The more Dawn Airey and Mark Lawson sneer at the idea of a golden age of British television, the more desperately today's television executives raid the past to stop their ratings from going into freefall. First came University Challenge and the return of Parkinson. Now we have got the return of Doctor Who, Come Dancing, Ask the Family, The Two Ronnies and Quatermass—all retro-television.
There is no doubt which has had the most impact. Over the past weeks you could not escape the Dalek jokes, Ron Grainer's haunting music, the forty-something nostalgia. Part of its secret was the format which gave the writers the freedom to take the doctor and his companion(s) anywhere, any time. Yet it was always very much about one place at one time: 1960s Britain.
The first episode of the revived series, like the last episode in 1989 and the very first episode in 1963, is set in contemporary London. As executive producer and chief scriptwriter, Russell T Davies, said the doctor and his new companion "are deliberately running past Big Ben, they're on Westminster bridge, there are double decker buses, because that's a great big signal at the start saying, 'This is British.'" But what kind of Britain? Trafalgar Square and black cabs or Rose's single mum, glued to daytime television, tower blocks and Cockney accents.
This uncertainty about Britishness was always at the heart of the original Doctor Who. Comparisons with another early-1960s science fiction series are interesting here. Star Trek was a product of the same time, but its high-tech team were, as Bryan Appleyard recently wrote, "sensible, post-Kennedy, liberal American heroes, sane and reliable." Although Doctor Who first went out the day after JFK was assassinated, it had no sense of the new frontier. Like 1960s Britain, caught between Lord Home and Harold Wilson's "white heat" of technology, it was a strange mix of the old and modern. There was the science and technology ("I reversed the polarity of the neutron flow"), but at the same time there was the shabby police box (out of date even then), the long woolly scarves and old gent clothes, the funny references to cricket ("with a talent like mine I might have been a great slow bowler"). The very first time we encounter the doctor, in the 1963 pilot episode, the Tardis is in a junkyard, more Steptoe & Son than Kennedy. Where was Britain going? What kind of place was it? Stuck in the past, or changing fast?
The Doctor himself could not have been more different from Kirk. There was nothing sensible and clean-cut about him. He was quirkier, funnier but also more irascible, like someone from a bygone age. Kirk (and America) was in the here and now. The Doctor, as played by William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton, was not.
Doctor Who was a product of a very particular cultural moment, a kind of Sergeant Pepper bricolage. It inhabited the same very British 1960s world of The Prisoner, The Avengers, Adam Adamant and James Bond—cross-genre series, set in a recognisable England, part country house Gothic, part Carnaby Street camp, fighting for goodness and decency against strange invaders.
There was something else these programmes sensed about Britain, a mix of memories of the recent second world war (ruthless Nazi/Daleks), cold war paranoia (Doctor Who finished the month after the wall came down) and a sense of something unsettling behind that genial British country house façade. Star Trek went out into space and found enemies out there; Doctor Who knew that the Daleks were coming. The Autons who featured in the first new episode had already tried to invade Britain twice before in the early 1970s.
There was something else all these posh white men had in common: they were loners. The Americans prefer teams—Kirk and his crew, Leo and the three sisters from Charmed, Buffy and her schoolmates. Not so for the doctors. "You're on your own, then?" Rose asks the doctor in the first new episode. She could have said the same to Bond, Steed or Number Six. He is not part of an army or organisation, just as Britain was felt to be going it alone: neither part of the EEC nor, any longer, the empire. Doctor Who was the product of a time when Britain was casting around for a new role, a new identity.
If Doctor Who was born of a particular moment, why revive it now? Can it be transplanted, 40 years on, with a here-and-now leather jacket and Manchester accent? Christopher Eccleston is a good actor, but now that he has declined a second series, it would be good if rumours that Bill Nighy was considered for the role turned out to come true. Nighy would be a better choice, older, more eccentric, more mysterious. He is closer to the appeal of the original, that odd mix of wit, the surreal and a kind of lost Englishness, unsure of where it is going or what it is really about.
Perhaps this is the appeal of programmes like Doctor Who for today's television executives. British television, like Britain in the 1960s, is lost in time, without a positive sense of identity. What is BBC1 for? Or ITV? As they haemorrhage viewers, they keep looking back to a lost, golden age when everyone knew what the big networks were there for. Wheeling out the Daleks is just a symptom of a loss of nerve.
