[A] remembrance is... a reconstruction of the past achieved with data
borrowed from the present, a reconstruction prepared... by reconstructions of
earlier periods wherein past images had already been altered’ (Halbwachs 1952,
69)
Later this year, Doctor Who
will reach its 50th anniversary, a major milestone that few
television programmes have achieved. Although partially overshadowed by the
announcement that current 11th Doctor Matt Smith will be leaving
(and the now-traditional media interest in who will replace him), the 50th
anniversary will see a range of different celebrations, from a special episode
through a BBC-organised convention. As long-term fans of the programme know, however,
we have been here before: Doctor Who
celebrated its 10th, 20th, 25th and 30th
anniversaries with similarly well-anticipated television specials,
commemorative magazines and/or events. As each of those anniversaries has demonstrated,
the history of Doctor Who is in
almost constant revision, with reconstructions of narrative conceits and
alterations of past fictional events a de
rigeur feature of dramatic anniversary commemorations.
Over a series of three blog posts, I want to think about how Doctor Who’s anniversary celebrations have
set up recurring traits around anniversary television programmes. Specifically,
I want to think about how fictional celebrations such as The Three Doctors (1973), The
Five Doctors (1983), Remembrance of
the Daleks (1988), Silver Nemesis
(1988), Dimensions in Time (1993) and
Scream of the Shalka (2003) created
their own remembrances of the programme’s history – both in terms of narrative
(the fictional world of the Doctor, the TARDIS etc.) and behind-the-scenes
production information.
The media representation and commemoration of ‘real world’ historical events
(such as the Second World War) tends to take place through news and
documentary-led programmes, and such programmes manufacture their remembrances
through a combination of archive footage, dramatic recreation, voiceover, and (often
temporally disingenuous) editing patterns. These manufactured media histories, then,
renew, challenge and efface real memories, creating a collective public memory
of the original event – as I was writing this first blog, for example, it was
claimed that collective memory of the First World War has likely been shaped
more by Blackadder Goes Forth than
any textbook or documentary.
This, then, suggests the importance of media constructions to public
memory of ‘real world’ histories. Using Doctor
Who, however, these blog posts will explore how anniversary fictions can reproduce
and reassert particular elements of its fictional dramatic history, while
promotional materials support a particular mediation and representation of the
programme’s production history. By looking at these specific stories, it is
clear that anniversary dramas retell stories about their fictional pasts, adding
a new veneer of meaning in each retelling, and representing subtle shifts in
the collective memory through each recreation.
10th anniversary:
The Three Doctors (1973)
If you’ve read this far, I’m going to assume you have a basic sense of
what Doctor Who is: a time travel
drama aimed at family audiences, that was first broadcast on Saturday 23rd
November 1963, and grew in popularity due (at least in part) to the
introduction of the Daleks in December 1963.
The first major anniversary story is 1973s The Three Doctors, although a case could be made for ‘World’s End’,
the first episode of The Dalek Invasion
of Earth, given it was broadcast on 21st November 1964 and is
the end of the first major arc of the programme, reintroducing the hugely popular
Daleks (who had been killed off at the end of their first story) and ending
with the departure of the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan (Carole Ann Ford). Yet although
it falls around the right time of year, and features returning villains (subsequent
conceits of the anniversary episode), the story was not designed to commemorate
the programme’s one year anniversary.
The Three Doctors, however, was
produced as a deliberate attempt at commemoration, bringing together the First
(William Hartnell), Second (Patrick Troughton) and Third (Jon Pertwee) Doctors
to battle a Time Lord villain, Omega. The story is a solid example of Pertwee’s
era as the Doctor, a partly-Earthbound action-adventure romp, featuring most of
the regular supporting cast from UNIT (the United Nations Intelligence
Taskforce), a military force designed to combat the alien and unusual, led by
Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (Nicholas Courtney), and featuring Sergeant Benton
(John Levene) and Jo Grant (Katy Manning). This Earthbound focus was a
production conceit for budgetary and story reasons: the Doctor’s memories of
time travel taken away by the Time Lords and the TARDIS’s dematerialisation
circuit removed.
Unlike traditional ideas of media anniversaries, which are based around
the proximity to an actual date, The
Three Doctors was broadcast as the first story of the 10th
season of the show, with episode one debuting on 30th December 1972,
almost a year ahead of the anniversary. Most journalism-based media anniversary
programmes also make specific reference to the period of time that has passed:
but The Three Doctors has not
narrative reference to ten years having passed, or even that the adventure
takes place in 1973.
That said, several anniversary themes are established that recur through
future programmes:
The multiple Doctor
/ the ‘absent’ Doctor: the programme is built around the combination of
Hartnell, Troughton and Pertwee in both production and narrative terms. It is
the first time Doctor Who would
revisit its past in such an overt manner, but by no means the last; it was also
designed to be the first time all three Doctors shared screen space and time,
although due to illness Hartnell’s First Doctor is mostly ‘absent’ from the
reunion, delivering his lines via the TARDIS scanner. The Three Doctors also sets up the dramatic concept of rivalry and
competitiveness between the Doctor’s incarnations: the Second and Third Doctors
bicker throughout, while the First (who describes his ‘replacements’ as ‘a
dandy and clown’) acts as a drill sergeant in his cameos. Off-screen, the
Troughton-Pertwee relationship was cordial, but featured a clash of acting
styles, with Troughton more given to on-set improvisation.
The Time Lords: Ten years into
the programme, very little was known about the Doctor’s people, the Time Lords.
The Three Doctors establishes much
more information: Omega gave the Time Lords the power of time travel by
harnessing the power of a black hole; Omega is a hero on Gallifrey, the Time
Lord’s home; the Time Lords have a governing structure that includes a President
and a Chancellor; and there are ‘Laws of Time’ (the first of which is that Time
Lords should not meet their other incarnations)
References to a
shared narrative past: Anniversary programmes tend to be spaces where
particular views or perspectives on the past can be solidified: here, for
example, Benton and the Brigadier both recognise and reminisce about previous
adventures with the Second Doctor, most notably those involving villains such
as the Yeti and the Cybermen (in turn, these reconstruct a vision of Doctor Who that focuses on the
spectacular nature of the villains: something promotional materials such as the
10th anniversary magazine special would also focus on)
Narrative change: like The Dalek Invasion of Earth, The Three Doctors ends with a narrative
shift that affects the whole programme: the Time Lords return the Third
Doctor’s knowledge of time travel, and give him a new dematerialisation
circuit, allowing the programme to return to its earlier narrative structure of
off-world and Earth-bound adventures.
Promoting the
Anniversary: The Three Doctors was promoted with
features in the Radio Times, a
special celebratory magazine, appearances on Blue Peter and a special exhibition at the Science Museum in London
focus on the actors, crew, costumes and stories that defined the decade. Each
of these materials offered a stronger sense of the programme’s decade-long
success, the actors and crew involved, and the range of monsters the programme
was famous for. As such, these were more traditional media ‘anniversary’ celebrations,
pulling together strands from the previous ten years, rather than The Three Doctors’ narrative approach.
Next time: From The Five Doctors
(1983) to Silver Nemesis (1988)...
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