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Doctor Who: A Cultural Reading
From 1963 to 1989 Doctor Who was a British TV institution. Over the years it developed a uniquely eccentric style, at once cosily familiar and cosmically terrifying. Many of its characters, creatures, and objects have become indelibly iconic: the Doctor and his assistants, the TARDIS, the Time Lords, and a nightmarish universe of monsters and villains.
The idea that the Doctor should have the power of regeneration was forced on the show's makers when William Hartnell, the original star, could not carry on. But the changing face of the Doctor became key to the evolution of the series and, for many, whole phases of life are summed up in the casting changes: Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy and, in a one-off incarnation, Paul McGann. Even now, in the shape of Christopher Eccleston, the Doctor is set to return.
In this comprehensive study, Kim Newman follows the Doctor's travels through time, examining outstanding stories as well as prominent themes, recurrent characters, and monster types to assess the show as television masterpiece and cultural phenomenon.
The idea that the Doctor should have the power of regeneration was forced on the show's makers when William Hartnell, the original star, could not carry on. But the changing face of the Doctor became key to the evolution of the series and, for many, whole phases of life are summed up in the casting changes: Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy and, in a one-off incarnation, Paul McGann. Even now, in the shape of Christopher Eccleston, the Doctor is set to return.
In this comprehensive study, Kim Newman follows the Doctor's travels through time, examining outstanding stories as well as prominent themes, recurrent characters, and monster types to assess the show as television masterpiece and cultural phenomenon.
144 pages, Paperback
First published January 26, 2005
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About the author
Kim Newman
286 books942 followersNote: This author also writes under the pseudonym of Jack Yeovil.
An expert on horror and sci-fi cinema (his books of film criticism include Nightmare Movies and Millennium Movies), Kim Newman's novels draw promiscuously on the tropes of horror, sci-fi and fantasy. He is complexly and irreverently referential; the Dracula sequence--Anno Dracula, The Bloody Red Baron and Dracula,Cha Cha Cha--not only portrays an alternate world in which the Count conquers Victorian Britain for a while, is the mastermind behind Germany's air aces in World War One and survives into a jetset 1950s of paparazzi and La Dolce Vita, but does so with endless throwaway references that range from Kipling to James Bond, from Edgar Allen Poe to Patricia Highsmith.
In horror novels such as Bad Dreams and Jago, reality turns out to be endlessly subverted by the powerfully malign. His pseudonymous novels, as Jack Yeovil, play elegant games with genre cliche--perhaps the best of these is the sword-and-sorcery novel Drachenfels which takes the prescribed formulae of the games company to whose bible it was written and make them over entirely into a Kim Newman novel.
Life's Lottery, his most mainstream novel, consists of multiple choice fragments which enable readers to choose the hero's fate and take him into horror, crime and sf storylines or into mundane reality.
An expert on horror and sci-fi cinema (his books of film criticism include Nightmare Movies and Millennium Movies), Kim Newman's novels draw promiscuously on the tropes of horror, sci-fi and fantasy. He is complexly and irreverently referential; the Dracula sequence--Anno Dracula, The Bloody Red Baron and Dracula,Cha Cha Cha--not only portrays an alternate world in which the Count conquers Victorian Britain for a while, is the mastermind behind Germany's air aces in World War One and survives into a jetset 1950s of paparazzi and La Dolce Vita, but does so with endless throwaway references that range from Kipling to James Bond, from Edgar Allen Poe to Patricia Highsmith.
In horror novels such as Bad Dreams and Jago, reality turns out to be endlessly subverted by the powerfully malign. His pseudonymous novels, as Jack Yeovil, play elegant games with genre cliche--perhaps the best of these is the sword-and-sorcery novel Drachenfels which takes the prescribed formulae of the games company to whose bible it was written and make them over entirely into a Kim Newman novel.
Life's Lottery, his most mainstream novel, consists of multiple choice fragments which enable readers to choose the hero's fate and take him into horror, crime and sf storylines or into mundane reality.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
August 10, 2009
This review is also posted on my blog (complete with links not included here) at http://inputs.wordpress.com/2009/08/1...
Kim Newman is a well-known and prolific author of genre novels, overviews on cult and horror film and TV and a reviewer for the film magazine Empire.
This book, an entry in the excellent BFI TV classics series, is an enjoyable if sometimes hastily written, short handbook. It manages to provide a nicely opinionated overview of ‘classic’ Doctor Who with a few references to the new post 2005 series with Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant.
There’s no strong argument unifying the book but there are a number of thought provoking tidbits, a few of which I will dip into below.
