Disney, Doctor Who and Britishness
Disney, Doctor Who and Britishness
As it moves over to Disney+, Graham Williamson charts 60 years of the totemic BBC TV show and the evolution of its connection with Britain's national identity.
On the sixtieth anniversary of Doctor Who, the TARDIS will land in one of the few places in the universe it has yet to materialise: Disney+.
British viewers will notice little difference. After acquiring all (well, nearly all – see below) of the "Whoniverse" for BBC iPlayer, the new episodes will continue to be available there. International audiences, though, will find it sharing a platform with The Simpsons and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. What does this mean for a show so often described as quintessentially British?
For Russell T Davies, the show's returning head writer and producer, it's strictly business. "It is absolutely the same show", he affirmed in January this year, adding "you haven’t watched a drama on British television in 20 years that hasn’t had American notes on it. Everything is a co-production."
Some co-productions are more urgent than others. In 2022, The Observer asked a panel of writers, broadcasters and actors what could be done to ensure the BBC saw its second centenary. Davies's response was memorably blunt: "Nothing. This is the end". Viewed in this light, Doctor Who's move to Disney+ is an escape hatch, a way of exercising some control over who buys one of the BBC’s totemic shows before some government fire sale awards it to Capita. Yet even as a Disney co-production, the show's fate is still determined by the perception of its Britishness.
After the Rwandan-born Scottish actor Ncuti Gatwa was announced as the Fifteenth Doctor, one viewer described it as "an OUTRAGE... progressively MORE corrupted BBC filth". Business as usual in online science fiction discourse, then, except that viewer was Stef Coburn, whose father Anthony Coburn wrote the first-ever Doctor Who story.
Last month, he announced he had refused permission for his father's work to be presented on iPlayer, threatening to sell the rights to "an ENEMY of the BBC, possessing ALL the resources required to act against them". He didn't say who that was, but Coburn has previously declared that should "anything untoward happen to me", the rights will go to the Russian Federation.
Coburn's vision of science fiction franchises being deployed as weapons of war is preposterous, but it does reaffirm that Doctor Who is linked in some way to British national identity. But why? Among similarly recognisable British adventure heroes, the Doctor stands alone in a lack of ties to the country that created them. James Bond is an agent of Empire, Sherlock Holmes has family connections to the government. Jon Pertwee's Doctor worked briefly for a UK-based branch of a UN group when he was stranded on Earth and he hated every second of it:
"If I could leave, I would, if only to get away from people like you and your petty obsessions! England for the English? Good heavens, man!"
Theresa May famously said that a citizen of the world is a citizen of nowhere, but the Doctor is - in the words of William Hartnell's First Doctor - "a citizen of the universe, and a gentleman to boot". Yet it is true that the Doctor has always been played by a British actor, and their characterisations have often reflected British national traits and stereotypes: eccentricity, dandyism, the garden-shed inventor, the colonial explorer.
To this, we might add the upper-class drop-out. Patrick Troughton's final story, ‘The War Games’, revealed that the Doctor fled his home planet of Gallifrey in disgust at their refusal to help less privileged planets. The Tom Baker serial ‘The Deadly Assassin’ depicted Gallifrey's ruling Time Lord caste as a cross between Oxbridge and the House of Lords. It was heavily implied the Doctor was being lined up for a very comfortable life had he not rejected his birthright: a space-time Tony Benn.
The Doctor's morality, then, is interventionist, a philosophy which has not always led to peace and harmony when deployed by the British state. The first episode of the revived Doctor Who in 2005 saw Christopher Eccleston's Ninth Doctor meet an entity whose planet was destroyed in the Great Time War. It's a detail which sits uneasily with Doctor Who's usual plot logic, where any alien found on Earth is a monster to be vanquished. It wasn't until Peter Capaldi's second season, broadcast against the backdrop of the 2015 European refugee crisis, when episodes like ‘The Zygon Inversion’ and ‘Face the Raven’ seriously questioned the show's customary assumption that an outsider must always be an invader.
Which leads to the matter of how the show handles race. Not in the human sense – the casting of Gatwa, plus Freema Agyeman, Pearl Mackie, Tosin Cole and Mandip Gill as companions before him means the 21st century show performs decently on that front. But Doctor Who has in the past been liable to depict whole races of aliens as irredeemably evil, in a way that shines an unflattering spotlight on its inspirations.
Most British science fiction and fantasy can trace its roots back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Doctor Who – whose TARDIS is essentially a cross between H.G. Wells's time machine and C.S. Lewis's wardrobe – is no exception. It was a time of Empire, a time when there was much talk of the "savage races" and the "criminal classes", and the British fantastical style internalised these prejudices. Even the socialist Wells depicted the Morlocks and the Eloi as having essentially inbred morality, a division repeated when Doctor Who's second serial introduced the Daleks alongside their beautiful, placid nemeses, the Thals.
Throughout Doctor Who's history, we see races who are predestined to be bad, whether because of their programming (the Cybermen), their selective breeding (the Sontarans) or a malevolent hive mind (the Autons). They are undifferentiated hordes, characterised only by sadism and lack of individuality, much as the British Empire saw its conquered peoples.
