Doctor Who – the most influential British TV series of all-time?
Blog by James Oliver on December 5th, 2009
Has there been a more influential British TV programme than Doctor Who? Not the modern version, you understand, with its CGI, top-line talent and generous budget but the spit ‘n’ sawdust original.
That might sound like a stupid question. After all, Doctor Who – in its ‘classic’ form – was a tacky science fiction show whereas, say, Cathy Come Home changed policy. But consider the millions of imaginations fired by ‘classic’ Doctor Who and the question seems less absurd.
Consider the many people who have cited it as an influence on their lives. They include scientists, writers, musicians (that theme tune was a pioneering piece of electronica) and many more besides. Not bad for a tacky sci-fi show.
It has become fashionable of late to sneer at ‘classic’ Who for its perceived deficiencies. Sadly, many of the charges hold water. The scripts were indeed sometimes silly. Many of the monsters were risible. But such criticism ignores the fact that, at its best, Doctor Who was pretty damned good. Take The Talons of Weng-Chiang, for example: a mash-up of Victorian music hall, giant rats and fake Chinese Gods. It’s a brilliant piece of pulp storytelling, featuring the peerless Tom Baker on top form.
Baker’s reign was the golden age – the body-horror of The Ark in Space (a plausible influence on the rather more expensive Alien), the genuinely terrifying Pyramids of Mars and the cod Frankenstein story, The Brain of Morbius. Perhaps his finest hour (and-a-half), however, was City of Death, a wonderful comedy co-written by Douglas Adams and featuring a cameo by John Cleese.
Very nearly as good is Inferno, in which Jon Pertwee gets blasted into an alternative universe. In addition to dealing with big philosophical issues of free will, it throws in green slime that turns people into monsters. The ultimate green slime adventure, though, is surely The Green Death aka ‘the one with the maggots’.
One of the constant complaints of Doctor Who fans is the shabby treatment accorded to the first decade of the Doctor’s travels. In its wisdom, the BBC destroyed many episodes starring the first Doctor, William Hartnell and his successor, Patrick Troughton (although fortunately the archivists carefully preserved every Trooping the Colour, in case you were worried).
The DVD releases go some way to rescuing the afflicted stories. For The Invasion (in which the Cybermen try to take over swinging London), the two missing episodes have been replaced by animated recreations.
The best release (so far, of course), is Lost in Time, gathering together the 18 ‘orphan’ episodes, the only surviving representations of their respective stories. The casual viewer might be better advised to start elsewhere – these are incomplete stories – but there’s a poignant magic to these episodes, at once a reminder of what we’ve lost and a celebration of what we have.
We shouldn’t deny the power of nostalgia in all this: it exerts a powerful gravitational pull that makes some of us more willing to overlook certain faults. Yes, Old Skool Who was cheap, silly and anything else you want to throw at it. But at its best, it gave us some of the finest TV ever. And that’s why it keeps drawing us back.
