Pop Culture

What the Doctor ordered

Limelight, November 2003

Forty years after the first episode was broadcast, Doctor Who is on the verge of a comeback.

            Dedicated fans might disagree. Doctor Who has not been produced as a television series since 1989, but he still has regular new adventures in books and audio plays, recorded for CD by the production company Big Finish, started by fans. Many of the novelists (including Sydney-based Kate Orman) were also fans during the eighties, who honed their writing skills in Doctor Who fanzines. Add the occasional made-for-video movie to that mix, and the Doctor is just as overworked as he was during his 26 years on air.

            He is still remembered fondly. Recently, readers of the British magazine TV Zone voted Doctor Who the all-time best television series. Meanwhile, ABC Online did a street poll, to discover which series Australians (or Tasmanians, at least) missed the most. Again, Doctor Who was number one - though many people said that they would not watch it again, "for fear of ruining their special memories."

            In case they change their minds, the ABC has made the unprecedented move of broadcasting every episode from the beginning, a sequence that should take three years to complete. (As some of the earlier episodes were destroyed, the run is slightly less than complete. However, it's close enough.)

            For those unacquainted with the series, the reruns might raise the question: "What's the big deal?" Even when it was produced, the low-budget production standards were almost laughable. But this was perhaps television's most influential science fiction series, budget (and Star Trek) notwithstanding. Not bad for a children's series, produced for its educational value.

            Doctor Who was first shown in Britain on 23 November 1963, while people were still mourning the death of JFK. The innovation began in the first few seconds of the opening episode, with the first strains of the famous theme tune (composed by an Australian, Ron Grainer). This eerie melody, recorded by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, was an early masterwork of electronic music.

            The stories themselves were no less inventive. Doctor Who was a textbook case of how to make a low-budget series set all over the universe. Rather than a huge (and expensive) spaceship, the Doctor (nobody addressed him as "Who") piloted a TARDIS, a time machine cum spacecraft that was bigger on the inside than the outside, and was supposed to change shape to match its surroundings. Instead of building a new shell for each story, the TARDIS -- due to a mechanical fault -- remained in the shape of a London police box.

            The villains were not giant monsters, but life-sized (and no less formidable) monsters like the Daleks ("Exterminate!") and the Cybermen. While teenagers were succumbing to Beatlemania, their younger siblings were being lured by Dalekmania, as the robot-like creatures rivalled the Doctor himself in popularity. The word "Dalek" even made the Oxford English Dictionary.

            The most inventive story device was yet to come. When the original star, William Hartnell, left due to illness in 1966, the producers noted that he was devised as an alien character. Rather than finish the series, they simply made Hartnell "regenerate" into a younger actor, Patrick Troughton. It was later revealed that he was a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey, hence this useful ability.

            This kept the series going for years. In 1970, Troughton transformed into Jon Pertwee, who would in turn tranform into Tom Baker. Baker is perhaps the archetypal Doctor, with his curly hair, floppy hat, multicoloured scarf (allegedly knitted by Madam Nostradamus) and bag of jelly babies.

            Throughout the eighties, the Doctor was played by Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy. Though his personality changed each time, he was always extremely clever, learned, eccentric and, most importantly, heroic, refusing to carry firearms when intelligence will suffice.

            The series has not been produced since 1989, save for an American-produced telemovie in 1996, in which McCoy regenerated into the younger, sexier Paul McGann. The fans gave mixed reviews to this tele-movie - praising McGann's performance, but denouncing his newfound libido, as he wasted no time smooching with his new sidekick. (The Doctor, as a children's hero, had always been more austere.) Recently, the BBC announced a revival, to be produced for BBC Wales.

            Like the Star Trek cast, many of the actors never really left the series, still appearing in fan conventions and audio plays. Not all of them, of course. Hartnell, Troughton and Pertwee (who later played TV's Worzel Gummidge) have passed away. Tom Baker is still acting, at age 68. "I can get two pounds from someone trying to find my pulse," he quipped in a recent interview. "The other day I made £80 waiting for a train at Charing Cross."

            Davison is still a popular lead actor on television, recently starring in the series The Last Detective and At Home with the Briathwaites. Colin Baker, a long-time science fiction fan, writes for the British magazine Dreamwatch.

            The Doctor's "girls" have had mixed success. The first, Carol Ann Ford (alias his 16-year-old granddaughter Susan), left the series because (as a 24-year-old mother) she was tired of playing a teenager. She later became a voice coach for actors and politicians.

            Maureen O'Brien (who played Susan's replacement, Vicki) didn't even enjoy the series. "I found the role limiting to say the least," she once said. "To look frightened and scream a lot is not very demanding to an actor." She moved on to become an award-winning actor, and is now equally popular as an author of crime and fantasy novels.

            Another 1960s companion who moved on to greater success was Jean Marsh, who played the short-lived (literally - she was killed off) space agent Sara Kingdom. Marsh went on to co-create two successful TV series, Upstairs Downstairs (in which she also starred as the maid, Rose) and The House of Elliot.

            The Doctor's longest-serving assistant was not a pretty young woman, but the Scottish piper Jamie. Frazer Hines, who played Jamie, also became the longest-serving cast member on the rural soapie Emmerdale (not shown here, but very popular in the UK), until his character was killed in 1994.

            Elisabeth Sladen played journalist an feminist Sarah Jane Smith, still regarded as the Doctor's most popular assistant. In fact, a spin-off series was devised, in which she teamed up with another popular character, the mechanical dog K9. (The series, K9 and Company, never went beyond a pilot.) Since the birth of her daughter in 1985, Sladen has been semi-retired.

            Lalla Ward, one of two actors to play Romana (a female Time Lord - the term "time lady" was never used), worked so well with Tom Baker that they were married... for 16 months. A writer and painter in her spare time, she gave up acting in 1992 to focus on her self-illustrated books.

            She is not the only one to exit the profession. Jackie Lane, alias 1960s companion Dodo (Dorothea), became an actor's agent, who listed Tom Baker among her clients. Brisbane-born Janet Fielding, who played the bossy Australian air hostess Tegan, also became an agent, who represented Paul McGann when he was cast as the Doctor. She last came home to Australia earlier this year... to appear at a Sydney Doctor Who convention.

            It all comes back to Doctor Who.

(This story was accompanied by a smaller article, seen here.)