Doctor Who, page 8 of 8

I didn’t read any horror fiction till I was about 16 or 17. The reason for this was simple. I’d had enough of nightmares.

In a sense, we’re all consumers of horror fiction, if only of the nocturnal, self-invented kind. And in an odd reversal of BBFC guidelines, we usually get the strongest dose in our youngest years. Never mind the sight of blood, violence, torture or mutilation, nothing compares to the experience of being alone in the dark with the weird creations of your own head, all perfectly tailored to terrorise you and only you. That’s 18-certificate stuff, but nature doles it out at 18 months, not 18 years. I still remember quite vividly nightmares I had when I was four, five or six, even though I now have difficulty remembering what it was I was dreaming when I woke up this morning.

When I was about five, we lived in part of a large house (now demolished, and turned, Nazareth Hill-style, into flats). The bedroom I shared with Garen at that time would have once been the servants’ quarters. It was on the first floor, but had its own staircase, with a rope bannister (which you could burn your hand on if you ran down too fast), and was isolated from all the other rooms on the first floor. I had repeated nightmares about that staircase, about being dragged up it, or down it, (whichever way the dream set up as being away from my mother and brother), by a host of ghouls, ghosts and goblins. Meanwhile, the bedroom itself had a cupboard which never closed, and from whose dark night-time interior I was sure a vampire was waiting to emerge. Each morning, with the dawn, a face appeared in the pattern of the curtain, which I always told myself was caused by a tree pressing close to the window outside, something I later realised was impossible for the tree that was actually there, because it was too far away. We only lived a short while in that house, but I came away from it with a host of remembered nightmares, and a number of fears, including such venerable classics as fear of the dark, but also some new, rather specific ones, such as fear of being upstairs on my own.

All excellent reasons, then, for not scaring myself silly reading horror fiction. I was, even without the nightmares, quite capable of scaring myself silly on my own. I remember, having once caught a glimpse of a trailer for a TV adaptation of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, with its Nosferatu-like vampire, using that face to scare myself whenever I was in the house alone. For instance, I’d need to go to the bathroom, but as I was on my way there, I’d suddenly think: what if I opened the bathroom door and saw that vampire face on the other side? As I approached the bathroom, it started to seem all too possible. More than once I decided to wait till someone else came home before I went to the loo!

The odd thing was that, at the same time, I was lapping up Doctor Who, which was going through its most horror-inspired phase, with the likes of The Brain of Morbius, The Pyramids of Mars, and The Horror of Fang Rock. (All favourites still.)

I didn’t read any horror fiction until the latter part of my teens, when I started lapping it up. But that’s for another post. One thing about those early nightmares which has always struck me as odd, though: the monsters which infested them were all so cartoony. Ghosts that looked like white blobs of sheeting with black O’s for eyes; tiny little fellows more like garden gnomes than evil goblins; and muppets. Yes, muppets. I distinctly remember a dream in which I was terrified by muppets.

It went like this. We’d been on a school trip that day, to a ruined castle (which turned out to be nothing but a few fragments of walls). Somehow, in the dream, I found myself left behind, still at the site of the castle, with night coming on. As it got dark, I became aware of a light coming from a door in the ground. Thinking it was better to find some light than stay outside in the ruins all night, I opened the door and went down some steps into an underground chamber. It was a banquet hall, with a long table laden with food. Sitting at the table were muppets. Not Kermit and Miss Piggy, but the big, shaggy ones you always knew weren’t proper puppets but men in suits. As soon as I saw them, they all stopped eating and turned to look at me. They had a very hungry look.

And then, as they say, I woke up.

I don’t want to, but I have to admit it: I hate the new series of Doctor Who. I tried not to, because that’s exactly what a betrayed fanboy would feel, and though I was a real fan of the series, I don’t like thinking of myself as a fanboy.

But I do have reasons — one all-pervading reason, in fact. There’s a quality the show has that it didn’t have before, a quality not just evident in the content and style, but in the very way it’s marketed. That quality is smugness. The new series of Doctor Who is smug.

The show’s acting (from the lead actors, anyway) is smug. It’s probably very good acting, but it doesn’t serve the drama. Rather, it seems to be trying to prove what good acting it is. The two lead actors seem so pleased with the way they can add little interpretative frills to each line, the way they can spin the dialogue to make it sound throwaway and casual and humorous (or, too often for my liking, self-righteous, which is the dominant tone of the likes of Eastenders), but the result, for me, is most definitely not a sustained narrative trying to create an overall effect (horror, or wonder, or the thrill of adventure), but merely a series of affective soundbites — emotibites, you could call them — no doubt intended to keep a jaded, emotionally sluggish audience engaged.

