Retrospective: Russell T. Davies by John Seavey 25/9/03
By the later stages of the Virgin New Adventures, word had spread far beyond the fan community about its quality and willing to take risks. Authors with friends and connections at the BBC, such as Ben Aaronovitch and Mark Gatiss, had communicated the enjoyment of writing for the range to other authors who'd not yet done a novel. Presumably it was this that attracted Russell T Davies, an award-winning TV dramatist, to write his novel Damaged Goods for the line. Whatever the reason, he brought a powerful intensity and a darkly different sensibility to the series.
Davies' previous work included the soap opera 'Revelations', and one can easily spot a "soap opera" influence on the novel; not in the pejorative sense it's usually used in, of cheap melodrama and endless shock revelations, but in a setting of all-too-human people, each concealing a life-time's worth of secrets and interacting with each other in a toxic cat's cradle of lies, anger, love, sorrow, and hatred. The Doctor beautifully describes the Quadrant, the housing settlement that forms the setting of Damaged Goods, as "76 fortresses", and Davies makes it seem as though he's worked out a complete life's story for each of those fortresses' inhabitants.
That's not to say that he ignores the science fiction elements of Doctor Who, though. Damaged Goods ties in quite well with the psi-powers arc it's a part of, neatly bridging The Death of Art and So Vile A Sin, even if the Brotherhood themselves play a small part. It also ties in with Gallifreyan history and legend in a way that neatly betrays Davies as a closet Doctor Who fan; no other could know not just about the War against the vampires, but also about the different colleges of Gallifreyan society as well (and the cameo by an ancestor of Benny is just the icing on the cake.) It all ties together with its human elements in a glorious tragedy that tears at the heartstrings.
But to laud the plot and characterization is to ignore Davies' true strength, his ability to generate atmosphere. When I say "glorious tragedy", I mean it; Damaged Goods generates an atmosphere of suffocating horror, despair, and dread so profound that when you finally do stop reading, it feels almost like you're surfacing. This is a book you could drown in, and it doesn't let up for even a moment.
I feel sure that Russell T Davies won't write for the range again; after all, he must have had opportunities in the almost seven years since Damaged Goods has been published. That's unfortunate, since his one novel for the range was a genuine triumph, a powerful and brilliant piece right down to its perfectly apt title. He's exactly the kind of author who needs to be invited back for a repeat performance; even if his follow-up is only half as good, it'd still be impressive.
The Man with the Plan by Antony Tomlinson 27/9/03
Well, things have changed a bit in the few days since John Seavey wrote his review of Russell T. Davies's main contribution to Doctor Who (the novel, Damaged Goods). In the conclusion to his article, Seavey states of Davies that "[h]e's exactly the kind of author who needs to be invited back for a repeat performance; even if his follow-up is only half as good, it'd still be impressive."
Well, spookily, hours after Seavey wrote this review, the BBC announced that Doctor Who would be returning to British TV screens in around 2005; they also announced the name of the author of the new series - Russell T. Davies. Blimey, the guy is not just coming back to do another novel - he's coming back to do the whole bloody series.
So there we go. Anyway, what do I think of Davies's contribution to Doctor Who? I believe that his most important contribution to the series is actually his acclaimed British drama, Queer as Folk. What was important about Queer as Folk is that it featured a leading character who was unashamedly a Doctor Who fan (and who also happened to be gay). This was probably the first time a Doctor Who fan has ever been shown on British Television in a positive light, and the advent of the series certainly diminished some of the stigma that surrounds Doctor Who fandom. I certainly feel more comfortable about coming out as a Whovian these days.
There are some wonderful Doctor Who related moments in Queer as Folk, though. One episode sees our lead character courted by two men. One - a flashy, but rather dull old bore - buys our hero a new car. The other - a man who genuinely understands our lead - buys him a full-sized, remote controlled K9. I know who I'd go for.
What about Davies's one (thus far) foray into Doctor Who proper - Damaged Goods? Well, I have to say that I found the book disappointing. As Seavey notes, the characters in this book are explored in great depth - the problem for me, however, is that I don't really want to know them. They are such a miserable bunch of depressive misfits. For me, the book is just too gritty - it's like a drug/troubled pregnancy-addled version of the last episode of Survival. Then again, perhaps this is my own fault for happening to seek escapism rather than realism in Doctor Who fiction.
The book goes downhill towards the end though. It turns into an orgy of violence which doesn't seem to add anything to the plot, but rather seems to issue out of an urge for some kind of climax. In fact it's the same resort to violence that ruined books like Falls the Shadow and Death and Diplomacy.
And I'm afraid that the Psi-Powers arc stuff was not seamlessly included as Seavey suggests - I had absolutely no idea what was going on from the point that the Doctor moodily whispers "the Brotherhood are behind this." The who?
Still, it is well written for the most part, the characters are well fleshed out and Davies has proved himself a terrific drama writer on television - so he seems an ideal choice to create a new Doctor Who TV series. What will it be like though?
