Triumph of a Time Lord

Regenerating Doctor Who in the Twenty-first Century

Matt Hills

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780857730961
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television

Before Saturday March 26th 2005, "Doctor Who" had been off the air as a regular, new TV series for more than fifteen years; until a production team led by Russell T. Davies re-imagined the programme so successfully, so triumphantly, that it's become an instant Christmas tradition, a BAFTA winner, an international 'superbrand' and a number one rated show. It's even been credited with reinventing family TV. This is the first full-length book to explore the 'new Who' phenomenon through to the casting of Matt Smith as the new Doctor. It explores "Doctor Who" through contemporary debates in TV Studies about quality TV and how can we define TV series as both 'cult' and 'mainstream'. Further, the book challenges assumptions in focusing on the importance of breath-taking, dramatic moments along with narrative structures, and in analysing the significance of Murray Gold's music as well as the series' visual representations. Matt Hills is a lifelong "Who" fan and he also considers the role of fandom in the show's return. He investigates too the multi-generic identity, the monster-led format, and the time-travelling brand of BBC Wales' 'Doctor Who'.
In the twenty-first century, TV is changing, but the last of the Time Lords has been more than ready: he's been fantastic.

FANS AND PRODUCERS

[T]his ‘author-function’ … is not formed spontaneously through the simple attribution of a discourse to an individual. It results from a complex operation whose purpose is to construct the rational entity we call an author. Undoubtedly, this construction is assigned a ‘realistic’ dimension as we speak of an individual’s ‘profundity’ or ‘creative’ power, his intentions or the original inspiration manifested in writing. Nevertheless, these aspects of an individual … are projections … of our way of handling texts: in the comparisons we make, the traits we extract as pertinent, the continuities we assign, or the exclusions we practice.

Michel Foucault (1979) ‘What is an author?’, Screen xx/1, p.21.

‘THE RUSSELL T. DAVIES ERA’:

AUTHORSHIP AND ORGANISATION

BBC Wales’ reimagining of Doctor Who is not distinguished from its predecessors merely by virtue of a new production team offering new creative input. Unlike prior incarnations, this regeneration is strongly linked to discourses of authorship, as Kim Newman points out:

… previous eras within the history of Doctor Who … were defined by who played the Doctor, with only fan scholars paying attention to the comings and goings of script editors, producers, and BBC regimes … Doctor Who (2005– ) was from the first seen, even outside fan circles, as authored.¹

In this chapter I want to analyse the consequences and distinctions of ‘authored’ Doctor Who. It is showrunner Russell T. Davies – re-creator, executive producer, lead writer and BAFTA Dennis Potter Award winner (2006) – who has taken on the mantle of auteur. This has potentially placed new Who within a body of work including children’s serials such as Dark Season (BBC, 1991) and Century Falls (BBC, 1993), celebrated drama Queer as Folk (C4, 1999–2000) and controversial telefantasy, The Second Coming (ITV, 2003). Davies’ multi-generic output has also taken in writing for Coronation Street (ITV, 1960– ), melodrama The Grand (ITV, 1997–8) and the playful, anachronistic ‘period drama’ Casanova (BBC, 2005). Davies has further explored contemporary, naturalistic settings in work such as Bob & Rose (ITV, 2001), and the comedy-drama Mine All Mine (ITV, 2004).

I have placed the ‘Russell T. Davies era’ in scare quotes for a specific reason. In the next section, I will argue that Doctor Who has been interpreted within fandom as multi-authored, rather than being articulated with any one creative ‘vision’ or authority figure. In line with fan discourses, Davies has sought not to adopt the role of singular authority, and the programme has been promoted as multi-authored, in line with egalitarian fan discourses (Davies himself also being a long-term fan of the show). The very concept of an authorial ‘era’ is thus an unstable artefact, winking in and out of existence like a TARDIS. Davies is a (de)materialising auteur – present and absent, simultaneously displaced in favour of other production team members, and solidified via specific, queered meanings and readings. Having first stressed the series’ approach to multi-authorship, I will then materialise Davies’ authorship by reading his work on Doctor Who through the intertexts of his other screenwriting – most notably Queer as Folk, but also The Grand, which tends not to be viewed as an important precursor of Doctor Who,² but which I will suggest can be read in this light. Finally, I will conclude by opening out questions of authorship into organisational, institutional issues. This new version of Doctor Who is ‘authored’ by the corporate entity of BBC Wales as much as by Russell T. Davies. What has arriving in Cardiff meant for the show’s identity, and for debates over BBC Wales’ provision of networked BBC television?³ First, though, I will focus on the intertwining of fan and production discourses of authorship.

