PDF Once Upon A Time Lord The Myths and Stories of Doctor Who Ivan Phillips Ebook Full Chapter
PDF Once Upon A Time Lord The Myths and Stories of Doctor Who Ivan Phillips Ebook Full Chapter
PDF Once Upon A Time Lord The Myths and Stories of Doctor Who Ivan Phillips Ebook Full Chapter
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Once Upon a Time Lord
For Mum,
in memory of Dad,
Ivan Phillips
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: ‘Quite a great spirit of
adventure’
Defining terms: Myths, stories, Doctor Who
Questions of canon: Keeping track (or trying to)
Fear of getting it wrong: The Skinner–Hadoke paradigm
1 Critics, fans and mythologies of discourse
Writing about Doctor Who: Difficult conversations and critical
projects
Fandom as a character: ‘Most likely to fight back’
Fandom as critique: Cultures and contributions
2 Doctor Who as mythology
On mythic identities: Flying carpets and silly robots
Remaking the monsters: Nostalgia and novelty
Transmedia traditions: Of fishmen, fanfic and sweet cigarettes
3 Doctor Who and mythology
Representing history: ‘In an area of human thought’
Themes of haunting: Ghosts in the time machine
Vampires, werewolves and other universal monsters
4 The hero and his worlds
World-building and the TARDIS: ‘Home, the long way round’
The Doctor as hero: A good man, an idiot, the destroyer of
worlds
Myths of representation / representations of myth
5 Conclusion: ‘The universe will surprise you’
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Figures
Calling his companion, Ace (Sophie Aldred), ‘a social misfit’ and ‘an
emotional cripple’ is part of the Doctor’s strategy to defeat Fenric, a
necessary undermining of her faith in him, but it is still an act of
cruelty. It restores something of the unease of the earliest Doctor
Who stories, the first thirteen episodes from ‘An Unearthly Child’ to
‘The Edge of Destruction’, in which the volatility of the hero (William
Hartnell) made him less than reliably heroic. This template for
challenging behaviour on the Doctor’s part has also been used in
‘The Invasion of Time’ (1978) and ‘The God Complex’ (2011), as well
as in many of the Virgin novels (1991–7) and Big Finish audio
dramas (1999–present).
Together with other stories of the period – Ben Aaronovitch’s
‘Remembrance of the Daleks’ (1988) and ‘Battlefield’ (1989), Kevin
Clarke’s ‘Silver Nemesis’ (1988), Rona Munro’s ‘Survival’ (1989) –
‘The Curse of Fenric’ represented an effort to recover a sense of the
primal enigma of Doctor Who’s central character, what Tulloch and
Alvarado had by then described as its ‘hermeneutic code (the code
of puzzles and mysteries)’.22 Cartmel and his associates were not the
first production team to give prominence to the perplexities of the
Doctor’s personality and to draw on prior mythologies in order to
adjust the scope of the programme. They were, however, the most
brazen in the attempt. They were also, crucially, the first to be
informed by a fan sensibility. Not all of the new stable of creators
had grown up watching Doctor Who from behind the sofa as children
and then as dedicated enthusiasts into adulthood, but many of them
had. The last three years of the classic series marked, in this
respect, the point at which a complex merging of identities – fans,
producers – began to take place. As a consequence, discourses of
production and reception became ever more intricate, a situation
intensified in the decade that followed as, following the final episode
of ‘Survival’ on 6 December 1989, fans seized the means of mythic
production. The quiet removal of the show from television – ‘The
BBC never publicly declared the demise of Doctor Who,’ writes Miles
Booy23 – left a vacuum that was filled by the products of fan
invention and aspiration.
How this mutation of the creative ecology affected the expanding
mythology of Doctor Who, and the myths woven around it, will be a
focus of the first chapter of this book. For now, it is worth noting the
contrast between the official (and therefore public) condition of the
show and the vitality of its continuing existence off-screen. Beyond
McCoy’s initially slapstick demeanour there had been a strategic
deepening and darkening of the narrative that his portrayal
embodied. Colin Baker’s depiction of the Sixth Doctor had already
emphasized elements of unpredictability and danger in the character
but without, apparently, gaining the confidence of the core audience,
the curiosity of a new one, or the respect and financial beneficence
of BBC management. The popular success and longevity of Doctor
Who seems, on the whole, to have been a source of bemusement to
the organization that created it, but the loss of institutional support,
exacerbated by a slow decline in ratings during the 1980s, was only
one of the problems for the show. There was also the issue, as
Chapman, Kim Newman, Jim Leach and others have observed, that
the conceptual ambition of the later McCoy stories was undermined
by a propensity to lose narrative coherence.24 David Rafer, for
instance, refers to ‘Silver Nemesis’ as ‘a pretentious mish-mash’ and
‘The Curse of Fenric’ suffered, in its broadcast version, from the
need to edit it down to size, becoming a congested, occasionally
brilliant riddle rather than the richly textured yarn that its
novelization eventually revealed it to be.25 As Booy writes,
‘interpretation of the McCoy years necessarily became a search for
some aborted level or hidden meaning’.26 This might suggest that
the attempt to extend the mythic scope of Doctor Who after a
quarter of a century on TV screens was either a valiant failure or a
fundamental miscalculation. In an important sense, though, it
created the conditions from which – via Virgin Books, Big Finish and
the TV movie of 1996 – the series would be regenerated by Russell
T. Davies in the early years of this century. Moreover, in the
cluttered, gapped, chaotic quality of some of the products of the
‘Cartmel Masterplan’ it is possible to discover the kind of evocative
abundance that is almost definitive of classical myth.