Recently Davies had a new series on TV - The Second Coming. I only saw parts of it, but what I saw was, I think, a good indication of what we can expect from the new series Doctor Who. For a start it was gritty and realistic, in much the same manner as Damaged Goods. It got into the lives and minds of troubled, yet ordinary people, and showed them being destroyed from the inside.
However, The Second Coming also had a clear sci-fi (in a way) element. And what Davies has proved in this respect is that he can produce bloody frightening television on a pretty small budget. During The Second Coming, several characters are possessed by some evil force and - simply through the drama (and some weird light effects on their eyes) - these beings were made utterly terrifying. In fact it was the first time that I've hidden behind the sofa out of fear for about twenty years. So I believe that Russell T. Davies is, in this respect, probably going to perfect as the new creator of Doctor Who.
Then again, if he gets stuck, there are plenty of people around that he can call up for help (Robert Shearman, Gareth Roberts, Mark Gatiss, Ben Aaronovitch etc, etc, etc...)
I just hope it really happens this time.
Some thoughts on current perceptions of Russell T Davies by Rob Matthews 5/4/07
A few days ago I read, via a link on Outpost Gallifrey, a particulary sloppy Observer profile of Russell T Davies. In spite of its laziness, or perhaps because of it, said article got me thinking, and reawakened some old concerns of mine about New Who, and how it's perceived.
Though it's perhaps unwise of me to give this transient piece a kind of immortality in the hallowed archives of the Ratings Guide, I'll quote here two things from the article that hit me like a slap in the face:
1) On a letter Russell T Davies wrote to The Guardian praising cartoon grotesque Mr Humphries from seventies sitcom Are You Being Served:
'The man who helped to rejuvenate the BBC's Saturday evening schedule by reinventing Doctor Who, has undeniable creative clout. But Davies's views also carry weight because professional success has bought a degree of celebrity, and status as a de facto spokesman for the gay community.'This one's not specifically related to what I'm about to say, but it serves as a useful indicator of the smug laxity of thinking on the part of the journalist involved. Russell T Davies no more speaks for all gay people than any random straight bloke - Richard Madeley, say - can claim to be a spokesman for the heterosexual community. Kindly get a clue, you condescending berk.
'The show has survived the departures of both Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper, but it couldn't outlive its re-creator.'What surprised me about this one was its matter-of-factness. Us fans have for some time been blithely discussing who Davies' successor should be when he finally decides to jump ship. Not necessarily because we're all keen for him to leave as soon as possible (though there appears to be a sizeable faction of us who are), but because we're all still operating on the assumption that, as with the classic series, the show is bigger than any one creative force who works on it, and naturally an in-demand writer who likes fresh challenges isn't going to stick around forever. In addition, it's obvious - or so one would have thought - that the BBC wouldn't give up an a spectacularly successful flagship show so easily.
Indeed, very likely they won't. Still, though, it was startling to discover the assumption still exists that Doctor Who as a 21st century TV show is inextricably bound up with Russell T Davies. The 're-creator' bit galled me particularly; as if the classic series - in all its many permutations over twenty-six seasons from Hartnell to McCoy - were one single entity and Russell T Davies' version another, one that is revolutionary and unique.
Quoting from myself now, in early 2004:
'This is the nature of the big schism between fandom and 'the normals' - most likely the new show will be credited with bringing the show up to date and strengthening its storytelling style for a new generation. And most likely I'll be left spitting blood and boring you poor DWRG browsers senseless about how, no, it was the books and audios which did that over the course of more than a decade, and dammit they deserve some credit'I'll resist that lovely guilty pleasure of saying 'I told you so', since up until recently I'd reconciled myself to this schism, and in the wake of the utterly fantastic 2005 season, had clean forgotten about my irritability on the subject. Anyway, looking back I see I also confidently noted in the same piece that Christopher Eccleston was going to play the young Tarkin in Revenge of the Sith, and that turned out to be utter bullshit, so my Nostradamus-like qualities aren't all that.
The thing is, we're now two (nearly three) years into the new show's run. One would have hoped that, even if we go to the extreme of pretending that Doctor Who hadn't existed before 2005, and that Russell T Davies really had created it from scratch, people would see that the potential of the format goes beyond any one writer - in much the same ways as the potential of Sherlock Holmes goes beyond Conan Doyle, or that of Batman goes beyond what Bob Kane has to offer. The description of RTD as Doctor Who's 're-creator' came to me as an abrupt reminder that people outside of fandom still assume that no new Doctor Who stories were told between McCoy and Aldred walking off into the distance and Billie Piper getting out of her bed to go to work (barring of course, what might accurately be described as 'that crap Paul McGann one') - that Russell T Davies really did take a hoary moribund old pig's ear and turn it into a silk purse. Indeed, I'd imagine the majority of viewers who don't watch Confidential or take any particular notice of the opening credits will likely be under the impression that Davies writes every episode. This shouldn't matter because it isn't true, but sadly it does matter because these perceptions count for something. If the perception is that the show is bound to not-be-as-good when boy genius Russell T Davies leaves, it'll become a self-fulfilling prophecy no matter how good Moffat/Gattis/Cornell's/Paul Abbot's first season is.
