Tim Robins continues his look back at the first season of The Fifteenth Doctor’s adventures, this time reflecting on its place in wider Doctor Who history…
(You can read the opening instalment here: Look Back in Anxiety: Doctor Who, Season One, 2024 – Part One)
Season Two of Doctor Who is upon us, but while fans are looking forward to the future of the show, I want to continue my look back at Season One, first broadcast in 2024.
In this part, I explore the impact of BBC Studios’ contract with Disney+, particularly its relationship to Doctor Who’s “Public Service” function. In short, did Season One continue to meet the BBC’s mission to inform, educate and entertain?
The direct answer to that question lies ahead in Part Three, but my answer begins here where I will review the creative nature of BBC Studio’s contract with Disney+ and look back to the 1960s and 1970s, to explore Doctor Who’s relationship of the so-called Reithian ethos that has informed the BBC’s place as a public service broadcaster.
As we have learnt, the contract between the commercial arm of the BBC and Disney’s streaming service was for 26 episodes, of which three 2023 60th Anniversary Specials, two Christmas Specials and 2024’s season one have already been screened. Beyond the now airing second season, awaits a five-episode spin-off, The War Between The Land and the Sea, due to screen later this year or early next year.
So, Doctor Who was not in the kind of trouble that I suggested back in my article, “Before We Begin”, written in 2021. As one commentator chided me, my fears – that the BBC could no longer afford to make the programme – failed to take into account its appeal as an Intellectual Property for US production companies and, specifically, for Disney, although I may yet be correct in suggesting that the BBC can no longer afford to make Doctor Who on its own.
It turned out the BBC had already been seeking funding from Disney before Bad Wolf productions and showrunner Russell T. Davies came on board. Talking on “David Tennant Does a Podcast With….”, Davies explained that, even before he was appointed as showrunner, there was already a move from the BBC to shift Doctor Who to a streamer precisely, because the programme would need a cash injection to keep going.
Davies noted that the BBC’s then director of drama, Piers Wenger, wanted Doctor Who to look like shows such as Stranger Things and the various Star Wars and Marvel shows and said, “It should look like that. It deserves to look like that.”
In return for acquiring the overseas distribution rights, Disney would handle international marketing and put money directly into the production, although Davies had to step in and debunk the rumour that the show would receive £10 million an episode.
“Any piece of television costs millions,” Davies said. “We’re not allowed to talk about budget, and we’re not on that Star Wars or Star Trek level, but it’s more than I’ve ever had to work with.”
Doctor Who’s proven, past, commercial success certainly appealed to Disney. A recent Disney+ press kit enthused “over 17 million Sonic Screwdrivers and action figures, 19 million DVDs and over one million tickets for Doctor Who live events have sold globally.”
Looking back on Season One (2024), Disney+ celebrated the fact that Doctor Who was a Top Five series for them, “globally every week it aired as well as being the BBC’s top drama for under 35s this year making it one of the biggest programmes for the demographic across all streamers and broadcasters.”
Davies described the contract between BBC Studios and Disney+ as “the best of both worlds.” Julie Gardner, an Executive Producer for Bad Wolf, Doctor Who’s production company, reassured fans that Disney+ “were really interested in what the show was, had been, the legacy of it, what Russell wanted to do…”
So, Doctor Who has not been entirely assimilated by Disney+ and Davies described their contract as “the best of both worlds.” But Disney’s input is certainly taken into account. Money talks, even if all it has to say is “buy more of our stuff.” As distributors and investors in the programme, Disney+ provide “notes” that have impacted on the show.
“The Church on Ruby Road” provided an oft-cited example of responding to notes from Disney+. There was a rather obviously inserted scene in which The Doctor appeared to info dump a lot of his backstory to a passing policeman, or, in commercial terms, pointing out Doctor Who’s Unique Selling Points. However, it seems that I was mistaken in thinking this was the point of the scene. Davies has said that Disney just wanted the character to appear earlier in the story.
However, Davies enthusiastically/willingly/willfully embraced key aspects of the Disney ‘brand.’ Not to make too much of a song and dance about it, Doctor Who incorporated song and dance into some of its stories.
Disney has long been a home for the musical even when the genre has laid fallow in mainstream cinema. I’m sure this was part of Davies’ strategy to attract younger viewers than the BBC’s usual audience of sixty-year-olds. Disney is synonymous with childhood.
