The tenth Doctor's era (2005-2010)

David Tennant

• "Arrived a hero, left a villain" by Thomas Cookson

"Arrived a hero, left a villain" by Thomas Cookson 7/4/12

JNT and RTD. Both prima-donna, insecure, control-freak producers. Both were media savvy about promoting the show, both gained fanatical acolytes, as though inherently attracting fans of a similar unpleasant, petty, narcissistic mindset, or having the same propagandising media power to inspire unreasoning fanatical loyalty as Hitler did. Both reduced the show to tacky style over substance and pretentious, bog-standard fan-fiction. JNT forced his own martyr complex onto the show and its hero, and RTD forced his own messiah complex onto the Doctor.

There always seemed a chill heart to fandom's celebration of the revival. Usually the angriest JNT apologists inspire my begrudging respect for their strength of passion, furiously defending the era they love. With the RTD sycophants, those creeps have only ever given me insincere, cold vibes.

I think Classic Who naturally earned the love of fans and this love preceded whatever ugliness later befell fandom. The New Who sycophants, however, seemingly decided the line they'd take and manned their trenches of psychological warfare against the fans who'd hate it, before the new series even began. The self-hatred and unreasoning snobbish contempt seemed to predate the New Series itself, and wasn't born of any genuine love, but more like a drug hit, pursuing and maintaining an avaricious high and being devoid of any empathy for others.

Much like with JNT, it's hard to qualify where RTD's era went wrong when I hardly believe the era was ever 'right'. For me, RTD's era went wrong in The End of the World's opening scene where the Doctor drops Rose off at various future destinations and the spontaneous, impulsive Rose doesn't even bother to take a one chance look outside before the Doctor moved onto a later date. It came off as unnatural and represented everything wrong with RTD's approach of feigned aggressive disinterest in what Doctor Who's supposed to be about.

Fundamentally, RTD just isn't comfortable with genuine awe. In most RTD stories, any moment of awe is sabotaged and burst by a bullish, sarky aside from the Doctor. Maybe it was fannish neuroses of not wanting the public to see his love of the show for too long, or insecurity that such moments would bore casual viewers and make them change channel. But I suspect there was more to it.

Such fannish self-hatred and cultish disassociative thinking stems mainly from the ratings disaster of 1999's Pertwee repeat season. Whereas once the 1996 TV Movie had inherited high British ratings and caught the wave of a renewed British nostalgia for its own homegrown cult classics (each time a Crime Traveller or Invasion Earth flopped, letters to the Radio Times demanded that the BBC stop trying to replace Doctor Who and just bring back the real thing), this gave way to a more demanding and ironic pop culture that just didn't have the patience anymore, and suddenly Doctor Who's residual affection from the older generation wasn't guaranteed to be enough.

So we ended up with the RTD era. An era based almost entirely on desperation, but with occasional hints of a moral purpose that became lost in this whole messiah complex hysteria, lack of sincere conviction, and the superficial glitter of showbiz. Christopher Eccleston's era hinted at RTD discovering and honing his better angels. Whilst RTD may today be an egotistical bitch, occasionally his writing betrayed his upbringing in one of the last generations that believed in community spirit, utilitarianism and having a stake in the wellbeing of your fellow man. Often RTD's writing caught and projected that ethos even despite being consciously written for an individualistic generation which requires heavy emoting scenes to get the audience to care and empathise with the lead characters, rather than the old days when it was just assumed the audience would naturally have a stake in them and their ideals. RTD's stories were perhaps a needed throwback to a more 80's notion of youth and teen-hood that was far more working class and far less about the hedonistic, permissive high-life of high-functioning sociopathy and avarice that characterises Scream, American Pie, Dawson's Creek and Skins, and can leave the viewer who's outside that lifestyle feeling crushingly inadequate. Rose felt like our kind of teenager, who rightly placed being a good person over living the high life.

RTD's era was of one-sided politics and a self-righteous hero who cuts through the bull and does what has to be done. It was perhaps a throwback to simpler storytelling and character archetypes as an antidote to the saturating media information overload that defines our age and its confused, exhausted, directionless, passive aggressive, apathetic generation. I even thought maybe RTD's infuriating, apocryphal moments and belligerent fan complex were about cultivating much-needed anger and motivation in our apathetic generation, and maybe channeling nerd rage towards a positive goal. Maybe RTD's era wasn't 'real' Doctor Who, nor the Doctor Who we'd waited for, but it was still important television.

This is in synch with Christopher Eccleston's ideals for what he thought the show would be, but, as is becoming clear, Eccleston grew to dislike the cliquey atmosphere on-set, and possibly also the sillier stories with the Slitheen which played down to kids in a way Eccleston hadn't expected or wanted from a writer like Russell. RTD producing Eccleston's season was like JNT producing Tom Baker's last season. In both cases, the control freak producer dropped the difficult force of nature actor who had briefly made this superficial new show edgy and riveting, and replaced them with the straight-laced, heart-throb actor who would do as they were told and who the producer could and did reduce to his little performing puppet. Eccleston played a Doctor the viewer could be scared of, much like Hartnell and the Bakers did. Eccleston's Doctor could reduce the life expectancy of everyone around him. Tennant was always too safe and, much like Davison, he never seemed genuinely formidable; attempts to make him seem dark in The Waters of Mars just seemed desperate.

