Rose: Ranking - 122

                                      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: he's mentioned in Marco Polo's journals, theres' a cave painting about him, there's a marriage vow carved on the side of an Aztec temple, he's a musician in Ancient Rome, was seen hanging out with pirates in Cornwall, commissioning paintings from Leonardo De Vinci,  starting the Great Fire Of London, being embroiled in the luddite attack on the Industrial revolution, defeating haemavores in World War Two, dancing onscreen with Laurel and Hardy, dating Queen Elizabeth I and Marilyn Monroe,  defeating daleks with Churchill, fighting witches with Shakespeare, blowing his top at Pompeii, being attacked by a giant wasp while Agatha Christie looks on, he's in an old legend of Robin Hood, was at the Montgomery Vus boycott, getting gassy with Dickens, fighting werewolves with Queen Victoria, there's nothing he hasn't done...'ere, come to think of it, the blonde girl he was in those last two looked just like you!'

 

 Well here we are, with the most important regeneration of DW’s life – the first episode for nine years; sixteen since it 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 keeps coming back, which means 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 of it, there’s a Tardis-sized hole in all of us when its not on air. The creators of the new-look DW knew that better than anybody: they were almost all to a person fans of the original show, who’d had that magic spell cast on them too. 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. 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. They only revived it in 2005 because they had faith in Russell T Davies and wanted to keep him, so left it up to him what series he really wanted to make; 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. DW came back 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).There was more resting on Rose’s shoulders than perhaps any other story in DW 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 DW 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, 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, over-brimming with new ideas of his own and giving everything the execution of a seasoned TV pro, with a story that manages to do everything on its huge great ticklist. Bringing back the Autons was a masterstroke for so many reasons. 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 and allows us space to get to know the characters, while our use of plastics was arguably even more of a talking point in 2005 than 35 years earlier. Just as with the big shift to colour in 1970, the Autons feel both impressively hip and new, yet very much in keeping with DW 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 9^th 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). 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. Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper sell both characters oh so well 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. As good as Eccleston is as a ‘harder’ Doctor its this regenerations’ softer side you remember and he’s actually even better at the comedy even though he wasn’t known for it at all (like William Hartnell in fact, the original Doctor from 1963). 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. 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 its 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. Watch out too for all the cliches of DW that had got down (wrongly) in the national psyche as everything this series gets wrong and why it got taken off air the first time round: 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. Yes there are some problems – a few duff notes, mostly when Mickey turns into a mannequin; 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 almost every other story in RTD’s run will be even bigger, bolder and more complicated than this one. Ignore the thorns though - ‘Rose’ is 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. 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.

+ 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 DW in a single speech is impossible, but this one did it better than any other I can think of. 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.

- There are a couple of moments where Russell’s background in children’s TV and his need to win over a kiddie audience comes across a bit too heavy-handedly. One is the infamous burping wheely bin (why does it burp? Nobody seems to know – frustrating, as the ‘ordinary being extraordinary’ is exactly what this series is for and nothing screams everyday more than a wheely bin). The other is watching Christopher Eccleston, classically trained actor and respected thespian, spending a full two minutes choking himself with an Auton hand while Billie Piper fails to spot what’s happening to him. This is DW at its most Chuckle Brothers – thankfully, while there’ll be no end of future kiddie-friendly stories (not least those farting Slitheens) nothing will ever be quite as, well, childish as this again.