Doctor When? Again?

Long ago - so long ago that it seems that in the intervening years entire civilisations, even planetary epochs, have risen and fallen, I was a child who spent his Saturday evenings staring at a small box which showed a grainy moving black-and-white picture. That box was called a television, best beloved, but it bore no more resemblance to a television today than the chimpanzee swinging through the trees bears to the modern politician or banker oozing through the concrete jungle.

One autumn evening, I found myself watching the strange story of a surprisingly intelligent girl (Susan Foreman, played by Carole Ann Ford) living with her grumpy grandfather (William Hartnell) in junkyard. The girl's surname was the same as my own and at the back of my young mind there was disappointment that this connection was not strong enough to pull me out of our living-room and into her world. Never mind; there was something strange and intriguing about Susan and her grandparent, and when her teachers, Ian and Barbara, investigated, I was eager for them to leap into the inevitable adventure.

The first oddity was the policebox in the junkyard. The second oddity was the inside of the policebox was much bigger than the outside. And the last, exciting oddity, at the end of the first episode, was the appearance of the policebox on a strange landscape on what even my young mind took to be a strange planet.

Those first episodes, when the travelers are held captive by a primitive tribe, were intriguing, but they were nothing in comparison to the fifth episode, when the TARDIS (by now everone in Britain knew what a TARDIS was) landed on another planet and Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara entered an apparently deserted metallic, humming city. Something Dreadful was about to happen, and as the minutes passed, I withdrew slowly from the screen and tried to hide my eyes from whatever was going to happen. But curiosity is stronger than fear and when at the end of the episode we glimpsed a kitchen plunger pointing at a terrified Barbara and as the swelling weird electronic theme tune drowned out her screams, my heart leapt in my scrawny chest. Along with half the British population (at least those under 30), I was hooked.

How could I not be a fan of Doctor Who? It was part of my childhood and even lingered into my early student days. I might not watch every episode, but I knew who acted each doctor and the idiosyncracy of each incarnation. In the end, I got too old and bored with the fact that the Doctor appeared too often on Earth. It was the early episodes that appealed to me - the ones where it seemed that every series took place, if not on a different planet, at least in a different reality - a Space Museum, a Celestial Toymaker's Workshop, and, dim in my memory but still my favourite, an incarnation of M C Escher's world where staircases led in every direction but always back to the same few places.

I did not so much grow out of Doctor Who as away from it, and when the series was resurrected with Christopher Eccleston I was curious enough to watch a few episodes. I enjoyed Eccleston's short-tempered Time Lord, seeing in him an echo of William Hartnell's original Doctor. Then David Tennant came and on the occasions I saw an episode, I approved of the continually enhancing production values and enjoyed some of the stories that were aired. Even more, I approved of Tennant, whom I have seen and heard in many different performances and whom I believe to be one of the finest actors of our time.  But, why, I wondered, did storylines always seem to be set in the UK, in its past, present, future or alternative time-line, or on a world or spaceship that always echoed modern Britain? This wasn't my concept of Science Fiction; it was like the later, boring series of Star Trek, when it degenerated into soap opera with human beings in funny masks. I wanted the doctor and his companion to escape from all that and to find themselves in worlds where they were the only humans, where alien lifeforms were not bipedal, but perhaps composed of liquids or gases or communicating through media they were unaware of, where English was unknown.

Now we have Matt Smith as the Doctor, Karen Gillan (Amy) and Arthur Darvill (Rory), who all do exactly what the script demands of them, and who do it well. But What, I wonder, are they doing? I turned on the television ten minutes into last night's episode and caught an episode where today-Amy and future-Amy were battling some robots and there was a question about whether both could be in the TARDIS at the same time. Onscreen there was plenty of energy and action and panic and reassurance and fear. Offscreen, I was bored. It seemed to me every time I caught an episode the Doctor and Rory and Amy were zipping backwards and forwards in time to save each other and I wondered if the scriptwriters had got caught in a timewarp and could do nothing other than sending their characters shuttling to and fro in time.

I know, the show's not meant for me; it's meant for a generation to whom these ideas are new and challenging. And it is well done, and of course if some from the production team reads this and is looking for a bald villain who can also be an authority figure on the side of good and gives me a call, I'll drop everything and come running. Every British actor wants to appear on Doctor Who - and not in a tin can or behind a rubber mask. But I doubt such a scenario is in my future reality. In the meantime I hope that in their world time will stop reverberating like a twanged rubber band, and TARDIS will once again take the Doctor and his companions to somewhere far beyond our imagination....