This is particularly galling as we're, at the time of writing, about to go into a new season in which an old fan favourite, Human Nature by Paul Cornell, will be adapted from 1990s printed page to 2007 TV screen, apparently in a more literal fashion than the loose adaptations of Jubilee into Dalek or Spare Parts into Rise of the Cybermen. It'll be very interesting to see whether there's any overt mention of this story's origins when the bones are picked over on Doctor Who Confidential; not because your average on the street would particularly care, but because there really should be some credit where credit is due, some acknowledgement that the process of bringing Who into the 21st century did not begin with Russell T Davies - that it has in fact been an ongoing process from more or less the moment the old show ended. I say this now not for the sake of mere fannish prissiness - though this may have been the case a couple of years ago - but because, at some point, a couple of years down the line when Russell hands in his notice, it is in fact going to be very important to the public perception of 21st century Who that he is not considered the only television writer who can come up with the goods.
Don't get me wrong, I believe what Russell T Davies has done for Doctor Who has been quite, quite wonderful - or was in its first year, anyway, less so in 2006. I doubt anyone could have gotten the new run of the show off to a better start as a popular drama. But it was not as revolutionary as it's portrayed by lazy journos, and neither is the man some kind of televisual messiah. Doctor Who has been talking in a grown-up's voice ever since its adolescence in the New Adventures, and Paul Magrs, Jonathan Morris, Lance Parkin, Robert Shearman and a whole host of others managed to do the witty, knowing and pop-cultural side of things long before Rusty came back on the scene (his initial foray into Doctor Who being, of course, the deeply bleak Damaged Goods).
The annoying thing for me is that what RTD has contributed to Who is as hugely overrated in the mainstream media as it is underrated in fandom...
I've never properly understood the hostility towards the man that we've seen in 'the fan community' almost from day one of the new show. I've always assumed it was merely down to the fact that, to misquote Oscar Wilde, every fan hates the thing he loves, and fans are never happier than when they're bitching about the object of their fandom (look at the display of sheer unreason from James Bond fans when that Daniel Craig fella was cast). Unfortunately, some of it - thankfully a relatively minor part - has sprung from homophobia, which, quite aside from being offensive and annoying, is also deeply tedious; but it's usually easy enough to identify when that's the case, and to simply stop taking notice of anything that person has to say.
Casting my net wider, to people whose opinions or arguing abilities I actually respect, I've found that the particularly odd thing about the fan perception of Russell T Davies is the way people seem to, for want of a better word, 'blame' him for the acclaim he gets. You'd think fans would be happy that the lead writer of their beloved show was winning Baftas for it, but instead they seem to begrudge him them. We accuse him of arrogance for acting like he's in charge of a show that he is, in fact, in charge of. In one instance, which examplifies an obtuse tone I've noticed a lot of fans adopt, a reviewer referred to him as a 'self-proclaimed genius'. This suggests either that I missed a press release somewhere, or that said reviewer needs to look up 'self' and 'proclaimed' in the dictionary.
And yet, Russell T Davies himself would be the first to tell you that everything that's brilliant about Doctor Who was present in the format created way back in 1963. Amid some very brief introductory notes in the booklet accompanying the 'Season One' box set, Davies took the time both to praise and recommend the classic series - 'and there's nothing old about it, not really - watch it on repeats and look a little deeper, past the obvious 60s, 70s, 80sness of it, and you'll see the sheer imagination and fun of it all' and to downplay the idea that the revival of Doctor Who was a one-man show: 'And I had nothing to do with the show's return. That was decided in some as-yet-undocumented discussion between Lorraine Heggessey (...) and Jane Tranter.' Sounds fairly humble to me. In another newspaper article just last week, evil egomaniac Russell T Davies laughed off the idea that it was he who'd introduced emotion to Doctor Who (it had always been present, he argued) and talked up Who-connoisseur's-favourite Robert Holmes as one of television's forgotten great writers. I'm left wondering if the idea that RTD somehow generates his own hype isn't some kind of fan race-memory throwback from the JNT years when John Nathan-Turner became his own propaganda machine. It's as if we can't accept that praise for Doctor Who could possibly be genuine!
Unless... and this is the thing that only occured to me recently, so forgive me if I'm being a bit slow here; unless the real reason for this resentment of the acclaim for Russell T Davies' Doctor Who is that the two are seen by the wider world as being inextricably bound together; that once Russell T Davies leaves Doctor Who, the acclaim will leave with him, and we'll be left with a knackered old sci-fi show to which television's resident genius had applied a magical kiss of life before moving on to his next marvel.
It's a scary thought (and come to think of it, I am being slow because Andrew Wixon experienced this same scary thought himself three years ago). But Russell isn't really to blame for that. He's never claimed that Doctor Who is wonderful because of him, he's always said that it's wondeful just because it is, innately, wonderful. The thing is, the mainstream media still doesn't quite believe him.
