Design for Doctor Who

Vision and Revision in Screen SF

Piers D. Britton

• Editore: Bloomsbury Academic
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350116832
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Categoria: Film e video

The long-running popular TV series Doctor Who is, Piers Britton argues, a 'uniquely design intensive text': its time-and-space-travel premise requires that designers be tirelessly imaginative in devising new worlds and entities and recreating past civilizations. While Doctor Who 's attempts at worldbuilding are notorious for being hit-and-miss – old jokes about wobbly walls and sink plungers die hard – the distinctiveness of the series' design imagery is beyond question. And over the course of six decades Doctor Who has produced designs which are not only iconic but, in being repeatedly revisited and updated, have proven to be an ever-more important element in the series' identity and mythos. In the first in-depth study of Doctor Who 's costumes, sets and graphics, Piers Britton offers an historical overview of both the original and the revived series, explores theoretical frameworks for evaluating Doctor Who design, and provides detailed analysis of key images. Case studies include the visual morphology of Doctor Who 's historical adventures, the evaluative character of cosplay, and the ongoing significance for the Doctor Who brand of such high-profile designs as the Daleks and the TARDIS interior, the 'time-tunnel' title sequence, and the costumes of the Fourth and Thirteenth Doctors.

PART ONE

A Critical History of Design for Doctor Who

Introduction to Part One: Why a history of Doctor Who design?

Since Doctor Who’s twentieth year of production, the series’ history on television has been the subject of a number of book-length critical and scholarly overviews.¹ Yet none of these dwelt at much length on visual design for the Doctor Who series and brand, if they touched on it at all.² Part One of this book represents a preliminary step towards rectifying this. That being said, a design history of Doctor Who ought to be justified in terms of doing more than simply filling an alleged gap. What, specifically, is to be gained from a comprehensive survey?

There are several ways in which the history of design for Doctor Who makes a good subject for a broad overview. First, Doctor Who has always been a design-intensive television text. In other words, in almost every episode Doctor Who relies heavily on both visual and sound design to create an immediate and powerfully evocative effect. This design-intensiveness is partly a function of Doctor Who’s main generic affiliations. In any science-fiction or fantasy, as also in period drama, design bears a heavy burden in establishing a plausible diegetic world which is distinct, and often remote, from ours. In Doctor Who this is doubly true, for designers have been responsible for evoking upwards of 200 different societies in Earth’s past, present and future and in various extra-terrestrial environments. In short, the time-travel premise of Doctor Who has created challenges for designers which exceed anything involved in realizing, say, the relatively homogeneous galaxy traversed by the USS Enterprise in Star Trek (CBS, 1966–9) and its sequels. Furthermore, unlike Star Trek and many other genre franchises from Flash Gordon (Universal, 1936–40; DuMont Television, 1954–5; Mike Hodges, 1980; Sci-Fi, 2007–2008) to Battlestar Galactica (NBC, 1978–80; NBC, 2004–2007), Doctor Who has also ostensibly gone without either a reboot or a major shift in focus, with Geoffrey Sax’s 1996 television movie (Fox/BBC, 1996), produced in Vancouver, and the revival, produced in Cardiff since 2005 (BBC, 2005– ), being explicitly billed as continuations of the original series. Consequently, the design challenges driven by the series’ premise in the 2010s were broadly similar to those of the mid 1970s, and for that matter the early 1960s. The varied aesthetic responses to these challenges are interesting to track.

By virtue of its longevity and internal narrative range, Doctor Who also makes for a striking case study of the way in which screen SF and fantasy respond to developments in the world behind the camera. Having appeared on screen (albeit not continuously) in every decade since the 1960s, Doctor Who inevitably reflects changing patterns in media production and consumption. Over the period of its lifespan, attitudes to science fiction and fantasy have massively altered, with both genres moving from the marginal and slightly suspect to the mainstream and commonplace. This has had both positive and negative consequences for Doctor Who, broadening its audience appeal and increasing its legitimacy but at the same time raising the bar for production standards and establishing new benchmarks for the quality of the screened image. Changing priorities at the BBC have buffeted Doctor Who over the years, as the corporation went from a period of growth in the 1960s to one of diminishing resources and decentralized production in the 1980s and thereafter. While shifting institutional conditions of production have not necessarily registered as alterations in the visual character of the show, design – and more specifically the physical and digital construction of the worlds and creatures of Doctor Who – to an extent reflects the changing aspirations and identity of the BBC.

If Doctor Who presents opportunities for taking a long view of design in a science-fiction programme, it also inevitably presents challenges to the historian of design for the screen. I noted above that Doctor Who has ostensibly never been rebooted, but its claims to continuity are, paradoxically, founded on the fact that an unusual amount of internal change has been one of the series’ main features since its fourth year on air. The frequent alteration of lead player (on average every three years while the series has been in continuous production, both before and after the hiatus), has normalized one kind of change and thereby de facto distracted attention from others. Even if the narrative has in principle been unbroken, Doctor Who’s seeming continuity is belied by the repeated shifts in the principal creative personnel – producers and later showrunners, story editors, and so on – which so often coincided, more or less, with a changeover in lead. In some cases, this succession process has led to seismic alterations in the nature and tone of the series, which in turn have often affected the demands made upon designers and fabricators.

