The Books of My Life: Doctor Who (Tulloch and Alvarado)

Doctor Who, along with the films of Alfred Hitchock, a favourite of my father's, stimulated my interest in the study of films and television shows. When I went to university in the 1970s, however, I did not become a Film Studies, a relatively new academic major and minor at the time I was in college. Nor did I become a Media Studies major or minor, an academic discipline or multi-discipline, which, like Film Studies, was relatively new in the academy at the time I was at uni. Instead I majored in Religious Studies and later took degrees in Cultural Anthropology, and History.

Despite specialising in and being socialised into certain academic disciplines during my undergraduate and postgraduate days, I long had a broader and multidisciplinary interest in theory, particularly Social Theory during my college days. I became interested in hermeneutic theory thanks to classes I took in Biblical Studies. From there it was an easy jump to the study of the giants of Social Theory including Max Weber, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and the recent theoretical fad of the moment in academia and cultural criticism, Semiology or Semiotics. 

I became very interested in Semiology and Semiotics during my undergraduate years for several reasons. The university I matriculated at, Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, was one of the major and leading centres of Semiology and Semiotics in North America at the time along with the University of Toronto. Both hosted a major Semiology and Semiotic conference every year, IU hosting it one year and the UofT the other. I attended what Semiology conferences I could, getting to meet writer Jorge Louis Borges, Umberto Eco, and the semiological anthropologist Mary Douglas in the process. While at Indiana I also took a postgraduate level course on the Semiotics of Names and a Semiology of Film Course with noted film scholar James Naremore and loved them both learning a lot about the semiology of culture in the process. What was so exciting about semiological or semiotic analysis at the time was that it seemed to promise a grand wholistic scheme that would bring together historical analysis, cultural analysis, the study of meaning, ethnographic analysis, and the deciphering of the deep structural codes at the heart of society and culture and its many "texts".

I mention all of this because John Tulloch's and Manuel Alvarado's Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text (New York: St Martin's, 1983), published in the year of Doctor Who's twentieth anniversary and which I recently reread, seems to me one of the best, if not the best, integration of historical analysis, production analysis, semiological analysis, and ethnographic analysis that came out during the era when Semiology was making its mark on the critical and academic world and particularly in academic Film Studies and in academic film journals like the British journal Screen, a journal, which, over time, integrated, or attempted to integrate, the film theory currents of the late 1960s, the 1970s, and 1980s, in France, Britain and the United States, a film theory integration that would, over time, come to be dominated increasingly by psychoanalysis and text centred analysis, a synthesis that has dominated Film Studies and by extension in Television Studies, ever since.

Tulloch's and Alvarado's book is simultaneously an insightful history of Doctor Who, an insightful history of British television and the BBC, an insightful history of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, an insightful exploration of the narrative and cultural codes reflected in and instantiated in Doctor Who between 1963 and 1982, and an insightful analysis, thanks particularly to interviews with those who wrote, directed, designed, and "filmed" Doctor Who, of the unfolding novelistic text, one that hasn't always been consistent over the years, of the British cultural institution that is now Doctor Who. As a case study, one that in turn makes use of case studies of Doctor Who episodes such as "Kinda", Tulloch's and Alvarado's book remains, at least to my mind, an example of how to do a historical, semiological, and ethnographic analysis of a television show, a film, or a work of literature.

One of the most interesting things, at least to me, that Tulloch and Alvarado explore in Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text, and there are many, is that apparently eternal Sisyphean question and conundrum that remains at the heart of television and film studies practitioners: who, if anyone, is the author of a television programme or a film? The issue of film authorship is an issue that goes back at least to the 1920s and the early years of film criticism. Early auteurists focused particularly on those directors regarded as artists, people like D.W. Griffith and, later on art cinema auteurs like Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini. Beginning in the 1950s auteur analysis was extended by the pioneering French film journal Cahiers du Cinema,  the pioneering British film journal of the 1960s, Movie, and the director focused writing of that American translator and adapter of French auteur theory, Andrew Sarris, to commercial directors in the Hollywood cinema. Auteurists who focused their gaze on Hollywood directors focused increasingly on the themes and visual styles of certain directors and used these, as evidence, of the veracity of auteurist theory, as evidence of the signature or marks of individual auteurs "writing" in the seemingly commercial and mass produced film culture that was Hollywood. 

It is important to remember three things about this post World War Ii auteurism. First, proponents of the theory, particularly those connected to Movie and Andrew Sarris, did not claim that every director was an auteur, only some of them. Second, advocates for auteur theory did not claim that only directors were auteurs. Those connected to Movie along with Sarris also looked at the authorial roles genre, writers, and the broader contexts of movie making, for instance, admittedly sometimes more in theory than in practise, played in "authoring" film and television texts. Third, many of the proponents of auteurism argued that auteurism was a policy and not a catechismal doctrine, though this too is often more in theory than in practise.

As was the case with many of the pioneers of auteurism, Tulloch and Alvarado, explore the layers of authorship--societal, cultural, historical, production--in Doctor Who. Tulloch and Alvarado, for instance, explore, the impact, or limited impact, of gender conventions or codes and changes in gender codes, narrative codes and changes in narrative codes, visual codes and changes in visual, codes associated with mise-en-scene, writing codes, genre codes and manipulations of genre, and historical factors and historical dynamics, all of which produce the Doctor Who text, an approach to film and television authorship that is simultaneously contextual, social, cultural, production centred, ethnographic, and historical, at the same time. Tulloch's and Alvarado's approach to auteurism, one that reflects in microcosm the approach of the book in general, should put the lie to those in Film Studies, Television Studies, and Literary Studies who maintain that auteurism is little more than contextless post-Enlightenment romanticism, though it hasn't and it likely won't.

Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text was supposed to be the first book of two on the show by Tulloch and Alvarado. The second was to focus on how readers or the audience interpreted Doctor Who. Eventually, Tulloch publshied several papers on audience or reader's response to Doctor Who in his and Henry Jenkins book Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek (London: Routledge, 1995). The essays on Who in that book, it seems to me, all of them by Tulloch, constitutes, along with Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text, a classic in Television, Film, and Literary Studies that offers a viable and, in my opinion, analytically superior alternative to the far too often simultaneously contextual and contextless crystal ball textualism of so many contemporary Television, Film, and Literary critics.