Another Insane Objective

On 27 December 1977, Star Wars finally received a theatrical release in the United Kingdom, allowing us all to see what the United States had been making such a fuss over since May of that year. Barely a week later, on 7 January 1978, Doctor Who returned from its midseason break over the Christmas holidays with a new four-part serial, Underworld.

If you’ve happened to read any other piece that mentions both that first Star Wars film and Doctor Who, it is quite likely those two facts happened to be mentioned. Because, you see, Star Wars is a good piece of science fiction. Underworld isn’t.

The story goes that the then-Doctor Who producer, Graham Williams, had attended a preview screening of George Lucas’ film and realised that his show’s production values weren’t really going to be able to hold a candle to this. He quickly made an attempt to try and enhance the appeal of Underworld, which was then in pre-production… but a confluence of factors (including Williams going on holiday, another script turning out to be impossible to produce and inflation severely affecting the budget requiring Williams to come up with an unprecedented way of saving money) meant that a lot of the story ended up looking like this:

And perhaps the bigger problem is that Underworld simply isn’t a very good story. It’s just not very interesting, which isn’t a criticism you can really level at the other sci-fi franchise we’re discussing here. And that’s why Underworld, and indeed most of the rest of that season of Doctor Who, has a tendency to be mentioned rather disparagingly in connection with Star Wars – children went to the cinema to see an exciting, impressive-looking piece of sci-fi, and then returned home to watch something that was anything but.

But you may be aware that there have been quite a few more Star Wars films since 1977. How did the Doctor Who stories of the time square up to them, and is the result interesting enough for me to write a blog post about? Let’s find out. (For the purposes of this article being readable, we’ll cover the six ‘main’ films in the remainder of the original trilogy, the prequel trilogy and the one film in the sequel trilogy that we’ve seen at time of writing, not Rogue One or the Clone Wars TV series.)

The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

This time around, the UK and the US got the film at the same time, in May 1980. At that moment, Doctor Who had been off air for over four months and wouldn’t be back until the end of August… but The Empire Strikes Back falls inbetween two wildly different eras of the show.

The 1979-80 season of Who still had Graham Williams at the helm, but it was to be his last year in charge. The five (or six) stories that make up that season variously feature a monster that looks like a giant phallus (amongst other special effects failures that included the Mandrels and the general look of The Horns of Nimon), a production so troubled that the director walked away halfway through after having an argument with Tom Baker on the studio floor, a story that had to be written in three days by Williams and the script editor as the writer couldn’t rewrite it himself (although this did produce City of Death, now widely considered to be one of the greatest stories of all time), Graham Crowden’s performance as Soldeed in The Horns of Nimon, and a story that had to be abandoned altogether (Shada) after a BBC strike meant the studio sequences couldn’t be filmed in time. During that second one, Williams decided he had had enough and this would be his last season as producer.

When the show returned for its 1980-81 season, John Nathan-Turner was now running the ship, and the show was totally different. The title sequence – which had last undergone a major overhaul when Baker took over the role nearly six years previously – was completely new, and the theme tune’s new composition was radically different to any the show had had in its 17-year history. A totally different aesthetic now dominated the show, both visually and thematically. Doctor Who had been well and truly dragged in the 80s, and it’s hard not to feel that Star Wars may have played some part in that.

Ironically, whilst the previous season had posted some of the show’s highest ratings ever (thanks in part to an ITV strike for part of its run that meant there was literally no alternative), Nathan-Turner’s first year out would take the ratings to unprecedentedly low levels due to its being up against an American import, Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century.