The Many Faces of Authorship:

‘The Phil Collinson Years’

Russell T. Davies’ cultural and industrial positioning as Who auteur has been viewed differently by a number of TV scholars. James Chapman sees it as a successful attempt to emulate ‘American Quality TV’, which has its own secure pantheon of auteurs including the likes of Chris Carter and Joss Whedon.⁴ By contrast, Dave Rolinson suggests that:

Davies has an unprecedented degree of control within the ‘hierarchy’ of ‘creative power relations’ … [new Who being described in SFX as] ‘almost auteur television’. As this implies, Davies’s highly distinguished pre-Who career creates new fissures in the attribution of agency, because Doctor Who is simultaneously a continuing series with a ‘generically coded format’ and an artefact from a writer in the ‘artist’ tradition.⁵

Here, the ‘generic’ status of the show, and its nature as an ongoing series rather than a discrete serial or one-off teleplay, appear to call Davies’ authorial position into question: the programme is ‘almost auteur’ TV, with Davies himself representing matter out of place – an ‘artist’ working in ‘genre’ TV rather than in the more rarefied realm of ‘drama’. Davies has evidently encountered this TV industry prejudice: ‘There are some sniffy people in the TV industry who have asked, archly, why I’m now writing genre, instead of drama. Obviously they’ve never watched a single episode of Doctor Who.’⁶

These two differing takes on Davies’ authorship can be characterised as ‘cult TV’ versus ‘television-as-culture’ discourses. The former sees authorship as legitimately extending into the realm of genre/series TV; though Chapman uses the label ‘American Quality TV’,⁷ his exemplars are nevertheless writer-creator-directors from The X-Files (Fox, 1993–2002) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (WB, 1997–2001; UPN, 2001–3). The latter position, meanwhile, restricts authorship to TV ‘drama’ conceptualised as a kind of genre-plus television, which supposedly transcends genre and attains the status of capital-C ‘Culture’.⁸

New Who may deny strenuously its ‘cult’ credentials (see Chapter 7), but by fusing ‘genre’ and ‘authorship’ it falls squarely into the domain of ‘authored’ cult telefantasy.⁹ This approach to authorship and value is one shared by Doctor Who’s long-term fandom, which has consistently interpreted the classic series as ‘authored’ as part of its textual revaluing and cultification. The work of writers such as Robert Holmes and Douglas Adams has been celebrated within fandom, with this authorial approach to old Who – interpreting it as multi-authored by isolating out the ‘signatures’ of different directors, writers and script-editors – carrying over into work from scholar-fans.¹⁰ This tendency to read TV as multi-authored is prevalent in other cult fandoms.¹¹

An emphasis on multi-authorship extends to the interpretation of producers’ work. For instance, it has been argued that 1980’s ‘[producer John] Nathan-Turner’s “signature” is less creative than administrative’,¹² that is, he successfully ‘got the money on-screen’ in his first series. Russell T. Davies himself has sought to extend discourses of authorship in relation to new Who, noting of series producer Phil Collinson that:

[2005–08] should be known forever as the Phil Collinson Years … you get far too much of me, me, me in DWM … And sometimes, when I read the stuff back, it sounds as though Phil’s job is purely technical … And while that’s a creative job in itself … it doesn’t allow for the massive input Phil has had into the scripts and ideas … of this bonkers old show.¹³

Davies details Collinson’s input on series four, particularly singling out the idea for ‘The Unicorn and the Wasp’ (4.7), and the botanical mise-en-scene at the end of ‘The Doctor’s Daughter’ (4.6) as examples of his creative work.¹⁴ New Who hence shares an emphasis on multi-authored readings of the text with the show’s established cult fandom. This particular integration of fan and production discourses may be unsurprising given that Davies and Collinson are both themselves fans of the programme. It does, however, contrast the series with some of its US SF TV contemporaries, such as the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica (Sci-Fi, 2003–9), which has a more monotheistic approach to the ‘author-as-God’, or at least the author-as-military-leader. As Suzanne Scott has argued of the Sci-Fi Channel’s BSG podcasts, typically featuring showrunner Ronald D. Moore:

fans’ consumption of the podcasts is intimately bound up with the acceptance of Moore’s word as law … That Moore’s podcasts open up dialogue not limited to the textual content of the show, but to the creative process that generates it, is surely a boon to enunciative modes of fan productivity such as online forums. In terms of fans’ textual productivity, the degree to which Moore’s commentary puts these practices ‘to bed’ along with each episode is still up for debate.¹⁵

Moore’s podcasting may give fans access to behind-the-scenes detail, but it also tends to reinforce a specific way of reading the text.¹⁶ By contrast, Doctor Who’s podcasts have not reproduced such an emphasis on Davies as the show’s singular auteur. Instead, they have repeatedly involved a wide range of production team members, including actors, directors, writers, executive producers, special effects technicians and sound engineers. These podcasts have clearly been planned and designed as episode-specific, with Dalek operator Barnaby Edwards and voice of the Daleks, Nick Briggs, featuring on ‘The Stolen Earth’ (4.12), whilst sound recordist Julian Howarth and supervising sound editor Paul McFadden are i...