A Love Letter to Doctor Who
https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/sci-fi/david-tennant-jamie-oliver-doctor-who-inspiration-newsupdate/
I was on holiday with my family. Wales, sometime in the early 2000s. Can’t remember exactly where we were. I remember a grey shore and houses running along the beach. I remember a big jellyfish nestled in the sand, and my sister using sticks to try and get it out and put it into the sea. It was pale purple and blue, and all translucent. And it was huge. It looked like an alien.
We got it out, in the end. But we think it was dead.
Was it summer? I don’t know. Maybe. In Wales, one cannot always tell. It was windy, and maybe not so warm, because when we got back to the family friend’s house where we were staying, my sister and I got into the bath together, and you don’t really have baths in summer because it’s hot. I remember the bath because there was a television attached to a metal arm coming out of the wall, so you could watch television in the bath. I remember thinking that was very cool.
We had bubbles in the bath, and the tub was big. Or else, we were small. It was probably a mix of both. I had a bath last night but it’s a small bath so I have to choose if I have my chest under the water or my legs, and I also have to fold my legs under myself if I want them to fit in the bath at all.
So – there we were – me and my sister, in the bath, in Wales, with the television hanging overhead. And we were transfixed. Doctor Who was on. Christopher Eccleston was The Doctor, and the episode was ‘The Empty Child’. Ah – now I can check the date. 21st May 2005. So it wasn’t summer after all.
- Tony Blair was Prime Minister. Charles and Camilla got married. Footballer George Best died. J. K. Rowling released Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. And Doctor Who was revived from the dead, having been discontinued after ‘Survival’, the episode that aired on the 6th of December 1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
So. ‘The Empty Child’.
WW2. The Blitz.
We meet a child with a gas mask on asking for his mother.
“Are you my mummy?”
His mother, who is hiding from him beneath the kitchen table.
Then a room in a hospital, filled with patients lying in bed, gas masks fused to their faces. And a most terrible transformation of a man’s face into that same gas mask…
The episode was a two-parter, so it ended on a cliffhanger, then my sister and I were toweled dry by our mother, and then we went to bed.
Doctor Who defined my childhood. I say that utmost sincerity. It is difficult to describe how obsessive I was. Maybe it’ll be better illustrated with photos of my Doctor Who scrapbook (entailing copious admissions of love for David Tennant, who played The Doctor from 2005-2010).
Doctor Who was the reason I became an actor, if only to, one day, act alongside David Tennant. The first film I ever made was a Doctor Who spoof episode (watch at your peril). After everything that has happened, all the meanderings along the way, the tears, the failures – now I am here, with a movie coming out in the next few months. I couldn’t have dreamed of this if I’d tried.
And we all watched it, you know. Pretty much everyone I knew watched Doctor Who. That was how it was. It didn’t matter that it was sci-fi, it was just what you watched on a Saturday night after you’d rushed through dinner in anticipation. It was what you looked forward to at the end of the week. And it really was good. There were a few other shows that fit in the same sort of category as Doctor Who, including ‘Merlin’, and, later, ‘Sherlock’. But neither of these stand up to the sheer genius, and success, of Doctor Who at its peak. It was adventure, comedy, blood-curdling terror, science, love, mystery – God, it was a whirlwind! It was even a stretch, at points, to call it ‘family’ television at all (lest we forget the nightmares we had after watching ‘Blink’?).
This all begs the question: what is the state of Family Television? We have witnessed the advent of streaming, and all of its deliciously tantalising offerings. It is now possible, and indeed plausible, that all members of a household could watch a different show, all at the same time: ‘Emily in Paris’ on an iPad, with air-pods in; ‘Stranger Things’ on a Macbook in someone’s room; football on the flat-screen TV; TikToks on a smartphone. Doctor Who was so very groundbreaking because it appealed to me and my siblings AND my parents. We watched together, as a family. Doctor Who was a shared experience. We bonded over it, and even during the toughest of times, the most divided of times, we’d still sit down to watch Doctor Who.
Is there any need for ‘family television’ anymore, when we can all watch whatever we like, whenever we want to? Cable television is dying. We are drowning in choice. The thing that defined Doctor Who, and which is difficult to replicate today, is how integral LACK of choice was to its success. What else was there to watch on a Saturday night, aside from rewatching a scratched DVD or VHS for the 5th time? No. It was Doctor Who, or nothing.
Lack of choice meant ease of choice, and thus less time, less mental energy spent deciding what to watch, and, most likely, fewer arguments about who wanted to watch what.
Too much choice can be stifling. Rather than giving us a sense of freedom, excessive choice can make us catatonic, and when we finally come to making a decision, the constant reminder that other choices may have been ‘better’ choices can lead to us feeling constantly dissatisfied.
David Lynch was known to eat the same meals every day, apart from when he was traveling. He said that this freed up his mind for more important endeavours, artistic endeavours in particular. I love to cook, so I won’t be likely to follow Lynch’s advice in this specific sense, but it is true that having a stable routine, and limiting fruitless distraction, can be nothing but a positive decision.
Fruitless distraction is, of course, your phone. You don’t notice it at first. A quick scroll here, a smidgen of jealousy there, a glance at this and that upon waking in the morning, a few hours sat on the sofa with your head deep in a screen. It is time passing without us noticing it. It is being inspired by a photo, or a short film, or a painting, but then scrolling past it, and forgetting that we were ever inspired in the first place. Then it is another screen. A streaming service with a thousand shows to choose from. What to pick? Then it’s an advert during an episode. Buy this! You need it!
We are being consistently distracted from the good things of life. I do not know what it is like to grow up now. It must be difficult, I think. It must be difficult not to get drawn into the terrible distraction of cyberspace. It’s so colourful, so loud, so intoxicating. It must be difficult to choose who you want to be, or what it is you really want to do, because all these choices are being thrown at you, all at once. It is an exceedingly claustrophobic world, the world we live in.
Besides all the roads I went down, all the dead ends, I always knew. I always knew I wanted to act. The choice had been made, in that bathtub in front of ‘The Empty Child’, on the old sofa in my family home watching ‘Blink’, in my bed, staring at the poster of David Tennant I had on the wall. I liked other things, sure – I liked writing, I liked cooking, I liked dancing – but that 45-minute slot on a Saturday night had my heart. I’d go to bed after watching Doctor Who, with no phone, no laptop, and I’d dream about the big screen.
The message here is to be on your phone a little less and daydream a little more. And I suppose this is also a love letter to Doctor Who. Thank you. I will be forever grateful.
xx
