The New Doctor! A Doctor Who Alternate History Story

Part 46 - Requiem for the (New) Doctor

 Editorial by Maxwell Darrow, Christmas, 1992, Tardis Confidential Fanzine

I wanted to like The New Doctor, really I did. I even gave it a chance. Take Monsters of Ness, for all its shortcomings, there was a genuinely interesting bit of absurdity at work there.

Some alien blancmange crashes on Earth in the time of the Dinosaurs, and accidentally wipes them all out trying to phone home. ET ouch! And then, it goes to sleep for seventy million years without ever realizing what it's done. It wakes up, and thinking the world is still ruled by reptiles - dresses up its captured apes as silurians because, in its mind, this will avoid unwanted attention! My god, that's sublime!

But that wonderful sense of absurdity vanishes thereafter, in favour of what I can only describe as a retro-Doctor. Someone who might have been mildly successful slipped in between Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee, or just before Tom Baker, if the show had decided to experiment with dumbing down.

The New Doctor was the wrong kind of time traveller. He was an anachronism. Doing things the way they'd been done in the old days, with the sensibilities and the stories of the old days.

The New Doctor was almost deliberately archaic in just about every way possible. The absence of CGI, the 70's era musical scoring, the cinematography and direction. There was nothing modern to it. It looked and felt like it had been made in 1972, not 1992. Even the stories, particularly the stories, had an old fashioned feel to them. It was as if Margaret Thatcher had never existed, or that deliberate absurdity had never been a thing. You almost expected Heart and Diamond to start go go dancing in the Tardis.

But the world had moved on. The world had changed. The swinging sixties and the mod seventies, the bohemian era had all passed. Now we had Reagan and Thatcherism, an 80's and 90's that were more cynical and knowing. The passions were different. It just wasn't the same place.

John Nathan Turner, starting with Peter Davison, but particularly during Sylvester McCoy's era, had raised the bar. The show was darker, edgier, more thought provoking. It was a show with both a conscience, but a consciousness.

Davison's Doctor was a more complicated character than Patrick Troughon, his adventures were more complex. You couldn't have done a metaphysical story like Kinda, or killed a companion, as in Earthshock. Tom Baker's Doctor changed companions like scarves, Peter Davison's grieved the loss or departure of each one. There was a deeper nuance, the stories took more risks, there was genuinely more at stake and good people died on the way. Colin Baker's Doctor was allowed to be truly dangerous, was allowed to be complex, and this was a shock to the BBC.

And then with Sylvester McCoy, the doctor for the late eighties, for the nineties emerged, a Doctor who fitted his age, his era, perfectly. McCoy's Doctor was all secrets and ambiguity, he was about playing the big game, not a wanderer, but a man with plans, with schemes. He was the most human and also the most mysterious Doctor. Compared to McCoy, Tom Baker's Doctor was a charming cipher.

And the BBC didn't understand any of this, which is why they cancelled the show. The show had gotten better, its stories richer, it tapped into veins of pure science fiction, but also into absurdity, its stories more profound and diverse. The BBC, that bunch of fossils, didn't appreciate what they had.

I suppose that's why they embraced the David Burton Doctor. He was such a throwback to what they knew. A Doctor who didn't challenge anyone, who was perfectly amiable, perfectly superficial. A comic figure winking at the audience, offending no one.

You simply couldn't go from the chess master, the manipulator and the game player, the figure of mystery that Sylvester McCoy's Doctor was, to the amiable lunk that was the Burton Doctor. Even Benny Hill had been cancelled. The David Burton Doctor was obsolete before he they ever shot a millimeter of footage. But they couldn't figure that out. Well, the audience showed them that they were wrong.

The truth is that Doctor Who had evolved, but these blokes hadn't, and they couldn't get that into their heads.

I love William Hartnell, and Patrick Troughton, I love Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker. I will forgive them much, because each of them was a product of their time and they fit it perfectly.

But David Burton didn't fit. David Burton brought us back to the eras of bug eyed monsters, of wobbly sets and wooden acting, of pretty girls that did nothing but scream on cue. Well, we had already had that. To be honest, we'd had it better back in the day when that sort of thing was acceptable. Did we really need a second rate copy of a bygone era?

I don't think so.