He's under no professional obligation to do so, but as a fan, who presumably wants to see TV Who go on long after his reign is over, this might be something for him to think about addressing a bit more strongly as time goes on.
Know your enemy! by Thomas Cookson 26/7/10
The problems and excesses of JNT's era were down to the producer's inexperience and inferiority complex. The blacklisting of old writers who JNT feared would undermine his authority, the forced, joyless tone, cheapening fan-service, sensationalism, self-destructive moral confusion, bitterness, and this inferiority complex being forced onto the Doctor's character.
Conversely, RTD's worst excesses seemed born of an arrogance occasionally bordering on narcissistic personality disorder (and a Blum-esque complex about fan criticism, meaning he's determined to provoke it). From End of the World I got the sense of a writer believing the narrative art is so easy it's beneath him. The various alien characters were treated with blatant disinterest, and the whodunit murder plot was put on hold till the last five minutes and resolved with impatient cavalierness that felt deeply unsatisfying.
Each RTD episode made my heart sink at the disrespect for the narrative art and the audience's intelligence. Obnoxious comedy moments were so intrusive they were practically bullish and completely trampled the drama. Emotional moments and character development undercut by an elitist 'selective compassion' that barely extended beyond the two leads. Almost everyone else was treated with contempt. Aliens of London's politicians and military characters were treated as passive, idiotic stooges to the most tedious, asinine comedy. Mickey suffered particularly crude slapstick like running towards a dematerialising TARDIS and hitting the wall. Adam was introduced just so the Doctor could kick him out to assert how he was too 'cool' to tolerate another Adric. A Doctor traumatised by war might realistically become pathologically derisive, insulting and belligerent, but it bugged me how tastelessly this was celebrated, whilst other characters were denied the dignity, spine or wit to be anymore than submissive to the Doctor's patting down.
Jackie was a stunted loudmouth stereotype who never grew or matured from that. Comparatively, the Australian children's time-travel series The Girl from Tomorrow featured a prominent mother character throughout who I never tired of, because she was a likeable, believable, mature character, and I empathised with her frantic worrying over her daughter. She was everything the horrid, cartoonish Jackie wasn't. Jackie was a turning of a cliche, the irresponsible mother, and a joke that got old fast. Plus, that horribly desperate comedy scene in Army of Ghosts where the Doctor passes Jackie off as an aged Rose and mercilessly insults her. Right till End of Time where randy pensioners goose the Doctor, RTD's era lacked any maturity or dignity and was simply a tasteless exercise in unrelenting humiliation. Attack of the Cybermen had more dignity.
New Who falls between either aggressive anti-intellectualism or obtuse intellectual conceits. World War Three and The Long Game were insipid, asinine political diatribes, with tasteless 9/11 digs and cut-and-pasted, patronisingly simplified political points that had nothing new to say. RTD's approach to 'satire' was sneering at particular politics whilst making no effort to understand them. Even when debating capital punishment (Boom Town) or bio-ethics (New Earth), he resorted to cack-handed villainy and magic fairy dust solutions to problems, thus easily dismissing all mitigating circumstances and moral dilemmas, and reasserting the Doctor's unquestionable self-righteousness. When Harriet Jones acts to defend Earth against Sycorax invaders, the Doctor scolds her with warped, badly written hyperbole "I should have told them to run because the monsters are coming- the human race." Sorry? Which race was terrorised again? The increasingly godlike Doctor's a law unto himself now, and we're supposed to always agree with him. Whether forgiving the Master on everyone's behalf or punishing his clone for destroying the Daleks. In End of Time, RTD's atheist agenda produces a villain whose very belief in an afterlife makes him a threat to the entire universe, with motivations so badly thought out I doubt even the villain himself knew why he was doing it.
I hoped New Who would really show the youth how everyone (not just the protagonist) has intelligence, worth, and the capacity and potential to grow and do positive things. Instead, the series seemed aggressively anti-intellectualist and stunted, with an insulting 'this'll do' attitude. World War Three and Gridlock depicted the masses as hopelessly stupid and gullible.
The exceptions where RTD really tapped into the potential of human endeavour are Turn Left and Parting of the Ways. In the latter, RTD's fondness for Reality TV led to him having more to say than just his usual sneering inanely at the topic, thereby producing a story about ruthless social Darwinism, and how good will and noble stances just aren't as fashionable today as arrogance or attention-seeking bitchiness, which ultimately coalesces with the fight for survival and final moral choice.
They're sincere love-letters to the Doctor of old. They're rare occasions where RTD embraces rather than represses his inner fanboy. The joy of connecting things and gathering characters together and drawing a sense of history and kinship, producing something genuinely utilitarian, where characters are no longer stunted hedonists and instead they do the right thing together. Briefly, we see mortal people bravely stepping forward in their beliefs and being heroic. Even the gamestation controller defies a lifetime's indoctrination and instinctively does the right thing. Unfortunately New Who's anti-intellectualism requires they all end up dead (or their timeline erased) rather than achieving anything. I guess that's the price for daring to be different.
