I’m interested in discussing the propensity of many Doctor Who fans to see the glass as being half empty, or not even there in the first place! I know this is against the culture of TARDIS Guide, which I see as looking for the positive, not being blind to the things that some of us don’t like, but accepting that much of this is a matter of taste, mood and many other factors. I’d like to explore this in a supportive, understanding manner to try and work out what fuels it, and how we can challenge, accept or live with it as part of us.
What’s brought it to mind lately is the current discussion around the possibility that the show might not be recommissioned after the current season. The first I heard of this was when I was listening to a podcast around August last year. The hosts were discussing the “news” that there was no news about a season 3 yet. They went on to mention their own dissatisfaction with Empire of Death and how the lack of news might be due to an underperforming season. This kind of talk has bubbled up now and then since, and, more recently, appeared in the press. I think it’s a shame, because these things can easily become self-fulfilling prophesies, with negative press feeding into a decision not to recommission. We’ve heard that the decision to go beyond season 2 was always going to be taken after it dropped, but it’s hard to know if that’s always been the case or is a nifty bit of retconning for PR purposes. But what’s abundantly true is that we have a new season of Doctor Who that will be starting very soon and, while many of us are excited by it, the excitement is, at best tempered by those voices that tell us that it might well be the last.
However, apart from on a very few occasions, most seasons of Doctor Who were commissioned on a yearly basis, which meant that almost every season of Doctor Who might have been the last one. And yet, it has continued and continued. I remember in 2005 before the new series was launched there were fans talking to me abiout the design of the TARDIS and the logo and so on, and who were convinced that the BBC had brought it back with the express purpose of burying the show for good. With twenty years’ worth of hind sight, I think they must have lost the spade.
I used to look through discussions on rec.arts.drwho during the first two years of the resurrected show (I’ve no idea why; it was a terrible and toxic place, especially in those years). There was a regular cry of “It’s the McCoy years all over again”, which was used to hint that cancellation was just around the corner. I’m pleased that the McCoy seasons have now been reassessed as a time when the show was at a creative high, now we know that the lack of enthusiasm in the wider BBC for the show during the late eighties was really due to internal politics.
I do think that time has a lot to do with why older fans still fret about cancellation and check ratings obsessively and so on. Before 1985 and the cancellation crisis, (which was quickly converted into a longer pause between seasons and a halving of screen time, due to public pressure), there had been a long season of Doctor Who every year since 1963. It was a television fixture and there not being another season of Doctor Who had been unthinkable. Suddenly the rug was pulled from under Doctor Who fans’ feet and the show was existing under a sword of Damocles. It didn’t help that when the initial run was ended in 1989, it was done so in a rather underhand manner. The public message was that there would be a slightly longer break between this and the next series; the reality was that the show was cancelled and all independent bids to make it were rebuffed.
In every era of Doctor Who there are things that I love, things that I’m indifferent to, and things that I dislike. Occasionally I’m irritated by it and want to tell the showrunner that they’re making Doctor Who wrong! The reality is no such thing, there’s just a bit that I’ve found not to my taste at that particular time. Thanks to the little voice inside that suggests that the show has to be perfect in all respects or the meanies will cancel it again, I’m often a bit more concerned about the current era than ones of years gone by. That’s a shame, because if I go back and rewatch an episode that I thought was weak at the time, with that cancellation crisis goblin no longer gnawing away at my thoughts, it seems like a perfectly cromulent episode of the show. They didn’t make the show wrong; I was just oversensitive to the possibility of losing it. I try hard to watch each new episode as if it’s an old one now, so that the hyper sensitive part of my fan brain stops looking for scenes that are begging for it to be axed.
The truth of the current situation is that, like with most seasons before it, we don’t know if it will be the last or if there will be a pause before more are made or if the show will continue for many years to come. What I do know for sure is that we’ve got a run of eight brand new episodes ahead of us, which is a great thing, and we’ve also got an expanded universe that will almost certainly keep on keeping on.
The whole TV industry was disrupted by a streaming model that was artificially inflated by investors hoping to make a quick buck. It’s now contracting to try to make what’s left profitable. In the mean time it has given viewers expectations of production values that are probably unsustainable across the industry. Mind you, it is an industry that’s very susceptible to group think. Certain ideas are taken as gospel, like TV drama has to look as good as blockbuster movies these days, or you can’t make sci-fi without years’ of rendering computer generated effects. In the nineties it was a given that you couldn’t make science fiction without American money, and you shouldn’t even try. I don’t think that’s true, but I don’t make the rules.
I still think that there’s room for lower budget science fiction and there’s room to be a lot more experimental about how you tell stories. One of the most exciting developments of recent years for me was Doctor Who Redacted. The first series was rough and ready, but so fresh and exciting. I love it when people do things like this with the show. I’m still optimistic that we’ll get more Doctor Who in future and that some of it will be on TV, but if we don’t for a bit, it still looks like we’ve got a great series ahead of us and there will still be some kind of future for the show. I just know it.
Where do your biggest fears for the show come from? Do you worry unnecessarily? Or is the whole universe really doomed? If you think it is, please keep it light. No one like to be told “I told you so” as they roast in a supernova.