Rose
(Series 1, Dr 9 with Rose, 26/3/2005, showrunner; Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, director: Keith Boak)
Rank: 122
‘If you dig deep enough and keep a lively mind the Doctor keeps
cropping up all over the place…There’s a cave painting of a police box, he’s
mentioned in Marco Polos journals, there’s a marriage vow carved on the side of
an Aztec temple, he’s in an old legend of Robin Hood, he’s a musician in
Ancient Rome, blew his top at Pompeii, was seen hanging out with pirates in
Cornwall, fought witches with Shakespeare, commissioned paintings from Leonardo
Da Vinci, started the Great Fire of London, was embroiled in the luddite attack
on the Industrial Revolution, was attacked by a giant wasp while Agatha
Christie looked on, defeated Daleks with Churchill and took down Haemavores in
World War Two, danced on screen with Laurel and Hardy, dated Queen Elizabeth I
and Marilyn Monroe, was at the Montgomery Bus Boycott, got gassy with Dickens and
battled werewolves with Queen Victoria, there’s nothing he hasn’t done…’Ere,
come to think of it, the blonde girl he was in the last two looked just like
you!’
Well here we are at last, with the most important regeneration of Dr Who’s life – the first episode for nine years; sixteen since the show was last made by the BBC and came back ‘home’. Time enough for an entire generation to have grown up without the delights of the greatest show in the galaxy. Had this been any other show old fans would have moved onto something else long ago too, but there’s something about this series that makes you keep coming back, that once you become a fan you’re a fan for life. However much of a rollercoaster ride it might be, however frustrated you might be with a particular era, however much it might go in and out of fashion there’s a Tardis-sized hole in all of us when it’s not on air. The creators of the new-look Dr Who knew that better than anybody: they were almost to a person fans of the original show, who’d had that magic spell cast on them too and wanted youngsters to enjoy what they’d once taken for granted. The question now was whether magic could strike twice. The BBC, after all, stopped believing in our eccentric little series a long time ago. They’d starved it by moving it round the schedules and then suffocated it when ratings began to fall (as any series does after being on the air so long) and BBC head Michael Grade was still talking about how awful it was to the series ‘Room 101’ the year it returned (even though it was to a degree personal: he was very close to Lisa Goddard, who’d both hated her part in ‘Terminus’ and has been married to Colin Baker). The Beeb then farmed England’s most popular scifi series out to anyone wanted to have a go (including, shock horror, Americans!) before abandoning it altogether. So hard had Dr Who been kicked that everyone with influence avoided it like it was a Terrileptil-created space plague.
Everyone except fan extraordinaire and early 2000s golden boy Russell T Davies (in case you’re wondering the ‘T’ was to differentiate him from the quiz host Russell Davies back when he was trying out a career in television – the ‘T’ doesn’t stand for anything, though Russell himself jokes it stands for ‘Russell The Davies. Who’s real first birth name is Steven incidentally, meaning we had two showrunners with that name in a row – Russell is his middle name). He’d had an extraordinarily prolific and successful 1990s, starting it as a children’s writer for ‘Why Don’t You?’ ‘Children’s Ward’ and his own series ‘Dark Season’ and ‘Century Falls’ (as well as being a one-time presenter on ‘Playschool’ before deciding he preferred life behind the cameras rather than in front of it) and had graduated to writing adult fare creating series like ‘Revelations’ ‘Springhill’ ‘The Grand’ ‘Queer As Folk’ ‘Bob and Rose’ and ‘Mine All Mine’. He also found time to write a Dr Who book for the ‘New Adventures’ line in 1996, which was a surprise at the time (Russell was by far the biggest name for the range who hadn’t come directly through fandom). Seeing as most everything he touched turned to gold, in 1998 the BBC head of drama Patrick Spence and deputy head of programmes David Liddiment had a meeting with Russell where they were basically trying to keep him and stop him going elsewhere and basically gave him carte blanche to do anything he wanted. To him it was obvious: to make other people fall in love with the show that had made him work for television in the first place, Dr Who. The reason the show came back at all was not because the BBC believed in it, but because they believed in Russell; all the high-ups fully believed this series would fail, the way they thought it had in 1989 (though through self-sabotage as much as anything else).In words that would haunt them the same way turning down the Beatles haunted Decca Records, they told him no (actually the words were ‘Why would we touch that piece of rubbish?’) Michael Grade’s reputation was stronger than Dr Who’s and even stronger than Russell’s. So the writer went off to make another project instead ‘The Second Coming’, about Jesus coming back to life and talking with a Salford accent (for which Christopher Eccleston was perfect casting). That was an even bigger success and Russell tried again in 1999, only to be told no once more.
Then in 2000 things
shifted: Lorraine Heggessey became the new controller of BBC One and though she
didn’t know Dr Who she didn’t dismiss the idea outright and thought that if
Russell was that determined to make the show then maybe there was something in
it. In 2001 Russell tried again and found to his shock that people were
actually listening to him. He spent twenty minutes giving an off-the-cuff pitch
of how he would bring Dr Who back, which included early ideas for both ‘Rose’
(where she’s a cleaner rather than a shop-worker and with dinosaurs instead of
Autons and the Weakest Link robot quiz in ‘Bad
Wolf’). However he still assumed it wouldn’t happen: after it was explained
to him that, technically, the BBC didn’t actually own the rights to the show
anymore. That seems weird given how closely the two were linked, but the end
days of Who had been a mess, with the BBC assuming that they’d made all the
money they could and handing the rights to the show handed out to BBC
Enterprises (not strictly the same company) in order to allow independent
companies to pitch for the rights to make it for the 30th
anniversary (see ‘Dimensions In Time’
for more on this mess), before the rights had finally gone over to the
Americans in time for the TV Movie and over to an independent company for
2003’s cartoon ‘Scream Of The Shalka’. It
wasn’t as simple as asking for them back – there were contracts to sort out,
money to change hands and it was still quite the gamble given that nobody
except Russell believed that an audience was out there. So Davies contented
himself with the fact that it would never happen and got on with his freelance
writing, his career still taking off into the stratosphere.