Return of the Jedi (1983)

When Jedi was released in June 1983, Doctor Who was midway through its 20^th anniversary run. Peter Davison’s second series in the role had gone out from January to March, and was largely a success apart from a story having to be abandoned following a strike (déjà vu, much? This time, however, the story was successfully remounted the following year as Resurrection of the Daleks) and a special feature-length episode to mark the anniversary, The Five Doctors, was in the planning stages. (It would ultimately feature two of the previous Doctors teaming up with Davison, someone who looked vaguely like William Hartnell, and some unused footage of Tom Baker culled from what they managed to film of Shada plus every companion they could get their hands on. Nonetheless, the special went down a treat, and the show seemed to be in rude health as it marked its milestone. Yet just over a year down the line, the programme would have dramatically changed again, and suddenly things weren’t looking so rosy for the future.

The Phantom Menace (1999)

Fast forward sixteen years to the first of the prequel trilogy, and what we have is a very different proposition. When we were first met little Anakin and Jar Jar Binks, Doctor Who had finished as an ongoing TV series nearly a decade ago. There had been a TV movie in 1996 that was meant to be a backdoor pilot, a co-production with America, but its failure across the pond meant a full series with Paul McGann as the Doctor was never to materialise, and by this point most fans had given up on the series ever returning.

One thing Doctor Who does have in common with Star Wars, though, is that it has a bloody massive expanded universe. Star Wars fans had been able to enjoy a steady stream of comic strips and spin-off novels since Splinter of the Mind’s Eye in 1978, originally intended as a sequel to the original film if it wasn’t a success. Since then, around 300 Star Wars novels, 200 video games and thousands of comic books have been published. Things really got going in 1991 with the release of Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire, which reached the top spot of the New York Times Best Seller list. Since then, we’ve seen on average ten new Star Wars novels a year. In short, the Star Wars expanded universe is very big indeed, and it played a big part in keeping interest in the franchise alive between the original trilogy and the prequels.

The Doctor Who expanded universe maybe hasn’t quite received the level of attention as the ongoing Star Wars one, but is around as big, and played just as important part in keeping its respective franchise’s torch burning. It began in 1991, when Virgin Books were awarded the Doctor Who license, and picked things up where the TV series had left off with the Virgin New Adventures, telling stories “too broad and deep for the small screen”. A sister line, the Missing Adventures, started in 1994 for stories featuring the previous six Doctors and their companions. Then, in 1996, the TV movie happened. Although, as mentioned above, it didn’t do well enough in America, its success in the UK alerted the BBC to the fact that there was still a considerable audience for Doctor Who, so they brought the license back in-house for two very similar lines published by BBC Books: the Eighth Doctor Adventures, featuring the continuing quests of McGann’s Doctor, and the Past Doctor Adventures for stories with the first seven Doctors.

Then, in 1999, the big one: Big Finish Productions, a company that make fully-dramatised audio plays, won the license to make Doctor Who stories (having already tested the waters with stories featuring New Adventures companion Bernice Summerfield that carefully avoided any mention of the parent show). Two months after The Phantom Menace reached the silver screen, The Sirens of Time, starring Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy, was released on CD and cassette. Both franchises had new beginnings of a very different nature, which would each continue over the next few years…

Attack of the Clones (2002)

Moods were fairly grim in both fandoms in the year we were subjected to Attack of the Clones… Oh dear, this is already turning into something I’d tried to stop myself from writing. I’m afraid I don’t really like the prequels. I know a lot of people do, I know they’ve been reappraised recently, but I really don’t like them, and heaven knows there’s been enough written about that over the last 18 years. Sorry. Anyway, they certainly had a negative reception at the time of release, which is more relevant.

Whilst one franchise’s fanbase was unhappy with the new film, for the other it still seemed hugely unlikely they’d ever get any new visual material ever again. There’d been a few animated internet things, which I have described here, but we were no closer to a proper new series of Doctor Who.

To be fair, for a TV series which had been cancelled thirteen years ago, it wasn’t doing terribly for new material. In addition to the novels, Big Finish was chugging along happily; Paul McGann had now joined the party, and we were getting new ongoing stories featuring his Doctor that completely conflicted with the ones in print in every way. The previous three Doctors were also having adventures with several of their TV companions, and even some new ones created by Big Finish. At around the same time Anakin and Padmé were making for such a convincing couple, a new two-CD adventure was coming out every month, with McGann just finishing up his second ‘season’ of adventures. But it seemed that was the best we were going to get.

