UPPER TIERS BLOG: HOW I WOULD FIX DOCTOR WHO

Sorry. More Doctor Who. I've had a chance to reflect on that first episode, and watched it again with Sanja yesterday. Well, almost. The first 10 minutes annoyed her so much that she chose to nap through the rest. Bear in mind, she used to love the show.

So, I was thinking - hypothetically - what I would do if I was in charge, and where do I think the show is going wrong?

Here's how I'd fix it - and whether, were Hell to freeze over, I would take the job if offered.

KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE #1

Doctor Who is a family show. What does that mean? It means something for everyone – but it doesn’t mean that the bits for younger viewers are off-putting to older viewers. And vice-versa. 

It has become a properly schizophrenic show. Kids aren’t idiots. Well, not all kids. Some are. They don’t need hyperactive storytelling and acting. They don’t need fart jokes to keep their interest. They just want good stories that they can follow, with characters they understand.

In Doctor Who now you get complex adult ideas butting up against toilet humour. Most kids shows I’ve worked on have been more emotionally complex and mature than Doctor Who can be now. 

But - and I'll explore this a bit later - is family viewing over? We still watch TV with our 20 year-old, but that's only because she's a bit of a shut-in like us. The rest of the kids are out with friends. When she's not watching telly with us she'll be in her room watching shows we'd never watch.

She did watch Doctor Who with us - and said tentatively that she enjoyed it - but only because I think she couldn't be bothered to slope off back upstairs after watching The Yellowjackets finale with us. She came back down when we were bingeing Adolescence.

Which is PHENOMENAL telly, incidentally; relevant to older families, and not a single fart joke in sight. I even laughed a couple of times; at things that weren't forced, or slapstick, but rooted in character.

KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE #2

Doctor Who is a legacy show, but it’s trying to have its cake and eat it.

It’s trying to say it’s still the same show it always was – sequels to a 50 year-old episode! Mentions of Susan! The return of Mel! – while clearly not being the same show at all. Do you want a new audience, or do you want to court the old audience? You want both at the same time, because you’re terrified about the ratings? Oh. Not sure that's going to work this way.

Here’s a thing: audiences, whether they grew up on Doctor Who or not, just want good stories, told well. That’s it.

All you’re doing with the Easter eggs and continuity is telling the older audience to watch, and then pushing them away by making a show that you’re also making very clear isn’t made for them anymore. Literally by telling them that in interviews. It's gaslighting!

That’s a huge part of the schism in the audience – and the utter rage some sectors of the older audience feel when they do tune in. They feel betrayed because on the one hand they’re being told it’s the same old show, when on the other hand it clearly isn’t anymore. I don’t even know what it is now. They feel angry, but aren't emotionally literate enough to articulate why, so blame it on the casting and the message.

I honestly think a lot of the deeply unpleasant "woke" accusations would go away if the show was just a bit more focused, and a little bit more inviting and inclusive of that older audience. Which is ironic, given how hard it hits inclusivity now.

It doesn't mean casting only white, straight, actors. It just means - and I hate to say it - making a better show. Not even the bigots will care if it's good.

Stranger Things is genius in how it manages to appeal to cross-generational audiences, with identifiable characters and storylines for every audience, nostalgia for the oldies, but with modern storytelling.

THE TONE

For me, a show that gets tone absolutely right is the first season of The Mandalorian. It’s tough, gritty – but it has a cute character who’s funny and in every scene, pretty much. Also, the humour comes organically from the world – I laughed hard in season one when the Jawas wanted Mando to fetch a big, hairy, egg for them. He nearly died getting it back, and all they did was crack it open and start eating the inside. All witnessed by this stoic, faceless, character.

That whole episode is kind of forgotten, given it’s not a huge mythos/arc ep – but it’s so clever in that there are big character and story moments woven into this absolutely ridiculous quest. It’s genius; it hits that ‘something-for-everyone’ note without veering from one extreme to another at the drop of a hat. It feels cohesive, rather than two completely different shows competing with one another.

The humour in modern Doctor Who often feels so forced, and doesn't come from character. So, it feels dumbed-down. There's a difference when it's a character who does or says funny things because that's who they are.

Moffat - who I had issues with, especially in how he wrote female characters - is a great comic writer. His Doctors were funny because they WERE. The humour came from character.

There's a rule of comedy that humour either derives from putting a funny character in serious situations, or putting a serious character in funny situations. One or the other - not both at the same time! You want someone calling The Doctor out for his behaviour, or The Doctor calling out somebody else's behaviour.

There were only ever flickers of it in RTD's original run.

In the episode Fear Her - otherwise one of the worst-regarded eps of Doctor Who ever - there's this tiny character beat where the Doctor and Rose are speaking with a worried mother as the Doctor is eating something from a jar with his fingers. Rose just quietly shakes her head at him to get him to stop. Amazing. I wish we'd had more of that then.

One of my favourite ever lines in anything ever was when Capaldi said to Clara: "You look nice. Have you had a wash?"