Then, in a move of
serendipity to make Jo Grant proud, things began to change. One of Russell’s
jobs was making an episode of the sitcom ‘Linda Green’ in Manchester that was
being written by Russell’s friend Paul Abbott
(starring Christopher Eccleston, again). There Paul introduced him to
Jane Tranter with the now legendary words ‘she’s into Dr Who almost as much as
you are!’ She had recently became controller of drama and she adored Dr Who;
the first thing she’d done when moving into her new office was build up a portfolio
of photos from past BBC shows that inspired her and in pride of place was a
Dalek. She’d started her career at the BBC as an assistant and one of her jobs
had been to lay out the sticky tape on the rehearsal rooms for the McCoy
stories over at Acton, the usual Who haunt in the 20th century. She
loved how warm and kind and funny and welcoming everyone was compared to the
other jobs she worked on (all very much Dr Who values) and thought it a shame
that a generation of children had grown up without the show. They eagerly
discussed the possibility of bringing Dr Who back but even then Russell assumed
it would never happen and she was just being ‘polite’ – it didn’t help than she
was seven months pregnant and about to go on maternity leave, unsure of when she
would be able to make it back to her job. So Russell went back to work,
creating ‘Casanova’ (with David Tennant) and his reputation grew ever higher.
So he was surprised when Jane returned to her job and called him in for a
meeting in February 2002 to discuss Dr Who – the rights were still such an
issue, though, that the talks were abandoned and Russell gave up altogether,
allegedly giving up picking up the phone when they rang.
Then in mid-2003 in
walks Julie Gardner, the new head of drama at BBC Wales. She’d never actually
seen Dr Who but she liked the idea of her department reviving a much loved show
and worked with Jane to make it happen, excited at the thought a writer of
Russell’s calibre might want to work on it. Together the two solved the rights
crisis, with a ‘deus et machina’ solution Davies himself would have been proud
of: they simply pointed out that nothing had been made for a while and there
were no plans for anyone else to make Dr Who so would they like to hand the
rights back please? Besides, if the show was a success they might be able to
market it to other countries to BBC Enterprises anyway. Julie finally got hold
of Russell and in a move that changed the fate of the show forever asked him
what old stories she would watch to get her up to speed. Soon she was knee deep
in Dr Who DVDs Russell recommended to her (the usual suspects: ‘Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ ‘Spearhead In Space’ ‘The Ark In Space’ ‘Genesis Of
The Daleks’ ‘The Talons Of Weng-Chiang’
‘The City Of Death’ ‘The Caves Of Androzani’ and ‘The Curse Of Fenric’). Julie became a committed Whovian from that
point on – and if a young hip trendy knowledgeable TV executive could fall in
love with the ‘old’ stuff, just think what a modern audience could do for the
‘new’ stuff. The trio had a formal meeting (at which Russell handed his new
colleagues toy Daleks, to sit on their desks to remember him by). The only
sticking point was Mal Young, official title ‘continuing head of drama’, who
said the show could only possibly work if it became tougher and had a big name
star known for his harder man roles . Word leaked that the series might be
returning with Russell at the helm in 2004, to which – after fifteen years of
nearlies maybes and not quites - most of fandom went ‘yeah right, we’ll believe
it when we see it’ while most drama
viewers thought Russell had gone quietly mad.
One of the latter was
Christopher Eccleston, who heard the news on the radio and thought his friend
was committing career suicide. He’d had no interest in Dr Who and thought it
was all a bit ‘posh’ and middle class, not relatable to the ‘real’ working
class world he’d grown up in (he’d been on the mega huge shortlist for the TV
Movie but hadn’t been asked for an audition and only found out about it later –
he says he probably wouldn’t have gone for the role in 1996; oh and in case you
were wondering he was born in the middle of ‘Marco Polo’,
slightly younger than the series itself; born in April 1963 Russell was born
ten months earlier and is just slightly older than the programme itself). The
more he heard Russell speak, though, the more Chris began to connect with his
descriptions of the Doctor, as a homeless wanderer who sometimes travelled with
people but was mostly intrinsically alone, forever moving through time.
Intrigued, he wrote an email off to Russell asking what other ideas he had for
the show and half-jokingly adding that if he ever wanted a Northern
harder-edged Doctor that he should be considered. Russell mentioned this at his
next meeting with Mal, who went from being sceptical to being one of the shows
biggest supporters. All Russell needed now was an actual producer for the show
and he knew just the man, nominating Phil Collinson, who had the three plusses
of a long history producing TV ) including ‘Peak Practice’ and lots of soaps),
working with Russell (on ‘Springhill’) and knowing Dr Who backwards. Dr Who now
had five people fully committed to it (six with Eccleston), a neat mixture of
passionate fans and complete newbies so that they’d be able to make sure every
script worked for every level of past Who knowledge. Even Michael Grade, the final sticking point,
saw how enthusiastic everyone else was and okayed it ‘just as long as I don’t
have to watch it’. The newspapers had a field day, incorrectly guessing Bill
Nighy for the Doctor (who was eventually approached but turned it down – see ‘Vincent and The Doctor’ for him changing his
mind) and Billie Piper as the companion, simply because she was in everything
back then. The production team thought that a good idea so approached her agent
but assumed she’d turned the job down flat when she learned it would mean
living nine months away from home in Cardiff.
