subtitle

...a blog by Richard Flowers

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Day 4191: Time's Champions Teaser #2, by Daddy Richard

What Doctor Who – The New Adventures Mean To Us: Richard


Doctor Who: The New Adventures (not, as Wikipedia disparagingly lists them, "Virgin New Adventures"), for six years from 1991 to 1997 were Doctor Who.

At the time, everyone was on board with this. The general public may have drifted away, but fans, DWAS, Doctor Who Magazine (and their rivals) all bought into this unifying idea: the series was – temporarily – off air, but that was okay, because the line remained unbroken. People who were recognisably Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred, joined by someone who would eventually turn out to be Lisa Bowerman, continued to play the Doctor and Ace (and their new friend Benny) albeit in paperback form.

With the exception of the four "Timewyrm" novels which are hard to place (although "at the beginning" seems obvious), The New Adventures form a continuous narrative of sixty adventures for the seventh Doctor in between his last two televised appearances. "Cat's Cradle" follows on directly from "Survival" (even the title is thematically consistent). "Lungbarrow" segues directly into the "Time Waits for No Man" TV movie. And "The Dying Days" is a bonus.

In hindsight, it was a miracle that everyone could play together nicely in the same shared universe sandbox.

So the first thing that the New Adventures mean is a shared community.

After Virgin lost the licence to print new Doctor Who there was what we might melodramatically call the great schism, partly caused by rival book continuities as Virgin's ongoing line of Benny-led NAs vied with the BBC's in-house Eighth Doctor Adventures, partly by the rise of the deservedly-popular Big Finish audios, partly just because fandom had decided to fall apart. The possibility that Doctor Who was a single ongoing narrative, one "continuity", was shattered at that point and there's no going back.

I'm not saying that these later stories are bad, or wrong. (Although I admit I'm no fan of the BBC's Past Doctor Adventures of the seventh Doctor and Ace, a strand that seemingly went out of its way to rewrite continuity as though the NAs hadn't got there first.) But Big Finish have produced an excellent series of audio adventures for the seventh Doctor, Ace and latterly Hex. There's also a darker, more contemplative range of solo seventh Doctor adventures, purportedly towards the end of his life, leading up to the lonely Doctor we see at the start of "Time Waits for No Man". But there is no gap for these stories to go in, any more than there is a gap for the equally-good fifth Doctor Peri and Eremim stories that allegedly go between "Planet of Fire" and "The Caves of Androzani". If you think that one continuity bulldozes another aside, that's up to you. If you want to think that they're a different time track, or an unreliable narrator, or a parallel universe away, or that time can be rewritten, or if you want to retcon that a gap can be there after all, then that's perfectly acceptable too. The dimensions of time are stranger than we know and any and all of these things can be true or false all at once.

But there's an extent to which this has led to a revisionist "they never happened" attitude towards the New Adventures. (Or the 8DAs or the audio adventures or all the above.) It's a tendency that says that since, by television audience standards, very few people read them they somehow don't "count", that because the general Joe in the street is not remotely likely to remember them that they didn't really happen (as though the average Joe in the street stands a chance of remembering "Enlightenment" or "Inferno" or even really "City of Death" either). People refer to them dismissively as spin-offs, non-canonical, or the derisive "fanfiction". (Though by that definition "Rose", "Blink" and "Human Nature (TV reprise)" should count as "fanfiction" too. Meaning: what's wrong with fans writing fiction?)

One particular way of disbarring the New Adventures is to say: "but people had to pay to read them".

Yet, for me, this is actually a strength. As fans we're all a bit Obsessive Compulsive to a greater or lesser extent. The urge to "collect the set".

So, the second thing about the New Adventures is their collectability.

In a way, I came to Doctor Who backwards. I remember watching, as a child, because those cliffhangers do stick in the head. I remember seeing Scaroth's face from behind a door at my gran's; I recall that I didn't see what the Foamasi did to Mr Brock because I hid my face; and I remember Tom regenerating into Peter. And Peter into Colin. But somehow I didn't remember the stories.

It wasn't until the advent of the video age, which coincided with both my going to university and my parents moving to Belgium (meaning I inherited a video recorder that would not work on the continent) that I got into Doctor Who. Which meant that Sylv could be my Doctor all over again.

