With so many key moments to celebrate in fifty years of Doctor Who it would be churlish to focus
on a personal sadness, wouldn’t it? Yet here I am at the anniversary party
sitting in the corner by myself. I was seven-years-old the day William Hartnell
recorded his last appearance as the Doctor at 7 o’clock p.m. on Saturday 8th
October, 1966. True, he returned briefly in 1972 to give a disembodied performance
as the ‘First Doctor’ in The Three
Doctors, but his final outing as ‘the Doctor’ was in The Tenth Planet, on 29th October, in a story that marks
the debut appearance of the Cybermen. That their paths cross over at this point
should have proven serendipitous. For here was my Doctor on his last legs, at
the very moment the master transhumanists come scouting for spare body parts. You will
become like us, they promise the Doctor. It’s a prediction with a twist, as
it turns out, since each will indeed regenerate but into something distinctly other
than their current form. And this means a new Doctor ... for there is no
disguising that this is the day my
Doctor dies.  To bring
him back I must also revisit that past. My approach – to give this essay some semblance
of perhaps undeserved academic legitimacy – is to interfere, the very thing the
Doctor dare not do, by staging a negotiation
of his ‘regeneration’ taking an oppositional
stance to the authoritative, grand narrative. Those italicised buzz words form
the basis of Stuart Hall’s early model of reception theory, which focuses on
how meaning is encoded by producers and then decoded by the audience. For Hall,
'distortions' or 'misunderstandings' are the result of 'the lack of equivalence between the two sides in the
communicative exchange' [i]
which may help clarify two things intrinsic to this paper: it's written as a timey-wimey conceit, as if emotionally contemporaneous
to the event, from the perspective of that grief-stricken seven-year-old;
secondly, it’s on a collision course with the future revisionist, one whose
memories may be exposed by the future discourses that inform them. As the
Doctor says to River Song in Forest of
the Dead (2008), 'time can be rewritten'. And as she replies, per the
Hartnell-Doctor in The Aztecs (1964),
'not one line'. Reception
theory gives me permission to change the past since it attacks the assumption
of the passive spectator, installing his imaginative intervention, the degree
of agency that enables the seaming of the viewed into the viewer’s life-experience
context. This is an approach that challenges the media ideology tradition by focusing on what viewers do with media consumption, the ‘uses’
and ‘gratifications’ of social and psychological needs[ii].
Television thereby relates to issues of personal identity and values. It can be
used to help negotiate social identity, or escape from it. There is already
clear precedent for recognising the active agency of Doctor Who fans. Hayward and
Fitzgerald identified more than 1,400 online short-form videos in mid-2011 that
remixed, mashed-up or even composed new musical accompaniments to the programme
(Hayward and
Fitzgerald, 2013: 145). [iii] And
during the show’s hiatus, after it had made the error of playing to the gallery
– and hence a very narrow fan-orientated view of the audience – it was fans who
came to the rescue, writing new texts such as the New Adventures novels, and playing what O’Mahony describes as a gatekeeper
role[iv]
(Hills 2010: 57). Indeed, many of these fans moved up
a level to that of author/producer, gaining careers on the rebooted
programme, thus further obliterating the simple producer-consumer binary. The audience is also a challenge to the integrity of the
fourth wall, the boundary that seals in the diegetic world. The camera tracking
through the closed gates of Foreman’s Yard, is the most obvious example of how
the experiential ignores the coherent and detached hermeneutic code, and offers
the mediated text up as a phenomenological encounter to be accessed ‘through
visual, tactile, olfactory and aural interactions, interactions which meet this
mediation, as contingencies of subjective experience'[v].
