Oh, You Know What This Is About

When discussing how Doctor Who works, it's important to discuss it in the wider context of television.

I love television. I always have done. I love the idea that stories and dramas and images can be beamed into the home, I love the lightweight immediacy of television, I love the inherent flexibility of the medium and the way it can tell stories that last fifteen minutes or twenty-four hours. It's long been my opinion that television is the most important medium we have, simply because it's the most sophisticated that's widely - indeed, almost freely - available to all.

What's interesting, then, is how increasingly television, and particularly British television, seems incapable of telling stories.

A historical note here. When Doctor Who first returned to television in 2005, it's easy forget how shocking it was. This was a time when television had become increasingly smug and inward-looking, when Ally McBeal and its ilk had propogated a whole sequence of programmes based around the concept of "affluent learned professionals complain shrilly about their made-up personal problems". Doctor Who, from the very first shot - a zoom from the expanse of space to Billy Piper's bedroom clock - set itself up as a drama in which people were tiny, perspective was everything, and a job of work was something that you could show in a 60-second montage. The plot of Rose (and no-one would claim that Rose was perfectly made - in fact, it was badly-directed and had a rather rushed alien invasion plot) was simple; a rude, strange and untrustworthy man wanders into the life of Billie Piper, bringing untold carnage with him (the first thing he actually tells Rose is "Wilson's dead"), and shows her the broader world, where empires rise and fall and the universe barely notices.

And yet if you describe this as the basis for "drama", you miss the point. More than anything, Rose was about two people. Characters who would later get rounded out (Mickey, Jackie) were portrayed as caricatures, representative of a wider society where people sue for compensation or do silly dances to impress their girlfriends. The story was about Rose and the Doctor, and the most important and memorable scene wasn't anything to do with Autons, or killer wheelie-bins, or shopping centres being invaded; it was when Rose entered the TARDIS, and stood in front of a man who baldly admitted he was an alien. Rose burst into tears at this point, suffering from culture shock, and this was the most human reaction to anyone entering the TARDIS since... well, possibly ever, and certainly since An Unearthly Child aired in 1963.

Eccleston was/is the best actor ever to play the role, and was never as loved as David Tennant simply because he was more difficult to get a handle on. This was a character who would point a gun at you, nearly get your boyfriend killed, call you stupid ape and then tell you what to do anyway. He didn't pull rank; rather than bigging-up his own mythology, he did his level best to hide it. The very first thing we ever saw him doing was blowing up a public building, but he didn't flinch from admitting he'd have been buggered if the Chav Companion hadn't been around to save him. If Tennant's Doctor might open up a window on your dusty world and show you the glorious sun outside, Eccleston would do the same even if it meant you got drenched.

In short, he was dangerous.

If that danger was what made this meaningful drama, it wasn't what made it drama; that lay in the Doctor knocking on Rose's forehead, or taking her for chips in The End of the World (before remembering he didn't have any money), or surprising - and yet not surprising - the audience by degenerating into a rage-fuelled, spittle-flecked avenging angel in Dalek. The most memorable scene in that first series is probably - probably - Richard Wilson's transformation into gas-mask-thing in The Empty Child; the most iconic is Eccleston's repeating of "no" in the Bad Wolf cliffhanger. And yet, for all the glory of these moments, the greatness of that series lay in the almost-forgotten moments that the sharpened the point of the drama. I'm thinking here of Eccleston's grin fading the moment Rose vanished from sight in The Long Game, or Gwendoline castigating Rose for thinking she was stupid in The Unquiet Dead, or Mickey's line of "we can write them a letter" in World War Three. The most affecting of these scenes is Rose's incoherent, tear-soaked speech a chipper in The Parting of the Ways, and it's worth remembering that at no time has Who - nor, indeed, any other series that springs to mind - ever done anything as radical as removing one of its central characters from the story in the season finale.

(The principle exception to this rule is telling. It's The Wire, of course. The very first scene in The Wire is McNulty having an irrelevant (plotwise) conversation with a character who never appears again.)

We might now look at the current main contender for "serious" sci-fi drama of our times, True Blood, which has replaced Heroes and Battlestar Galactica as the one we're all supposed to think is Proper. Perhaps what's interesting in this comparison is that the opening follows all the same lines - a mysterious stranger walks into the life of an ordinary working-class girl, and promptly starts buggering it up as soon as she gets too close. Why, then, is True Blood so utterly, killingly banal?

(Oh yes it is.)

