Timeless Adventures (2 page)

The third strand featured in this volume is the return of
Doctor Who
to television in 2005 in the newly revitalised series, chronicled in chapter seven. It’s a show now run by fans (both show-runners Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat and star David Tennant are all self-confessed active fans of the original series). However, the new version of
Doctor Who
has re-engaged successfully with the mass audience the series lost in the 1980s. The show was refurbished to appeal to everyone, yet it is recognisably still the same
Doctor Who
that went off air in 1989.

Doctor Who
is more successful now than it has ever been, and has enjoyed a sustained period of success. When
Doctor Who
was off the air, the memory of the show remained with audiences who’d grown up with it as children, whether in the 1960s, the 1970s or the 1980s. In 1996 the series was dramatically declared the All-Time Favourite BBC Programme in a public vote celebrating the BBC’s 60th anniversary, beating the likes of much-loved shows
EastEnders
and
Casualty.
The revived version of the series has won armloads of awards, from BAFTAs and National Television Awards to the science-fiction Oscars, the Hugos.

Crucial to this success has been the revived series’ willingness to engage with modern social, political and cultural (even consumer) issues in a way not seen since the early-to-mid-1970s. Unlike in the 1980s, but very in tune with the 1960s and 1970s,
Doctor Who
is once again a TV show that attracts an audience due to its accessibility and the fact that it is easily understood as part of a modern television environment.

The 50th anniversary year saw
Doctor Who
refresh itself once more, as Matt Smith hung up his sonic screwdriver after a hugely successful four-year run as the Eleventh Doctor, making way for Peter Capaldi to step aboard the magical TARDIS space-time machine as the twelfth version of the renegade Time Lord. It may have been seen as another moment of crisis for the show, but the fact is
Doctor Who
’s very strength lies in such change. The show thrives on renewal and every new lead actor or showrunner brings something different and unique to this uniquely long-lived series. Long thought of as a dead series during much of the 1990s,
Doctor Who
is now guaranteed a future, as long as the series remains relevant to its audience. The Doctor himself is now one of the great British fictional folk heroes, alongside Sherlock Holmes, Robin Hood and James Bond. Each of these characters returns again and again, in new forms and in new media, telling new, but always relevant, stories. Just like them,
Doctor Who
will keep returning, forever.

Who created
Doctor Who
?

Reading the credits of the current incarnation of the series will not tell you the answer to that question. If you rely on an early edition of the quiz game
Trivial Pursuit
, which claimed
Doctor Who
was created by one-time Tony Hancock scriptwriter Terry Nation, you’ll be no better informed. That assertion has continued to surface, even in the
Guardian
obituary of the first
Doctor Who
producer Verity Lambert late in 2007. Earlier histories of the show often credited the 1960s Head of BBC Drama, Canadian Sydney Newman. The truth, however, is that the national institution that is
Doctor Who
was the product of a committee working within another national institution, the BBC itself.

Hugh Carleton Greene became BBC Director General at a crucial time of change in the corporation’s history. Brother of author Graham Greene, he’d been a war correspondent for the
Daily Telegraph
before joining the BBC in 1940. In and out of the BBC throughout the next two decades, Greene held a variety of important posts that allowed him to succeed Ian Jacob to the top position in 1960. He was now running an organisation with a unique history. Founded in October 1922 by John Reith, the British Broadcasting Company (later Corporation) had a responsibility (as stated in the BBC Charter of 1927) to ‘inform, educate and entertain’ the nation. The BBC was – and still is – funded through a licence-fee scheme, paid by all who own a television. This often left the organisation open to political manipulation by the government of the day. Experimental television broadcasting had begun in 1932. A regular service started in 1936, but was interrupted by the Second World War before resuming in June 1946. The BBC established many of the basic ‘ground rules’ of television broadcasting, and has often evinced a very paternalistic attitude, resulting in the nickname ‘Auntie’.

As Director General, Greene had a clear mission statement: to drag the BBC out of the complacent 1950s (some might say the 1940s) and to ensure that the Corporation’s output kept pace with the dizzying social and political change of the 1960s. The big threat the BBC faced was ITV, the independent commercial broadcaster started in 1955, which had found popular success and acceptance as the 1960s began. In comparison with this dynamic young commercial operation, the bureaucratic and hidebound BBC appeared to be a relic from a bygone age. Deference was out and protest was in as the 1960s began to truly swing. It was Hugh Carleton Greene’s job to reflect this sea change in British culture in the programmes that appeared on the BBC.

Among the innovative programmes that debuted on his watch (which extended until 1968) were melancholic situation comedy
Steptoe and Son
, gritty police drama
Z-Cars
, and late-night biting political and social satire
That Was The Week That Was
(or
TW3
). All were long-running (except
TW3
, axed amid electoral controversy, although its satiric approach to news and politics lived on through the work of David Frost and others) and significantly developed their respective evolving genres. These three shows all began in 1962. They were to be joined by another groundbreaking series in 1963:
Doctor Who
.

In order to compete with ITV, Greene approached one of the rival broadcaster’s key creative figures to become the BBC’s new Head of Drama. Sydney Newman had come to ITV from a successful career in his native Canada where he’d started out as a film editor for the National Film Board. After working in American television in the early 1950s in New York, Newman returned to Canada to take up a post with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation where he became Supervisor of Drama Productions in 1954. By 1958, Newman was in Britain, having been hired by ITV regional franchise ABC (serving the English Midlands and the North) as a drama producer. Newman, brash and forthright like the independent broadcaster he was joining, rapidly rose to become ABC’s Head of Drama. He was directly responsible for the creation of
Armchair Theatre
, a weekly show that presented the work of a new breed of ‘angry young men’ playwrights to large audiences, and gritty drama
Police Surgeon
, which developed into the more fantastical
The Avengers
.