It's genius. Funny, but rooted in character. It's rude, but it's rude because he's an alien. It's lightyears away from the 15th Doctor whooping about Space Babies.

See also when Tom Baker said in City of Death "Well, you're a beautiful woman, probably."

I steal that gag ALL the time in my scripts, because it's so utterly perfect.

STOP WORRYING ABOUT THE FUTURE OF THE BBC

I think… this is part of what has gone wrong. The BBC is panicking. I know this first-hand – they can see the writing is on the wall for the license fee, and already they barely have enough money to make shows.

They’re trying desperately to win over the next generation of viewers with Doctor Who, but – even though he has a ton of experience writing for kids – RTD seems to be trying too hard. There’s a desperation to it. That first episode was too much noise and bluster, all hyperactive editing, seemingly terrified that the audience will switch off or look at their phones if there isn't something LOUD happening every 30 seconds, instead of gripping them with story and mystery. It's all so on-the-nose and... I find it a bit embarrassing that international audiences are watching it thinking this is how we think sci-fi should be.

How many other shows bang on about their need to attract younger audiences? The BBC seems to be putting its entire future in the hands of Doctor Who. Just let it be a good show, instead of forcing it to flail around in a panic.

That’s what the show feels like more than anything now – a manifestation of the BBC’s internal panic over its own future.

INTERNAL CONSISTENCY

I get that Doctor Who is – at its core – an anthology show. It goes from one completely different world or time to another from week to week. But… something has felt off. It feels like a bunch of different shows with recurring characters than one consistent series. Different tones, different genres, but not even the Doctor feels consistent from week to week. There's nothing else to thread it all together, barring the TARDIS.

During the first couple of Moffat seasons, the show had a beautiful, storybook, kind of photography and lighting – dark, but lush, and it’s my favourite era visually. I even think it’s one of the things much of the Jodie Whittaker era got right – it LOOKED gorgeous.

Somehow the show looks smaller and cheaper now, despite having a much bigger budget. Again, that feels like a misplaced attempt to court a younger audience - we have to be BIG! But it's trying to be big visually and failing.

Also, the music feels horribly dated. Sorry, Murray Gold. You write great themes, but the incidental music often sets my teeth on edge. Another area in which the Whittaker era was superior for me.

STOP TRYING TO MAKE THE DOCTOR SOMEONE THE AUDIENCE WOULD WANT TO BE MATES WITH

The Doctor should be a weirdo. I like Ncuti Gatwa. I liked Jodie Whittaker. But… neither is selling me that they’re a thousand year-old alien genius. That’s the show; that is who the show is about. It’s the USP; a regular person traveling with this dangerous maniac.

Smith and Capaldi are my favourite modern era Doctors, because they embodied that so perfectly. Both humour and drama came from them being at odds with normality – either through Smith’s awkwardness and intensity or Capaldi’s rudeness and rage.

Gatwa has had a few BRILLIANT moments where he lets that through, showed some of his darkness, but the high-kicking and chuckling and crying… it’s just not saying alien to me. It feels like being trapped in a lift with somebody who has been on a sugar binge.

The darkness isn’t there all the time, simmering beneath the surface; it comes and goes. Whittaker just felt like a default, half-arsed, attempt to rewrite Tennant’s matey Doctor.

Gravitas! That’s the word. Or ‘mavitas’, for pity's sake – the Doctors should have that in spades. And Whittaker and Gatwa haven’t had it for me, talented and charismatic as they are. Great actors, but maybe wrong for this role. And no, I'm not advocating that all Doctors need to be white, straight, men. Just someone with a bit of heft. Someone a tiny bit scary, I think.

Someone you wouldn't want to be trapped in a lift either, but for very different reasons.

SLOW DOWN

Seriously, that first new episode ricochets from one moment to another. It’s full of ideas, but they come at you so fast it feels chaotic.

And, again, you have these weird tonal juxtapositions – a very CBBC opening… concluding with the bad guy turning out to be an “incel”, who gets turned into a sperm and hoovered up. Yes, that’s funny… but also… who’s your audience here?! It all happens so fast there’s no time to process anything.

Also, this was the companion’s ex-boyfriend. She’s just killed him, and she and the Doctor laugh and run away. I mean… hello? Is nobody flagging this up? Tonally, where does that sit with the rest of the ep?

And somehow… the pacing is simultaneously fast and sluggish. 

I like mad shows – Severance is one of the maddest shows I’ve ever seen – but it feels like it knows what it wants to be at every moment. It’s SO carefully written and considered. Doctor Who just feels like a splurge of anything goes, and so it becomes an unenjoyable watch. It doesn’t feel curated or constructed – just a stream-of-consciousness. 

Which also means, stop cramming 50 ideas into each episode. The brilliance of the Mandalorian is how simple the storytelling is. Some of those episodes are just 30 minutes, but feel so much more expansive for their simplicity. Doctor Who is now breathlessly racing from one not-fully-explained idea to another.