But as it happened she was enthusiastic: Billie wanted to appear in
something that was more family-orientated than the adult stuff she’d been doing
to get away from her pop career (everyone still thought of her as a teen
singer, something she’d fallen into while doing her actor training – forget the
cheesy hits by the way, check out the later stuff from when her records stopped
selling and she could record what she wanted; ‘Walk Of Life’ is a great, very
Dr Whoy song about change) and though no one knew it yet was on the verge of
splitting with her husband DJ Chris Evans and wanted to throw herself into
something big so she didn’t have to think about stuff. Though other actresses
were seen in case she didn’t show (including Peter Davison’s daughter and
future David Tennant wife Georgia Moffatt) she was always top of the list.
Even so, most people –
especially high up at the BBC –expected Dr Who to fail. The McGann version had
tried and burned, despite having a budget the BBC could only dream of and a
dashing young star in the lead role, why would this one be any better?
Newcomers who’d never heard of the show
would surely just ignore it, while long-term fans would just grumble. Others
were confused and a little worried about Russell’s masterplan, to make a show
that appealed to everyone that a family could watch together – which was simply
not how people watched TV anymore (see most of our 1960s reviews for why Dr Who
always bucked this trend in that respect, as a ‘safe space’ for adults and
children to lay out their views of the future, something largely abandoned when
the show went into colour and starting being more for adults). As a sign of the general lack of faith Dr Who
was given the lower sort of budget common to the Saturday night light
entertainment shows it replaced and nestled against, not a full drama budget
(and needless to say it was Russell who stick his neck out for the traditional
Saturday slot). The show was also given thirteen episodes to make or break;
there wouldn’t be a second shot. It’s worth remembering, when we talk in
reviews across series one about how everything is thrown at these episodes,
that a majority of people working on them never ever expected to be doing
anymore after this (the one exception, reportedly, is Steven Moffat who – being
slightly more on the outside – could view the scripts with less pressure and
instantly knew it would work and openly talked about what he’d write in future
years when the revived show ran and ran, much to everyone’s surprise).
There was more resting on
‘Rose’s shoulders than perhaps any other story in Dr Who history– we all knew
that our show might not survive another revival failure. The early signs for
this series didn’t look good either I confess. A showrunner best known for gay
dramas and that most boring of kiddies TV series Children’s Ward? The lead role
going to a Mancunian with big ears best known for working class plays and
‘heavy’ roles? A blooming ex teenage pop star as the female lead?! I know I
wasn’t the only longterm Dr Who fan dreading the arrival of this story and
crossing my fingers that it wouldn’t be as bad as I feared – I hadn’t dared
hope it would actually be any good. But it was, dear reader, it was oh so very
good. Russell T Davies judged the mood perfectly, executing a script that
gushes with fanboy enthusiasm at being able to play with so many brilliant
inventions, yet is over-brimming with new ideas of his own and giving
everything the execution of a seasoned TV pro. Even the bits that Dr Who had
never done before somehow felt like Dr Who, because it was being made by people
who cared about these sorts of things again. Russell learns from the mistakes
of the TV Movie: he doesn’t give the first half of the script over to a past
Doctor who ‘dies’ and a second half to a new Doctor that’s unstable’; there are
no confusing continuity references (he never even uses the word ‘Auton’
anywhere in the story even though fans all know a plastic mannequin when we see
one); all the Victorian-Edwardian symbolism, such a part of the 1996 special,
has gone to be replaced by obvious signs that we’re in the ‘real world’. Cleverly
the show hasn’t actually changed that much since the BBC last made it: we have
the council estate setting of ‘Survival’
that feels real and powerful, that we’re watching a gritty thriller rather than
airy fairy science fiction, along with the emphasis on seeing things from the
eyes of the companion and the thrill that if all this can happen to a decidedly
ordinary girl on a normal day at work in a normal job then it can happen to
‘us’. Dr Who is exactly the same as it always was – it’s just the Doctor (‘all
planets have a North’, the line that sold me this revival would work) and the way TV works that have changed and
both are bang up to date. The use of so many real locations and especially the
London Eye as an Auton transmitter (then pretty new and deeply odd: who wants
to pay money to look at a polluted London skyline when you can look at the
universe instead? Clearly the work of aliens!) makes it clear this isn’t a show
that pretends the intervening years haven’t happened. It feels like a
contemporary drama too (one of the many problems with the TV Movie was that it
was still paced like a four parter, all in one go): pacy, quick-witted, but
with an emphasis on characters and how they think and feel and react, something
‘classic’ Dr Who had only started touching on from 1987 when Andrew Cartmel
became script editor.