Unfortunately, New Who mostly presents people as utterly stupid, spineless, passive and self-involved. It's so degraded it defies realism, but fandom seems blinded by how much more 'emotional' it is. Sometimes RTD drew tragedy and dramatic irony out of this anti-intellectualism, like Donna's fate, but even that's devalued in End of Time. Mickey's character 'growth' into a tough hero was macho rubbish. He gets sick of being belittled and put out by the appallingly cliquey Doctor and Rose, and so decides to prove himself with daredevil stunts simply because he doesn't want to be left out or treated with contempt anymore. Like Rattigan in The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky, sacrificing himself because he couldn't face unpopularity.
New Who's like an advert for itself, hence the repetition, deliberate irritation, forced zaniness, forced awe and cartoon logic. Most adverts wouldn't get away with promoting insecurities of being left out, but New Who somehow did.
Remember the Controller in Day of the Daleks, who always believed he was doing the right thing, but the Doctor confronts him with the lie he's been living and shows him another way, so he redeems himself and helps the rebels? Real, mature character development in a proper morality play. But when do we ever see characters with idealism in New Who? In 70's Who they were commonplace.
Classic Who was more intellectually stimulating, and any dodgy science was covered by pinches of beautiful, 'make-believe' whimsy, like the Doctor and Romana breaking Meglos' time loop. New Who's too cynical, stunted and disposable for such leaps of faith. It doesn't believe in itself or trust its audience. We're told rather than shown how wonderful and magical it all is. Instead of whimsy, it's heavy-handed mawkishness, particularly Last of the Time Lords' anticlimax or Ursula's frankly disturbingly pornographic false happiness and forced horny willingness having been reduced to a face on a paving slab. We invested in Classic Who by invitation and maintained the spell from our end. New Who's so bitchy and sneery, it's completely inapproachable in the same way. It's like our investment's being unrelentingly mocked and we're being kept out on some private joke.
RTD's endings require the complete shutting down of critical thinking in order to be enjoyed. Perhaps influencing unthinking fascism in its fans, hence the sycophants' psychotic crusade against any dissenters.
I've gotten much hate and abuse from hysterical JNT apologists, and I theorised that vanity-obsessed, agenda-driven control freaks with an overwhelming media image, like JNT and RTD, can inspire the same fanatical, unreasoning loyalty that Hitler did. However, I begrudgingly respect those JNT defenders. They loved their era so much they got angry and argued furiously for its worth. That's love, so raw, passionate, honest and human. Yet, with the RTD sycophants, I've never gotten anything but the most cold, insincere, slimy vibes off these creeps. It's all about their image as fans being redeemed, it's all about them.
Society today is overran with the suspicious, petty-minded jobsworth mentality of sucking up to the boss, catching out and harassing 'rule-breakers' and unrepentantly demolishing them. Particularly benefits staff, tabloids, train guards administering penalty fares, and especially our own elitist, power-tripped superfans. Doctor Who's completely antithetical to this mentality. Even the 'conservative' Pertwee era treated jobsworths with a scorn that I once found mean-spirited before discovering how contemptible real jobsworths are. Surely, the sanctimonious, sniffy jobsworth mentality more suits Star Trek's fanbase? Then again, 80's Who was produced by an accountant and stories like Time-Flight resembled the most awkward, soulless workplace-orientation videos, perhaps setting the precedent.
Fandom's become so business-minded, yet you wouldn't know it from how surreal fandom is, where everything's so exaggerated, pretentious and wrapped in impenetrable cartoonish caricature acts (always hiding a nurtured vindictive streak). Where common respect goes out the window so fast you barely notice its absence. It's truly baffling when these up-themselves fans suddenly get serious and demonstrate a shocking capacity for brutally contemptuous behaviour.
New Who appeals particularly to superior-minded superfans with a reductionist view of the show and people, and an externalised self-hatred, and shame of being seen enjoying the show (they're elated that they can enjoy New Who, securely knowing that society would approve). The worst are desperately 'controversial' anti-artists who justified their love of the 'crap' show by sneering at anything with worth, and love nothing more than to spitefully tear down and demolish art and people. So they love New Who's tasteless, trashy leanings on par with similar trash they enjoy like Big Brother and Footballer's Wives. They care nothing for talent, art, achievement or potential.
Since Doctor Who's revival, fandom's become disturbingly cult-like (especially on elitist 'view by membership' forums), with nutjob sycophants obsequiously worshipping the show's 'saviour', cultivating a mood of unbelievable worthlessness, being creepily over-familiar and psychologically profiling any dissenters. Fandom's fixation with ratings and the casual viewers' perspective suggests a frightening collective disassociative thinking.
