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A major Doctor Who fan-site; specifically its page of interviews with various cast members.

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The actress will be riding solo at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival next month as she introduces audiences to her catalogue of politically-charged characters, including a drunk Washington staffer and a patriotic actress accepting her Oscar.

We chatted to Ingrid ahead of the production, as well as about her portrayal of fan favourite Osgood in Doctor Who, and her thoughts on a female Doctor...
Ingrid Oliver performs her one woman show, Speech! at Pleasance: That from 2nd-27th August at 4.30pm. For tickets call 0131 556 6550 or visit www.pleasance.co.uk.

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Archive for 'Interviews' * Doctor Who News * WhovianNet

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The actress will be riding solo at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival next month as she introduces audiences to her catalogue of politically-charged characters, including a drunk Washington staffer and a patriotic actress accepting her Oscar. We chatted to Ingrid ahead of the production, as well as about her portrayal of fan favourite Osgood in Doctor Who, and her thoughts on a female Doctor...

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e) The Importance of the First Woman Doctor

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e) The Importance of the First Woman Doctor

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A blog post written by a fan on the importance of the Doctor finally regenerating into a female version after 53 years of being a man.

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This casting is important because this tells women that you can be the lead and not just the sidekick. That a woman can lead a science fiction series, and probably spur many girls into STEM related careers. That you can have face on screen that you recognise as like yourself, and that not only are women present, but they are now occupying one of the most iconic roles in science fiction TV history.

The importance of having role models on screen is invaluable for young women. When videos emerge of little girls faces lighting up at the reveal that a woman is under that big black hoodie, the impact it has both now and as they grow up cannot be taken for granted. Confidence grows in young women when they are able to see women occupying space in a career they might not have thought available to them.

The success of the Hollywood film Hidden Figures on highlighting the crucial role of black women scientists in the USA's 'race to space' of the 1960s shows that women do exist in these fields, and that we have a duty to not only highlight that erasure, but to encourage girls and young women to pursue fields that continue to be seen as reserved for men, because that reserve is a myth. By being open to diversity, we all gain.

With all the positive reactions, unfortunately, have come the reductive, sexist and defamatory ones. The Sun and Mail Online (who we won't be lending clicks to here) have published stills of nude scenes from Whittaker's previous roles. The blatant sexism in their attempt of humiliating a woman for doing her job is clear, made somehow even more tasteless with their cringe worthy use of 'Carry On' style of language, branding Whittaker a saucy minx for flashing her boobs.

Quite rightly, Whitaker has said that she has absolutely no shame in doing these scenes - why should she?

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Why the first woman Doctor Who is important, and so is the world's reaction

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This casting is important because this tells women that you can be the lead and not just the sidekick. That a woman can lead a science fiction series, and probably spur many girls into STEM related careers.

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A letter featured in The Stage, from a fan on the subject of Doctor Who needing a new script. (Newspaper clipping)

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Register to get involved in the biggest newspaper digitisation project that's ever taken place in the UK!

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A review of Doctor Who by The Stage in 1989 on the attempts to axe the show. (Newspaper clipping)

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Register to get involved in the biggest newspaper digitisation project that's ever taken place in the UK!

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i) The Doctor Does Radio for 30th Anniversary

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i) The Doctor Does Radio for 30th Anniversary

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Jon Pertwee returns as the Doctor again for a radio series that features new material. (Newspaper clipping)

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Register to get involved in the biggest newspaper digitisation project that's ever taken place in the UK!

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A panel show explaining the concept of the phenomenon to a complete novice.

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f) An American's Reading of the Time-Lord and the blue box

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f) An American's Reading of the Time-Lord and the blue box

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How one American has received Doctor Who and how he believes it relates to the rest of the world.

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For the past few weeks, the Doctor has been circumnavigating the globe. Cardiff, London, Seoul, Sydney, New York, Mexico City, and wrapping up last night in Rio de Janeiro, Peter Capaldi is (literally) being introduced to the world in advance of his debut as the Twelfth Doctor. (Or wait, did we start over with the counting? How does John Hurt factor in again?) Capaldi's first episode, "Deep Breath", is getting a film-premiere-style event in Leicester Square on Saturday, which will be simulcast in hundreds of theatres around the world. The rest of us will watch it on plain old BBC One - or your local affiliate, in whatever country you live in. The world tour reflects the truly global reach of today's Doctor Who, a show that now holds the record for "largest ever simulcast of a TV drama", after 94 countries aired the 50th anniversary special at the same exact time last November.

If you follow Doctor Who on social media - and I cannot recommend their joyful and incredibly fan-positive Tumblr highly enough - then you've seen slices of the world tour: Capaldi and Jenna Coleman in increasingly sharp outfits, strange-looking lost-in-translation moments onstage (Capaldi doing a very shy version of the twist in South Korea; Capaldi holding a sombrero in Mexico), and, most importantly, endless queues of fans. Sonic screwdrivers and fezzes, long brown coats and rainbow scarves, Weeping Angels and Cybermen and TARDIS dresses that never fail to inspire my deepest envy - we saw pictures of crowds around the world all looking pretty much the same, united by their love of a single thing: a British cultural institution, half a century old now, but with the potential for endless regeneration.