Very cleverly, too, we
get just exposition for newbies to follow but it comes at the ‘right’ places,
at different times through the plot not all at once. Unlike the TV Movie which
began with the Doctor spouting continuity the episode starts with Rose and
introduced ‘us’ to this world along with her. We begin with a shot of planet Earth, exactly
like the one in ‘Spearhead From Space’,
only this one is computer generated, showing off the huge advance in technology
since 1970. And then we don’t follow the Doctor but the companion. Starting the
episode with a quick montage of Rose’s everyday life overlaid with that awful
horrid modern rubbish that people counted as music aback in 2005 was a
masterstroke: it roots us in ‘this’ world before whisking us away. Then the
music fades and we’re left with silence, as if we’ve moved away from the busy
distracting world to the Dr Who one left alone with just Rose and some dummies
which, if you’re an old hand, you know to be scared of and if you’re new is the
perfect jumpscare. We’ve gone from a recognisable life that’s nothing special
and has been the same every day for years, speeded up the way life does through
repetition of a job you know really well
and do without thinking – then time feels like it slows down as they bring the
music down and it’s so quiet you think you can hear her heart beating, then
realise it’s your own. Rose is scared, as if she’s really truly ‘living’ for
the first time, exactly what Dr Who is all about. How could she not want to
feel that again? How could we at home not want to fee that again? It’s a brave beginning, with a full eight
minutes before we get any talking. Then the Doctor comes. And goes, leaving
Rose back, dizzy, in the hubbub of the outside world that now suddenly seems so
intrusive, so ‘wrong’. And then he comes
again when Rose is getting her life back together. Then goes. Then returns. It’s
creative foreplay, giving you just enough to want more.
Each time The Doctor reveals
a little bit more about himself: who he is, that he’s alien, that he has a
sonic screwdriver (for the first time since ‘The
Visitation’!), that he has a police telephone box that can go anywhere in
time and space. By that time we both know and connect with Rose and her tiny
little life where she’s dreaming of more. Of course you go with her to travel
in the Tardis. How can you not? By doing the first episode this way Russell
invites us to come with him: he doesn’t assume we’re along for the ride the way
the McGann monstrosity did. We’re given everything that Russell always loved
about this show, offered to us on a plate, but it’s up to us to accept it, to
see if we agree with Rose or would rather stay home where it’s safe and cosy
with Mickey. This is in invitation to follow, not a demand. But it’s one so
powerfully written that no one could possibly have turned it down. Not even
Michael Grade, who begrudgingly admitted later that it was okay and that if Dr
Who had been made like this in the 1980s he might not have cancelled it (of
course, if he’d given it the staff, the love and the money they had in 2005 and
not put it on against the most popular show on ITV and messed it up by moving
it round the schedules then that would have helped a lot too).
Fans wondered: is this a
reboot? Or the same show? For most of the first two years Russell hedged his
bets (only in Martha’s year and ‘Human
Nature/Family Of Blood’ did we have it confirmed this Doctor carried on
from previous ones; even this story just has the 9th Doctor’s face
in Clive’s discoveries of him from the archive, contradicting the feel of the
rest of the episode that he’s just regenerated – though it would be in keeping
with this less self-centred regeneration that he just hasn’t been bothered to
look before now. Unless he went back to have these adventures in the gap
between Rose saying ‘no’ and ‘yes’ to joining him. Rather sweetly, one of these
is the assassination of JFK, which happened the day before the first ever Dr
Who episode, deliberately chosen as a fan-friendly Easter Egg. The ‘Titanic’
bit might be a gag about ‘Time Tunnel’ doing this all-too obvious moment in
their first episode. Or, quite possibly, a jibe at Kate Winslet who’d been ‘discovered’
in one of Russell’s shows and may at one time have been considered for Rose
but, since hitting the big time with ‘Titanic’, had stopped returning his
calls. Note that this companion is called Rose and will later fall for a ‘Jack’).
Would this story be for the ‘new’ crowd now or would it still remember ‘us’? Bringing
back the Autons was a masterstroke for so many reasons and it felt right that a
part of Bob Holmes should be here in the revival (he died in 1986 – partway
through writing ‘The Ultimate Foe’ –
but his colleagues Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks were both at Rose’s premiere).
On the one (plastic) hand it pleased older fans by bringing back classic
beloved monsters we thought we’d never see again, plastic mannequins that come
to life ruled by a ‘nestene consciousness’ from outer space but done with a
budget they could only dream of in 1970 – just watch the scene where they break
out of a shop, just like they did as the big chilling climax to ‘Spearhead In
Space’, but in a minor throwaway scene because they have money to burn and show
off now (relatively speaking anyway). On another its perfect for new fans too:
the idea of mannequins coming to life is much easier to understand than a race
of alien monsters with a whole backstory to swallow (one of the big reasons
they were used for the re-launch in colour in 1970, actually a much bigger ‘change’
in one go than this story) and allows us space to get to know the new characters
while still understanding the threat. On yet another (this mannequin’s an alien
and got lots of arms okay?) it sells exactly what Dr Who always did so well,
make the ordinary seem extraordinary all over again. Plus it was topical: our
use of plastics was arguably even more of a talking point in 2005 than 35 years
earlier and every kid watching this would have been able to see a plastic
coated something from where they viewing. Just as with the big shift to colour
in 1970, the Autons feel both impressively hip and new, yet very much in
keeping with Dr Who traditions to make it seem like the same show.