Cliques often share a laughable delusion that the whole world thinks like them. They're the worst sellouts, desperate to deflect the 'sad', 'undesirable' label onto other fans, but anyone who gets that vile, vindictive, petty or stalkerish over a TV show (and plays the victim when bitten back) is pathetically sad beyond words.
These sycophants love pretending they're 'unselfishly' welcoming new fans to their nauseating, plastic 'love-in', whilst repressing and scolding any fannish sense of entitlement, because it's 'for the kids'. Proprietorial fans certainly did the show no favours in the 80s because their demands sorely undercut how essential artistic integrity is. But I don't believe RTD has any integrity, and these poisonously accusatory sycophants have twisted 'fan entitlement' into some unforgivable thought-crime. After all, our modern world sees many vile acts go automatically forgiven, except rocking the boat.
I believe TV has a responsibility to today's youth, who often lack self-worth. But I can't see RTD's degrading, sneery, condescending, anti-intellectualist show inspiring the youth positively, anymore than Warriors of the Deep's debilitating, disgusting, humanity-hating suicidal appeasement ethos would. Whatever happened to treating viewers with intelligence, or 'go forward in all your beliefs'? If these sycophants truly empathised with 'the kids', they'd give them more credit for their intelligence, patience, curiosity and imagination. But these insecure, trumped-up superfans wouldn't want young fans getting ideas above their station.
If image-conscious fans behave so reprehensibly when their image is redeemed, they deserved to remain in shame; if Doctor Who really had to become so anti-intellectualist, cowardly and desperate, then I'd rather it had stayed dead. Despite my frequently wishing Doctor Who had ended with Horns of Nimon's uplifting masquerade party, I couldn't erase JNT's repugnant era, because ultimately it made the irreplaceable Big Finish audios possible. New Who has no such silver lining for me. Pre-2005, anything was possible. Now even wishful thinking's frowned upon.
A Retrospective by Hugh Sturgess 11/8/10
Not since John Nathan-Turner has one man aroused such mixed feelings in fandom as Russell T. Davies (the "T" doesn't stand for anything, by the way). To some, he's a joyfully uncaring bachelor-uncle figure. To others, he's a very unpredictable, carefree, boisterous individual; in other words, a complete and total bastard who never listens to criticism and has set sail in the good ship Lollipop a long time ago. Not to say he can't be both. Though many have striven to document Davies, evaluate him, classify him and, in some extreme cases, shoot him through the lungs, no one can doubt that his iteration of Doctor Who is certainly distinctive.
About the New Series and its monolithic creator, there are varying opinions. Some are euphorically upbeat. Others are resolutely downbeat. Other, wiser heads live in the real world and are possessed of objective analysis, and so can approach the series from a rational point of view - oh! Sorry to play my hand so soon, but I might as well elucidate now. The New Series is marked by highs and lows, just as the old series was. Aside from highs like Season Fourteen and lows like Trial of a Time Lord, the paleo-TV, book and audio versions remain generally average. For every "gritty classic" like Genesis of the Daleks, we have a padded snorefest like Revenge of the Cybermen. For every twisted psychodrama like Jubilee, we have a derivative travesty like The Dark Flame. Where we have Alien Bodies, we also have Placebo Effect. Anyone who declares that (say) the old series was better all round or that David Tennant was the bestest best Doctor ever is simply allowing the immediate to override the remembered, nostalgia to clog up accurate memory.
Now that RTD has left the helm of the "mothership", we can at last look back at his era as an organised whole. A period of dizzying highs and depressing lows, it also boasts an all-too-clear descent into media-whoring, from the angry, crazy Series 1 to the safe and bubblegum-like Series 4. The comparison with JNT is an apt one, as he too produced disciplined seasons with everyone at the top of their game, before descending into the realms of self-parody and defiling of the dead.
Here, I've decided to lay out ten of my favourite things about or in the New Series, and ten of my least favourite things, alternating so as not to depress or bore you. In no particular order and with no bias, I give you my impressions about the reign of Russell T.:
1a. The Time War (Good) - Gallifrey is a planet so boring that almost every Time Lord we have ever met has left there for want of something better to do. The Doctor left is because it was dull. Rassilon was so bored that he fell asleep for ten million years. Gallifrey is a planet so boring that it was blown up twice (and even JNT planned to do it back in 1985 in the unmade story Gallifrey), just to make it interesting.
What the Time War did was make Gallifrey, the Time Lords and the Daleks powerful, mysterious and exciting by removing them from the universe. Things immediately become more exciting once they no longer exist. Readers of the Eighth Doctor Adventures, in which Gallifrey is blown up and the Time Lords become legends, will attest to this. The conflict between the awesome reputation of the Doctor's people and their physically shrivelled nature is resolved by blowing the hell out of everything. The fact that they become something I'd love to be able to say if it weren't a spoiler in The End of Time is a testament to this.
It also gives an in-universe reason for the series to give a damn about the Daleks. Presented as the ancient evil (EVILLLL!!!, evil from the dawn of time!) that fought the forces of good before history began, they are placed in the centre of the Doctor Who mythos. Again, they are for more powerful and threatening when presented only in retrospect, which is just one of the many reasons for the relative shiteness of Journey's End, given that there's millions of the buggers in that one.
