New Worlds, Terrifying Monsters, Impossible Things: Exploring the Contents and Contexts of Doctor Who

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I love old things. They make me feel sad.

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Archiving, Transmitting, and Branding Doctor Who

Introduction

Erin Giannini

With Doctor Who’s long history comes a great deal of baggage, both on the level of narrative and the sheer volume of actual extant episodes of the series. Derek Kompare, in writing about the rise of television on DVD, pointed out that one of the reasons why there were fewer TV buffs than film buffs was the difficulty of storage (Kompare 337). Until DVD and Blu-Ray, anyone wanted to collect every Who episode would need a few VCRs and possibly one of those NSA data centers to store the tapes. A total of 816 episodes of Doctor Who have been filmed; using a low-quality six-hour videotape would still require more than 130 tapes. (And that’s just when one uses technology and formats that have only recently been outmoded.)

Unfortunately for the completist, nearly 100 of these episodes are missing, victims of the BBC’s wiping policy; if storage of one series was a challenge, the full slate of television programming from the BBC, which went on the air in 1937 (with a break for World War II), was enormously difficult, and programs such as Doctor Who suffered enormous losses. Michael Matthews takes us through the painful wiping policy of the ‘60s era BBC, or, as he refers to it, the archivist’s nightmare, in which 97 of Doctor Who episodes (among numerous other series) were recorded over or junked. Not all hope is lost, Matthews asserts; searchers, animators, and fans have made strides in the painstaking reclamation and reconstruction from photo stills, audio recordings, and scripts.

In a similar vein, Paul Booth also engages with episode construction; he asks what an American Who, based on the Doctor Who television movie that aired on Fox in 1996, would have looked like. From Booth’s perspective, the Who movie represents a fascinating might-have-been that could very well have been influenced by then-contemporary series such as The X-Files or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as well as by the state of American television pre-Internet but post-cable…a major time of transition (i.e., not a fixed point) appropriate for a Time Lord. While the Who movie did not manage to successful migrate the series to America, it was the 2005 return of Doctor Who to the BBC that enjoys an unprecedented popularity stateside. Lynnette Porter analyzes this current popularity in the United States, characterizing it as another British invasion, including season six’s (31) filming in Utah, the first-ever simultaneous airing of the Christmas special A Christmas Carol (31.0) on the BBC and BBC America, and even touching on the Starz/BBC co-produced fourth season of Torchwood. Brian Faucette takes a different approach to the intersection between Doctor Who and the United States, tracing the ways in which the classic series sought to differentiate itself from American science fiction television, such as Star Trek, only for the process to come full circle with the new Who and the influences of American auteur-based quality television. Faucette also touches on the branding of the series for a more global audience and Doctor Who’s intersection with geek-as-the-new-cool culture of contemporary television.

To examine that intersection of Doctor Who and branding, this section ends with Colin Yeo delving deeply into the branding and merchandising involved in new Who, particularly with Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor. With Bowties and Building Blocks—one representing a primary identifier for Eleven, the other one of the numerous branded products associated with Matt Smith’s portrayal, Yeo ponders the question of how much of the branding blitz of the Matt Smith years will continue into the reign of the Twelfth Doctor. Is Peter Capaldi as marketable as the man who made bowties cool?

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A History of Space and Time

Archiving, Reconstruction, and Recovery of Doctor Who

Michael Matthews

When viewed next to the endless expanse of time and space that a being like the Doctor calls his domain, human history, long as it is, can start to feel rather small. Making this observation even more unsettling is the apparent lack of effort that mankind has put into preserving that history, especially in regard to entertainment, and especially in regard to genre entertainment like Doctor Who. Television archiving in particular has quite the short and checkered past, and while the state of the industry has improved drastically over recent years, the vast majority of early television—genre or otherwise—is gone forever, due in no small part to the culturally sanctioned apathy of then-fledgling networks. As one of the oldest and most prestigious broadcasting corporations in existence, it is difficult to come to terms with the fact that, for years, the BBC treated their tremendously important televisual output with nothing short of negligence. The consequences of this negligence only become clearer as time goes on, as the network now finds itself tasked with recovering pieces of a national identity, one half-hour at a time.

