DOCTOR WHO... OOOAAAAAAH THERE....!

Ohhhhh… Happy Monday!

Can’t remember if I told you, but we’ve had Sanja’s family staying since last Tuesday. It was a bit last-minute.

My mum got taken to the hospital AGAIN on Sunday morning, after only being back at her nursing home since Tuesday. They didn’t keep her in thankfully, but it has been a kind of chaotic week or two months or years or so.

Sanja’s dad goes home today, and then tomorrow we’re FINALLY off to meet Grandson #2. On Wednesday I dare say we’ll be trying to claw back some of our depleted social battery.

I said last week that we’d do a Biffo’s Brain on Thursday, but I have to go into London for a rare in-person meeting, so it’ll likely be Friday or Sunday instead. I’ll keep you posted. I might be sharing some Digi Level 2 bits with some of you later this week though. Yadda yadda yaddoooo.

NEXT WEEK… life – and Digi/BYAMPOD schedules - will hopefully be back to some sort of normal. If not, I shall be jumping out of a high window somewhere because… damn.

"I AM DW"

So anyway… Doctor Who. Sorry. I wish I didn't care so much, but this is going to be a long ramble, I fear. Also; spoilers.

I love Doctor Who. You know that, right? It’s woven through my memories and my life from as early as I can remember. It’s why I became a writer. It ignited my imagination. It’s my comfort telly.

Did you watch it at the weekend? Do you even care about Doctor Who? You may wish to clock out at this point, but at the very least, you are unlikely to have missed that a new series started over the weekend with a two-episode double bill.

I have to say, on first watch, I really enjoyed both eps. But… I watched them initially on my own. Watching them again later, with other people, was… a very different experience.

Sanja’s dad, brother and sister-in-law hated it, to the point that her brother couldn’t last the full episode, and had to leave the room, because it was “so dumb”. He seemed genuinely angry about it. He's usually so mild-mannered, I was taken aback by his reaction.

The last time he came to stay, Sanja’s dad binged an entire Peter Capaldi season, but these new episodes were – to him - terrible.

One of our daughters thought it was stupid, another messaged me to say it felt to her like they’re making Doctor Who for little kids now, another was just confused by it, and not in a good way… And even Sanja, who had liked the talking babies, struggled with the second episode – not least the song-and-dance routine at the end...

I dare say that subsequent episodes will settle down a bit, and display the full range of genres that Doctor Who is capable of - as well as the breadth of Russell T Davies' enviable talent - but first impressions count, and my first-hand experience of other people’s first impressions, across a fairly broad demographic, was not good news.

I was pretty much alone in saying I’d liked the two eps unequivocally.

WOKE UP 

Of course, there has been a LOT of chatter online about it. Massive amounts, not least because the marketing and hype has been all-encompassing.

I’ve never seen such a vociferous reaction to any piece of pop culture ever.

Not even Star Wars. I’m seeing real rage – on Twitter, Facebook, the main Doctor Who forum – and for once it seems to be far outweighing those expressing positive views… apart from critics, who seemed to universally love it in advance reviews.

A lot of it obviously comes from those accusing the show of being too “woke” (I had someone tweet at me calling it “degenerate”, which seems somewhat excessive), but I don’t know if any of those people had even watched it, because the first two episodes didn’t feel any more ‘woke’ to me than the show did back in 2005.

I think the issue here is that they’re just *perceiving* it as more ‘woke’.

Nevertheless, the inevitable racism and anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric is overshadowing, and getting mixed up with, what appears to be a very real seam of legitimate criticism and disappointment, that has nothing to do with race, or sexuality, or gender. I worry that a lot of valid criticism, from regular people, is getting dismissed as ‘anti-woke’ bigotry, when it's nothing of the sort.

It happened quite a bit when Jodie Whittaker was The Doctor; it was often difficult for people to say they might’ve found that era, y’know, boring, because they’d frequently be accused of not liking it due to The Doctor now being a woman.

It’s telling that when the topic of The Doctor being a woman was first mooted in the 1980s nobody batted an eyelid. 

People should have a right to be disappointed by something – especially a version of something they have loved their entire life – without being accused of bigotry or prejudice. Sure, we all have subconscious prejudices, but my family’s reactions had nothing to do with race, or gender, or anything other than they didn’t think these two episodes were very good or made with them in mind.

So much of the messaging leading up to this new series, the publicity around it – typically driven by the questions of journalists looking for a clickable headline – has had a strong focus on it being more a progressive show than it was in the past, presumably because it’s 2024 and everything has to be couched in the language of The Culture Wars.

2005, when the series first came back, seems with hindsight like a much kinder, slightly less divided, world and you could have, say, a pansexual character without it becoming a topic of controversy.

The more I read over the weekend, the more I got a sort of sinking feeling that something has gone badly wrong in the messaging around Doctor Who this time, and that it’s now backfiring on the show.

It has even – coupled to the reactions of family - started to colour my opinion of those first two episodes.

DOCTOR POO

Maybe it WAS a bad idea to kick off a new era – the first truly international launch for Doctor Who – with an episode featuring talking babies, a monster made out of snot, and a climax involving a massive space fart from an arse-shaped space station.

On paper, I should love those things – and I did, for the most part. But also… I did find the snot stuff (a "snot-twist", if you will) a bit much, even for me, so no wonder others were appalled. I’ve seen how people respond to poo jokes in Digi… and that’s a long way from being a flagship family drama on BBC1.

