Once Upon a Time Lord

The Myths and Stories of Doctor Who

Ivan Phillips

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781788316453
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Télévision

'Every story ever told really happened...' (The Doctor, 'Hell Bent', 2015)
Stories are, fundamentally what Doctor Who is all about. In Once Upon a Time Lord, Ivan Phillips explores a wide range of perspectives on these stories and presents a lively and richly-varied analysis of the accumulated tales that constitute this popular modern mythology. Concerned equally with 'classic' and 'new' Who, Phillips looks at how aspects of the Time Lord's story have been developed on television and beyond, tracing lines of connection and divergence across various media. He discusses Doctor Who as a mythology that has drawn on its own past in often complex ways, at the same time reworking elements from many other sources, whether literary, cinematic, televisual or historical. Once Upon A Time Lord offers an original take on this singular hero's journey, reading the unsettled enigma of the Doctor in relation to the characters, narratives and locations that he has encountered across more than half a century.

Chapter 1

Critics, fans and mythologies of discourse

Writing about Doctor Who: Difficult conversations and critical projects

By the time Doctor Who returned to television screens on 26 March 2005, a lot of words had been published about the original series and its spin-offs. These were to be found in commercial non-fiction books (ranging from Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke’s The Making of Doctor Who in the 1970s to David Howe, Mark Stammers and Stephen Walker’s series of reference texts in the 1990s), in fanzines and newsletters, and on the web.¹ The number of significant academic readings of the series, however, of critical-theoretical papers and books by professional scholars, could still be counted on the fingers of one Sontaran hand.² Since Tulloch and Alvarado’s monograph in 1983, things had been quiet in those whispering corners of the academy where Arcalian, Prydonian and Patrex might seem like viable affiliations.

Tulloch and Fiske had both published journal articles in the period leading up to that first book-length study, and a few more were to follow. Even so, as the clock ticked down to the broadcast of ‘Rose’, any literature review on the topic of Doctor Who was going to be a relatively simple task, an excavation of what the traditional university-based academic might view as ‘popular’, ‘mainstream’, ‘zeitgeist’ or (most dubious of all) ‘fan’ sources, but with little need to engage with what the same academic would see as ‘recognized authorities’. Beyond The Unfolding Text, the diligent researcher would need to become familiar with Tulloch and Henry Jenkins’s Science Fiction Audiences (1995) and Piers Britton and Simon Barker’s Reading between Designs (2003),³ but otherwise the territory to be mapped might appear as sparse as a BBC quarry.

The field has grown since then in both fecundity and complexity. There would be little tolerance now for the kind of binaries assumed above, those easy oppositions between fan and academic, popular and esoteric, low-brow and high-brow, shallow and deep. The discourses of Doctor Who, of culture in general, are far more subtle and interwoven than such divisions suppose. This is partly due to the sheer quantity of material available, ensuring that everything is somehow in contact with everything else. It is also due to processes of mutual recognition and involvement, whereby professional academics have undertaken a sustained examination of the relationship between scholarly and fan activities, and fan communities have drawn increasingly on the activities of scholars. The fact that academic scholars are often participating members of these fan communities is suggestive of the ways in which distinctions have been elided. That said, it is reasonable to remark that the academy has been more willing to embrace fandom than vice versa.

Even where reviews are largely positive, as with those of Matt Hills’s Triumph of a Time Lord, there is evident discomfort with the methods of the academy: ‘persevere – it does get easier’.⁴ The situation is not much improved when the work of professional academic critics is considered by their professional journalistic peers. Here is Robin Pierce, reviewing Decker’s Who Is Who? for Starburst Magazine:

Needless to say, it gets very heavy, very quickly. For example, when discussing the Doctor’s homesickness in 2007’s Gridlock, Professor Decker explains: ‘While the Doctor exhibits melancholia for an actual place, existential phenomenology posits an analogous metaphysical homelessness that has the potential to affect anyone, even those of us who haven’t locked the last members of our species in a time loop for eternity.’ And while reeling from that, we’re then treated to a quote from Simone de Beauvoir about how ‘one may falsely assert oneself as being or assert oneself as nothingness’. Anyone?⁵

And this is Hywel Evans reviewing Hills’s edited collection of essays, New Dimensions of Doctor Who, in Doctor Who Magazine:

Get this: ‘An unstated assumption guiding theories of intertextuality is that the viewing subject cognitively recognises and interprets intertextual references, thus casting them in the role of “amateur semiotician”.’ Well, if you say so, mate.⁶

Referring to Ross Garner’s chapter ‘Remembering Sarah Jane’, this recalls Ian Briggs’s importation of Tulloch and Alvarado’s discussion of ‘semiotic thickness’ and ‘auxiliary performance codes’ into the pseudo-intellectual banter of an Iceworld guard in his script for 1987’s ‘Dragonfire’. Briggs also named many of the other characters in the story after media theorists (McLuhan, Bazin, Belazs, Kracauer, Arnheim, Pudovkin) and, in his subsequent novelization of the tale, took the satire further by having the Doctor groaning inwardly at the thought of a chat based around cultural studies: ‘Semiotics? The Doctor began to worry. This was going to be a very difficult conversation …’⁷