In fairness to the BBC, it must be acknowledged that archiving television was not always an easy task. In TV’s earliest days, the majority of programming was broadcast live, with no reliable means of capturing playback besides transferring the work to a different medium. This was most often done by filming an on-set monitor with a 16-mm camera, creating what in the UK is known as a telerecording (kinescope in the United States). These telerecordings could then be stored as film prints, and also produced negatives, theoretically preserving the broadcasts for an indefinite length of time. Unfortunately, these telerecordings cost extra money to make, and saddled these early television studios with the additional need for storage space. Once recording broadcasts on videotape became more common, the storage needs behind preservation doubled, and the BBC, like most broadcasters, showed little concern over the long-term maintenance of its library. As a cost- and space-saving measure, policies were instituted that had tapes periodically junked, or wiped, allowing them to be re-used to record later broadcasts. Yet, the telerecordings remained, and it became a further BBC policy that no tape recordings would be junked until after the network was sure that a telerecording of the program existed. Some recordings were actually able to last years before finally being overwritten. Nonetheless, the fate of any tape recording made at the BBC through the 1960s was uncertain, and even the telerecordings were systematically disposed of once it became clear that foreign markets were no longer interested in purchasing copies (Out of the Vaults…).

In 1963, right in the midst of this archivist’s nightmare, appeared Doctor Who. Conceived almost on a whim by the BBC’s head of drama, Sydney Newman, the series was intended to be a semi-educational, family-friendly science fiction show, commissioned mostly to fill a half-hour scheduling gap on Saturday nights. From these low expectations emerged an outright cultural phenomenon, and Doctor Who became hugely popular in a surprisingly short amount of time. Sadly, the show’s popularity was not enough to spare it from the storage practices of the BBC, and while the end of tape junking in the mid-’70s meant that all Doctor Who episodes from 1969 on would survive in their original forms, the show’s first six years were given no guarantee. The adventures of the William Hartnell’s First Doctor, and of the Second Doctor, played by Patrick Troughton—whose universally lauded take on the character helped pave the way of the show for decades to come—existed mostly as scattered collections of telerecordings, largely lost to time.

The loss of these years is keenly felt among archivists and fans alike, a result of the show’s own extensive history—which, interestingly, is actually longer than the entire history of television archiving. Doctor Who’s broader, overarching mythology was introduced gradually over the course of the show’s 50-year run, but several key moments that occurred in these first six seasons ran the risk of being lost, and some, such as the first appearance of the Doctor’s signature sonic screwdriver (Fury from the Deep 5.6), are still lost. The most notable example of such a loss is the fourth and final episode of the First Doctor serial The Tenth Planet (4.2), a missing episode whose consequences are perhaps more far-reaching than any other in the show’s run. As the only part of its serial that is still considered lost, The Tenth Planet: Part 4 is already a thorn in the side of any archival-minded audience, but what elevates the episode above and beyond a mere unfortunate loss is its introduction of the now-famous concept of regeneration.

By the time 1966 came around, William Hartnell was unwell—he suffered from arteriosclerosis—and was unable to keep up with the demands of the BBC’s busy filming schedule. A show called Doctor Who could hardly continue on without the Doctor, but the showrunners resisted the idea of cancelling the program entirely. Instead, they recast the role with a new actor—Patrick Troughton—and created an in-universe justification for the change: a Time Lord defense mechanism known as regeneration. The Tenth Planet is home to this critical first regeneration, but it is, of course, in the serial’s fourth, missing episode that the event occurs. Footage of the actual regeneration does survive thanks to a clip from the children’s program Blue Peter (Out of the Vaults…), but the story as a whole serves as both a swan song for the First Doctor, and as a major turning point for the show itself. The serial’s incomplete status, then, only underscores the tragedy that these lost episodes represent.

