Choosing the wrong Doctor Who

Once again my fellow New Zealanders have disappointed me. In a poll run by the Herald, they have chosen Jon Pertwee as their favourite of the eleven actors who have played Doctor Who. Pertwee may have been a fine actor, but it seems to me that he had little understanding of the ethos and aesthetics that have made Doctor Who such an important cultural artefact.

Doctor Who could only have been created in postwar Britain. Exhausted by two World Wars, separated from much of its empire, and usurped as a political and economic power by the United States and the Soviet Union, mid-century Britain was a society attempting to adjust to altered circumstances. The hyper-jingoism which had characterised Victorian and early twentieth century popular culture in Britain - the 'muscular Christianity' of Tom Brown's Schooldays, or the mystified imperialism of Kipling, or the good-natured xenophobia of Billy Bunter - seemed suddenly to be both absurd and dangerous.

Born in Gallifrey, the planet of mandarin Timelords, and destined to roam the universe, Doctor Who was a rarified but erratic being, a sort of displaced and impoverished but nonetheless charming aristocrat. His TARDIS, with its telephone box facade and inefficient machinery, mocked the scientific versilimitude that American science fiction writers were fond of creating for their heroes. In adventure after adventure, the Doctor won victories over evil through a combination of chance, cunning, and the sort of eccentric, aleatory thinking that is usually the province of visionary artists.

Although Doctor Who was ostensibly a science fiction series, it took its real inspiration from the past. The makers of the programme looked back to the centuries before the industrialisation of Britain, when magic and science marched together. Doctor Who's ancestor is not Darwin or Edison but John Dee, the Elizabethan sage who combined astronomy with necromancy, and cast a magical spell against the Spanish armada. The classic episodes of Doctor Who, with their abrupt yet strangely logical transitions from one place or era to another, recall Shakespeare's late romances, where the medieval poet John Gower could be transported through time to the Renaissance, and an Italian duke could be deposited suddenly on a tropical isle.

Plays like The Tempest and Pericles were performed  at the Blackfriars theatre, an indoor space fitted out with twisting pipes and hidden levers that enabled Shakespeare to fill the stage with steam or foam, and thereby simulate a shipwreck or a fire or a magical rite. Blackfriars was reborn in the London warehouses that were the backdrop to so many of Doctor Who's classic episodes.

At the same time that the BBC was filming Doctor Who in cramped and chilly warehouses, California's dream factories were turning out television series like Star Trek, which projected the American Imperium into the distant future and the distant universe. Where the Doctor was anarchic artist, who assisted earthly creatures on his own terms, Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise was a servant of the American military-industrial complex, a twenty-first century James Cook who loyally reported and interpreted his geographical and ethnographic discoveries to his military and political masters. Where Doctor Who's absurd vehicle, sonic screwdrivers and blundering journeys through time mocked the pretensions of postwar science to exactitude and objectivity, Captain Kirk and his crewmates gave tedious lectures that seemed intended to make the Starship Enterprise seem a logical outgrowth of America's space and weapons programmes.

Jon Pertwee played Doctor Who from 1970 and 1974, years in which Britain's postwar malaise hardened into a crisis. Mass strikes shut down the economy and brought down Ted Heath's Tory government, students occupied universities and declared their solidarity with the revolutionaries of Vietnam, Enoch Powell and a revived fascist movement campaigned against 'coloured' immigration from the Caribbean and Pakistan, and senior members of the military and Mi5 began to make plans for a coup against the Labour government that had replaced Heath.

It was in this context of social disorder and right-wing reaction that Pertwee chose to reinvent Doctor Who as a patrician, wealthy, institutionalised figure who respected the British state, worshipped science, and both hated and feared aliens. Instead of acting as a freelance friend of humanity, Pertwee was attached to Unified Intelligence Taskforce, or UNIT, a secret arm of the British state run by the strutting, moustachioed Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, and dedicated to countering the threat that extraterrestrial invaders posed to dear old Blighty. With the help of UNIT Pertwee established his own laboratory, where he worked on devices that would defend the British state and slaughter dangerous aliens. Pertwee's Doctor was a martial arts enthusiast, who seemed to relish knocking out anybody who annoyed him. Pertwee also gave the Doctor a plummy voice and a passion for sports cars.

Jon Pertwee was replaced as Doctor by Tom Baker, a man who won a massive new following for the series. With his Bohemian trenchcoat and scarf, his habit of winning over apparently sinister aliens by offering them jelly babies, his contempt for rules and regulations, and his penchant for poetic monologues about the perversity of human ambition, Baker rescued Doctor Who from Pertwee's innovations.

For decades, Tom Baker tended to come out on top when fans of the programme were asked to name their favourite Doctor. What does the triumph of Pertwee's violent, authoritarian, reactionary Doctor Who in this new poll tell us about the mindset of Kiwis in 2013?

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]