BY THEIR POPULAR culture shall ye know them. The old, mainly. In particular those of us who were there when just about everything in popular culture happened for the first time, from rock and roll to transistorisation to colour tv and its enduring sitcoms and characters; even the advent of the internet.
The great Gil Scott-Heron famously sang that the revolution will not be televised, but he was wrong. Everything today is televised, caught on camera phones and CCTV cameras, bunged up on YouTube and other internet sites, everything from celebrities smacking paparazzi in the street to airplane crashes and Jihadi beheadings.
Thus Dr Who, achieving Year 50 of its existence, if not 50 years of continual life, symbolises through its self-regenerating protagonist not just something about human nature but also the pertinacity of media culture. Nowadays all that seems to change is the medium; the content is merely reinvented and repackaged. Marshall McLuhan must be chortling to himself in electric heaven.
The original Dr, William Hartnell, appeared in 1963. He was a grumpy old cove (I assume the oldest in actor terms) with a touch of the darkness about him. The series was in black and white, of course, this being late 20th century Britain in a well-advanced stage of its managed decline. The theme music, though, produced by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, was distinctly modern, memorable and slightly sinister: much better than the updated version being used in the current series.
The Dr appeared among us in a memorable year, which had begun with one of the worst winters the country had known. Kim Philby, the Soviet spy, defected to Moscow, acquiring in the process the undeserved status of a romantic hero. Another Dr, Richard Beeching, hacked the railway system, closing 2,000 stations and thousands of lines of track. The Great Train Robbery took place, netting the criminals over 2 million pre-decimal pounds. It turned into a decades-long media business, inspiring films, tv programmes, books, music and millions of column inches (and now centimetres) of news. Beeching didn’t.
THE GREAT SCANDAL of the year was Profumo, the government minister who had a relationship with a call girl, Christine Keeler who in turn had been sleeping with a Russian naval attache. This was in the days when ministers resigned when they were discovered to be behaving badly, as opposed to today when they cling to their jobs until their hands are chopped off. Profumo himself has disappeared from the scandal leaving only his name to it, a bit like a Cheshire Cat, whereas Christine Keeler, the girl with whom he cavorted, was transformed into an icon through Lewis Morley’s famous photograph of her sitting naked, facing backward, on a chair. Even the chair acquired an aura of its own. It was reputed to be an Arne Jacobsen, but proved to be a knock-off. Double modern kudos to the chair.
In the States, Kennedy had his head blown off by a lone gunman, or two, or maybe a group of them, depending on your preference, and conspiracy theory turned into a big media business. And yes, I can remember where I was when I heard about it. I was the boy, I was there by the radio, but I didn’t suffer.
More to the point, however, is that Dr Who arrived in the year of the Beatles’ first LP, Please Please Me, which stayed at the top of the charts until it was overtaken – by their second LP, Love Me Do. Long hair and hedonism were in. Life would never be the same again.
This is the world into which Dr Who pops, an ancient figure in a thoroughly modern context, where the latest technological gadgetry and entertainment collided with age old problems of conflict and greed. The Dr arrived, like a character from a Tarot card or classical myth and has become his own mythology.
Like the rest of us he’s come a long way since 1963. Now he’s in colour, with high production values and top-notch actors. The Britain that appears in the contemporary series is a world away from the dull, tatty, down-at-heel, scruffy, cramped and small-minded country I remember. The Dr endures, outliving the garbage of politics and current affairs through the very media that produce it. If you want to draw a simple message from him it’s this: we should learn how to regenerate ourselves from within. If we don’t, the Daleks and the Cyberman will triumph, and we can’t have that.