Of course, Disney is also synonymous with animation. Season One embraced at least the look of 2D animation in, for example, the cartoonish musical notes weaponised by The Maestro in “The Devil’s Chord“. A more obvious example is Season Two’s Mr Ring-a-Ding, in the upcoming “Lux” episode. The 2D character looks like he’s stepped from the retro-animation world popularised in the Cuphead video game.
Disney are also owners of Marvel Studios, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Davies incorporated aspects of the superhero genre into Doctor Who. Instead of engaging with alien races, The Doctor was confronted with super powerful, god-like creatures that were no longer bent on conquering the Earth but destroying the fabric of reality itself; enter The Toymaker, The Maestro and Sutekh (making a return appearance from 1975’s “The Pyramids of Mars”).
Davies has offered a number of reasons for introducing super villains instead of Doctor Who’s usual rogues gallery of monsters. For example, he noted that, when he joined the show, Jodie Whitaker’s Doctor had just had a story in which she fought the Daleks and the Cybermen and the Master all in one episode. Davies said that the story was “brilliant, but once that’s happened, it’s just common sense to take a different step…”
Elsewhere, Davies said that cosmic supervillains raised the stakes as now the entire fabric of time and space (multi-verse?) was under threat.
Personally, I can’t see many of The Doctor’s traditional adversaries fitting in with the brave new world of music. Anyone up for line-dancing Cyber-personages? Ice Warriors performing a Mars based remix of “Ice, Ice Baby”? Davros “Do, do, doing the Dalek”? I’m not.
Davies was keen to point out that he didn’t see The Doctor as a conventional superhero. “… I started to think that a lot of action heroes and other superheroes just punch people to sort things out,” he’s previously noted. “But the defining feature of the Doctor is that they don’t carry a weapon, and, quite profoundly, he makes jokes in the face of danger.”
Maybe. Of course, The Doctor does carry his sonic, which has been used as everything from a kind of magic wand to a potential weapon of mass destruction.
In the event, I found the new Disney-Doctor Who to be a little disappointing. Despite all the handwaving, there seemed to be a lot of standing around talking about what was going to happen. Stephen Moffat’s story, “Boom” played right into the hands of Starburst critic, Paul Mount, who finds Moffat’s writing unbearably static. There were also curious echoes of Davies 2005 season, not least Sutekh’s dialogue in his final rant.
Doctor Who can encompass a variety of story types, but I found the changes of tone jarring rather than liberating. I wasn’t alone. YouTuber ‘Stubagful” thought the show and its viewers might be undergoing an existential crisis. He pointed out the multi-platform , streaming environment doesn’t lend itself to a family audience, sitting together in a preordained place, on a preordained day, at a preordained time.
Additionally, Stubagful went on to note that making a show aimed at everyone is now rare.
“The move to Disney+ has come with this statement that Doctor Who is now setting out to fit in with the streaming environment,” he says. But, he argues, streaming is more niche aimed at specific age groups with specific interests.
In contrast to Doctor Who, the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises produce different programmes for different audiences. Stubagful gives the example of Star Wars as “something that seems to understand the fragmentation of audience… Mandalorian and Boba Fett for the original trilogy fans, Obi-Wan Kenobi for Millennials who saw the prequels when we were kids, young Jedi adventures for the younger kids, Star Wars Resistance for the older kids”.
Another reaction has been that the entire contract with Disney+ is a deal with the Devil. Writing in the fanzine, Tides of Time, Thomas Barker wrote, “This is the first time Doctor Who hasn’t been in-house since the 1996 TV movie, made by Universal Television and BBC Worldwide, with Rupert Murdoch’s Fox network in the United States as the principal customer. This time, I fear outsourced production will stick. Bye-bye, public service Doctor Who.”
On the face of it, such fears seem entirely reasonable. By handing overseas distribution rights to Disney+ has, in effect, sequestered the programme from the space of public service broadcasting. A recent Disney+ press kit makes no mention of Doctor Who’s important role as a product of the BBC as a “public service” broadcaster, let alone the public service values that have shaped the show since its creation.
I’m not so sure. At this point, it is worth taking a brief side quest back in time to the first half of the 20th Century, to remind ourselves of the BBC’s organisational values and where they came from. The values are known as the BBC’s “Reithian ethos”, named after its first Director General, Lord Reith.