However else it is defined, it is clear that a ‘myth’ is a cumulative
and irregular mass of material that needs to be examined as a whole
as well as in fragments. To form a mythic understanding of Doctor
Who, every artefact contributing to its developing mythology must
be available for study. With this in mind, the approach of the current
book is comparable to that of Piers D. Britton in TARDISbound and
Kevin S. Decker in Who Is Who?27 In other words, a flexibly thematic
arrangement is preferred to a more chronological one, with classic
and new Who treated alongside each other and shown to be in
dialogue. Similarly, although the public eminence and cultural reach
of the television series mean that, inevitably, this will be the main
focus of discussion, other manifestations of the mythology are a
significant part of the story. This, of course, raises questions of
canon and, tempting as it might have been to leave these for others
to fail to answer, they have proven both difficult to avoid and
extremely suggestive in relation to ideas of myth. ‘Myth, after all,’
Coupe has written, ‘is inseparable from the idea of totality; yet myth
has only ever been a gesture towards it.’28
The concept of a resolved canon is almost certainly incompatible
with traditional understandings of myth and, in the context of Doctor
Who, it is surely a fascinating chimera. Broadly speaking, when
confronting the insoluble problem of canon, there is the pragmatic
approach – ‘the television series takes priority over what is said in
the other media’29 – and there are arguments. This book tends
towards the latter, while keeping the television screen in constant
view. Regrettably, however, its scope does not allow for extensive
reflection on the offshoot dramas K9 and Company (1981), The
Sarah Jane Adventures (2007–11), Torchwood (2006–11) and Class
(2016).
Almost forty years ago, Tulloch and Alvarado supposed that the
‘committed audience’ would have ‘an accumulated knowledge and
clear memory of a programme’s past’.30 When that programme is as
expanded and ramified as Doctor Who, however, the knowledgeable
accumulation will inevitably include aporias and elisions, and the
memory might only be clear in inverse proportion to its reliability.
Towards the end of their study, Tulloch and Alvarado noted that the
‘programme coherence’ of Doctor Who was ‘totally bound up with
the mythology of two decades of adventure’.31 Two decades have
now become more than five decades and a concern for coherence is
a fundamental aspect of ‘brand management’ for the regenerated
television series.32 It is a concern, though, that can never achieve
more than a playful compromise with the contradictions of the
mythology.
There are so many possible narrative tracks within Doctor Who, so
many discursive practices and areas of disputed methodology, that
the sensible strategy must be to set limits on any enquiry. Hills is
explicit in making ‘televised Doctor Who from 2005 onwards’ the
foundation of his Triumph of a Time Lord,33 and both he and Andrew
O’Day argue convincingly that ‘new Who’ can – and to some extent
should – be separated from the ‘classic’ series in critical discussions,
being the product of an entirely different ecology of creation and
consumption. O’Day is right to suggest that, in terms of making
general qualitative assessments of the old and the new, ‘there is no
comparison’.34 From the perspective of an exploration of the
mythology of Doctor Who, the idea of setting limits would risk an
impoverishment of the analysis. It would also, I suspect, be
impossible. The nature and success of the fiftieth anniversary
celebrations in 2013 demonstrated not only a rich, vital interplay
between classic and new Who but also an essential continuity which,
in mythic terms, transcended half a century of wonderful
incoherence.
‘Inconsistency’, Newman writes, ‘was built into the format from the
outset, to the eventual frustration of fans who like to hammer the
whole series into some overarching design.’35 Lans Parkin and Lars
Pearson, at the start of their colossal and meticulous Ahistory: An
Unauthorized History of the Doctor Who Universe, offer a disclaimer
about the viability of their unifying project:
Now, with dozens of new books, audios, comic strips, short stories and a new
TV series, not to mention spin-offs, it is almost certainly impossible to keep
track of every new Doctor Who story, let alone put them all in a coherent –
never mind consistent – framework. References can contradict other references
in the same story, let alone ones in stories written forty years later for a
different medium by someone who wasn’t even born the year the original writer
died.36