive precision as many of the PDAs and MAs. The baseline property of the NSAs, one might say, is to render effective homage to the television ‘original.’ A prime example is Stephen Cole’s delicious novel ‘The Monsters Inside’ (2005), a story of the Slitheen and one of their rival families, the Blathereen, who have by characteristic use of disguise and guile taken over a prison colony for their own nefarious ends. Here, the chronological distance between source and homage was very short indeed: the book was published during the revived Doctor Who’s first triumphant season on television (within weeks of the Slitheen’s first television appearance), and was one of a cluster of novels meant to round out the adventures of Rose Tyler and the Ninth Doctor. The mixture of visceral horror, absurdity, pathetic sentiment, scatological humour, and the breakneck pace of the action all combine to conjure powerfully Russell T. Davies’s vision of Doctor Who, and the spot-on characterization of the abrasive Ninth Doctor crackles with Eccleston’s dangerous energy. Yet this is not homage for its own sake: the primary function of Cole’s beautifully judged tonal mimicry was surely to maintain the integrity of the brand.

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Not all the novels’ allusion to the tone of Doctor Who on television seems like straightforward homage; indeed, one could argue that the evocation in ‘The Monsters Inside’ is almost hyperbolic. With this in mind, it seems important to make distinctions between homage, parody and pastiche, all of which have been employed as modes of allusion in the Doctor Who texts. In his recent study, Pastiche, Richard Dyer carefully distinguishes between forms of textually signalled imitation, pointing out that pastiche differs from homage and parody in that it implies no value judgment of its source.236 Homage always entails positive appreciation of a past work or its makers, while parody is a negative critique of a work or genre, which lampoons, satirizes and ridicules.237 By contrast pastiche need not imply either positive or negative stance towards the object of imitation, though it will draw attention to the reference by means of selecting and exaggerating or accentuating elements in the template.238 In discussing the point of pastiche, Dyer argues that by virtue of its evaluative openness and its studied exaggeration or emphasis of recapitulated motifs, it ‘sets in play our relationship to the past’, mobilizing feelings associated with particular cultural conventions from a given historical moment even as it signals that it is doing so.239 Dyer’s model of pastiche – textually signalled imitation which ‘deforms’ its source by selective exaggeration or concentration – seems aptly to describe a great swathe of material from the classic series of Doctor Who during the heyday of its popularity in the 1970s. The wholesale mining of the horror genre during the period when Robert Holmes was script editor and frequent scriptwriter (1974–1977) was often meant to stimulate many of the same emotions as the old Hammer and Universal films from which writers ostentatiously borrowed. However, this material savoured of pastiche rather than pure homage because of the way that it distilled and accentuated motifs, often conflating more than one source. To take a single example, ‘The Brain of Morbius’ (1976) combined the man-centred Gothicism of Frankenstein with the woman- centred Gothicism of She, admixing the central device from They Saved Hitler’s Brain (David Bradley, 1968). The story places the Doctor and his companion between a former Time Lord dictator, Morbius, and a sisterhood guarding the source of an elixir of eternal life. Morbius lives on only as a brain, temporarily preserved in nutrients; his

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acolyte, the surgeon Solon, is constructing a new body which he wants to top off with the Doctor’s head. The Frankenstein motif is visually exaggerated in Roland Warne’s costume design for the monster, not only through the fact that it is very visibly stitched together from different body parts but also through the fusion of an array of different alien physiologies: the body’s right arm, for example, is a huge crustacean’s claw. One might cite half a dozen other serials exhibiting this kind of synthetic pastiche, combining source material in one case from Quatermass and The Thing from Another World (Christian Nyby, 1951); in another, The Phantom of the Opera and Fu Manchu; in yet a third Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Forbidden Planet; and so on.240 Although social satire periodically made an appearance in Doctor Who, true parody was less a feature of the classic series. It has subsequently manifested with gusto, however, in audios, novels and the new television series. Well-known game shows, for example, were mercilessly sent up both in the new series episode ‘Bad Wolf’ (2005) and the audio serial ‘The One Doctor’ (2001), while the smug platitudes of the Star Trek franchise have come in for a drubbing in both the novel ‘The Blue Angel’ (1999) and the audio serial ‘Bang-Banga-Boom’ (2002), the latter also taking an extended pot-shot at Space 1999 (ATV, 1975–1977) and the Eurovision Song Contest.241 What has newly emerged in the novels (and one or two of the Big Finish audios) is that a central object of imitation, whether homage, pastiche or parody, has become Doctor Who itself. The very concept of the PDAs/MAs has encouraged the production of texts which render pure homage to the past, in affectionate, ‘straight’ recapitulation of templates drawn from Doctor Who’s classic series. This has proven particularly true for the eras of lead actors who are unwilling or unable to extend their eras by reprising their roles in audio plays (which is to say the deceased Hartnell, Troughton and Pertwee, and until 2009 also the elusive Tom Baker). The most clear-cut pastiches, and also some of the richest of the Doctor Who novels altogether, are those in which the pastiche is appositionally doubled. These are often stories in which evocation of a particular moment of Doctor Who’s history is juxtaposed with a generic or textual reference to something outside the series. In a manner typical of Doctor Who, these juxtapositions can be startling, surreal, and enjoyably incongruent. They generally involve evoking the manners

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and mannerisms of a particular configuration of the TARDIS crew, while placing these characters within a scenario which is stylistically unlike any from their own ‘era’ in Doctor Who. One of the most striking examples of appositional doubling is Stephen Cole’s ‘Ten Little Aliens’ (2002). As its title suggests, this is a story very deliberately in the mode of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (aka Ten Little Indians), in that protagonists die one by one at the hand of forces only gradually discerned by the survivors. The opening chapter introduces a hard-bitten squad of ‘bughunting’ space commandos about to embark on what is supposed to be a simulated mission, though their quarry ultimately turns out to be all too real. The overtones of militarized monster movies of the 1980s such as Predator (John McTiernan, 1987) and Aliens (James Cameron, 1986) (which also draw on Christie’s attrition formula) are immediately clear to anyone familiar with this movie genre. The louche commandoes in Cole’s book clearly reflect the posturing and banter of the assault team in Aliens. One of the squad, Shel, even proves to be a cyborg, recalling the covert android operatives in the Alien movies. The down-and-dirty, hyper-macho, post-Vietnam imagery of these Hollywood blockbusters is vividly suggested, and starkly set against it is a ‘classically’ English TARDIS crew from the mid-1960s. Alongside the schoolmasterly First Doctor are the cockney sailor Ben and the elegant, upper-middle-class Polly. At the time of their introduction into the television series in 1966, Ben and Polly had been meant to embody two different aspects of ‘with-it’ youth,242 and both were correspondingly dated as media and social stereotypes by the early 2000s. Cole plays up the contrast of styles to the maximum, even to the extent of having the Doctor and his companions initially kitted out in the now-risible ‘futuristic’ spacesuits from the TARDIS stores, seen on television in ‘The Moonbase’ (1967), which are splendidly at odds with the hi-tech combat gear of the commandos: Ben felt a bit of a prat in his new astronaut gear. It was more like a wetsuit than a spacesuit, and made from a dull green quilted material which felt a little too snug for comfort in all the wrong areas. The worst of it was the headgear; like looking out from a crystal ball.243

By choosing to make the outfits brightly coloured (Polly’s is daffodil yellow, the Doctor’s blue) where they had obviously been

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of indeterminate hue in the black-and-white ‘Moonbase,’ and by indicating Ben’s discomfort, Cole frames the whole device while simultaneously milking it for its splendid redolence of this more ‘innocent’ era of Doctor Who. Yet ‘Ten Little Aliens’ is not merely a cerebral exercise in the juxtaposition of trappings and manners, coolly equating early Doctor Who with amusing naïveté. On the contrary, the book resonates fully with Dyer’s claim that pastiche ‘imitates formal means that are themselves ways of evoking, moulding and eliciting feeling’ (my italics), permitting us to be touched by affective conventions while at the same time making us aware of those conventions.244 In Cole’s book the apposition of divergent sensibilities allows for contrasting personal vignettes. In the case of the commandoes, we are allowed glimpses of the epic interstellar war and the military way of life which has emotionally crippled them; in Ben’s and Polly’s, we gain insight into the kinds of social expectations and blind-spots which have, for better or worse, shaped their class and gender identities in 1960s Britain. It is to the latter that I now briefly turn. Both Polly’s and Ben’s dialogue – and their reported thoughts, which closely follow their speech patterns down to Ben’s cockney dialect – help to emphasize the extent to which they are not contemporary characters. For example, there are persistent, uncomfortable reminders that the essentially good-hearted Ben does not always partake of the more liberal attitudes of even his own time, as in his response when Polly (in the event presciently) describes the Asian lieutenant Shel as seeming robotic: ‘Confucius say, he inscrutable,’ Ben said cheerily. ‘Bet if we looked hard enough we’d find “Made in Taiwan” stamped on him somewhere.’ Polly didn’t smile back. ‘That’s racist, Ben.’ ‘Come on Pol, I didn’t mean nothing by it.’ ‘No one ever means anything by it, but they still make jokes all the same. Would you like to be treated like that?’245

Nor is Polly’s liberal progressiveness in any uncomplicated way a mark of emancipation. It becomes clear that she is painfully aware of, yet trapped in, the gender role of caregiver, assigned by a post-war British society still largely untouched by feminism. Cole intensifies

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the impact of this disclosure (as of Ben’s capacity for casual sexism) by the way it is framed. One chapter is cast in the form of ‘logs’ transcribed from data in the commandoes’ telepathic headsets, which the Doctor and his companions are also obliged to don. Each individual’s entries are thus in the first person plural (‘we’ rather than ‘I’). This not only honours the telepathically shared nature of the experience, but directly implicates the reader as a kind of voyeur. In the course of this section, we are privy to Polly’s thoughts about the self-pitying Shade, a commando with a guilty past who is clearly seeking emotional support, even absolution, from her. So many guys have looked at us that way over the bar ... at the end of the night. They’re tired, and all the possibilities of the night have flounced out in mini-skirts and high heels in someone else’s arms. They’ve cried on our shoulder, and when we’ve given them the right answers they want to take us home ... Except in the morning, those poor lost lambs would only want us to get them a cup of tea and shut the door on the way out.246

There is pathos in Polly’s recalling that Ben seemed preferable just because his brand of self-pity did not lead to such sexual advances: [Shade] places both his hands on our shoulders. Thinks his ship’s come in. The thought of Ben comes to us loud and clear. Ben missed his ship that first night we met. He looked at me across the bar, miserable as sin. Not calculating. Not weighing up his chances.247

The sudden, fleeting slippage from first-person plural to first-person singular adds to the poignancy of a passage already striking just because its wistfulness is so sharply contrasted with the raw tensions articulated in most of the commandoes’ ‘logs.’ In summary, then, ‘Ten Little Aliens’ exemplifies one of pastiche’s chief potential strengths, as Dyer sees it: the capacity to render past modes of feeling – or at least past conventions for the textual portrayal and evocation of feeling – simultaneously immediate and remote. Polly and Ben are anachronisms in more than the narrative sense that they do not belong in the future world of the story; in terms of stylistic and affective presentation, they

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themselves embody a past which for many readers is distant, and for some known only through cultural artefacts such as Doctor Who itself. Yet Polly’s and Ben’s very personal struggles with their 1960s worldview, weirdly framed by the futuristic militarism of the commando story, also seem disturbingly close, recalling Dyer’s contention that pastiche can ‘allow us to feel our connection to the affective framework, the structures of feeling, past and present, that we inherit and pass on.’248 In Doctor Who pastiche becomes such a rich expressive device, I would suggest, precisely because the Doctor Who idiom is one which inherently thrives on narrative contrasts. While Doctor Who, with its episodic, reiterative form, is generally unsuited to charting ongoing moral or social formation, and may indeed be able to treat relatively few of the messy complexities of life, it is extremely well suited to the kinds of touching or sobering vignette seen in Ben and Polly’s scenes in ‘Ten Little Aliens.’ I would argue that such vignettes are rendered all the more affective because they are set against events with global or cosmic implications. At their best, Doctor Who narratives renew familiar problems of defining and understanding emotional states and ethical choices by a process of vertiginous shift in perspective. It is to the worth of bringing the human and the suprahuman into suggestive apposition that I turn in the final chapter.

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VII TOWARDS AN ETHICS OF DOCTOR WHO

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began the last chapter with the question ‘Is Doctor Who any good?’ The correspondent opening question for this chapter might be ‘In the final analysis, what good is Doctor Who?’ In other words, do Doctor Who texts possess merit in any ‘larger’ or ‘deeper’ sense than being stylistically satisfying examples of a given genre or idiom? Are they likely to be beneficial to their audiences and readers beyond offering them transitory gratification? If scholars in the field of cultural studies have historically been squeamish about aesthetic evaluation, then in the humanities at large there is continuing suspicion of the kind of ethical evaluation which the above questions demand, in spite of various claims for a ‘turn to ethics’ in the last decade. Two main reasons for this resistance tend to be articulated in tandem. First, critics express an anxiety that a turn to ethics represents a turn away, a ‘retreat’ or even an ‘escape’ from politics.249 Second, the very term ‘ethical’ raises the spectre of dogmatic moral systems which are firmly tied to conservative or reactionary ideology. Thus, for example, Chantal Mouffe can describe what she sees as the ‘current infatuation with

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ethically correct good causes’ as the expression of a ‘moralizing liberalism ... filling the void left by the collapse of any project of real political transformation.’250 As I noted in the previous chapter, politics is almost entirely unchallenged as the ‘right’ basis for scholarly analysis of mass-media texts, and such politically based analysis in cultural studies and television studies has mostly taken a leftist stance. By extension, texts understood by critics to be politically compromised or retrograde – which in practice encompasses virtually all mass-media fiction – will almost certainly receive unfavourable judgment in such analyses. Ironically, this politically driven approach is in itself effectively moralizing: the ‘good’ is implicitly equated with the liberal, interrogative and counter-hegemonic, and the ‘bad’ with the reactionary, complacent and pro-hegemonic. However cool or detached the rhetorical stance of a particular commentator, political critique of mass-media texts tends to be essentially cautionary (if not actually denunciatory) in tone, as much of mine has been in earlier chapters of this book. If the moralizing-by-another-name of political analysis is the sole basis for evaluation, then it is virtually a foregone conclusion that the Doctor Who texts will be found wanting, or worse. As I have shown, Doctor Who has often been marked by cultural imperialism, endorsement of violence (however ostensibly reluctant), sexism and heteronormativity, and a white, patriarchal bias is endemic to the texts, often standing in stark opposition to Doctor Who’s supposed inclusiveness. Within the framework of politically based deconstruction, this catalogue of charges might seem terminally damning indeed. Useful though the key concerns of ideological analysis may be in revealing dissonances and inconsistencies in a text, unremitting exposure of flaws can make for a rather depressing critique and, worse, for a potentially redundant one. Much of the list of deficiencies above can be, and is, trotted out in relation to almost any allegedly liberal mass-media fiction of the last quarter century from Star Trek: The Next Generation to My So-Called Life (ABC, 1994–1995). There is little virtue in taking up another inch of library shelving with what amounts to another jeremiad against yet another popular text. Why offer critical commemoration of something if one believes it to be largely or entirely bad and, moreover, bad in ways which are not particularly distinctive? As I noted in the Introduction, my book

