John Higgs is my favorite contemporary author. Each new work is like a revelation. I’ve reviewed a number of his books in Splice Today: here, here, here and here. I’d recommend any of them. You’ll see by the subject matter the extraordinary range of his interests, from Watling Street to William Blake; from the KLF to the Beatles. He’s at his best when writing about British popular culture and history from his own unique perspective.
His new book, Exterminate/Regenerate: The Story of Doctor Who is, as its title makes clear, the story of the long-running BBC TV series. It’s had a major effect on the imaginations of British schoolchildren since it was first broadcast on November 23rd 1963. That includes me. Watching the title sequence had a profound impact. Nothing like it had been seen on British television. It had an arresting theme tune, groovy and at the same time avant-garde. It was purportedly the first piece of electronic music to be used in a title sequence on television. It’s gone on to influence generations of musicians, including Aphex Twin, the Chemical Brothers and Paul Hartnoll of Orbital, all of whom cite it as the beginning of their interest in electronic music.
This wasn’t the only first for Doctor Who. The producer was Verity Lambert, the BBC drama department's first female producer, and the serial was directed by Waris Hussein, the BBC’s first Asian director. Both were young, in their 20s. The program was conceived by Sydney Newman, a Canadian producer, recently hired from a rival commercial station. As such Doctor Who was created by outsiders, for outsiders, and it has continued to appeal to outsiders ever since. It’s the longest running science fiction series ever to appear on TV.
I remember that first program clearly. I was 10, and it had a mysterious effect on me. The Doctor back then was nothing like the cheery trickster we see today. He was sinister and threatening, emerging like a shadow from his police box in the middle of a junk yard, and then kidnapping the two teachers who’d followed his granddaughter home. They enter the box only to discover that it’s larger on the inside than the outside, and is some sort of a futuristic time machine. Higgs compares this to the portals to other worlds that often appear in folk tales and myths. Both the Doctor and his granddaughter turn out to be aliens. They’re all then transported back to the stone age, which is where most of the action takes place.
I was also a witness when the Daleks first appeared on our screens. These are The Doctor’s most famous enemies, which Higgs refers to as “space Nazis”. They were thrillingly scary. This was in the second serial, broadcast in seven weekly parts from December 1963 to February 1964. There’s a wonderful scene in An Adventure in Space and Time, a biographical feature about the first Doctor Who, William Hartnell, written by Mark Gatiss. Verity Lambert catches a bus after the episode had aired, to see all the kids strutting about, putting on Dalek voices. This is when she knows she has a hit on her hands. I can verify that. I was one of those children. I still remember the excitement in the playground as all us kids chanted “I am a Dalek! Exterminate! Exterminate!” waving our hands in front of our chests, or falling to the ground, writhing in agony, in imitation of the victims. It’s something you never forget.
This is what makes Higgs’ book so compelling. He’s taken a fictional character, a person who never existed, and written a biography of him, as if he was a real human being. We have the entire history of the program, from its first conception to its latest manifestation, Doctor by Doctor, over its entire 62-year history. This is an adventure in itself, involving many plot twists and reversals, with subplots and love stories, at least as exciting as any of the individual series in its long and varied career.
You may know the program comes in two distinct parts: the classical era, from 1963 to 1989, featuring seven different Doctors, after which the show was cancelled—returning for one night only, in 1996, starring Paul McGann in a TV movie—and then a revived era, from 2005 to the present, featuring several more. In the second half of the book, dealing with the revived series, Higgs discusses the actor David Tennant’s reasons for wanting to take on the role. “I saw Jon Pertwee turning into Tom Baker,” he recalls. “I remember that experience prompting a conversation with my parents about what actors are and what they do and that was very much the beginning of my decision to do that as a career.” He was three years old.
The program showrunner, who recruited Tennant for the part, was Russell T Davies. It’s Davies’ genius that’s behind the success of the second run of the series. Davies was also influenced by watching the Doctor regenerate as a child. (This is one of the features of the program. The Doctors are regularly dying off and turning into someone else.) He says his first clear memory was of seeing William Hartnell fall to the floor and turning into Patrick Troughton.
“Doctor Who made me a writer,” he says. “I used to make up Doctor Who stories. I used to walk home from school burning with them.”
Between them, Davies and Tennant have inspired a new generation of young people to want to take part in the Doctor Who legacy.
