Retrospective: Russell T. Davies by John Seavey 25/9/03
By the later stages of the Virgin New Adventures, word had spread far beyond the fan community about its quality and willing to take risks. Authors with friends and connections at the BBC, such as Ben Aaronovitch and Mark Gatiss, had communicated the enjoyment of writing for the range to other authors who'd not yet done a novel. Presumably it was this that attracted Russell T Davies, an award-winning TV dramatist, to write his novel Damaged Goods for the line. Whatever the reason, he brought a powerful intensity and a darkly different sensibility to the series.
Davies' previous work included the soap opera 'Revelations', and one can easily spot a "soap opera" influence on the novel; not in the pejorative sense it's usually used in, of cheap melodrama and endless shock revelations, but in a setting of all-too-human people, each concealing a life-time's worth of secrets and interacting with each other in a toxic cat's cradle of lies, anger, love, sorrow, and hatred. The Doctor beautifully describes the Quadrant, the housing settlement that forms the setting of Damaged Goods, as "76 fortresses", and Davies makes it seem as though he's worked out a complete life's story for each of those fortresses' inhabitants.
That's not to say that he ignores the science fiction elements of Doctor Who, though. Damaged Goods ties in quite well with the psi-powers arc it's a part of, neatly bridging The Death of Art and So Vile A Sin, even if the Brotherhood themselves play a small part. It also ties in with Gallifreyan history and legend in a way that neatly betrays Davies as a closet Doctor Who fan; no other could know not just about the War against the vampires, but also about the different colleges of Gallifreyan society as well (and the cameo by an ancestor of Benny is just the icing on the cake.) It all ties together with its human elements in a glorious tragedy that tears at the heartstrings.
But to laud the plot and characterization is to ignore Davies' true strength, his ability to generate atmosphere. When I say "glorious tragedy", I mean it; Damaged Goods generates an atmosphere of suffocating horror, despair, and dread so profound that when you finally do stop reading, it feels almost like you're surfacing. This is a book you could drown in, and it doesn't let up for even a moment.
I feel sure that Russell T Davies won't write for the range again; after all, he must have had opportunities in the almost seven years since Damaged Goods has been published. That's unfortunate, since his one novel for the range was a genuine triumph, a powerful and brilliant piece right down to its perfectly apt title. He's exactly the kind of author who needs to be invited back for a repeat performance; even if his follow-up is only half as good, it'd still be impressive.
The Man with the Plan by Antony Tomlinson 27/9/03
Well, things have changed a bit in the few days since John Seavey wrote his review of Russell T. Davies's main contribution to Doctor Who (the novel, Damaged Goods). In the conclusion to his article, Seavey states of Davies that "[h]e's exactly the kind of author who needs to be invited back for a repeat performance; even if his follow-up is only half as good, it'd still be impressive."
Well, spookily, hours after Seavey wrote this review, the BBC announced that Doctor Who would be returning to British TV screens in around 2005; they also announced the name of the author of the new series - Russell T. Davies. Blimey, the guy is not just coming back to do another novel - he's coming back to do the whole bloody series.
So there we go. Anyway, what do I think of Davies's contribution to Doctor Who? I believe that his most important contribution to the series is actually his acclaimed British drama, Queer as Folk. What was important about Queer as Folk is that it featured a leading character who was unashamedly a Doctor Who fan (and who also happened to be gay). This was probably the first time a Doctor Who fan has ever been shown on British Television in a positive light, and the advent of the series certainly diminished some of the stigma that surrounds Doctor Who fandom. I certainly feel more comfortable about coming out as a Whovian these days.
There are some wonderful Doctor Who related moments in Queer as Folk, though. One episode sees our lead character courted by two men. One - a flashy, but rather dull old bore - buys our hero a new car. The other - a man who genuinely understands our lead - buys him a full-sized, remote controlled K9. I know who I'd go for.
What about Davies's one (thus far) foray into Doctor Who proper - Damaged Goods? Well, I have to say that I found the book disappointing. As Seavey notes, the characters in this book are explored in great depth - the problem for me, however, is that I don't really want to know them. They are such a miserable bunch of depressive misfits. For me, the book is just too gritty - it's like a drug/troubled pregnancy-addled version of the last episode of Survival. Then again, perhaps this is my own fault for happening to seek escapism rather than realism in Doctor Who fiction.
The book goes downhill towards the end though. It turns into an orgy of violence which doesn't seem to add anything to the plot, but rather seems to issue out of an urge for some kind of climax. In fact it's the same resort to violence that ruined books like Falls the Shadow and Death and Diplomacy.
And I'm afraid that the Psi-Powers arc stuff was not seamlessly included as Seavey suggests - I had absolutely no idea what was going on from the point that the Doctor moodily whispers "the Brotherhood are behind this." The who?
Still, it is well written for the most part, the characters are well fleshed out and Davies has proved himself a terrific drama writer on television - so he seems an ideal choice to create a new Doctor Who TV series. What will it be like though?
