I’ve just finished reading Jason Arnopp’s excellent interview with Christopher H Bidmead in the latest DWM. Bidmead was the script editor during a period of Doctor Who in the early 1980s that divides opinion, depending on whether you like your Who as a fluffy confection or a more downbeat affair grounded in hard science. I’ve got a soft spot for it, but it does feel stuffy, especially after the larks of previous years.
In the interview Bidmead puts his finger on so many problems in current Who it’s almost a shame the piece appears in something as pro-nu-Who (though understandably!) as DWM. In this context he comes across as a grumpy old bugger who needs to, like, move with the times. But he’s so right about some of RTD’s storytelling decisions. My favourite f’rinstance is when he goes on at length about how the sonic screwdriver is a killer of ingenuity. We say ah, but wait, why waste valuable minutes and brain cells getting the Doctor through a locked door by other means? Russell said as much during Series One, was very jolly about it and we all nodded at such wisdom. But Bidmead points out, if the story slows down while the Doctor escapes by luring a Dalek onto a cloak or whatever, then “What the hell is the door doing there?” Seems obvious really, and can be applied elsewhere: if showing the Doctor unconvincingly descending a lift shaft is a waste of screen-time, why keep your pustulent zombie types downstairs?
I do love it, this new phenomenon. It’s full of zest and colour. Sometimes I’m disappointed by what’s underneath, but it seems ungrateful to complain after clamouring for so long to get it back. But while we’re all chuckling at Bidmead’s endearing grumpiness, recalling the other miserablists that have graced DWM’s pages - I’m looking at you Boucher, Priest, Clive Swift, Richard Martin - you can’t help but agree when he says RTD’s scripts often feel like first drafts. The ones that don’t are the ones that tend to have had the hard work already done by other writers. First drafts are messy, undisciplined things, full of excess. If you’ve got a scene like the one in the first draft of ‘Journey’s End’, where our hero uses the TARDIS to tow a planet home, then that’s OK, you’ll think of something a bit less deranged in the rewrites. How I wish Bidmead had caught that one, especially as he and Davies often dabble in similar waters: I long to see Bidmead gesticulating wildly in a 1981 Doctor Who Confidential, describing his companion-heavy planet-hopping season finale as ‘massive’, with the fate of the universe at stake, etc etc. It may have a scene in it where the Doctor has the foolproof plan of materialising the TARDIS underwater and opening the doors, but hey, there are always the rewrites. Pssst, 1981-Christopher, in a future episode the Doctor actually drains the Thames! Yeah, I know that makes no sense, but trust me it’s an absolute riot!
So Christopher, I thought you came across as a bit of a plum on the DVD extras, full of yourself, keen to distance yourself from criticism. But I like you again now, you speak a lot of sense and seem like a thoroughly nice bloke. I think the Moff should install you in the Upper Boat basement as his irascible unpaid scientific advisor.
Tags: doctor who
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Loved this interview too -of only everyone was allowed / willing to be as candid; s’pose we can pencil in grumpy RTD era interviews for 2030? I do take his points -and yours - about story telling but I think sometimes the current show is way more imaginative than the old one. The towing the planet is a case in point- it’s such an out there idea most writers would shy away from but i saw little as joyous in tv all last year as the sight of the world being towed thru the galaxies by a police box and all the companions looking at each other (and us). It felt like 10 million of us all there on the adventure. But that’s just me; I like it that DW is now about people rather than things. Chris Bidemead’s ideas are too much like ‘hard’ sci-fi for my liking and watching many of his stories now, there seems to be too much dry scientific dialogue which is never matched by enthusiasm - science should never be boring (scientists tell me this anyway). CB may hate the sonic and towing planets, but what did he come up with - E space, CVEs and computations. I’d swap all that for Rose’s phone call home in End of the World any day.