The bit that really sells
this story, though, isn’t the alien threat but the people we meet along the
way: the 9th Doctor, surly and withdrawn and oh so alone for the first half of
the story (Russell very sensibly learning from the Paul McGann TV Movie not to
waste half his precious first episode on a regeneration sequence and letting
the public fall in love with a ‘person’ who gets killed off). He’s
disconnected, betrayed, a wandering loner – a more romantic and accessible
image than a man in Edwardian dress talking about opera or someone ‘more than
just a time lord’. He’s tougher, someone you’d back in a fight but would still
worry might lose, clearly suffering some kind of trauma we don’t hear too much
about at first. He’s utterly oblivious of most Human conventions, Russell
borrowing the 4th Doctor’s confusion of the opposite sex (and
starting off on the wrong foot with Rose’s mum), the part that surprised most
non-whovians who’d been promised more romance and relationships (though
Whovians knew with The Doctor it wasn’t going to be a normal courtship). Russell, always a good one for stage
directions, described him thus: ‘Like Terence Stamp if he’d worked on a market
stall. No matter what is going on, this man enjoys himself’ (the Nestene voice,
meanwhile, is described as having a ‘voice like whales tumbling through a
Cathedral’ – alas they didn’t get that one quite right I don’t think). Eccleston
gets lots of chances to do the bristling he does so well, even if he’s notably
less sure-footed on the comedy and children’s stuff (it’s the point where he
lectures a CGI pool of liquid that isn’t there you can see the look in his eyes
wondering if he’s really right for this show).
Rose is rarely better, a teenage girl in a deadend job with big dreams
and a smile that you can all too easily believe melts even this timelord’s
hearts. She might be thick enough not to notice her boyfriend Mickey is now
shiny and talking weirdly but she proves her worth to the Doctor by being
brave, curious and clever (all the things he likes most: she’s the one who
works out about the London Eye and uses her gymnastic skills when the Doctor
has given her permission to run away). Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper
sell both characters oh so well from the first that we feel as if we’ve been
travelling with them forever by the end of this story, each one proving their
loyalty, courage and morality several times over before the credits roll.
Billie Piper, too, is far
more gifted at acting than singing, by her own admission (she was trying to
become an actor when she was ‘spotted’ and made to be a reluctant pop star) and
her Rose is as more grown-up, far more rounded, far more ‘human’ than any of
the interviews with the ‘real’ her that had dominated the music papers during
the 1990s. The only section of hers that doesn’t quite right true is when she’s
worried for Mickey: future stories will make Rose’s biggest virtue her big
heart and capacity to think of everyone’s feelings before her own. But her
concern for her own boyfriend is over in seconds - as far as she knows he’s dead and The Doctor’s
ambiguous response isn’t helping, but a couple of worried lines aside, she’s
smiling her big goofy smile again (they’ve been together five years, off and
on, according to the 2005 annual while ‘Father’s
Day’ shows she’s known him since they were toddlers). Both roles are judged
to perfection here; you feel why she wants to run away and why he wants to take
her and only her – their chemistry fizzles from first scene to last (though it’s
if anything even higher when David Tennant comes along in series two). For now
the other characters, like Rose’s mum and boyfriend, are less well drawn out
(poor Mickey in particular is a one-dimensional coward – something put right in
the next few stories), but that’s how it should be: this story is all about
Rose from the title on down. Both Camille Coduri and Noel Clarke will get
better as time goes by but are a bit OTT here, straying dangerously close to
the old-fashioned idea of ‘Dr Who acting’ (to be fair to Noel he’s doing this
episode right off the back of the Auf Wiedersehn reunion and broke off from the
shoot to go to the funeral of co-star Pat Roach, who’d died suddenly in the
last week of filming, so his head’s somewhere else even when it isn’t a plastic
replica taken from his shoulders).
There are, notably, a lot
of links back to ‘Damaged Goods’, Russell’s first published Dr Who work. That,
too, follows a Tyler who lives on a council estate (though it’s a boy named
Gabriel) – Rose is itself a common name Russell has used before (notably in
‘Bob and Rose’), so putting his most common first name and surname together was
always going to be ‘lucky’ (a lot of writers have names like these, me
included. Terry Nation is another). The title hints at a damaged Doctor, but
actually it’s the world that’s troubled: this is a story, set in 1987, at one
with the bleak Thatcherist dystopias of the Cartmel days, where no one has any
money and the wrong people are in charge, full of drug dealers and chancers.
After so many books about semi-Gods and Torchwood levels of gratuitous levels
of sex and violence it really stood out for being refreshingly ‘normal’ where
good wins against evil, but only just because fighting evil is hard. The part that comes over clearest in both the
book and ‘Rose’ though is how Russell thinks about the world: it’s dark,
dangerous and all too easy to be swallowed up by it and made bitter, but
individual humans can be amazing, a reminder of everything wonderful about the
universe (in that sense he’s the writer who’s come closest to where we started,
with David Whittaker another writer who saw Dr Who as a reminder of everything
that’s light in an often dark world; by contrast the likes of Dennis Spooner
wanted to laugh at it, Terrance Dicks wanted to change it, Robert Holmes wanted
to turn it on its head and point out the absurdities of it, Douglas Adams wanted
to explain it, Eric Saward wanted to blow it up and Andrew Cartmel despaired of
it. As for the ‘other’ influence,
Russell made no secret of the fact that Buffy: The Vampire Slayer’ was the
series that had most captured his heart post Who and it was there he got the
ideas for a long running series arc that was sketched in behind each episode story,
the emphasis on relationships and characters than plot and a forty-five minute
running time. Also the ‘fantasy series done I real life costumes’ aspect
(Russell had written a leather coat into his draft script before casting, but
it was a costume Eccleston had come to like and one he was eager to have in the
new series – he didn’t want the fancy eccentric uniforms of Doctors past, or
indeed Doctors future. Interesting that this Doctor both wears leather and eats
meat later in ‘Boom Town’, apparently forgoing his ow of vegetarianism three
regenerations back in ‘The Two Doctors’.
