The Twelve Doctors

Actor Sylvester McCoy has said he would be keen to return to “Doctor Who” for its fiftieth anniversary.

McCoy, who played the seventh Doctor from 1987 to 1989 (his last regular appearance was twenty-one years ago to the day, on 6th December), said fans wanted a multi-Doctor story to mark the programme’s golden jubilee in 2013.

Sylvester, now 67, also suggested that earlier Doctors - played by actors who have since died - could be brought back using computer technology.

“They’ve got such imaginations, they could do anything,” McCoy added. “I was a lucky little fellow to get that job,” he concluded.

Cynics may suggest Sylvester could simply be “touting for business”, to quote “Revelation of the Daleks”, but I believe he was sincere in his proposal. He doesn’t necessarily need the work. He’s participating in an Evelyn Waugh stage production well into the New Year before heading off to New Zealand to work on Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit”. McCoy was actually down to the last two for the role of Bilbo Baggins in “The Lord of the Rings”. The other actor got it, and that was Ian Holm. Sylvester also continues to work on “Doctor Who” audio dramas so he’s keeping busy! He did once say that he shouldn’t have been in the 1996 American “Doctor Who” TV movie, not because he didn’t want to be but because they should’ve started afresh rather than change lead actors thirty minutes into the story! Introducing the concept of regeneration so early into a revamp, and to an American audience unfamiliar with the idea, was one of the reasons, he believed, the production ultimately failed. I’m curious to know how he thinks a multi-Doctor story might succeed…

And, I’m not sure how much truth there is in the notion that die-hard “Doctor Who” fans want a multi-Doctor story. They’ve not always been amongst the show’s most successful adventures. There were three official ones in the classic era of the series, “The Three Doctors”, “The Five Doctors” and “The Two Doctors” celebrating the tenth, twentieth and twenty-first anniversaries of the programme respectively. My favourite of these is the latter. It was skilfully written by Robert Holmes but let down by poor direction. Robert rejected authorship of the previous celebratory offering on the grounds that its spec included too many leading characters. While “The Five Doctors” might be fun, sharing the limelight with all your illustrious predecessors and numerous companions, and enemies, proved Holmes’s fears well-founded. “The Two Doctors” is more focused with fewer actors, and a longer playing time enables it to highlight the banter between the chosen incarnations, together with their respective companions, to greater effect. By the time we reach 2013, Matt Smith’s eleventh Doctor is likely to have regenerated into a twelfth and the problem, as Holmes saw it, will be all the more compounded.

Warden’s Watch: Journey’s End

Disappointment set in right from the outset of the concluding episode of the Fourth Season of Russell T. Davies’s reincarnation of “Doctor Who”. I wanted the writer to go through with the regeneration and have a brand new Doctor conclude a story begun by his predecessor. But, it wasn’t to be. In fact, instead of having no David Tennant, we were actually presented with two of the pesky fella! And, there was me wishfully thinking he was about to get another week off!! It’s not that I dislike the actor, just not overly keen on his portrayal of the character, although I’ve grown to accept it a little more over the recent series. As if to compound my dissatisfaction with the opening of the final instalment, up pops Rose’s Mum, Jackie. Lovely woman and all that, just not my cup of tea. Very convenient, too, that both Rose’s ex, Mickey, and Mrs Tyler should appear, out of the blue, armed to the teeth, guns aimed directly at the two Daleks about to exterminate the suddenly-rather-fragile Sarah Jane Smith. The suddenly-rather-comely Gwen Cooper was also saved by something hitherto unmentioned that the late Toshiko had been working on before her death. Altogether, too convenient. At least, in the case of the Doctor, the resolution of his part in the previous episode’s triple cliff-hanger had been properly set up, that the hand would have its part to play in the denouement of the adventure. The other two instances were cheats, like a whodunit in which the murderer is revealed to be someone who hasn’t appeared in the story until the moment of revelation! It’s not the first time “Doctor Who” has resolved certain demise with the Saturday morning cinema serial approach. 1985’s “The Mark of the Rani” immediately springs to mind, in which a character is inserted into the recap, at the start of the final part, rushing out of a wood to save the seemingly doomed Doctor from the clutches of dastardly death!

Just imagine how different the episode might’ve been had a new dynamic been set up by suddenly, and surprisingly, introducing us to the eleventh Doctor. It would have taken the story, and indeed the series, in a completely new and much welcomed change of direction. I suppose Russell wasn’t ready to do that just yet and, instead, presented the viewer with the ultimate tease. A simple rule of drama is the tighter you tighten the tension, when the balloon is burst, it’s more than likely to be something of a let down. Davies made it hard for the story to recover from this point in and, sadly, it didn’t. Robert Holmes turned down the offer to write “The Five Doctors”, in 1983, citing too many leading men as the reason. And, despite there being plenty of space, the console room of the TARDIS became overcrowded in “Journey’s End” through the writer’s inability to resist this shameless get-together. Because of this, the participation of Davros is restricted. The scientific schemer doesn’t reappear, after last week’s reintroduction following an absence from our screens of almost twenty years, until nearly twenty minutes into the extended second half of the story and is despatched approximately twenty-five minutes later with still over fifteen minutes to run. Yes, on second viewing, I was watching the clock. A whopping twenty-five percent of the final episode is taken up with tearful farewells, making it even more soppy than the gushing conclusion of “Doomsday”, two years ago. On the plus side, Julian Bleach was terrific as Davros and, maybe, deserved more air time considering the iconic stature of the character within the series. Unless you believe less is more which, in just about every other aspect of the production, wasn’t the case. The other standout performance, and not just here but throughout the entire Fourth Season, was that of Bernard Cribbins, a consistently strong character. I like him. I could’ve done with a little more of Eve Myles in her red sweater, too, but that’s a personal preference rather than a dramatic one! Like the two Peter Cushing movies of the Sixties, this was good Dalek material whilst being lousy “Doctor Who”.

All Change

Doctor Who Classics: The Doctor Regenerates

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This is a favourite moment of mine from classic “Doctor Who”. It’s not particularly representative of the rest of the serial from which it’s taken, which, it should go without saying, is staggeringly brilliant from beginning to end; even without the addition of this superlative coda. These few minutes were simply the mud-encrusted icing on the richly-refined cake…