The Destruction Of The Daleks

Question: How many Dalek’s does it take to destroy a television show?
Answer: As many as Russel T. Davies can imagine.

I’ve been a fan of BBC’s time-travelling hero for longer than I can remember. Many of my childhood memories are punctuated my images of a white-suited Peter Davison standing against his TARDIS, and a cliffhanger at the end of every episode leading to a long wait until the next Saturday.

It was sad how Doctor Who fizzled out back in the late 80s and early 90s. Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy weren’t a patch on the previous inhabitants of the role, and the Paul McGann film that followed was so polished, so American, and most of all, so un-Who­ that it pains me to see his portrayal canonised as an official Doctor (although they were remakes of earlier William Hartnell stories, the two Peter Cushing films from the 1960s are more in key with the Who ethos; although a lack of BBC-involvement in those camp films practically excludes Cushing as an official Doctor).

So following 1996’s poor performing film, Doctor Who was all but extinct. Until the BBC – spearheaded by producer and head-writer Russel T. Davies – revived the character in 2005. The changes to the format of the show were many, intending to give the series the jump-start it needed to appeal to a 21st century audience.

Most importantly, the show is now comprised of standalone 1-hour episodes. Previously the format had always been 30-minute episodes, with between 3 and 5 episodes completing one story. Although you can understand the BBC’s motivation in this change – it makes the show more accessible to the casual viewer – it takes away one of the show’s most important trademarks: the cliffhanger ending. Many weeks of my youth were spent wondering how the Doctor (or one of his companions) would escape the peril that almost inevitably spelt death at the end of the last episode. These days, although there is a fair amount of peril to be found within an episode, it’s usually resolved fairly quickly, negating the need for schoolboys to spend the next 7 days imagining the outcome.

Where once the TARDIS was a source of perpetual randomness, the Doctor can now fully control his time-machine. Previously, the fact that he couldn’t accurately command where the TARDIS landed led to stories set on strange alien landscapes, new even to the Doctor. 21st Century Doctor Who removes this feature, and places the Doctor with a fully functioning time machine (except for the broken chameleon circuit which keeps the vessel in its iconic 1950s Police Box format).

So, now that the Doctor can now steer his TARDIS, the series gives us far too many earth-based episodes, either set amongst the chavs of Sarf Landon, or in – quite bizarrely – the Welsh city of Cardiff (the base of BBC Cymru Wales, who produce the show).

The third major change to the show is the re-introduction of the sonic screwdriver – the Doctor’s trusty tool that has a seemingly endless list of uses. Introduced by the second Doctor, the gizmo was written out of the series by the time of the fifth doctor, with the writing staff conceding that it was simply a plot device that was very limiting to the script. In Russel T. Davies’ Doctor Who, the sonic screwdriver is used relentlessly, assisting the Doctor in almost every situation. Again, this works against the show’s favour with the Doctor never really finding himself in peril. Lost your key? Sonic screwdriver. Close to death? Sonic screwdriver. Earth on the brink of extinction? Sonic screwdriver. It is the writer’s lazy way out of everything.

My final fault to be found in an otherwise excellent show is the overuse of its characters, most notably the antagonists, and especially the Daleks. In the good old days (nostalgia is never as good as it used to be), the Daleks would be used sparingly – probably as a result of limited BBC budgets. However, since the final episode of the ninth Doctor’s (Christopher Eccleston) run, the Daleks have been an all too common fixture of the series, with six episodes in the tenth Doctor’s (David Tennant) reign marking the most appearances the villains have ever had with one Doctor.

From the 1960s through the 1990s, a story featuring the Daleks would mean that the BBC props department would actually have to build the damn things. Nowadays, the availability of affordable CGI means that millions of Daleks can be written into a script – see the aforementioned episode Bad Wolf – without a thought for how this will destroy the character and effectively remove the terror that they once possessed. An appearance by the Daleks used to be a special thing – now they’re becoming like wallpaper.

Still, the future is rosy. Matt Smith has started his tenure as the eleventh Doctor, and his leggy assistant Amy Pond (Karen Gillan) marks a welcome change to the dumbed-down cockernee assistants of Eccleston and Tenant’s years. Things are looking good. I would say that Smith’s portrayal of the Doctor owes a fair deal to David Tenant, although this is probably down to him not fully finding his feet yet.

Now if the scriptwriters could just forget about the Daleks for a while - it should be moderation, not extermination.