With the series off the air, Doctor Who became treasure. Video was a source of stories that I didn't remember seeing. And of stories that I could never remember seeing, because they were older than I was. To me, the Hartnell era was a gold mine of new Doctor Who. And then came the New Adventures.

The inclusion of "story arcs", present from the very beginning in the "Timewyrm" and "Cat's Cradle" series, the recurring supporting cast, the ability to revisit and greatly expand the mythos of the Earth Empire or Ancient Gallifrey... all this adds to the addictive jigsaw that keeps you coming back for more.

The "Cartmel Master Plan", derided or affectionately remembered, was never a setting in stone of the book series' overarching story. But instead was a metaphor, the idea not just that this secret document was kept in the vault at Virgin Publishing, but that these secrets would be revealed. It adds another dimension to the series' collectability: the desire to keep coming back to see what they will tell you this week, to see if you can puzzle it all out.

But equally the long running themes and arcs of comic book storytelling which underlay Andrew Cartmel's conception of the series in the last television years translate directly into the so-called soap opera aspects that Russell Davies brought to the series in the 2000s. The ongoing emotional developments (and occasional breathtaking resets thereof) of the lead characters were a main feature of the range. Indeed "angst" is easily the word most associated with the range. Yet the very fact that these characters could have relationships was revelatory, even revolutionary.

So the third and final thing that the New Adventures mean is transgression.

Doctor Who has always managed to present as startlingly genderqueer thanks, ironically, to its massively conservative "no hanky panky in the TARDIS" rule (mixed in with actors such as Patrick Troughton, Katy Manning or Tom Baker all liking to play it a bit "naughty").

As often observed, those time-space bromides in the tea (clearly enforced by the TARDIS telepathic circuits until they burn out trying it on with Captain Jack, leading to Doctor ten being Mr Smoochy, Doctor eleven getting married, and Amy and Rory Pond doing the deed while in the Vortex faster than you can say "bunkbeds") meant that we had a male lead who was intelligent, witty, heroic and totally uninterested in girls (Russell retcons about Sarah Jane notwithstanding). At the same time we saw a succession of strong female characters from Barbara Wright to Ace – taking in the likes of Liz Shaw, Jo Grant, Leela, Romana and Tegan along the way, not to mention best-friend Sarah – who were more than capable of holding their own against Daleks, Sontarans and Cybermen and usually more devoted to their hair care than any man. Toss in gay icons from Kate O'Mara to Bonnie Langford – and that's in the same show! – and you can start to see how this was looking to a certain section of the audience.

And yet it was all left unsaid.

The New Adventures could come out (as it were) and say it. How we thrilled – as boy readers identifying with a girl character – to experience Ace's emotional roller-coasters. How we swooned at every hint of Benny's bisexuality (yes, the time-travelling archaeologist who's very much the fiftieth century girl years ahead of River Song. In so many ways). And then actual gay characters (from "Tragedy Day" on). In those years before the word "squee" had been found, we didn't know what to do with ourselves.

And, yes, a lot of the sexualising of the characters was hetero. We'll no doubt discuss the "het-ing up" of Ace later. But we didn't care. The world is mostly straight but not all of it. And so were the New Adventures.

Arguably, taking a television kids' series and turning it into grown-up novels is a pretty perverse thing to do in and of itself. Answering questions you'd never think to ask – can the Doctor get drunk (yes), does he have a navel (yes), do the Time Lords fu- (apparently they used to but gave it all up until very recently) – are all very risqué.

But if that isn't already transgressive enough, the novel as a form lends itself to transgression, playing with time and point of view and unreliable narrator. Perhaps the most playful NAs are "Conundrum" (almost to the point of meta-textuality) and "Christmas on a Rational Planet" (deconstructing the established myths of the New Adventures while playing a game of spot the Doctor Who story reference – can you find them all?) while "The Highest Science" and "Tragedy Day" toy with satire and "Parasite" does the Joseph Campbell monomyth thoroughly to death.

(And in the related Missing Adventures, "The Romance of Crime", "The English Way of Death" and "The Well-Mannered War" develop pastiche to high art in rediscovering the Douglas Adams era.)

In conclusion, then:

Chelonians, Pakhars, Legion, Hoothi, Phractons, Sensopaths, Sloathes, Slaags, Quoth, N-Forms, Toys – never heard of them? You should have. Toss in generous helpings of Ice Warriors and Earth Reptiles and everywhere the shadow of the Daleks and you've got the most interesting range of monsters in Doctor Who's history. Yet two of the best, "Sanctuary" and "Just War", have no alien monsters at all.