Looking to revitalise the BBC’s moribund drama department and under instructions from Director General Hugh Greene, the BBC’s Director of Television Kenneth Adam hired Newman to become Head of Drama at the BBC. He took up the post as soon as his ABC contract expired in December 1962. Resented by many in the BBC – due to being younger, better paid, outspoken, and (maybe worst of all) ‘foreign’ – Newman was quick to make his mark. He split the unwieldy drama department into three units – series, serials and plays, headed by Elwyn Jones, Donald Wilson and Michael Bakewell respectively. All three reported directly to Newman, whose arrival was a sign of big changes to come at the BBC throughout the 1960s.

Donald Baverstock, the BBC Controller of Programmes, met with Newman in March 1963 to discuss the need for a new show to fill an early-evening scheduling gap between the live afternoon sports programme
Grandstand
and the pop-music review show
Juke Box Jury
, which led into the prime-time Saturday evening schedule. The slot had been previously filled by a variety of short-lived shows and serials, including a Francis Durbridge thriller, a six-episode sciencefiction serial
The Big Pool
and comedy series
The Telegoons
. Newman and Baverstock wanted a new drama show for the slot, something that could potentially run all year round (with short seasonal breaks) and could attract a loyal family audience, keeping the older
Grandstand
viewers tuned in, yet also appealing to the younger, hipper audience attracted to
Juke Box Jury
. Newman proposed and considered a variety of ideas, including a drama set in a boys’ school.

However, for as long as he could recall, Newman had been a fan of literary science fiction. ‘Up to the age of 40, I don’t think there was a science-fiction book I hadn’t read,’ he claimed. ‘I love them because they’re a marvellous way – and a safe way, I might add – of saying nasty things about our own society.’ Newman was aware of, and embraced, science fiction’s ability to comment on contemporary politics and society in the disguise of fiction about the future. While at ABC he’d commissioned the science-fiction drama-anthology series
Out of This World
, as well as the serial
Pathfinders in Space
and two sequels,
Pathfinders to Mars
and
Pathfinders to Venus
. The
Pathfinders
shows featured juvenile characters as a point of identification for the younger target audience and were co-created by Malcolm Hulke, later a key, politically motivated contributor to
Doctor Who
. Introduced by classic-horror-film icon Boris Karloff,
Out of This World
dramatised the work of key science-fiction authors such as Isaac Asimov, John Wyndham and Philip K Dick, whose
Impostor
was adapted by screenwriter Terry Nation, later to create the Daleks for
Doctor Who
. These previous Sydney Newman shows combined elements that would be central to
Doctor Who
: an anthology-series format, with strong ‘audience identification’ characters (as the BBC described them) carrying forward from story to story.

Newman’s interest in science fiction was fundamental to his thoughts on filling the Saturday scheduling gap, but the BBC had already been actively investigating the possibility of developing a series of literary science-fiction adaptations since early 1962. Always on the lookout for material to adapt, especially literary material, the BBC had an in-house ‘survey group’ that monitored film, radio and theatre productions for material that might be of use to television. Donald Wilson, then running the BBC’s script department, and Head of Light Entertainment Eric Maschwitz commissioned a report on literary science fiction that might be suitable for television adaptation. The report, compiled by drama script editors Donald Bull and Alice Frick, was submitted in April 1962. The pair had read and evaluated a selection of then-current science-fiction novels and short-story anthologies, and had met with some authors, including Brian Aldiss. The report labelled the genre as particularly American and ideas-based rather than rooted in character. Various sub-genres were identified, from simple thriller plots, to technology-driven narratives and ‘big ideas’ like cosmic threats to mankind and cosmic disasters. Interestingly, one of the sub-genres identified was described as ‘satire, comic or horrific, extrapolating current social trends and techniques’, a description that could be applied to much of
Doctor Who
’s output over the next 45 years. This was key to Newman’s belief that science fiction was a worthwhile genre.

Previous significant science-fiction ventures by the BBC had included the 1950s
Quatermass
serials (
Quatermass, Quatermass II
and
Quatermass and the Pit
) by Nigel Kneale and the two
Andromeda
serials (
A For Andromeda
in 1961 and
The Andromeda Breakthrough
, broadcast in 1962); these both fell into the ‘cosmic threat to mankind’ sub-genre the BBC report had identified. The report suggested that ideas-driven narratives were not enough; to succeed, a new television drama would have to attach the ‘magic’ of its science-fiction content to ‘a current human situation’. Also, ‘identification must be offered with identifiable human beings’. This remit would be closely followed into the twenty-first-century version of the show.

Frick and her drama-department colleague John Braybon were asked to investigate the subject matter further in a second report itemising specific literary science-fiction titles the BBC could adapt. By July 1962, the pair had devised some rules for TV science fiction that might appeal to the BBC and had some definite suggestions of stories to be adapted. The ‘rules’ were simple: no bug-eyed monsters; no ‘tin robot’ central characters; no ‘large and elaborate’ settings, such as spaceship interiors or alien planets. They must feature ‘genuine characterisation’ and rely on the audience having to ‘suspend disbelief on one fact only’. Frick and Braybon settled on stories dealing with telepaths or time travel as being most suited to adaptation to television on an inevitably limited BBC budget. They described the time-travel concept as ‘particularly attractive as a series, since individual plots can easily be tackled by a variety of scriptwriters. It’s the
Z-Cars
of science fiction’.