To date he’s never done either again so maybe it’s a post time war fall off the
wagon?). Plus the biggest influence: the main character, though supernatural,
has a ‘normal’ love life (though for now the biggest surprise, both at the time
and in the wake of what came since, is that the Doctor and Rose rub each other
up the wrong way more often than not, even if The Doctor kind of enjoys someone
standing up to him after a time war when he wanted someone to do just that and
Rose is enjoying someone that isn’t bent round her little finger the way Mickey
is. the true romance comes later, though: this is far from love at first sight).
There’s notably none of the ‘gay subtext’
the tabloids were up in arms about Russell shoving in front of the children –
indeed the only gay/bisexual character in this first year was written by the
heterosexual Steven Moffat. Although not in the original script (Rose was more
personally betrayed by her two bosses, men who were ‘forever holding hands’ and
turn out to be two Autons fused together!)
We don’t hear much about
the time war as yet – that all comes spilling out later – but already we know
that the Doctor watched half the universe burn (no idea why the Earth survived
it). It’s a brave decision (given how much this changes continuity, including
all the stories written in the interim – ‘Damaged Goods’ included) but also a
clever device, a reason to make the Doctor more troubled and less sure-footed,
to root him in a responsibility the others didn’t have (though it doesn’t come
out of nowhere – the 7th Doctor was getting there). In a way it
returns the Doctor to where he began in ‘An
Unearthly Child’, alone (bar Susan) and on the run from a natural disaster,
back to being grumpy and alien and slightly paranoid. It als adds a lot of the
mystery back into his character (with the time war not fully unexplained until
‘The Day Of the Doctor’ – and note how
quickly the viewing figures tumbled after a lot of that mystery was revealed). It
is, in a sense, a metaphor for the atomic bomb everyone spent most of ’classic’
Dr Who fearing might be dropped (it was cancelled in 1989 right before the fall
of the Berlin Wall), subtly updating the concerns of the show from the original
writers who had all lived through WWII and feared another war. Here the worst
has happened already and we’re dealing with the destruction and aftermath In
fact the draft script went further, with the Autons referred to as ‘terrorists’,
the ‘new’ threat that had contemporary viewers hiding behind the sofa after
watching the news now Russia seemed to have calmed down. We hoped) and American
had become stable again (we dreamed): these got cut at the eleventh hour after
a number of Al Qaida attacks made such an idea ‘insensitive’ .. It is, in another
sense, a metaphor for the cancellation: a devastating event that made time
stand still, that caused the Doctor to lose faith that anyone was watching and
turn his back on humanity. He feels abandoned and has lost sight of who he is,
with hints that it hasn’t been long since he was ‘The War Doctor’ with his
inability to juggle cards (manual dexterity with new fingers is apparently the
part that takes longest to ‘click in’) and seeing his reflection in a mirror
for the first time and laughing at his ears (though at the time of course we all assumed
he’d just been McGann because we hadn’t been told otherwise; this doctor is
super cagey about his recent past, though coming after ‘Day Of The Doctor’s the
surprise is how readily this regeneration answers to being ‘Doctor’ again). When
Rose enters his life it’s like ‘us’ joining him all over again and giving him
hope – he can do okay out of the limelight (as with the books and comics and
magazines and Big Finish audio stories, all things Russell pushed to save when
his BBC colleagues tried to axe them for getting in the way, as he knew how crucial
it was to keep the Doctor’s ‘missing’ life alive and besides he wanted ore Who
in the world, not less), but it’s more fun with someone else watching to show
off to. It’s a clever idea because it makes Rose as important to the Doctor as
she is to him, it evens out their relationship in a way we only ever saw with
Ace or Romana, while later Russell stories (notably ‘The Runaway Bride’ and ‘Waters From Mars’) will riff on how badly the
Doctor needs someone, that left to his own devices he can go too far.
Everyone throws
everything at this episode, as if trying to bat away all the usual accusations
of Dr Who as quickly as possible: the aliens are very high budget (mannequins
have never been so eerie), the guest cast are superb (full marks to comedian
Mark Benton as conspiracy theorist Clive whose closer to the ‘truth’ of the
Doctor than he realises – I so wanted him to become a regular character), there
are no ventilation shafts and the sets never even slightly wobble (though there
is a great deal of running, both in and out of corridors). Instead we get a
scifi series that’s as big, as bold, as colourful, as imaginative, as well
written and above all as emotional as any that had ever been made – including
the original series. Yet the TV Movie,
with a budget even this episode can only dream of, arguably did that part alright too: underneath
it all is a script full of a plot we understand about characters we instantly
care about (would a ‘Rose’ by any other script smell as sweet, even with the
same effects ans actors? Probably not). It’s a show brimming with a surprising
confidence given what was going on behind the scenes, a determination to tell a
god story the best way and for the most part it works. Of course there are
problems: we only get time to sketch in the Doctor and Rose and the alien
threat, with no proper explanation for how the Nestene consciousness got here
or where it’s been hiding all this time. Everything is drawn in heavy broad
strokes, with the hope of filling things in later – just what you needed at the
time as an opener, though watching this episode back to back with the later
ones shows up how flat some of the characterisation really is. We don’t get to
see something that Russell will excel at in later stories, the sense that this
threat is happening on a wider scale (no Trinity Wells news reports as yet,
while for all we know this Auton invasion seemed to affect one shopping mall).
