TV MEMORIES - DOCTOR WHO - ROSE (2005)

Good grief - was it really twenty years ago since Doctor Who returned to our TV screens ? Time it would seem waits for no man, even the venerable Time Lord himself. 

Regular readers of this blog will know that I'm a lifelong fan of Doctor Who. I first fell in love with the show when the immortal Tom Baker was the Doctor in residence - with his manic grin, curly hair and ridiculously long scarf, Mr Baker supplied a reassuring presence and counterpoint to all the terrifying space monsters that put the shits up five year old me and many other kids of my generation 

The original show ran for over twenty years, but in 1989 the good Doctor's luck finally ran out. Short sighted BBC producers succeeded where the Daleks, the Cybermen and the Master had all failed and finally put an end to the Doctor's adventures by cancelling the show. 

Doctor Who was dead.

 No regenerations allowed this time.

Thankfully they at least didn't kill off our hero, he merely stepped into his trusty TARDIS with his friend Ace and dematerialised into the wild blue yonder. Not to be seen again for several years.

BUT...the Doctor DIDN'T go away (despite the best efforts of his enemies at the BBC - a case of art imitating life if ever I saw one), not entirely at least.

The Doctor returned in a series of spin-off novels (called The New Adventures) which where published by Virgin books and featured the continuing adventures of the Seventh Doctor (played on TV by Sylvester McCoy), among the new up and coming fan authors who wrote for this series where several names which where to become familiar to viewers of the series upon its eventual return - Mark Gatiss, Paul Cornell, Stephen Moffat and one Russel T Davies. All these soon to be TV writers cut thier teeth on this cult series of novels. The importance of The New Adventures in the overall evolution of Doctor Who cannot be underestimated.

Then for one night only in 1996 the Doctor returned in the form of Paul McGann in a BBC/Fox TV co-production. McGann was a great new Doctor but the TV movie pilot episode was overly Americanised. Despite that it got great ratings in the UK but unfortunately completely tanked in the US. Fox pulled out of the deal and Doctor Who was stuck in rights limbo for several more years.

Yet still the Doctor survived - the BBC clawed the rights for the book series off Virgin and published thier own series of novels featuring the new Eighth Doctor. Meanwhile an audio production company known as Big Finish began to produce audio dramas based around Doctor Who to great critical acclaim. It was obvious that the fans and the general public weren't ready to let go of the Doctor just yet.

So it came to pass that the BBC, after a sixteen year hiatus (bar the TV movie), produced a brand new series of Doctor Who. The new show was to be produced and (mainly) written by Russell T Davies (told you he'd be back)...oh...and those other New Adventures authors I mentioned ? They had an episode each as well. The new (Ninth) Doctor was played by respected thespian Christopher Eccleston, whilst companion Rose Tyler was to be played by teenpop starlet Billie Piper.

When the show came back in 2005, I was 31 years old. As I've written before, I'd always been a massive Doctor Who fan growing up and for a while I even stuck around into the early 90's despite there being no sign of a new series.

I've got to admit though, roughly around 1991 my interest started to wane a bit - I was about 17/18 at the time and was just starting to get interested in girls and going out with my mates - the real world of bars and nightclubs became the thing that occupied my Saturday nights, the poor old Doctor seemed to be a little bit past it to my fickle tastes. Plus I'd also got heavily into reading Stephen King and Clive Barker, so it was those two authors who occupied most of my imagination at the time.

However about 10 years later, I started working with and became friends with a chap who was heavily into Doctor Who. This friendship rekindled my fascination with the show and it wasn't long before I was going round his flat and watching classic stories on VHS (I also got back into the books and spent a lot of time browsing charity shops for cheap second hand copies of the New Adventures novels). Needless to say when the show returned a few short years later I was absolutely stoked for it's return.

So it came to pass on Saturday 26th March 2005 that I was eagerly sat in my bedroom awaiting the start of the new series. I remember I was watching it on a portable colour CRT TV that I'd owned since the mid 80's, I can remember watching episodes of the original series on this telly, so it was nice to be watching the new iteration on this "old faithful" device, it gave the event a sense of symmetry in a weird sort of way. 

The dulcet tones of the BBC announcer kicked in "Aliens beware... he's back. Doctor Who !!!" and then THAT theme tune started blaring out with a nice CGI TARDIS blasting through a brightly coloured time vortex. It felt familiar but also new and exciting - just how it should do. Somewhere I imagined the sound of an entire generation cheering that their hero had returned and a new - young - generation of kids taking up that rallying cry (but that's probably just me). Whatever - it felt special...it WAS special.

That's probably my main memory of that night - I then spent the next 45 minutes absolutely entranced by what I was seeing. It was literally everything I'd hoped it would be - it keep the same classic thrills and chills and monster packed action which made the original series so memorable, it had the same slightly cheesy B-movie feel that the best stories from the classic series had, but, at the same time it felt fresh and new. It was faster paced, more cinematic looking, the human characters where more relatable...it was just much more "21st century".

Christopher Eccleston was a great choice for the new Doctor. Losing the more theatrical dress sense of his predecessors, clad in a battered leather jacket and jeans - he was a more approachable and even in his way a more "normal" looking Doctor. But that "bloke next door" aspect of him only served to make him seem more alien in the long run - he looked like he fitted into 2005 London... but he never really did.

This Doctor was a survivor of a Time War that had wiped out both his own race (the Time Lords) and his arch enemies - The Daleks. This backstory added many new layers to the Doctor's character (he was essentially suffering from PTSD) and this in turn informed Eccleston's performance. Over the course of the series, through his friendship with Rose, we see the Doctor regain his confidence and slowly learn how to become a hero again before his regeneration into David Tennant's tenth Doctor in the series finale.

