There’s more than a touch of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in Mrs Gillyflower’s daughter Ada (Rigg’s own daughter, Rachael Stirling) and her naming of the captive Doctor as ‘my monster’ (and in Matt Smith’s distinctly Karloffian performance). Ada’s blindness (a result of her mother’s experimentation) relates to other notions of sight and seeing in the episode, from the optogram (the last vision preserved in a dead man’s retina), and the cod-silent movie flashback explaining the Doctor’s prior involvement with Sweetville, through to her mother’s vision of a new world in a ‘shining city on the hill’. This phantasmagoria of an episode turns on Mrs Gillyflower’s plan to poison the Earth by launching a rocket loaded with venom derived from her symbiote, Mr Sweet (a prehistoric parasite familiar to Madame Vastra), and repopulating the new world with her preserved morally upright recruits.
The Crimson Horror is an unashamed grand guignol genre mash-up, drawing as much on Victorian archetypes (filtered through film and television recreations) as on Doctor Who’s own preferred form of storytelling in the past. Mrs Gillyflower’s mad scheme is just the kind of thing a Doctor Who villain of the 1960s or 1970s might have dreamt up, with her happily confessing that the weapon the red leech’s venom represents has indeed fallen into the wrong hands: hers. In its joyful excess, in storytelling and visual realisation, The Crimson Horror is a throwback in more ways than one to classic Doctor Who (in a very different way to Gatiss’s Cold War), and a fitting episode to feature in the show’s 50th year on air.
The same could not be said for the return of the Cybermen in Neil Gaiman’s Nightmare in Silver, a disappointing attempt to trade on key icons from the past. While the Cybermen are suitably ‘upgraded’, it is only through the acquisition of old tricks, such as bullet time movements (from 1999’s The Matrix) and on-the-fly upgrading (from Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Borg, first seen in 1989’s ‘Q Who?’, a Cyberman rip-off themselves). The story is set in a rather cheaply realised futuristic theme park called Hedgewick’s World (recalling the Dickensian ‘Fantasy Factory’ from The Trial of a Time Lord, episodes 13–14) which quickly falls – despite the presence of a platoon of military rejects – to an army of reborn Cybermen, while the Doctor engages in a battle of wits (expressed through a chess game, shades of The Curse of Fenric) within his own mind against the Cyber Planner. The only really new element here is the reconfiguration of the old Cybermats (recently seen in Closing Time) into suitably miniaturised Cybermites. There are nostalgic shout outs to the Cybermen of the past in the Cyber Planner (last heard of in the Troughton story The Wheel in Space) and in cleaning fluid (The Moonbase) and gold (Revenge of the Cybermen, Earthshock, and Silver Nemesis) being fatal to Cybermen’s health. The sets in the Cyber-army’s lair recall those of The Tomb of the Cybermen much more directly than anything in the supposedly direct sequel Attack of the Cybermen. However, Gaiman’s reconfiguration of the Cybermen does much to remove their original role as a form of upgraded humanity, as explored in Rise of the Cybermen and The Age of Steel and in their original 1960s stories.
Instead, the story explores the relative morality of war (drawing on recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the ‘war on terror’ rhetoric) and the danger of becoming too like your aggressor in order to defeat them (an issue raised almost simultaneously in cinemas in Star Trek Into Darkness). Emperor-in-disguise Porridge (Warwick Davis) relates the history of the Cyber-wars and how trillions had to die to save billions. ‘I feel like a monster sometimes,’ he confesses, as he was the ‘poor blighter who had to press the button to blow it all up’. This theme takes precedence over any ideas of the Cybermen as updated automata or the occasionally uncanny nature of sideshows, circuses, freak shows and fairs represented in Hedgewick’s World.
The 50th anniversary run of stories culminated in The Name of the Doctor, a season finale truly wrapped up in the show’s own history (a dangerous area for the series after its failures of the 1980s). It opened with the instigating incident for the whole Doctor Who mythology in which William Hartnell’s First Doctor steals/borrows/liberates a TARDIS on Gallifrey. Cleverly reconstructed using CGI and colourised clips from the original series, the pre-titles sequence teases the mystery of Clara (whose ‘I don’t know where I am’ phrase is repeated from The Bells of Saint John, along with the leaf motif from The Rings of Akhaten) as she is seen to interact with several past Doctors.
