Adventures in Space and Time
What sort of TV show is Doctor Who? And is it always the same show?
The Doctor (William Hartnell), Barbara (Jacqueline Hill), Ian (William Russell) and Susan (Carole Ann Ford) in The Mutants (aka The Daleks, 1963-64).
The celebrated Doctor Who screenwriter Malcolm Hulke once claimed that, in science fiction, there are only two stories: “They come to us or we go to them.”
We’ll get to whether that’s true or not presently. First, though, we need to ask a more fundamental question. Is Doctor Who even science fiction in the first place?
Early-1960s BBC drama boss Sydney Newman, arguably the series’ most prominent co-creator, didn’t want it to be. He insisted the programme should be as “rooted in reality” as possible, while early paperwork specified it should be “neither fantasy nor space travel nor science fiction”. But Newman’s Reithian ambition was to be upended after less than a month by the success of the Daleks – after which his diktat that the “outer-space stories must be based on factual knowledge” was jettisoned out of the nearest airlock.
The Doctor (Patrick Troughton) and Victoria (Deborah Watling) discover scary seaweed in Fury from the Deep (1968).
Pletrac (Peter Halliday), Vorg (Leslie Dwyer), Shirna (Cheryl Hall), Jo (Katy Manning) and the Doctor (Jon Pertwee) in Carnival of Monsters (1973).
His other central mission statement – “to bring history alive for the young” – lasted a little longer, before being quietly retired early in Patrick Troughton’s run. After that, the Doctor and his friends would still occasionally land in the pages of history, but would generally find themselves grappling with time-travelling monks and clockwork robots, as opposed to the machinations of Emperor Nero or Citizen Robespierre.