It was a funny fact that a few years back, the BBC's biggest foreign export was not the World Service, as one might have guessed (and hoped). It was Top Gear, with an estimated global audience of 350 million - and despite the local versions licensed and produced in dozens of countries, people around the world still seemed to prefer three ageing, dumpy Englishmen who thrive on bullying and cheap shots, a trio and about whom you can spend the whole episode guessing, "Just how racist/homophobic/misogynistic/xenophobic/deeply problematic is he really?" (I'm sorry, James! You are the lesser of three evils and I've always liked you best.)

Peter Capaldi in Cardiff on the first leg of the Doctor Who World Tour. Photo: BBC/Guy Levy

I was one of those foreign Top Gear viewers: watching it in long marathons on BBC America with friends, laughing as they regularly poked fun at themselves, I was largely unaware of the way the show was perceived in Britain until the Mexican fiasco - which was removed from the American broadcast, by the way - and the resulting backlash that trickled across the Atlantic. The paradox of Top Gear as a global phenomenon still puzzles me: to export the idea that general mean-spiritedness and casual, indiscriminate racism is some sort of hallmark of British humour - "But we take the piss out of everyone! That's just how it's done," the BBC meekly protested after those abhorrent comments about Mexico - is a depressing concept at best.

Flash forward to 2014, and to a recent BBC Worldwide report that names Sherlock and Doctor Who as the broadcaster's biggest exports of the past year. That worldwide simulcast of "The Day of the Doctor" - which aired in the evening here, so the middle of the night for points east and in the morning for points west - was a revolutionary moment in television history, a sign that in the era of immediacy, piracy isn't the only option for an international audience. And Sherlock has been licensed to 224 territories worldwide; while the BBC were celebrating the record-breaking domestic audience of more than twelve million for "The Empty Hearse" in January, Chinese viewers were clocking five times as many views over the first two weeks alone.

But while both Doctor Who and Sherlock - and I see the James Bond franchise tossed onto this list a lot, too - are longstanding British cultural entities, I think that Doctor Who is unique among them. It's not a set of oft-adapted characters, but a single show - the longest-running science fiction show in the world - about, ostensibly, the same single character. It's pointless for me to patiently explain here, in a British publication, that everyone from 1963 onwards has "their Doctor", many of them wrapped up with specific moments of childhood - but I have to say that as a foreigner, this is one of the most fascinating elements of the show in its original cultural context. I have a Doctor, too: Ten. I love his endless, useless apologies and the way he bounces around - but not too much. I love Rose and Donna and I especially love Martha Jones. But I came to Doctor Who through Torchwood (yeah I know, I'm sorry), via other fans of other things on LiveJournal and Netflix streaming and all the conventions of modern global fandom. I've never been hugely into sci-fi, so while plenty of Americans surely can, I can't remember even having heard of the Doctor prior to five years ago. In the US, despite stellar cable ratings that go up with every regeneration, it's still referred to as something like "that cult British sci-fi show".

The Doctor Who World Tour in New York

The question of any cultural product and its relationship to national character can get very tedious very quickly. I doubt you want me to start hashing out, "Just how American is Captain America?" (...very?) But when culture is being exported and consumed by wildly diverse audiences, the question gets a bit more interesting. If the message of Top Gear as a massive cultural export was, "We're the fools - but actually you're the fools. Never mind, look at these stupidly expensive cars," what's the message of global Who? The British government thinks of its cultural exports as prime opportunities for soft-power diplomacy: with the recent news that the BBC was talking with the North Korean government about exporting programming, someone at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office told the Sunday Times, "I have always believed that what brought down the Berlin Wall was not highbrow diplomacy but Dallas and Dynasty."

Steven Moffat seems convinced that his shows are thriving in good part due to their national character. In advance of the 50th anniversary, he told the Guardian, "If you want to sell a show to the world, make it as British as you can." Two months ago, he followed up:

When you're exporting a show around the world, do you worry about how to appeal to other cultures? And I think the way to appeal to other cultures is to be your own culture, just to be yourself. And Americans like British shows. If they elect to watch a British show, they want it to be terribly British...The Britishness of Doctor Who is sort of irrelevant to Doctor Who because it takes place in all of time and space. Whatever is fundamentally British about that mad show, it's just leaking onto the screen from the people that make it. It's not a calculated thing. I'd have to concede that there's something incredibly British about Doctor Who, but I couldn't necessarily say what it is."

