As I sit here on the coach from Oxford to London, reclining in a fabulous maxi dress from Monsoon and blogging on my Macbook, I look around and I think to myself, “I am a massive twat.” The deal is, a long time ago in the misty recesses of 2009, I decided to start a blog. I had plans, nay, dreams for this blog. I would mix a light scattering of poetry, music, art, television and film with lessons in every day pragmatism that could be drawn from them. I would make witty and incisive comments on popular culture. People would read my blog and say to each other, “Have you seen the latest post? So true. So true.” I would achieve internet fame and fortune, with legions of loyal followers that spanned from the tech-savvy to the middle-aged who learnt to use the internet just to read my blog. Eventually, I would be discovered by The Guardian, who would immediately offer me a weekly column, recognising the need to appropriate my unique outlook on the world: wry, precise, yet with a certain bittersweet melancholy. I would be like the best parts of Lucy Mangan, Charlie Brooker, Marina Hyde and David Mitchell all in one precocious undergraduate package. In time, my blog would come to represent the zeitgeist, a brilliant microcosm of life at the beginning of the twenty-first century. That was the plan, and it was beautiful.
I wrote one post and then let it gather dust.
So now I begin again, marginally more humble, though not much. I have kept the name (and I swear, whatever my subconscious was doing in yoking together the names of two of the greatest writers in the English language, I though it was just a cool name) and revamped the layout. I have a notebook teeming with ideas (well, six). But I am going to start with something very dear to my heart and the yardstick against which I end up measuring questions of both style and morality: Doctor Who.
...
As a nearly-twenty-one-year-old English student who occasionally manages to dupe the other person in the conversation into thinking she's a functioning adult, I feel the need to put my deep attachment to Doctor Who under the microscope. It was not so long ago, after all, that Stephen Fry was patronising it in a way that you don't really mind about, because he's Stephen Fry. (Slight digression: I just had the thought that if I didn't know who Stephen Fry was and someone asked me to guess based on the name, I'd say he was a very thin clerk in a Dickens novel, possibly with some kind of moustache.) In terms of the social embarrassment of admitting to liking Doctor Who when you are neither a) a child or b) possessing a child (like a parent, not like The Exorcist), I seem to have gone through a sort of curve. It was alright to watch it when it came back in 2005 because it was a cultural event. I have very vivid memoires of being on my Duke of Edinburgh Bronze camping weekend during the airing of the first episode and sneaking off to the common room of the youth hostel we were camping outside to catch the last fifteen minutes. In retrospect, choosing the grounds of a youth hostel as our campsite was a particularly cruel act on the part of the organisers, the presence of actual beds mere metres away from my both damp and cloyingly hot sleeping bag reducing my fifteen-year-old self to a seething mass of misery and rage. Mais, je divague.
In my later teens, I learnt that admitting you watched Doctor Who was less okay, mainly because it was on on a Saturday night and thus if you were staying in to watch the fictional adventures of a couple with a dubious age gap and a series of be-rubber-suited nemeses, you clearly had no life. I do not dispute this. I do, however, remember one occasion on which the episode impressed me so deeply that I had to talk about it to my bus companion, and thus ended up recasting the central tension of the episode as the nature of the relationship between Billie Piper and John Barrowman. It did work, though, because as we approached the school gates the following week, she asked with studied casualness whether “Billie Piper had got off with that American bloke”. A victory of sorts. When I got to university, I assumed it would be more of the same but social acceptability threw me another disorientating curveball and all of a sudden it was Fine If You Like That Kind of Thing, Not My Cup of Tea but Have You Tried Bob, I Think He's Into It. Even more bewildering, there were those who were clearly my social superiors and yet talked all things Whovian like watching a kids' show about a 900-year-old Gallifreyan who fights pepper pots was not, in fact, a case for instant dismissal from the light of day and all human company until end times came, but perfectly normal. No big deal, in fact. Of course the penny eventually dropped with a boom louder than the Large Hadron Collider imploding into a black hole and taking all life as we know with it into the unknown: Doctor Who can be intellectualised. In fact, if university has taught me anything, it's that most things can be intellectualised, and thus legitimised. They were just as unsure as I was of the social implications of Who fanhood, but they'd rumbled something which I had yet to rumble, a trick that has served me well: if you talk about something like it's important, with passion and conviction and words of more than three syllables, they will believe you. They will start to re-evaluate the thing you're talking about. “Here is a well-adjusted, self-actuating, rational and intelligent human being,” they will think, “and she has just put forward the case for Bridget Jones' Diary as a microcosm of the evolving gender politics of the 1990s. I myself have not devoted any significant period of time to thinking about this, so I am just going to accept that she is right and not, in fact, desperately trying to justify spending four hours reading both novels back to back instead of writing an essay on Byron's Thyrza elegies.” The great thing about doing this with Doctor Who, though, is that I believe every word I'm saying.
