Well yes… To an extent. But there’s more to it than that.
Fans love things in a vaguely or emphatically obsessive way (there’s definitely a spectrum). Someone who loves, for example, The Beatles isn’t necessarily someone who would spend £8,437 on John Lennon’s school dentention slips and think it a wise use of money. There are of course the other more interesting fans of The Beatles who have been inspired by them to create their own music.
Fans of music have this option to express their love. Countless garage bands prove it – the DIY aesthetic means that a music fan just has to pick up an instrument, learn some covers and express their fandom in an exhilarating and gratifying way, perhaps going on to create their own music and getting their own fans. That is after all how The Beatles themselves started out, doing Chuck Berry covers at the school fete.
Lovers of other things tend not to have immediate access to ways to express their inner fan. Sports fans may love their football but most know deep down that the chances are they will never play for their country. Similarly, people who are fans of Star Wars are unlikely to direct or act in the films; and fans of TV shows like Doctor Who are unlikely to produce the show.
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| Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat: The Fanboys That Made It... |
This is quite a weird situation. And it is in many ways a brilliant situation. It is a good thing to know that there is Saturday family television not merely being churned out by programme monkeys to get high ratings (like the awful Robin Hood revival that began around the same time as Doctor Who came back). This is something that is being made by people who are passionate about something and want to do happy memories of their childhood justice. They care about wanting to make something good, which isn’t as common as it should be in television. And they are very talented at what they do – Russell T Davis and Steven Moffat didn’t get the job of showrunner by turning up at the BBC and waving their Doctor Who Magazine subscription at reception. They’re two of the best writers for television of the last 30-odd years, who would have been remembered for shows like Press Gang, Queer as Folk, Coupling and so forth for years even if Doctor Who was still dead and buried.
However (there was always going to be a 'however'...)
Mark Lawson mentions the writers’ fandom origins in passing in a recent review of Doctor Who and Sherlock’s recentepisodes written for The Guardian (Moffat is of course heavily involved in Sherlock, but we’ll have plenty of time to discuss that next week after the 3rd series finishes…). Most of Lawson's article is concerned with how Moffat and Mark Gatiss respond to their fans however, and this is where the danger of having fan hands at the steering wheel (or the lunatics in charge of the asylum) has the potential to be damaging. Genre fiction tends to become afflicted with continuity – that is, people start to enjoy the game of pretending that the stories are real as much (or in some cases more than) as they enjoy the stories themselves. Whole books have been devoted to putting all the Sherlock Holmes stories into chronological order, whole blog posts about UNIT Dating (if you need to ask what ‘UNIT Dating’ means you don’t want to know the answer, believe me). And fans love the continuity stuff, can’t get enough. But drama stands or falls on its ability to tell fun and engaging stories, not how well it plugs continuity holes.
Lawson says the Doctor Who Christmas episode, ‘The Time Of The Doctor’ “included a plot twist that granted the Time Lord another dozen physical regenerations, thus resolving (at least in the minds of the producers) the problem, much discussed on fan sites, that according to the rules originally set down, the Doctor was permitted only 12 embodiments.” This is true; and it was embarrassingly pointless. It added nothing of dramatic worth to the plot of the episode. It was solving a problem that only a fraction of the audience knew existed and most of them probably weren’t particularly bothered about it being answered either, being much more concerned with what the hell was meant to be going on. And that’s just one example of many call backs to old episodes, in-jokes and so on. It’s the job of the fan and fan-fiction to worry about all these piddling little details, and the job of the writers of the BBC’s main Christmas Day event to make good drama for all the family.
But this is the problem – being a fan himself Moffat feels the need to be accountable to fandom and this is a big, big mistake. Because that’s when the programme begins to be made primarily for the fans and not the majority of the audience. He’s an excellent writer, but fan fiction’s never a pretty sight. Obsessing about essentially meaningless details gets in the way of interesting characters and things actually, you know, making sense. And that is what killed Doctor Who in the 1980s after all – the producers had spent years courting the fans at the expense of the interest of the general public; until eventually only the fans were watching and it was inevitably axed. Funnily enough, concentrating on giving a minority of obsessives what they (think they) want isn’t the recipe for a popular show.
The vast majority of an average Doctor Who audience are casual viewers, willing to enjoy a good story but not expecting to have more than a basic grasp of the concept of the show - and why should they? As a programme it has become too exclusive. My girlfriend likes Doctor Who to the extent that if I’m watching it she’ll watch it with me and sometimes get pretty into it, but she isn’t and never will be a fan. Recent episodes make her feel confused, left out and ultimately bored, which means that I don’t enjoy them as much either.
