When looking through the history of Doctor Who, the overriding sense I get is one of unlikeliness. While most popular television shows have a single person standing as their chief creator, by contrast Doctor Who seems somehow congealed, arising from a series of fortunate decisions from a string of separate people. The Daleks, the ethereal theme music, the idea of a time machine hidden inside a police box— all of these were probably essential to the show’s success, but all arose independently, through exactly the right people having exactly the right ideas.
Even so, Aidan Turner’s three-season run on the show strikes me as particularly improbable. The story is well-known, but bears repeating: late in December 2010, Doctor Who’s then producer Steven Moffat disappeared. While it’s not the place of this blog to speculate on what happened to him – there are many other places on the Internet which will do just that – it’s worth highlighting that even six years on, no evidence around where he might have gone has ever been found. There’s no obvious reason why a man who, by all accounts, had recently achieved his childhood dream would choose to disappear, and while he certainly had his enemies – like anyone attached to Who in a major capacity does – none seem the type to have consciously engineered his disappearance.
Regardless, disappear he did, and Moffat’s absence was to plunge Doctor Who into chaos. While production on the show’s sixth series was well on the way, the absent producer had left little information on where the show might be going next. While some of Moffat's unused ideas have since come to light – his notes have hinted at concepts such as a spaceship stuffed with dinosaurs, and a planet full of Daleks gone insane – his disappearance meant that none of them would ultimately come to fruition. Indeed, the plotline raised in series 6 about a question that should never be answered went unresolved throughout Matt Smith’s tenure, only being alluded to again in his very last episode.
The second half of Smith’s tenure remains something of a sore spot with fans. Following Moffat's last episode, The Wedding of River Song, Doctor Who went through a phase of having no real executive producer, which lead to a succession of disjointed episodes that had very little to do with each other. Particularly painful was the damp squib of Who’s 50th Anniversary in 2013, where a special episode where Smith’s Doctor met his childhood self was watched by fewer than 6 million viewers.
By that point, of course, the controversial appointment of Moffat’s successor had already been announced to the public. While the previous producers of post-2005 Who had been veterans with decades of experience working in television, the BBC appointed the unknown Ben Issacs to oversee 2014’s season. Issacs’ notoriety is now such that it’s easy to forget how few people had heard of him in 2013, and the extent to which his appointment was treated with dismay. His only real TV experience was as the writer-producer of Worlds Apart, a niche BBC Three drama about a man who traveled through several parallel universes. Most industry observers concluded – correctly, as we now know – that Issacs’ appointment was a desperate last throw of the dice on the part of the BBC, as a means of avoiding having to cancel the show in the year of its 50th Anniversary. As had happened so often in the history of Doctor Who, a radical solution to a problem turned out to have extremely far-reaching consequences.
What's still an open question, though, is whether appointing Ben Issacs was actually a good idea. It's certainly true that under his management the Doctor would travel to far darker places than would previously have been allowed, and that parental outrage at some of its most controversial moments might have done the BBC no favours in terms of its popularity. Yet it's notable that Issacs’ vision energised younger viewers in a way that previous producers couldn't match. The younger generations, Issacs argued, know that the world is a dark place. What would the point of fantasy be if it couldn't even acknowledge that? For my part, I mostly agree with him. While Issacs has his quirks – not least his insistent focus on the dangers of fascism in an age where it barely even exists upon the fringes – his willingness to put difficult and disturbing messages at the heart of a family show is something I have much respect for. GK Chesterton said that children enjoy fairytales not because they say dragons are real, but because they say the dragons can be beaten. Issacs, whatever else he is, is a firm believer in our age’s dragons— and for that reason, if nothing else, I'm glad he had ownership of Britain’s most persistent of fairytales.
