My father was a great admirer of the television show Dr Who, right from the start in 1964. Because I’m so old, I remember three Doctors: William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee. I was four when I started watching it; 14 when I finally rebelled, using the occasion of Tom Baker becoming the Fourth Doctor to jump ship and make a clean break, which consisted of playing records loudly in my bedroom.
But looking back, they were good years; I came from a very loving and secure background — an only child — and Saturday evenings watching the show as a family was one of the tableaux which seem to sum it up. The evening meal was taken early (my dad barely able to keep calm as he strode around the kitchen; he didn’t believe in women cooking, being a Communist — and a show off), I was dispatched to walk the dog until it became exhausted, my mother took extra pains with making the always immaculate lounge even more welcoming. Then we would gather to absorb the magic; talking was frowned upon and as for anything as daft as screaming at the Daleks or hiding behind the sofa, forget it — this was a serious business. After my teenage rebellion, I avoided anything to do with Dr Who for decades — but on discovering that my third husband was a Whovian, it was kind of like coming home. When one of my favourite actors, Christopher Eccleston, was announced as the Ninth Doctor after a long lay-off, I decided to throw myself into this new but oddly familiar fan experience.
I was very lucky to get back onboard when I did; this was the brilliant pairing of Eccleston and Billie Piper as his companion Rose Tyler, an unconsummated love story to rival Lost In Translation. It was here also that I became a fan of the writer Russell T Davies, going back to seek out his earlier body of work. But when Ecclestone left after just one season and was replaced by the ineffably irritating David Tennant — all mugging and shrugging, with a Cockney accent that made Dick van Dyke look like Ray Winston — I lost interest. When my husband watched it, I’d go into my bedroom and play CDs loudly.
So when it was announced that RTD was returning to Dr Who in 2021 after several years of plummeting ratings, I didn’t even know he’d left in 2010. The fans were jubilant, as he was still revered for the way he’d brought the show back to life in 2005 and made it a surprise smash hit; the general feeling was that each subsequent change of show-runner had watered down that winning formula a little more, and the most recent incumbent (Chris Chibnall) had brought it to the brink of cancellation with atrocious scripts, an unlikeable lead (Jodie Whittaker) and an insufferably preachy tone that had a lot to do with the internet’s idea of social justice and almost nothing to do with monsters. The “Doctor Woo” jibe had been well earned. Of course we all knew RTD was a raging Leftie, but we also knew (or at least believed) he was no fool. This was going to be Doctor Who’s last chance — surely he’d have the sense to rein in the wokery a bit, bring back the half-decent jokes and reverse or at least ignore Chibnall’s disastrous Timeless Child storyline, which had posited that the First Doctor was not, in fact, William Hartnell but a little black girl? And we had every reason to feel encouraged by an interview that had recently appeared in the Telegraph with the headline “RUSSELL T DAVIES LAMBASTS DIVERSITY FIXATION OF ‘RUBBISH’ NEW TV WRITERS”. Go get ’em, Russell!
To say that what happened next was disappointing would be like saying that Daleks don’t make the best bartenders. RTD’s first comeback episode began by introducing us to a transgender youngster who wasted no time in telling off the Doctor for assuming a monster’s pronouns; that pretty much set the tone for the two (mercifully short) series that followed, in which Ncuti Gatwa gave us his Doctor as a prancing ninny who’d burst into tears at the drop of a fancy hat. But this incessant woo was actually the least of the revamped show’s problems. Davies had always been better at dialogue than plot, but whatever storytelling skills he’d once had seemed to have deserted him: series-spanning story arcs led nowhere, or to the tritest conclusions, and it soon became apparent that he still knew how to start a story but had totes forgotten how to end one. Even the humour was laboured and often weirdly childish, or else weirdly bitter.
When people inevitably started to complain, he hit back, saying they just had to accept that the show wasn’t for them any more. But it didn’t really seem to be for anyone else either, as the ratings continued to plummet; almost every episode in the second series got lower ratings than the one before and so became, for one week only, the lowest-rated episode ever. And then it just stopped, seemingly halfway through a story that made absolutely no sense, and Ncuti was off, amid rumours of backstage bust-ups, to be fleetingly replaced by Billie Piper, for reasons that almost certainly don’t exist yet and probably never will.
Now Davies is back: not only with Tip Toe, a miniseries about two next-door neighbours (Alan Cumming as a gay bar owner, David Morrissey as a straight electrician), but also with a strange new beef that no one saw coming. It was set off when, talking to the Guardian, Davies said of including a sympathetic gender-realist female character: “I wanted all sorts of voices in there. I’ve got friends who are gender-critical. It’s only online you end up screaming and shouting and being attacked by them. In real life, you have a chat, and we all kind of sigh and put up with each other. That’s how the world works.”
“In real life, you have a chat, and we all kind of sigh and put up with each other. That’s how the world works.”
Having friends who think differently from one? How very dare T! Cue India Willoughby piling in on him for speaking to people who don’t think exactly the same as he does, because “tolerating the intolerant is unacceptable”. Some of the snarkiest reactions could be found on Mumsnet, where one user observed that “no doubt he’ll make a statement soon suggesting he was ‘misquoted/taken out of context’ and will swear fealty to the Purity Police”.
The Purity Police are the merciless overseers of the Purity Spirals, and that’s just what Davies has got himself into with Willoughby. In the past, a PS was known as “infighting”, which has always been so much worse on the Left, where politics takes the role of religion. Purity Spirals are so out-there cray-cray that one of the most famous centred on an Instagram knitting circle run by a gay man who became the victim of a race-row pile-on after he attempted to recruit more people of colour by using the hashtag Diversknitty; he was accused of white supremacy and ended up in hospital on suicide watch. A sophisticate once told me that if you sit at a pavement cafe on the Via Veneto long enough, you will see everyone you know. It was probably an exaggeration — but I do think it true that if you stay on X long enough, you will have a bust-up with India Willoughby.
Davies has not deigned to answer Willoughby since the initial invitation to a ruck, so I’m hoping that Dr Whobris (as I have dubbed him) will stand firm and not be bullied into submission by the T he seems so determined to add to the LGB — though, of course, the bad part of me would love to see a good old online barney. Whatever, I think we can safely say that Tip Toe is not the only RTD show in town now that his comeback has commenced: I’ll be keenly observing both.