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The Doctors: 30 Years of Time Travel and Beyond |
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The Doctors: 30 Years of Time Travel and Beyond |
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| Synopsis: A video documentary featuring lots of interviews and previously unseen location filming from missing stories. |
Will people produce any old rubbish with(out) the series' name on it? by Tim Roll-Pickering 6/3/03
Adrian Rigelsford's book of the same name has a reputation for numerous factual inaccuracies and this video doesn't escape from the same curse. Although it does contain discussion of Season 18 there are many cases where interviewees misremember details that don't go unchecked - for instance reference to The Invasion of the Cybermen - whilst the general format focuses primarily on the actors playing the lead role before branching off to look at the programme's position in the 1990s. This video originally hit the shelves only a few months before concrete news about the Fox/Amblin TV movie came through and so the tape is interesting as a document of views on the future of the series during the 'Wilderness Years' when nothing was certain.
The interviewees are a mixture of familiar faces such as Nicholas Courtney, Sylvester McCoy and John Nathan-Turner along with some production staff and guest stars who haven't appeared so much on camera such as former BBC Head of Serials and Head of Drama Shaun Sutton or Delta and the Bannerman guest star Donald Henderson. The latter is unfortunately the worst used interviewee as due to the format of having two of three people talking together on camera and generating memories through their conversation there are times when some individuals fall into the background. This technique also results in a number of interviewees not directly addressing the camera, making the shot feel crude and clumsy and so consequently not the best.
There are a number of interesting revelations in this video. Peter Davison's comments have been blown out of proportion but he is perfectly honest about how to the cast the series can appear cheap whilst the scripts are full of plot holes that aren't obvious on a single viewing. But he is clear that he enjoyed his time in the role. John Nathan-Turner also admits to a number of mistakes such as multiple companions or The Coat and before DWM began serialising his memoirs he recalls a number of personal and difficult moments such as breaking the news to Colin Baker that he had been ordered to recast the part.
The video also contains a number of previously little seen photographs, though many are of poor quality and are not the best illustrations of the points being made by the interviewees. There is also 8mm home movie footage from The Smugglers, The Abominable Snowmen, The Daemons and Shada, but with little in the way of explanation of just what scenes are being filmed or who is in them, vital points given the lack of sound.
The book The Doctors: 30 Years of Time Travel and Beyond has been criticised as 'proof that any old rubbish about the series will be printed'. Whilst the video does deserve credit for some of the memories it produces as well as for offering fans a chance to see the home movie footage (though in the era of the internet and the reconstructions a lot of this is now far easier to obtain than back in 1995), the whole thing comes across as a less than satisfactory attempt to tell the story of the series or even of the leading actors and so could be easily forgotten. 2/10
Mistitling ain't a crime by Shawn Fuller 7/7/04
It's probably worth pointing out that this work exists in different formats, with potentially different edits. Other reviews I have read indicate that the VHS transfer may be of a better technical quality than the Waterfall Home Entertainment DVD version released in 2002. Having never seen any other version, I am not in a position to comment... except to say that a kid in grammar school could improve this version of The Doctors a hundred-fold with an hour on an old iMac. Even so, all the editing in the world isn't going to help some fairly basic flaws: microphones are obviously in frame for many of the interviews, there's been no attempt to color balance shots, and there's really no narrative thread stringing the interviews together. To call this a "documentary" would make Ken Burns embarrassed of his craft.
But, to me, all that's hardly the point.
The Doctors works because it answers a question I've had for two decades: "What the hell happened to Doctor Who?" In the early 80s I actively watched the show on my local PBS station. I was thus very much a child of the Baker/Davison years. By the mid 80s, it was only sporadically shown on my local PBS station. Eventually word came through that the show had been cancelled. By the late 80s - even before the show was cancelled in Britain - it simply became too much work trying to find a station that still broadcast it. Doctor Who faded as a memory of childhood.
But I had always wondered what happened to the show. How could the longest-running science fiction show ever made - indeed one of the longest-lived shows of any kind - simply whimper out of existence without so much as a farewell episode? Given the furor over "final" episodes of much shorter American series like Cheers and M*A*S*H, it seemed utterly incomprehensible that a show well-loved around the world could just fade away.
This DVD - which doubtless would be better-received were it more properly called, Death of a Time Lord: Reflections on the End of Doctor Who - goes a long way to giving candid answers to that nagging question. While I can well imagine that hard-core fans would be unsurprised by most of the content of this disc, I found it fascinating stuff. Far from being disillusioned by the lack of technical sophistication involved in the production of the piece, I found it evocative of its source material. The raw, low budget nature of the footage is vintage Doctor Who. I especially enjoyed seeing actors returned to locations where they'd filmed particular episodes, as if they were being sent to "holy ground" on some sort of nostalgic pilgrimage. Yet the places are barely distinguishable from one another. For Americans, this was always one of the great charms of the show. It was always delightful seeing the British delude themselves into believing that one part of their country looked sufficiently different from another so as to masquerade as completely different planets. The Doctors succeeds with its low-budget approach because it's exactly what the producers of Doctor Who would do if they were asked to film a series of interviews in the style of Doctor Who.