It's all a little vague - and certainly up for debate. Over dinner with an English friend last night, she confessed she's found the recent iterations of Doctor Who to feel less and less British - but then, she acknowledged, the question of what that even means, in broader culture, is always shifting, particularly in the past few decades. And then there's the question of Steven Moffat: as someone who spends a whole lot of time on Tumblr, I can tell you that his choices, in front of and behind the camera, aren't winning him legions of progressive fans. Casting choices aside, the fact remains that no female writers have penned an episode since Moffat took the helm five years ago (a woman will - finally! - direct this series' two-part finale, though). And Russell T Davies' subtle (and not so subtle) efforts at diversity and inclusion have been largely absent in the Eleven era, cast aside in favor of big, twisty plotlines (most of which I enjoy and think make perfect sense, but I know I'm not always in the majority here).

But whatever you think of Moffat, it's perhaps reassuring to know that he doesn't really plan to warp the show to suit the global audience. Unlike the big American movie studios: take, for example, this recent NPR report on Transformers 4, a film I was warned off by everyone and their mother, which pandered to Chinese audiences - and the central government - in ways that no one seemed to find particularly entertaining. With BBC exports, the common worry seems to be that the United States will ruin things (a fair concern. Remember: I was a Torchwood fan) with clunky, watered-down remakes or some sort of demand for the sort of "Britishness" we've come to expect, something with butlers and tea and I'm not taking a shot at Downton, I swear.

The TARDIS lands in Rio de Janeiro

There will likely be the sense that with millions more fans around the globe, something integral to Doctor Who's origins will be lost. But then, maybe not: one thing that I find pretty remarkable about the show is how it can work on a number of levels at once. Caitlin Moran once wrote that, "In a world where very little is a surprise, and everything is viewed with cynicism, Doctor Who is a genuine rarity. It represents one of the very few areas where adults become as unashamedly enthusiastic as children. It's where children first experience the thrills and fears of adults, and where we never know the exact ending in advance." And one of the great things about fandom (I acknowledge here that quoting Moran and writing positively about fans in the same paragraph is deeply ironic) is how personal it can be: if a show is working on many levels, perhaps it can work for everyone at once, in some small way.

Whatever you think of the current incarnation of Doctor Who, perhaps the greatest gift to the world is that, at its heart, the Doctor is a pacifist. He doesn't just choose non-violence: he actively champions it. You can turn to Moffat, who's spoken eloquently on this:

When they made this particular hero, they didn't give him a gun - they gave him a screwdriver to fix things. They didn't give him a tank or a warship or an x-wing fighter - they gave him a box from which you can call for help. And they didn't give him a superpower or pointy ears or a heat-ray - they gave him an extra heart. They gave him two hearts! And that's an extraordinary thing.

Or perhaps you'd rather turn to Craig Ferguson, who was (amazingly) in a Glasgow punk band with Peter Capaldi in their youth. On a 2010 episode of his American late-night show, Ferguson opened with a kind of insane musical tribute to Doctor Who, ostensibly to introduce the show to an American audience before interviewing a very young Matt Smith. I highly recommend the whole thing, but perhaps these lyrics sum it up best:

One thing is consistent though
And this is why the show is so beloved by geeks and nerds
It is all about the triumph of intellect and romance
Over brute force and cynicism

When the news each day grows ever darker, those seem like the sort of values that any nation would be happy to export.

Elizabeth Minkel is a staff writer for The Millions,and writes a regular column on fan culture for the New Statesman. She is on Twitter @ElizabethMinkel.

Our culture's best-known writers are not always those who write the best books, but rather those who live the noisiest lives. Over the past half century, nobody has played the role of renegade artist more fiercely and unapologetically than Hunter S Thompson, who began his career in the Sixties with a notable book of journalism about the Hell's Angels, and went on to produce two very funny works of "gonzo" journalism ( Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72).

At his best, Thompson dived into American mayhem and reported what he saw - a chaotic, senseless war of cops, power, money and delusional advertisements for political candidates, Las Vegas showrooms and assault rifles. In Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, his hallucinogen-driven vision almost perfectly reflected the madness of America in 1968-1972, when politics was being waged in the streets. At both the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, and the 1972 Republican Convention in Miami, Thompson was there:

...the Nixon convention in Miami was not even in the same league with Chicago in '68. The blinding stench of tear gas brought back memories... Around midnight on Wednesday I found myself reeling around completely blind on Washington Avenue in front of the convention hall, bumping against cops wearing black rubber masks and running after demonstrators clutching wet towels over their faces... Finally, when the gas got so bad that I no longer knew what direction I was moving in, I staggered across somebody's lawn and began feeling my way along the outside of the house until I came to a water faucet. I sat down on the grass and soaked my handkerchief under the tap, then pressed it on my face, without rubbing, until I was able to see again. When I finally got up, I realised that at least a dozen cops had been standing within 20 feet of me the whole time, watching passively and not offering any help - but not beating me into a bloody, screaming coma, either.

In his best journalism, it's often hard to distinguish between lucid reports of actual events and his wildest hallucinations. For Thompson, there was a special benefit to choosing the drug you used when reporting a particular experience - whether it was a presidential campaign, or a sequin-fraught Debbie Reynolds stage-show, or a convention of boozy district attorneys watching propaganda flicks about the dangers of marijuana. Drugs could either help you comprehend the madness or maintain your sanity. Gonzo journalism wasn't simply about getting the insane facts right. It was about enduring them.

