The Books of My Life: Inside the Tardis

What we read, just like what we are intellectually interested in, is, in large part, a product of what we value regardless of who we are. I have been a long time watcher of Doctor Who so it is not surprising that one of the books I would get around to reading at some point is James Chapman's Inside the Tardis: The Worlds of Doctor Who (London: Tauris, revised edition, 2013).

Chapman, a film and television historian who has also written on the James Bond films and The Saint and The Avengers television series's, has written a book that should be, in many ways,  a model of how one should write a book on a television series, particularly one as historically and culturally significant as Doctor Who. Chapman's book is grounded in historical analysis, genre and subgenre analysis, the analysis of discourse surrounding Doctor Who of critics and fans, and, most significantly, at least for Doctor Who from 1963 through the 1970s, in archival work at the BBC Written Archives Centre in Reading. As a result Chapman's book nicely puts Doctor Who from the first doctor to the eleventh in broader economic, political, technological, institutional (BBC, British television), cultural, geographic (UK), and demographic contexts.

Chapman's exploration of the BBC Written Archives gives Inside the Tardis a richness and texture that is missing from most books on TV shows written by the devotees of the donut hole or crystal ball textualism who generally eschew archival work, interviews with personnel involved in the making television shows, and qualitative and quantitative analysis of how viewers actually read the television shows they watch that unfortunately dominates film, television, and literary analysis these days. Chapman's work in the BBC archives not only gives richness and texture to his analysis of Doctor Who. It also allows him to put to rest several mythic sacred cows that have become common place in Doctor Who criticism, such as that, for example, which puts the reason for the demise of Doctor Who in 1969 solely at the feet of BBC One Controller Michael Grade. Chapman rightly sees the freezing of the BBC's license fee, the transformation of programming practises, the rise of new technologies, inflation, and Thatcherism as playing the leading roles for why Doctor Who was put on hiatus in 1989.

There is one downside to Chapman's book. It is a pity that the 1980s archives were not available for study at the time of Chapman's research and writing. Hopefully either Chapman or some other enterprising scholar can rectify this in the future.

I want to conclude by giving Chapman's book, despite its limitation, my highest recommendation. I  not only recommend it to fans of Doctor Who but for those looking for an example of how to write and write in a jargon free way about historically and culturally significant television programmes like Doctor Who. May Doctor Who live for another fifty years.