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is ultimately predicated on the idea that Doctor Who as a whole constellation of texts possesses merit; but this merit can only be characterized by expanding the critical frame beyond entrenched political positions. My attempt to define some of the ‘beauty’ of Doctor Who in the last chapter was a step towards reframing discussion of the texts, acknowledging some of their strengths within and across several media universes. It was more specifically a step towards the present chapter. Here I address issues which have sometimes been considered as a function of the aesthetic. As I noted in passing in Chapter Six, questions about the ultimate worth of aesthetic experience raised in Monroe Beardsley’s inquiry into the subject are essentially ethical, in that they extend beyond notions of taste and beauty and are concerned with notions of the good. Beardsley addresses not only the aesthetic qualities of a text or object and the way that these qualities are apprehended but also the ‘inherent value’ of art, which he sees as its improving potential for the individual and society.251 The purpose of this chapter is not so much to propose a more ‘essential’ kind of value in Doctor Who as to suggest certain ways in which the texts represent, in Lance Parkin’s lovely phrase, ‘the finest dreams of hundreds of human beings.’252 By way of a preface, it is worth addressing two possible objections to this project. One might well ask why it is really necessary to seek some kind of ‘good’ in Doctor Who beyond stylistic or idiomatic accomplishment; why, in other words, the texts of Doctor Who should be expected to edify within any value system, be it framed as ethical, political or moral. In an important and provocative recent essay, ‘The Burden of Culture’, Jonathan Sterne has cautioned against the critical tendency to consider all culture a form of political action, ‘good’ or ‘bad’; he suggests that a humane society should allow for ‘meaningless, non-directed activity that nonetheless uses human energy, effort and creativity.’253 Cannot Doctor Who texts simply be appreciated as an often-skilful, ludic entertainment, which at its best capitalizes on a premise rich in evocative and affective possibilities? It seems to me that an evaluation of Doctor Who in terms of stylistics alone does a disservice to the imaginative scope of the texts. Doctor Who was originally meant to be educational, or at least edifying.254 While there has been much change in both the

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ostensible purpose of the narrative and the standards by which it could be considered instructive, one marked and recurrent element in the texts of Doctor Who has been the capacity to frame difficult questions in surprising ways. Although it would be unreasonable to hold all the entries in a vast narrative to a single standard of sober and serious edification, several of Doctor Who’s prime aesthetic and idiomatic traits identified in the last chapter – surreal apposition, the epic vignette, pastiche, even harlequinade performativity – lend themselves to ethically rich storytelling, and the results deserve to be assessed as such. Having committed to this path, a second obstacle presents itself. If Doctor Who is culpable in so many ways that can be laid bare by political critique, are there really any ethical strengths which could outweigh, or even counterbalance, these deficiencies? As a basis for answering this, I should like to turn to an old and venerable metaphor resurrected by Wayne C. Booth in his study of the ethics of fiction, The Company We Keep: the conceit of the text as a friend or companion.255 There are a number of ways in which Booth’s arguments are intriguing and applicable in the present context, but for the present I want to adduce only one aspect of the friendship metaphor. We do not expect to find the same personal qualities and range of interests in all our friends, and we do not expect them to be faultless according to our own cherished values in order for the friendship to be sustainable. While Doctor Who may be demonstrably flawed from various critical standpoints, and while some of the texts – not least the new television series – may be in some ways more ideologically problematic than others, it should not necessarily follow that these weaknesses cancel out strengths, nor should the presence of these weaknesses be enough to condemn the Doctor Who texts out of hand. Few of us, I think, would be so quick to dismiss a real friendship on this basis. It is a function of the premium that academics place on critical thinking that we are a good deal more practised at the rhetoric of blame than that of praise. This habit of thought makes it all too tempting to work one’s way down the checklist of objectionable traits commonly identified in political critique, and by extension to assume that putting a tick in every box means that the text in hand ought to be condemned. Yet whether or not such an assumption is ever justified in relation to a single text such as a novel or film, it

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is surely unjustified in the case of an open-ended, media-crossing, vast narrative such as Doctor Who. None of Doctor Who’s qualities are circumscribed within a finite span of pages or a certain number of reels of tape or celluloid. In other words, the kind of friendship we can enjoy with a vast narrative is clearly of a very different order from the kind we may enjoy with The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949) or George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Our ongoing ‘conversation’ with the Doctor Who texts is not with a notional individual, for the texts are inherently multi-vocal. They do not present a single ‘implied author,’ to use Booth’s preferred term for the ideal author figure constructed within and defined by the text (as opposed to the real flesh-and-blood individual who produced it). Moreover, the array of voices which collectively construct Doctor Who is constantly in flux, with the passage of time and changes in production and consumption patterns. Our patience with certain Doctor Who authors may ebb and flow, and we may retrospectively single out periods or arenas of the texts’ development for censure. Yet it need not follow that perceived weaknesses undermine our overall sense of the narrative as a good companion, nor that localized faults irrevocably taint the whole. By extension, persistent weaknesses may on long acquaintance seem less important than the various strengths the texts exhibit over a period of years. If we accept that Doctor Who, with all its shortcomings, may yet be a ‘good friend’, it remains to determine how the value of this friendship can be ethically judged. It is important to emphasize at once that ethical evaluation need not involve jettisoning other perspectives. There is really no good reason to assume that ethics and politics are incompatible; I certainly seek here to build on, not overturn, the politically based judgments I made earlier in this book. It seems to me that fear of the supposed dichotomy between ethics and politics can in part be dispelled if we avoid conflating ethics with morality. In his essay ‘Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the Other,’ Derek Attridge carefully differentiates fundamental ethical demands, which entail engagement with the unpredictable subtleties of interpersonal relationships and responsibilities, from moral obligations enshrined in societal norms and institutions, which are inherently predictive and limiting.256 John Guillory similarly observes that the problem which ethical philosophy originally addressed, namely how to live, cannot be reduced to

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questions of moral imperatives and laws.257 While Guillory rightly points out that the distinction has become thoroughly blurred in popular awareness, this seems reason to continue seeking to clarify the difference between ethics and morality, not to sidestep the problem.

A Basis for Ethical Criticism As regards criteria for ethical judgment of the kind of ‘friendship’ that a text may offer, I think we can do much worse than use those suggested by Wayne Booth in The Company We Keep. I find Booth’s approach attractive because of its lack of portentous moral prescription: it is based on the assumption that, as he writes, ‘ethical distinctions do not depend on choices among the traditional moral virtues.’258 His model is a correspondingly flexible one, with the potential to accommodate a range of kinds of ‘companionship.’ As I shall depend a good deal upon Booth’s list of seven variable measures of literary friendship in the pages that follow, this list is worth quoting in extenso: Our reading friends [i.e. texts or implied authors] can vary: 1. in the sheer quantity of invitations they offer us; 2. in the degree of responsibility they grant to us – what we might call the level of reciprocity or domination between author and reader; 3. in the degree of intimacy in the friendship; 4. in the intensity of engagement that they expect or require – from total concentration to slack, comfortable, slowly-ripening acquaintance; 5. in the coherence, or consistency, of the proffered world; 6. in the distance between their worlds and ours, that is, in the familiarity or strangeness of the world we enter – the amount of rude challenge, or ‘otherness’ that they fling at our current norms; 7. in the kind, or range of kinds, of activities suggested, invited, or demanded – from a reassuring concentration on single-minded issues or formal patterns ... to a reconstruction and embrace of whole ‘worlds’ that seem to include every topic that our ‘real’ worlds include ... .259

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Although envisaged primarily in relation to single texts (or occasionally the whole output of single authors), Booth’s criteria can usefully serve as the basis for some initial comments about the vast narrative of Doctor Who in toto. For one thing, these criteria serve to highlight Doctor Who’s fluidity and instability. For example, the enormous quantity of material within the ongoing Doctor Who narrative is wildly incoherent in focus and tone, its ‘proffered world’ volatile as much in terms of affective or discursive qualities as in the lapses and contradictions at the level of overall plotting. Case studies of two contiguous entries in the textual set may yield strongly divergent judgements on the intensity of engagement, and the kind and range of activities which each demands – an effect which is likely to be amplified by comparing texts from different points in the Doctor Who’s evolution, or in different media. Take, for example, ‘Spare Parts’ and the following audio-serial release, ‘... ish.’ Marc Platt’s ‘Spare Parts’ draws on one of the richest seams of Doctor Who lore, the story and spectacle of the Cybermen, and is set in a world which is strongly evocative of England (or rather an ingrained myth of England) in the recent past. Whatever ‘otherness’ it may offer, the drama’s effect is bound to be most powerful for those with a prior familiarity with the Cybermen, and will probably work best for those who have lived with the Doctor Who texts for some time or at least with some intensity. ‘Spare Parts’ is certainly not for me (or, I suspect, for other long-term fans who have praised it, such as Russell T. Davies260) a slack, undemanding text, a story from which my attention can readily be distracted, even on the umpteenth hearing. Yet, what makes it compelling in large measure is my long-term, ‘ripened’ acquaintance with Doctor Who. Without this, I should not be able to appreciate, for example, how dissimilar ‘Spare Parts’ is to another origin story, ‘Genesis of the Daleks.’ ‘Spare Parts’ affords me a level of responsibility as a reader which the earlier, more sententious text, with its fixed and comfortingly simple rehearsal of given morality, did not. There is no metaphorical finger wagging, moralizing or lofty dispensing of received wisdom here: ‘Spare Parts’ invites me to engage in the same kind of interpretative challenge that the ‘implied author’ is himself grappling with as he delicately and compassionately explores the kinds of social struggles and crises which might eventually give rise to the horror of the Cybermen.

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While ‘... ish’ requires no less intensity of engagement, in other respects the text’s invitations to me are of a wholly different order from its immediate precursor, ‘Spare Parts.’ It is entirely selfcontained, the only elements persisting from elsewhere in Doctor Who’s textual universes being the Sixth Doctor and his companion Peri. Built around language, linguistics, and lexicographers, with a dramatis personae consisting mostly of scholars, word nerds and a particularly loquacious ‘talking book,’ Phil Pascoe’s ‘... ish’ is a tour de force of compression and internal coherence of ideas, and demands the closest possible attention to a succession of tightly interwoven concepts and virtuosic wordplay. For some, the implied author of ‘... ish’ might seem to adopt the stance of learned teacher, coolly informing listeners about a subject on which they may be relatively ignorant. By this reckoning, ‘... ish’ cannot be considered a text which involves listeners as ‘equals’ in the endeavour of reflection and interpretation. Yet with its glittering play of puns and quibbles, ‘... ish’ does offer intimacy of a kind. In order to keep up with the twists and turns of its reasoning, one must, as Booth would have it, accept an assignment as reader.261 If followed, this assignment will lead to a confident communion with the subtle thinking of the implied author, who poses vast questions about the ways in which language structures our experience of the cosmos. However, ‘... ish’ is ultimately a cerebral rather than a dramatically moving story. The nature of the engagement it demands and the intimacy it invites are therefore radically different in range and orientation from anything offered or required by ‘Spare Parts.’ By virtue of Doctor Who’s endurance, spread and above all its (productive) internal disunity, it might seem that the narrative’s ethical potential is all that can reasonably be subject to overall evaluation. Even here there is a difficulty, since there is no stable benchmark for judging how well this potential has been realized over the course of many years and across at least three different media. In light of this, I have chosen in the remainder of this chapter to discuss very few exemplary texts, since increasing the scope or number would not in itself yield more complete or conclusive results. Whereas in the chapter on aesthetics it was necessary to address the mediumspecific modalities of a set of specific, key traits, here I mean only to sketch some of the ways in which Doctor Who can be ethically rich, none of which is necessarily medium dependent.

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Inevitably, my choice of case studies here is informed by the historical moment in which I write, by my own intellectual formation and established preferences and by the arguments I have developed earlier in this book. As I have suggested throughout, the novels, audios and to some extent the revived television series have often demanded intensity of engagement from and placed responsibility upon reader or audience in a way that their alternately didactic, preachy or flippant predecessors in the classic series generally did not. Black-and-white moralizing has been largely superseded by subtler articulation of ethical problems. These more recent texts have stretched Doctor Who’s scope beyond the invention of a vivid secondary world of time travel, monsters and alien environments, raising more complex questions about our understanding of causality, the life and role of societies and individuals, and the nature and price of heroism. They are stories which often demand considerable reflection, both in themselves and in relation to earlier Doctor Who texts, and in many cases reward attentive repeated review in a way that serials from the classic series, envisaged only for single broadcast rather than as entries in a library, were not necessarily meant to do. Consequently, all three of my examples are drawn from these more recent texts. First, I discuss Iris Wildthyme, a character who has materialized in a range of Doctor Who media since 1998, invariably calling into question a variety of assumptions about the Doctor’s heroism and some of Doctor Who’s most enduring narrative formulae. Thereafter, I consider two specific stories: an episode from the fifth season of the new series, ‘The Beast Below’ (2010), and one of the EDA novels, ‘Grimm Reality’ (2001). Both of these stories invite a range of kinds of engagement, and yet both are distinguished by a marked degree of internal coherence. Inasmuch as it is a boon in terms of aesthetic and stylistic potential, the flexible, loose-knit character of the Doctor Who narrative also carries a powerful possibility for ethical renewal. The same has not historically been true for the rigidly mapped worlds in other longrunning transmedia narratives. It is striking that both the James Bond 007 movies and Star Trek have required a franchise ‘reboot’ in order to bypass expectation and bury precedent: in the case of Bond, this meant taking much of the attractive suaveness out of his sexism and casual violence, while Star Trek used a time-travel paradox as the basis for a revised version of its internal chronology, allowing new

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character and gender dynamics to be overlaid on the original.262 Yet even with the introduction of comparably bold devices such as the Last Great Time War in the new series and the destruction of Gallifrey in the EDAs, Doctor Who’s process of internal adjustment inevitably seems less extreme, because of the texts’ innate tendencies. Ethical or political realignment has not depended simply on revision, in the sense of overhauling existing elements. Because the palimpsestic character of Doctor Who is so ingrained, ethical shift can readily be achieved through accretion, with new elements being overlaid on the existing text to supplement or ‘correct’ it.