Eventually, Thompson grew so famous for his shoot-from-the-hip, pharmacologically-driven rants against the likes of Richard Nixon, uptight hotel managers, overbearing cops, and kiss-ass fellow-journalists, that he never produced another sustained piece of reportage, wasting his final decades pumping out well-paid weekly columns for newspapers and sports magazines. As the quality and intensity of his work diminished into manifold rumours about his notorious lifestyle, Thompson just kept growing more famous; his books joined the curriculum of the middle-class universities he professed to despise; and he was ritually celebrated as a "great writer" on late-night talk shows, where he wobbled around in his iconic Hawaiian shirt, with a half-full bucket-cocktail in one hand, and his trademark cigarette filter in the other.

When his comic alter ego, "Raoul Duke, weapons consultant", became a recurring character in Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury comic strip, Thompson suffered one of the worst things that can happen to a good writer: he became a caricature of himself. His image adorned ads for TarGard Permanent Cigarette Filters. ("For one thing, it is not a holder. It is a filter. A big difference.") His Fear and Loathing persona could be purchased on HalloweenCostumes.com, and he even let himself be filmed drunkenly blowing things up with high-powered weaponry while knocking back cocktails. Then, sometime in the early Noughties, it all stopped being funny. Especially to Thompson.

In February 2005, Thompson's suicide note sounded like a pull-quote from one of his columns:

The Football Season Is Over. No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring...

He drew a smiley face at the bottom of the page, picked up one of the numerous weapons lying around his cabin in Woody Creek, Colorado, and shot himself in the head. Later, his numerous devoted friends (including Johnny Depp, John Kerry, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro and Bill Murray) shot his ashes into the sky with a cannon.

After reading this big, dense, and beautifully produced tribute to the life and death of America's only true "gonzo" journalist (Thompson coined the term, with his friend Bill Cardoso, to signify stories where the reporter's perception of events was more important than the story itself), it is clear that Thompson was well loved. An irrevocably lapsed Irish Catholic, he was discharged from the Air Force in 1957 for his "rebel and superior attitude", and went on being summarily discharged from numerous jobs and commissions. Then, in New York City, he befriended John G Clancy, who provides one of the lengthiest and most devoted remembrances in this volume:

Over the years people have asked me what kind of guy Hunter was. Usually I would answer that he was a loyal long-time friend and a great writer. I didn't add that he was also a courageous fucker who never held back and always stood up and fought. I didn't add that he was whip-smart, would argue on a dime, and kick your ass if you stood in his way.

The book's title - Who Killed Hunter Thompson? - is essentially rhetorical, since nobody could have infiltrated Thompson's arsenal without Hunter's well-armed consent (although he did make claims before his death that he might be "suicided" for exposing a secret conspiracy related to the World Trade Center attack). But even after reading these numerous glowing tributes - assembled by the late magazine editor Warren Hinckle, who in 1970 first paired Thompson with the illustrator Ralph Steadman - it is still hard to understand why anyone would want anything to do with the guy. In fact, listening to them all chucklingly reminisce, it often feels like arriving late to a party where everybody is beautifully stoned except you. They get the jokes; but you don't get any of them. And the jokes keep coming for hundreds of pages.

For example, several contributors recall Thompson's great "sense of fun", exhibited by the pranks he pulled, such as playing the recorded "screams of a wounded pig" through a megaphone one night in the direction of Jack Nicholson and his frightened children, or igniting sticks of dynamite under beer kegs, or spraying unsuspecting people with Mace. During a Manhattan restaurant lunch with fellow "New Journalist" Tom Wolfe, he tried to "clear" the place with a "marine distress signalling device, audible for 20 miles over water". Then, of course there was the hilarious time he blasted his long-time female assistant in the middle of the night with a shotgun, and she had to be taken to the Emergency Room. For years afterward, he enjoyed telling people: "Have you noticed how no one comes to the door unannounced since I shot Deborah?" Ha ha.

Then there was his delightfully anarchic affection for trashing motel rooms that he didn't have to clean, or insulting waiters in restaurants. "Hey you! I'm talking to you! Bug-eyed motherfucker! What are you staring at?" What a "perfect Southern gentleman," as one dear friend recalls. Several times in this book, yesterday's anarchic madman looks like someone who might today merit a #MeToo Twitter stream.

Thompson was a smart, funny writer; and even near the end of his life, he could still spot the new truths early (he just couldn't always spot them in himself). Shortly after 9/11, he wrote his most prescient words ever:

We are At War now - with somebody - and we will stay at war with that strange and mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives. It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fuelled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines, and no identifiable enemy...

Based on these fond reflections of his friends and co-workers, Thompson may not have been a very reliable person, but he was often a reliable and remorseless ob-server of what has long prevented America from being great.