From Earth to Io to the edge of Empire. From Gallifrey in the Dark Times to the Worldsphere of the People to the End of the Universe. From Dalek opera to the etiquette of the Ice Lords to Time Lord finger-biscuits. From Ace to Benny to Chris and Ros. Time's Champion, Ka'Faraq'Gatri, The Doctor.

These are the New Adventures.

These are my Doctor Who.

This is how much they mean to me.

First published on "Time's Champions" by Daddy Richard.

13 comments:

Tat said...

"At the time, everyone was on board with this. "

Bollocks we were!

"fans, DWAS, Doctor Who Magazine (and their rivals) all bought into this unifying idea: the series was – temporarily – off air, but that was okay, because the line remained unbroken."

Actually, most fans I know accepted that it was gone forever and thus 'ours' to play with, rather than a publicly-owned copyright being flogged to Richard Branson and a set of stories contradicting the equally well-loved DWM comic (itself a publicly-owned copyright flogged to Stan Lee). Fandom's centre of gravity shifted towards our shared upbringing.

"One particular way of disbarring the New Adventures is to say: "but people had to pay to read them".

Yet, for me, this is actually a strength. As fans we're all a bit Obsessive Compulsive to a greater or lesser extent. The urge to "collect the set". "

Very no. This spinoffery was merchandise, pure and simple, and while your attempts at a neuropathology of fandom is less irksome than this idea that we've all got Asberger's it's still a one-size-fits-all extrapolation from your own experience. I know a few people who were routinely buying them as market research because they had notions they wanted to turn into hard cash instead of a fanzine article (as anyone with any self-respect would have chosen instead - that's me extrapolating from me) I don't know of many people who would by one of these books simply bcause it was one of these books. Nobody who was especially enthusiastic about Kate Orman would have been seen dead with a McIntee.

"The inclusion of "story arcs", present from the very beginning in the "Timewyrm" and "Cat's Cradle" series, the recurring supporting cast, the ability to revisit and greatly expand the mythos of the Earth Empire or Ancient Gallifrey... all this adds to the addictive jigsaw that keeps you coming back for more.

'You' in this case not meaning me. Nor, apparently, anyone reading 'Skaro'.

and finally
"the deservedly-popular Big Finish audios"

No comment.

Millennium Dome said...

Tat,

As the author of an essay titled "Was 1973 the Annus Mirabilis" you're not really in the best position to lecture anyone about "one-size-fits-all extrapolation from your own experience".

You've clearly missed the point that this is a personal account as flagged up by the title "What the New Adventures Mean to Us".

However, you are also wrong in fact. e.g. the DWM and the New Adventures for a long time did not contradict one another, with the magazine printing "Preludes" and the comic strip crossing over with NA stories. It even featured Benny.

Equally the BBC did not "flog off a publicly-owned copyright" (with sub-Marxist subtext "the BBC privatised Doctor Who"). "Publicly-owned" is not the same as "free collective use", or perhaps you'd like to try treating a nuclear power station as a playground and see what happens. A similarly nasty surprise awaits you should you try to make use of "Doctor Who", "the TARDIS" or worst of all the Daleks, as the disclaimers all over your own published works loudly attest.

Nor did the BBC ever surrender any part of its copyright; they licenced Virgin to produce books, keeping control of the copyright themselves, and as a bonus getting paid something for producing nothing. Waiting on the BBC to give television unto us is as likely to get you Crime Traveller as it is more Doctor Who. The New Adventures' licence granted permission to people who wanted to make new Doctor Who to make it at a time when the BBC themselves had no interest in or intention of doing so. And we, the public, got the possibility of enjoying new Who when otherwise there would have been none.

And you never had to pay for the New Adventures if you didn't want to; people who didn't want Doctor Who on the telly had no choice about paying for it through their licence fee. Which of those is actually more equitable?

(cont...)

Millennium Dome said...

(...cont)


You are, of course, one of those people who dismiss the New Adventures as "spinoffery". Yet, I would say that for almost all of the televised run, many of the people producing Doctor Who did it only because the BBC told them to, or "for the money". Whereas, most people writing New Adventures did it first and foremost because they passionately wanted to write Doctor Who. I find the latter far more laudable.

