About This Chronology

I started this candidly insane project in 2002, before the Welsh Series was a Cambrian gleam in Big Russell’s eye. I had of course read A History of the Universe and Ahistory by Lance Parkin, the giant upon whose shoulders more than any others I precariously perch. He observed in the forward to Ahistory that including all the short stories and comic strips into a chronology would be too time-consuming an exercise. He was right. It has been.

This unfinishable chronology, then, aims to encompass all the professionally broadcast, released and published Doctor Who stories, plus the more notable stories written for charity or simply left online, plus all those not featuring the Doctor but relating to Doctor Who narrative. Obviously, the spin-offs: the Daleks, Benny, Faction Paradox, every cheeky plate Big Finish has set spinning; Iris Wildthyme, that is evidence that Doctor Who fascinates those with a very different sensibility to my own as, gawd help us, is Torchwood. Sherlock Holmes is almost casually subsumed, as is Carnacki the Ghost Finder. Fringe entanglements lead us to fictional continuities too vast even for me to venture very far into: Star Trek, Cthulhu, Marvel Comics, the rambling M C Escher roman fleuve of Michael Moorcock.

Category, and the essentially fictional distinction between singularity and plurality itself, are not characteristics of reality, but human conceits imposed on it to ease communication. Many of the boundaries of this project I have set by whim, without a pretence of objectivity. There is no more Death’s Head II than there has to be, because he’s not much fun. There’s as much Death’s Head as I can find, because he is.

While it is more than a television programme, I think it has been at least ten television programmes:

The Odyssey of Barbara and Ian 1963-5

Fascinating Stories of the Unknown*      1965-9

The Man From UNIT                       1970-3

The Doctor And His Assistant** 1973-80

The John Nathan-Turner Show   1980-7

The Cartmel Master Plan               1987-96

Eking Out McGann                          1996-2005

The Russell T Davis Show              2005-9

Steven Moffat – Lawrence Miles: A Confrontation in the Desert  2010-7

What Is Chris Chibnall Doing?      2018 - 2022                        

 

*The splendid tagline to the 1968 World Distributors Annual

**Not really a thing until The Curse of Peladon, then the basic format of the show from Carnival of Monsters to Meglos

Needless to say this chronology necessitates the biggest

SPOILER ALERT

since I didn’t pull the handbrake up enough and our car rolled forward out of its parking space and knocked off its front spoiler on the opposite kerb and I had to warn passengers getting into the back to mind themselves as we were carrying it behind the front seats until we got around to having it reattached.

I expect many, perhaps most, who have read this far will say that chronology, like canonicity, is a pedantic concern that misses the point of Doctor Who, that it is unimportant. OF COURSE it is unimportant. I wouldn’t have been presumptuous enough to devote twenty years of my life to it if I thought it was important. Nonetheless, you can tell a story about any rando in a time machine, and plenty of people do, to good effect. If you tell a story about the Doctor in the TARDIS, you are saying to your audience, you know that mysterious traveller in time and space known as the Doctor? With all that he, or she, has done? Some of which you know and much of which you don’t? Well, one specific heartbeat of her or his life, when he or she might have been somewhere else, it happened that they were HERE and THIS happened and nothing was quite the same afterwards.

And it’s not quite like saying it of Wonder Woman, or Robin Hood: nothing wrong with either, of course, but they are narratively reinventible, again and again. It is a little like saying it of Sherlock Holmes: Conan Doyle imagined a streak of pedantry in Dr Watson, and illustrates it with a broken line of dates, weekdays and seasons, which give us, absent-mindedly, elements of a realistic biography of Holmes. (Sometimes Watson contradicts himself, which is no mistake by Doyle: pedants are not immune to error).

The Beeb and its hired writers have done the same on a huger scale: indeed, in at least one more dimension! The Doctor is perhaps the fictional character whose life, chronicled over some six decades, uniquely approaches in volume and complexity of information that of an actual individual.

