The Books of My Life: Doctor Who (Newman)

I didn't really start watching the BBC television programme Doctor Who until the 1970s. I had seen a few of the Doctor Who serials when William Hartnell was the Doctor from 1963 to 1966, but had only a vague memory of those that I had watched. These were the days, after all, when TV repeats were limited, when the Beatles were popular, and when video cassette recorders and DVD players did not exist. I was unable to see any of the Doctor Who serials from the years when Patrick Troughton was the regenerated Doctor beginning in 1966 and when Jon Pertwee assumed the role of the Doctor beginning in 1970. 

It really wasn't until the Tom Baker years, from 1974 to 1981, that I really started watching Doctor Who religiously, mostly in omnibus form. By that time I much preferred Who's genre blending (science fiction meets horror meets comedy), whimsy, wit, and referentiality to self-important American science fiction TV programmes like Star Trek (NBC, 1966-1969). I continued watching Doctor Who through the years when Peter Davison (1982-1984), Colin Baker (1984-1986), and Sylverster McCoy (1987-1989) assumed the mantle of the Doctor and enjoyed it despite the negative folklore that grew up around the show--of which I was unaware--about its poor special effects, its obvious rubber monsters, and its flimsy sets. I focused my attention more on story than on the visual spectacles associated with the show. 

I was saddened when Doctor Who went into hiatus in 1989 at the insistence, at least in the fan demonology of the show, of Sir Michael Grade, the controller of the BBC at the time. I did not see the Anglo-American Doctor Who television movie in 1996 (BBC/Fox) with Paul McGann as the eighth doctor. I was not even aware of its existence as I didn't watch much television at the time involved as I was in the academic world. I did not initially watch the revival of the show under much heralded writer Russell T. Davies in 2005, but once I did, I must admit, after some initial hesitation--I questioned whether it would ever be the Who of my memories--I grew to like it very very much and contine to watch the show when I can.

Given my interest in Doctor Who it should not be surprising that I have, on occasion, read several non-fiction books on the show. I read, for instance, John Tulloch's and Manuel Alverado's Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text from 1983 with its emphasis on semiotic, narratological, and production aspects of the show, in the late 1980s. I took occasional excursions into David Howe's and Stephen James Walker's excellent, authoritative, and opinionated scholar fan episode guide The Television Companion: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide Doctor Who from 2003 particularly after I acquired a number of the DVD's of the show. I read the revised edition of James Chapman's excellent cultural history of Doctor Who, Inside the Tardis: The Worlds of Doctor Who from 2013, which had extensive discussion of the Christopher Eccleston (2005), David Tennant (2005-2010), and Matt Smith (2010-2013) years of the revived Doctor Who in 2018. And recently I read Kim Newman's brief monograph on what is now generally referred to as Classic Who (1963-1989), Doctor Who: A Critical Reading of the Series (London: BFI, TV Classics series, 2005).

Newman, a longtime critic for the British Film Institute's (BFI) magazine Sight and Sound, has written a monograph on Doctor Who that is similar to other entries in the BFI TV Classics series including Ann Billson's on the superb American television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Newman's longish essay on Who, like Billson's on Buffy, takes a chronological approach to Doctor Who providing readers with a brief history of the series from its birth in 1963 with its mysterious and alien Doctor, to its regeneration under the cosmic hobo Doctor in 1966, to its zenith under the swinging sixties Bondish Doctor beginning in 1970 and its Gothic Doctor beginning in during the years Philip Hinchcliffe was producer of the show (1974 to 1977), to its increasingly pantomime or "panto" Doctor during the years Graham Williams produced the show (1977 to 1981) when ratings began to decline, and finally to its slow death from 1982 to 1989.

Newman's monograph, as the subtitle of the book makes clear, is more than simply a historical analysis of Classic Who with brief discussions of the TV movie and revived series thrown in for good measure. It is also a critical analysis of the show from the perspective of a scholar fan. Newman makes clear that he was, from the first episode he saw, "The Dalek Invasion of Space", the second episode in the second series of Doctor Who from 1964 that "starred" what have become the most famous villains in Doctor Who, the Daleks, a fan of the show. He remained, he writes, a devoted fan through the years when Who became something more than what he calls a kiddie Quatermass, Nigel Kneale's famous three part BBC series (1953, 1955, 1959), thanks to its Gothic horror, its humour, its conspiracy tales, its futurism, and its philosophising, but started to waver with the introduction of K-9, the computer/dog that was the Doctor's first non-human companion in 1977, and thanks to the years that Douglas Adams served as script editor of the show between 1979 and 1980. 

As a critic, an inherently normative enterprise, Newman makes no bones about disliking K-9, the "piss-take" Adams years, the fundamentalist theocritism of fans who demanded continuity, and Mary Whitehouse, the doyen of British moral guardians, whose organisation complained about violence in the Gothic horror era early during Tom Baker's reign as the Doctor (1974-1977) leading, though Newman doesn't really explore this in any detail, the BBC to tone down the horror changing Doctor Who in the process. As a critic Newman admits that he liked some episodes and did not like others.

Thanks to its largely normative approach to Doctor Who Newman's monograph is characterised by a  problem associated with all such criticism, its notion of value and beauty is ultimately grounded in the eye of the beholder regardless of how sophisticated the eye of the particular beholder is. Additionally, Newman's Doctor Who suffers, largely because of its monographic nature, from lack. Newman does not, for instance, mention Verity Lambert, the first producer of Doctor Who who helped establish the narrative, mythological, and visual nature of the show. He does little with the production contexts of the show. His contextualisation of Doctor Who in broader economic, political, and cultural contexts is limited to generalisations. Despite such issues, which may be a problem for some, I still highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of British television, British science fiction television, and British culture since Doctor Who became and remains, thanks to its Britishness, something of a British cultural institution.