Nor can you deny the fact that more new writers entered the series during the course of the New Adventures than at any other time in the series' history. That's a tremendous flowering of creativity.

You may not yourself know many people who read the New Adventures (except, bizarrely, as "market research") but, again, the fact is that they routinely sold upwards of ten-thousand copies. Yes, a tiny fraction of a TV audience, but vastly larger than any circle of acquaintances you may be claiming to speak for.

But then, when you say:

"Nobody who was especially enthusiastic about Kate Orman would have been seen dead with a McIntee."

...you just give away how small a circle you are basing your anecdotal evidence upon.

(I'm sure we will be lighting on both "The Left-Handed Hummingbird" and "First Frontier" as high points of the range, and probably calling both "Sanctuary" and "The Room With No Doors" classics.)

I'm not going to deny there were differences between factions in fandom – Alex's piece more than mine touches on the Rad v Trad, Frock v Gun debates – but that does not mean they didn't all come together in the Fitzroy Tavern to argue it out. Or to punch Paul Cornell on the nose. I know you know this, because you were there.

Now, I've no idea if you didn't feel part of a fan community in the New Adventures era, but if you felt left out and alone, then I'm sorry for you. But that's your experience. You have no power and no right to say that I did not feel drawn into a shared community by my experience of those books.

That is what the New Adventures mean to me.

To quote a controversial Doctor: "whether you like it or not".

Millennium Dome said...

And finally...

"No comment"

Do you object to "popular" or "deservedly" in regard to Big Finish? "Popular" is surely another indisputable fact – their output sells well enough to support several full-time salaries, on top of what they pay for their casts and writers. "Deservedly" then, depends whether you think that the reward of popularity is justified by the hard work put in by Jason, Gary, Nick and all their directors (Ken, Barnaby, Lisa etc), sound designers, writers and of course actors to produce something creative for the enjoyment of people pretty much like you and me. You're not obliged to like the output, but don't knock the input.

Tat said...

On the advice of my NA-loving wife, I waited 24 hours to cool off before replying to your replies. Here's what I wrote, now officially Dot-sanctioned:

Tat said...

Well, I do seem to have touched a nerve. Lucky I didn’t resort to name-calling or ad hominem arguments. I wasn’t seeking to cause offence, just articulate why I felt offended.

“ As the author of an essay titled "Was 1973 the Annus Mirabilis" you're not really in the best position to lecture anyone about "one-size-fits-all extrapolation from your own experience". “

But I also wrote ‘Was 2006 The Annus Mirabilis?” and sent you a rough-draft. And as you recall, neither essay was an extrapolation from my experience but an examination of the stats and claims for and against by various parties. You did actually read this or are you just saying what you think will score points?

“You've clearly missed the point that this is a personal account as flagged up by the title "What the New Adventures Mean to Us". “


Yes, I’ll cop to that. But you did use a universal ‘we’. That way Parkin lies.

“However, you are also wrong in fact. e.g. the DWM and the New Adventures for a long time did not contradict one another, with the magazine printing "Preludes" and the comic strip crossing over with NA stories. It even featured Benny .”

But they killed Ace. And until 1995 there wasn’t a lot else they could have done, what with there not being enough to fill a monthly magazine.

“ Equally the BBC did not "flog off a publicly-owned copyright" (with sub-Marxist subtext "the BBC privatised Doctor Who"). “

A reading of the BBC’s own charter is hardly ‘sub-Marxist’. You sound like Tea Partizan who sees that Hitler called his party ‘National Socialists’ and concludes that all Socialists, including multi-millionaire playboy Baz Obama, are Nazis. A curious piece of invective even after last week’s weird post when you said Polly Toynbee ws a ‘Tory’ (and even more alarmingly that serial-patsy Clegg was ‘The most successful Liberal since Lloyd George’, but I promised not to argue politics with you after you went all Ipcress File).

“ "Publicly-owned" is not the same as "free collective use", or perhaps you'd like to try treating a nuclear power station as a playground and see what happens.”

Ooh! Ooh! Do I get to dress up as Andy Pandy?

“ A similarly nasty surprise awaits you should you try to make use of "Doctor Who", "the TARDIS" or worst of all the Daleks, as the disclaimers all over your own published works loudly attest.”