The Doctor’s tomb (a giant version of the Police Box TARDIS) has been discovered on Trenzalore, and his friends have been kidnapped, so the Doctor must go where he should never go: the end of his own timeline. This somewhat sombre and funereal, rather than celebratory, episode was an unusual way to lead in to the show’s 50th anniversary special that November. The episode ties in to the Trenzalore warning delivered by Dorium in The Wedding of River Song (and she make a muted spectral appearance), and hints at the Doctor’s greatest secret. After the mystery of Clara is resolved – she’s been splintered in time, repeatedly ‘born to save the Doctor’ and to undo the damage done by the Great Intelligence when it (in the form of Richard E. Grant) has invaded the Doctor’s past, turning all his victories into defeats – the Doctor’s secret is revealed, kicking off a new wave of fan and viewer speculation. His ‘secret’ is a previously unknown incarnation, played by John Hurt, the guest star in the anniversary special rather portentously unveiled at the cliffhanger climax. Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor refers to him as ‘the one who broke the promise’ inherent in the Doctor’s choice of title. Hurt’s one line is the mysterious: ‘What I did I did without choice… in the name of peace and sanity’. Frustrated viewers would have to wait until November to have those new mysteries resolved.
However, a mere two weeks after transmission of the season finale came the sudden announcement that Matt Smith was leaving the series. With recent speculation about his increasing US profile and career ambitions – and given Dorium’s comments two years earlier that ‘…the fall of the Eleventh…’ would take place on Trenzalore – fans were perhaps not too surprised. Once again, media speculation became rife as to who would be cast as the Twelfth Doctor.
With The Name of the Doctor Moffat’s dark fairytale had reached its climax. The Christmas episode The Snowmen and the eight episodes aired in the show’s 50th anniversary year of 2013 each contained key elements of Moffat’s approach to Doctor Who as an imaginative fantasy for family viewing. While overnight ratings had fallen a little through the run, time-shifting (which continued to increase as the show was transmitted earlier and earlier on Saturday evenings) easily brought the overall average ratings up to the approximate 7.5 million viewers each year had reached since 2005.
The appearance of John Hurt at the conclusion of The Name of the Doctor may not have been a complete surprise. His casting in the 50th anniversary special had been announced weeks before the episode aired, although his precise role was still a secret. The only clue had come from Hurt himself, who in a newspaper interview described his part as ‘an aspect of the Doctor’.
Moffat’s run on the series had done much to foreground the role of the Doctor as a character in a fairytale story or legend. Davies began it with Eccleston and Tennant, making their Doctors legendary figures which monsters should fear. Moffat turned the character into an imaginary friend for young Amy, and he’s brought back into existence through her remembrance of him as a storybook figure. With Clara, she is tasked with saving the Doctor by actually jumping into his ‘story’, his timeline, in The Name of the Doctor in order to save him and – in turn – be saved by him. Moffat’s meta-textual take on Doctor Who had reached its heights by the 50th anniversary, suggesting that the Twelfth Doctor might benefit from a ‘back to basics’ storytelling approach to the series.
To the disappointment of some fans, the 2013 anniversary special did not take the approach of previous anniversary shows The Three Doctors and The Five Doctors in reuniting all the still-surviving actors to have played the series’ title role. Moffat’s solution had been the inclusion
of past doctors in The Name of the Doctor.
With Christopher Eccleston having declined to take part, Moffat instead wrote an episode that revolved around Matt Smith’s current Eleventh Doctor and included the reappearance of David Tennant’s still popular Tenth Doctor, alongside Billie Piper as Rose Tyler. Both had only been absent from the show for three years, but the producers knew their return would attract additional viewers when the special aired on 23 November 2013, exactly 50 years to the day since the first episode of An Unearthly Child.
Filmed between 2 April and 5 May, the episode entitled The Day of the Doctor was written by Moffat, shot in 3D and featured the return of the Zygons (who appeared only once before in 1975’s Terror of the Zygons), alongside the obligatory appearances by Daleks and Cybermen. Returning from The Power of Three was Kate Stewart, played by Jemma Redgrave, with Joanna Page appearing as Queen Elizabeth I.