Appointed in 1922, Lord Reith did much to define the BBC’s public service role at a time when it simply operated as a radio station. This role included the organisation’s much-vaunted independence from state control. This entailed the broadcaster giving “an equal consideration of all viewpoints, probity, universality and a commitment to public service.” Lord Reith asserted that BBC programmes should ‘educate and entertain’ to which was added a mission to inform.
Lord Reith was famously opposed to any involvement of the commercial marketplace on television. Speaking in The House of Lords, he delivered a withering condemnation of proposals for ITN (Britain’s Independent Television Network.
“Somebody introduced Christianity into England and somebody introduced smallpox, bubonic plague and the Black Death. Somebody is minded now to introduce sponsored broadcasting … Need we be ashamed of moral values, or of intellectual and ethical objectives? It is these that are here and now at stake.” And, yes, that’s right – Lord Reith, the son of a minister, did see public service broadcasting as a Christian mission.
Reith’s words may seem somewhat dated to today’s ears. Yet they still influence attitudes within the BBC. For instance, Reith saw Light Entertainment as “groundbait” to lure audiences towards highbrow cultural content. Surely this attitude is seen in the way the newly-reinstated Doctor Who music concerts are justified as hooking young audiences and delivering them to the live performance of classical music.
The Reithian mission to “inform, educate and entertain” is certainly an important part of BBC programming today. The values were explicitly mentioned in a job advertisement for the position of a producer based in America.
That said, it would be naive to think that Doctor Who was once free of all influence from commercial television. Indeed, commissioned under the auspices of a new Director General, Sir Hugh Greene, it was designed to compete directly with ITV’s popular swashbuckling children’s series through the scheduling technique of “matching like for like”.
ITV’s unabashed commitment to adventure was signalled in their programmes’ titles, such as The Adventures of Robin of Sherwood (1955-60), The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (1956) and The Adventures of William Tell (1958-59), still being shown in to the 1960s. Doctor Who was duely subtitled ‘“An Adventure in Space and Time”, at least in the pages of the BBC’s listings magazine, the Radio Times.
Neither was the BBC unaware of Doctor Who’s potential for commercial exploitation. The Daleks’ popularity led to the broadcaster granting a flurry of licenses to manufacturers during the ‘Dalekmania’ of the mid 1960s. Today, the plethora of Dalek related merchandise can be seen in the books and museum displays of private collector David Howe. And let’s not forget Terry Nation’s attempt to take “his creations” off the BBC and exploit them on a commercial television network in America.
Looking back to 1963, it is clear that Doctor Who represented a new relation to the Reithian values of information, education and entertainment. The move towards populism existed in tension with Reith’s instance on the BBC’s “high minded” purpose. This tension can be seen as underpinning the famous spat between Head of Drama Sydney Newman and Doctor Who’s first producer Verity Lambert over the introduction of the Daleks to the programme.
Newman argued the Daleks were just “Bug Eyed Monsters”, but Lambert argued that they were pitiful creatures, whose fate dramatised the way prejudice could lead to nuclear war. But, for sheer chutzpah, it is hard to beat “The Keys of Marinus” written by Terry Nation in the wake of The Daleks success.
Nation framed” The Keys of Marinus” as a kind of thought experiment, exploring different situations in a world where peoples’ conscience has been given over to a machine which has then broken down. But, as realised in the script and on-screen, the resultant story was a frankly lurid tale of brains in tanks, angry plant life and aggressive aliens in rubber fetish wear. I’m not at all sure audiences picked up on the lessons in civic and personal moral responsibility, let alone whether or not the story exemplified the Reithian requirement that the “preservation of a high moral tone is obviously of paramount importance.”
But, in his book The BBC: Public Institution and Private World (1977), industrial sociologist Tom Burns back argued that the Reithian ethos was on its way out by the 1970s. In an unashamedly elitist account, Burns observed that the BBC’s public service culture had been maintained by, for example, recruiting of Oxford and Cambridge educated types into the BBC’s higher ranks and such good fellows’ genuine sense of vocation.
In contrast, over the 1960s and 1970s, relations within the BBC had become, increasingly, a negotiation between trade unions and managers. In the face of the Government “tightening the purse strings.” The BBC had, for the first time, but by no means the last, used independent management consultants, in this case McKinsey the so-called, “Masters of the Universe.”
Although referring to specifically to BBC Radio, the McKinsey report seems particularly prescient:
“Traditionally, broadcasting has been based on the principle of mixed programming. On a single channel, the public is offered the whole range: news, documentaries, plays, music, light entertainment, serials, sport – all types of programmes, covering all interests and all ‘brow’ levels.