Iris Wildthyme A prime example of productively troubling addition to the Doctor Who universes is the character of Iris Wildthyme, who seems to be another time-travelling Gallifreyan. Originally invented by the author Paul Magrs for a non-Doctor Who novel, Iris first appeared in Magrs’ BBC-published Doctor Who stories in the late 1990s. She has now insinuated herself into the careers of five incarnations of the Doctor either in print or in audio dramas, creating an upset wherever she appears. To a greater extent than any of the Doctor’s female companions discussed in Chapter Five, Iris Wildthyme embodies a studied affront to some of the givens of the Doctor Who texts. This is not simply a matter of her gender or her actions within the narrative, as is the case for other challenging figures such as Ace or Amy. The kinds of narrative in which Iris is involved are for the most part thoroughly infused with her spirit of misrule, serendipity and irreverence. ‘The Scarlet Empress’ turns a fairy-tale quest into a road narrative set mostly in Iris’s TARDIS, which is permanently disguised as a double-decker London bus. ‘Verdigris’ concerns (among other things) alien invaders who mistakenly assume that they can seamlessly infiltrate earthly societies by impersonating characters from classic novels. ‘The Wormery’ finds Iris trying to get to the bottom of a mystery in a 1930s Berlin nightclub, a mission which (for complex reasons) makes it essential for her to drink copious amounts of ‘the house special.’ Most tumultuous of all is ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen,’ which concerns the denizens of Dogworld and their

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attempts to control a Tolkien-like novelist so that he writes his magnum opus, The True History of the Planets, about them. In the midst of this intricate plot we encounter Iris working as a nightclub singer in Las Vegas in 1960, carelessly performing a 1970s repertoire a decade prematurely, and just as carelessly bestowing time-travel equipment on her friend Noël Coward. It is easy to characterize Iris in terms of a series of oppositions with the Doctor. The Doctor has claimed to be ‘Time’s Champion,’ and has always been an itinerant arbiter for the oppressed and distressed: Iris is quite unabashedly travelling just for fun, downing endless G&T’s and listening to ABBA or Motown on an old tapedeck as she careens through space and time in her bus. The Doctor is asexual and often distant with Iris as with other friends and companions; Iris is irrepressibly sentimental, and openly carries a torch for the Doctor, expressing her affection with blunt sexual assertiveness. Whereas the Doctor’s companions mostly join him by design or accident, we know that Iris kidnaps some of hers and bullies them into staying with her, and she seems to have a particular penchant for attractive gays and lesbians, in contradistinction to the predominantly straight array of travellers in the Doctor’s TARDIS. Whereas the Doctor eschews weapons, Iris is quite prepared to use guns, including a World War One bazooka which she keeps in her bus, and a pink blaster which she carries almost as a fashion accessory. Whereas the Doctor is footloose and oriented always towards the future and the next adventure, Iris owns houses on many planet s, is profoundly nostalgic, records parts of her adventures on a camcorder and compulsively keeps a journal, in which, it turns out, she claims many of the Doctor’s adventures as hers. Yet it would be a mistake to treat Iris as a purely parodic figure, and a still greater mistake to understand the stories in which she appears simply as satires and spoofs, or even in any straightforward sense commentaries. Rather, Iris represents an ethical challenge by embodying and amplifying some of the main inconsistencies in the Doctor Who texts. In his influential essay ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’ Theodor Adorno proposed that the most productive art in the modern era would exhibit a negative aesthetic. For Adorno, the ‘successful work ... is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony

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negatively by embodying the contradictions ... in its innermost structure.’263 Against this, he set an ‘affirmative culture’ marked by kitschy sentiment, which he regarded as endemic to consumer society. Adorno argues that mass-cultural kitsch constantly upholds the ‘spurious harmony’ to which he so strongly objects. Iris Wildthyme, and the Doctor Who stories in which she appears, resonate powerfully with Adorno’s notion of the negative aesthetic. Without offering overt didactic judgment, they crystallize irreconcilable contradictions or elisions in the classic series (and also, to an extent, in the sometimes turgidly self-important NAs). Doctor Who as a whole, like Iris’s journals, is an unreliable narrative; the Doctor, as I have noted in earlier chapters, resembles Iris in that he is actually far from non-violent, is habitually reckless of his friends’ safety and oblivious of their prior lives and connections, and is heroic at a price of emotional and social immaturity. In many ways, then, Iris serves to magnify some of the Doctor’s unacknowledged characteristics at least as much as she stands in contrast to some of his other entrenched traits. Yet Iris’s most important attribute has been simply expressed by her creator, Paul Magrs: he commented in interview that Iris ‘can’t be seen as good or bad, she’s just muddling through.’264 If Iris commands affection as a character, it is because she is humanly endearing with all her foibles, not because she is impressive or noble. Indeed, Iris is so effective in raising troublesome ethical problems in Doctor Who precisely because she does not uphold certain norms, but by her behaviour and attitude opens up an interrogative space around them. She transgresses narrative conventions which unquestioningly celebrate as heroic the values of unbridled liberal paternalism but she cannot be coded as villainous or even in any absolute sense antiheroic. Some negative fan response would have it that Iris is an undermining or trivializing figure in Doctor Who, and that stories in which she features are among those which unacceptably diminish the Doctor’s heroic status. He certainly plays the role of companion to Iris (rather than the other way around) for much of ‘The Scarlet Empress’ and proves ineffectual in preventing inter-dimensional war in ‘The Blue Angel’, though not for want of trying. ‘The Blue Angel’ is controversial among fans in other ways pertaining to the Doctor’s status, for it denies the Doctor Who reader two of the principal recurring comforts of the texts: uncomplicated immersion

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in the ‘reality’ of the narrative world, and final, triumphal closure. The novel presents two contrasting universes, in one of which the Doctor is a mentally ill man, living in a terraced house in the northeast of England, who only fantasizes his time-and-space travelling adventures. The narrative strand in Doctor Who’s ‘real’ universe ends not with a neat denouement engineered by the hero but with twenty questions about the fate of the novel’s main characters. Although the interrogative non-conclusion in ‘The Blue Angel’ is wonderfully provocative, in terms of textual importance it should not be allowed to overshadow the other refusal of closure which occurs a little earlier in the same novel. At what ought to be the climax of the action with various antagonists converging for a bloody showdown, Iris whisks the Doctor away from the conflict. To his fury she deprives him of the opportunity to resolve the (clearly insoluble) crisis, and the text therefore deprives readers of the predictable delight of seeing how the hero will overcome insurmountable odds. The scene of battle from which the Doctor is torn is one of ghastly violence, and his removal from the situation intensifies the impact of this carnage rather than offering the comfortable anaesthesia of an ingenious or fortuitous victory. In other words, the non-conclusion tacitly draws attention to the ways in which closure in adventure narrative can be a kind of denial and occlusion, the expression of that ‘spurious harmony’ condemned by Adorno. Yet it would be quite wrong to see the Iris Wildthyme novels and audios as detached, cynical exercises in deconstruction. Iris is nothing if not a Saturnalian figure of delight, and most of the novels and short stories in which she appears exemplify ways in which Doctor Who can be brought into lively rather than deadening ethical dialogue with its own textual past and conventions, requiring readers to reflect on the norms of adventure narrative within an expanded frame. Indeed, though I have used Adorno’s concept of negative aesthetics, the term ‘negative’ is many ways an unfortunate one for the Wildthyme stories. To understand them as ethically positive is to recognize that ‘The Blue Angel’ and ‘The Scarlet Empress’ do not, as some fans complain, neutralize or emasculate the heroic figure of the Doctor. On the contrary, they enrich and complicate his role by extending it beyond some of the affirmative platitudes of the adventure genre. In ‘The Blue Angel’ the ‘alternative universe’ scenario is at one point framed in terms of the Doctor’s weariness

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of being Time’s Champion and his desire to experience new kinds of adventures on a more intimate, human scale. Tellingly, he muses that ‘in the human run of things, in terms of the most vital experiences, [he is] a virgin.’265 ‘Excelis Dawns’ and ‘The Scarlet Empress’ even involve the Doctor in day-to-day concerns such as cooking breakfast or shopping to restock Iris’s mini-bar, and, as Paul Magrs points out, these quotidian things have become so foreign to the adventure genre that there is ‘almost a kind of erotic frisson about ... the idea that an adventure story can be grounded suddenly in that kind of bathos, those everyday things.’266 If the Iris Wildthyme stories serve to refract some of the Doctor’s largely unacknowledged traits and unexplored character possibilities, then other recent Doctor Who texts have amplified the paradoxes in his heroism in quite different ways. Rather than explore his potential for humanity, the new television series under Russell T. Davies, like the NAs, at times brutally underscored his inhumanity. From its inception, the revival periodically stressed that the Doctor is a figure surrounded by hazard and death, a character who seems to attract turmoil where he does not actually create it. In the very first episode, ‘Rose’ (2005), an internet geek called Clive, who has made a study of the Doctor’s recorded interventions in history, warns Rose against getting embroiled in the traveller’s affairs. At the end of the episode, with nicely ironic symmetry, Clive is shown as one of the casualties in an abortive alien invasion, which the Doctor has inadvertently catalyzed. Significantly, when Rose decides to travel in the TARDIS, she asks the Doctor whether his mode of life is always dangerous; he replies without hesitation that it is. In a much later episode, ‘The Runaway Bride’ (2006), there is much stronger acknowledgement that the Doctor is dangerous. Here for the first time we see him not just as a lodestone for conflict, or even as a hero capable of severe miscalculations, but as a self-appointed arbiter of justice who is pitiless in the retribution he metes out to his adversaries – in this case, the spider-like Racnoss. By the time this episode was broadcast in 2006 the conceit of the Doctor’s offering his opponents one chance to abandon a path of self-serving destructiveness had already become a predictable trope, as – almost needless to say – had the pattern of their inevitable refusal and final destruction. Yet, in ‘The Runaway Bride’ the tenor of this motif is new: here, several protracted shots linger

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not only on the despair of the Racnoss but on the Doctor’s steely, implacable resolve as he watches this suffering. In the wake of witnessing this, Donna Noble (at this stage still an incidental character) comments that the Doctor needs to find a travelling companion. When he brushes off this suggestion, she insists: ‘Sometimes I think you need someone to stop you.’ It is worth noting that the climax of ‘The Runaway Bride’ does not represent a consistent ethical standard in the revived Doctor Who but a sporadically developed theme. In fact, treatment of the Doctor’s near-titanic power and ‘heroism’ were wayward almost to the point of schizophrenia in the new series under Davies. With the Tenth Doctor, in particular, the texts became more rhapsodic in celebration of his messianic status, more saccharine in showing characters’ adoration or gratitude, and more bombastic in trumpeting his ‘victories’ than was ever true before. While conversely there has been no shortage of warnings that the Doctor’s heroism is a double-edged sword, these warnings can easily be drowned out by the ecstasies of praise, and by the weight of generic precedent for regarding ultimate triumphs of this kind as inherently praiseworthy. Booth writes of such ‘resounding endings’ as being among ‘the seductions of conventional form.’ In order to make a text gripping and finally satisfying, Booth observes, an author must often capitulate to expectation, using devices which massively reduce life’s complexities, hyperbolically polarize virtue and vice, and produce endings characterized by impossible fulfilment. The danger of depending on such devices is that readers’ responses to a text may be shaped primarily by these conventional effects – the hero’s triumph, the consummation of a love affair, and so on – rather than any implicit enrichment or critique of the genre. Crucially, Booth stresses that a reader’s yielding to the ‘lessons’ of these conventional motifs cannot fairly be considered a mis-reading. While one might wish to view it as under-reading, the reality is that the text itself asks for this response, even if it asks for other responses too.267 The implied authors of the new series of Doctor Who periodically wrestle with the question of how, in Booth’s phrase, to ‘abide by the demands of a conventional form, while making the whole thing work for matters un-conventional.’268 Having said that, many a ‘resounding ending’ under Russell T. Davies was marked ultimately by surrender to the rapture of conventional resolution, eclipsing

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any new ethical challenges issued earlier in the narrative. The most notable instance is the multiple climax of Davies’s own script for ‘Journey’s End’, discussed in Chapters Three and Five above. Davros’s strictures against the Doctor for tacitly encouraging violence in his companions – a moment both chilling and poignant – are forgotten as the Doctor and Donna overcome the Daleks with a bravura display of resourcefulness. Worse, the Doctor’s fortuitously created clone is allowed to destroy the whole Dalek fleet with only a bare reprimand from the ‘original’ Doctor. Even this token objection to violence is undercut when Rose is paired off with the clone, in a moment of classically sentimental resolution. Finally, the tragedy of Donna’s relegation to her former, unsatisfying life is eclipsed by another moment of traditionally mawkish sentiment, as we are invited to extend our ultimate sympathy for the lonely figure of the narcissistic hero, departing Shane-like into infinity. Yet the implied authors of certain other stories – including ‘The Runaway Bride,’ also written by Davies – clearly demonstrate a commitment to examining the obverse of the Doctor’s superhuman abilities rather than implying by default that they are in some simple way ‘good.’

‘The Beast Below’ The probing of the Doctor’s lack of humanity is hardly an innovation of the new series, or for that matter the licensed novels. Moments such as the Doctor’s dispassionate destruction of the Racnoss in ‘The Runaway Bride’ hark back to a signal event in the earliest adventure of the classic series, when the Doctor silently contemplated killing a wounded caveman with a rock in order to expedite the time travellers’ escape from the Palaeolithic tundra, until interrupted in his plan by Ian Chesterton. Even after the Doctor was ‘reformed’ by such interventions, the presence of a super-intelligent alien protagonist at the heart of the Doctor Who texts – as with Star Trek’s logic-bound Spock – has always offered ample opportunity to explore dissonances between mental and emotional faculties, between principles of justice and the sense of compassion, and between ethical myopia and hyperopia (a matter to which I shall return below in relation to ‘Grimm Reality’). In many ways Doctor Who functions like a morality play, embodying certain principles

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and ideas in the Doctor and his companions in order to set them in productive dialogue. As noted, demonstration of the Tenth Doctor’s flaws, like celebration of his virtues, tended to be writ large. Just as ‘The Runaway Bride’ addressed his capacity for Olympian callousness, so a later story by Davies, ‘Waters of Mars’ (2009), addressed the Doctor’s capacity for Promethean hubris as he wilfully sought mastery over time, and so on. More recent episodes produced under Steven Moffat have veered away from grandiloquent set pieces showing the Doctor’s inhumanity to a critique of what might more neutrally be called the Doctor’s unhumanity. ‘The Beast Below’ (2010) does not show gargantuan acts of ruthlessness or insensitivity but rather a Doctor whose good intentions pave the way to error. In teasing apart contradictions in the Doctor’s behaviour and outlook, probing the nature of his heroism, ‘The Beast Below’ does not make him straightforwardly anti-heroic. Instead, the episode examines the limitations in the Doctor’s formidable powers of reasoning, raising complex questions about his emotional compass and ethical identity. ‘The Beast Below’ is in effect a reintroduction of Doctor Who from Amy Pond’s perspective, charting her first flight aboard the TARDIS. Presumably because of this, the script emphatically articulates all the Doctor’s most familiar traits. Arriving on Starship UK, which bears the whole population of Britain (except apparently Scotland) away from an Earth scarred by solar flares, the Doctor has plenty of chances to demonstrate his ‘Doctorishness’ to Amy. From the outset this allows for humour at the Doctor’s expense, for the audience knows what to expect of him in a way that Amy does not. Before they leave the TARDIS, he sternly admonishes her that she must adhere to his alleged golden rule of never getting involved ‘in the affairs of other peoples and planets.’ The irony of this is underscored when a weeping little girl on the TARDIS’ scanner screen catches the Doctor’s attention, and he scampers out to comfort her. ‘So is this how it works, Doctor?’ Amy teases: ‘You never interfere with the affairs of other peoples or planets unless there’s children crying?’ The plot is classically, even stereotypically, conventional for Doctor Who: a suspense story where the Doctor must use his phenomenal acumen to uncover a mystery and unseat an oppressive

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regime. Here, the misery of the little girl alerts him to the fact that something is amiss, and he quickly amasses enough clues to deduce correctly that Starship UK is a police state. Investigating the curious absence of engine vibrations, the Doctor finds that there are no engines: the ship is ‘powered’ by an enormous space-dwelling creature which carries the ship on its back. The British people have sought to enslave this creature by administering electric shocks to the pain centres of its brain. A video message from the incumbent monarch, Liz Ten, explains how this came about: The creature you are looking at is called a star whale. Once there were millions of them. They lived in the depth of space and, according to legend, guided the early space travellers through the asteroid belts. This one, as far as we are aware, is the last of its kind, and what we have done to it breaks my heart. The Earth was burning; our sun had turned on us and every other nation had fled to the skies. Our children screamed as the skies grew hotter. And then it came ... like a miracle: the last of the star whales. We trapped it; we built our ship around it, and we rode on its back to safety.

