There has never been a show quite like Doctor Who. Not only in terms of its ceaseless reinvention, but also in the huge swathe of literature that show’s continual popularity has inspired amongst its more dedicated devotees.
You would be forgiven for thinking, whether you’re a devout Whovian with a heaving bookshelf of tomes cataloguing the series from various approaches or a casual fan in equal parts mystified and curious as to the show’s enduring appeal, that maybe there is nothing left to be said about those most well documented and catalogued of genre shows.
What more could be said that hasn’t been said a million times before? As if to answer that burning question, independent publishers Obverse Books have tossed their hat into the ring with a book series that promises a fresh perspective on “the children’s own programme that adults adore”.
In Doctor Who mythology, the Black Archive is a secret vault of forbidden knowledge and alien tech. In this world, it’s the umbrella title for a series of story-specific volumes that take a particular serial from Doctor Who, and explore its various layers, with each writer adopting a unique approach, in order to tease out new details and fresh perspectives from each story, affording them a broader canvas for exploration as individual stories part of a wider whole.
Obverse’s Stuart Douglas gives an economical precis of the range: “They’re a Doctor Who related version of the BFI Classics books – populist but academic, rigorous but reader-friendly, shedding new light on an old subject.”
Range editor Philip Purser Hallard expands on this: “I felt we were overdue a series of longer pieces of analysis that could focus in real depth on selected individual stories, teasing out their themes and approaches at length. And because I’m an old-fashioned sort of writer and reader, I wanted those to be paperbacks rather than one search result among hundreds.”
The Black Archive was launched this month, with its first four titles ranging from 1966’s historical drama cum doppelganger mystery ‘The Massacre’, through to 1970’s sci-fi flavoured conspiracy thriller ‘The Ambassadors of Death’, ‘Rose’, the episode that brought Doctor Who back in 2005, and ‘Death In Heaven’, the finale of Peter Capaldi’s first season as the Doctor.
The writers of these volumes are, respectively, Jim Cooray Smith, L.M. Myles, Jon Arnold, and Philip Purser-Hallard. I spoke to two of these writers to find out more about this project.
The latter two volumes are probably the most intriguing, as ‘Nu Who’ (Doctor Who after its 2005 reinvention) arguably possesses less of a legacy of critical writing, than the massively documented and critique’d ‘classic’ (1963-1996) series. Writer and critic Jon Arnold stepped up to the task of unravelling ‘Rose’, the serial that hit the ground running in terms of showrunner Russell T Davies’ fresh approach for bringing the moribund series back into the new millennium.
“My starting point was the hoopla around the tenth anniversary celebrations of Rose last year; the sense that it’s merged into being part of Doctor Who’s history as much as the original run or the ‘wilderness years’ (so-called). When it was first broadcast it really was the shock of the new; there were hints of the BBC regarding it as a flagship with huge billboard posters and primetime trailers but nothing really prepared us for Rose’s impact. It seized the essence of the series and rebuilt it for the 2000s.”
What was so special about this ‘reboot’? “It takes this moth-eaten old format which was only regarded as of interest to nostalgists and old fanboys (and it was mainly boys) and, like Frankenstein, pumps a reactor full of cultural electricity in to reanimate it – from pop culture, from RTD’s background. It’s not a regeneration story in plot terms but it certainly is in terms of spirit. And that was what fascinated me and determined the approach I took; what exactly RTD brought to Doctor Who and that ten years on, with Moffat’s tenure following it, that we could put it in context and not simply see it as the only real way Who could be approached this century. Grandiose as it may seem in aim it’s an attempt to write Rose into history; both the history of the show and the cultural context of the time.”
As to the approach Jon took, he was even more forthcoming: “I’m one of those writers who needs to work out the theme before starting to write; once I’d worked that out the aspects I wanted to cover almost suggested themselves. I wanted to look at why RTD made the decisions he did with the format of the show; how he reworked the Doctor to fit a character-based drama; how the companion’s role changed and became stronger and how the show was designed as part of a Saturday night line-up.”