Still more fundamental was the technological breach between the original version of Doctor Who produced in London up to 1989, largely in the electronic studio; the television movie shot on film in Vancouver in 1996, and the revived series made by BBC Wales, shot wholly on video (which was filmized before broadcast during the series’ first four years back on air) and later high-definition video. Beyond advances in recording and editing technology which allowed for a clearer and more finely-tuned screen image, the nature and amount of digital post-production work that episodes of Doctor Who routinely undergo has massively altered the audio-visual experience. So, while set- and costume-design practices may not have changed that much in fifty-seven years, enhanced production values in the new series have generally added lustre to designers’ work. Conversely, the harsh illumination typical of television during the original run often showed even the most sophisticated and well-realized design imagery quite literally in a bad light, which is even more glaring in retrospect.

This speaks to a challenge of assessing Doctor Who design as an historical whole. A ‘clean’ read of design for screen entertainment is never available, for it is inherent to film and television that design is always woven into a larger visual context, and almost never a privileged object of scrutiny in its own right. Framing, depth of field, lighting and editing shape audiences’ perceptions of design imagery in all screen texts. Yet beyond this, different genres, and shifting expectations for the effectiveness of those genres, also affect the ways in which this imagery is experienced. A single example will serve to illustrate this last point. ‘Pyramids of Mars’ (1975) is a consistent fan favourite among ‘classic’ Doctor Who serials, almost invariably polling high in surveys.³ A central conceit in ‘Pyramids’ is that one of the gods of Ancient Egypt, actually a powerful alien from the planet Phaester Osiris, is attended by Servicers – killer robots which superficially look like Egyptian mummies. Barbara Kidd’s costumes for the Servicers, with their boldly angular facial structure, powerful, shelf-like chests, and beautifully crafted bandage shells, represent a very daring, stylized design statement – one which Simon Barker and I years ago praised as among Doctor Who’s strongest (as I still feel them to be).⁴ More recently, some commentators have found the mummies ‘silly’ or even ‘nonsensical’.⁵ For at least one of these critics, the fault for this seems to lie primarily with their clumsy, overstated movements, and especially their ‘slow gait’, rather than with perceived deficiencies in Kidd’s costumes.⁶ This view may reflect a general feeling among the mummy-robots’ detractors. If so, the critique speaks clearly to the fact that design for television can never be separated from its deployment and on-screen presentation. Where mise-en-scène ages badly, the chances are that design will age badly too.

The question of perceived changes over time in the quality of design, and for that matter perceptions of Doctor Who’s inherent unevenness, will come to the fore again in Part Two of this book. For the present purpose of laying groundwork for an historical overview, it is enough to acknowledge that Doctor Who is simultaneously unified, as story and brand, and fragmented, as production and as object of critical scrutiny. With this in mind, what I offer in Part One is primarily a study of the ways in which both continuities and changes in creative vision, and shifts in institutional pressures and imperatives, have affected the design and realization of sets, costumes, props and graphics for Doctor Who. Where appropriate, I make reference to changes in production methods, and a recurrent concern throughout Part One is the relationship of Doctor Who design to imagery in other media texts, especially science fiction and other ‘genre’ television and cinema.

There is little or no attempt here to engage with the history of fashion, or the history of commercial design more broadly, as a referent for Doctor Who design imagery. There are undoubtedly points of connection between Doctor Who and vanguard industrial and fashion design. One notable example is provided by costume designers’ patronage of Mayfair tailors and haberdashers such as Huntsman of Savile Row and Mister Fish for Jon Pertwee’s costumes as the Third Doctor. During the same period, designers also shopped for the Third Doctor’s companions at two fashionable boutiques which marketed mostly to the young, single ‘working girl’: Biba furnished kookily with-it ensembles for Jo Grant (Katy Manning), while Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) wore clothes from Biba’s sometime neighbour, Bus Stop.⁷ Beyond this, it is true that contemporary fads inflect grooming and costume in almost any kind of screen fiction, and Doctor Who’s futuristic scenarios certainly have no shortage of hairstyles and outfits which in retrospect may seem painfully dated to their historical moment. A prime example is offered by ‘The Ark in Space’ (1975), set in 6098 CE, in which the crew of the space station Nerva have shaggy hair and flared uniform trousers that from an early twenty-first-century perspective could only belong to the mid-1970s. Even allowing for such refractions of contemporary taste, design for speculative and futuristic screen fiction does not map in any consistent and useful way onto trends of the moment. I have therefore made the decision to set fashion aside in Part One of this book, rather than add a potentially unhelpful complication to an already-complex narrative.

If fashion in the narrow sense, meaning couture and modish consumer goods, lies outside the scope of this historical overview, then fashion in the wider sense, meaning the discourse of style and stylistic change, is woven throughout this survey. And just as high-street fashion veers from flamboyance to minimalism, from brash effects of colour and pattern to self-conscious dourness, and from the extravagant to the utilitarian, so Doctor Who has varied in the ways and degree in which it has embraced design qua design. By this I mean that at certain moments costumes, sets a...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Contexts and Conceptual Framework
• Part One A Critical History of Design for Doctor Who
• 1 The London period –1963 to 1989
• 2 The TV movie and the Cardiff period – 1996, and 2005 to 2020
• Part Two What’s at Stake in Design for Doctor Who
• 3 The work of design in the Doctor Who narrative
• 4 Responding to design for Doctor Who – evaluations and transformations
• Part Three Thirteen Key Designs: a Personal View
• 5 Formative and enduring images
• 6 Design of the times
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index of names
• Index of subjects
• Copyright