Fortunately for all of us, these losses are not, and never were, total. The BBC, in keeping with other producers of visual media, became much more committed to archiving during the mid-1970s, and in 1978, the network followed the creation of its official Film and Videotape Library with an immediate an effort to reclaim the missing elements of its collection. Thanks in large part to the work of collector, fan, and amateur archivist Ian Levine, he and BBC Archive Selector Sue Malden were able to reacquire just under half of the lost Who episodes for this archive within 3 years, most of which came in the form of scheduled-to-be-destroyed telerecordings from the BBC Enterprises library in Ealing (Out of the Vaults…).

Even those Who episodes that do remain missing still survive in various forms. One of the more simplistic fossil records of the show’s lost years is the BBC’s extensive library of tele-snaps, early pictorial records of television broadcasts that were available exclusively from freelance photographer John Cura. These tele-snaps were generally commissioned by television personalities as a sort of photo résumé, and one of Cura’s regular customers was original Who producer Verity Lambert. Frustratingly, the BBC junked its initial collection of tele-snaps just as it did its collection of tapes and prints, but many have since been recovered (Tele-Snaps). Tele-snaps have since formed the basis of many different episode reconstructions throughout the years, especially the BBC’s early attempts, included on past DVD releases, which used on-screen text and added narration to bridge the substantial visual gaps, as well as their rather rudimentary series of Photonovels (Photonovels). Lucky as the BBC is to have these images, the tele-snaps were not worth much without sound; it is in the solving of this dilemma in particular that another intriguing element of this story comes into play.

The form in which many of Doctor Who’s earliest remaining records exist tells us, wonderfully enough, that obsessive Whovians are hardly a modern phenomena. Even in the early days of the series, before a full mythos had been built, Doctor Who had viewers that refused to miss an episode, and better yet, wanted to keep a personal copy of the episodes after their initial airdates. Unfortunately, in a pre-VCR world, cheap video recording equipment was not available to the average consumer. What was available, though, was a relatively inexpensive means of in-home sound recording, a method that many fans took advantage of, assuming—correctly—that an audio record was better than nothing at all. By placing a microphone and recorder beside their televisions as the episode aired, these fans were able to keep an archived audio version of the story that could be listened to later, as if it was a radio drama (Regenerate!).

The problem with this method, of course, is that Doctor Who is not a radio drama—at least not principally—but a television program, meant to be seen and heard simultaneously. Fans who wanted to listen to their recording of Fury from the Deep (5.6), for instance, would have a difficult time following the plot based on audio cues alone. The same problem is made worse in the present day, now that Fury from the Deep holds the status of a serial whose visual elements are no longer considered extant (Out of the Vaults…). Nonetheless, retaining the audio elements of a lost serial is an excellent jumping-off point, and thanks to the efforts of dedicated fans in the series’ early years—especially Graham Strong, whose unorthodox recording methods resulted in pristine audio quality, and David Holman, the only known individual to have recorded the entire set of missing episodes (Out of the Vaults…)—not a single episode of Doctor Who is lost in its entirety. For every missing episode, the audio survives, even if no visual elements do.

In addition to contributing a sense of completeness and authenticity to Doctor Who’s fossil record, the possession of audio recordings serve to make the prospect of potential visual reconstructions significantly less daunting. While some sort of visual information would be ideal, the fact remains that nothing would ever truly need to be put together from scratch. After factoring in the additional boon of the many original shootings scripts that still remain from this period (Beneath the Ice), the main issue of Doctor Who reconstruction becomes one of creativity and resourcefulness, rather than the grueling detective work—or worse, guesswork—that often accompanies such projects.

Some of the most noteworthy and successful Doctor Who reconstructions can be found among the handful of restored serials that the BBC has re-released in the last few years, adding brand-new, animated episodes to stand in for the missing ones. These reconstructions are undertaken by professional animation studios, replicating the characters, sets, and actions that would have appeared on-screen, and repurposing the extant audio tracks to serve as, essentially, a voice-acting reel. The process, ingenious though it may be, is costly and time-consuming, and with only a few episodes able to be in the pipeline at once, the serials chosen for this manner of reconstruction must be selected carefully. As of May 2015, the only Doctor Who serials to have undergone this animated treatment are those that are at least partially complete, missing only one or two of their 4 to 6 episodes. Of course, it is much more tempting to complete a serial that has partially survived than to recreate one that is missing in its entirety, as focusing on serials with surviving visual elements provides a strong, authentic foundation on which to model the characters and art styles of the reconstructions themselves.

