- by Owen Morton
Most people will by now have noticed that Doctor Who has made a comeback, and a remarkably successful one at that. I’m enjoying the revival very much, despite having only managed to see five out of the eight episodes so far aired (actually, those stats aren’t too bad – it feels like I’ve missed more than I’ve seen), and in this article I’m going to outline why I think that Christopher Eccleston is the best Doctor there has yet been.
It’s because he’s the only one I’ve ever seen.
Okay, that’s not quite true. I have seen an old Doctor Who series entitled ‘The Ark In Space’ – which I believe starred Tom Baker and was made in 1974, not bad knowledge for someone who is not a Doctor Who obsessive – but I don’t remember it very well, other than a few vague reminiscences that I shall relate in a minute. I haven’t seen any others, though, except possibly the very first episode, though it is equally possible that what I was watching was a black and white programme about upside down moving dustbins with kitchen plungers attached.
Right, so let’s first talk about ‘The Ark In Space’. Sorry, anybody who thinks this is the definitive episode of Doctor Who – I don’t know that anyone does – but I thought it was pretty tripeulous (that’s an adjective I made up, meaning ‘like tripe’). The problem with it is that I saw it quite a long time ago, and all I can now recall is that it consisted of several hours of people running round some kind of spaceship, trying to escape from a man in a green sleeping bag who was hunching around on the floor. Thrilling drama it might have been, but I can no longer remember any of said drama. All I remember is the rather dodgy special effects. For that reason, I have to conclude that the modern episodes of Doctor Who are better. Call me shallow, but based on this one experience which I can remember very little of, I can draw no other conclusion really.
Actually, having thought of this matter of special effects, I think I’ll embark on a little discussion about them and that famous Doctor Who cliché – ‘hiding behind the sofa’. Ever since the new series came on the BBC, I’ve heard this phrase from about a thousand different angles. All the newspapers mention it (rather sarkily, though, I’ll admit), but right now I can recall at least two individuals who’ve said it in all seriousness. I won’t embarrass them by naming them here, but their initials are Annie Clark (my mother) and Amy Baker. They both claimed that they used to watch it as children and hid behind the sofa because they were so scared.
Putting aside the fact that my only other experience with Doctor Who was my mother forbidding me to watch it when I was about six on the grounds that “it’s a load of old rubbish” (a statement she has vehemently denied ever making, but I remember), thus calling into question why she ever watched it – from behind the sofa or not – if she thought it was rubbish, it’s still interesting to wonder why anyone would feel compelled to watch it from such a vantage point. As mentioned above, both my mother and Amy said they were scared. I have to wonder what they were scared of. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not an expert in Doctor Who, but the bits I have seen do not inspire – and would never have inspired – me to watch from behind the sofa. Come on, the Daleks are rubbish bins upside down (maybe that’s what my mother meant about “old rubbish”), and even if they do say, “Exterminate!” at regular intervals, even if they can fly up stairs, it’s not the sort of thing that makes people terrified, especially in this day and age. My mother does, admittedly, get frightened easily, but I’d bet even she wouldn’t watch something like ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ or, I don’t know, ‘The Lawnmower Man’ from behind the sofa.
The stupid sleeping bag in ‘The Ark In Space’ had even less call for terrified viewing. The only reason I’d go behind the sofa to watch that would be if I’d dropped something down there by accident and then deciding it wasn’t worth coming back out again. And I’ve also noticed that most intelligent people conserve space in their living rooms by putting the sofas up against the wall. You wouldn’t be able to even fit behind it, unless you were as thin as a rake. Plus, seeing as most people only have two sofas, if that, there wouldn’t be enough room behind them for the entire family, if there were the standard 2.4 children and both parents.
I don’t think anyone genuinely did watch from behind the sofa. My mother is almost certainly lying (I can say this without fear of contradiction because she doesn’t read my website), and I’d imagine Amy was lying as well. I ask you – have you ever met anyone who said they watched Doctor Who from behind the sofa, and you believed them? I haven’t. So, the question is, why do people claim they watched Doctor Who from behind the sofa? Do they genuinely believe they did? And in twenty years’ time, will we be telling our own children that we did too?
The answer to the last question is easiest. No, we won’t. Or I won’t anyway, because it’s a stupid thing to claim. The last thing I want is for my children to watch an episode of the current Doctor Who series and say, “Hey, Dad, you’re a complete spizwizzle [this is an invented slang term of the future, which means roughly ‘idiot’] for watching this from behind the sofa.” You see, our children won’t believe us about it, any more than we believe our parents and Amy.
The second question is harder. I don’t think they genuinely do believe it. I think – and this is tied up with the answer to the first question – that they only say they did so they can fit in with a growing crowd of idiots who also say they did. These are the sorts of people who give sci-fi a bad name. They’re the sort of people who think Star Trek: Voyager was actually enjoyable. They’re the sort of people who’ve been queuing up outside the cinema dressed as an Imperial Stormtrooper for the last sixteen weeks in anticipation of being the very first person to get a ticket to ‘Revenge of the Sith’ tomorrow. (This is a question probably better reserved for if and when I do a review of said film, but what the hell is a Sith? I have a suspicion that when I have seen the film, I won’t have any better idea than I do now.) They’re also the sort of people who have ever seen an episode of Space: 1999.
But why do these stupid sci-fi fans say they watched Doctor Who from behind the sofa? I don’t know where the origins of this myth lie, but I’d guess that a long time ago, in the mists of time, back in 1963 (I think?) when Doctor Who first aired, there was a conversation between two people that went like this:
Person 1: Hey, did you see Doctor Who last night?
Person 2: Yes, I did, but I watched from behind the sofa. You see, it’s one of those inflatable sofas that you can see through, and I was just being a bit silly.
Person 1: Cool! Can I come round next week and watch it from behind your transparent inflatable sofa too?
Person 2: Sure you can! Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if some people misunderstood us and thought we watched it from behind an opaque sofa? We could start a nationwide craze for watching Doctor Who in silly places!
Person 1: Yeah! Let’s go round telling everyone we do that!
And that’s almost certainly how it began. Someone believed the lies that these two irresponsible persons told, and it spread to the papers, and to the television, and to the general populace, who all started claiming that they watched it from behind the sofa. And somewhere, even now, these two anonymous persons are still sniggering.
As an interesting side note, my dad has never claimed to watch it from behind the sofa. Instead, he watched it through his neighbour’s window. They had a TV, you see, and he didn’t. Quite how interesting it was without the sound, I don’t know, because surely he couldn’t have heard it through the window. Unless, of course, his neighbour always turned Doctor Who up really loud for the benefit of people who were watching from outside. In which case, though, the neighbour might as well have just invited said people in to watch it. Which, on thinking about it, is quite possibly what my dad actually said, and I just misunderstood him. See how easily these misunderstandings occur?