It wouldn't be worth continuing without pointing out the clunking banality of the central metaphor, vampires-as-underclass, which is too vague and obvious to hold any attention; besides, it becomes offensively stupid if you try to equate vampires to any actual underclass. Certainly the "metaphor" isn't at all convincing, and is little more than a hollow attempt to give an unsustainable worldview some (entirely spurious) ethical weight. This is hardly surprising, as most television can't do big subjects without getting a nosebleed. You could cite the recent BBC drama Five Days here, and the way it mentioned terrorism and training camps before quickly changing the subject; or you could talk about an episode of House called The Tyrant, in which the team faced the moral dilemma of whether to save the life of an African dictator who was preparing to slaughter millions of people - but he was dictator of a fictional country, and the people belonged to a tribe that don't actually exist, which made the line "it will be worse than Rwanda" more than a little inaccurate.

So the sheer vapidity of True Blood's central metaphor is commonplace, and besides, it isn't the principle problem. Rather, it's the fact that neither of its central characters ever do or say anything interesting. Sookie's character seems to consist of "waitress, telepathic, strong"; Bill Compton, the object of her affections, is a broodily good-looking mannequin with old-fashioned clothes and a pale skin. This is a time when character and character outline are more or less the same thing; this is why we're supposed to believe that there's an attraction between Bill and Sookie, even though for the duration of the first episode they barely have a conversation worthy of the name. They're "characters", a shorthand version of people; televisual constructs that comply with the rules of demographically-targeted cult television, Dark Moody Stranger and Aspirational Girl, approximations that never once take the time to behave like an actual person. We're supposed to accept their attraction because, well, that's what characters in these dramas do.

Directly comparing them to the Doctor and Rose tells you all you need to know. Eccleston's Doctor is a damaged character. We know this because his clowning is never quite convincing; because of the way he risks everything by giving the Nestene Consciousness a chance at the end, and obviously does so out of guilt; because of the flicker of vulnerability in his face when he asks Rose if she wants to come with him. Bill is also supposed to be damaged, and he shows it by staring off into middle-distance and intensely whispering all his lines.

Of course, it's a long time since Rose aired, but what distinguished Davies-era Doctor Who was its ability to just show people relaxing, chatting, and being funny and likeable and ordinary and vibrant. This was always part of the narrative, even if it was seldom part of the plot. In the (dreadful) story 42, the Doctor openly says how scared he is. It's incidental, a moment that just occurs, and then lets the audience process it. Even in the later, tawdry, self-satisfied sequences of his tenure, Davies could sometimes get this looseness of characterisation right, as with Midnight or Turn Left. But by then, the programme had become corrupted by its membership of the establishment. Davies was once obsessed with the idea that the press couldn't wait to bring down Doctor Who. By the time he left, he knew he was the media's darling, and had lost sight of his aims to such an extent that... well, that he thought casting Catherine Tate was an acceptable thing to do.

But it's Stephen Moffatt who's in charge now, and Stephen Moffatt is another question. Davies may have wanted to be many things, but he never wanted to be cool. Moffatt has certainly been one of the best Who writers since the series came back, but he's also been a "look-at-me" type of writer. His banana joke in The Empty Child went down well, so he used it again in The Girl in the Fireplace. Blink is an extended exercise in the writer showing how clever he is, and he only gets away with it because the slices of ostentatiousness tend to take place at bits that really are pretty clever. Because of this desire to be admired, you can take it as read that Who under Moffatt will never be as downright odd as it was under Russell T. Davies. We won't get a Love and Monsters, or a Gridlock, or any story as bonkers as Smith and Jones. Davies tended to indulge himself; Moffatt will indulge his audience. The odd counterbalance here is that he's every bit as much the fanboy as Davies, who's nerdishly thrilled by the idea of clockwork soldiers, but still takes the piss out of geeky fanboys who work in a video shop.

The conflict between nerd, show-off, and hard-headed demographically-aware careerist is apparent through every moment of The Eleventh Hour. You can see it in the new Doctor's costume, which is the most inoffensively English-professor uniform imaginable... but at the same time, you can imagine Matt Smith's Doctor genuinely thinking bow ties are cool because Indiana Jones wears them when he's not adventuring. If the show has fallen away since its vivid Eccleston-era debut, we know that it won't get back to those peaks any time soon, and we can't expect it to. As a story, The Eleventh Hour uses plenty of Moffat's old tricks, and the trailer for the rest of the series makes it clear that we'll be getting Daleks, Weeping Angels, Cybermen, and more. The appearing-throughout-a-young-girl's life that sustained The Girl in the Fireplace pops up again. The nasty aliens have an odd catchphrase. You can only see the bad thing from the corner of your eye. Lines are re-used from Blink (the "Duck" scene) and The Girl in the Fireplace ("You've had some cowboys in here"), neither of which really make sense on their own merits. The Shy One lives with his mother, stays in his bedroom and watches porn; the Boring One is ignored by the hot girlfriend who'd rather eye up the fit young bloke while he's changing. In the end, the Doctor scares off the aliens with a "don't you know who I am?" speech. We can safely assume, even at this early stage, that this period of Doctor Who will never run the risk of being uncool.