Higgs is an amusing and insightful writer, full of witty observations about his subject. He suggests that the program’s longevity may be due to something that biologists refer to as niche construction. This is the way that a biological entity will alter its environment to secure its long-term survival. As Higgs puts it: “By existing in and engaging with that landscape, it alters it in a way that is hopefully beneficial.” And he compares this to the long-term survival of Doctor Who: “no longer a set of stories reliant on the prior existence of writers and other creative professionals to keep going. It was a set of stories that created the writers and other professionals who would keep it alive.”
There’s then a discussion about what constitutes life. “It generally involves moving, changing, reacting and consuming, which are all things that Doctor Who does. There is a presumption, however, that to be classed as a living thing it is necessary to physically exist. For this reason, the claim that Doctor Who is alive strikes many as absurd. It is far less controversial to say that it behaves like a living thing, not that it is one. That position seems far more reasonable. It only becomes troubling should you attempt to work out what the difference is between something that is a living thing, and something that just acts like one.”
I haven’t followed the series since its revival. It’s one of the features of the program that everyone has their own favorite Doctor. Mine is Tom Baker. As a child I too wanted to write Doctor Who stories, so when Russell T. Davies took on that role, I was resentful, and refused to watch.
Luckily I bumped into a couple of friends in the pub before the book came out. One of them, Craig, told me that he was a fan of Doctor Who. Fans of the program refer to themselves as “Whovians” and they’re often at odds with the makers. I told him about Higgs’ book, which he was eager to read. Later we met in the pub again to discuss it.
There was a revealing misunderstanding at the start. Craig referred to “the Jodie Whittaker era” and I made the mistake of thinking that she was one of the side-kicks. The Doctor usually has a side-kick, often a teenage girl or a young woman. I was showing my inherent sexism. Jodie Whittaker was, in fact, the 13th Doctor, and the first female to play the part.
Craig told me that he’d never been more excited about a Doctor Who book than this one. (And he’s qualified to know, owning and having read hundreds of books devoted to the subject.) He said, “There’s all sorts of things going on at once. It’s bigger on the inside than on the outside.” It was like a love letter to Doctor Who, he said. “It’s about devotion and about identity and about change.”
He said that Higgs uses Doctor Who as a framing device, to show how society and people have changed. “It’s the history not only of Doctor Who, but of the BBC and of British TV culture in general.” He said that it couldn’t have happened anywhere else but the BBC, and in any other decade than the 1960s. “An era defining, unique show about a unique character, not from the pages of literature, but created first for the exciting, still relatively young medium of television. A revolutionary, escapist program, with all that post war hope of future change and advancement, yet exploiting so much of the fear and horror of the war years. A defining show in a defining era, on the edge of new discoveries; the space race, science, and the ‘white heat’ of technology, Doctor Who would go on to define many eras. Much like time travel itself, always of its time, but timeless,” he said.
He then told me about his own relationship to the series. His first Doctor was Peter Davison. “As beige as his costume,” he joked. He went on to say that, in truth, choosing a favorite Doctor is a bit like choosing what to eat. “It depends what mood you’re in. And why limit yourself when there’s so much on offer?”
Craig’s a wheelchair user. During the so-called “Wilderness Years,”, when the program was cancelled, he kept himself going by sending his mum out with a shopping list for her to scour the second-hand shops. He had several friends who also helped feed the beast, including a postman friend and an indulgent uncle. He subscribed to Doctor Who Monthly–the longest running TV tie-in mag in history (yet another Doctor Who first). There were also books, audio books, videos, CDs and fledgling dial-up websites, complete with flash animation cartoons, to help keep the flame alive. He never lost hope that one day the TARDIS would fly back into peoples’ living rooms and hearts once again.
He said that when he was a child, his mum would stick on a video, and he’d be happy for an hour or two while she went out. I was intrigued by this. It occurred to me that there’s nothing more expansive in its scope than Doctor Who. It must’ve been liberating for a person of limited mobility to allow his imagination to roam free, with all time and all space to play around in.
It was Craig who suggested that the program appeals primarily to outsiders—gay people, disabled people, trans people and to the neurodivergent, as well as to rebels and artists and children everywhere. Children are perpetual outsiders in the adult world.
The Doctor’s the ultimate outsider, an alien being from another planet, but he (and occasionally she) always wins in the end. He’s also a fighter for justice and on the side of oppressed people everywhere. Perhaps this is what explains the appeal.