It is good to see Newman confirm my own long held prejudice that from ’1963 to K9, Doctor Who was important and from 1977 to 1989 it wasn’t.’ (p. 7) Like Newman, I stopped watching not long after the introduction of K9, the metal robot dog, which Tom Baker would kick in frustration behind the scenes. I didn’t mind K9 so much as Baker’s increasing tendency to treat proceedings as all a bit of a joke. I was more interested in the serious science fiction offerings of the Troughton and Jon Pertwee eras. After around 1977, as Newman says, the series degenerated into failed comedy, pantomime and self-referential fan-fiction.
Newman also provides a number of other insightful observations. For example, in relation to the fixed (and ghastly) costumes of the later Doctor Who. These costumes he describes as a ‘comic-book invention … unsustainable in live-action where audiences wonder if the hero is wearing the same, never cleaned, never-worn-out clothes for years on end’ (p. 97) The earlier Doctors if they had a certain style (ie Jon Pertwee’s Carnaby St Edwardian style) they still had different sets of clothes to their wardrobe.
I also enjoyed Newman’s remark in relation to Who merchandising that it became difficult to be scared of monsters like the daleks that had been turned into soft toys. (Speaking of soft toys, there is an excellent blog at Live Journal titled Who_knits: Time and Double Pointed Needles in Space which details a variety of Dr. Who knitting projects. And this is by no means the only Dr. Who knitting site on the net.)
Newman also notes with a surprising ambivalence for someone who has been involved in cult genre and fandom for so long, ‘in the 1960s, fictional events were not obsessively covered by the national press. Now no popular television drama can surprise audiences by writing out a character through murder, marriage or act of God (or have them outed as gay or a serial killer) without a leak making the front page of the tabloids’ (p. 40) He is discussing here the lack of fanfare that heralded the regeneration of William Hartnell into Patrick Troughton.
It would have been interesting to see some further elaboration on why these changes have occurred. My own view is that this shift marks a welcome move away from the hide-bound stranglehold of the scientific and Hegelian world view where only the rational and the empirically visible had any value, returning to a much earlier view that there is more to existence than what we can see immediately before our eyes. This earlier view is described by French historian Jacques Le Goff in his book The Medieval Imagination. It is a view which didn’t draw a rigid division between the fictional and the non-fictional.
Another observation I thoroughly approved of was Newman’s comment about the propensity of American series not to understand that ‘viewers who enjoyed the adventures, didn’t want to listen to whining characters who only wanted to get home and lead boring lives’ (p. 20). The Wizard of Oz has long been an exemplary fan disappointment on this front – as was its ending – ‘it was all just a dream’, a generic resolution universally loathed by fan viewers whenever it appears in a series or film.
Unfortunately, Doctor Who was not entirely exempt from this irritating hankering after home theme. One of the later companions, Tegan, was particularly tedious in this respect. This is something that Russell T. Davies (a hater of The Wizard of Oz ending) has deliberately gone out of his way to counter in the new series of Doctor Who – even if I do find these new outings problematic on a large number of other fronts. The Outland Institute blog very aptly describes the new series as ‘Neighbours in Space’.
Also of interest in this book, is Newman’s broad knowledge of other cult and genre television which he is able to reference in his discussions which goes a long way to contextualising Doctor Who in the context of other contemporaneous cult TV and film.
Kim Newman is a well-known and prolific author of genre novels, overviews on cult and horror film and TV and a reviewer for the film magazine Empire.
This book, an entry in the excellent BFI TV classics series, is an enjoyable if sometimes hastily written, short handbook. It manages to provide a nicely opinionated overview of ‘classic’ Doctor Who with a few references to the new post 2005 series with Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant.
There’s no strong argument unifying the book but there are a number of thought provoking tidbits, a few of which I will dip into below.
It is good to see Newman confirm my own long held prejudice that from ’1963 to K9, Doctor Who was important and from 1977 to 1989 it wasn’t.’ (p. 7) Like Newman, I stopped watching not long after the introduction of K9, the metal robot dog, which Tom Baker would kick in frustration behind the scenes. I didn’t mind K9 so much as Baker’s increasing tendency to treat proceedings as all a bit of a joke. I was more interested in the serious science fiction offerings of the Troughton and Jon Pertwee eras. After around 1977, as Newman says, the series degenerated into failed comedy, pantomime and self-referential fan-fiction.
Newman also provides a number of other insightful observations. For example, in relation to the fixed (and ghastly) costumes of the later Doctor Who. These costumes he describes as a ‘comic-book invention … unsustainable in live-action where audiences wonder if the hero is wearing the same, never cleaned, never-worn-out clothes for years on end’ (p. 97) The earlier Doctors if they had a certain style (ie Jon Pertwee’s Carnaby St Edwardian style) they still had different sets of clothes to their wardrobe.
