“Oh, you know, ‘The people of Planet Zog are being fought by the Zognauts...’ I don’t give a toss. I go through Radio Times, reading the billings of these shows — ‘The crystals of Narthok are in danger from the blah blah blah’ — and I don’t care. The audience is so much more intelligent than that. I won’t have dumbing-down for a second.”
Travelling down to some studios in Wales, I had been vaguely wondering why the BBC had suddenly decided to remake Doctor Who. I learn the answer as soon as I walk into Unit Q2, Imperial Park, Newport. It is standing in front of me, babbling fluently and, I slowly realise, brilliantly. It is Russell T Davies, chief writer and executive producer, and previously writer of Queer as Folk and some of the best children’s television shows. Without this camp, chortling, verbal torrent, this encyclopedia of schlock TV, this genially conceited motor mouth, there would have been no point in trying to resurrect our own space opera. Nobody else could conceivably have got it right.
“I mean, I’ve watched the Harry Potters several times. I don’t say you’ve got to match them. You disappear up your own arse if you try to chase cinema on television, but you’ve got to nod towards it. You’ve got to have professionals. These scripts are better than Harry Potter scripts — good characters, good stories, good jokes, good scares.” They show me some clips of the new show, with Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor and Billie Piper as his “young assistant”. I remember when that phrase first acquired inverted commas. I was about 13 at the time.
“I never ask what he was doing with his young companion,” says Davies, with mock huffiness. “It’s the sort of thing journalists think about.”
The clips make it clear.
Davies may babble, but he also delivers. The scripts are, indeed, much better than Harry Potter. They are slick, witty and, most important of all, fresh. They also have Davies the Mouth’s fingerprints all over them. The Doctor’s slightly deranged monologue sounds suspiciously like Russell T himself.
“So, you identify with the Doctor?” I ask him between clips. “More with Billie,” giggles Julie Gardner, producer, head of drama for BBC Wales and part-time Wise to Davies’s Morecambe. He affects a juicy pout. “Oh, yeees.”
Okay, enough of this. Doctor Who began on November 23, 1963, and ended in 1989. There was a one-off TV movie in 1996. The series was silly, naff, consoling and, especially in its choice of actors to play the Doctor, brilliant. From William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton through to Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker, the doctors were batty, obsessed, dandyish and polychromatically scarved. Above all, they were British types. Compare these characters to those in the first series of Star Trek, which began in 1966. With the possible exception of “Bones” McCoy, Kirk and his crew were sensible, post-Kennedy, liberal American heroes, sane and reliable. The Doctors, in contrast, formed a portfolio of bonkers Brits. Eccleston might, in this context, be a problem. Bill Nighy had been floated, the obvious choice — if anything, he would have been the battiest of the lot. But Eccleston is just a wiry lad in a leather jacket that Davies describes as “strangely timeless”. He’s good, but is he lasting? Will Dead Ringers be impersonating him years hence, as they do Baker? Never mind: the Britishness of the enterprise is intact. “This is very, very British,” says Motor Mouth. “We’ve got the Houses of Parliament and red buses. It’s all very emphasised. The first shot is the earth from outer space, and it zooms into Britain and London. We’ve had all those yellow school buses and prom days. We’ve had enough of that.”
Actually, he hasn’t had enough of it all. He is crazy about American teen sci-fi such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. His favourite film of all time is Back to the Future. In fact, it is exactly this kind of enthusiasm that makes him so aware of the kind of competition the new Doctor Who is up against. For the truth is that, apart from the weird excursion of Blake’s 7, which ran from 1978 to 1981, the Doctor was the only real British attempt to do TV sci-fi. We handed over the genre to the Americans and they ran with it, producing gems such as The X Files or Buffy, as well as the various, often gemlike, Star Trek iterations. The problem then became competing, not just aesthetically but also financially. American television wealth meant those shows could produce special effects good enough to convince the Matrix generation that they were worth watching. This, too, has changed. The cost of special effects has dropped and, meanwhile, we have some of the best effects people in the world. As a result, this series is replete with light and magic, all made by The Mill, the Soho outfit that did, among other things, Gladiator.
That movie, however, had a mere 100 visual effects. This new Doctor Who series — 13 45-minute episodes — has about 800, and The Mill has been churning them out at the rate of 100 a month. “I don’t know,” says The Mill’s boss, Robin Shenfield, “but I’m pretty sure nothing of this scale has ever been attempted — certainly nothing British.” This means that the beloved clunkiness of the old series — cardboard sets, crummy aliens — is to be replaced by computer-slick graphics. This is, at the very least, a sentimental loss. Mike Tucker, the miniature-effects supervisor on the new series, also worked on the old one. He used to admire its frantic overreaching. “It was always pushing against the boundaries of its budget, trying to do stuff it couldn’t possibly achieve,” he says. “They would try to make the Loch Ness monster attack a village, or they’d have an attack with a horde of Daleks when they had only three Dalek props. It was one of its great charms. But then Star Wars came along and raised the game. These days, kids are so effects-literate.”
Computer graphics had to happen, of course, but, to their credit, everybody involved is aware of the potential loss of the show’s distinctive patina. Davies insisted, for example, that the interior of the Tardis should look like a terrible, lived-in British mess, as opposed to the gleaming flight deck of the Starship Enterprise. And outside, it’s still an old-fashioned police box that disappears and reappears with that weird donkey-braying sound. The Mill people have been fiddling with this effect, but in principle it’s intact — and as clunky as ever.
The big issue, of course, is the Daleks. They are back, and they look much the same, except that they now have a harsh bronze sheen and are plainly better built. They still have the sink-plunger weapon, which, on the originals, really was a sink plunger, and they still appear to be severely restricted in their evil work by their inability to climb stairs. Davies, typically, has turned both these attributes into roguish gags. The sink plunger kills somebody horribly — a sort of face-sucking operation, I gather — and when Piper runs up a staircase to escape a Dalek, she discovers, to her horror, that they can fly. Obvious, really.
Wholly new to the series is Cassandra. She is what an American waiter would call Davies’s “signature dish”.