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I agree that Bidmead’s ‘era’ wasn’t quite the way to go either, as I said at the start of the piece. But I find RTD’s approach too often veers into the wildly implausible. At least good old CHB would’ve materialised the TARDIS around Earth and our heroes could have bought it home that way, with all the whooping if you like that kind of thing. As for the mobile phone, I like that the companions are cut off from home - can you imagine Hartnell waving his sonic piledriver… mmm, screwdriver, at a Bakelite telephone for Ian and Barbara? These new companions have it easy, I tell ya!
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OK, well, it’s a fair cop. I have been grumpy about RTD’s regime. But now that it’s over I’ll concede some points.
He gave the new version of the show some really huge momentum. And I see that what I’ve called the “first draft” stuff is largely a function of the totally changed audience environment. It’s a wild fight for eyeballs out there today: you need to be cute, crisp and glitzy just to get folks to stay in front of the telly. Good story-telling and structure are luxuries we could afford (to aspire to) back in the day. Today’s TV has to work like stink just to hold onto its audience at pretty well any price, and RTD is surely a master of that.
The street cred that he introduced is part of this, but also, admittedly, a dimension that was missing. I don’t think we could have had a black pregnant bisexual companion back in the day, but, yes, the show would have been all the better for it, perhaps. But I would still have stuck as closely as I could to the (extrapolated) science. Barry Letts wanted it that way, and he was right.
Christopher H. Bidmead (yes, I am he*)
(*the verb “to be” takes the subjective case)
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As one who cheered loudly when I read your interview, I think you may now be erring on the side of charity. To me the whole point of this new, improved, revived, regenerated Who should be that it can now afford all the luxuries that were unattainable in the old days, and easiest and cheapest among those luxuries should be the utmost care and craftsmanship at the stage before a penny has been spent on effects or sets or guest stars.
I’ve read a story recently about someone telling van Gogh he painted too fast, and the artist replying “No, you look too fast.” Just because something has (for some reason that escapes me) to play on the screen at breakneck pace, with events succeeding each other too fast for the human brain to spot that they don’t make sense, the script does not have to be written that way, or look as if it has been. And if any single thing on telly these days has no need to compete for eyeballs, if any show has a guaranteed head start in securing an audience, a new version of Doctor Who would have been it.
Mr Bidmead, your strictures on RTD struck a chord with at least one embittered Doctor Who watcher. I wonder, if it seems ungrateful to criticise the new Who after wanting it back for so long, how bad it would have to be before one *could* express disappointment without seeming churlish. Or is Russell T Davies merely the latest incarnation of Doctor Johnson’s dancing dog?
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Finding myself in the difficult spot of defending both ends, I have to plump for a happy middle.
I was a big fan of CHB’s work on the show; I thought he gave back some of the credibility that wonderful old Douglas Adams (again, big fan of his too!) had frittered away (actually, I think it was the budget that frittered it away, but DNA’s indulgences didn’t help). Bidmead’s time on Doctor Who gave us much to think about in exactly the way RTD never did.
Having said that, I’ve spent a lot of time in the past five years defending some of Davies’ choices, particularly where it comes to dialogue; but where plot is concerned, RTD’s version DOES rely too much on emotion and spectacle to paper over the breaks in plausibility; this is precisely why Moffat’s stories in the RTD era are such total standouts from the pack.
Still, in a post-Python world there is definitely room for very silly moments in otherwise serious drama, and Doctor Who wouldn’t be the show it is if it didn’t have both Warrior’s Gate and Love & Monsters, if it wasn’t as emotional as Human Nature or as detached-Doctory as Castrovalva.
In the end, RTD did it the way he wanted, and we can pick nits in it as we would with any other producer; but even if you hated every OTT moment, he also cleared the way for future producers and script editors to have their say, giving us a show with a future even if his episodes grow sillier in hindsight.
So in the end, it looks like the “more heart than mind” approach worked well, at least for a while; now we’ll see where else we’ll be taken, and perhaps someday (perhaps very soon) a kid who grew up loving CHB’s era of the show will come to power and “put things to rights” once again.
I can’t say as I’d have it any other way.
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