Maybe ending the second ep with that musical number was just too left-field. I don’t dislike the idea at all in principle, but I thought the song was pretty weak, it came out of nowhere, and it didn’t feel like the uplifting celebration they were clearly going for. It was just jarring.

It's always wearisome when somebody calls my work ‘self-indulgent’, because I don't even really know what they mean when they say that. It always felt like a lazy criticism. Looking back though, that song DID feel self-indulgent.

So now I’ve kind of settled on the opinion that as much as I enjoyed the episode, and appreciated how stupid it was, Space Babies was completely the wrong first ep to kick off the series, especially for its Disney+ launch.

If you don't care about this one way or another, I'm happy for you.

FLEXI

While I’ve always thought Doctor Who’s strength was the flexibility of its format, starting with an episode that is SO far from the show’s origins now seems risky to the point of self-sabotage.

But.... surely the response to those two episodes isn't what they intended or expected?! Was it?! Is there something cleverer going on, some oblique strategy that we can't see?

It remains to be seen what effect it has on the rest of the series, but the brilliant pre-release marketing promised something far different – more epic, less quirky – than the small, self-contained, shamelessly silly and hyperactive episode that we got. Yes, a daft first ep is typical of the Russell T Davies format… but they were never *this* daft.

If my daughters – who were SO excited for the new series, because they loved Ncuti Gatwa in Sex Education – found it too much, then god knows what Middle America would’ve made of it, or Marvel fans, or Star Wars fans, or Game of Thrones fans.

I think what really concerns me is that RTD has stated that he wants a slice of that Stranger Things or Star Trek/Star Wars/Marvel pie for Doctor Who – which implied something more along the lines of those franchises - but those shows are not like the incarnation of Doctor Who we got at the weekend. Not even slightly. They aim older and broader.

STRANGER STILL

Take Stranger Things, the show RTD most wants Doctor Who to be seen alongside.

The genius of it is, firstly, its nostalgia. I’ve read the original pitch document, and it is very specifically targeting a certain age demographic with fond memories of the 1980s, who can now watch TV with their kids… and it began at a time when 80s nostalgia was big among younger generations (they've moved onto the 90s and 00s now).

The stories are split between different demographic groups; kids, teens, middle-aged parents. There are focus characters for multiple demographic groups. The story is one big movie. It’s funny without being childish. It’s scary, exciting, there’s romance, heartbreak, action. It’s all very, very carefully considered, and executed brilliantly.

Doctor Who is very much not that. Now, with hindsight, it’s hard to say who Space Babies and The Devil’s Chord actually were for, other than Russell T Davies. It feels like it has misjudged the potential audience, and genuinely does feel like a deliberate attempt to push certain people away. Almost as if it revels in that.

And, again, I say this in spite of enjoying the eps; I'm just now looking at the bigger picture, with the benefit of hindsight.

So yes, my perverse initial reaction to both eps was “These are ridiculous… so many people are going to hate it… and I love that…”… but now I’ve started to worry, because I don’t actually want people to hate Doctor Who, and certainly not in the numbers that now seem to be hating it. 

I want it to be embraced, for people to enjoy the show I’ve loved literally my entire life, even when it’s rubbish, to see what I see in it. I don’t want anyone to feel excluded by it, and I don’t want it to end up cancelled, because then certain types will feel they’ve won.

STRAIGHT UP

There was a Metro article that went viral over the weekend, with the headline that Doctor Who was never intended for “straight white males”.

Jinx Monsoon – who I thought was brilliant as Maestro (Sanja found the character too shouty) – was quoted as saying "For every transphobic, racist, bigoted 'Doctor Who' fan that we lose this season, there are going to be three to five new fans who are coming in for the representation. So to those fans — who are not fans — I say, 'Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.'"

Then there were reports that the sonic screwdriver got redesigned because the old one looked too much like a gun, Davies’ own assertion that Davros will no longer be disfigured and in a wheelchair, as the “crippled villain” is an ableist trope, the excellent Ncuti Gatwa speaking of ‘white mediocrity’ being more celebrated than black talent, etc. etc.

And those quotes – often off the back of questions from journalists – were then taken and amplified by other journalists, and would get passed around online, and amplified further, until that’s all the message became – that the Doctor Who that a massive part of the audience grew up loving was in some way wrong, and you were wrong for liking it, and the show was only about some ‘woke agenda’.

It's important to consider all of these things in 2024, and now is the right time to carefully evolve the stories we tell, but… the messaging around Doctor Who is piling up, becoming compounded, and through that snowball effect it’s starting to come across as tone deaf as Hilary Clinton’s ‘basket of deplorables’ speech.

Instead of reaching out to those Trump supporters who weren’t necessarily on the extremes, the ones who just wanted an alternative, to shake things up, Clinton alienated them. I fear the same might have already happened with this new series of Doctor Who.

Some people, who have loved this show their whole lives – whether it’s for 61 years or 18 – risk receiving the message that they’re no longer welcome. And that seems bizarre when the episodes also contain 60-year-old continuity references.

I dunno. I feel weirdly rattled by it all, by the culture war elements, but also by the temperature of the discourse around it. It was just this silly little show I grew up watching and reading about, and maybe it was never meant to be the biggest TV show in the world.

I hope I’m wrong, and it’s all just online guff… and that the majority of those who saw it did just enjoy it for what it is, like I did.

That wasn’t my experience of watching it with family, but we’re just one family.

So, I dunno.  

Silly Doctor Who.