Recently Davies had a new series on TV - The Second Coming. I only saw parts of it, but what I saw was, I think, a good indication of what we can expect from the new series Doctor Who. For a start it was gritty and realistic, in much the same manner as Damaged Goods. It got into the lives and minds of troubled, yet ordinary people, and showed them being destroyed from the inside.
However, The Second Coming also had a clear sci-fi (in a way) element. And what Davies has proved in this respect is that he can produce bloody frightening television on a pretty small budget. During The Second Coming, several characters are possessed by some evil force and - simply through the drama (and some weird light effects on their eyes) - these beings were made utterly terrifying. In fact it was the first time that I've hidden behind the sofa out of fear for about twenty years. So I believe that Russell T. Davies is, in this respect, probably going to perfect as the new creator of Doctor Who.
Then again, if he gets stuck, there are plenty of people around that he can call up for help (Robert Shearman, Gareth Roberts, Mark Gatiss, Ben Aaronovitch etc, etc, etc...)
I just hope it really happens this time.
Some thoughts on current perceptions of Russell T Davies by Rob Matthews 5/4/07
A few days ago I read, via a link on Outpost Gallifrey, a particulary sloppy Observer profile of Russell T Davies. In spite of its laziness, or perhaps because of it, said article got me thinking, and reawakened some old concerns of mine about New Who, and how it's perceived.
Though it's perhaps unwise of me to give this transient piece a kind of immortality in the hallowed archives of the Ratings Guide, I'll quote here two things from the article that hit me like a slap in the face:
1) On a letter Russell T Davies wrote to The Guardian praising cartoon grotesque Mr Humphries from seventies sitcom Are You Being Served:
'The man who helped to rejuvenate the BBC's Saturday evening schedule by reinventing Doctor Who, has undeniable creative clout. But Davies's views also carry weight because professional success has bought a degree of celebrity, and status as a de facto spokesman for the gay community.'This one's not specifically related to what I'm about to say, but it serves as a useful indicator of the smug laxity of thinking on the part of the journalist involved. Russell T Davies no more speaks for all gay people than any random straight bloke - Richard Madeley, say - can claim to be a spokesman for the heterosexual community. Kindly get a clue, you condescending berk.
'The show has survived the departures of both Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper, but it couldn't outlive its re-creator.'What surprised me about this one was its matter-of-factness. Us fans have for some time been blithely discussing who Davies' successor should be when he finally decides to jump ship. Not necessarily because we're all keen for him to leave as soon as possible (though there appears to be a sizeable faction of us who are), but because we're all still operating on the assumption that, as with the classic series, the show is bigger than any one creative force who works on it, and naturally an in-demand writer who likes fresh challenges isn't going to stick around forever. In addition, it's obvious - or so one would have thought - that the BBC wouldn't give up an a spectacularly successful flagship show so easily.
Indeed, very likely they won't. Still, though, it was startling to discover the assumption still exists that Doctor Who as a 21st century TV show is inextricably bound up with Russell T Davies. The 're-creator' bit galled me particularly; as if the classic series - in all its many permutations over twenty-six seasons from Hartnell to McCoy - were one single entity and Russell T Davies' version another, one that is revolutionary and unique.
Quoting from myself now, in early 2004:
'This is the nature of the big schism between fandom and 'the normals' - most likely the new show will be credited with bringing the show up to date and strengthening its storytelling style for a new generation. And most likely I'll be left spitting blood and boring you poor DWRG browsers senseless about how, no, it was the books and audios which did that over the course of more than a decade, and dammit they deserve some credit'I'll resist that lovely guilty pleasure of saying 'I told you so', since up until recently I'd reconciled myself to this schism, and in the wake of the utterly fantastic 2005 season, had clean forgotten about my irritability on the subject. Anyway, looking back I see I also confidently noted in the same piece that Christopher Eccleston was going to play the young Tarkin in Revenge of the Sith, and that turned out to be utter bullshit, so my Nostradamus-like qualities aren't all that.
The thing is, we're now two (nearly three) years into the new show's run. One would have hoped that, even if we go to the extreme of pretending that Doctor Who hadn't existed before 2005, and that Russell T Davies really had created it from scratch, people would see that the potential of the format goes beyond any one writer - in much the same ways as the potential of Sherlock Holmes goes beyond Conan Doyle, or that of Batman goes beyond what Bob Kane has to offer. The description of RTD as Doctor Who's 're-creator' came to me as an abrupt reminder that people outside of fandom still assume that no new Doctor Who stories were told between McCoy and Aldred walking off into the distance and Billie Piper getting out of her bed to go to work (barring of course, what might accurately be described as 'that crap Paul McGann one') - that Russell T Davies really did take a hoary moribund old pig's ear and turn it into a silk purse. Indeed, I'd imagine the majority of viewers who don't watch Confidential or take any particular notice of the opening credits will likely be under the impression that Davies writes every episode. This shouldn't matter because it isn't true, but sadly it does matter because these perceptions count for something. If the perception is that the show is bound to not-be-as-good when boy genius Russell T Davies leaves, it'll become a self-fulfilling prophecy no matter how good Moffat/Gattis/Cornell's/Paul Abbot's first season is.