Some of the humour seems a little forced in places, especially the notorious
burping wheely bin and Mickey the mannequin. This is the duffest sequence all
round in fact: given everything we come to know about how observant Rose is it
seems mighty unlikely she doesn’t notice when someone close to her is taken
over. The ending, where a big ol’ gloop of Nestene consciousness is saved not
through the Doctor’s cleverness but by Rose’s unlikely gymnastic skills she
never uses again, seems a bit too easy , while the Doctor makes his
‘anti-plastic’ awfully quickly (where was that when he was Jon Pertwee then
eh?!) Worst of all, they kill Clive: ‘us’, to all intents and purposes, a Dr
Who fan who knows every fact going (even if it’s for ‘real’ and not as part of
a TV series); Mark Benton is excellent in a role that a) could so easily have
become over-acted (think Lee Evans in ‘Planet
Of the Dead’ or the Whizzkid in ‘Greatest
Show In the Galaxy’) and b) he was a last minute replacement (possibly for Mackenzie
Crook, an actor mentioned in Russell’s ‘making of’ diary/autobiography ‘A
Writer’s Tale’ (and who’ll end up in another Who-related revival instead, ‘Worzel
Gummidge’). If anyone should know how to escape an alien invasion it should be
him! You can’t help but feel that Russell is exterminating any sense this show
is for middle-aged men in his desire to remake it for teenage girls. Future
stories will have far more interesting locations to film in than the London Eye.
Cardiff’s Queen’s Arcade (filling in for London, not for the last time) and the
Q2 Warehouse, an unused paper mill in Newport (where the Nestene showdown takes
place; if you’re wondering the Powell estate is actually Brandon Estate in
London’s Kennington, chosen partly as it was more sheltered and easier to control
for filming and because the architecture opposite was the same height as the
Tardis prop, perfect for parking against). Special effects outside contractors
The Mill’s Nestene effect isn’t one of their best, though to be fair to them
they were learning on the job (their ‘audition tape’ had been adding the
Nestene consciousness as seen on the cover of the Target novelisation of ‘Terror
Of The Autons’ and their first go at the Moxx of Balhoon onto an empty shot
from another Russell show ‘Sea Of Souls’). The heavy schedule, back to back
with ‘Aliens Of London/WWIII’ left
the cast and crew exhausted and making some odd and clumsy decisions on which
shots to pass, especially in the second half of the story. The Nestene are
really thick, sending their Autons out to conquer just one shopping mall in one
corner of one city – and apparently after peak hours given how few extras are
around. They’ve had decades to pan for this invasion then get their hours
muddled up – they’re not going to conquer the universe that way are they? For
all the talk of improved scripts the ending, of using anti-plastic, is exactly like
the way the Cybermen are defeated with ‘Polly cocktail’ in ‘The Moonbase’ (and that didn’t make
much sense either). Almost every other story in RTD’s run will be even bigger,
bolder and more complicated than this one, while in terms of sheer jumpscares
and terror it can’t match its source material ‘Spearhead From Space’, a story
that desperately needs the Doctor – only for him to be unconscious and out of
it (an aspect of the story Russell will lean on for ‘The Christmas Invasion’ instead).
And yet, it’s easy to
ignore the thorns because of everything ‘Rose’ gets right, the perfect middle
ground and compromise-without-selling-out of everything this story needed to do
and all the audiences it had to juggle. There’s enough continuity here to make
fans happy (the namecheck for Genghis Khan’s hordes not being able to get into
the Tardis ‘and believe me they tried’ was another moment that sold me, just
like Pertwee’s Doctor !), but not so much it scares non-fans away (as a clue to
Russell’s way of thinking he wrote a fifteen page ‘Bible’ to hand out to
writers which mentions the ambiguous note that ‘The fiction of the Doctor has
40 years of back story. Which we’ll ignore. Except for the good bits’). The new
titles and music are like souped up versions of the old days, different enough
to seem hip but not so different they felt wrong, something harder to get right
than you might think (and in case you’re wondering the Tardis now travels in a ‘red’
vortex when going forward in time and a ‘blue’ vortex when going backwards.
Why? I don’t know, but it works) ‘Nice to meet you Rose – now run for your
life!’ is one hell of an introduction to a character, never bettered even with
all the previous regeneration stories out there. The first new series Tardis
reveal is a beauty: modern etch means we get to see Rose peep inside and then
run all the way around the box, before doing the old ‘bigger on the inside’
spiel in a way that still feels refreshingly new (Russell will have to find a
way to make each future reveal different, safe in the knowledge that most
people watching at home know all this stuff and the fun is waiting for the to
catch up, but with Rose you’re meant to feel overwhelmed, just as you were in
the best Tardis reveal which is still ‘An Unearthly Child’). For all the talk
of toughening the Doctor up – the aspect that worried me most from the
pre-publicity - he’s still the same gentle soul at heart one who refuses to
carry a weapon and talks to the monsters and gives them a last chance to
reform. This is still very much the same Dr Who – the screen size has changed
(the first time Dr Who’s in widescreen!), the colour scheme is different
(orange, bizarrely), the way it’s made is very different (hand-held cameras throughout
– something Dr Who pioneered in ‘Warrior’s
Gate’ in 1981) and it’s both slicker and more dysfunctional, adding ‘human’
elements the classics series could never dream of, simply because television
has changed so much, yet as a series it’s still so obviously recognisably the
same.