The stories told by ‘fan-scholars’ and ‘scholar-fans’ to stake their claims to the territory they share, the language used to tell these stories, can be revealing. Where James Chapman conspicuously dismisses ‘the impenetrable critical language of high theory’, Hills responds with an insistence that ‘one person’s “jargon” is another’s useful vocabulary’.⁸ He notes, furthermore, that linguistic obscurity is not the exclusive preserve of academic commentators:

Fandom is often as guilty of this as academia. The word ‘squee’ probably doesn’t mean much to non-fans, just as the word ‘signifier’ won’t mean much to those who aren’t already media students. So-called jargon is, in reality, just another cultural group’s language that we don’t want to spend time getting to grips with.⁹

In Barthesian terms, it is ‘natural’ for fans to use one common vocabulary and for academics to use another: one person’s ‘fanwank’ is another person’s ‘strategic deployment of intertextuality for collective gratification’.

After a period of comparative inactivity, the academic presses have become very busy with Doctor Who in recent years. The machinery cranked into action with Kim Newman’s pocket-sized BFI critical guide of 2005, closely followed by Chapman’s Inside the TARDIS (2006). Reviewing the original edition of this for The Independent, Matthew Sweet argued that previous non-fiction on the series had

existed principally to tell you what the acronym TARDIS stood for, and that Patrick Troughton played the central part [of the Second Doctor] in the style of ‘a cosmic hobo’ – whatever that was. The potential readership just wasn’t ready to investigate the hermeneutic coding of William Hartnell’s astrakhan hat.¹⁰

The corollary of this was that Chapman’s history – ‘unpretentious, readable, solidly authoritative and self-consciously anti-theoretical’ – could be presented as a belated and critically conservative reiteration of material already published by fan-scholars in Doctor Who Magazine and elsewhere. Harsh as this is to Chapman, Sweet’s supporting claim is persuasive: ‘Doctor Who is becoming more complicated and expansive by the day, and its effective analysis might require an author with a slightly more adventurous approach.’ Read alongside Newman’s entertainingly opinionated history, Chapman’s detailed linear account suggests that a distinct academic manner, separable from that of fan-scholarship and informed by a sympathetic awareness of theory, has yet to be developed.

David Butler’s edited collection Time and Relative Dissertations in Space (2007) can be seen, in this light, as a crucial publication. An overtly academic book, issued from a prestigious university press, it is a substantial volume (over three hundred pages), comprising seventeen chapters, plus an introduction and afterword. It features scholar-fans trying out various critical positions, but, more suggestively, it shows them mingling with (and often being indistinguishable from) fan-scholars. Of the nineteen contributors to the book, only around half were university-based at the time of publication, and at least seven were freelance authors. The afterword, taking the form of an autobiographical essay by novelist Paul Magrs, effectively returned the book to its own first causes, the business of storytelling: ‘It is my job – as this writer/critic/reader/teacher thing I have made myself into – to pull and tease at these floating strands of fiction, and to ravel them up.’¹¹

The trend towards a mingling of expert voices, exemplified by Lindy Orthia’s Doctor Who and Race (2013), is far from absolute, and in some ways the partition of academic and non-academic remains firmly in place. The contributors to collections from academic publishers such as Cambridge Scholars, Open Court, Intellect and I.B. Tauris are almost all university lecturers, as are the writers of monographs from the same sources. Even so, the ‘almost’ is significant here, and it is notable that there is an occasional recognition of debt and influence between the authorial constituencies. So, the editors of Impossible Worlds, Impossible Things thank not only academics Matt Hills, Rebecca Williams and David Butler but also Doctor Who historian Andrew Pixley, Doctor Who writer Rob Shearman, and Doctor Who actor, writer and Dalek operator Barnaby Edwards. Hills, similarly, while thanking many fellow academics in Triumph of a Time Lord, makes a point of acknowledging prominent scholar-fans, recognizing ‘the sheer brilliance of much fan commentary’ in fanzines and blogs, and noting that the writing of authors such as Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood ‘is frequently as illuminating as published academic critique, if not more so’.¹²

The key point here is that the years since 2005 have seen a profound transformation of the environment within which Doctor Who is examined. Plainly, this has been a direct result of the extraordinary success of the returned series. After all, where are the old oppositions between consumer and producer, spectator and participant, fan and critic, more radically entangled than in the contributions of the most famous and influential fans of all, Russell T. Davies, Steven Moffat and Chris Chibnall, David Tennant and Peter Capaldi? It would be reasonable to suggest, though, that changing cultural and economic contexts for both the BBC and UK universities have also been a significant influence. In 2002, writing about the mutual antipathy of fandom and academia, Hills commented, ‘I can see no way that these institutional differences can be dissolved for as long as the university remains a residual site of cultural authority.’¹³ Nearly twenty years on, such authority is being eroded by the effects of controversial university fees structures (outside Scotland, at least) and the rise of a distrustful audit regimen that is typified by the National Student Survey and governmental frameworks established to measure the ‘excellence’ of both research and teaching. As the fabled ivory tower of higher education becomes subject to escalating processes of accountability and marketization, a systematic disruption of the cultural authority of the university might be perceived. A similar destabilization is manifest in recent challenges to the status and institutional security of the BBC, ...