With his usual mixture of glee and righteous indignation, the Doctor sets about bringing down the corrupt government (‘This is what I do every time, every day, every second: this!’) only to discover more disagreeable truths. Liz Ten’s abdication would result in the star whale’s being freed, but this in turn would cause Starship UK to disintegrate, its populace perishing as the whale broke away. The Doctor is faced with what he himself describes as ‘an impossible choice: humanity or the alien.’ Since he cannot condemn the inhabitants of the starship to death and will not leave the space whale in pain, he decides to send a strong charge through the creature’s higher brain, leaving it a vegetable but securing Starship UK’s forward momentum. Amy is able to provide a better resolution because she is ultimately more observant than the Doctor, and because her deductions are infused with empathy. When Hawthorne, the head of Liz Ten’s secret police, reveals that ‘protesters and citizens of limited value are fed to the beast’ but that ‘for some reason it won’t eat the children,’ Amy realizes that the star whale came to the dying Earth voluntarily. It could not stand to hear the children of the scorched world crying. All the violent measures used to secure and manage its great strength were therefore

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gratuitous. When Amy spurs the queen to abdicate and the torture machinery is consequently turned off, the whale does not attempt to break free: it actually increases its pace. As Amy comments: ‘All that pain and misery ... and loneliness. And it just made it kind.’ Although the Doctor’s intentions are, as ever, portrayed as fundamentally high minded and well meaning, there is no room for doubting that ‘The Beast Below’ is a critique of the Time Lord’s heroism. Examples of the Doctor’s maverick improvisation and irreverence abound, but they are consistently shown to verge on reckless irresponsibility, thoroughly belying his sermon to Amy about non-interference. For example, his first, hasty act of resistance against the Starship UK’s government leads to the time travellers’ being summarily plunged into the lower reaches of the starship and eventually the star whale’s mouth, whence the Doctor has to devise a rapid escape. Most importantly of all, the ‘resounding ending’ in which the Doctor sets out to save the day is delicately undercut. His assumption that the whale is acting under duress proves to be rash, and there is greater hubris in his blithe supposition that he has the right to take matters into his own hands. Yet the Doctor’s failure here is ultimately shown to result from a lack of imagination, based in turn on a lack of self-knowledge. Amy is able to resolve the situation because she sees in the star whale the same good qualities she knows the Doctor to possess: as on-screen flashbacks inform the audience, Amy compares what she has heard of the whale with her memories of the Doctor’s kindness at their very first meeting in ‘The Eleventh Hour,’ when Amy herself was a frightened seven-year-old. She later articulates this similarity for the Doctor when he somewhat half-heartedly berates her for jeopardizing the safety of the starship. While acknowledging that she could not have been certain how the whale would react to being freed, Amy comments: ‘I’ve seen it before; very old and very kind, and the very, very last [of its kind]. Sound a bit familiar?’ The Doctor’s mute response to this hints that his self-image is ultimately negative, for all his displays of cockiness and bravado: close-up shots clearly delineate his unease as Amy compares the star whale’s benevolence to his. That this is more than just modesty is borne out later in the season in ‘Amy’s Choice.’ Here the Doctor faces an adversary who turns out to be an embodied projection of his own darkly self-critical tendencies, the Dream Lord. The

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moment of self-recognition is accompanied by a chilling remark from the Doctor: ‘There’s only one person in the universe who hates me as much as you do.’ ‘Amy’s Choice’ actually shows the Doctor at his noblest, once again prepared to risk death to support Amy. Even so, when Amy later asks sceptically whether the Doctor really believes the Dream Lord’s searing disparagements he is again uneasy, deflecting the issue. In short, there is no ‘spurious resolution’ here any more than in ‘The Beast Below’; the Doctor’s nature remains equivocal, a matter for debate. The real distinctiveness of ‘The Beast Below’ lies not in the fact that it critiques the Doctor’s heroism but in the fact that it sidesteps the most obvious kind of critique. The conceit of the Doctor as a kind of faerie king, who may grant human wishes and desires but operates remorselessly outside the scope of human moral codes, was well worn by 2010. In ‘The Beast Below’ Amy does not merely stop the Doctor; in doing so she reminds him of the great humanity of which he is capable.

‘Grimm Reality’ So far in this chapter I have focused on texts in which the Doctor or other key elements in the vast narrative of Doctor Who are somehow rendered strange, altered through apposition or refraction. It is one of the inherent strengths of the ‘endlessly deferred narrative’ that core motifs can repeatedly and variously be made ‘other.’ As I have indicated in various ways throughout the book this process of alteration (in the fullest sense of that word) has added enormous vigour to Doctor Who texts during the last twenty years, complicating former assumptions, challenging complacency and undermining platitude. Yet it would be unfortunate if I implied, even by default, that an act of internal critical revision is always needed to make Doctor Who ethically interesting, as though the narrative’s premise lacked any inherent ethical potential. This is clearly not the case; indeed it could be claimed that a fantastical narrative like Doctor Who, even at its most hackneyed, will always provide potentially enriching encounters with otherness, simply by virtue of its vivid and varied appeal to the imagination. Indeed, the imagination can be seen as fundamental to free ethical conduct, for such conduct

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requires that we strive imaginatively to understand the needs of another human being or situation without being driven by either external moral doctrine or self-interest. To an extent it can be argued that reading – here broadly defined to encompass acts of watching, listening or looking – provides the basis for this kind of ethical imagination, for it is through dint of imaginative effort that we become the reader which the text and its implied author seem to demand.269 By extension, any narrative which asks for such active exertion of the imagination as Doctor Who, in all its media manifestations, might reasonably be considered good training for ethical interaction with others. Yet such a claim clearly cannot go unmodified. If mere volume of imaginative effort marks a text as potentially valuable for the reader’s ethical formation, then there is no reason to suppose that the kind and range of imaginative effort demanded by Doctor Who is of any particular consequence. Conversely, if the quality of the imaginative stimulus is significant, then it must be owned that certain texts may actually offer us little to expand our imaginative field, and may even anaesthetize or atrophy our imaginative faculties, diffusing them in ‘easy’ distractions. Such accusations are certainly levelled at fantasy texts such as Doctor Who, which tend all too often to be dismissed as escapist. What I should like to suggest, therefore, is that the key aesthetic motifs I identified in the last chapter, including pastiche, have formed the basis for those Doctor Who texts which make unusual demands of readers’ imaginative engagement through the prodigious intensity, coherence, scope and range of their world-building. To illustrate this, I offer my last and longest case study, focusing on the EDA novel ‘Grimm Reality’ by Simon Bucher-Jones and Kelly Hale. As I noted in Chapter One, Doctor Who quickly established certain narrative conventions, idiomatically definable in terms of the adventure genre, which writers have continued to use in all the narrative’s different media universes. ‘Grimm Reality’ – even more than ‘The Beast Below’ – evokes these with almost archetypal force. The motif of the travellers landing on a strange world, becoming separated from the TARDIS by circumstance, and then quickly becoming separated from one another for much of the action, is played out to the letter in what is in effect a quest narrative. Anji Kapoor and Fitz Kreiner follow paths which bring them up against moral challenges

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or uncomfortable self-reflection as they are led by circumstance to a rendezvous with the Doctor who is himself on a mission. The hero, in best Doctor Who tradition, is kept slightly mysterious by the fact that we see him often through others’ eyes rather than being granted consistent access to his thoughts. Again in a manner characteristic of many earlier Doctor Who narratives, ‘Grimm Reality’ places the Doctor as mediator between the denizens of the world on which he has landed and other visitors with more rapacious intent. As in quite a number of previous stories, this second group is an interstellar ‘mining’ corporation on the lookout for a potent source of energy. Their intervention in the eco-system of the planet is, typically, near catastrophic, but it is not the only danger: a looming natural disaster also threatens. As ever, it is ultimately up to the Doctor to deal with two apocalyptic threats with one single, elegant act of resolution. The status quo on the planet is restored, with both beneficiaries and sufferers emerging from the Doctor’s act of ecological and social healing. And in a characteristic fashion (which aptly bears out Miss Prism’s definition of fiction in The Importance of Being Earnest), the good end happily and the bad, unhappily. Lest this stark rehearsal of conventional motifs suggest otherwise, it should be stressed at once that there is nothing naïve or rote about the conclusion to ‘Grimm Reality’ or indeed about any of the novel’s free invocation of cliché. On the contrary, if ever a Doctor Who story represented Wayne Booth’s ideal of meeting the demands of a conventional form while making the whole thing work for matters un-conventional this novel would be the one. The happily-everafter motif is simultaneously legitimated and ironized by the fact that, as the title implies, ‘Grimm Reality’ is set on a world where social norms and also, crucially, natural laws have been shaped by fairy tale. Subversion of convention is deliciously signalled early in the novel in a twist on one of the standard Doctor Who devices. The heroes’ separation from the TARDIS is often the result of the ship’s being physically stolen or falling out of reach. In this story, an impassably dense forest springs up around the TARDIS moments after the crew have disembarked. Quite apart from the pageant of beauty and horror which its fairy-tale premise allows, ‘Grimm Reality’ requires readers to contemplate a society whose values are powerfully ‘other.’ The laws

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of this world prove to be sustained by a wishing economy, which determines the human inhabitants’ interactions both with each other and with the various seemingly supernatural beings around them. Magical creatures and events are actually emanations of the planet’s underlying intelligence, a non-corporeal creature disgorged from a nearby white hole, which is not subject to the laws of our universe and therefore able to shape matter at the quantum level. This entity fashioned the ‘wishing world’ after having imbibed fairy tales stored in the databanks of a crashed spaceship; the resultant ecosystem is ‘held together by a powerful living symbiotic skein.’ Here, supposedly inanimate objects, guided by the planet’s inhabiting intelligence, ‘conspire to help the good’, provided that this indwelling intelligence is not deranged or the balance of its world wisdom upset.270 The idea of the wishing economy, which the Doctor seeks to preserve, creates a quite specific departure from Doctor Who narrative’s ethical norms. Whereas the status quo established by the Doctor at the end of many stories is understood to be politically correct and ethically sound, even if this assumption does not always withstand close scrutiny, in ‘Grimm Reality’ the natural/ethical order which the Doctor finally restores is in many ways an affront to liberal, democratic values rather than an affirmation of them. The Doctor asserts the right of this ‘wishing world’ to exist on its own terms. Yet we, like Anji Kapoor, may find ourselves unconvinced that protecting this realm of magic – which, true to the spirit of fairy tales, can also often be cruel – is really in the best interests of its populace. Conversely the Doctor’s counter-arguments to Anji, to which I shall shortly return, should throw into question our own assumptions about natural ‘order’ and human justice. As well as playing with conventions of the adventure genre at large, ‘Grimm Reality’ also makes exceptionally vivid use of key aesthetic motifs in Doctor Who. Above all, the story is a tour de force of surreal apposition. There is a studied contrast between science fiction narrative set on the mining spaceship Bonaventure, which in tone as well as subject might almost have sprung from the work of Robert Heinlein, and the faerie scenes taking place on the ‘wishing world’ where events are frequently told in whole or part in a gorgeous pastiche of folk tale narration, typeset in italics. Yet there are further intricate and unexpected internal contrasts and twists in

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the world(s) of the text. For example, the crew of the Bonaventure consists of three different species, each with its own captain. As well as the generally meretricious humans, there are the ‘abanak’, genial-seeming, pink, hippopotamus-like creatures, and ‘vuim’, a dour race of insectoids. As the plot unfolds, it turns out that the abanak are anything but benign: it is their greed, perfidy and destructiveness which precipitates a near-apocalyptic event on the planet. Conversely, the vuim prove to be honourable, kindly and reasonable, aiding the one fundamentally decent member of the human party when he uncovers the abanak plot to cheat the human crew and rape the planet. The simple theme of disparity between seeming and being, so familiar from folk tales, is reflected neatly and unexpectedly in the science-fiction plot running parallel to events on the wishing world. For present purposes, since it is arguably less important for ethical criticism of the text, I shall leave aside the many ways in which ‘Grimm Reality’ simultaneously underscores and transcends Doctor Who’s innate flatness and correspondent emphasis on performativity (i.e. what I have called the harlequinade motif). Suffice it to say that the folk tale’s dependence on custom and coincidence makes it natural that the Doctor and his companions should be assigned conventional roles within the magical wishing world, and natural too that these should represent their conventional function in the overall Doctor Who narrative. Thus, companions Anji and Fitz actually become servants, while the Doctor becomes a wandering vagabond with the adopted name ‘Doctor Know-All.’ This refractive doubling of the established roles of (and hierarchy between) the Doctor and his companions heightens the impact of their ethical and existential dilemmas on the wishing world. Especially striking is the fact that the Doctor proves to have more in common with the dispassionate, capricious-seeming mentalité of the faerie realm than the human sphere of moral and political struggle. But what of the third category I have identified as a key element in Doctor Who: the aesthetic of the epic vignette? What are the broader implications of world building in ‘Grimm Reality’, and how might its reach and scope stimulate empathy for ‘otherness’ in the reader? With unforgettably ‘cinematic’ images such as that of the planet’s idyllic surface literally rolling away from the Bonaventure’s scout ships to avoid being despoiled, ‘Grimm Reality’ is nothing

