Is Doctor Who cool yet?

Doctor Who Magazine gave me a giant poster of the Eleventh Doctor, which I put on my door. I mainly did this to annoy my flatmate who thinks Matt Smith is ugly (I initially put it on his door). Point is, it was the most fanboyish sight I have beheld since I made the mistake of attending Whovention 2003. It made me wonder whether things have improved for my kind since the dark days of my teenage years.

Lest we forget, in its early days Doctor Who was the shit. In 1965, considered by some to be the height of series' popularity, kids were talking about it in school, everyone wanted a Dalek for Christmas, and outgoing producer Verity Lambert was leaving as her legacy a hit show that was being sold to 44 countries or something. Doctor Who wasn't a nerd thing in its early days. It was a groundbreaking series that collided the mundane with the ultra-modern, and histories of the period list it, along with the Beatles and the Bond films, as one of the defining

cultural touchstones of 1963.

Television itself was pretty cool. Not until the early '60s did owning a television become the norm for middle-class households, and consequently Doctor Who's first generation of viewers was also the first generation in whose leisure time television played a significant role. There were only two channels, and much more of a culture of watching whatever the BBC decided to show you. Doctor Who was, after all, created with the intention of bridging the gap between sport show Grandstand and pop music programme Juke Box Jury, thus cementing a continuous Saturday evening in front of the telly with the fam. But its success came from more than just timing. Plenty of other shows happened to be on, and none achieved a popularity that put them in the same league as James Bond and the Beatles. Even as the new series is one of the most watched shows on British television, it's hard to fathom that in 1964 a child with a Dalek lunchbox would be the envy of his classmates, rather than, say, beaten up.

Needless to say, Doctor Who's cultural cachet kind of went downhill from there. Not dramatically by any means, but the next fifteen years or so were a series of slumps and recoveries, and not even during the "golden age" of the Hinchcliffe/Holmes era was the show as popular as the Dalekmania days. Then Star Wars happened, and the '80s happened, and it looked like a little old thing like Doctor Who would never be cool again. When the show was cancelled in 1989, it was experiencing something of a renaissance. After the long, slow decline of the Nathan-Turner/Saward era, the series started to pick up in a big way. The 1988 and 1989 seasons, as we'll see when we get there, featured stories that were not only some of the best Doctor Who stories ever, but expanded the idea of what Doctor Who could do. Doctor Who was getting awesome again. But it wasn't enough. By 1989 the cool kids had much cooler things to watch and besides, Coronation Street was on ITV at the same time. Doctor Who was for nerds. It was good, but it was about as cool as a question-mark sweater-vest.

So when Russell was given the seemingly impossible task of bringing that old show back, he had a lot to prove. If the show was going to last more than thirteen episodes, not only did it have to be good, but it had to be really cool, because in the intervening years Doctor Who's public image had only gotten worse. Every day children were growing up without a Doctor to call their own, original Doctor Who stories (books, audio plays, comics) often descended into fanwank, and interest in the show was increasingly becoming the province of those who threatened to make Trekkies look like productive members of society. Point is, Russell succeeded. As episodes like "Aliens of London" (N1.4) or "Midnight" (N4.10) demonstrate, Russell is the master of the popular touch. It was for good reason that Lawrence Miles described "Rose" (N1.1) as "possibly the most Buffy thing ever seen outside Buffy itself" and quipped that it "may have led you to wonder whether the transmission signal to the Autons could only be stopped by Billie Piper heroically throwing herself off the London Eye." Like Buffy, new Doctor Who presented both fans and casual channel-surfers (is there any other way?) with a brightly-coloured, unapologetic yet self-referencing, pop-culture conscious, witty world that violently collided the mundane with the bonkers. And what's more, people will admit to liking it. Now, especially because the perceived (invented) boundaries between high and low culture are today blurrier even than they were in 2005, discussing Doctor Who in public, far from being social suicide, can actually make me seem more interesting (in certain circles) because I can talk intelligently about pop culture. Which is cool these days, you understand.

Ahem. Predictions of how the Moffat era will shape up depend on what priority one gives to his numerous identities. When I think of Moffat as a Russell devotee who wrote Jekyll, had run out of ideas by his fourth Dr Who story ("Silence in the Library," N4.8 and N4.9), and has stacked Season 5 with a mix of his sitcom buddies and some of the less stellar writers of previous seasons, I expect all the things that annoyed me about Russell's Who to return, along with talentless writing and inept plotting. But when I think of him as a big old nerd who wrote Coupling and "Blink" (N3.10), I'm excited for a fresh new Doctor Who helmed by the best person to take over from Russell. It will certainly be funny; in a different way from Russell's, but humour can be assured. One of Russell's main weaknesses was that he didn't seem to have as much facility with science fiction ideas as Moffat does, though the fact that "Silence in the Library" was basically a greatest hits of his previous stories does worry me. Some of Moffat's comments, such as getting annoyed at commentators who see too much of a separation between the "old" and "new" series, suggest that he will have more respect for the show's past than the militant "every episode is someone's first" ethos of the Russell era. I think the show will lose some of its popular touch, but it might appeal more to fans, or adults, or children, or just me. As we've learnt, just because a TV show gets bad ratings, or even is cancelled, doesn't mean it's bad. But even from a very commercial standpoint, Doctor Who is worth keeping around more than other shows. It has a large and multi-generational fanbase, "cultural icon" status, and it has proven that it can be very popular even if occasionally its popularity declines. Hopefully it will be good, and hopefully, therefore or despite that, the show will live on. The reason Doctor Who has survived in a way that almost no other series ever has is its capacity for change. More than anything, that's what the series needs, and that what we'll get in April. Get excited.