Talking 'Bout My Regeneration
Last updated: 04/10/2006 - 15:03
Is this the ultimate guide to the triumphant return of a television legend – Britain’s best known, most-loved (and only time travelling) GP: The Doctor?
Back To The Vortex – The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to ‘Doctor Who’ 2005 by J. Shaun Lyon.
Beware evil doers everywhere – the Doctor’s back – and not only is it definitely about time – but (as must be apparent to event the staunchest non-fan) it’s also about ratings smash hits, headline-grabbing and showbiz column inches galore!
Unless you’ve been hiding under an extra terrestrial rock for most of the last year you won’t have failed to notice that BBC TV’s time travelling science fantasy series has returned to our screens. Since the show reappeared at Easter – after a lengthy hiatus – it has once again proved an enormous Saturday teatime hit and is now (arguably) as firmly established as ‘must-see’ TV as it was when Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker played the central character in the ‘70s.
The dateline was September 2003. A bleak time for fans of the good Doctor. The series had been off the air since 1989 – and had slipped away down a cul-de-sac into fondly (or not so fondly!) remembered cultdom). Despite the nine million-plus viewers who tuned into the 1996 Doctor Who TV Movie, despite: conventions, a constant outpouring of books - both novels and non-fiction - two radio series starring Jon Pertwee, two BBC web-casts starring Sylvester McCoy and Richard E. Grant) and a flood of star-studded CD dramas, a return of the TV series seemed a fanciful dream.
The Rumour Mill
Then – seemingly overnight – things started to happen. Rumours began spreading on the internet, in fanzines and the genre press - the fans started to hear that the Doctor might be on his way back to Saturday nights! The mainstream press got interested quickly and the ensuing media frenzy became nothing short of unprecedented. Fast-forward to March of 2005 and – after a sixteen year transmission break – the first new episode of new Doctor Who was broadcast to huge acclaim.
New series author Rob Shearman - the man chosen to scare the wits out of a whole new generation by penning the episode Dalek, introducing the metallic villains to our screens once again) sums this transformation up in his neat afterword to the book. “I never thought it would happen” he says. “The idea that it would be big, a mainstream hit that seemed to be on the front cover of every magazine in Britain, a programme that would be openly discussed in pubs and playgrounds – hey, something that my wife would watch...that was just an impossible dream, surely.”
So how did this happen, exactly? Well, it seems the stars were – quite literally – in the right place at the right time. The book gives much kudos to the architect of Doctor Who 2005 – Executive Producer, chief writer for the series – and notorious fan of the original series: Russell T. Davis. The writer behind such challenging inventive television as Bob & Rose, The Second Coming and Queer As Folk, this man really has been the principle torch bearer for the new show – and is quite rightly portrayed as such here. In a rather nice move the foreword to the volume has been written by the previous incumbent in the Producers canvas chair: Philip Seagal, the man behind the last (abortive) attempt to re-launch Doctor Who, in 1996. Seagal brings an interesting perspective to proceedings – and communicates a fondness for the show (both before and after his own TV Movie) that is endearing – and rather touching.
His foreword – and the opening chapter: ‘Til Last We Met’ bring the reader up to speed, filling in rapidly the space between the end of the original run of the BBC science fiction series in 1989 and the first murmuring of the new version of ‘Who. From there - as you’d expect from a TV tie-in book - Back To The Vortex charts the creation of the new series, how and as it happened – examining various milestones along the way.
These include:
The book also details the battles of-screen to secure the inclusion of the Daleks – the series most iconic villains – and takes a look at the emergence of the show’s next star as David Tennant (Casanova, Blackpool, The Quatermass Experiment) gets set to don the mantle of the tenth Time Lord.
A detailed episode guide to the new series, giving not just episode summaries and cast and crew details, but also a panel-based commentary on each episode and a look at the overarching themes of the show as the series’ unfolds.
Following the episode guide proper each story is broken down into the following easy to digest subsections:
Also included amongst the 423 pages are 18 pages of colour photographs (mostly candid snaps of the production of the new series – including a fabulous full-page new series Dalek in all its gold liveried glory!)
Facts & Figures
As if that wasn’t enough, there’s all the facts and figures about viewer numbers broken down by episode, to show how the phenomena of Doctor Who in 2005 grew to be a monster mainstream smash hit, securing Saturday night time travel adventures for at least two more seasons. Chief among these is the fact that – aside from a great performance in ratings terms across the original run of the show, mid-Summer and against some stiff competition, the first episode created such a ‘buzz’ that ten million viewers watched. That’s an incredible 43% of the UK possible audience share! Not bad for a series that many inside and outside of TV land thought had had it’s day decades past…Add to that facts and figures on the repeats on BBC Three – and even for the specially commissioned documentaries (Doctor Who Confidential – one of which followed each new episode, over on the BBC’s digital service) and you’ll have more numbers than any one fan could need!