There are exceptions. Malcolm Hulke, one of the few card-carrying Communists to write for British children's television, created the Silurians as a race who could exhibit a range of moral positions. The revived series, meanwhile, has shown us Sontarans whose belligerence is toned down to become a comic foible, as well as Daleks who question their mission of extermination. It has also introduced new races like the Ood, an inversion of the Autons whose hive-mind is completely benevolent. The Ood only become aggressive once they're separated from that shared brain, often by humans looking to sell them as slaves.
The presence of a slave-trading, planet-colonising Human Empire in Doctor Who's version of the future reminds you that the show began at a time when Britain's Empire was a live political issue. The revived series has been kinder to the Human Empire than the original run, with the Ninth Doctor even describing it as "great and bountiful". It's one of those details, like the occasional jokes about "hoodies" and "chavs", which dates the show's 2000s incarnation to a time when a lot of otherwise clever people thought issues of class, nationalism and imperialism were things of the past, fodder for ironic humour. But the original series depicts the Human Empire as something close to a recurring villain in stories with telling titles like ‘Colony in Space’.
It's unlikely that Disney bosses will lose sleep over the show's stance on British imperialism. Yet the ultimate irony of Doctor Who's national identity is this: it took Americans to get us to understand how British this show is.
Back when William Hartnell was the Doctor, the show didn't appear especially British at all. That was an era when the show's future staple plot of aliens attacking present-day Britain occurs precisely once. Hartnell’s TARDIS landed in China, Mexico, France (twice), Greece, Italy, America, Antarctica and several medieval locations in what is now Israel.
There are two reasons for this. The first, and most prosaic, is that in the 1960s television was considered more akin to theatre than cinema. Jodie Whittaker's Doctor visited a similar array of other nations with the help of extensive overseas location shoots, but back in 1964, audiences were happy to suspend their disbelief when Doctor Who depicted the Aztec empire as a series of sets with painted backdrops (and, more problematically, white actors playing indigenous Mexicans).
The other reason cuts to the heart of what Doctor Who is, and what makes it different to other shows. Put simply, Doctor Who was created by outsiders. Whatever Stef Coburn thinks of this, his father's script was brought to the screen by a Canadian head of drama (Sydney Newman), a Jewish female producer (Verity Lambert) and a gay British-Indian director (Waris Hussein).
It is not too fanciful to credit the show's essential cosmopolitanism, its belief that any place or planet can be a valid setting for drama, to this remarkably diverse set of creators. And that is ultimately the goodness at the show's heart: when it slips up, when it's culturally insensitive or takes the easy route of depicting a whole race of aliens as genetically wicked, it's because it has failed to live up to the extraordinarily progressive ideals at its core. Most shows don’t have a guiding light that strong.
Is it any wonder that 1960s Britain did not see this show as particularly British? This only changed when the early Jon Pertwee episodes were sold to America. British audiences had accepted Pertwee's dandyish, fatherly, gadget-loving action hero as a new actor's spin on a familiar part, but American audiences needed some context to help them understand this peculiar figure.
The context was Britain. Pertwee's Doctor was promoted as being another quirky British hero to file alongside Adam Adamant and Steed and Peel. It didn't take off instantly, but by the time Tom Baker left the role the show had developed a loyal American fanbase. During the 1980s, the show's producer John Nathan-Turner actively courted this US audience with a touring exhibition that ran from 1986 to 1987.
Yet every time Doctor Who tried to cater more to its American fans – the 1996 TV movie, for instance, in which Paul McGann's Doctor engaged in a motorcycle chase across San Francisco with his Agent Scully-alike companion – the less they appreciated it. It's easy to understand why. If an American chooses to watch Doctor Who over any of their own country's science fiction shows, it must be because the show offers something fresh, something exotic, a different attitude.
Something British, in short. It's no coincidence that the revived series didn't take off in the US until Matt Smith arrived, playing the Doctor as a scatterbrained tweedy don, Professor Branestawm with a dashing dash of early Hugh Grant. It's a quintessentially English characterisation.
Yet Smith took the show’s reins at a time when that traditional Englishness was looking less and less benevolent. By the end of his first season, David Cameron and his Old Etonian friends had taken office. Smith's posh, floppy-haired Doctor was succeeded by Peter Capaldi, a Glaswegian former punk whose most famous previous role was as the Mephistophelean government spin doctor Malcolm Tucker in Armando Iannucci's abrasive The Thick of It.
To look for content about Britain on TikTok, Twitch, or any other site favoured by the young audience Doctor Who must attract, is to confront how badly Britain's soft power has collapsed in the Brexit age. Back in the 1970s, Jon Pertwee's Doctor could be promoted as "very British" safe in the knowledge that the audience would associate that identity with eccentricity, innovation and intelligent humour. Today, young people are more likely to see the "Bri'ish" as beset by post-imperial self-delusion, mindless nationalism and a bizarre media-class paranoia about trans people.
Doctor Who's essential values – that cleverness will always beat violence, tyrants will always fall, that "hate is always foolish and love is always wise" – have never been more relevant. The question is whether a show so wrapped up in British national identity can still embody those values for a global audience. Once the sixtieth anniversary specials have finished celebrating the show's – and by extension the nation's – past, that will be the hardest mission for Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor.
‘The Star Beast’, the first of three Dr Who 60th Anniversary specials will air on BBC One and iPlayer from 6.30pm on Saturday 25th November.