Who Killed Hunter S Thompson?
Edited by Warren Hinckle
Last Gasp, 529pp, £39.95

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The global force of Doctor Who: what does Britain's biggest cultural export tell the world?

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For the past few weeks, the Doctor has been circumnavigating the globe. Cardiff, London, Seoul, Sydney, New York, Mexico City, and wrapping up last night in Rio de Janeiro, Peter Capaldi is (literally) being introduced to the world in advance of his debut as the Twelfth Doctor.

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a) The Legacy, Meaning and Power of Doctor Who

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a) The Legacy, Meaning and Power of Doctor Who

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Fifty years on - the significance of Doctor Who on the world.

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Fifty years ago today, the world was recovering from the shocking assassination of John F. Kennedy.But as that death rocked the world and dominated the media, something new was born. At 17:15 on BBC One, the first episode of a new children's drama serial was broadcast. At that time, it was practically a miracle that Doctor Who's first episode An Unearthly Child had been made at all after the disaster of the initial pilot episode. But those twenty-five minutes about a mysterious teenage girl, two inquisitive schoolteachers, and grumpy old man with an impossible machine were the start of a legend that has stretched across fifty years and over two-hundred countries, and become an immortal component of science-fiction, television drama, and British culture. But the next five decades weren't plain sailing. Not by a long shot. Despite a successful run and one of the most visible fan communities of all time, Doctor Who was always facing problems in some way. But whether it was William Hartnell's failing health, budget crises, or the successful attempt by BBC One controller Michael Grade to kill it in the late 80s, Doctor Who always came through and beat back. Like the homo sapiens in The Ark In Space, it was and still is indomitable.

Doctor Who is like the Tardis with its Extrapolator shielding activated: almost indestructible. Its quality and popularity protect it from having to adhere to the standards of television and allow it to fundamentally be its own organism. The original mandate from its creator Sydney Newman was "no bug-eyed monsters". Its first producer Verity Lambert ignored him and ushered in Dalekmania. Michael Grade ran it into the ground and it came back kicking and screaming like Davros after every one of his defeats, to scale never before seen heights in family entertainment. Sixteen years with only one real adventure being released would have been enough to leave any other programme forgotten and ignored. Doctor Who kept going through books and audio plays thanks to devoted fans heeding the Fifth Doctor's encouragement of "Brave heart" and creating and consuming all of that new media, and keeping Doctor Who ticking over until the building blocks for its return were laid down. We've now come to a point where Doctor Who represents the best of family drama, has more supplementary material and merchandise than ever before, and is something that can connect people from all walks of life. Millions of people from children in the West Country, to office workers in Norway, to Stephen Hawking and even members of the Royal Family, are Whovians. As well as being a cultural phenomenon and a hugely entertaining piece of drama, it's a societal leveller and it brings people together. It's impossible to get a statistic for this but so many relationships and friendships (including a couple of my own) will have been forged in the past fifty years by a shared appreciation of Doctor Who. So little else (especially a TV drama that started its life with wobbly sets and tinfoil robots) is able to have that kind of influence on people's lives. And that's something we will at least try to pass on to our children and grandchildren.

But the handing down of Doctor Who to the next generation isn't just limited to being a fan. The torch being passed is at the core of Doctor Who's production as well. Ever since the 1980s, the lunatics have been running the asylum with fans John Nathan-Turner, Peter Davison, and Matthew Waterhouse joining the Doctor Who family in production and performing roles respectively. And in their wake came David Tennant, Russell T. Davies, Mark Gatiss, and Steven Moffat. All men who grew up on Doctor Who and later had an immense impact on it in their adult lives. And that's why it keeps improving and staying strong. Because it will almost always have a fan at the helm. A person who was raised with Doctor Who, developed their own appreciation and interpretation of it, and isn't just working on it for a big fat cheque but is partly doing it because it's something that influenced their childhood to such a large extent and something that they fundamentally love. David Tennant and Steven Moffat became actors and writers because of Doctor Who. And that's undoubtedly true for other people on every level of its production. From the executive producers all the way down to the runners.

But the most important thing about Doctor Who isn't how long it's lasted or how popular it is, it's the programme's message. To quote Craig Ferguson, Doctor Who represents "the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism". It also spreads the message of how (as the Doctor himself told us) "Some corners of the universe have bred the most terrible things. Things that act against our very beliefs. They must be fought." But the most important message that we can take from Doctor Who is embodied through the Doctor's companions. That we all have boundless potential and need only the right stimulus to unlock it and help us become something greater. And of course (my personal favourite) "There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes." That wisdom and so many other small messages threaded throughout its 798 episodes and counting is the greatest gift of Doctor Who. Doctor Who has gone beyond a phenomenon and become something impossible to describe in a single word. Even if it sees a dip in popularity and ends up in the TV wilderness again, that funny little blue box will always be waiting for us with its doors wide open to take us through all of time and space. Doctor Who is completely ineffable in its continued cultural significance and will be a constant in science-fiction and drama circles around the world for decades to come. And hopefully I'll be expressing similar sentiments in 2063. But that's dependent on me surviving that long. Not Doctor Who. Because the Tardis will never sit gathering dust as a strange curiosity like the Ninth Doctor had hoped. And neither will Doctor Who.

