Today marks the twentieth anniversary of Doctor Who to British television screens after sixteen years (barring a one-off TV Movie and the odd charity sketch) and as the latest "Whoniverse" era starring Ncuti Gatwa is something of a second reboot (the upcoming series is officially "Season Two"), I thought I'd do a rewatch of the 2005-2022 era (given its own section on BBC iplayer), starting with 'Rose' and finishing with 'The Power of the Doctor'.
I'd been a Doctor Who fan for a few years prior to it's return, having been introduced to it by my Dad with a DVD of 'The Five Doctors' and watching a fair amount of the series on VHS, DVD (remember the shop MVC?) and tape recordings of weekend morning omnibus showings on UK Gold. I'd also started collecting new issues the official tie-in magazine at the end of 2001 (I'd been given several 80s issues that I think belonged to my uncle but were kept at my grandparents' house). Funnily enough, a feature article in my first "new" issue speculated on what the show might be like when it came back. I had also listened to a few of the Big Finish audio adventures (starting on cassette!) and I'd watched the webcasts on the BBC website (they started as Real Player videos of audio dramas with illustrations before evolving into flash animations). At the time, the closest thing I'd had to a "new series" was the webcast 'Scream of the Shalka' and, for a brief, Richard E. Grant was canonically enough the "Ninth" Doctor to have had his own chapter in the 40th anniversary coffee table book 'Doctor Who: The Legend'. I was very excited though when I read of the TV series being revived in a tiny newspaper item that had a picture of a Dalek.
On the night itself, I got my mum to prepare spam for tea (I think I wanted to recreate teatime in the 1960s). The episode opened and within the first few minutes, there was a technical error where some audio from something Graham Norton was doing managed to leak in while Billie Piper was being menaced by Autons. Also, our Sky signal was a bit glitchy so in one scene, the picture would freeze and then speedily catch up with the audio. I thought this was an editing technique they were using in the show.
Headwriter Russell T Davies had just 45 minutes to set out his stall of what a cult Sci-Fi show might be like in 2005 and the production team were rewarded with an overnight record of 10.81 million viewers. In hindsight, updating the format from 25 minute serials worked in its favour - there's no cliffhanger to make us wait another week to see how this debut would conclude and it's not too long to bore new kids either. At the beginning, we're plunged through Earth's atmosphere into the world of 19-year old shop assistant Rose Tyler and by the end, we have an alien called the Doctor (I missed the Nestene Consciousness calling him a Time Lord the first time round) and a teleporting, time-travelling police box called a TARDIS. It's all you really need to know really and I rather wish it could be as stripped-down to the basics now as it was back then.
With that, Davies takes the basic format of the show and updates it for the next generation, giving us a companion who lives on a council estate and has a mum (rather like giving Tegan an aunt in the 80s) and a boyfriend and we have a Doctor who doesn't speak in RP (deliberately on Christopher Eccleston's part) and wears a V-neck T-shirt and leather jacket - but still, crucially, acts like a weirdo alien in human form. Davies and director Keith Boak then take these two and tries to cram in as much British iconography as possible - Big Ben! Royal Mail! Council estates! London buses! The London Eye! The police box! - a relic of a bygone era, both in the real world and on telly (gleefully explained as a disguise by the Doctor).
We also get the sense that this new series has a history - this stranger called the Doctor has seemingly been popping up at different points in history, e.g. the JFK assassination (sensibly, Davies refrains from referencing past incarnations), and it's apparently not the first time that shop window dummies have come to life and attacked the public (at university, we had a whole lecture on Doctor Who in which they showed clips contrasting the Auton attack here and with the original in the '70s serial 'Spearhead from Space').
In the span of the show's history, it's the first companion's introduction story in quite sometime in which it's presented from their perspective rather than the Doctor arriving somewhere and meeting someone new. As with Ian and Barbara in 1963, so to is Rose in 2005 someone through whom the audience experiences the story vicariously. By the end of it, the show's real USP is time travel and, like Rose, we're off on the trip of a lifetime. No longer was this show just something my dad and uncle watched and I inherited like an heirloom. Now, it could be my show too and my life wouldn't be the same without it. The Doctor was back and he was taking me with him.