The celebratory epic episode was not the only way that Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary was marked. Alongside a documentary on the show and many other news reports and special programmes, a drama entitled An Adventure in Space and Time recounted the early days of the programme. Written by Mark Gatiss, it starred David Bradley as William Hartnell and dramatised the key moments and personnel who were instrumental in the creation of the iconic series. Fittingly, it was one of the final programmes to record at Television Centre, where much of Doctor Who was made in the 1970s and 1980s, before the BBC vacated the distinctive building.
The introduction of the twelfth actor to play the Doctor became a sensational media event in itself. Topping the 2009 instalment of Doctor Who Confidential that had introduced Matt Smith, the 2013 special live broadcast Doctor Who Live: The Next Doctor was a global phenomenon, transmitting simultaneously in the UK, America, Canada and Australia (at 4am!). In the days before the 4 August transmission, speculation as to who had won the part was rife in news papers. Among the suggested candidates were comic actor Chris O’Dowd, stand-up Chris Addison and BAFTA-winner Daniel Rigby, all actors in the now expected 30–40 age range.
To the surprise of many, though not all as his name had featured prominently in the previous week, the role went to the 55-year-old star of The Thick of It, Peter Capaldi. Fittingly for the 50th anniversary, Capaldi was the same age as William Hartnell when he first took on the role in 1963. Like David Tennant before him, Capaldi was also a life-long fan of the show having been involved in the Official Fan Club when a teenager in the 1970s. He’d had a letter about the show published in the Radio Times in 1973. Capaldi had also previously appeared in the Doctor Who episode The Fires of Pompeii (2008) alongside Tennant, as well as in a major role in the Torchwood miniseries Children of Earth (2009). Almost seven million viewers watched the live reveal on BBC1, with a further 1.5 million watching in the US, Canada, and Australia.
Capaldi said of winning the role: “It’s so wonderful not to keep this secret any longer, but it’s been so fantastic… Being asked to play the Doctor is an amazing privilege. Like the Doctor himself I find myself in a state of utter terror and delight. I can’t wait to get started.” For Moffat, the choice had been reasonably simple. “One of the most talented actors of his generation is about to play the best part on television. We made a home video of [Capaldi] being the Doctor and I showed it around and everyone said ‘Yes, that’s the Doctor’. There was a shortlist of one: Peter Capaldi.”
Capaldi would be the first Oscar-winner to take the role (he won in 1994 as the director of the Best Live Action Short for Franz Kafka’s It’s A Wonderful Life), as well as the first established writer-director. He was the third Scottish actor to play the part, following Sylvester McCoy and David Tennant. Of his take on the Doctor, Capaldi said: “Even though I’m a lifelong Doctor Who fan I haven’t really played Doctor Who since I was nine… So as an adult actor I’ve never worked on it, so what I did was I downloaded some old scripts from the Internet and practised those in front of the mirror. I’m surprised now to see Doctor Who looking back. You look in the mirror and suddenly, strangely, he’s looking back and he’s not me yet – but he’s reaching out, and hopefully we’ll get it together…”
Beyond the 50th anniversary Doctor Who’s future looked secure. A Christmas special was scheduled for the end of 2013 and production was due to resume on an eighth series with Jemma Louise-Coleman set to return alongside Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor. With ratings fairly steady across the first seven series of the revived show, continually increasing iPlayer viewing figures, a higher profile in the US – where the series now aired on BBC America the same day as in the UK – and a host of peripheral spin-off sales, from DVDs to action figures, there seemed little reason why Doctor Who in its newest, refreshed form with a new leading actor would not celebrate its own 10th anniversary in 2015.
Across its 50 years on television, Doctor Who has become a part of the folklore of British culture. Every so often it might disappear for a while, but it will always return, refreshed and renewed (regenerated, you might say), as it has the most flexible format of any show, anywhere: a mad man in a magical box that can travel anywhere in space and time. No wonder it endures.