The show is smug in relation to its audience in other ways. It tells its audience what to feel, moment by moment. For instance, in an episode from the first series where Rose is taken out onto the top of Captain Jack’s spacecraft hovering above a blitzed-out London, she says something like: “I’m standing on a spaceship hovering above London!” The subtext of this statement of the obvious is: “Look, you stupid audience, this is a wonder moment — feel the wonder, feel it!” Not only is this treating the audience like a bunch of idiots who can’t feel anything unless it’s spelled out for them, it’s doing an injury to the deeper psychological function of the show’s drama. The great thing about any sort of drama is that it allows a viewer to interpret it in a way that’s personal to them. It’s only by doing this, by allowing the viewer to impose their own emotional concerns, that it’ll be able to have its effect — cathartic, uplifting, whatever. The difference between that and what the new series of Doctor Who is doing is the same as the difference between a laugh generated by a funny joke and a laugh that comes from someone holding up a card that says LAUGH. If you constrict a viewer’s emotional responses by telling them what to feel, you cut them off from their genuine emotional concerns and do them no benefit at all. (And I thought the above example of Rose’s spelling-out-the-wonder was bad till David Tennant came along and over-egged the wonder at almost every opportunity. He’s always saying something like, “Aren’t humans brilliant?” like that kid from The Fast Show. Who was brilliant.)

The show also has what I call the smugness of the present. This is a special sort of smugness you feel if you think the age you’re living in is so much better than every other age simply because it’s the age you live in. It’s the smugness of people who think history is over now we’ve got everything right. It’s the smugness that leads to remakes of classic movies, a smugness that says: “Of course we’ll make Psycho better this time round, because we’ll be doing it with modern technology,” or, “Of course we’ll make Dracula better this time round, we’ll be doing it with a modern sensibility,” or whatever. But here’s an example from the show. It’s the episode from the first season that had Charles Dickens in. Rose meets a Victorian-age serving maid. Almost straightaway, Rose asks something like, “Where did you go to school?” A pretty unlikely question to ask someone you’ve just met, unless you feel they might have gone to a school known to you. (Which in this is quite unlikely, as Rose is talking to a woman born a century before her, and half a country away.) The only reason she asks the question, then, is so viewers in the 21st century can feel self-satisfied at how much more enlightened they are when the serving maid answers, “I didn’t go to no school.” Oh how misguided those Victorians were! Oh how much more enlightened we are in our wonderful age of school and… school and… Oh, all those other wonderful things we have in our wonderful age! We treat our poor so much better! (We still have poor, though, so let the smugness end there.) The thing that’s wrong with this is that the whole point of science fiction taking us to other worlds is not to make us feel how much we, in our current age, have got it right, but how much we’ve got it wrong, how much further we’ve still got to go.

Another smugness that gets to me is how the show is being marketed. The Christopher Eccleston season of Doctor Who was released on DVD as “Season One”. Why? Because this new series of Doctor Who is obviously so much better than those others, it requires a whole new chronology. Those last thirty years of the show, they were B.C. This new series is A.D. We’re out of the dark ages and into the light! The messiah has come!

If only the new series was worth being smug about. It gets so much wrong. The format is too short to build up both an entirely new fantasy world and a drama set inside it, so as a result we get what I call tokenised fantasy, where you end up in situations like the end of that recent two-parter with the Beast living on a planet near a black hole, where the Doctor had to smash some vases or whatever in order to defeat it. Smash vases? It’s meaningless. It was simply a way of resolving the drama by inserting a “this story ends here” token. Tokenised fantasy. The Doctor and Rose’s are they/aren’t they relationship (modelled on a far more believable sexual tension between Mulder and Scully in The X-Files) just doesn’t work because we know it won’t ever happen, so it comes across as audience manipulation on one level and confusion as to what the characters’ real feelings are on another. The show’s style is comedic. This isn’t to say the old show didn’t have its comic moments, but when they worked it was because it was the characters who were being funny, while the world they were in remained serious, meaning the darkness they were facing within that world remained potent. (I of course exclude the Sylvester McCoy, or “pantomime”, era from this statement.) The new series can’t take itself seriously, almost like it’s embarrassed to be dealing with the vivid emanations of its writers’ imaginations. You can joke about fantasy, but if you don’t at the same time allow yourself to value what the fantasy’s about, to take the underlying drama seriously, you’ll gain nothing from it. It’s like all those awful stories that end with it “just being a dream”. If it’s “just” a dream, you don’t have to take it seriously, and all that darkness within you, well, you don’t have to take that seriously, either, you don’t have to face it, you can just let it boil away and devour you from the inside, nice and slowly. The new series of Doctor Who wants to come across as non-threatening; as a result it comes across as fluff.

I know the old series of Doctor Who wasn’t perfect. It’s almost a rule that even the best stories were flawed by at least one really awful moment (the giant clams in Genesis of the Daleks, the fluffy rat in The Talons of Weng Chiang), but this was because of their tight budget. Knowing they weren’t able to produce something to rival Hollywood’s Most Expensive, they were forced to make sure they got the tone right. They quite literally couldn’t afford to be smug.

I could go on and on, but I’m sure I’ve embarrassed myself enough for the moment, betrayed fanboy that I am. I’ll go away now and mumble to myself in the corner.

But — alright one more thing — the music. The music. The old Doctor Who theme tune was an invitation to another world. It was weird, frightening, mysterious. It was numinous. The new music is an invitation to curl up with a cushion. It’s multi-layered, beautifully produced, ever so correct. It’s technologically smug. And sterile.

Alright, I really will shut up now.