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The Legacy, Meaning, And Power Of Doctor Who

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Fifty years ago today, the world was recovering from the shocking assassination of John F. Kennedy.But as that death rocked the world and dominated the media, something new was born. At 17:15 on BBC One, the first episode of a new children's drama serial was broadcast.

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An analysis of why the story of the Time-Lord with a blue box is still popular 50 years later.

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Doctor Who first aired on British television on 23 November 1963 (the day after JFK's assassination for fact fans) - making it by some distance the longest running popular drama series (excepting soap operas) in the history of television. But why have the adventures of an otherworldly eccentric in his unreliable time machine disguised as a blue police box proved so popular and enduring?

When we look at any long-running popular fiction, we have to consider what I call its internal and external histories. By the 'internal history' of Doctor Who I mean the evolving mythos of the fictional universe of 'The Doctor', his friends, companions and enemies. There's no question that Doctor Who has served up a mythology as rich as other big science fiction and fantasy franchises: Star Trek; Star Wars; Harry Potter; The Lord of the Rings. The Daleks are surely one of the most iconic alien monsters in the history of the SF genre, while in the character of 'The Master' - a fellow Time Lord, but a renegade - The Doctor has an arch foe equivalent to Sherlock Holmes's Professor Moriarty.

But I think it's the external history of the series that really explains its place in cultural history. By 'external history' I mean the contexts and influences on Doctor Who. In its more-than-half-a-century, Doctor Who has been transformed from a product of the traditional Reithian ethos of public service broadcasting into one of the corporation's biggest global brands. One of the most striking aspects today when watching the early Doctor Who episodes starring William Hartnell - the first and, in my view, still the best incumbent in the role - is how didactic they seem. The Doctor's first companions, Ian and Susan, were schoolteachers, whose role was to explain the science of the futuristic adventures and the historical contexts of the period stories.

William Hartnell as the Doctor peers through his monocle at two extra-terrestrials during filming of the popular science fiction series Doctor Who at the BBC's Shepherds Bush Studios in London, 1964. (Photo by Harry Todd/Getty Images)

A third of all Doctor Who stories in the series' first three years were set in different periods of the Earth's past - including trips to the ancient world ('The Romans' and 'The Myth Makers'), the Middle Ages ('Marco Polo' and 'The Crusade') and the Old West ('The Gunfighters', which saw the Doctor at the Gunfight at the OK Corral). It's become something of a received wisdom that the historical stories were not as popular with audiences as the science fiction stories, though this is not borne out by either the viewing figures or the qualitative research undertaken by the BBC's audience research department.

I think one of the key reasons for Doctor Who's longevity has been the series' ability to refresh itself periodically by bringing in new recurring characters (in its recent incarnation, especially, Doctor Who has often been compared to a soap opera) and even recasting its star. Peter Capaldi, was the 12th Doctor in the series' internal timeline. (Or - depending upon one's point of view - the 13th if John Hurt's previously unknown 'War Doctor' from the 2013 Golden Jubilee special is included). One of the beauties of Doctor Who is that the series is able to rewrite its own mythos. As the current 'showrunner' Steven Moffat has remarked: "It's impossible to have continuity errors in a series that includes time travel and parallel universes."

In fact, the idea that the Doctor is able to physically renew his body and appearance (only later did this come to be known as 'regeneration') was originally a response to an external determinant. By 1966 William Hartnell's health had deteriorated and he was no longer able to keep up with the nearly year-round recording schedule of Doctor Who. Hence the production team hit upon the entirely practical solution of replacing him with another actor - Patrick Troughton. Once the precedent had been set, Doctor Who was able to recast its lead every time the current star tired of the role (or, notoriously, in the case of the sixth Doctor, Colin Baker, when BBC executives ousted him from the role).

Like all successful long-running cultural phenomena, Doctor Who has responded to changes in wider society and culture. The alien menaces of the 1960s, pre-eminently the Daleks and the Cybermen, reflected that decade's obsession with technocracy and technological advancement. The Cybermen, who were arguably a more plausible enemy than the Daleks, were the products of 'dehumanised medicine': they were not robots, but human beings who had replaced their flesh and blood bodies with mechanical parts to the extent that they lost all emotion and ceased to be human.

The Daleks run riot in Doctor Who, 28 September 1964. (Photo by Ronald Dumont/Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The early 1970s brought third Doctor Jon Pertwee down to earth as scientific adviser to UNIT (the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce) and addressing environmental threats in stories such as 'The Green Death' and 'Invasion of the Dinosaurs'. And 1980s Doctor Who may have hinted at the Thatcher era through the presence of a powerful female villain known as The Rani. Unfortunately by this time declining audiences - in sharp contrast to its mid-1970s heyday - meant that the future of the series had become uncertain.