Revenge of the Sith (2005)

It seems rather strange to me that the final prequel was released in the middle of Doctor Who’s triumphant return to television. They seem to belong to different eras, somehow; after all, when the last movie was released the Doctor was still very much in his wilderness years. But released it was, and it seems somehow to bring the whole thing full circle: in 1977, people could watch Star Wars and then go home and watch Underworld. In 2005, people could watch “Father’s Day” and then, a few days later, go to the cinema for the premiere of Revenge of the Sith. And then they could go home again and watch “The Empty Child”, the beginning of a two-part story that remains possibly my favourite story of the revived series to date.

In fairness, Sith is a markedly better movie than its two predecessors… but that first series of ‘New Who’, as it has come to be known, has yet to be beaten for me for consistent high quality, and showrunner Russell T Davies would (largely) continue that for a golden age that would last until 2010, overseeing four series and an array of special episodes. Things had certainly changed a lot since 1977. And were it not for Disney, that might have been it.

(There’s probably an interesting comparison to be made between Lucas still being at the helm for the Star Wars prequel trilogy, much of new Who being written by people who were fans of the show in their childhood, and just who was responsible for writing/directing the sequel trilogy. Hmm.)

The Force Awakens (2015)

The Force Awakens, the beginning of the sequel trilogy, was released at the end of an interesting year for Doctor Who. It had finished its ninth series just two weeks before the Force awakened in cinemas, its fifth under the stewardship of RTD’s replacement, Steven Moffat. And where Davies’ first series, that had been on when Revenge of the Sith had hit the screens, had specifically targeted the casual viewer and put the previous 42 years of continuity to one side, Series 9 is possibly the most inward-looking, continuity-heavy run the show had ever done. The very first story requires intimate knowledge of two Tom Baker stories from the mid-70s, as well as an online-only minisode from 2013. Star Wars benefits from being a more famous franchise, but even so The Force Awakens has no such risk of alienating casual viewers; coupled with a bizarrely hubristic trailer that used the line “Same old, same old” as a selling point, the 2015 series of Who was by far its lowest-rating to date. The fortunes of the two franchises had changed again.

One interesting thing is the effect the franchises’ returns to screens big or small had on the expanded universe. The Force Awakens effectively consigned much of the expanded universe to non-canon status, although new tie-in novels based on the new films would continue to be published. Russell T Davies, upon becoming the revived series’ showrunner, fought to stop the BBC shutting down Big Finish and looked after them by discouraging family-unfriendly stories, helping them to keep going alongside the new TV episodes; over the next decade, their output grew and grew, with long-term holdout Tom Baker finally signing up to produce new audio adventures for the Fourth Doctor, and other new ranges including the Lost Stories (adaptations of unproduced TV scripts), the Companion Chronicles and their successors the Early Adventures (stories narrated by the companion actors of the three Doctors no longer with us), a range adapting some of Virgin’s New and Missing Adventures, and spin-off series for guest characters from the popular 1977 story The Talons of Weng-Chiang and 1988’s equally beloved Remembrance of the Daleks. They’d even been officially granted canonical status by being referred to in the minisode mentioned above, which was done for the 50^th anniversary. Shortly before The Force Awakens was released, it was announced that Big Finish would produce their first stories based on the revived series, with ranges for Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, River Song and other less annoying characters, including stories featuring the Tenth Doctor himself, David Tennant.

CONCLUSIONS AS FOLLOWS:

Year	Star Wars	Doctor Who
1977	Great	Not great
1980	Great	Better
1983	Great	Pretty good
1999	Not great	Not being made
2002	Not great	Not being made
2005	Better, still not great	Great
2015	Great	Incomprehensible

How Star Wars Conquered the Universe by Chris Taylor was a useful resource for bits of this article, so I thought I’d better mention it here.