More importantly, though, The Doctors gains much from its "unofficial" status. Sure, being able to have access to the copyrighted material of the BBC would have given them clips from the series, and maybe interviews with the upper echelons of BBC management, but the price would have been a BBC-paid editor. It's unclear how different these interviews would have been had they been conducted by the participants' former (and, in most cases, current) paymasters, but one can well imagine that the bits most critical of the BBC would not have survived. Nevertheless, material from the upper BBC management - even a summary from contemporary news articles - would have neatly balanced the interviews present here, and indeed should have been present to give the piece more journalistic balance.
In the end, the limitations of the piece make it usable by only a particular segment of Doctor Who fandom and perhaps not at all to any British fan over the age of 25. I liked it simply because it addressed a lot of questions about the Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy years that I think casual American fans continue to have. While I learned something from almost every participant, I was literally taken aback by the demeanor of the now-late John Nathan-Turner. Far from being the egotistical producer I had always imagined, he came across as sympathetic, willing to admit his mistakes, and protective of the actors he'd cast as Doctor. A guy doing a job who'd gotten some things right and some things wrong.
Well, that's one take on his appearance here, anyway.
Another is that until 1986 he had no idea what made for good Doctor Who and after 1986 he didn't want to be there anyway. The self-doubt and blame-laying is so unbridled here that in many ways this DVD unwittingly becomes JNT's turn at Hamlet. (I swear at one point I could almost hear him saying, "To be or not to be. That is the contractual question.") By way of example, he attempts to say he'd "got it wrong" by having too many companions in the TARDIS, and that he "had to learn the hard way" that the best format was "one Doctor, one companion". Really? So... lemme see here. According to that logic, every season from the 1963 opening until Harry departs Tom Baker's Doctor is a "mistake" that we now have to rethink as "problematic". Interesting. How long were THOSE producers' seasons, John? And how were their ratings? Come to think of it, how were YOUR ratings when you had multiple companions versus, say, 1984-1989 when you didn't? Yeah, John, that was really what you needed to "learn the hard way". It couldn't have possibly been that when you went to the one companion format, the one companion you had (call her Peri, Mel, or Ace) was a complete failure of casting and characterization, could it? Rather nearer the mark in terms of accurate assessment, are JNT's "Greek Chorus" on the disc, made up of Brian Blessed, Shaun Sutton, and Don Henderson. Instead of mucking about with companions or details of costume (which even JNT admits he got wrong with Colin Baker), they assert he should have been focused on reigning in the actual characterization of the Doctor. As the trio neatly points out, Troughton without producer Innes Lloyd's hand of guidance wouldn't have been great.
Still, my point here isn't really to debate the merits of what the interviewees said, fun as that might be. Rather, it's just to demonstrate that while tighter editing and a more "controlled" interviewing environment might have made for a technically better show, the "raw" format of The Doctors allows personality and tone to emerge from the interviewees in a way that a more "polished" production might have failed to elicit. In essence, there is just enough editing here to create the feel of discussion, leaving the viewer, virtually unhindered by narration, to make up her own mind what conclusions to draw. A non-fiction product that showcases what, in research terms, would be a kind of "source material" is, I think, an entire rarity in the Doctor Who DVD market. This is as close as many American fans will likely ever get to "candid" remarks about Doctor Who by key production figures during the 1980s, stimulating the observant fan to lively debate about the implications of the participants' comments.
It might be worth pointing out that there's genuine source material on the disc as well, in the form of home movies taken during filming of three episodes during the 60s and 70s. However the film appears as is, without sound, narration, or contextual editing, so some might be disappointed. It's certainly not a big enough part of the disc to make it the basis of your purchase decision. I really liked it as a bonus, though, as it offered something American fans have probably never seen: contemporaneous behind-the-scenes (color) photography of the first and second Doctors.
Taken as a whole, then, The Doctors is a useful addition to my collection, even if I'm glad I got it at a bargain basement price. Whether you'll find it valuable really depends on how much or how little you know about the Doctor's travels. It's not at all a place to start for an overview of the series. Nor is it a place to come if you're well-versed in Doctor Who lore. But for that middle range of fans, who either ignored or couldn't follow Doctor Who in the 1980s, you'll doubtless find something here you didn't know. It would be fascinating to return to this video after the new Doctor Who series starts in 2005 to see if any of the nostalgic warnings given here were heeded by the new production team.