But ultimately, what was the appeal of tackling this iconic episode? “The appeal was really in analysing a cause celebre; where a great deal of the best analysis of Doctor Who is analysing the places its reach exceeds its grasp I wanted to analyse an unalloyed success. It’s a flawed episode of course (which story isn’t?) but in terms of what it achieves it’s the most radical and successful episode ever, bringing mass ratings and critical acclaim on a scale that’s extremely rare. It wants to revive Doctor Who and it succeeds to the point that the show became a cultural touchstone again and that it’s still an integral part of Saturday night (and will be to at least 2018), even in culturally fragmented times it retains a mass audience.”
On the reverse side of the medal, comes Philip Purser-Hallard’s volume on ‘Death In Heaven’, the 2014 two-parter which reinforced the ‘body horror’ of the Cybermen and gave us Missy, the Doctor’s longstanding adversary, now transitioned into female form.
“I wanted to write about Dark Water / Death in Heaven because, at the time I started planning the series, it was the most recent season finale, but also because I really, really love it. Stories about artificial afterlives fascinate me, I think the treatment of the Cybermen as the undead is done subtly and with great thematic richness, and I think the reinvention of the Master as Missy is possibly the best creative decision Steven Moffat’s made. It’s also, in my view, the most satisfying series finale he’s been responsible for, and the best since Christopher Eccleston’s departure. Unlike most of his endings it’s very ‘traditional’ in shape, in that it has a lot of the characteristics of a Tennant-era season finale – the pyrotechnics, the romantic personal drama, the set-pieces involving London landmarks – but it has a deftness of construction and a level of thought about its meaning that I associate more with Moffat-era Doctor Who.”
Purser-Hallard’s contribution may prove to be controversial among skeptics of Who’s extended universe, in that it connects themes from ‘Death In Heaven’ with those that Purser-Hallard seeded in one of Obverse’s own spin-offs, ‘City of the Saved’; a part of Doctor Who’s extended universe that has its roots’ in the novels of Lawrence Miles. Fans are notoriously touchy about spin-off media, and its relationship with the BBC ‘canon’, but I was sufficiently curious to learn more:
“I agonised a bit about that, worrying that it felt like self-promotion. As I say, I find the fact that Moffat wrote a story set in a technological afterlife that’s also a city utterly unremarkable, that being a staple of eschatological fiction as far back as the Bible’s Book of Revelation. I certainly don’t think he stole the idea, and if he had it would be very arrogant to imagine he stole it from me. There’ve been comments to that effect on the internet, though, and in the end I was worried that not saying anything would be taken as a comment in itself. So I added the brief appendix where mention that there’s a rich tradition of this kind of fantasy, which Moffat – and, unrelatedly, I – are working in.”
Though there is a rich bibliography of texts on Doctor Who, there is relatively little that really peels the skin of the onion to a satisfying degree on a story by story basis, a deficit that the Black Archive will go some way to correcting, if the range has any success. Purser-Hallard says, “I love reading analysis of Doctor Who stories. But although some of them have been inspected and prodded and probed by fans for the best part of half a century now, it’s rare to read something that goes into real depth. Particularly since the manifestation of the internet, the amount written about most Doctor Who stories has been astronomical – but it’s all in short pieces scattered across hundreds of different locations, both electronic and papery.”
Jon Arnold is more forthright: “I decided we needed something less waffly, less ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ of not saying much or saying something obvious and concealing it behind a lot of unnecessary waffle and verbiage. In a lot of ways it’s a reaction against the school of waffle; I wanted it to be more economical, in tune with the tone of the episode itself and comparatively accessible. If there are diamonds there I don’t want to make anyone dig through a mountain of shit to find them.”
As to the appeal of this range as a going concern, Purser-Hallard is optimistic: “The point of comparison a lot of people have mentioned is the 33⅓ series of short books about music albums, although in fact I was thinking more of the BFI Film Classics series about individual films. Both of those series are well into the hundreds now, so maybe we’ll do all right too.”
Author bio: James Gent has contributed to several acclaimed publications devoted to cult and popular television including 1001 TV Series You Must Watch Before You Die, You & Who: Contact Has Been Made and Blake’s Heaven: Maximum Fan Power. In 2014, he wrote the biography for the official Monty Python website.