It Could Be Said #50 Happy Birthday Doctor Who
As The Doctor's Birthday Party finally comes to an end, Will wonders what it is we're actually celebrating
I have a question – what are we celebrating when we celebrate Doctor Who’s 60th Birthday?
It’s not six decades of continuous transmission, indeed the show spent its entire 59th year off the air after the previous production team concluded their tenure on October 23rd, 2022. It had two cancellations in the 1980s and spent the entirety of the 1990s and half the noughties in the wilderness.
It’s return to our screen during this year’s Children in Need also belied the idea that the series is one seamless story with the short comedy sketch reimagining the creator of the Doctor’s most fearsome enemies, to evade suggestions that it was equating disability with evil. Of course, Davros’s introduction in 1977 was itself a retcon of the Dalek’s original origin story, one that would significantly change the nature of the stories told with them in subsequent appearances of the Classic series. Doctor Who may never have had the type of hard reset of continuity that James Bond or Batman films routinely undergo, but it revels in its ability as a series about time travel to ignore mistakes and explore new ideas.
Even the Doctor and his TARDIS are everchanging, with actors and production designers having far more freedom to reimagine the exterior appearance of our hero or the interior of his ship. And there’s no singular creative force behind the show’s creation that previous generations can either look for inspiration or be scolded by fans for failing to do so.
What we are actually celebrating is Doctor Who’s format.
All Hail The Great Committee
Doctor Who was famously the brainchild of senior executives who then farmed it out to rising stars such as Verity Lambert and Waris Hussein. The series development was shaped by extensive audience research and long brainstorming sessions with a key consideration being making sure it fit the early-evening timeslot it was being given. The very antithesis of the creator-led development ethos that is usually at the heart of the mythology of groundbreaking shows.
And this atypical development process may well be why Doctor Who is unusually defined by its format, even to this day. The Doctor and his assistant(s) traveling space and time to explore interesting phenomenon and right any wrongs they happened to encounter. This sci-fi twist on the gentleman Victorian explorer allowed the BBC to welcome its audience to whatever world, whatever era its writers could imagine. The second special, Wild Blue Yonder made particular use of this fact, with its sci-fi psychodrama on an abandoned spaceship at the very edge of the universe being bookended by a cheeky historical interaction with Mr Issac Newton and a return to a contemporary Britain gripped by madness. The whole series in microcosm; Doctor Who literally is the series that can do it all.
But more than just streamlining travel, the character relationships dictated by the format ensured the show can always briskly explain brave new worlds to the viewers. The Doctor has the knowledge and confidence to understand his surroundings and adversaries, whilst the Doctor’s assistants ensured they had a reason to explain key details to the audience. The series would finetune this format, sliming down the overlarge initial cast of five and introducing the inspired idea that The Doctor could regenerate. Regeneration meant that series could always follow the archetype of the eccentric explorer and his rookie accomplice rather than getting bogged down with younger actors cosplaying as characters from the sixties.
Punching Above Sci-Fi’s Weight
In a world dominated by American pop culture its easy to forget that Doctor Who is a much mainstream property than Star Trek or any other American sci-fi property with the possible exception of Star Wars. I say possible, because the series ratings performance is genuinely remarkable when you place it into the correct context. Until quite far into the 1980s, Doctor Who could be relied upon to get at least six million viewers every week and would frequently past the seven million viewer mark. At its peaks under William Hartnell and Tom Baker, it could even break the 12million viewer threshold.
Now these numbers are not dissimilar to those enjoyed by Star Trek, especially The Next Generation at its peak. But you have to factor in America’s much larger population. It’s never easy working out how large a television universe is, but based on the Moon landings, a conservative estimate is that America had about five times as many television viewers as Britain. So, Doctor Who’s base audience of six million would be the same as Star Trek as having a hardcore audience of 30 million, it peaking above twelve million would be comparable to the most Star Trek episodes having an audience in excess of 60million viewers. It’s important to remember that The First Doctor and The Original Series existed in a television landscape before cable had arrived in America, or the syndication market had fully matured, so Americans effectively had little more choice which channels to watch than people in Britain did. Of course, the development of niche channels helped Star Trek survive the collapse of its core audience to somewhere closer to 4million in the early nineties, whereas Doctor Who was cancelled for comparable numbers in the late eighties.
But even today Doctor Who easily surpasses the big American properties. The overnight viewership for the first 60th Anniversary Special on the BBC was 5.1 million viewers. These *raw* numbers would have seen it come second in the American Network Television ratings charts, with the most watched thing that night being a College Football game on ABC that did (drumroll please) 5.3 million viewers.
When You Think About It, The Enterprise Must Surely Be Bigger On The Inside!?!
You appreciate just how strong Doctor Who’s format is when you compare it to its American near-contemporary, Star Trek. The Enterprise is just as fantastical a machine as the TARDIS, even gaining the ability to effectively engage in time travel with the introduction of The Holodeck in The Next Generation, but is manned by a crew in the hundreds, with thousands on board when dependents are considered. This slows the action down, both because the crew engage in discussions about whether to engage with the situations they stumble upon, the sheer weight of lives at stake imbues those discussions with far higher stakes, and such an elaborate operation requires more tightly tethering our explorers to a broader geopolitical situation.
The Doctor is free to have his adventures, but the Captain of the Enterprise must think about their managerial duties, personal responsibilities, and loyalty to the wider Federation. And of course, the Enterprise’s captain is a human that will age, forcing either new characters to be placed in the captain’s chair, or for old characters to be recast. And Star Trek has always struggled to explain why its highly experience military-cum-scientist crew need to constantly explain to each other what to them would highly obvious aspects of their world and work.
But above all else, Star Trek is a show that at its best is defined by its distance to contemporary society. Its creator, Gene Roddenberry, envisaged this story of humans exploring space in the far future as an inspiring example of how far human beings had evolved past the concerns and complaints of contemporary society. Such humanism ironically makes the show incredibly alien, as for every sci-fi fan that finds such worldbuilding inspiring, there’s genre sceptics who find it cold or confusing.
Doctor Who is the complete opposite of this ethos. Rather than brood on how far humanity has to travel to impress the aliens it meets in the future, it has the alien travel back in time to marvel at how wonderful we are, despite all our imperfections. Doctor Who is unique in long-running sci-fi shows in that it is set in contemporary Britain, always anchored to whoever The Doctor chooses to travel with them in The Tardis, despite the freedom to go anywhere in space and time. One hopes that as it enters its new era on Disney+ it doesn’t lose sight of that enduring strength.