And while we’re on it, why is Doctor Who still only 45-ish minutes long? It’s the streaming era – 45 minutes is an outdated model now, written for an American hour, with ads.

All the shows we’re watching at the minute – Yellowjackets, Severance et al – are around an hour per episode. So, make it an hour for god’s sake – that’d solve a lot of the issues with the pacing and give more space for characterisation in-between all the running around.

Or better yet – go the Disney route and don’t have a fixed run time. Let the episodes be as long or as short as they need to be.

MAKE BETTER USE OF THAT BUDGET

Here’s the thing… despite an injection of Disneymoney, Doctor Who still cannot compete with big, American, shows. It looks cheap and small. I counted up the number of sets in the opening episode, and there are basically about half a dozen, if that. 

Doctor Who is being written for a much bigger budget – it thinks it has a budget three times the size. But because it doesn’t, because it’s trying to do these big, massive, set-pieces without the actual money to do them, it comes off looking cheap and cheerful.

Back in the 70s, during the Phillip Hinchcliffe era, they went gothic in part because they knew the BBC were better at doing period dramas than they were sci-fi. They wrote for the means and funds they had available.

Doctor Who isn’t doing that anymore. It’s trying to compete with shows that are significantly better funded, and it’s backfiring. Ambition is great, but it needs to work within its means. Spend the money better instead of trying to stretch it so thinly.

STOP LAUNCHING THE SERIES WITH THE WEAKEST EPISODES

Moffat got this right: start with the Daleks! Or The Doctor being shot! Start with something as massive as a finale. Draw people in that way.

JUST REST IT

I think the damage is done. It needs a break, and in a few years it someone needs to be put in charge who can reimagine it in a radical way – preferably somebody without any of the Doctor Who baggage. Somebody who actually stops and sits down and discusses what the show is, and who it’s aimed at, before putting pen to paper. 

BUT! HERE'S ANOTHER THING...

I think we all have to accept that the TV landscape has changed over the past 20 years. The new Doctor Who is broadly being written for a world that no longer exists. Even back then they were saying family viewing no longer exists. Somehow, Doctor Who managed to buck that trend, but things have changed too much now.

I’ve been on the inside of it – the BBC is dying. British TV IS dying. Or, at least, contracting rapidly. There’s none of the money there was even five years ago. There’s huge pressure on every single show to be a big, international, hit. Every show now needs international money to get made. It needs to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. But I don’t think the BBC has yet learned how to do that. 

Look at the shows of recent years that have been buzz-y. They’re things like Adolescence, Severance, The White Lotus, Stranger Things. One of the BBC’s biggest, buzziest, shows is Bluey-  which is for little kids. Yes, they  all need to do well, but there’s no pressure to somehow simultaneously court a CBeebies audience and an adult audience AND teenagers. They know their specific audience.

A huge chunk of the audience who might’ve once watched Doctor Who just aren’t going to because they’ve got all these other screens vying for their attention, so you need to focus it towards an audience that will watch it. The competition is immense now. Even Marvel movies are struggling – but then something like the Minecraft movie, which crosses over with one of those other screen properties (a video game), has been huge. Biggest film of this year. 

The BBC – plus ITV et al – are trying to do what they can to survive, but I think they know, deep down, that they’re fighting a losing battle. There is such huge pressure on Doctor Who in particular to be an enormous success, and all things to everyone, instead of just another TV show, that anything other than huge success feels like an utter failure. AND because it’s so intrinsic to the BBC there are those who revel in its failure, who cheer it to the gallows. 

WOULD I DO IT?

I nearly wrote on Sarah Jane Adventures. Did you know that? And then Elizabeth Sladen passed away. I was gutted. That's the closest I've come to writing for anything Doctor Who-related, given that Big Finish completely and repeatedly ignore my agent's emails.

It wouldn't ever happen, but let's say hypothetically I was offered the job of showrunning Doctor Who... would I do it?

Honestly? Probably not. Firstly, it's a lot of work. A life-consuming amount. The last couple of years of my career pre-covid - where I was working as lead writer on several shows simultaneously - were relentless, and I was so wired and anxious the whole time. I'm done with that now. I'm done with TV people. I just want to earn enough to pay the bills, on my terms. I don't have any ambition in TV anymore. I've been too burnt by it.

Plus Doctor Who requires the showrunner to be a showMAN (or person) to a certain degree. I wouldn't fancy that. Especially not when articles like this one lay much of the blame at your feet when it all goes wrong. Especially when a lot of the success or failure is outside of your control. I'm sure RTD is just trying to make the best show he can, yet he constantly gets called a woke, arrogant, egomaniac.

But ultimately, I think the era of TV that Doctor Who belongs to is done. It's over. I don't know - given all of the above - whether you could bring it back and make it the success that the BBC seem to want - or, rather, need - it to be. That's the real elephant in the room, the thing nobody really wants to admit. This is a bigger story than Doctor Who - it's where the British TV industry is at overall, and nobody knows how bad it's going to get, or what it'll look like, when this period of transition is over. Doctor Who might just be the most high-profile example of that struggle.