What will they do with Doctor Who?

 

As anyone reading this might know, today the BBC announced that this year’s proposed Xmas special had been cancelled and that  both Russell T Davies and Bad Wolf are leaving the franchise. Doctor Who as a property will remain owned by the BBC and the programme making will be put out to competitive tender. Neither of these are too much of surprise, rumours to this effect have been circulating online for a few months. What it means is that the show may not be back for an unknown number of years. Conservative estimates say two years, some suggest more like five or six. As I’m sure the tabloids of old would put it- Who Knows?

Look back to when the show came back in 2005- it had actually been in production for eighteen months before any episodes were shown. So, you could conjecture that even if tenders were invited next month we would be unlikely to see any episodes until 2028 at the earliest.

The BBC has put programmes out to tender before. In May last year Casualty went through this process and the lead time was fairly quick; by December the tender was awarded …to the BBC. Casualty though is set in the present day in a standing set. Doctor Who can take place anywhere, any time. It’s a more expensive, complex programme which would certainly be a challenge for anyone to make at a time when tv budgets are being squeezed.

The farewell statements today include a post by Russell T Davies claiming there was never a script written for the Xmas special which seems odd as Murray Gold has talked about seeing scripts for it earlier this year. Late last year RTD even said the draft script shocked the BBC and he mentioned three words it contained. So, we will never find out now about Winternox. Unless he was making all that up.

It certainly does feel though like Doctor Who needs new blood.  Ostensibly the ratings for recent seasons have been ok, commensurate with other scripted dramas. However, something that can’t really be measured mathematically is what programmes are part of a national conversation, in other words have a buzz about them. It feels a long time since Doctor Who had that, perhaps going back more than a decade. I remember thinking when it got to the stage of there being a special programme just to announce the identity of the new Doctor we had reached a hubristic tipping point because there was so little talk of it the next day except of course amongst fandom. You can almost trace the decline in general public interest since then- Jodie Whittaker’s announcement came in the form of a short film. Ncuti Gatwa just had emojis on X.

Of course its not always clear how much a decline like this is down to the content of the programme or is something that would have happened whoever the Doctor was or whoever was writing it. We still call it the new version of Doctor Who but its actually an old programme in itself- not many shows run for twenty one years and those that do tend to settle into a comfortable groove. There comes a point when only those who have watched before will watch again and each year more of them lose interest

We all know the arguments about the content of recent seasons; variously its too “woke”, too nostalgic, too sloppy with storylines, too childish etc. More than any specific issue, I’d say its too confused. People always extol the apparent `flexibility` of Doctor Who but in fact there is a formula that works and its only when diverging from it that the show has tended to run into trouble. That formula is- Doctor lands somewhere, there is a problem, they sort it out. The end. Yes, you can occasionally have arc developments, continuity etc but just imagine how big all of time and space would actually be. Then ponder on the likelihood of running into the same characters or places more than once.  The series always seems to over exploit its more popular aspects like endless Master, Dalek or Cybermen stories each of which dilute the reasons why they were popular in the first place.

For me the best eras of the show are when it stuck closest to that formula. Within it you can be flexible such as the non linear manner Steven Moffatt liked to tell stories- but it still sticks to that idea. It is a common mistake of genre writers to assume their audience possesses all the knowledge of and interest in classic material and genre lore that they do and once you start feeding more and more of that sort of stuff in, a lot of the audience loses interest. Recent Doctor Who – and people will have their own line to draw as to when this started- has seemed to rely too much on a mixture of nostalgia, shocks and box ticking to fill its increasingly small number of episodes.

I do feel like we should acknowledge the vast contribution Russell T Davies has actually made to Doctor Who. He made it more popular than it had ever been and provided some thrilling moments to rival anything the classic series did. If you’d told me twenty- five years ago that Doctor Who would be one of the top -rated shows in the UK I would never have believed you. Had you also predicted that various episodes would be as exciting as stories from the 70s or 80s I would have doubted that.  In the years before the revival, fans thought the only way to bring it back was as a more serious adult series similar to something like Strange. Instead, Davies saw a potential for Doctor Who to find its sense of wild adventure and populism again.

However, times have changed and his recent return ended up with that disappointment most reunions have. You can’t re-create a magic from two decades ago. I actually don’t think a lot of the recent stories are that bad but and I do think- I can say it now- that Ncuti Gatwa was a rare miscast from a show that has had largely impeccable casting. It’s a shame that I never felt free to say that while he was incumbent because others who did were accused of racism but its not that; there are plenty of black or Asian actors I would have chosen over him. I just didn’t feel he had that elusive `Doctor` quality and it didn’t help that the scripts seemed to be written for Ncuti Gatwa rather than for the Doctor.

One key thing that any future version of the show needs is a certainty over what audience it is going for. Is it an adventure romp? A show for kids? A horror show? A serious sci fi show? A fantasy series? The absolute worst thing it could be though is a show aimed at fans alone. Which is why I’m not going to be laying out my ideas as to what the next iteration should be because hopefully it will be miles away from anything fans would think of. We are a tiny, tiny proportion of the audience and it feels like we’ve had enough fan service tropes to last thirteen lifetimes. So, leave Omega in the cupboard and invent something new!