Later episodes will throw in the better aliens, the better CGI, even the better ideas and characterisation, but you get just enough of all four to keep you watching through to the end credits and into next week, along with a dash of the old storytelling magic the show always used to have (and which the TV Movie, for whatever reason, didn’t have). It’s childish enough for the adult audiences and clever enough for the kids, there to be enjoyed as a family with something for everyone for the first time in a long time. This story went down well with most committed fans but it also hooked a lot of curious children and partners and husbands and wives of committed fans. It’s a beautiful bit of writing cleverly balanced from the head but also written passionately from the heart, delivered by a cast who are already hitting the ground running (it helped this story was shot after the more tentative Slitheen two-parter), a story that manages to sell the trip of a lifetime to old timers and new comers alike. Some 10.81 million people tuned in, the highest since ‘The Creature From The Pit’ in 1979 and the 7th most watched anything on any TV in Britain that week (the highest since ‘The Romans’ – the story, not the time period that is) smashing all expectations the BBC had for it. They came, no doubt, for the blitz of publicity that meant this show was everywhere, but the fact that almost all of them tuned in again on week two is all down to this story. We fans owe a lot to ‘Rose’, which is still one of the best jumping on points for fans even now. The universe was never quite the same again.
POSITIVES + I was really
enjoying the episode anyway but the scene that really sold this to me as a
success wasn’t the big budget Auton invasion in high definition or the big
action sequence arrival of the Doctor. No, it was the quiet reflective scene,
where Rose wants to know who he is and the Doctor takes her hand and tells her
that he can feel the ‘turn of the Earth’ beneath their feet, that even now ‘we’re
falling through space’ and that he’s there to catch people when they fall.
Summing up Dr Who in a single speech is impossible, but this one did it better
than any other I can think of summing up the sheer beauty and horror of the
universe. All the more remarkable, then, for the fact that the entire middle
section of this scene was added during a later shoot when ‘Rose’ was found to
be a little too pacy and was suddenly under-running (which is why, if you’re
sharp eyed and know your locations, you can see the background switch from
London to Cardiff then back again). Followed by one of my favourite jokes that
‘all planets have a North’, which ducks the question of why Christopher
Eccleston talks like that despite coming from Gallifrey while being down to Earth
in all the best ways. No wonder Rose wants to run off with the Doctor right
there and then. So did I.
Reeltime Pictures made their own low budget
straight-to-DVD Auton trilogy across 1997-1999, with UNIT back in action for a
re-match against the Nestene Consciousness. In the first story, simply titled
‘Auton’, The Autons have been lying in their giant warehouse, a sort of British
Area 51, ever since their last encounter and have long been considered dormant
until they start waking up. Sally Arnold is a decent character lead, who comes
over a sort of cross between The 3rd Doctor and Liz Shaw, though she was
actually a last minute replacement for The Brigadier as Nicholas Courtney had
to pull out close to the shooting deadline. In the second volume ‘Sentinel’ a
suspicious UNIT operative named Lockwood and his scientific advisor Natasha
discover a government conspiracy to cover up a giant island where Autons have
been sent to live full and happy lives in secrecy (a concept borrowed for the Torchwood
episode ‘Adrift’). Third volume ‘Awakening’ has the Nestene Consciousness
change tack by taking over the world’s computers while Lockwood himself has
been infected and has started working against his UNIT colleagues. A pretty
decent set of tales all in all, ones which suffer from the usual static camera
work and low special effects but feature some pretty decent plots that would
have made fine Dr Who stories. Usually Reeltime have a few star names in there
to attract fans but Nicholas Briggs is the only name you might recognise; the
young cast are all pretty darn good though.
‘Autonomy’
(2009) is one of the ‘gap year’ 10th Doctor books towards the end of
his life where he travelled without a companion and, in a neat mirror with
‘Rose’, brings the Russell T Davies era in book form to a near-close with a
story much like where we started, with a trap set by the Nestene Consciousness
in revenge for the events of that story. It’s an obvious crib of ‘Westworld’,
with a shopping centre-come-theme park filled with robots that go on the
rampage when the consciousness is switched on. There’s even a ‘Wild West Theme
World’ to go along with ‘Doomcastle’ ‘Winter Zone’ and ‘Hyperville’ (which
sounds straight out of The Crystal Maze).
Writer Daniel Blythe really captures the bittersweet melancholy of the 10th
Doctor during the ‘specials’ year and The Doctor slightly falling apart without
a companion by his side and knowing that this might be the last time he goes to
old haunts or experiences something new. The dialogue (and especially the jokes
and anecdotes) is top notch, while Kate is a decent one-shot companion
substitute; it’s just a shame the plot itself is so by numbers it feels as if
it’s running on automatic itself, pretty much what you’d expect a ‘Westworld
with Autons’ book to look like. Georgia Moffatt, Mrs David Tennant and Peter
Davison Junior, reads out the audiobook version – while she’s done lots of
audio adventures by now, as either her character Jenny from ‘The Doctor’s Daughter’
or other parts, this is I think the only time she’s ‘voiced’ a character
originally played by her husband and she does a really good impression of
him!
‘One Rule’ (2015) is one of Big Finish’s ‘Torchwood’
series, a prequel featuring Yvonne Hartman creating the ‘new’ look Torchwood
One in direct response to the Auton invasion. She claims its necessary because
one of the victims in the shopping mall attack was the Mayor of Cardiff. She’s
also come into possession of a scanning device used by the Drahvins (from ‘Galaxy 4’)
only to carelessly lose it at a restaurant during lunch (the same one where
Mickey was an Auton?...) Surely inspired by the era when politicians seemed to
leave all sorts of important documents behind on trains, it’s a thoughtful
story about what would happen if something precious and alien really did leak
to the wider public and whether it’s best to cover up or come clean. Like many
political Who stories not a lot happens but at least Yvonne feels like a living
breathing character in this story rather than just Cruella De Vil on steroids
as she is on TV.
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Of The Shalka’ next ‘The End Of The World’
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