Other perspectives are offered by this chronology. Vistas of time stretch out from the present into the past and future: the Doctor and what he interacts with are glimpsed in orders of magnitude of duration: decades, centuries, millennia, myriads, kilocenturies and so on. (I believe I have made up the word ‘kilocenturies’). Working on this chronology has had me spending long hours in contemplation of temporal scale, as history becomes anthropology, becomes natural history, becomes geology, becomes cosmology. And then one turns in the other direction, and speculates on what a panorama this might present, almost inconceivably vaster. In The Infinity Doctors, Lance Parkin gives the universe a future about 10²⁴ times longer than its current past: we are in its opening instants. And then Simon Bucher-Jones takes us out into the big pond in which our universe is a small fish.

Perhaps half of Doctor Who stories aren’t anchored to a date at all, and these I have scattered, largely randomly, alongside those that are. The latter give a clue as to how the TARDIS’s destinations, and related events, are distributed through the cosmos’s duration. If you are a purist who objects to my making stuff up, I have no objection if you simply ignore all the entries marked ‘arbitrary placement’, and it would make no difference if I had as I obviously can’t stop you.

Additionally, I have suggested films, books, graphic novels, the occasional TV drama, that are not irreconcilable with Doctor Who continuity. Sherlock Holmes again sets a good example; vampire stories and stories of Earth – and humanity itself – undergoing strange transformations in the distant future are both fertile sources of material.

Tone, of course, isn’t a problem, because Doctor Who is omnitonous. There are modes of storytelling that Doctor Who hasn’t done yet, but there are none undoable. The ideal Doctor Who story is one that is as different as possible in as many different ways as possible from the one that preceded it: location, structure, scale, tone, focus. The near random way that chronology orders these stories maximises the frequency with which this is achieved. The Doctor would be the only constant if he or she were very constant, and the Doctor is frequently absent anyway. (In Doctor Who continuity, the Doctor is like God, Whose absence is merely a special case of His presence).

Perhaps the biggest handicap under which the new series has laboured is following the modern practice of having a showrunner who produces most of the scripts, I assume for reasons of managemental superstition. This is not conducive to the radical, grasshopper eclecticism on which the programme thrives. Neither Davies or Moffat lack imagination, but they only have one each. After three years, in both cases, the scoop was audibly in contact with the barrel. Still, it has not proved an insuperable handicap.

The story generating machinery that Sydney Newman devised has proved uniquely antifragile. Like the broom in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (the poem by Johann von Goethe, not the Missing Adventure by Christopher Bulis), the pieces into which entropy has broken it over six decades have simply carried on returning to the well of narrative and bringing more of it back on their own account. Perhaps the entropy of the Doctor Who universe is an apprentice entropy, a Mickey Mouse entropy, horrified because there seems to be no spell to stop it.

(Now I think of it, Bulis’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice does feature a broom. Barbara accompanies a witch in flying on it.)

I saw An Unearthly Child on November 23^rd, 1963, on the television set of the house next door, as the guest of the boy who lived there, named, by banal coincidence, Harold Wilson. The phrase “behind the sofa” is an attempt to domesticate and make safe the ambivalent relationship children have with dread. It’s not that they quite like it so much as that they recognise it as a symptom that they are learning something of importance that has been concealed, a ferocious evolutionary imperative. It is a sort of insurance against the disappearance, or other catastrophic failure, of one’s parents. Statistically, parents disappear or fail catastrophically often enough to make this an entirely worthwhile insurance.

It’s fair to say that there was a fierce commitment in most of the people involved in An Unearthly Child not to domesticate the dread: Lambert, Whitaker, Coburn, Hussein, Hartnell, Hill, Russell were addressing the children over the heads – under the heads? – of any intervening adults. What we saw was going to be what we got.

