Britton - TARDISbound: Navigating the Universes of Doctor Who

Piers D. Britton is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Redlands, Southern California. He is co- author, with Simon Barker, of Reading Between Designs: Visual Imagery and the Generation of Meaning in The Avengers, The Prisoner and Doctor Who.

For Simon Who Else?

In gratitude for thirty years of friendship

Piers D. Britton

TARDISbound

NAVIGATING THE UNIVERSES OF DOCTOR WHO

Published in 2011 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd

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Copyright 2011, Piers D. Britton

The right of Piers D. Britton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 9781 84511 925 6

eISBN: 978 0 85773 221 7

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

T he idea for this book germinated from conversations I had with Simon Barker and Derek Kompare in 2005. Although a co-authored study did not, as originally planned, result from those early discussions, I am grateful to both colleagues for providing the initial stimulus for this project, and to Simon in particular for providing characteristically crisp advice when I was in the sagging middle stages of the writing process. Simons reflections on Doctor Who (and on other matters) have suffused my own for most of our lives, and it is impossible not to see him as hovering, Hermes-like, over much of the work I have done here.

One of the great delights of my academic involvement with Doctor Who has been that it has led me over the years into encounters with creative individuals of extraordinary calibre. Two of these have made vital contributions to the life of this text. I am indebted to my dear friend June Hudson for the ravishing cover illustrations, and to Paul Magrs for supplying me with the books title, TARDISbound. I will add that both these artists have inspired me as much with their work at large as with their direct involvement in this book.

A number of colleagues at the University of Redlands, and other members of the campus community, have influenced this book in one way or another through provocative suggestions, pointed questions and trenchant comments, including Priya Jha, Bill McDonald, Ted Pearson, Kelly Hankin, Kathy Feeley, Leslie Brody and Nancy Carrick. Eliza Rodriguez y Gibson has played a crucial supportive role, too broad in scope to define here easily, offering critique, conversation or cocktails as required. In the course of the books preparation, Lizas and my research interests have come evermore fully into alignment, and it has been a privilege to enjoy with her the kind of scholarly camaraderie and reciprocation I always imagined the academy would supply but had never before actually experienced.

I should like to acknowledge the support of former and ongoing colleagues in the erstwhile Department of Art and Art History at Redlands who in different ways encouraged or supported my work on this book during a very difficult period: Ral Acero, Cara Cole, Ann Marie Leimer, Jacob Ristau and our administrative assistant Jo Nuo. Im enormously grateful for the tireless and patient support (and the wicked humour) of Sandi Richey, Head of Circulation Services and Inter-library Loan at the Armacost Library and indeed to all members of the library staff, not least former Director Jean Swanson. Thanks also to the staff of the University of California Riversides Rivera Library who administer the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and Utopian Literature; the ready accessibility of materials in this collection has been a great boon during the preparation of this volume.

Via sundry online forums, email conversations, and Facebook posts I have benefited from support, comments and information from Kelly Hale, Stuart Douglas, Philip Purser-Hallard and Simon Bucher-Jones. I am grateful, as ever, for ongoing intermittent contact with Ian Potter who continues to complicate and upset my ideas in very useful ways. Sin Gibson offered wonderful encouragement at two crucial moments.

Students in recent seminars on visual culture, film and television costume and television aesthetics have significantly modified my thinking about much of the material in this book, especially Liz Brooks, Mia Buckland, Myranda Hunter, Molly Irelan and Michaela Petrovich.

My commissioning editor, Philippa Brewster, has been a model of patience and a fund of common sense as this text shambled unsteadily towards belated completion. I am most grateful to her for encouraging me to submit the proposal which ultimately led to this books being picked up by I.B.Tauris, and for all mercies ever since, including the opportunity to revisit my text in the wake of the Eleventh Doctors arrival on screen.

Without my student research assistant, Nicholas K. Zaharopoulos, this volume would certainly never have been finished. Nick was shrewd enough to anticipate my needs better than I could forecast them, and he calmly relieved me of burdens and removed obstacles in my path more times than I can remember. Words cannot express my relief that the manuscript was essentially complete before he graduated from Redlands. I never taught Nick in class, but I learnt a lot from him.

Last, paraphrasing Hitchcock, I should like to acknowledge the four most important contributors to the successful completion of this book: the first is a dauntingly able and imaginative scholar; the second is a colleague of unswerving integrity and tenacity; the third is my spouse and co-carer for three dogs and a cat; the fourth is as fine a cook as ever performed miracles in a domestic kitchen (not least on nights when it was really my turn to make dinner) and their names are Anne Cavender.

INTRODUCTION

D octor Who was first the subject of a book-length scholarly study in 1983; this was Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text by John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado. The subtitle of the volume clearly signals the authors conception of their subject: The Unfolding Text implies both that Doctor Who was ongoing (it was to remain in continuous production on BBC TV until 1989) and more importantly for my purposes in the present book that it was a unified, monolithic phenomenon. This last point was hardly controversial at the time. Doctor Who had been devised for television and still principally existed in cultural consciousness as such.

For some commentators, the claim that Doctor Who is primarily, if not exclusively, a television phenomenon still holds good. This has been the position of both James Chapman and Kim Newman who have published critical-historical studies of Doctor Who since its triumphant revival on BBC television in 2005. My book focuses on Doctor Who as a media phenomenon which is firmly established not only in the television cosmos but also, to borrow a well-known phrase from