Even the BBC can’t use the Daleks without a note from their mum. As the increasingly unfortunately named Mad Norwegian is an American outfit, this is a different ball-game from if I, a licence-fee payer, refer to these things without making money. That’s how fanzines work.

“And you never had to pay for the New Adventures if you didn't want to; people who didn't want Doctor Who on the telly had no choice about paying for it through their licence fee. Which of those is actually more equitable?”

The latter, obviously. Have you been inhaling next to Rupert Murdoch? These people who didn’t want Doctor Who did want some telly, and as the BBC engineers were in charge of maintaining the transmitters and training the technical staff who went to commercial stations it was infrastructure as much as what idiots now call ‘content’ that was being paid for.
(As we both know, Doctor Who was more than breaking even in its later years and so people who weren’t keen on paying for it weren’t actually paying for it: it was paying for ‘Tender Is The Night’. The delay in making Season 26 was because everyone saw it as a potential gold-mine, as did Virgin, and put in bids.)

“Nor can you deny the fact that more new writers entered the series during the course of the New Adventures than at any other time in the series' history. That's a tremendous flowering of creativity.”

Or lousy quality-control. Even by the standards of a series that employed Bob’n’Dave, Pip’n’Jane or Chibnall.

Tat said...

“Yes, a tiny fraction of a TV audience, but vastly larger than any circle of acquaintances you may be claiming to speak for.”

But it’s not just my circle of acquaintances that I consulted on this. See below.
“But then, when you say:

"Nobody who was especially enthusiastic about Kate Orman would have been seen dead with a McIntee."

...you just give away how small a circle you are basing your anecdotal evidence upon.”

Actually, no: I thought like you to begin with (or the flipside, that I was the only person who didn’t really like either, despite people saying ‘… I know you don’t like them but THIS one’s good’) but then I landed up doing an MA Dissertation on the subject so I went to ManoptiCon and asked total strangers what they thought. This isn’t anecdata, this is the result of a questionnaire. And for the crucial year 1993 I was in Birmingham, far from the Tavern crowd. In a bookshop, talking to customers...
Did you do this?
(Unlike Lawrence or, apparently, you, I don’t assume myself to be typical - of anything - so I go looking for external validation of my impressions. I find it as often as not and where there’s a difference I comment on that. The essay you cite as ’evidence’ that I map my gut onto the whole wide world is an example of me testing my hunch. So’s the other one).

“. You have no power and no right to say that I did not feel drawn into a shared community by my experience of those books.”

True. I wasn’t even trying to Just as you have no right to include me in the ‘Everyone’ who was ‘on board’ with these being the one and only truly original continuation of the TV series.

“That is what the New Adventures mean to me.

To quote a controversial Doctor: "whether you like it or not". “

Good luck to you. I just never subscribed to the view that if you didn’t buy them you weren’t a ‘true’ fan. That’s the sort of sales-pitch they use for terrible artwork and Dapol models.

Tat said...

“And finally...

"No comment"

Do you object to "popular" or "deservedly" in regard to Big Finish?”

Which part of “No Comment” don’t you get?

Tat said...

Curse this clumsy online malarky. Two lines went walkies. Behold:

“the fact is that they routinely sold upwards of ten-thousand copies.”

Where did you get this number? Even Andrew Beech trying to talk up fandom to The Times only said 8000


And that's it. Sorry to act like the sulky teenager telling the kids that the department store Santa was some old git from the JobCentre.

Nick Campbell said...

Tat Wood, why did you feel the need to come in so heavily on this blog post? It was quite obviously an affectionate, personal tribute to the New Adventures. Yes, the claim that all Who fandom was in one accord over the books is worth unpicking and, at least, qualifying. On the other hand, the tone and form of your response were completely misjudged and disproportionate.

Millennium Dome said...

I read as far as:

"Well, I do seem to have touched a nerve."

No, I did you the courtesy of replying to a comment that was offensive in its content and its language.

But you seem desperate to pick a fight. Well, if that's your attitude, then I'm not going to bother reading any further. This is me walking away.

Perhaps you will have something interesting and constructive to contribute on another subject, but as far as this one goes: stop now.

Kate Orman said...

I want to read your dissertation, Tat.

Kate Orman said...

I want to read your dissertation, Tat.