Doctor Who was 'rested' in 1989 and - with the one-off exception of a US co-produced television film in 1996 starring Paul McGann (the George Lazenby of Doctor Who) - was absent from television screens until its triumphant return in 2005.

There are all sorts of reasons why the new Doctor Who has been successful - even more so than what is now referred to as 'the classic series'. For one thing, it finally has the production values to match its cultural imagination, while advances in special effects technology mean that Doctor Who is able to visualise the epic spectacle that characterises US-made sci-fi series such as Star Trek and Babylon 5. And under the guidance of showrunners Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat, Doctor Who has cannily incorporated aspects of 'cult' television - story arcs, spoilers, and an active engagement with its own fan culture.

Yet the underlying reason for Doctor Who 's continuing success, I would maintain, remains the same: its quintessential Britishness. For all that the Doctor comes from the Ancient and Worshipful World of Gallifrey, everything about him - from his Edwardian fashion sense to his preference for tea and jelly babies - suggests a certain eccentric brand of Britishness. The fifth Doctor, Peter Davison, even wore a cricket outfit and bowled a mean leg cutter. As a heroic archetype, the Doctor is more 'eccentric professor' than the young, clean-cut heroes of US science fiction.

British actor Peter Davison, who played the Doctor in Doctor Who, 15 April 1981. (Photo by Photoshot/Getty Images)

Moreover the Doctor stands for the values traditionally associated with Britishness: understatement, opposition to injustice, and resistance to tyranny. The many waves of alien invaders throughout the series' history - not just Daleks and Cybermen, but Sontarans, Ice Warriors, Zygons, Slitheen, Adipose, Weeping Angels and the rest - can be seen as stand-ins for historic would-be invaders such as Philip II's Spain, Napoleonic France and Hitler's Germany. It's long been said that the Daleks, with their desire to exterminate all other life forms, were an allegory of the Holocaust: the 1975 story 'Genesis of the Daleks' made this explicit by turning the Daleks' creator Davros into a ranting Hitlerite madman bent upon mass genocide.

For more than 50 years, Doctor Who has been a part of the British cultural landscape. And there's every reason to suppose that Britain's (and the world's) favourite Time Lord is here to stay.
James Chapman is professor of film studies at the University of Leicester and author of Inside the Tardis: The Worlds of 'Doctor Who' - A Cultural History (I. B. Tauris, London, 2006, 2nd edition 2013). To find out more, click here. This article was first published in 2015.

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It was recently annouced that Jodie Whittaker will be taking on the iconic role of Doctor Who. Professor James Chapman looks at the history of the sci-fi series, and considers why, more than 50 years after it first aired, its popularity continues to endure...

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A insight into what the actresses who played the earlier companions thought about their experience on the show.

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Carole Ann Ford, Doctor: William Hartnell

My character was Susan, the granddaughter of Bill Hartnell's Doctor. I played her for 18 months in 1963, from the very first episode. Susan wasn't called a companion at the time. She was just his granddaughter, and when she left he missed her and decided he needed a companion, so he started recruiting young ladies. We had no idea the show was going to run for 50 years, but we got mobbed from the start. Then, as now, the fans were aged from eight to 80.

I played Susan quite tomboyishly. When the part was first suggested to me, they said I was going to have the physicality of an Avengers girl, with all sorts of extraordinary powers. I'd have happily done anything they flung at me, but none of that happened.

One of my big hates about the part was the fact that Susan was constantly running into danger and screaming. We met goodness knows how many peculiar creatures, and I just don't think she would automatically have screamed. But I was told, "No, you're a damsel in distress." They did put it into the script that Susan was the Doctor's equal, and she was even meant to be capable of flying the Tardis, but I was never allowed to do more than flick the odd switch.

There are times I wish I hadn't done Doctor Who. It more or less put a halt to my TV career: it was a struggle to get parts that weren't kooky 15-year-olds. But I did a lot of theatre. They were very happy to have me because at that time a television name put bums on seats.

I am so jealous of the current companions. It started when I saw Billie Piper swinging on a rope. I'd have loved to have done that. The girls nowadays have it good. They're given proper, three-dimensional characters to play, and they have a wonderful time. They're allowed to be funny, they're allowed to be sexy - they're just allowed to be interesting people.

Carole Ann wears jacket, £1,899, by Balmain, from harrods.com. turtleneck, £135, by johnsmedley.com. leggings, £12, by topshop.com. Boots, £455, by russellandbromley.co.uk. Makeup: Victoria Bond at Mandy Coakley Represents using Chanel Le Weekend and A/W 2013. Hair: Ernesto Montenovo at Phamous Artists.

Deborah Watling, Doctor: Patrick Troughton

My character, Victoria Waterfield, was a Victorian miss living in a very large house with her father. I played her for a year from 1967. Her mother had died, and then the Daleks came along and killed her father. That's when the Doctor - the second one, played by lovely Patrick Troughton - came to rescue me and took me off in the Tardis.