This is particularly galling as we're, at the time of writing, about to go into a new season in which an old fan favourite, Human Nature by Paul Cornell, will be adapted from 1990s printed page to 2007 TV screen, apparently in a more literal fashion than the loose adaptations of Jubilee into Dalek or Spare Parts into Rise of the Cybermen. It'll be very interesting to see whether there's any overt mention of this story's origins when the bones are picked over on Doctor Who Confidential; not because your average on the street would particularly care, but because there really should be some credit where credit is due, some acknowledgement that the process of bringing Who into the 21st century did not begin with Russell T Davies - that it has in fact been an ongoing process from more or less the moment the old show ended. I say this now not for the sake of mere fannish prissiness - though this may have been the case a couple of years ago - but because, at some point, a couple of years down the line when Russell hands in his notice, it is in fact going to be very important to the public perception of 21st century Who that he is not considered the only television writer who can come up with the goods.
Don't get me wrong, I believe what Russell T Davies has done for Doctor Who has been quite, quite wonderful - or was in its first year, anyway, less so in 2006. I doubt anyone could have gotten the new run of the show off to a better start as a popular drama. But it was not as revolutionary as it's portrayed by lazy journos, and neither is the man some kind of televisual messiah. Doctor Who has been talking in a grown-up's voice ever since its adolescence in the New Adventures, and Paul Magrs, Jonathan Morris, Lance Parkin, Robert Shearman and a whole host of others managed to do the witty, knowing and pop-cultural side of things long before Rusty came back on the scene (his initial foray into Doctor Who being, of course, the deeply bleak Damaged Goods).
The annoying thing for me is that what RTD has contributed to Who is as hugely overrated in the mainstream media as it is underrated in fandom...
I've never properly understood the hostility towards the man that we've seen in 'the fan community' almost from day one of the new show. I've always assumed it was merely down to the fact that, to misquote Oscar Wilde, every fan hates the thing he loves, and fans are never happier than when they're bitching about the object of their fandom (look at the display of sheer unreason from James Bond fans when that Daniel Craig fella was cast). Unfortunately, some of it - thankfully a relatively minor part - has sprung from homophobia, which, quite aside from being offensive and annoying, is also deeply tedious; but it's usually easy enough to identify when that's the case, and to simply stop taking notice of anything that person has to say.
Casting my net wider, to people whose opinions or arguing abilities I actually respect, I've found that the particularly odd thing about the fan perception of Russell T Davies is the way people seem to, for want of a better word, 'blame' him for the acclaim he gets. You'd think fans would be happy that the lead writer of their beloved show was winning Baftas for it, but instead they seem to begrudge him them. We accuse him of arrogance for acting like he's in charge of a show that he is, in fact, in charge of. In one instance, which examplifies an obtuse tone I've noticed a lot of fans adopt, a reviewer referred to him as a 'self-proclaimed genius'. This suggests either that I missed a press release somewhere, or that said reviewer needs to look up 'self' and 'proclaimed' in the dictionary.
And yet, Russell T Davies himself would be the first to tell you that everything that's brilliant about Doctor Who was present in the format created way back in 1963. Amid some very brief introductory notes in the booklet accompanying the 'Season One' box set, Davies took the time both to praise and recommend the classic series - 'and there's nothing old about it, not really - watch it on repeats and look a little deeper, past the obvious 60s, 70s, 80sness of it, and you'll see the sheer imagination and fun of it all' and to downplay the idea that the revival of Doctor Who was a one-man show: 'And I had nothing to do with the show's return. That was decided in some as-yet-undocumented discussion between Lorraine Heggessey (...) and Jane Tranter.' Sounds fairly humble to me. In another newspaper article just last week, evil egomaniac Russell T Davies laughed off the idea that it was he who'd introduced emotion to Doctor Who (it had always been present, he argued) and talked up Who-connoisseur's-favourite Robert Holmes as one of television's forgotten great writers. I'm left wondering if the idea that RTD somehow generates his own hype isn't some kind of fan race-memory throwback from the JNT years when John Nathan-Turner became his own propaganda machine. It's as if we can't accept that praise for Doctor Who could possibly be genuine!
Unless... and this is the thing that only occured to me recently, so forgive me if I'm being a bit slow here; unless the real reason for this resentment of the acclaim for Russell T Davies' Doctor Who is that the two are seen by the wider world as being inextricably bound together; that once Russell T Davies leaves Doctor Who, the acclaim will leave with him, and we'll be left with a knackered old sci-fi show to which television's resident genius had applied a magical kiss of life before moving on to his next marvel.
It's a scary thought (and come to think of it, I am being slow because Andrew Wixon experienced this same scary thought himself three years ago). But Russell isn't really to blame for that. He's never claimed that Doctor Who is wonderful because of him, he's always said that it's wondeful just because it is, innately, wonderful. The thing is, the mainstream media still doesn't quite believe him.
He's under no professional obligation to do so, but as a fan, who presumably wants to see TV Who go on long after his reign is over, this might be something for him to think about addressing a bit more strongly as time goes on.