This Doctor was a survivor through and through - even when he was arseing about dancing to Soft Cell records you could tell his smile was only really a facade to hide his trauma behind. Eccleston completely nailed it and it's a shame he only did the one series (but if he had done more we might not have got Tennant and that would been even more of a shame).

Then there was Billie Piper as Rose Tyler. At the time I probably wasn't alone in thinking "what the hell are they doing casting her ?" In 2005 Piper was basically a washed up pop star - her brief career as a pop singer when she was still a teenager in the 90's having long since fallen by the wayside. At that time she was mainly known for being the recently divorced wife of ginger TV annoyance Chris Evans, and during the late 90's was usually mainly seen in public going out and getting pissed with her then hubby. 

What I'm basically saying is that her acting ability was a totally unknown quantity, nobody was really expecting much, BUT...my God...she completely knocked it out of the park. She was every bit as good as Eccleston was.

Piper bought a relatable "girl next door" vibe to the character of Rose - slightly mouthy, slightly "council estate", brave and with an empathy that was sometimes needed to pull the Doctor back into line during his more erratic moments. She was the perfect foil to Eccleston's survivor's guilt ridden Doctor.

The regular supporting cast where pretty solid too - Camile Coduri as Rose's chavy mum - Jackie, Noel Clarke as Rose's on/off frustrated boyfriend Mickey and best of all - John Barrowman as swashbuckling intergalactic rogue/adventurer Captain Jack Harness (a character who proved so popular he eventually got to head his own spin-off show - Torchwood).

The first episode utilised some classic series monsters - The Autons - living plastic creatures controlled by the Lovecraftian Nestene Consciousness. The Autons where originally seen in Jon Pertwee's first story as the Third Doctor - Spearhead From Space - from way back in 1970. The Autons had one of THE iconic moments in classic Who with the scene where a bunch of 70's shop window dummies came to life and started gunning down innocent pedestrians in the high street. It's one of those moments that scarred a generation for life.

This scene naturally got its own 21st century redux in this new story. The Autons are every bit as menacing as they where in the original (although the 21st century show's glossier production values did rob them of some of thier creepy grittiness), this time they where even accompanied by creepy looking "child Autons". Which definitely gave them a bit more heft on the scare-o-meter.

Autons (being able to control anything made from plastic) come in all shapes and sizes, not all of them as effective as others. I'm taking about the killer wheelie bin Autons, a decent idea in principle but let down by the some CGI that hasn't aged well...oh well - it looked ok back in 2005 and cheesy effects have always been a part of Doctor Who's charm, so at least it's traditional.

The only (slight) disappointment was in the depiction of the Nestene Consciousness itself. In the original two Auton stories in the 70's ('Spearhead From Space' and 'Terror Of The Autons'), the Nestene Consciousness wasn't particularly well done (in Spearhead it was just a rubber tentacle that attacks Jon Pertwee, in Terror it's an early video effect that just sort of hovers onscreen and looks totally unconvincing), so this new version didn't have a hell of a lot to live up to, televisually at least. 

However, I'm not talking about the lame Nestene from the TV show...I'm talking about the Nestene as depicted in the Target novelisations of those original Auton tales.

I'm talking about this chap...

In the books the Nestene is described as a nightmarish creature "somewhere between a spider, octopus and a crab". The cover of Terror Of The Autons' is often listed amongst one of those cultural artifacts which deeply unnerved a generation of kids, and it's easy to see why.

My point is - this creature would have been impossible to achieve on a 1970's BBC budget BUT come the futuristic year of 2005 and the advent of CGI it really should have been absolutely no problem to finally, at long last, effectively realise this awesome Lovecraftian nightmare. Instead what we got was this...

A big fat CGI blob that looks like the interior of a lava lamp. I mean...he's OK...he looks a lot better onscreen when he's moving about but he's just a bit... uninspired. A bit of a lost opportunity I feel, but by no means a deal breaker.

Those forty five minutes blasted by. Doctor Who was BACK in grand style.

I switched off my knackered old portable TV and went out for the evening to a house party in Norwich and spent most of the party talking to my mate Dan (who was and still is a MASSIVE Who-head) about what we'd just seen. It was a truly great night.

That first series didn't disappoint. Week after week I eagerly tuned in, and what delights I saw - Zombies animated by gaseous aliens, aliens that skinned overweight humans and lived inside thier flesh (and farted...a lot), the return of the mighty Daleks retooled and made into a credible foe for the 21st century, the revelation that the Doctor was now the last of the Time Lords left alive, and creepiest of all a small undead child with a gasmask fused to his face asking the question "Are you my Mummy ?", all culminating with the Ninth Doctor's epic regeneration into the Tenth Doctor played by David Tennant (the only actor to ever truly rival the legendary Tom Baker in the public's affections as "best Doctor Who"). What a ride it was. That first series was a true classic of early 21st century TV.

Unfortunately Doctor Who's future is somewhat in question at the moment due to co-producers Disney Plus dragging thier heels over whether or not they're actually going to recommission a new series (don't even get me started on the Disney partnership- I was initially quite up for it but it's turned out to be a deal with the devil, it's certainly sucked all the joy out of what should have been a year of celebration for Who fans).

But I digress, I'm sure the Doctor will survive in some form or another irrespective of what the evil mouse and his corporate lackeys decide to do. After all... he's returned before. Happy 20th anniversary "new Who".