Doctor Who and the malaise of British TV Sci-Fi

I suspect that some of us have a rather fuzzy rose-tinted childhood memory perspective on how "good" the old days of Doctor Who were. For me Tom Baker will always be the man, but I think it's likely his tenure too would leave me cold if I were seeing it for the first time today. However looking back at the earliest shows, well before my time, the first actors (Hartnell and Troughton in particular) managed to carry off their roles with genuine weight and grit in the midst of an embarrassment of shitty FX and cardboard sets. There is a sense that serious Science Fiction and original creative work was at least being attempted in the face of a hopeless lack of resources.

I did have hopes for the modern series in the early stages of the Ecclestone re-launch. He seemed to tame the worst excesses of the hammery that the role often seems to have brought out in many of the preceding, otherwise capable actors; and Billie Piper I thought was a genuine revelation as a real equal in character and not just a mini-skirted bit of fluff on the sidelines. But the scripts just became increasingly dire with every episode. full of lazy in-joke references and jaw-droppingly bad rip-offs from better SF (does anyone remember the "spiders" in an Ecclestone episode just months after Minority Report had given us the exact same thing? I couldn't believe what I was seeing). Tennant, a fine actor in better fare by all reports, seems to have been worn down by a mixture of poor scripting and lazy directing into gradually replacing performance with just a bag of overblown ticks and mannerisms. His eyebrows rise higher than Penfold's to express interest in anything.

What infuriates me the most are the audience-insultingly low aims of the whole venture. When you compare this to the best of US Science Fiction (the recent Battlestar Galactica reboot or the best of Star Trek for example), but even more when you compare it to the BBC's own world-class output of what they label as “proper” drama, the writing is just so smug, childish and lazily repetitive. That the BBC can lavish millions on what is considered to be a flagship program, but hand it over to such talentless hacks can to me only be explained as sheer arrogance. The attitude seems to be “It's Science Fiction, therefore it's only for kids who don't know any better, and it's Dr. Who. Everyone loves Dr. Who, so why should we try any harder? Everyone will watch it anyway, especially if the lead actor is good looking and we throw a few b-list celebs into the mix”

This sort of under-achieving attitude has been a sadly predictable feature of most attempts at home grown sci-fi in recent years. There seems to be an utter failure to grasp the kind of dramatic and conceptual scope that the genre, at its best, is capable of. Other recent disappointments include "The Deep", and the shockingly bad "Primeval". It is remarkable to consider that of all programs, the space set sitcom "Red Dwarf" is probably the most sophisticated and original sci-fi series to have made it off the BBC's drawing board in the last quarter of a century.

Meanwhile, as far as the good Doctor is concerned, I bailed the moment Catherine Tate appeared. This marked for me the point when any vestige of interest in making SF/Drama was stomped on by a BBC in-house back-slapping fest and spin-off marketing machine.