Steven Moffat – lucky enough to be the showrunner during Doctor Who’s pivotal 50th year – had his own views on why the series succeeded: ‘Imagine the sheer nonsense of devising a show, one of whose mission statements was to terrorise eight-year-olds! I’m not sure we could pitch it now. Doctor Who isn’t just Hammer Horror or sci-fi. It’s also a little bit The Generation Game, a little bit showbiz. It’s a weird show. It’s half scary Gothic castle, half shiny floorshow. Any show can be one or the other, but Doctor Who manages to be both. It’s great – the most entertaining thing that British television has ever done.’
The newest incumbent of the 50-year-old part of the Doctor agreed. Peter Capaldi said on Doctor Who Live: The Next Doctor: ‘I think Doctor Who is an extraordinary show and the thing that strikes me about it is that it’s still here after all this time. And the reason that I think that it’s still here is because of the work of all the writers and the directors and the producers who’ve worked on the show, and the actors – and I don’t just mean the fabulous actors who’ve played the Doctor, but all those actors who’ve sweated inside rubber monster costumes and those who wear futuristic lurex catsuits. But the real reason – the big reason – that Doctor Who is still with us is because of every single viewer who ever turned on to watch this show – at any age, at any time in its history and in their history – and who took it into their heart because Doctor Who belongs to all of us. Everyone made Doctor Who.’
RESOURCES
EPISODE GUIDES
Through to the 2013 Christmas Special, Doctor Who had racked up 800 individual episodes. That’s far too many to list here with associated credits (there are entire books that do little else), so this ‘resources’ section will direct readers to useful Doctor Who guides hosted on the Internet. Be aware: the Internet is dynamic and constantly changing, so the following URLs could be subject to change.
OFFICIAL BBC EPISODE GUIDES
Classic Series (1963-89, 1996):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/episodeguide/
New Series (2005-onwards):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006q2x0/episodes/guide
BOOKS
A selection of titles consulted in the writing of this book and recommended for further reading on key topics and issues raised.
Bignell, Jonathan and Andrew O’ Day. 2004. Terry Nation. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Booy, Miles. 2012. Love and Monsters: The Doctor Who Experience, 1979 to the Present. London: IB Taurus.
Britton, Piers D and Simon J Baker. 2003. Reading Between Designs: Visual Imagery and the Generation of Meaning in The Avengers, The Prisoner and Doctor Who. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Britton, Piers D. 2011. TARDISbound: Navigating the Universe of Doctor Who. London: IB Taurus.
Burk, Graham & Robert Smith. 2012. Who is the Doctor: The Unofficial Guide
to Doctor Who, the New Series. Toronto: ECW Press
Chapman, James. 2006. Inside the TARDIS: A Cultural History of Doctor Who. London: IB Taurus.
Clapham, Mark, Eddie Robson and Jim Smith. 2005. Who’s Next: An Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who. London: Virgin.
Collins, Frank. 2010. Doctor Who: The Pandorica Opens – Exploring the Worlds of the Eleventh Doctor. London: Classic TV Press.
Cornell, Paul (ed). 1997. License Denied: Rumblings from the Doctor Who Underground. London: Virgin Publishing.
Cornell, Paul, Martin Day and Keith Topping. 1995. Doctor Who: The Discontinuity Guide. London: Virgin Publishing.
Gillatt, Gary. 1998. Doctor Who from A to Z: A Celebration of Thirty-Five Years of Adventures in Time and Space. London: BBC Books.
Howe, David J, Mark Stammers and Stephen James Walker. 1992. Doctor Who: The Sixties. London: Virgin.
Howe, David J, Mark Stammers and Stephen James Walker. 1994. Doctor Who: The Seventies. London: Virgin.
Howe, David J, Mark Stammers and Stephen James Walker. 1997. Doctor Who: The Eighties. London: Virgin.
Miles, Lawrence and Tat Wood. 2004. About Time 3. New Orleans: Mad Norwegian Press.
Miles, Lawrence and Tat Wood. 2004. About Time 4. New Orleans: Mad Norwegian Press.
Miles, Lawrence and Tat Wood. 2005. About Time 5. New Orleans: Mad Norwegian Press.
Miles, Lawrence and Tat Wood. 2006. About Time 1. New Orleans: Mad Norwegian Press.
Miles, Lawrence and Tat Wood. 2006. About Time 2. New Orleans: Mad Norwegian Press.
Miles, Lawrence and Tat Wood. 2007. About Time 6. New Orleans: Mad Norwegian Press.
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