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if not spectacular; in fact, one might question whether the term vignette is really applicable. Yet the ‘otherness’ of all these broad, fantastical vistas is calibrated to peculiarly human concerns: intimate, one-to-one interactions are the linchpins of the epic world of the text in an even more pronounced degree than is usual for Doctor Who by virtue of the conceit of the planet’s economy of wishes. The idea of personal responsibility, and of its fundamental immeasurability, is structured into the narrative in a way that ties mise en scène indissolubly to the text’s demands for ethical engagement. This reaches its zenith at a key moment near the climax, relating to the Doctor’s interactions with one particular character, Janet, the maidservant to a giant. At one point in the novel, Janet enables the Doctor to escape the giant’s castle, and after they have fled, she thwarts her erstwhile master’s pursuit with various spells. The Doctor is obliged to leave Janet on a beach when he travels on to the Castle of Sighs. He swears to return to her rescue, but she predicts that he will forget her, as indeed he does. Once his memory is stirred and he comes back to the beach he finds to his horror that she is gone. He then tries to explain the depth of his anguish to his bemused companions: ‘She helped me escape. I promised I’d come right back for her. I promised!’ ‘Well’, Fitz began in an effort to be comforting and sensible, ‘you couldn’t. There were other things going on that were more important – ‘ ‘That doesn’t matter here!’ the Doctor cried. ‘You need to understand something ... On this world, there is no grand or noble ideal that takes precedence over a single creature. A promise made even to a tiny ant is as important to keep as an appointment with destiny. More important, possibly.’271

In short, ‘Grimm Reality’ demands that we try to imagine, and reflect upon, a natural order in which the ethical hierarchy so long posited in Doctor Who is called into question. The narrative of Doctor Who is full of people (including, periodically, the Doctor) who sacrifice their lives for the benefit of the many, implying that such extreme altruism is inextricably entwined with achieving justice and attaining the good. In short, Doctor Who frequently teaches us to accept that death and individual sacrifice are part of the process

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of renewal or restoration of the commonweal. ‘Grimm Reality’ turns this proposition on its head. But the inversion of values in this story is not simple. A little after the Doctor’s fruitless return for Janet, the world’s magic becomes rougher in reaction to the incursions from without, the world intelligence inadvertently killing numberless members of the population as it tries to defend itself. In wake of this, Anji challenges the Doctor to justify seeking to save this capricious ecosystem. ‘Working to preserve this, are we? A world where people are hurt and punished and toyed with?’ ‘There’s good and bad here,’ the Doctor admitted. ‘But we’ve been asked to save it from an alien disruption, an invasion from outside. Should we refuse to help because their world is sometimes harsh?’272

He then pointedly asks whether his own past protectiveness of Earth should have been tempered by the fact that ‘some people were unemployed and some were being tortured and there hadn’t been a year without a war somewhere in ... oh, probably the whole of human history.’273 Yet, once again, the authors of ‘Grimm Reality’ are not offering ultimate moral judgment, for they do not imply that the Doctor is straightforwardly right in this matter. Anji’s final rejoinder to the effect that she hopes the Doctor isn’t ‘putting saving the world over saving the people on it’ underscores for the reader and the Doctor (who tellingly responds by staring at her ‘as if she’d just accused him of abusing his own child’) that he himself is more likely to be hyperopic than myopic. Nor is the final resolution of the story unequivocally positive. The Doctor does not win the day through clarity of mind, but through a game of brinkmanship with the villainous abanak and a kind of psychedelic communion with the wish-granting entities from the white hole. In other words, ‘Grimm Reality’ presents him not as steadfast moral linchpin and spokesman for reason but rather, as Anji at one point reflects to herself, a kind of idiot savant, ‘special in the way that Parsifal was special.’274 Furthermore, our last view of what passes for societal order on the wishing world is not the (predictable) enchanted nuptials of a virtuous prince and princess, but a coda in which six selfish sisters who mistreated Anji die horrible

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deaths brought on by their magical gowns, which Anji, as their servant, had (presumably in ignorance) helped weave and sew. With powerful cogency, the story depicts a world which is arguably neither better nor worse than ours in terms of its natural justice, but just challengingly ‘other.’ ‘Grimm Reality’ exploits its fusion of fairy tale and science fiction to offer a richly varied, powerfully engaging account of one Doctor Who’s oldest concerns, and one that has come ever more to the fore in the texts: the relationship between personal responsibility and problems on a global or cosmic scale which are almost inconceivably daunting and intractable. This leads me to my final point, which I can best illustrate with a metaphor drawn from the Doctor Who narrative itself. In one memorable scene from a 1977 serial, ‘The Robots of Death’, the Doctor tries to explain the relationship between the interior and exterior dimensions of the TARDIS to his companion Leela, a tribal huntswoman who is earthily practical in outlook. He holds up a small box close to her and places a larger box at sufficient distance that it appears as though it would fit into the small one. He points out that if you could keep the large box ‘exactly that distance away and have it here, the large one would fit inside the small one.’ Leela’s characteristically blunt response is, ‘That’s silly.’ In the most wonderful, Parsifalian fashion it may be said that Doctor Who as a whole narrative partakes of this same ‘silliness.’ Indeed, the dimensional paradox of the TARDIS is (among other things) the single best embodiment of the richly surreal potential of the texts. One aspect of Doctor Who’s ethical value resides in its capacity for playful combination of irreconcilable things, the ability to link impersonal, all-encompassing crises in time and space with intimate human challenges, or at least keep the two in a dynamic, enquiring relationship with each other. At its most engaging, Doctor Who brings together in free play the elementary and the ineffable, the politically contingent and the ethically transcendent, the riddles of the cosmos and the riddle of the sphinx. That at least has never changed and – while enthusiasm persists for the Doctor’s journeys through textual universes and dimensions of the imagination – it surely never will.

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1. John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado, Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text (London and Basingstoke, 1983). 2. James Chapman, Inside the TARDIS: The Worlds of Doctor Who (London, 2006); Kim Newman, Doctor Who (BFI TV Classics) (London, 2005). 3. Alan McKee, ‘How to Tell the Difference between Production and Consumption: A Case Study in Doctor Who Fandom’, in Cult Television, ed. Sara Gwenllian-Jones and Roberta E. Pearson (Minneapolis and London, 2004), pp. 167–185. 4. Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, ‘Introduction’, in Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, ed. Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Cambridge, MA and London, 2009), p. 2. 5. Newman, Doctor Who, p. 8. 6. Chapman, Inside the TARDIS, p. vii. 7. For a fuller critique of the ‘what so-and-so calls ...’ formulation, see Mark Bauerlein, Literary Criticism: An Autopsy (Philadelphia, 1997), pp. 136–140. 8. Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (London and New York, 2002), pp. 16–21. 9. See Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin, ‘Introduction’, p. 2. 10. Lance Parkin, ‘Canonicity matters; defining the Doctor Who canon’, in Time and Relative Dissertations in Space: Critical Perspectives on Doctor Who, ed. David Butler (Manchester, 2007), pp. 251–252; Lance Parkin, ‘Truths Universally Acknowledged: How the “Rules” of Doctor Who Affect the Writing’, in Third Person, ed. Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin, p. 19; Paul Cornell, ‘Canonicity in Doctor Who’, 10 February 2007, http://www.paulcornell.com/2007/02/canonicity-in-doctor-who.html (accessed 5 July 2007). 11. Chapman, Inside the TARDIS; David J. Howe, Stephen James Walker and Mark Stammers, The Handbook: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to the Production of Doctor Who (Tolworth, 2005) and The Television Companion: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who (Tolworth, 2003).

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12. See Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin, ‘Introduction’, p. 2. 13. Matt Hills, Fan Cultures, pp. 131–138. 14. For an excellent guide to the attributes of tricksters, see William J. Hynes, ‘Mapping the Characteristics of Mythic Tricksters: A Heuristic Guide’, in Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts and Criticisms, ed. William J. Hynes and William G. Doty (Tuscaloosa and London, 1993), pp. 32–45. 15. I am using the term serial in the standard British sense, which correlates broadly with the American term ‘mini-series.’ 16. So read the blurb on the back cover of the early NAs, beginning with John Peel, ‘Timewyrm: Genysys’ (London, 1991). 17. Hills, Fan Cultures, p. 40; McKee, ‘How to Tell the Difference’, p. 172; Matt Hills, Triumph of a Time Lord: Regenerating Doctor Who in the Twenty-First Century (London, 2010), pp. 54–58. 18. Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin, Third Person, pp. 2, 5. 19. Ibid.: p. 5. 20. Ibid.: p. 2. 21. Hills, Fan Cultures, p. 134. 22. Ibid.: p. 135. 23. Ibid.: p. 138. 24. Hills, Fan Cultures, pp. 134–5. 25. Howe, Walker and Stammers, The Handbook, p. 410. 26. Ibid.: p. 722. 27. Ibid.: p. 786. 28. Paul Cornell made a particular practice of rescuing marginal or marginalized motifs: e.g. in ‘Love and War’ (London, 1992) the Doctor is pitted against the Hoothi, mentioned only once in the classic series in a throwaway line from ‘The Brain of Morbius’ (1976). 29. For example, David Banks’s ‘Iceberg’ (London, 1993) represents an attempt to consolidate the history of the Cybermen. 30. Lance Parkin, A History of the Universe (London, 1996). 31. Parkin, Ahistory: An Unauthorised History of the Doctor Who Universe, 2nd edition (Des Moines, 2006), p. 13. 32. Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood, About Time 4: 1974–79 (Des Moines, 2004), p. 65. 33. A summary of statements about the Doctor’s age in the full range of Who texts, noting inconsistencies, can be found in the general Wikipedia article on the Doctor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_%28Doctor_ Who%29 (accessed 27 June 2010). 34. Parkin, Ahistory, p. 269. 35. Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman, ‘Unnatural History’ (London, 1999), p. 269. 36. Paul Cornell, ‘Canonicity in Doctor Who.’ 37. Ibid. 38. Alan McKee, ‘Is Doctor Who Political?’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. VII, No. 2 (2004), p. 207. 39. Hills, Fan Cultures, p. 140.

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40. Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott, Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero (New York, 1987), p. 6. 41. Tulloch and Alvarado, The Unfolding Text, pp. 31, 52. 42. Ibid.: p. 100. 43. Ibid.: p. 35. 44. Chapman, Inside the TARDIS, pp. 82, 81. 45. Ibid.: p. 105. 46. Nicholas Cull, ‘ ”Bigger on the Inside ...”: Doctor Who as British cultural history’, in The Historian, Television and Television History, ed. Graham Roberts and Philip M. Taylor (Luton, 2001), p. 104. 47. See Donald Shell, The House of Lords (Manchester, 2008). 48. Cannadine, The Rise and Fall of Class, p. 163. 49. Henry Jenkins and John Tulloch, Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek (London and New York, 1995), p. 115. 50. Kate Fox, Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour (London, 2004), p. 81. 51. David Cannadine, The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain (New York, 1999), p. 133. 52. Ibid.: p. 156. 53. Piers Britton and Simon Barker, Reading Between Designs: Visual Imagery and the Generation of Meaning in The Avengers, The Prisoner and Doctor Who (Austin, 2003), pp. 146–147. 54. Tulloch and Alvarado, The Unfolding Text, p. 61. 55. Fox, Watching the English, p. 82. 56. Tulloch and Alvarado, The Unfolding Text, p. 100. 57. Tulloch and Alvarado, The Unfolding Text, p. 100. 58. Cannadine, The Rise and Fall of Class, p. 168. 59. Ibid.: pp. 19–20, 168–70. 60. Ibid.: p. 158. 61. Ibid.: pp. 158, 164. 62. Ibid.: pp. 156–157. For a critique of the damning treatment of ‘the anally retentive, obsessive rising class’ in 1960s British adventure series, see David Buxton, From The Avengers to Miami Vice: Form and Ideology in Television Series (Manchester, 1990), pp. 104–105. 63. Tulloch and Alvarado, The Unfolding Text, pp. 50–54, esp. 52. 64. Cull, ‘ ”Bigger on the Inside ...” ’, p. 100. 65. Jennifer Harris, Sarah Hyde and Greg Smith, 1966 ... and all that: Design and the Consumer in Britain 1960–1969 (London, 1986), p. 116. 66. Moya Luckett, ‘Performing Masculinities: Dandyism and male fashion in 1960s-70s British cinema’, in Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis, ed. Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson (London, 2000), p. 321. 67. Buxton, From The Avengers to Miami Vice, p. 104. 68. Cannadine, The Rise and Fall of Class, p. 164; Jonah D. Levy, The State After Statism: New State Activities in the Age of Liberalization (Cambridge, MA, 2006), pp. 43–44. 69. This periodization even informs the division of Chapman’s Inside the TARDIS, where the chapter concerning Hinchcliffe’s ‘era’ is entitled

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70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82.

83.

84. 85. 86. 87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

95. 96.

221

‘High Gothic’ (pp. 98–117) and that concerning Williams’ is entitled ‘High Camp’ (118–133). Tulloch and Alvarado, The Unfolding Text, p. 100. For example, in 1981 the producer Philip Hinchcliffe gave an interview for Marvel Comics’ Doctor Who Winter Special in which he noted: ‘We had this picture in our minds of a self-portrait [sic] by the French artist Toulouse Lautrec showing this bohemian figure standing beneath a wide brimmed hat’ (p. 32). Chapman, Inside the TARDIS, p. 105. On a related note, see the discussion of hybridity in Baker’s wardrobe in Britton and Barker, Reading Between Designs, p. 151. Tulloch and Alvarado, The Unfolding Text, p. 100. Telephone conversation with the author, February 1995. Tulloch and Alvarado, The Unfolding Text, p. 52. On this subject, see also Cull, ‘ ”Bigger on the Inside ...” ’, p. 104. Benjamin Cook, Doctor Who–The New Audio Adventures: The Inside Story (Maidenhead, 2003), p. 25. Based on figures published in Howe, Walker and Stammers, The Television Companion, ‘The Happiness Patrol’ performed markedly less well than other serials in Season 25; pp. 660, 664, 667, 672. Howe, Walker and Stammers, The Handbook, p. 786. Terrance Dicks, The Doctor Who Monster Book (London, 1975); Justin Richards, Doctor Who: Monsters and Villains (London, 2005). Anne Cranny-Francis and John Tulloch, ‘Vaster Than Empire(s), and More Slow: The Politics and Economics of Embodiment in Doctor Who’, in Third Person, ed. Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin, p. 352. Alec Charles, ‘War without End?: Utopia, the Family, and the Post-9/11 World in Russell T. Davies’s Doctor Who’, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 35, Part 3 (2008), p. 455. Cull, ‘ ”Bigger on the Inside ...” ’, pp. 101–102. Ibid.: p. 103. See, for example, the broad variety of political positions claimed by fan respondents in McKee, ‘Is Doctor Who Political?’, p. 206. McKee, ‘How to Tell the Difference’, p. 174; Lance Parkin, ‘Truths Universally Acknowledged: How the “Rules” of Doctor Who Affect the Writing’, in Third Person, ed. Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin, pp. 20–21. Tulloch and Jenkins, Science Fiction Audiences, p. 145. Hills, Fan Cultures, p. 40. McKee, ‘How to Tell the Difference’, pp. 172–175. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York and London, 1992), p. 24. Parkin, ‘Truths Universally Acknowledged’, p. 21. Jenkins, Textual Poachers, pp. 88–107. The other six strategies and motifs which Jenkins lists (Textual Poachers, 162–77) are: recontextualization, refocalization, genre shifting, crossovers, character dislocation, and personalization. Cull, ‘ ”Bigger on the Inside ...” ’, pp. 101–102. Ibid.: p. 103.

