Mindless Ones

The Happiness Patrol is one of the greatest triumphs of Andrew Cartmel’s aesthetic as applied to Doctor Who. It’s a Brechtian political satire about consumerism and Thatcherism, a cutting polemic and the logical end-point of the theatrical tradition which I have spent much of these essays arguing is where Doctor Who is most at home.

It’s also an utter failure in one important way. Doctor Who is what is euphemistically called a ‘family show’. This is another way of saying it’s a children’s programme which is taken seriously enough by enough adults that it’s not considered politic to mention that it’s for children. And The Happiness Patrol is absolutely not a children’s show in any way.

As an adult, I could watch this and appreciate the way that the sets are deliberately avoiding mimesis; to a child, even a bright child, it just looks cheap and like they’re not even trying. As an adult, the Kandyman can seem a sinister repurposing of an advertising icon; to a bright ten-year-old, it’s just silly. Even more than something like the 60s Batman TV show, this story is one that to a child looks like they’re not taking it seriously, and to the extent that a child can see that there’s anything more going on in the story at all, it looks like a bunch of patronising adults taking the piss out of the programme they’re making, and out of their audience.

The end result is a programme that’s a bit like that “What I/my family/my friends think I do” image macro that went around the internet shortly before I wrote this:

Who Andrew Cartmel apparently thought this programme would be watched by: bored Media Studies and English students, who could watch partly ironically and partly with an appreciation of how Brecht’s theatre of the absurd is being adapted for the purposes of a prime-time SF drama. (All those students were actually watching Coronation Street on the other side).

Who the BBC apparently thought the programme would be watched by: small children, at least that group of small children whose parents weren’t watching Coronation Street on the one TV in the house (children turned off in disgust after seeing the Kandyman, if not before). When Cartmel went to see the head of drama at the BBC, he was asked who he thought the programme should be for, and said “for everyone”, and was told in no uncertain terms that no, it was for children.

Who was actually watching the programme: the ‘core fanbase’, at this point mostly made up of people whose idea of intellectual discussion was whether you should count number of episodes or number of stories appeared in to determine whether the Daleks or the Master was the Doctor’s arch-enemy.

And this sums up a lot of the problems with the Cartmel era of the programme. Take, for example, the character of Ace.

The official line among Doctor Who fandom is that Ace is the best companion from the classic series, more realistic than any of the previous companions, tough, working-class and streetwise. And, indeed, in the later books and audio dramas that’s a fairish description.

But what we have on the TV screen is a twenty-seven-year-old middle class kids’ TV presenter playing a sixteen-year-old street kid, speaking in slang that was just a year or two outdated at the time, so to actual kids she sounded like a painful attempt to be down with the kids, and who manages to be the only violent juvenile delinquent who refuses to use any language stronger than “bloomin’”.

This isn’t to say that the character didn’t have value — if nothing else she was the first companion other than Jo Grant to actually have much in the way of character development — but she was a gesture at a particular idea of realism, and one that appealed to the existing fanbase but not to the audience of children she was meant to.

(This has changed in recent years — now Ace is not meant to be even remotely contemporary, children find the character easier to relate to, because she’s not in the uncanny valley of slight wrongness).

But this sort of thing is repeated throughout the Cartmel era. To take a more blatant example, let’s look at race in Doctor Who around this time.

Andrew Cartmel believed, correctly, that Doctor Who was too white, and that it needed more black characters. But the solution to this was not to write good characters and have them happen to be black, but rather…well…let’s look at the four stories in this year.

In Remembrance Of The Daleks, despite its anti-racist theme, there a single black character, a Jamaican immigrant who has one scene, in which he talks about how his grandfather was a slave and offers philosophical advice, and who has no interaction with the wider plot.

In this story, there is one black character, a wandering blues harmonica player who gives the Doctor some help and teaches the planet about the blues and to get in touch with their feelings.

In Silver Nemesis there is one black character, Courtney Pine appearing in a cameo as himself, getting one line of dialogue but otherwise just playing jazz saxophone.

And in The Greatest Show In The Galaxy there is the character of the Ringmaster — a rapper.

Essentially we’ve moved from having no black representation at all in the show (off the top of my head I can’t think of a black person with a speaking part in Colin Baker’s thirty-one episodes — I may be missing one, but if so they were a small part) to having black characters, so long as they’re Magical Negroes or performers of stereotypically ‘black’ music (or, ideally, both). This is an improvement of sorts, but it actually draws attention to the problem more.

And that is, in a nutshell, the problem with Doctor Who’s twenty-fifth series. It’s clearly better than what came immediately prior to it, but in a way that makes the problems even more obvious. 1989 would see another huge improvement, but by then it was too late…