At first, I was very prim, in this long frock with big sleeves. But I thought, "I can't stay in this for a year if I've got to climb mountains." So gradually Victoria got her own character and the frocks changed: she became stronger and stronger.

There weren't many women on Doctor Who. It was mostly men on the set. I went out with one of the camera boys; that was quite fun. I went out with a Yeti as well, and a Cyberman, but only for one night. I couldn't take it. The height of him!

I enjoyed being the damsel in distress and getting all that attention. I worked with so many monsters: the Daleks first, then the Ice Warriors and the Cybermen - they were horrendous. And I killed the Seaweed Monster with my scream. They all nicknamed me "leather lungs".

When they announced there was going to be a new Doctor, people kept coming up to me and saying, "Have you heard the rumour? It could be a woman." I said, "Don't be so ridiculous." Every time the Doctor changes, they always say that. I'd just like him to be a little older, so kids can relate to him like a father or grandfather. Peter Capaldi's going to be brilliant.

* Deborah wears blouse, £630, by Giles, from matchesfashion.com. Makeup: Victoria Bond at Mandy Coakley Represents using Chanel Le Weekend and A/W 2013. Hair: Ernesto Montenovo at Phamous Artists.

Katy Manning, Doctor: Jon Pertwee

I played Jo Grant in the 1970s. She was young and very much a woman of her time. Most of her clothes were from Biba: tiny miniskirts and thigh-high boots with seven-inch platforms, worn while scampering over mountain sides in a very English winter. Once, during filming, my feet froze to the ground through my thin suede boots.

People assumed Jo was ditsy, but she was actually a very tough, feisty, little person. She was incredibly loyal, too: she was prepared to lay down her life for the Doctor. But because she was clumsy and screamed a lot, people assumed she wasn't strong.

We had some interesting monsters. We had a black plastic chair and when someone sat in it, it ate them. And we had these policemen, Autons, who ripped off their faces. After that, apparently, lots of children became frightened of policemen.

Three years after I left, the famous Dalek shot happened [Manning posed naked with a Dalek for Girl Illustrated]. The shot was my idea: I may have had one or two champagnes too many at the shoot and ended up wrapping myself round the Dalek wearing only sparkly boots. It caused an absolute furore. I ended up in every newspaper and live on the Six O'Clock News.

I was told I owed it to the fans to be appropriate. It was bizarre. I came into the show to bring in a teenage audience, and I assume the very short skirts were to encourage the fathers to keep watching after the football results. Yet here I was being told this photo was "disgraceful". Once, a boy said to me, "We've got a picture of you and you've got no clothes on!" And I said, "Well, yes, I had to go and save the universe and I didn't have time to get dressed."

* Katy wears jacket, £890, by 3.1 Phillip Lim, from harrods.com. Turtleneck, £135, by johnsmedley.com. Leggings, £12, by topshop.com. Gloves, Katy's own. Makeup: Victoria Bond at Mandy Coakley Represents using Chanel Le Weekend and A/W 2013. Hair: Ernesto Montenovo at Phamous Artists.

Louise Jameson, Doctor: Tom Baker

Doctor Who was a bit of a ritual in our house: watching in the living room with our boiled eggs and baked beans became a weekly staple. I love that I was brought on to a programme that had been part of my childhood.

Being in Doctor Who was a gift that kept on giving for me: it's turned into my pension, basically. It takes me all over the world. In the past 12 months, I've been to Chicago, Los Angeles, Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland... I wouldn't say being in Doctor Who has defined my career, but it certainly launched my career in television, and for that I am eternally grateful.

My character, Leela, was a warrior: intelligent, aggressive and moral. She lived in the jungle and wore leathers. At the time - 1977, the age of the struggle for equal rights - she was intended to be a role model. She was punchy, she was feisty, but she took off her clothes to do it. I didn't think the costume - or lack of it - was gratuitous at the time. In hindsight, I might have liked her to be brighter, with more dialogue, but I think my leather leotard did bring in a new male demographic. Wearing it never bothered me, though it was very uncomfortable trying to go for a pee. But I did get a funny piece of fan mail once from a young girl called Katie that said, "Will you please put some clothes on?" It saddens me now that Leela's outfits are the main thing people remember about her. She really held her own against the men.

I think the new Doctor should have been a black, redheaded lesbian. Everyone goes, "Is it gonna be gay? Is it gonna be redheaded? Is it gonna be a woman?" Perhaps they should just do it all at once.

* Louise wears top, £55, and necklace, £20, by Freedom at Topshop, both topshop.com. White rollneck, £115, by johnsmedley.com. Makeup: Victoria Bond at Mandy Coakley Represents using Chanel Le Weekend and A/W 2013. Hair: Ernesto Montenovo at Phamous Artists.
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Doctor who? The Time Lord's companions from the 60s and 70s have their say

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My character was Susan, the granddaughter of Bill Hartnell's Doctor. I played her for 18 months in 1963, from the very first episode. Susan wasn't called a companion at the time. She was just his granddaughter, and when she left he missed her and decided he needed a companion, so he started recruiting young ladies.