“But experience, both in this country and abroad, suggests that many listeners now expect radio to be based more on a different principle – that of the specialised network, offering a continuous stream of one particular type of programme, meeting one particular interest. One channel might offer pop, another serious music, another talk programmes, and so on.”
I don’t know how the new managerialism impacted the production of Doctor Who. The early 1970s saw the “dream team” of producer Barry Letts and Script Editor Terrance Dicks enact public service values with stories that addressed social issues. Doctor Who didn’t align itself with a political party, but it did have stories that dramatised hot topics of the day, including colonialism, feminism and environmentalism, with stories such as “The Mutants”, “The Monster of Peladon” and The Green Death” (the one with the maggots!).
On the other hand, Reith’s view of the BBC as a holy mission had certainly faded into the background. The hallway of Old Broadcasting House even had an inscription that read (in Latin, of course): “This temple of the arts and muses is dedicated to Almighty God by the first Governors in the year of our Lord 1931, John Reith being director-general.”
At a time when Christian moralists still had an evangelising place in the Establishment, and a censorious impact on popular culture, Doctor Who could be wonderfully iconoclastic. Many imputed or would-be deities were exposed as frauds. Of course, the Third Doctor was represented as au fait with members of the Establishment, obsequious in the face of Royalty and a constant reminder that every planet has a South East of England, but that didn’t stop Pertwee, in character, recording “Who is The Doctor.” Despite a reference to “satanic powers”, the profanely lyrics question, “Is your faith be for your mind?” No, no Doctor, not me, no siree.
There was even room for commodifying Doctor Who. Licenses were still sold, and I can’t leave 1970s behind without a mention of Pertwee’s plans to financially exploit licenses for his “Whomobile”. Talking on BBC’s lunch-time magazine show, Pebble Mill at One, he couldn’t help throwing in the possibility of profiting from what, in effect, was a kind of product placement.
Pertwee’s ambitions were unrealised. After asking for a higher wage, Pertwee was let go and the production team, mischievously in my view, contrived to have the Third Doctor killed off in a confrontation with a giant money spider – the spider, allegedly, being a symbol of greed in Buddhism to which Letts and Dicks subscribed.
Side quest over, today’s commodification of Doctor Who is of a different order of magnitude to previous efforts to profit from the programme. “While we are glad to be a long way from Lime Grove,” opined Mathew Kilburn, in Tides of Time, “we wonder what Sydney Newman or Barry Letts would think of all this.” I have no idea.
I think that, beyond the reorganisation of funding and production, the ‘star’ producers would have evaluated the new Season One on the quality of its production and the way it might reasonably be seen to embody the BBC’s public service values.
The fact that the previously-mentioned recent Disney+ press kit makes no explicit mention of Doctor Who’s “public service” function is a notable absence. But, despite fears to the contrary, the process of commodification has not entirely eliminated the BBC’s public service values.
When the press kit proudly reports that BBC brands are “internationally recognised across a broad range of genres and specialisms,” it is worth remembering that that recognition doesn’t just derive from overseas sales of BBC formats and content, but from the BBC’s place as Britain’s premier public service content maker. In this way, the BBC’s ‘brand’ identity encompasses Public Service values.
As we will see, the BBC’s Reithian ethos, consigned to silence in Disney+ publicity, remains a vocal partner in Doctor Who Inc.
Tim Robins
• Look Back in Anxiety: Doctor Who, Season One, 2024 – Part One
Web Links
• The Tides of Time
Doctor Who and associated culture, by the Oxford Doctor Who Society and friends
• The Doctor Who Merchandise Museum
Curated by David Howe
• The Archive: The Adventures of Sir Lancelot – in 4K
• Television in Europe COMMUNICATION AND SOCIETY edited by George Gerbner and Marsha Siefert
- About the Author
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A freelance journalist and Doctor Who fanzine editor since 1978, Tim Robins has written on comics, films, books and TV programmes for a wide range of publications including Starburst, Interzone, Primetime and TV Guide.
His brief flirtation with comics includes ghost inking a 2000AD strip and co-writing a Doctor Who strip with Mike Collins. Since 1990 he worked at the University of Glamorgan where he was a Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Media Studies and the social sciences. Academically, he has published on the animation industry in Wales and approaches to social memory. He claims to be a card carrying member of the Politically Correct, a secret cadre bent on ruling the entire world and all human thought.
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