The television series Doctor Who, a BBC-produced British cultural institution about a regenerating, time-traveling alien, first appeared on screen November 23, 1963. Today marks a new series, a new Doctor arrives in time for Christmas, and to celebrate, we asked Piers Britton, co-author of Reading between Designs: Visual Imagery and the Generation of Meaning in The Avengers, The Prisoner, and Doctor Who and TARDISbound: Navigating the Universes of Doctor Who, to examine what's changed and what hasn't in the Doctor Who universe.
Design in “New Who” (and “New New Who”): An Afterword to Reading Between Designs
By Piers D. Britton
Twenty-one years ago, when Simon Barker and I began research for what eventually became Reading between Designs, Doctor Who was just as much a thing of the past as the other two TV series that we featured in chapter-length case studies (The Avengers and The Prisoner). This was still true when our book finally came out in spring 2003 — though within a matter of months Doctor Who had new currency with the announcement of a Russell T. Davies-helmed revival. As it turns out, our analysis of what is now called Classic Who is largely unaffected by the arrival and breathtaking success of the new series. In design terms Classic Who remains—to use a suggestive term invented for New Who narrative—time locked. The visual style of the old series is irretrievably remote, even in this jubilee year. This is not just due to New Who’s shift in production techniques, with single- as opposed to multiple-camera shooting (and thus individual lighting of each set-up) and much more extensive post-production work than was the norm in the classic series. Nor can it simply be attributed to the improvement in production values made possible by a larger budget and by the ever-growing sophistication of the prosthetic and digital technologies on which Who so heavily depends. There is another factor, which is distinct, if not discrete, from these developments: a decisive aesthetic shift away from the kind of stylized design and experiment that justified Classic Who’s inclusion in Reading between Designs. For at least its first five years on air New Who was strongly anchored in the visual sensibility of recent science fiction and fantasy TV made in the US, and clearly designed to meet the standards for generic verisimilitude established in these programs. The immediate context for New Who was formed by shows like Firefly and Battlestar Galactica, and at slightly greater distance by The X-Files and the later television instantiations of Star Trek (particularly Deep Space Nine and Enterprise). In varying degrees these series are all marked by an espousal of what we might call SF realism, which is to say a tendency to dour, lived-in, gritty design imagery rather than operatic spectacle and flamboyance. While Russell T. Davies was show runner, this understated, borderline grungy style was the norm for the revived Doctor Who. The series aesthetic changed slightly in 2010 under the tutelage of the new writer-producer, Steven Moffat, whose “faery tale” approach to Who storytelling encouraged more whimsical and exuberant design work. Even so, the will-to-brand in New Who precluded the kind of internal variation in visual style, and thus some of the bolder innovations and deviations, which Classic Who had accommodated. For example, it’s almost impossible to imagine the new series supporting the kind of radical shift in narrative and visual tone that occurred in the midst of the eighteenth season of the classic series. Here a high-concept SF serial playing with evolutionary theory (“Full Circle”) was followed in rapid succession by a knowingly hammy vampire pastiche (“State of Decay”), a hauntingly surreal, Cocteau-esque fantasy (“Warrior’s Gate”) and a wordy, quasi-Shakespearean melodrama of court intrigue (“The Keeper of Traken”). They were all informed by radically different design concepts that served to optimize the tonal shift.