And this is a paradox in Doctor Who. Some of its finest writers: Hulke, Adams, Cornell, Orman, Big Russell himself, have been paladins of Humanism, powerfully bringing their values to their work. But Humanism is ultimately a mechanism of reassurance, and it is the nature of Doctor Who that you wait for conclusive reassurance, and you wait, but logically and systemically it cannot offer you any.

All children know horror lies behind adult reticence, the information withheld through fear. Consider what we learned: the Doctor’s society has time travel, faster than light travel, dimensional transcendence, but with all that unimaginable technological power, things have gone seriously wrong. This is a fragment of a family, a grandfather and a granddaughter with no representatives of an intervening generation. Where are they? What happened to them? The Doctor won’t say. He has had such a disagreement with the authorities that he and Susan are fugitives. (She gives every sign of being with him voluntarily). What fate are they trying to avoid? Why are they having to avoid it? They won’t say.

The hissing imprecision of monochrome 405 lines television was very conducive to dread. What Barbara and Ian discovered was that everything they thought normal, everything they thought central, everything they thought everything, was parochial and marginal. And we learned it too, though at least we were relatively safe on the other side of the TV screen. The universe – and the Doctor could scarcely contain his exasperation at having to make the point - is not human.

And in The Reign of Terror at the end of the first season we learned that even humanity isn’t human, not as we like to use the term. In the other three historicals, we saw societies that were hostile to outsiders, for legible reasons. Here we saw a society, recognisably like our own as the others had not been so presented, that step by logical step had become an arbitrary death-trap not for outsiders but for its own members, all the way up to Robespierre; beyond individual intention, an expression of the universe’s random lethality. Because, why not? There is nothing very much to stop it. This, I learned, was one of the horrors behind adult reticence, and if there are any children reading, take it from me, it still is.

This I learned from the careful story telling of Dennis Spooner, who claimed to be a TV writer because he was not clever enough to write prose. He was clever enough to exploit the basic tension between the nature of the Doctor and the nature of Doctor Who. A kind answer to my earlier question is that Chris Chibnall is trying to warm hearts and affirm life. You can certainly argue that it is the Doctor’s job to be life-affirming, but it is Doctor Who’s job to be reality-affirming. We admire the Doctors for their compassion, their courage, their resourcefulness, even their showmanship or showwomanship, no small thing in the human condition: but still they can offer us no conclusive reassurance, still the universe isn’t human, still we collide with death and things as bad but less comprehensible as they go about their unfathomable business.

I think the best Cyberman story – better even than Marc Platt’s audio drama Spare Parts – was Scott Gray’s 2005 Doctor Who Magazine comic story The Flood. Instead of forcing cyberconversion on a group of humans, the Cybermen simply release all inhibitions on their emotions, by chemical means. After the resulting orgy of revulsion, rage and self-loathing, they say “We can free you of this.” The humans crawl forward, begging pathetically for release. The Cybermen exist because they are what we would choose to be, “We will survive,” they assert at the story’s climax. “No, you won’t,” replies the Doctor, losing patience with them, and exposes them to reality. If it’s not contempt he’s expressing, it’s something alien and worse.

The one quality an actor playing the Doctor consequently needs, I’d say, is hauntedness. No names, but I don’t think everybody cast has had it. And I’m not talking about Peter Cushing’s splendidly perky Doctor Who: he wasn’t really playing the Doctor. Still, the programme has survived miscasting. I think it has the self-organising resilience to survive most things.

I shall try to keep my perspectives eclectic. It is fair to say I wouldn’t know fashion if it bit me in the arse, but I am anthropologically aware that it is constantly there, something bulky moving through the undergrowth, and it has its legitimate bearing.

This chronology encompasses material up to the end of 2021. If I actually succeed in finishing it, I shall try to update it annually. My methodology is based firmly in tinkering: I don’t know if it will stay on Blogger or migrate somewhere else. When and if completed (temporarily), it will follow, humbly, in the footsteps of Lance Parkin and be a history of the Universe. Beginning with the last five weeks of 1963.