Doctor Who is something to be
consumed sensorially; not merely watched but (at the very least) heard as well
as perhaps touched, tasted and embodied.  Given the above, perhaps I have established the right for
the small child in me to speak. But a word of caution. Set against this
experiential agency is the admission that Ill be using my own time machine,
which is not only to rely on memory with all its foibles, 'distortions' and
'misunderstandings', but also to speak hesitantly against the impressive volume
of the anniversary party now in full swing. And partly, I admit, this
hesitation is the adult mediator taking the young child aside and reflecting,
perfectly reasonably, that Hartnell may well have saved Doctor Who by leaving when he did. Had he stayed, the part may indeed
have remained his until the show was cancelled in – what?? – another year … another two? Not that my grief-stricken
younger self wants to hear any of this. William Hartnell came to
be the Doctor partly through the decisions of a committee set up to create a
show to fill the slot between the football results and Jukebox Jury – the main protagonist was to be an older man with a
mysterious past and scientific bent – and partly through producer Verity Lambert’s
intuition that he was just perfect for the part. She saw in his recent roles a
duality that excited her, humour and petulance, although Hartnell had struggled
with being typecast as the acerbic sergeant-major figure. This flexibility
became a problem almost immediately when BBC Head of Drama, Sydney Newman,
pulled the ‘pilot’[vii] describing Hartnell’s
character as mean and unsympathetic. The reshoot considerably mellowed him and
for the next three years different producers, directors and writers journeyed
back and forth, almost as many times as the TARDIS, in their construction of
the Doctor. It is not too much of a stretch to say that Hartnell’s Doctor
embodied the duality of the two strikingly different opening episodes darkening
in one story and becoming childishly silly the next. Such was the production matrix[viii] of
Doctor Who: writers coming and going,
with rather a loose authorial control being exercised at the top, certainly
nothing like the all-seeing all-knowing showrunner figures of Russell T Davies
and Steven Moffat. Hartnell’s Doctor is all
the more enigmatic and rounded for this openness of authorship, a sharp
contrast to those who follow. Christopher Eccleston plays a troubled Doctor,
Tom Baker laughs his enemies into destruction[ix]
(until he meets his real nemesis in the figure of producer John Nathan-Turner).
Each inhabits their character in relation to the Doctor’s past. Thus Matt
Smith’s Doctor is both quirky and frenetic. But Hartnell’s Doctor doesn’t have
a single defining characteristic and there is no past to build on. In the same
way that he is constructed as a mysterious absence in the fifteen-or-so minutes
leading up to his entrance in An
Unearthly Child – with characters speaking in proxy for him; props, sets
and darkness describing the empty space he is yet to inhabit, and even
metaphysical allusions being drawn (the dark and mysterious fog) – so the
studio matrix constructs him as a void, each writer projecting his ideas onto the
character until these projections become superimposed atop each other, contradictory
and dissembling, pointing only back to the absence, if to anything. And that is
what worked. That is what stopped his Doctor immediately becoming the heroic
figure we recognise as today’s Doctor. It is also what kept the Doctor’s
identity reflective of imaginative studio and viewer authorship. | Dene October: The Day my Doctor Died: a Child’s Experience
of the First Regeneration  Regeneration. It only really makes sense in the rear view mirror. As you travel into Snowcap Base, there are no signposts announcing this way to regeneration [i] Hall, Stuart “Encoding/Decoding,” Critical Visions In Film Theory. Ed. Timothy Corrigan, P. White, M. Mazaj. Boston: Bedford St. Martins 2011: 54 [ii] Elihu Katz, Jay G. Blumler, and Michael Gurevitch. The Uses of Mass Communication, Sage Publications, Beverly Hills, (1974). Mazaj. Boston: Bedford St. Martins 2011. [iii] Philip Hayward and Jon Fitzgerald in Music in Science Fiction Television: Tuned to the Future, K.J. Donnelly [Ed] Routledge 2013: 145
[iv] Afterword: Scholar-Fandom’s Different Incarnations, Matt Hills, in Impossible Worlds, Impossible Things: Cultural Perspectives on Doctor Who, Torchwood and The Sarah lane Adventures Ross P. Garner [Ed] 2010 Cambridge Scholars Publishing: 57
[v] October, Dene. Adventures In English Time and Space: Sound as Experience in An Unearthly Child. Mad Dogs and Englishness conference, London. 2013
[vi] Up until The Savages (1966) each episode was given a title. The Savages was the first instance of the title representing the story, which was then subdivided into parts (part 1, part 2 etc) [vii] The ‘pilot’ recorded a month earlier than the version that actually aired [viii] Dene October, Doctor who? What's he talking about?: Performativity and the First Doctor, pending publication Scarecrow Press 2014 [ix] Wood, Tat and Miles, Lawrence. About Time: The Unauthorized Guide to Doctor Who - Seasons 1 to 3, Mad Norwegian Press 2006: 15 |