So – who (or should that be ‘Who’?) will like this weighty tome? Well, long-term fans of Doctor Who obviously – but the book will also win over new fans of the new series. The Doctor Who series broadcast in 2005 perhaps tried more than any previous new incarnation of the show to start with a clean slate. There’s the TARDIS – the Doctor’s erratic time machine, perpetually stuck in the form of a 1950’s British Metropolitan Police Box, there’s The Doctor himself (plus companion/s), there are old enemies to fight (1960’s scriptwriter Terry Nation’s uniquely marvellous creation: The Daleks) and a small amount of chat about the Doctor’s own people: The Time Lords. That’s your lot as far as back story/baggage is really concerned.
What this book does in one handy volume (it’s detailed and chunky, but not so heavy you can’t read it on the train, bus, or in the playground) is what the new series itself does so well: give the audience/reader a neat jumping in point. This is 'Doctor Who: Year One' – and although I don’t doubt it will be lapped up by countless dedicated amateur historians of the original series and neatly filed away alongside numerous other tomes of ‘Who lore it’s real home will be in the mitts of the new audience. New readers – just like the new fans created by the ‘classic’ series throughout it’s original run - will be eager to bone up on the background of what they’ve just seen while they wait excitedly for the new series to hit BBC One next year.
The volume will also be of great interest to anyone interested in a case study of the way modern television is scripted, put together, marketed and received. The work offers a fascinating and at times incredibly detailed study of the minutia of a modern television production – and might as easily be expected to find it’s way onto media studies course reading lists as onto the Christmas lists of the Time Lords’ fans.
It compares favourably with similar genre works of recent years – think somewhere between Pocket Books’ Buffy The Vampire Slayer: The Watcher’s Guide series and Titan Books’ Don’t Panic: Douglas Adams & The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy and you’ll be pretty close. Indeed, for tone and detail Back To The Vortex goes further than either of these two examples. Readers of the official publication of the TV series (Pannini’s Doctor Who Magazine) who will have read Andrew Pixley s’ production archives of the classic series’ might recognise a similar approach here. Certainly the level of detail is comparable to that long-running series of articles. The book scores further over most ‘companions’ to TV series in having a number of different voices attached to the project. Aside from the author: J. Shaun Lyon (editor of the American fan web site Outpost Gallifrey) the book benefits enormously from drawing on nine ‘panellists’, who each give their commentary/opinions throughout the book. This makes the whole seem much more even than it could so easily have been – with each new ‘voice’ bringing fresh insights and ways of looking at the stories they’re discussing. At times it really is like listening to the opinions of friends talking over what they thought of the show they’ve just seen round a table down their local.
The Spoiler Zone
As an ‘unofficial’ volume it also has a series of important roles to play. Firstly, being removed from the production itself it can perhaps be somewhat more objective than the BBC’s own output of tie-in volumes (good though they often are – this can be objective, where an ‘official’ book might just have had trouble). Secondly this makes a really first-class summary of a time period for the ‘new’ show that many ardent fans will have missed: the media build up, rumours, leaks, hints and revelations that appeared across the media as the series’ broadcast got closer. This territory – the world of ‘spoilers’ - will have been just the things that the shows’ dedicated fans purposely missed out on, so as to enjoy the series as close to ‘new’ as possible. Having avoided that slow-drip of information this book can now be safely enjoyed post-broadcast, as a way of revisiting many of those potential ‘spoiler’ moments as they unfolded - safe in the knowledge that they won’t ruin the enjoyment of the series itself.
With the future of the television series assured – there’s a Doctor Who special on at Christmas, a spin-off series planned, a second full series of adventures in the coming year and at least a third having been green lit by the Beeb – Telos could be onto the start of a long-running series themselves. Somewhere, right now, a new Doctor Who episode is probably being planned, filmed, edited or finished with lavish effects and music – one can only hope that somewhere nearby there’s also someone taking notes – and thinking about Back To The Vortex 2. As Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor was so fond of saying, this is (quite literally) ‘fantastic’. Roll on series (and volume) two!
For further reading on the classic series of the show Back To The Vortex has a detailed appendix of some of the best ‘sites and books to hunt down. In addition, we recommend seeking out The Television Companion, by David J. Howe and Arnold T. Blumberg, The Programme Guide by Jean-Marc Lofficier and Licence Denied: Rumblings From The Doctor Who Underground, edited by Paul Cornell. This last work is out-of-print, but is still around – and is a light-hearted look at the world of Doctor Who fandom circa 1997. For online reading the website of the series’ official fan club in the UK: The Doctor Who Appreciation Society is packed with resources and articles on the show’s long history, as is the ‘site edited by the author of Back To The Vortex: Outpost Gallifrey, as well as the BBC’s own Doctor Who website.
Telos Publishing are an independent, small-press publishers of limited edition, collectible books for all fans of horror, noire crime ‘pulps’, dark fantasy and genre television. The firm started out by publishing a series of novellas set in the universe of the Doctor Who television series – and has since branched out into many other areas of the fantastical. Back To The Vortex is only the latest non-fiction work to be released – following unofficial series guides to Stargate: SG1 and 24.
Back To The Vortex – The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who 2005 is in the shops now, priced £12.99 (standard paperback) and £30.00 (limited edition signed and numbered hardback) from Telos Publishing Ltd.
Book jacket image is © Telos Publishing Ltd. 2005. PSP Ltd is not responsible for the content of external websites.
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