I hated the domestics of Rose's family, but, looking back on the Australian series The Girl From Tomorrow, I see that on principle there's nothing wrong with introducing a mother character to a teen sci-fi adventure as an emotional focal point, provided the mother character is a realistic and endearing image of motherhood. Anyone can sympathise with a worried mother. In Survival, Sergeant Patterson tells Ace that he's disgusted with the way she's left her mother worrying. Empathising with a mother is the most basic feeling someone can have. Even if, as in The Girl From Tomorrow, the mother in question can be a quite strict, intimidating matriarch, she can still inspire respect and empathy. But Jackie Tyler was a horrible, spiteful loudmouth stereotype who just inspired contempt and revulsion, particularly when forced down our throats by Russell.

Jackie was at her best when other writers wrote her as utterly unpleasant and a symbol of everything wrong with our spoilt, materialistic society and captured the underlying hopeless unhappiness of Jackie's dream chasing. In Rise of the Cybermen, her 'perfect' rich marriage leaves her miserable and cruel. Again, though, RTD's overall control and exhaustion of his own excesses overrode everyone else's good work.

Russell seemed determined to paint fans who disliked the domestics as misogynists or snobs, and he consistently bases his female characters on the worst, most unpleasant, insecure, territorial and clingy kind of fag hags he's known, and thinks this captures the pulse of modern womanhood. He made the show just for them, turning the Doctor into the besotted lapdog of Rose, despite it making no sense for the Doctor to see her as so special. Again the sycophants seemed to think this desperate sexual tension and vulgar titillation was needed to keep the show popular, as though a platonic relationship wouldn't work on TV today. This is complete bunk given that Mulder and Scully worked as a popular platonic pairing in the same way as the old Doctor and companion team worked on the inherent connection between femininity and the fantasist. Both knowing what it's like to be patronised, dismissed and disregarded.

To me, nothing charts the descent of RTD's era more effectively than comparing Tooth and Claw and Last of the Time Lords. Tooth and Claw captures RTD's best qualities of sheer exhilaration. But it also has a quieter scene where the Doctor shares dinner with Queen Victoria and she tells of how she misses her late husband and how her faith in God keeps her believing that one day she'll see him again.

Russell is of course a militant, belligerent atheist (hence why his era appealed to militant, rhetorical, belligerent fans) and so Victorian values represent everything he's antagonistically opposed to. Sexual and emotional repression (but without voice or sympathy for victims of sexual abuse), homophobia, oppression of women, religious indoctrination, child cruelty. This scene shows why Russell feels he has to be belligerently antagonistic. Because if he stopped, he'd have to admit to a certain awe. The scene with Queen Victoria shows the side of Victoriana that makes it almost seem like a better age. A time before our hedonistic fatalism and pessimism, when, for all the horrors of the Victorian age, it was an optimistic age where people believed with evangelical conviction that religion and science would point the way forward to a better future. It's a dichotomy that Russell wrestles with, and he almost dares to reckon with it here.

Last of the Time Lords shows Russell's rather elaborate solution. His bleak vision for what humanity's destined to become at the universe's end is perhaps his loudest atheist statement, but the story ends with the Doctor becoming Jesus, healing everyone's injuries, undoing the Master's evil acts and declaring his foe forgiven. Russell effectively reckoned with his envy of believers, by creating a religion of his own, making the Doctor his God. To everyone else watching, though, it's downright shameful and as laughably over-earnest as JNT's worst, most desperate moments. But it did something JNT's era never could, by breaking my ability to care anymore. The Doctor's invincible superpowers made the entire drama suddenly redundant, proving indeed that enough bad work can form a corrosive critical mass.

I could believe utterly in Tooth and Claw and its authentic vision of Victoriana. But, by Last of the Time Lords, anything real or believable was gone. Doctor Who had no sincerity to it anymore.

Why was RTD kept so long? By Series 3, he was recycling the same old tricks. An obligatory new family, contrived new love interest, a token Dalek story, and a defeated Doctor wallowing in misery over Rose. His best was behind him. The Girl in the Fireplace and Silence in the Library were ahead of their time, whilst the rest of RTD's era seems shockingly dated now.

As with JNT, though, the BBC wanted him to stay. JNT was trusted by the BBC for his budgeting skills, for making the show serious again after the anarchic Williams era, casting Peter Davison as a more straight-laced Doctor, and for stories like Black Orchid. RTD, however, seemed kept around by the BBC simply because he was a big-name writer working for them, so they kept him happy.

I'd become acclimatised to RTD's style by The End of Time, and endured its typical plotless rubbish, messiah-complex Doctor, the Time Lords villainised by a combination of bad fanfiction and an anti-religion agenda painting the Time Lords as suicide bombers who believe they're going to heaven (it's their only motivation). But then the Doctor's vindictive "look at you, not remotely important" reminded me anew how much RTD had forced his own petty, spiteful personality onto the show.

That left the nastiest aftertaste, and any residual charitability towards RTD was flushed down the toilet as he proved himself to truly be the monstrous villain I never quite wanted to believe he was. After that, I decided I'd sooner rewatch Timelash than ever watch any of RTD's era again.