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97. 98. 99. 100.

101. 102. 103.

104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109.

110. 111. 112. 113.

114. 115.

116. 117. 118. 119.

120. 121.

122.

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Published by Victor Gollancz, 1963. Chapman, Inside the TARDIS, pp. 66–67, 101. In Doctor Who Confidential (BBC 3, 28 June 2008). Matt Hills, ‘ ”Gothic” Body Parts in a “Postmodern” Body of Work? The Hinclcliffe/Holmes Era of Doctor Who (1975–77)’, Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media, 4 (2007), http://intensities.org/Issues/Intensities_ Four.htm (accessed 24 December 2007), passim but esp. paragraphs 28 and 29. Cook, The New Audio Adventures, p. 36. Ibid. On this shift from ‘poacher’ to ‘gamekeeper’ see Hills, Fan Cultures, p. 40; McKee, ‘How to Tell the Difference’, p. 172; and Parkin, ‘Truths Universally Acknowledged’, pp. 20–21. Jenkins, Textual Poachers, p. 162. Cook, The New Audio Adventures, pp. 63, 263. Jenkins, Textual Poachers, pp. 162–3. Cook, The New Audio Adventures, pp. 190–191. On ‘fanwank’ both generally and in relation to the new series, see Hills, Triumph of a Time Lord, pp. 58–66. Paul K. Longmore, ‘Screening Stereotypes: Images of Disabled People in Television and Motion Pictures’, in Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability (Philadelphia, 2003), p. 133. Cook, The New Audio Adventures, p. 218. Charles, ‘War without End?’, p. 456. Cranny-Francis and Tulloch, ‘Vaster Than Empire(s)’, p. 350. Britton and Barker, Reading Between Designs, pp. 172–3; and see also Lincoln Geraghty, ‘From Balaclavas to Jumpsuits: The Multiple Histories and Identities of Doctor Who’s Cybermen’, Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2008), p. 92. Cranny-Francis and Tulloch, ‘Vaster Than Empire(s), p. 352. Cynthia J. Fuchs, ‘ ”Death is Irrelevant”: Cyborgs, Reproduction, and the Future of Male Hysteria’, in The Cyborg Handbook, ed. Chris Hables Gray (New York and London, 1995), pp. 281–300. Ibid.: pp. 282, 285. Ibid.: p. 282. Ibid.: p. 286. For a trenchant account of attempts to complicate heterosexual oppositions in Star Trek: The Next Generation, see Lee. E. Heller, ‘The Persistence of Difference: Postfeminism, Popular Discourse, and Heterosexuality in Star Trek: The Next Generation’, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 24 (1997), pp. 226–244. Hills, Fan Cultures, p. 138. Quoted in ‘No Sex, It’s The Doctor’, 24 August 2000, http://www. rainbownetwork.co.uk/UserPortal/Article/Detail.aspx?ID= 8246&sid=65 (accessed 4 October 2006). Daniel Judd, ‘Queer as (Doctor) Who’, 11 November 1999, http:// rainbownetwork.com/UserPortal/Article/Detail.aspx?ID= 11467&sid=65 (accessed 4 October 2006).

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123. Tom Bishop, ‘Fans count down to new Doctor Who’, 24 March 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4376489.stm (accessed October 4 2006). 124. Steve Neale, ‘Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on men and mainstream cinema’, in Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (London and New York, 1993), p. 12. 125. Laura Mulvey, ‘Afterthoughts on “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946)’, in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington, 1989), p. 34; Neale, ‘Masculinity as Spectacle’, p. 14. 126. Neale, ‘Masculinity as Spectacle’, p. 15. 127. Ibid. 128. Laura Mulvey, ‘Afterthoughts’, p. 34. 129. Ibid. 130. Ibid.: p. 33. 131. Neale, ‘Masculinity as Spectacle’, p. 15. 132. ‘The Time Warrior’, 1974. 133. Jennifer Craik, The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion (London and New York, 1994), p. 170. 134. Britton and Barker, Reading Between Designs, p. 195. 135. Steven Cohan, ‘ ”Feminizing” the Song-and-Dance Man: Fred Astaire and the spectacle of masculinity in the Hollywood musical’, in Screening the Male, ed. Cohan and Hark, p. 62. 136. Ibid.: pp. 63, 66. 137. Chris Holmlund, ‘Masculinity as Multiple Masquerade: The ‘mature’ Stallone and the Stallone clone’, in Screening the Male, ed. Cohan and Hark, p. 214. 138. See inter alia Christopher Bahn’s interview with Russell T. Davies on the Onion’s A. V. Club Web site, 27 July 2009, http://www.avclub.com/ articles/russell-t-davies,30869/ (accessed 30 July 2009). 139. Head was the actor whom Radio Times readers most wanted to see play the Doctor, according to the published results of an online poll in the Radio Times 40th Anniversary Special, p. 4 (pull-out from Radio Times, 22–28 November 2003). 140. On branding in the new series, see Hills, Triumph of a Time Lord, pp. 66–70. 141. Matt Hills, ‘ ”New New” Doctor Who: Brand Regeneration?’, The Antenna Blog, 19 April 2010, http://blog.commarts. wisc. edu/2010/04/19/new-new-doctor-who-brand-regeneration/ (accessed 4 June 2010). 142. David Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford, 1995), p. 62. 143. Adrian Lourie, ‘Interview: Steven Moffat, Doctor Who Screenwriter’, 22 March 2010, http://www.scotsman.com/features/Interview-StevenMoffat-Doctor-Who.6169021.jp (accessed 25 March 2010); Nicole Lampert, ‘He’s Patrick Moore in a male model’s body ... she’s a leggy redhead in hotpants ... Stand by for trouble in the Tardis!’, 2 April

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144.

145.

146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152.

153.

154. 155.

156.

157. 158. 159. 160. 161.

162. 163.

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2010, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1262832/DoctorWho-Matt-Smith-makes-debut.html (accessed 2 April 2010). ‘Doctor Who Prompts Surge of Popularity in Bow Ties’, 30 April 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/ doctor-who/7656389/ Doctor-Who-prompts-surge-in-popularity-of-bow-ties.html (accessed 4 June 2010); ‘Time Lord Saves Harris Tweed’, 29 March 2010, http://thechap.net/content/section_news/?p=335 (accessed 29 March 2010). Andrew Groves, quoted in ‘The fashion police on Doctor Who’s new outfit’, 21 July 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/ hi/uk_news/ magazine/8160710.stm (accessed 21 July 2009). Sebastian Brook, quoted in ibid. Jeremy Langmead, quoted in ibid. Quoted in Tom Spilsbury, ‘The Time is Now! The DWM Interview: Steven Moffat’, Doctor Who Magazine 418, 3 March 2010, p. 21. Alexander Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (Minneapolis, 1993),pp. 81–95. Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer, p. 82. Quoted in Spilsbury, ‘The Time is Now!’, p. 20. Steven Moffat, ‘Doctor Who: The Return of the Weeping Angels’, The TV Blog, posted on 22 April 2010, http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ tv/2010/04/doctor-who-the-return-of-the-w.shtml (accessed 24 April 2010). Dan Martin, ‘Doctor Who: a triumphant regeneration?’, The Guardian TV and Radio Blog, 25 June 2010, http://www. guardian.co.uk/tv-andradio/tvandradioblog/2010/jun/25/doctor-who-the-big-bang (accessed 26 June 2010). Cull, ‘ ”Bigger on the Inside ...” ’, p. 104; Chapman, Inside the TARDIS, p. 7. For example, in his short essay ‘Science Fiction’ for The Television Genre Book, Luke Hockley refers to the fact that ‘each of the Doctors has also had a different “Assistant” ’, each time curiously capitalizing the term almost as though it were an actual rank or office (The Television Genre Book, ed. Glen Creeber, 2nd edition (London, 2008), p. 41). For a nuanced introduction to heteronormativity, see Diane Richardson, ‘Heterosexuality and social theory’, in Theorising Heterosexuality, ed. Diane Richardson (Buckingham, 1996), pp. 2–9, 17. Jo VanEvery, ‘Heterosexuality and Domestic Life’, in Theorising Heterosexuality, ed. Diane Richardson (Buckingham, 1996), pp. 44–45. Richardson, ‘Heterosexuality’, p. 17. Kate Orman, ‘The Year of Intelligent Tigers’ (2001), p. 269. Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood, About Time 5: 1980–84 (Des Moines, 2005), p. 278. The term originates in Laura Mulvey’s foundational study of woman as image and man as bearer of the look, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington, 1989), p. 19. On the hiatus and changes in policies following it, see Chapman, Inside the TARDIS, pp. 159–165 and Newman, Doctor Who, pp. 101–105. Russell T. Davies, ‘Damaged Goods’ (London, 1996).

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164. Chapman, Inside the TARDIS, p. 106. 165. Dale Smith, ‘Broader and deeper: the lineage and impact of the Timewyrm series’, in Time and Relative Dissertations, ed. Butler (Manchester, 2007), p. 273. 166. Lawrence Miles, ‘Interference’ Book I (London, 1999), p. 122. 167. Miles, ‘Interference’ Book II (London, 1999), p. 203. 168. Lars Pearson, I, Who 3: The Unauthorized Guide to Doctor Who Novels and Audios (New Orleans, 2003), p. 103. 169. See Dee Amy-Chinn, ‘Rose Tyler: The ethics of care and the limits of agency’, in Science Fiction Film and Television, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2008), pp. 258–259, 265. Dr. Amy-Chinn’s excellent article was published after this section of my chapter was drafted; while its thrust is ultimately different from my argument here, there are a striking number of convergences in our approaches and conclusions. 170. See Amy-Chinn, ‘Rose Tyler’, pp. 258–62. 171. Paul Revoir, ‘Who’s steamed up the Tardis? The Doctor shares a passionate kiss with companion Amy’, Mail Online, 1 May 2010, http:// www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1270166/Whos-steamed-TardisThe-Doctor-shares-passionate-kiss-companion-Amy.html (accessed 3 May 2010). 172. Simon Cable, ‘Dr Ooooh! How the Time Lord’s saucy, short-skirted new companion sent viewers into orbit’, Mail Online, 6 April 2010, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1263583/Doctor-Whosracy-new-companion-Karen-Gillan-sent-viewers-orbit.html (accessed 7 April 2010). 173. On the normative construction of ‘good girls’, see Lorna Jowett, Sex and the Slayer: A Gender Studies Primer for the Buffy Fan (Middletown, CT, 2005), pp. 44–45. 174. On the question of Russell T. Davies’s ‘gay agenda’, see Hills, Triumph of a Time Lord, pp. 35–36. 175. The Doctor’s description of himself in ‘The Big Bang’ (2010). 176. Commentary by Scott Gray, Adrian Salmon and Alan Barnes, The Complete Eighth Doctor Comic Strips, Vol. 3: ‘Oblivion’ (Tunbridge Wells, 2006), p. 218. 177. In Blum and Orman, ‘Unnatural History.’ 178. Peter Anghelides and Stephen Cole, ‘The Ancestor Cell’ (London, 2000). 179. Jacqueline Rayner, ‘Earthworld’ (London, 2001) pp. 245–246. 180. Nick Wallace, ‘Fear Itself’ (London, 2006), pp. 24–25; Peter Anghelides, ‘Frontier Worlds’ (London, 1999), p. 11. 181. Lloyd Rose, ‘The City of the Dead’ (London, 2001), p. 31. 182. Rayner, ‘Earthworld’, p. 47. 183. Paul Magrs and Jeremy Hoad, ‘The Blue Angel’ (London, 1999), p. 210. 184. Mark Michalowski, ‘Halflife’ (London, 2004), p. 129. 185. Ibid.: p. 168. 186. Pearson, I, Who 3, p. 177.

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187. Adrienne Rich, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’, in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale and David M. Halperin (New York, 1993), p. 239. 188. Christine Geraghty, ‘Aesthetics and quality in popular television drama’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1 (2003), pp. 27–29. 189. Creeber, ‘The Joy of Text? Television and Textual Analysis’, Critical Studies in Television, Vol. 1, No. 1. (2006), p. 85. 190. See Alan McKee, ‘Interview with Kate Orman: Dr Who Author’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1 (2005), p. 137. 191. Catherine Johnson, Telefantasy (London, 2005). 192. In The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. Robert Audi (Cambridge, 1995), p. 10. 193. Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (New York, 1958), p. 524. 194. Ibid.: p. 525. 195. Ibid.: p. 526. 196. Ibid.: pp. 527–528. 197. Ibid.: p. 571. 198. Ibid.: pp. 572–575. 199. Sarah Cardwell, ‘Television Aesthetics’, Critical Studies in Television, Vol. 1, No. 1. (2006), p. 75. 200. Robin Nelson, TV Drama in Transition: Forms, Values and Cultural Change (New York, 1997), p. 156. 201. Jonathan Sterne, ‘The Burden of Culture’, in The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies, ed. Michael Berubé (Oxford, 2005), p. 98. 202. Sarah Cardwell, ‘Is Quality Television Any Good?’, in Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond, ed. Janet McCabe and Kim Akass (London, 2007), p. 30. 203. Cardwell, ‘Television Aesthetics’, pp. 75–76. 204. Ibid.: p. 77. 205. See Geraghty, ‘Aesthetics and quality’, pp. 32–33. 206. Robert J. Thompson, Television’s Second Golden Age: From Hill Street Blues to ER (Syracuse), p. 15. 207. Rhonda Wilcox, Why Buffy Matters (London, 2005), pp. 175–190. 208. Ibid.: p. 176. 209. Ibid.: p. 190. 210. Ibid.: p. 176; Wilcox later echoes this by referring to the scene as an ‘intrusion of unreality’ (p. 187). 211. Ibid.: p. 188. 212. Ibid.: p. 187. 213. Ibid.: pp. 189–90. 214. Ibid.: pp. 176, 190. 215. Ibid.: pp. 176–179. 216. Johnson, Telefantasy, p. 111.

