When the show returned our first sighting of the Doctor was of him blowing up a shopping centre. Several years on and the Doctor is now working in a similar centre selling toys.
If anything it perhaps highlights the change that has taken place behind the show. It is no longer a drama programme about an anarchistic time traveller but an entertainment brand. The lead actor is not actually playing the Doctor but a peddler selling the brand. Even the fictional companion is shown to be a famous model within the fictional world; the child asking for an autograph a metaphor that the brand is targeted at children, not through drama, but something as shallow and meaningless as advertising or celebrity idolisation.
As such the modern show is nothing more than an entertaining advert for something else. Even the BBC execs, eager to defend a piece of rubbish like Strictly Come Dancing, referred to Saturday night television as entertainment night. According to the exec concerned Strictly was as much a part of the entertainment schedules as Doctor Who; here he betrayed the general view within the organisation – it is not a drama show but an entertainment programme, nothing more and as long as it keeps to the now standard formula nothing can go wrong.
Formula for a new Doctor Who Script
0-30 min: Scooby Doo style monster chasing or time paradox shenanigans.
30-35 min: cloyingly sentimental drivel often confused with drama or characterisation.
35-40 min: annoyingly tacked on scenes pertaining to be part of a story arc but having little to do with story and everything to do with the incomprehensible, cynical and instantly gratifying pursuit of plot over meaning.
40-41 min: trailer for next week – somehow being more coherent than most of the episodes themselves.
42+ min: dreary rendering of theme music that makes everyone glad they run trailers and voice overs in place of closing credits these days.
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