The first serial to be completed in this fashion was 1968’s The Invasion (6.3), whose 2 missing episodes were animated by Cosgrove Hall studios in 2006. The subsequent DVD release of the now-finished serial went on to be one of the BBC’s most successful Doctor Who releases, and left fans clamoring for more (Regenerate!). The methods used by Cosgrove Hall were initially considered too expensive to repeat a second time, but after 6 years, the BBC listened. The next serial to be restored in this manner was First Doctor story The Reign of Terror (1.8), released in January 2013. Since then, the animation method has been used to complete a further 4 serials, although it remains unclear if any more are planned.

This selectivity makes sense, as the work undertaken to produce these animated episodes is nothing short of amazing, not least of all because the entire process is done with a keen eye towards authenticity. The direction and editing of the reconstructions, which in the realm of animation should technically have no limits, are deliberately simplistic, limited to the techniques that would have been available on television equipment of the 1960s. Likewise, the monster designs, which could potentially be more lifelike than ever, show a similarly intentional restraint. The Ice Warriors (The Ice Warriors 5.3) and the Cybermen (The Invasion 6.3) don’t look any more realistic or frightening as animated beings; rather, their costumes are recreated in all their clumsy, cheap, unconvincing glory. Even flubbed lines, which remained in the original takes of the program for budgetary reasons, are left unaltered.

In fact, the limits of the original filming environment are taken into consideration by the animation team at all times, going so far as to identify elements of the original shooting script that, for one reason or another, would not have been possible to achieve on-set. In the shooting script for The Ice Warriors, for instance, the Martian leader Varga (Bernard Bresslaw) is called upon to knock a man unconscious in a manner that would require much more mobility than the final costume design provided the actor. The animators at Qurios Entertainment therefore decided, when animating the episode, to depict Varga as simply striking the man over the head with a heavy object, a method that would have required minimal levels of movement on the performer’s part (Beneath the Ice). Even in a situation in which achieving the intention of the original creative team is completely possible, a faithful recreation of the original elements takes precedence. This debate of intention vs. authenticity has long been a prominent one in the world of archiving, and the world of reconstruction in particular; to see these animators take the stance that they ultimately did says volumes about the BBC’s new and improved attitude towards the management of their library.

In a timey-wimey turnabout worthy of the Doctor himself, the future of Doctor Who’s past looks brighter than it ever has before. With an official majority of the lost episodes now found, the possibility of further discoveries always on the horizon, and an almost-unanimously popular stopgap method in the form of animation, there is finally room to hope that one day, fans of the world’s longest running sci-fi series will be able to sit down and watch the Doctor’s adventures in their entirety. Until that day arrives, Doctor Who soldiers on, just as its hero always has: standing tall and ready to face the oncoming storm, even if that means putting on a brave face…or a new face entirely.

Seeing patterns in things that aren’t there

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Reading Doctor Who: The TV Movie as Pilot

Paul Booth

The 1996 Doctor Who TV Movie (hereafter TVM) holds a divisive place in Doctor Who fan culture. Before the The Night of the Doctor mini-sode and The Day of the Doctor (33.14) 50th anniversary celebrations, which cemented the Eighth Doctor (Paul McGann) firmly in the mythology and history of Doctor Who, there remained an uncertainty as to the canonicity of this post-Classic but pre-New Who Doctor. The notion of canonicity, discussed by Doctor Who novelist Lance Parkin in his piece Canonicity Matters, means that some things are considered part of the official Doctor Who universe (i.e., the TV episodes), while other things may be considered outside the official BBC-authorized narrative (e.g., the novels written between the end of the Classic series in 1989 and the start of the New in 2005). Officially, the BBC holds no canon of Doctor Who, meaning that any professional text created of Doctor Who material might be considered official (such as the Big Finish audio adventures), but