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NOTES

227

217. Doctor Who’s first Radio Times listing is available online at the BBC’s archive pages at http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/doctorwho/6405.shtml (accessed 11 July 2010). 218. Johnson, Telefantasy, p. 6. 219. Ibid.: pp. 22–27. 220. Ibid.: p. 31. 221. Ibid.: p. 39. 222. David Morley, ‘Television: Not So Much a Visual Medium, More a Visual Object’, in Visual Culture, ed. Chris Jenks (London and New York, 1995), p. 170. 223. But see Matt Hills’ compelling arguments in ‘Televisuality without television? The Big Finish audios and discourses of ‘tele-centric’ Doctor Who’, in Time and Relative Dissertations, ed. Butler, pp. 280–295. 224. Ian Potter, ‘The Filipino Army’s advance on Reykjavik: world building in Studio D and its legacy’, in Time and Relative Dissertations, ed. Butler, p. 169. 225. Stephen Gallagher, ‘Scripting Warriors’ Gate–so what actually happened?’, In-Vision 54 (November 1994), p. 7. 226. Chapman, Inside the TARDIS, p. 111. 227. Robin Nelson, ‘Quality TV Drama: Estimations and Influences Through Time and Space’, in Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond, ed. Janet McCabe and Kim Akass (London, 2007), p. 43. In a related article, Nelson suggests that improved production values in television might seem to ‘invite aesthetic considerations echoing those of film studies’, more directly implying a distinction, if not necessarily a hierarchical one, between the subjects of film and television studies (Robin Nelson, ‘ ”Quality Television”: The Sopranos is the best television drama ever ... in my humble opinion ...’, Critical Studies in Television, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2006), p. 67). 228. Quoted in Roberta Pearson, ‘Lost in Translation: From Post-Network to Post-Television’, in Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond, ed. Janet McCabe and Kim Akass (London, 2007), p. 244. 229. See inter alia the essays in Quality TV, ed. McCabe and Akass, and Thompson, Television’s Second Golden Age. 230. Cardwell ‘Is Quality Television Any Good?’, pp. 29–34. 231. Quoted in Benjamin Cook, ‘Never Mind the Daleks: Here’s Davros’, Radio Times, 5–11 July 2008, p. 13. 232. Examples abound at the Doctor Who Ratings Guide: http://www.pagefillers.com/dwrg/frames.htm; on the subject of fan evaluation, see also Alan McKee, ‘Why is “City of Death” the best story?’, in Time and Relative Dissertations, ed. Butler, pp. 233–245; idem, ‘Which is the best Doctor Who story?” a case study in value judgments outside the academy’, Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media, 1 (2007), http://intensities. org/Issues/Intensities_One.htm (accessed 20 July 2008). 233. Paul Magrs, ‘The Scarlet Empress’ (London, 1998), pp. 129–131, 135–137. 234. Mags Halliday, ‘History 101’ (London, 2002), p. 35. 235. Halliday, ‘History 101’, pp. 106, 112, 119.

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228

TARDISbound

236. 237. 238. 239. 240.

241. 242.

243. 244. 245. 246. 247. 248. 249.

250. 251. 252. 253. 254. 255. 256. 257. 258. 259. 260.

261. 262. 263. 264.

Britton_Notes.indd 228

Richard Dyer, Pastiche (London and New York, 2007), p. 23. Ibid.: 36–7, 40. Ibid.: 56–7. Ibid.: 178, 180. See Hills, ‘ ”Gothic” Body Parts, passim; also Tulloch and Alvarado, The Unfolding Text, pp. 111–113; Chapman, Inside the TARDIS, 106–110; Newman, Doctor Who, p. 87. Cook, The New Audio Adventures, p. 175; I am grateful to Simon Bucher-Jones for drawing my attention to the Space 1999 parody. On the origins of Ben and Polly, see David J. Howe, Mark Stammers and Steven James Walker, Doctor Who: The Sixties (London, 1993), pp. 120–121. Stephen Cole, ‘Ten Little Aliens’ (London, 2002), p. 37. Dyer, Pastiche, p. 180. Cole, ‘Ten Little Aliens’ (London, 2002), p. 85. Ibid.: 204. Ibid.: 217–8. Dyer, Pastiche, p. 180. This is a recurrent theme among the contributors to The Turn to Ethics, ed. Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (London, 2000), including Judith Butler (p. 15), John Guillory (pp. 29–30) and Chantal Mouffe (p. 85). Chantal Mouffe, ‘Which Ethics for Democracy?’, in The Turn to Ethics, ed. Garber et al, pp. 85–86. Beardsley, Aesthetics, p. 573. Lance Parkin, ‘The Gallifrey Chronicles (London, 2005), p. 130. Sterne, ‘The Burden of Culture’, p. 99. Tulloch and Alvarado, The Unfolding Text, pp. 39–43. Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley, 1988). Derek Attridge, ‘Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the Other’, PMLA, Vol. 114, No. 1 (1999), p. 28. John Guillory, ‘The Ethical Practice of Modernity: The Example of Reading’, in The Turn to Ethics, ed. Garber et al, pp. 38–39. Booth, Company, p. 179. Booth, Company, pp. 179–180. Davies praises ‘Spare Parts’ as ‘some of the best drama ever written for any genre, in any medium, anywhere’, in his foreword to Cook, The New Audio Adventures, p. 3. Booth, Company, p. 188. In Casino Royale (Martin Campbell, 2006) and Star Trek (J. J. Abrams, 2009) respectively. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA, 1983), p. 32. Alan McKee, ‘Doctor Who, Popular Culture and Politics: An Annotated Interview with Paul Magrs’, M/C Dialogue: Conversations on Culture and the Media, 28 May 2006, http://dialogue.media-culture.org.au/node/2/ print, p. 8 (accessed 26 May 2008).

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NOTES

265. 266. 267. 268. 269.

270. 271. 272. 273. 274.

Britton_Notes.indd 229

229

Magrs and Hoad, The Blue Angel, p. 80. McKee, ‘Doctor Who, Popular Culture and Politics’, p. 8. Booth, Company, pp. 430–431. Ibid.: p. 434. Anne Lindsey Cavender, ‘ ”Lessons of variety and freedom”: Reading and Ethics in China and the West’, (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 2000), p. 4. Simon Bucher-Jones and Kelly Hale, ‘Grimm Reality’ (London, 2001) pp. 198–199. Ibid.: p. 206. Ibid.: p. 213. Ibid.: p. 214. Ibid.: p. 168.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

A Note on Further Reading As noted in the Introduction, this volume is neither a history nor a systematic survey of Doctor Who. For those seeking a book-length history focusing primarily on the classic television series, James Chapman’s Inside the TARDIS is a commendably thorough and thoughtful academic study. Kim Newman’s more abbreviated and summary account of Doctor Who’s history for BFI Classics is also rich in insights. The best systematic guides to the production and reception of the classic series currently in print are David J. Howe, Stephen James Walker and Mark Stammers’ Handbook and Television Companion. For an engrossing polemical analysis of the classic series, see the six-volume About Time series co-authored by Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood. Densely informative but lively guides to the novels and audios up to 2002 are provided by Lars Pearson’s three-volume I, Who series. Benjamin Cook’s chronological guide to the making of the Big Finish Doctor Who audios up to 2003, Doctor Who–The New Audio Adventures, is shortly to be complemented by Richard Dinnick’s two-volume Big Finish Companion (Big Finish, 2011), though this will address the company’s whole audio output rather than just Doctor Who. Irregularly produced Doctor Who Magazine Special Editions (London: Panini Publications) provide the best production guide to the new series currently available. Series One to Four of the new series are covered in Nos. 11, 14, 17 and 20 respectively, and the 2009 Specials in No. 25. Among the rapidly multiplying array of critical-theoretical texts on Doctor Who, three deserve special mention here: John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado’s Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text, still an immensely rich and provocative resource after nearly thirty years; Matt Hills’s characteristically elegant and vivid Triumph of a Time Lord, avowedly conceived as ‘a new Unfolding Text-type book’ (p. x) dealing with the new rather than the classic

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231

series, and the immensely rewarding collection of essays edited by David Butler, Time and Relative Dissertations, which is the only academic book to date to be inclusive of all media manifestations of Doctor Who.

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INDEX

Aaronovitch, Ben 14 ABBA 201 Ace (Dorothy Gale McShane) 51, 111–12, 116, 117–24, 128, 135, 153, 172, 184 Acheson, James 45, 166 action heroes 96, 100, 105 minimalist sartorial style of 94, 99 partial undress of 87, 95 Adam Adamant Lives! 43 Adorno, Theodor 201–2, 203 Ahistory (A History of the Universe) 22 Alias 21 Aliens 187 Ally McBeal 170 Alvarado, Manuel 1, 31, 34, 35, 36, 46 Amy-Chinn, Dee 225 (n. 169) Angel (Buffy, the Vampire Slayer) 74, 101–2 An Inspector Calls 75 anti-establishment 31, 37, 88 anti-heroism 13, 19, 34, 50, 79, 89, 122 aristocracy 33, 45 aristocrat, The Doctor as 33, 42–4, 52 Aristotle 147

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Astaire, Fred 95, 96, 98 Attridge, Derek 195 Avengers, The 43, 61, 155, 181 Baker, Colin 19, 36, 50, 96, 159, 177–8 Baker, Tom 3, 19, 31, 35, 45, 46, 47, 48, 53, 108, 158, 186 Barker, Simon vii, 77 Batman 122 Batman 89, 122 Battlestar Galactica 58, 77 BBC Doctor Who audio dramas 3 BBC Doctor Who novel series Eighth Doctor Adventures (EDAs) 3, 9, 14, 16, 19, 20, 24, 25, 27, 51, 52, 57, 81, 92, 112, 119, 139, 182, 200 New Series Adventures (NSAs) 3, 9, 69, 184 Past Doctor Adventures (PDAs) 3, 9, 16, 24, 73, 112, 163, 184, 186 Beardsley, Aubrey 164 Beardsley, Monroe C. 148–9, 150, 193 Bender, Jack 170 Bennett, Tony 27 Biba 53

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Big Finish Productions 3, 4, 6, 11, 14, 15, 36, 49, 50, 59, 66, 69, 70, 72, 75, 80, 81, 82, 84, 119, 123, 125, 127, 154, 161, 174, 176, 180, 186, 230 Bluetooth 56, 78 Bond, James 4, 27, 43, 88, 103, 127, 141, 199 Booth, Wayne C. 194, 195, 196–7, 198, 205, 212 Borg (Star Trek) 80, 87 Briggs, Nicholas 15, 58, 175 Brown, Peri 50, 84, 115, 119, 122, 198 Buffy, the Vampire Slayer 11, 16, 21, 58, 85, 101, 112, 123, 152–3 Bullitt 94 Butler, David 230 Buxton, David 44 camp 45, 93, 94, 99, 104, 107 Cannadine, David 38, 44 canonicity 4, 11, 24, 25, 147 Cardwell, Sarah 149, 150, 151, 170 Chaplin, Charles 35, 95 Chapman, James 1, 4, 7, 11, 31, 45, 46, 110, 168, 230 Charles, Alec 56 class 6, 29–54 lower/working 30, 31, 34, 37, 38, 39, 41, 44, 51 middle (and ‘upper middle’) 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37–42 models of 38 upper 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 38, 42, 45, 46, 49, 94 Cocker, Jarvis 53 Cohan, Steven 95, 96, 98 Cold War, The 56, 62 collapse of deference 42, 45, 47, 49 continuity 16, 17, 21–4, 50, 83, 102, 162 Cook, Benjamin 230 Cornell, Paul 25–6, 58, 123, 219 (n. 28)

Britton_Index.indd 238

Coward, Noël 157, 201 Craik, Jennifer 94 Cranny-Francis, Anne 56, 67 Cream 95 Creeber, Glen 147, 148 Cull, Nicholas 31, 34, 42, 56, 60, 61, 68, 110 cult icon 26–7 cultural studies 6, 147, 149, 150, 191, 192 Cybermen 22–3, 41, 56, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 69, 73, 76–81, 82, 157, 174–6, 197, 219 (n. 29) Cylons (Battlestar Galactica) 77 Daleks

5, 21, 25, 26, 55, 56, 59, 60, 61, 64–5, 65–70, 71, 73, 76, 77, 92, 119, 130, 131, 132, 161–2, 175, 206 Danger Man 89, 90, 91 Darth Vader 77 Davies, Russell T. 3, 11, 26, 58, 84, 102, 109, 111, 123, 128, 171, 204, 205, 206, 207, 228 (n. 260) Davison, Peter 36, 50, 96, 97, 116, 127 Davros 59, 60, 63, 64, 65, 66, 70–2, 73, 76, 77, 82, 121, 158, 174, 206 Department S 95 design 164, 166–7 costume 35–6, 45–6, 52–3, 93–4, 95, 97, 104, 161, 167, 179, 186 set (art direction) 164, 167, 170 Die Hard 95 DiGioia, Allen 170 Dinnick, Richard 230 Dirty Harry 94 Doctor, The First 29, 33, 35, 36, 39, 48, 50, 53, 100, 187 Second 35, 39–42, 43, 50, 115 Third 31, 36, 37, 40, 42, 43–4, 47, 73, 94, 95, 97, 116, 124 Fourth 19, 31, 36, 45–8, 94, 95, 97, 116, 125

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INDEX

Fifth

50, 68, 77, 78, 94, 97–8, 127 Sixth 19, 36, 50, 115, 178–9, 198 Seventh 19, 25, 95, 116, 118, 120, 122, 124, 126, 184 Eighth 9, 15, 25, 51, 52, 115, 116, 124, 126, 139, 141, 176, 183–4 Ninth 9, 15, 36–7, 85, 99–100, 103, 184 Tenth 9, 25, 36, 37, 52, 85, 99, 100–2, 103, 105, 108, 111, 121, 125, 184, 204–6, 207 Eleventh viii, 8, 9, 37, 85, 99, 102–9, 135, 136–7, 184, 207–10 Doctor Who alleged pacifism of 72, 83, 84, 87–8, 93, 121, 192, 206 Big Finish audio dramas …ish 177, 197, 198 The Apocalypse Element 68 Bang-Bang-a-Boom 186 The Chimes of Midnight 49 The Condemned 49 Davros 70, 71–2, 76 Excelis Dawns 204 The Fearmonger 177 The Gathering 127–8, 133, 154 The Genocide Machine 66–7, 69, 70 Invaders from Mars 177 Jubilee 69, 81 LIVE 34 176 Mad Dogs and Englishmen 200–1 Master 71, 72, 75–6, 82 The Mutant Phase 68–9, 175 The Natural History of Fear 176 Omega 71 The One Doctor 186 The Raincloud Man 49 Spare Parts 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 174–6, 180, 197, 198

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239

Terror Firma 72 The Time of the Daleks 67 Urgent Calls 177–9 Whispers of Terror 177 The Wormery 200 branding of 12, 100, 102, 108, 135, 184 Classic series television episodes The Ark in Space 62 The Aztecs 170–1 Battlefield 168 Black Orchid 97–8, 105–6 The Brain of Morbius 185–6 Carnival of Monsters 90, 94 The Chase 67, 68 City of Death 47 The Creature from the Pit 97 The Curse of Peladon 73 The Daemons 94 The Dalek Invasion of Earth 60 The Daleks’ Master Plan 29, 33, 68 The Deadly Assassin 18, 23, 34, 48, 165–8 Death to the Daleks 67 Earthshock 77 Evil of the Daleks 65, 67 The Faceless Ones 40 Fury from the Deep 40 Genesis of the Daleks 2, 61, 65, 72, 77, 78, 79, 197 The Green Death 44 The Hand of Fear 25, 114 The Invasion 157 The Keeper of Traken 24, 164–5 The Keys of Marinus 15 The Macra Terror 40 Meglos 49 The Moonbase 23, 40, 61, 187–8 Planet of Evil 62 Remembrance of the Daleks 65, 66 The Ribos Operation 158, 165 The Robots of Death 217 The Sea Devils 96–7