I honestly do think Doctor Who is important. I mean, objectively, it just is: over the last six years, it has become BBC's flagship show, given the biggest budgets and the best slots. The stars become household names. The marketing and merchandise is ubiquitous. There are few eight year olds who couldn't tell you what a dalek is – in terms of shaping future generations, it has unprecedented sway. And, by and large, the show takes its responsibilities on this count very seriously. At the centre of it is the age old Battle of Good and Evil. Good triumphs, not because it has to but because the characters fighting for the light are brave and loyal and steadfast and clever and determined. It does the thing that all great children's literature (and some great adult's literature) does: it shows you how to be a better person. It makes heroism a viable option. It is almost entirely free from cynicism, always excepting the odd reference to kissograms.
Plus, I can hand on heart swear that some of the most poignant, exciting and brilliant moments I've seen in television come from this show. Christopher Ecclestone’s battle-scarred, northern time lord giving in to his need to save Rose from the time vortex pounding through her head and kissing her with the wonderfully cheesy line, “I think you need a doctor”. Tremendously satisfying. David Tennant telling Martha about Gallifrey and its silver forests and three suns, a beautiful illustration of the power of storytelling. The moment in the Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone two parter (from the most recent series, it had both Weeping Angels and Alex Kingston, for those not au fait with episode titles) where Ian Glenn knows he's going to die and Matt Smith's Doctor says he wishes he'd known him better, to which he answers, “I think, sir, you knew me at my best” is one of my favourite on-screen moments ever. Heart-breaking, brief and beautifully executed.
Actually, I have to say this last series in general has been my favourite. Russell T Davies did great things in his time as showrunner but it did sort of devolve in later seasons into bids to make David Tennant ever more messianic and the plots ever more momentous and grandiose, often at the expense of good writing. Plus, I always did like Stephen Moffat's episodes best. Not that I wasn’t apprehensive about pretty much...everything (new Doctor, new Companion, new TARDIS, new title sequence) but I really shouldn’t have worried. As with most Moffat creations, there's a definite marmite quality to it, but like it or loathe it, I don't think you can deny that the overall quality is miles higher. Sexy, clever, dark and more than a little self-satisfied – just what the Doctor ordered. Although it must be said, fan as I am of Stephen Moffat’s writing, much of my renewed interest lies in Matt Smith’s (weirdly hypnotic) hands. A lot of people talk about 'their Doctor', which, as far as I can tell, is not so much your favourite Doctor, more like the one you'd get up off the operating table in the middle of open heart surgery to hop into the TARDIS with. I guess Matt Smith is my Doctor, then. There is literally nothing I dislike about his performance. It's like with Keats: there is no bad Keats, there is only Keats that is less good. Smith's Doctor has the delicate blend of otherworldliness, weariness, insanity, vulnerability, arrogance and brilliance down pat. And he's so odd. Actually, that's what I like about Matt Smith in general, really. He's really bloody odd. Just weird. In a good way, obviously.
Since I started watching Doctor Who in 2005, I have often looked at it like a relationship. I think everything is wonderful while it's happening, yet I frequently find myself looking back on certain moments and cringing. Plus, I talk about it too much and it forgets my birthday. But the reason I like the new series so much, why it has elevated the show to 'must watch (as soon as available on the Internet)' TV, is because it seems to hinge around that sense of importance in a very quiet, understated way. It is an important story. It's one of the best (and best-loved) of our modern mythologies. And I do love a good mythology. At the age of seven, I could reel off all the major gods in the Greek Pantheon and quite a few of the minor ones too. I love learning about mythologies, becoming familiar with their dynasties and the interconnectedness of their stories. Mythologies try and teach you something about the world you live in. Even when mythologies contain the greatest of gods, the stories are always about humans and human behaviour. Doctor Who has always embraced that message: that humanity is special and worth fighting for. It's about finding the joy in the universe and defending it against the dark. And it happens to be funny and silly and hugely enjoyable at the same time. Bi-winning.
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