Doctor Who’s remit, right from day one, was to be accessible to everyone in the family on a Saturday in between the afternoon sport and the evening’s adult entertainment. Which is how it was for most people. It wasn't targeted at anything as specific as sci-fi fans. It was something you watched with your parents or children. Fandom as a ‘thing’ didn’t happen to Doctor Who until the 1970s. Doctor Who’s ‘history’ was just whatever the writers happened to remember at the time. Then an article was published in a magazine by the Chief Head Fan of the Doctor Who Association (or whatever). It was one of Tom Baker’s most famous stories, ‘The Deadly Assassin’ – the story where the whole idea Lawson mentions about ‘The Doctor can only have 12 lives’ was introduced. The article lambasted the producers for messing up the continuity: what was all this nonsense about him only having 12 lives, how dare they? They had ruined Doctor Who! (The article's available online but it’s so excruciatingly badly written I can’t bring myself even to link to it…) So what did the producers do or say in response? Nothing whatsoever, obviously – if you’re the producer of a high profile BBC1 prime time show you don’t take shit off some guy in a bedroom, frankly. And it’s ironic to think that Steven Moffat was crowbarring in desperate dialogue at Christmas to justify some fictional facts that fandom itself had originally been dead set against.
Any good TV series should be able to have its premise summed up in a sentence. Doctor Who = ‘Mysterious man travels through time and space in a magic box.’ Doctor Who is by no means a failing show, it is still generally well regarded, but I think it’s time it went back to basics and stopped getting bogged down in its own mythology – and maybe aim to make some new fans as well as just pleasing the old ones.
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| DARFIELD |
UPDATE: 31/01/2014
Have been reading some of Philip Sandifer's excellent Doctor Who blog 'TARDIS Eruditorium' again, and he says so much more about The Deadly Assassin in a better way than I ever could... http://www.philipsandifer.com/2011/11/far-more-than-just-deadly-assassin.html
I've heard the new Sherlock has some fan theories in the first episode. How weird and meta to have fanboys write a series (Sherlock), make all sorts of in-jokes (Neil Gaiman's Sherlock story, The Sherlock movies with the Iron Man actor, and those are just the 'Easter Eggs' I can pick up as an American.), and finally to have them incorporate fanfiction based on their fanfiction which then becomes part of the narrative. Surreal.
ReplyDeleteTo be fair, the satire on fan theories in Sherlock worked quite well I thought. Perhaps because of the tongue in cheek way it was done.
DeleteI actually love easter eggs, in jokes and what have you - I just prefer them when they're used a bit more sparingly.!
I've never seen a full episode of Dr Who, because I just assume that without knowing all the in jokes, and back story there's no point.
ReplyDeleteI can see why but actually most episodes stand on their own quite well especially in the earlier years. You ccn watch them out of order, skip ones etc and on the whole it will work fine. It's not like Breaking Bad or Game Of Thrones where if you miss an eepisoe that's that.
DeleteI don’t think the problem was that they addressed it so much as how it was addressed. I rarely see an article where they mention how many doctors there have been and don't mention the limit so I don’t think the concept is alienating, but it felt completely shoe-horned in part way through the episode: "oh yeah btw this is my last life because of x, y & z", yet it had no internal consistency (in The Time of Angels, another Moffat episode from the latest series, he used spare regeneration energy to heal River's hand). He also has a tendency to only reference the bits he likes, actually changing the show’s history to suit his view of how the Doctor and the show should be. While RTD had his own problems, he got it pretty much right when it comes to making references the past. When David Tennant first referenced Gallifrey it was a huge moment for his character, it certainly wasn’t just a random reference to please fans, and I find it difficult to believe moments such as this confuse the casual viewer.
ReplyDeleteNow Moffat’s taken over, he’s trying to write a show that rewards long time viewers, and there’s nothing wrong with that in theory, but he’s making it up one episode at a time. Keeping mysteries invites people to try to create links themselves and find the answers, yet the creative team on the show seem to hold distain for people actually trying to work them out, or, God forbid, actually point out its flaws. If they were going to reference the regeneration limit it should have been the plot of the episode, bring it up at the start and explain it, resolve it by the end, not just mention it to try and please the one group of people who will never, ever be pleased.
I exactly agree - what I was getting at was the lazy way it was shoved in made for bad telly. But you must rmember that the majority of Christmas Doctor Who audience probably haven't read an article about Doctor Who. I think - I have absolutely no statistics to back that up with!
DeleteI've no problem with people picking and choosing which bits of continuity to keep and discard as long as they are doing it for a better story - Robert Holmes essentially created what we think of as the Time Lords in 'The Deadly Assassin' by ignoring a lot of went before. That's why I thought it was quite a relevant story to reference in relation to 'Time Of The Doctor'. The difference is that Holmes changed things in order to write a surreal political thriller-cum-satire, whereas I think it's true to say as you do that he seems to be trying to make a massive story arc up as he goes along sometimes.
I don't want to sound anti-Moff because I like his writing a lot. Also, disillusionment with the showrunner traditionally sets in after 3 seasons or so and everyone's getting nostalgic about the RTD era conveniently forgetting how they were posting rabid 'RTD Must Go' rants 5 years ago!