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240

TARDISbound

Doctor Who – Continued The Seeds of Doom 62 The Silurians 91 Silver Nemesis 77 Spearhead from Space 32 The Sun Makers 47 The Talons of Weng Chiang 158, 163, 165 The Tenth Planet 23, 61, 80, 174, 176 Terror of the Autons 37 The Three Doctors 23 Tomb of the Cybermen 76, 89 Trial of a Time Lord 19, 159–60 An Unearthly Child 66, 157, 159 The War Games 18, 34 The Wheel in Space 41, 61–2, 176 Eighth Doctor Adventures (EDA) novels The Blue Angel 14, 143, 186, 202–3 The Book of the Still 144 The City of the Dead 142 Earthworld 143 The Gallifrey Chronicles 142 Grimm Reality 184, 199, 206, 210–17 Halflife 143–4 History 101 182–3 Interference 25, 124, 125–6 Option Lock 52 The Scarlet Empress 52, 200, 202, 203, 204 Seeing I 52 Unnatural History 24, 52 Vampire Science 52 The Year of Intelligent Tigers 116 eroticization of 100–2, 125–6, 133–4 exceptionalism 83–6 ‘gay agenda’ in 136 ‘gay-friendliness’ of 83–5, 86, 88, 112 Missing Adventure (MA) novels

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The Dark Path 72 New Adventures (NA) novels Human Nature 25, 123 Iceberg 219 (n. 29) Love and War 120, 121, 219 (n. 28) Lungbarrow 18 Timewyrm: Genesys 219 (n. 16) Transit (Ben Aaronovitch) 14 New Series Adventures (NSA) novels The Monsters Inside 184–5 New series television episodes The Age of Steel 78, 80 Bad Wolf 92, 186 The Beast Below 137, 207–10, 211 The Big Bang 136, 137–8 Blink 134 Doomsday 56, 69, 101, 131, 136, 157 The Eleventh Hour 102, 136, 209 The Fires of Pompeii 170–1 Flesh and Stone 102, 136–7 The Girl in the Fireplace 172–4 Human Nature/The Family of Blood 134 Journey’s End 63, 72, 121, 131–2, 135, 206 Last of the Time Lords 74, 75, 134, 135 The Lodger 105–7, 109 The Long Game 92 The Pandorica Opens 70 The Parting of the Ways 130–1 Partners in Crime 132 Rise of the Cybermen 56, 77–8, 79, 81 Rose 129, 130, 204 The Runaway Bride 204–5, 206, 207 School Reunion 25, 101, 124, 125, 126, 127, 137

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INDEX

Smith and Jones 134 The Sontaran Stratagem 135 The Sound of Drums 74 The Stolen Earth 63 The Time of Angels 105 The Vampires of Venice 107, 109 Victory of the Daleks 65, 137 Voyage of the Damned 133, 140 Waters of Mars 207 Past Doctor Adventures (PDA) novels Bullet Time 25, 124, 126–7 The Face of the Enemy 73 Festival of Death 15 Ten Little Aliens 187–90 Verdigris 200 Short stories (BBC) Femme Fatale 181–2 Doctor Who Magazine 69, 139, 230 Doctor Who Monster Book, The 55 Doctor Who – movie (TVM) 9, 50, 117, 126, 183 Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures (MAs) 3, 9, 16, 21, 73, 121, 163, 184, 186 Doctor Who: The New Adventures (NAs) 2, 3, 9, 14, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 24, 25, 27, 51, 57, 58, 81, 92, 112, 118, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 128, 153, 162, 202, 204 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text 1, 31, 230 dress peculiar 94, 98 ‘retro’ 42, 93 Dyer, Richard 180, 185, 188, 189, 190 Easter Parade 95 Eastwood, Clint 89, 94 Eccleston, Christopher 3, 4, 35, 36, 98, 102, 103, 108 El Cid 89

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241

Eliot, George 195 Elizabeth R 170 endlessly deferred narrative 7, 17–21, 88, 210 epic vignette 157, 158, 160, 165, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 194, 214–15 episodic format 12–15, 153, 170, 190 establishment, the 31, 34, 38 Eurovision Song Contest 186 fan fiction (fan-fic) 57–9, 68 fan-produced texts 60, 66–73, 75, 76–7, 78–9 fan professionals 15, 16, 58, 65, 67, 69 fanwank 69 fan writers 15, 25, 59, 68, 73 femininity 80, 114, 117, 125, 136, 138 feminism 124, 188 ‘filmised’ video 168, 169, 170 film noir 98 First Blood 95 Fisher, David (Six Feet Under) 112 Flaubert, Gustave 181 Fleming, Ian 4 Forbidden Planet 47, 186 Fox, Kate 36 Foxon, Steve 177 Frankenstein 185–6 Fuchs, Cynthia 80 Fugitive, The 18, 89 Fu Manchu 186 Gale, Cathy 181 Gallifrey 23–4, 25, 68, 75, 165–8 destruction of 25, 142, 200 Gaudí 164 gentleman (rank) 29, 32, 33 the Doctor as 29, 30, 31, 46 Geraghty, Christine 151 Geraghty, Lincoln 222 (n. 113) Gorey, Edward 79 Grant, Jo 53, 113, 116 Guantanamo Bay 56 Guernica 182–3

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242

TARDISbound

Guillory, John

195–6

Haight-Ashbury 53 Harkness, Captain Jack 84, 99, 128, 136, 139–41, 144 harlequinade motif 158, 159, 163, 178, 179, 194, 214 Harrigan, Pat 5, 12, 16, 17, 26 Hartnell, William 93, 186 Head, Anthony 102 Heath, Edward 33 hero, the popular 27 socialized 90, 91 woman- 122, 131 heroism masculinity and 5, 6, 87, 111 middle class and 34 narcissism and see narcissistic hero normative 6, 13, 20, 28, 74, 85, 87, 95, 103, 108, 205 problematizing of 82, 92, 95, 98, 105, 127, 199, 202–3, 204, 207, 209, 210 upper class and 42 heteronormativity 102, 108, 111, 113, 116, 118, 130, 131, 135, 136, 138, 139–40, 145, 192 Hills, Matt 7, 12, 17, 26–7, 64, 82, 102, 230 Hinchcliffe, Philip 19, 45, 46, 47, 53, 221 (n. 71) Holmes, Robert 165, 185 Holmes, Sherlock 42, 43 Holmlund, Chris 99 Home, Alec Douglas 33 Howe, David J. 11, 230 Hudson, June vii, 95 Hudson, Lauren 177–9 hyperdiegesis 17, 21, 25, 26, 57, 68, 69, 81 Importance of Being Earnest, The 212 Incredible Hulk, The 89

Britton_Index.indd 242

Inspector Lynley Mysteries, The instrumentalism 150 ‘inwardness’ 5, 155 Ipcress File, The 62

170

Jacobs, Jason 151 Jenkins, Henry 34, 57–9, 67, 221 (n. 94) Johnson, Catherine 147, 155–6, 157 Jones, Martha 85, 100, 101, 117, 120, 133–5, 136 Jones, Samantha (Sam) 21, 24, 117, 119, 126, 139, 142, 181 Joplin, Janis 100 Jovanka, Tegan 50, 119, 127–8, 133 Judd, Daniel 84–5, 87, 93 K-9 49 Kapranos, Alex 53 Keaton, Buster 95 Kirk, Captain James T. 84, 86, 88 Kreiner, Fitz 112, 114, 116, 119, 120, 139, 141–5, 182, 183, 212, 214, 215 Lambert, Verity 31 Laurel, Stan 105, 107 Lethbridge-Stewart, Brigadier Alistair 41 Life on Mars 170 Lloyd, Harold 95 Loch Ness Monster, The 157 Longleat House 46 Lucasfilm 11 Mackintosh, Charles Rennie 164 Mad Max (franchise) 89 Magrs, Paul vii, 3, 14, 181, 200, 202, 204 Major, John 33 Majorelle, Louis 164 Manchurian Candidate, The 62 Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The 89, 90 Marquis de Sade 181 Martin, Dan 108

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INDEX

Marvel Comics 2 Marx, Harpo 46, 95 Marx, Karl 47 masculinity normative 80, 83, 87, 88, 93, 94, 99, 100, 106–7, 108, 114, 140 theatricalized 98, 108 masquerade 35, 52, 86, 98–9, 100 Master, The 28, 49, 59, 60, 63, 64, 69, 72–6, 82, 96, 134, 135, 158, 174 McCoy, Sylvester 36, 93 McGann, Paul 3, 9, 50, 53, 93, 102, 103, 128, 176 McIntee, David 126, 127 McKee, Alan 26 McQueen, Steve 94 McShane, Dorothy Gale see Ace Menzies, D. I. Patricia 49 Mercer, David 170 Middlemarch 195 Miles, Lawrence 22, 119, 125, 230 Moffat, Steven 3, 12, 58, 102, 104, 105, 109, 117, 128, 207 Mondas 59, 76, 77, 78–9, 174–6 Monsters and Villains 55 Morbius 185 Motown 201 Mouffe, Chantal 191–2, 228 (n. 249) musical comedy 95, 96, 98 Myles, Sophia 173 My So-Called Life 192 narcissistic hero 88–91, 92, 93, 94, 108, 109, 110, 206 narrative deferral 101, 117 Nazism 56, 60–1, 66, 68 Neale, Steve 88–9, 92 negative aesthetic 201, 203 Nelson, Robin 149–50, 169, 227 (n. 227)

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243

Newman, Kim 1, 4, 6, 230 Nyssa of Traken 49, 78, 79, 119, 175 Omega

23, 24, 174

palimpsest 17, 23, 65, 74, 108, 135, 181, 200 Pallisers, The 170 Paramount Pictures 11 Parkin, Lance 22, 24, 58, 71, 193 Parsifal 216, 217 Pascoe, Phil 198 pastiche 15, 163, 175, 180, 182, 185, 186, 188, 189–90, 194, 211, 213 patriarchy 27, 85, 86, 108, 111, 118, 122, 124, 129, 131, 140, 145 deflated 136–7, 141 Pearson, Lars 144, 230 The Phantom of the Opera 186 Picard, Jean-Luc (Star Trek: The Next Generation) 87 Pompadour, Madame de (‘Reinette’) 172–3 Pond, Amy 85, 102, 117, 135–8, 140, 200, 207–10 Potter, Dennis 170 Predator 187 Prisoner, The 18, 47 Prisoner of Zenda, The 47 Pyroviles 171 ‘Quality TV’ 152, 169, 170 Quartermass and the Pit 41 Quatermass serials 156, 186 queer definition of 102–3 identity for the Eleventh Doctor 85, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 108, 109 moments 139 relationships 112 theory 112 Radio Times 2, 155, 139 Rani, The 49

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244

TARDISbound

Rassilon 23–4 received pronunciation 36, 40 regeneration 17, 18, 92 reptile men 41, 91 Richards, Justin 15 Robson, Eddie 177–8 Rolling Stones, The 95 Romana 48, 49, 113, 115, 116 Rosenberg, Willow (Buffy, the Vampire Slayer) 112 Russell, Gary 15, 68, 84, 93 Ryder, Tom 127 Sarah Jane Adventures, The 8 sexuality 45, 84, 93, 101, 103, 106–7, 108, 112, 117, 120, 125, 126, 135–6, 139–40, 144 She 185 Shearman, Robert 69 Sinclair, Izzy 139 Six Feet Under 112, 170 Skillen, Tony 31, 33 Smith, Dale 125 Smith, Matt 3, 12, 25, 43, 102, 103, 104, 105, 108 Smythe, Evelyn 121, 128, 174 Sopranos, The 16 Space 1999 186 spectacle 5, 28, 85, 92–9, 100, 101, 102, 103, 109, 147, 156, 163, 171, 172, 174, 197, 215 intimate 156–7 Spike (Buffy, the Vampire Slayer) 74 Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The 61 Stallone, Sylvester 95 Stammers, Mark 11, 230 Star Trek (franchise) 4, 58, 59, 80, 103, 186, 199 Star Trek (television series) 11, 58 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine 20, 123 Star Trek: First Contact 87 Star Trek: The Next Generation 20, 80, 192 Star Trek: Voyager 20, 122 Star Wars (film) 11, 77

Britton_Index.indd 244

Star Wars (franchise) 4, 11, 186 Steed, John 43–4, 181 Sterne, Jonathan 193 Summers, Buffy (Buffy, the Vampire Slayer) 74, 101, 102, 152 surreal apposition 157, 158, 165, 167, 172, 175, 178, 186–7, 194, 213 Tamm, Mary 48 TARDIS 13, 14, 24, 26, 32–3, 37, 49, 105, 130, 143, 207, 211, 217 Iris Wildthyme’s 200 kitchen 52 log 24 as metaphor 28, 92, 217 Target Books (W.H. Allen) 2 Teach Yourself Tibetan 97 television studies 147, 150, 156, 192, 227 (n. 227) Tenko 170 Tennant, David 3, 12, 52, 58, 63, 102, 103–4, 105, 108 Thatcher, Margaret 33 Thatcherism 49, 51 They Saved Hitler’s Brain 185 The Thing from Another World 186 The Third Man 195 thirtysomething 170 Time Lords of Gallifrey 23–4, 25, 32 48, 49, 65, 68, 74, 88, 91, 132, 134, 165–8, 185 Time War 25, 200 Torchwood 8 Toulouse Lautrec, Henri de 45, 221 (n. 71) Tucker, Mike 66–7 Tulloch, John 1, 31, 34, 35, 36, 45, 46, 56, 58, 67 Tyler, Jackie 130, 131 Tyler, Rose 21, 85, 92, 100, 101, 102, 111, 117, 119, 120, 123, 125, 129–32, 133, 135, 136, 137, 140, 141, 144, 184, 204, 206 U.N.I.T. 32, 41, 73, 113, 126

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INDEX

Valeyard, The 19 vast narrative 6, 10, 12, 16, 26, 28, 57, 137, 150, 194, 195, 197, 210 violence, problem of 65, 87, 88, 93, 95, 106, 119, 120, 121, 192, 199, 203, 206 Virgin Publishing 2, 3, 8, 9, 16, 147, 163 Walker, Stephen James 11, 230 Ward, Lalla 48 Wardrip-Fruin, Noah 5, 12, 16, 17, 26 Warhol, Andy 181

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245

Weymouth, Viscount 46 When the Boat Comes In 170 Wildthyme, Iris 24, 143, 181, 199, 200–4 Williams, Graham 45 Williams, Rory 107, 136, 137, 138 Willis, Bruce 95 Wood, Tat 22, 119, 230 Woollacott, Janet 27 X-Files, The 21, 58, 122, 123, 155 Yeti 41, 62

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Britton_Index.indd 246

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