On the other hand...
1b. The Doctor's Daughter (Bad) - Ron Mallet's reviews of the New Series would always end with a paragraph saying that, for all the deficiencies of the script (it failed to be The Talons of Weng Chiang, the story didn't make sense unless you paid attention, working-class people might be watching, etc), it was technically speaking very good. This turd of a story is different, in that it really is badly made. This world is, more than any other, just a couple of corridors. It's the kind of place even Terry Nation might have called "one-dimensional". It's badly written ("the hole they left in my life, and the pain that filled it" - yuk!), poorly acted, ill-thought-out, unsatisfying and pointless.
The opening is rushed. The "hello, dad" comes out of nowhere and vanishes. Jenny changes characterisation every five minutes, "Jenny" is a very dull name for the Doctor's daughter and the thought behind it is risible. The war is fought out inside a single building for about a week; this is meant to be "quirky", but we're all shouting "no, it's stupid" right back at them, because it's not connected to anything else. It's as though there was no editing process of any kind. There are grizzled old soldiers, and we see no fighting, yet these soldiers are born and die so quickly that they think that the war has been going on for thousands of years? Watch the beginning again, knowing the ending, and handwave away the general's grizzledness, and you still can't imagine it.
Nothing about the Hath makes sense. Did you know that the Hath originally had dialogue, but everyone agreed it was "better" when they just made bubbling noises? Says it all really.
2a. The Doctor jumping through a mirror into the Palace of Versailles on horseback (Good) - It's pretty damn cool, and it doesn't involve an unlikely piece of technology or an offering of technobabble. It's a physical, reasonably plausible thing for the Doctor to do. It also nicely puts Arthur the horse to good use, when in another story it might just have been forgotten or handwaved. From a technical point of view, it's impressive too, since David Tennant isn't on the horse, the horse isn't in the room, and there's no mirror. What a guy.
2b. Long, meandering, piss-boring conversations between the companions about their relationship with the Doctor (Bad) - Russell is confused about what "character" means. He thinks that Midnight has a paucity of character development, when I feel that I know what Val Cane is really like by the end much more than I do with (say) Donna. In reverse, he thinks that it's "vital" for the companions to have discussions about themselves / the Doctor / their aunties that utterly stop the plot and indulge Murray Gold's desire to attack us with aural sludge. (Pay special attention to the final scene in The End of Time, where Murray makes one last, poignant abuse of artistic taste: "Boopily-boop, boop-boop-boop. Boopily-boop...")
The Sontaran Stratagem is an appalling piece of television, and possibly its nadir comes when Donna calls up Gramps from the TARDIS to have a sniffle about how the Doctor isn't here and that she misses him. What possible relevance has this to the plot? Does this make Donna a deeper character? No, cause it's just mingy crap. I don't think that Donna is any more real at the end, because it doesn't feel like a real scene. Father's Day is centred around two characters, Rose and her father, and it gets more development out of them than all the long, meandering, piss-boring conversations in Series 3 and 4. Dalek and The Girl in the Fireplace develop the Doctor much more than the appalling line "the hole they left in my life, and the pain that filled it" in The Doctor's Daughter. It's actually bad writing, and not that interesting the twelfth time around.
3a. Gas-masked zombies chanting "are you my mummy?" in the Blitz (Good) - Doctor Who, at its best, is something completely and utterly different to anything else on TV. That's what's so depressing about pap like The Sontaran Stratagem: it could so easily be something else on TV. For a start, it could be either Torchwood or The Sarah Jane Adventures, so why do we have to put up with it in the "mothership" series? Gas-masked zombies filing out of an abandoned hospital in Blitz London is a spectacle unique to Doctor Who and having them chant "are you my mummy?" is a great example of Doctor Who's ability to turn something that should be absurd into something terrifying. Another great example is the death of the first weakest link in Bad Wolf. The woman is absolutely shitting herself, and what should be tosh is a gem.
3b. Hearing about alien planets we will never see cause we're too stupid to understand what's going on (Bad) - Rose went to see an alien planet without us. Instead, we were treated to a visit to Cardiff so that she could tell us and her boyfriend about it. The planet had frozen seas, with ice-waves a thousand miles high. We never saw it. The planet Felspoon has mountains that sway in the breeze. We never saw it. We went to Grey Planet 7. Barcelona has dogs with no noses. We never saw it. We went to the Powell Estate instead.
This is the biggest disappointment in the New Series. I can appreciate that it would cost a lot to make a giant CGI extravaganza for an alien planet, but - beyond this practical concern - there's a feeling that the production team didn't even consider it. That they felt that we would be happy with invasions of Earth, a few space stations and "traditional" quarry planets. That that's all you can expect from Doctor Who. The Web Planet might be daft and stupid and silly, but what I get from the New Series' technique of offering us amazing sights and never showing us them is a total contempt for the audience.
