Rovers' returns

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Publication: The Times Literary Supplement
Date: 2005-04-29
Author: Roz Kaveney
Page: 20
Language: English

For people who were even mildly devoted to it, the cult science-fiction series Doctor Who was never just a television programme. During the 1960s, which Doctor you regarded as the best was one of those things that said something about you — like which Beatle you thought of as your special imaginary friend. Other fans would ask the question and then look at you with cold eyes if you gave the wrong answer. Like other mythopoeic objects of pop-culture love — Sherlock Holmes and Buffy the Vampire Slayer both spring to mind — the Doctor was a secular messiah, who saved people but also helped them to save themselves. Like Sherlock and Buffy, only rather more often, he died and was reborn; far more than either of them, he was as alien enigma onto whom both fans, and new actors playing the part, could project whatever they chose.

Then there were his companions. Almost all such figures have sidekicks, to be rescued or occasionally to assist in rescuing, to sit still during expository speeches, to act as voices of conscience or realism. Doctor Who had many such; they were eye-candy for the parents of the children and adolescents at whom the show was aimed, but sometimes more than that Leela, the pragmatic barbarian, for example, or Romana, the ultra-sophisticate.

The fans are especially relevant when considering Doctor Who's return to BBCI, because both the production team and the large starting audience reflect the continued loyalty of viewers who never entirely accepted the show's cancellation as a rational market decision. For those who care, there was a falling-off after the years in which Tom Baker played the Doctor's fourth version (1974-81), but Sylvester McCoy, the Doctor at the time of cancellation, in 1989, was far from the worst of his successors. In fan mythology, cancellation was an arbitrary decision by Michael Grade and so something that the BBC might reverse at any time.

This seemed less likely after a failed co-production, in 1997, with Paul McGann as a somewhat transatlantic version of the Doctor. But the rise to prominence of the scriptwriter Russell T. Davies has changed matters. Early on in his ground-breaking television drama Queer as Folk, Davies declared himself: his anti-hero Vince was an obsessive "Whovian". Now, in an alliance with various other bright, youngish A-list things — including Mark Gattis of The League of Gentlemen — Davies has persuaded the BBC that the show is viable, again.

The first three episodes are at once enjoyable in themselves and a celebration of the show's past — the trip to the far future and the terrifying Victorian ghost story are both plots the show repeated time and again; a repetition known, when viewed favourably, as playing to your strengths rather than as mere obsession. Christopher Eccleston is a hipper, sexier Doctor than we were used to in the past — less a scarily dour grandfather or wonderful mad uncle than a friend's very cool elder brother. But the show's principal strength is Billie Piper as Rose, the new companion. She is clearly a post-Buffy consort, the type who can swing on a rope and knock an animated shop-window mannequin flying. Rose is attractively vulnerable, seeing the wonder of the Earth's end, but also being upset by it, and possessed of a common sense that counterpoints the Doctor's sometimes naive idealism. She is also what is commonly known as a "Mary Sue" — an unironic reflection of the writers' and fans' desire to get in there and help the Doctor out (while managing to stay pretty). At the same time, she is a modern working-class woman, with an affecting back story — a childhood on a London estate as the only daughter of a needy, single mother.

Another product of fannish yearning is the big screen recension of Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a project on which Adams — himself a one-time script editor and writer on Doctor Who — was engaged at the time of his death in 2001. Like the novel, the television show and the computer game, the film version is a recycling of the original radio serial as much as a fresh imagining of the material. The effect on an audience is something like listening to a Bach transcription; there are the "greatest hits" moments one knows well, alongside different bits of passage-work one can't immediately place.

This tendency to reprise affects many of the performances: Alan Rickman's delivery of lines belonging to Marvin the Paranoid Android — "Here I am, brain the size of a planet ..." — is a reading as indebted to Stephen Moore's in the radio show as Judi Dench's "A Handbag?" was to Edith Evans. Some of the new casting is inspired, particularly that of Mos Def as Ford Prefect, "who turns out to be from a small planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse, and not Guildford as he had hitherto claimed". Martin Freeman is attractively tousled as the flint's Candide figure, Arthur Dent, yet convincing during those few moments when Hollywoodization requires him to demonstrate a capacity for irritation or heroism. Dent is not so much Everyman as Every English Man, confronted with a world that was alien to him even before he ended up travelling on spaceships.

Part of what fans look for is comfort — they want the new, but not the too new. So the film was always going to have problems: For the excerpts from the talking book of the title, the television show used animations that tried to be (but were not) computer graphics, and which now look charming in their simplicity; the film tries, with mixed results, for something equally non-realistic. As conceived by the Hensons' Creature Shop, the villainously bureaucratic Vogons, who destroy the Earth to make way for a bypass, have too many warts this time round. And the sphere-on-sphere redesign of Marvin is too cute. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy takes few risks, is a pleasant way to spend time, but will create few new fans of its own.

Rovers' returns

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