And yet, and yet... if we accept that this is a demographically-targeted Doctor, far more interested in playing to the cool crowd and tolerating the geeks with patient good humour, then you might ask: what's the first thing we see Matt Smith's Doctor doing, once he's finished hanging in the skies over London?

He's having a conversation.

This is something that Eccleston did in another Moffatt-scripted story, The Empty Child. It's also something Tennant never did, not with anyone, and that includes his companions; the only real exception is Joan at the end of Human Nature, and that's marked by how catastrophically he misjudges the situation. He bantered with his companions, he didn't talk to them; he showed his Tortured Side by the accepted method of walking around with staring eyes (or, in the case of Wilfred Mott, making self-aggrandising speeches). He was far more interested in making jokes over the head of companions, and much as he made speeches about how wonderful humanity was, he didn't actually bother interacting with it.

Matt Smith is entirely different. His performance is excellent, that much should be stated immediately. Some of this is technical - just look at the way that he starts out with Tennant-like quirks, but these are carefully-modulated and thinned-out as the story progresses. However, the choices he makes are more interesting. Even though he has to do all the Doctor-as-demigod stuff, even though his character is closer to Tennant than is comfortable, even though he's asked to declare "I'm the Doctor" as if he's declaring himself to be Christ incarnate... Smith actually seems genuinely interested in Amy Pond. When Tennant grinned wildly, it was because he wanted people to know how good-humoured he was. When Smith grins wildly, it's because he's delighted. The simple line "She sounds good, your Mum" is more real and empathetic than anything Tennant uttered in four years. Smith, in the first hour, has already become a Doctor that won't laugh at anyone unless they're joking. If Tennant was in the kitchen with him, Amelia Pond would have told him to leave as soon as you could say "smug git". This is no longer a godlike figure condescending to lower himself to our level.

In just over an hour, then, Matt Smith has made Doctor Who palatable again.

So palatable, yes, but will it ever be unexpected? Probably... not. We've already seen Daleks in World War II (did you know they're a bit like Nazis?), the comeback of the Weeping Angels, and Professor River Song - this series will be playing to its strengths, or what it perceives as its strengths. This is aiming to be a Science Fiction series, not a festival of the unexpected, and a Science Fiction series is the one thing that Doctor Who has never comfortably been.

But then, Doctor Who has always been an entryist tract. The period of the programme I remember - that's McCoy, since you ask - desperately wanted to be popular, and it still managed its moments of magic. Perhaps the most telling thing about this story was how charming it managed to be. This was Doctor Who on the village green, fixed in the mind of most fans as "traditional", but not actually seen in the new series since it returned. If more or less every plot element was an old one reused, it's no mean feat to keep pace going as well as the story does. In short, if it was generic, it was fresh and open and wanted us to like it. If it barely added any meat to the bone of other characters, it still portrayed those characters as real people. It's the most exciting Doctor Who story since 2007, even if there are as many worrying touches as there are reasons to be cheerful. Over the next thirteen weeks, as much as we'll be watching the Doctor battle monster-of-the-week, we'll be watching Steven Moffatt's inner fan do battle with his sneery side. No matter what side wins, it won't be Great. But it may well be Very Good, and there's reason enough to believe that will happen.

We might remember that, when Matt Smith was cast, Stephen Moffatt made reference to "the look, the hair." It's ironic, because Tennant was the Doctor who was once actually described as having "great hair", and he did look like he'd spent an hour getting it right. Tennant was the self-aware Doctor, and what smothered his era was the programme's self-awareness. Smith didn't even bother checking what he looked like until the end of the episode. The series may be concerned about how it looks, but Smith's Doctor clearly doesn't.

So not Great, but Very Good. There's a sense of this series moving upwards for the first time in a long time and for that reason, it no longer feels like a commercial juggernaut. Almost by default, there's the feeling of an underdog. The series is on the outside again. Where it belongs.