I also enjoyed Newman’s remark in relation to Who merchandising that it became difficult to be scared of monsters like the daleks that had been turned into soft toys. (Speaking of soft toys, there is an excellent blog at Live Journal titled Who_knits: Time and Double Pointed Needles in Space which details a variety of Dr. Who knitting projects. And this is by no means the only Dr. Who knitting site on the net.)
Newman also notes with a surprising ambivalence for someone who has been involved in cult genre and fandom for so long, ‘in the 1960s, fictional events were not obsessively covered by the national press. Now no popular television drama can surprise audiences by writing out a character through murder, marriage or act of God (or have them outed as gay or a serial killer) without a leak making the front page of the tabloids’ (p. 40) He is discussing here the lack of fanfare that heralded the regeneration of William Hartnell into Patrick Troughton.
It would have been interesting to see some further elaboration on why these changes have occurred. My own view is that this shift marks a welcome move away from the hide-bound stranglehold of the scientific and Hegelian world view where only the rational and the empirically visible had any value, returning to a much earlier view that there is more to existence than what we can see immediately before our eyes. This earlier view is described by French historian Jacques Le Goff in his book The Medieval Imagination. It is a view which didn’t draw a rigid division between the fictional and the non-fictional.
Another observation I thoroughly approved of was Newman’s comment about the propensity of American series not to understand that ‘viewers who enjoyed the adventures, didn’t want to listen to whining characters who only wanted to get home and lead boring lives’ (p. 20). The Wizard of Oz has long been an exemplary fan disappointment on this front – as was its ending – ‘it was all just a dream’, a generic resolution universally loathed by fan viewers whenever it appears in a series or film.
Unfortunately, Doctor Who was not entirely exempt from this irritating hankering after home theme. One of the later companions, Tegan, was particularly tedious in this respect. This is something that Russell T. Davies (a hater of The Wizard of Oz ending) has deliberately gone out of his way to counter in the new series of Doctor Who – even if I do find these new outings problematic on a large number of other fronts. The Outland Institute blog very aptly describes the new series as ‘Neighbours in Space’.
Also of interest in this book, is Newman’s broad knowledge of other cult and genre television which he is able to reference in his discussions which goes a long way to contextualising Doctor Who in the context of other contemporaneous cult TV and film.
November 8, 2015
A concise and useful history of the series up to the first season of the revival. Colored by Newman's personal tastes and biases, but he's fairly open about that, so it doesn't detract too much from the overall effect.
January 31, 2022
A fun panorama view the classic iconic British show DOCTOR WHO. Could serve as an appetizer for the multi-volumed ABOUT TIME book series that exhaustively covers the show from it's unlikely inception back in 1963.
July 25, 2022
A concise view of unlimited time and space.
January 23, 2023
Solid review of classic Doctor Who, with a touch of Eccleston and first season of Tennant thrown in.
August 13, 2014
BFI produces in-depth critical readings of films and television series. Here, Kim Newman delves into the history of Doctor Who. Starting from the very beginning in 1963, to the probably welcomed ending in 1989, even including the attempted revival TV movie in 1996, and continuing through to the newest series revival starting in 2005, Newman hits the high points, and the very low points of this show that has captivated audiences for decades.
There have been whole series of books focusing on the production on Doctor Who over the years, so Newman is quick to simply reference these and list them for anyone interested in further reading, but he takes a look at the show as a whole, looking into the story peaks and inevitable valleys hit when certain writers and producers either ran out of creative steam or just didn't care enough to make it work.
As a definite fan of the show, Newman spares no punches when it comes to his least favorite Who moments through the years (especially when it comes to K-9).
If you are a fan of Doctor Who, new or old, and enjoy deep critical analysis of film and television, this is definitely a book worth picking up.
I would be interested in an updated version that explored Newman's thoughts on the rest of the revival series, however, especially how he thinks Moffat has held up as showrunner after Davies.
There have been whole series of books focusing on the production on Doctor Who over the years, so Newman is quick to simply reference these and list them for anyone interested in further reading, but he takes a look at the show as a whole, looking into the story peaks and inevitable valleys hit when certain writers and producers either ran out of creative steam or just didn't care enough to make it work.
As a definite fan of the show, Newman spares no punches when it comes to his least favorite Who moments through the years (especially when it comes to K-9).
If you are a fan of Doctor Who, new or old, and enjoy deep critical analysis of film and television, this is definitely a book worth picking up.
I would be interested in an updated version that explored Newman's thoughts on the rest of the revival series, however, especially how he thinks Moffat has held up as showrunner after Davies.
March 3, 2008
Meh.
It was alright.
It was alright.
March 9, 2013
A good quick intro to the long-running series.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews