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The BBC celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of the first airing of Doctor Who are now being confined to our collective memory but what did this global televisual event really symbolise for Planet Earth…?
Like me, you’re probably suffering from an acute case of Whovian fatigue, so ubiquitous was the raft of programming dedicated to the science fiction phenomenon as it approached its half century. It left one feeling somewhat over exposed. Much of the fanfare, it has to be said, took the form of self-referential, superlative waff, but to dismiss the nostalgiafest as wholly vacuous would also be extremely unkind.
Like me, you’re probably suffering from an acute case of Whovian fatigue, so ubiquitous was the raft of programming dedicated to the science fiction phenomenon as it approached its half century. It left one feeling somewhat over exposed. Much of the fanfare, it has to be said, took the form of self-referential, superlative waff, but to dismiss the nostalgiafest as wholly vacuous would also be extremely unkind.
For any television programme to have existed so long in today’s fast moving and fickle world of entertainment is an achievement worthy of note. One only trumped on UK television by Blue Peter, The Sooty Show and ITV’s soap opera Coronation Street.
Although here’s where you could argue the BBC is being somewhat disingenuous. All those shows have run continuously since their inception but the BBC’s opinion of Doctor Who hasn’t always been so affectionate. The Corporation cancelled the show in 1989 and, with the exception of one aborted attempted to resurrect the series in 1996, Doctor Who was de facto defunct for 15 years between 1990 and 2004. Only now, due to the unexpected global audience the show has garnered since its 2005 rebirth, are the BBC confident enough to go ‘all in’ on the ‘Who ha’!
Even from a critical standing it all seems a bit much, bearing in mind the show's second coming has only occasionally spun the considerable chaff of a full seven series into the rarest of TV gold.
However, just as I was tiring of all things TARDIS, along came Mark Gatiss’s ode to the First Doctor, a dramatisation of the show’s origin story. As I settled in to 'An Adventure In Space And Time', a practically perfect love letter to Doctor Who, I began to feel all my cynicism ebb away.
For here was the essence of what makes Doctor Who special. David Bradley’s excellent embodiment of William Hartnell, the insecure, ageing ‘character actor’ whose ill health eventually led to the regeneration conceit, was truly something to behold. To see the despair in his realisation that his time as the Doctor is coming to an end is both heartbreaking and portentous, symbolising at it does, the fear we all feel at the transience of our limited time on Earth, that our existence is but a mere, insignificant footnote in the history of humanity.
Imagine you were the only actor to have played the role, how gut wrenching it would be to consider it continuing in your absence. As Hartnell meets his successor in the form of Reece Sheersmith’s Patrick Troughton, it becomes clear the game is finally up – “Why does everything have to change?” he bleats, but, of course, it must; the only permanence in our lives being impermanence.
Yet what he couldn't realise at the time was how the foundation he laid would still be bearing the weight of the whole Doctor Who canon some 50 years in the future.
Many viewers of the anniversary episode, screened simultaneously worldwide, would have registered a similar feeling to Hartnell’s melancholy. For those younger than me, it would have been at the appearance of David Tennant’s Doctor, for those older, the cameo from Tom Baker.
But, then, perhaps the passing of an everlasting torch from one (re)generation to the next is our only salvation from the spectre of our inevitable mortality; whether it be the ideals, beliefs and knowledge that a parent passes to a child or the skills and experience a mentor passes to a trainee?
After all, if even the Lord of all time and space can’t free himself from that one great certainty, then perhaps we humans shouldn't feel so aggrieved we are also denied an eternity.
Doctor Who is to be cherished for so much – its morality, its faith in science, its wonderful escapism – but perhaps it is the sense of belonging that each generation’s Doctor gives to their audience that makes the show a true diamond in the rough? It has delivered a different meaning to different sets of fans the world over, each imprinting on their version of the Doctor their own, distinct, self-image.
Doctor Who is to be cherished for so much – its morality, its faith in science, its wonderful escapism – but perhaps it is the sense of belonging that each generation’s Doctor gives to their audience that makes the show a true diamond in the rough? It has delivered a different meaning to different sets of fans the world over, each imprinting on their version of the Doctor their own, distinct, self-image.
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