4a. "Run!" (Good) - When we all snuggled up to watch Rose, way back in 2005, we spent the first five minutes waiting for the Doctor to appear. We knew it had to happen eventually, and we knew it was going to happen when the mannequins came to life. We all expected the Doctor to rush in, kick some plastic arse and save her. Instead, this hunched, cheeky little man pokes his head around a corner and gabbles "run!" It wrong-foots the audience gloriously, since someone who is set up as a great hero is introduced in an almost offhand way. Truly a brilliant moment, and something that makes Rose watchable again and again. Picture how they'd do it in Series 4, all robo-fog and soaring strings, and you can understand what went wrong with the RTD era.
4b. The death to demonstrate that things aren't what they seem (Bad) - I've mentioned this in other reviews, so I'll keep it brief here. Basically, when you introduce characters whose sole function is to die to draw attention to Something Alien at Work, you're writing badly. That's not good drama, that's The Avengers. It becomes routine very quickly, so that you know the reporter in The Sontaran Stratagem will die before the opening titles, like the way you know the scientist in Rise of the Cybermen will be zapped in five minutes.
The opening scene in Rise of the Cybermen is the nadir, managing to open a story that purports to be about a desperate man trying to survive and about humanity's techno-fetishism, with a cackling supervillain declaiming "kill him!" and "how will you do that FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE?!", as though from a mountain. It lacks realism and, more crucially, drama. It's also a kind of dramatic shorthand for "dangerous" that simplifies things for viewers to the point of babying.
5a. Midnight (Good) - Amid the CGI-inundated crap of Series 4, sandwiched between the smug, safe dullness of Silence in the Library and the self-satisfied over-excitement of The Stolen Earth, Midnight (and Turn Left after it) is fantastic. With basically no money for effects, one set and a limited cast of characters, Russell turns out a script that is not only the best of Series 4, but one of the best of the series. RTD can seem like a self-parody has-been when one watches a story like Journey's End, but here he proves that all he needs for him to lift his game is for someone to crack the whip. CGI makes his job too easy, and this low-budget offering is, as a result, sublime.
He mentions in The Writer's Tale (a great read, by the way) that the characters aren't very deep. That's wrong. They don't go on about how their girlfriend left them for a rock-person and mummy got killed by space aliens and whatever (well, except for Sky Silvestry, in the episode's least effective scene), but I know, after viewing the episode, exactly what each of them is like. The terror of the situation lets us see who they are in little flashes of insight. Val Cane disregards her son's opinion because he's just a kid, except when he agrees with her; Biff Cane feels inadequate, desperate to prove his manliness in a life that doesn't require bear-wrestling; Professor Hobbes really thinks his assistant Dee Dee is useless, and she secretly agrees with him. It's amazing writing actually, painting whole lives in a few strokes. Amazing acting, too.
The threat is unique too. Again, Doctor Who takes something that should be absurd or even annoying (repetition of whatever anyone says, like an irritating brat) and makes it supremely unnerving.
A triumph.
5b. Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead (Bad) - The Doctor arriving in a gigantic library filled with every book ever written is a great story. Unfortunately, it's Lawrence Miles's example script The Book of the World, briefly available on his blog. There's a great story that has monsters pursuing our heroes, repeating innocuous lines until they become unnerving. Unfortunately, it's The Empty Child. There's a great story where shadows can move around separate from their owners. Unfortunately, it's Peter Pan.
Everything in this story has been done better elsewhere. Much of it, done better in the series itself. Moffat's decision to end with "everybody lives, Rose, er, I mean River" seems like a glorious salute to The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances, but when you remember he wrote that too, it looks like he's basically saluting himself. Including the shuffling repeating monsters almost looks like self-parody. Some said that Doomsday was Doctor Who doing its own fan-fiction. Well, this is definitely Moffat doing his own fan-fiction.
Plus, the lack of scope is crippling. The library has every book in creation, and yet nothing of any interest is found there. Nothing more exciting that a big hard-drive runs the planet. The Vashta Nerada look like living shadows, but they're really dust motes. River Song is someone really important from the Doctor's future, and yet she's wasted because the Doctor acts like such a moron around her, and the story is just as invested as he is in doltishly solving the "riddle" of who she is. It's telling that in a story set in a library, no one ever reads a single book. The only time they try to, someone tells them not to. The Library might as well be empty for all the use the books are to the plot. It's just a sci-fi setting, not a really location at all.
What's most galling of all is the central conceit. We are introduced to the Library as a dream in the mind of a little girl at home. But somehow the Doctor and Donna have got in!!! Wow! I've already mentioned Peter Pan, and this idea smacks of that kind of children's folktale. However, having presented us with this unique, magical idea, Moffat then "surprises" us with a lame revelation about virtual reality.
Wretched.
6a. The Family of Blood (Good) - I don't think I can do better than quoting myself (I know, incredibly arrogant, isn't it?) in my review of Series 3: