These archived essays were written by your editors in a younger and more innocent time and place. We present them as a time capsule of a sillier day, and one in which it seemed as though Doctor Who‘s final days on TV had been and gone…
An issue of SFX published in November 1999 carried an interview with the supposed new producer of Doctor Who. Amongst predictable statements that the forthcoming movie would feature time travel, dark horror and the Master, he also reminded readers that the movie’s prime obstacle would be in reaching a new audience. But hang on a minute – this was just five months after Comic Relief correctly predicted that the majority of British viewers would pay to see new Who on their screens. Is the wider Doctor Who audience dead or alive?
The last producer of the programme certainly believed so. The McGann Movie was so pre-occupied with introducing the Doctor Who formula that it left nothing beyond a standard concept to warrant a new series – and as the programme’s 1989 axing had already proved, the title and concept are not enough to keep the show on air. Ironically, The Curse of Fatal Death took a fresh and comic approach to the formula and proved considerably more popular with fans and casual viewers alike, despite not including a moment of character introduction or links to the established canon: the very things that Phil Segal and his apparent successor deemed most important. Their understanding is that casual viewers have no idea what Doctor Who is. They are dangerously wrong. The majority of countries around the world are fed a regular stream of repeats, whilst in Britain the popular programmes Blue Peter, Whatever You Want and The National Lottery have all featured Doctor Who within the last year. Trailers for BBC Choice, Children’s BBC and The Best of British have even included a Dalek or two. So what has given the producers this misconception?
The 1990s have indisputably belonged to the fans. Fan-Fiction and audio-visual spin-offs developed into the licensed Virgin novels and Reeltime Pictures releases, all exploring the mature, complex drama that Season 26 had begun to exhibit. Yet any new producer must realise that new millennial-Who must be tailored for the public, and understand that this type of adult-Who seen in the BBC novels and BBV videos is not what fans really believe a new TV series should be. As Comic Relief and Big Finish have recently demonstrated, the best way for Doctor Who to return would be to throw off continuity headaches and nostalgically model itself on ’70s television aimed at a family audience – as though the ’80s and ’90s had never happened. The latest scheduling of repeats into the weekday evening ‘cult’ slot shows that the BBC are sill incorrectly aiming the show at fans; but we’re in a considerably better position to see the continuation of Doctor Who on TV than we were ten years ago… provided that our ‘new’ producer realises that “nostalgic” means Phantasmagoria, not Dimensions In Time.
