Who's Who?

Christopher Eccleston plays the title character in the new Doctor Who series.

Blimey, no sooner does the new Doctor Who get off to a roaring start, drawing 10 million U.K. viewers for its March BBC 1 debut, than star Christopher Eccleston quits, announcing he won’t return for a second season for fear of being stereotyped by the series’ success. (What, he wanted a flop?)

As Canadian viewers will learn when the 13-part British series makes its CBC debut on April 5, Eccleston makes an engaging Doctor Who, playing the venerable Time Lord as a bounding marauder. Nevertheless, there have been eight previous Whos; a design quirk allows the doc to trade his body in for a new model, so every star has proven expendable. What will hurt, however, is that the BBC hoped to bankroll the $23-million series with a 2005 Christmas merchandizing blitz – an unlikely prospect now that the star toy is gone.

Perhaps Eccleston’s sudden departure came as such a surprise because the venerable sci-fi series has always been blessed with good fortune. It was created in 1963 by BBC head of drama (and former CBC-TV producer) Sydney Newman as a Saturday “tea-time” series that might serve as a bridge between Grandstand - a sports show that's still running - and the teen platter series Juke Box Jury.

The Toronto-born executive intended the show to be educational. As originally designed, Doctor Who was a crotchety 650-year-old alien who travelled through time disguised as a human, pitching in to help earthlings at key moments in history. The first episode found the good doctor (William Hartnell) encouraging cavemen to build the first-ever fire. A subsequent episode found him drawing a gun at the OK Corral. And so on.

But the series did have an endearing quirk right from the start. Doctor Who’s time machine was supposed to adapt to its surroundings, but never really worked and so remained a 1950s style London police call box, a clever bit that audiences would have had fun with at the time – shoddy British workmanship was a running gag through Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s term during the 1960s.

And perhaps that’s the secret to the show’s success. Periodically, regenerated heroes allowed the series to go with the flow of popular culture. When Hartnell fell ill in 1966, the character of Doctor Who turned into a Beatle-haired clown who played the recorder (Patrick Troughton). Subsequent Time Lords inevitably reflected their era. Jon Pertwee’s Who (1970-74) was a blond Bond who drove his own Whomobile. Next, Tom Baker (1974-81) made the show youthful again with his Shirley Temple curls, 20-foot scarves and pockets full of jelly babies.

The remaining Whos – Peter Davison (1982-84), Colin Baker (1984-86), Sylvester McCoy (1987-89) and Paul McGann (in a 1996 TV movie) – were men of their time as well. Earnest, celery-eating Davison was compared more than once to John Major, then a grey-haired and -suited underling in Thatcher’s Tory government.

The familiar call-box time machine shows up in the first episode of the new Doctor Who, but the debut has obviously been crafted to cater to a more impatient entertainment demographic. Conspicuously faster and more ironic than its predecessors, the series takes off 10 minutes in when Who visits the apartment of a shop girl he’s just saved from an attack of zombie mannequins. (Plastics, it seems, are threatening to come alive and take over the world.)

“If you’re an alien,” asks Rose (played by British pop singer Billie Piper), “Why do you sound like you’re from the north?”

“Lots of planets have a north,” Doctor Who responds.

With that, Doctor Who snoops through Rose’s flat while she’s in another room. In a lightning-fast sequence designed to show off Who’s otherworldly intelligence (and the show’s bouncing wit), the Time Lord picks up a gossip magazine and proclaims, “It won’t last; he’s gay and she’s an alien.” A fast flip of a paperback prompts a two-word verdict: “Sad ending.” Then the recently regenerated doctor reviews his own face in the mirror, “Could have been worse.” Moments later, he is attacked by a mannequin arm that leaps from the couch. After subduing the severed limb, he throws it to Rose with a cheerful aside: “He’s armless.”

The soundtrack accompanying the zombie attack adds another level of ironic cool to the sequence: the strong-arm manoeuver is orchestrated with a musical quote from the B-52’s inter-stellar party classic, Planet Claire.

The fun continues a few scenes on when Rose looks up Doctor Who on the Internet and discovers a local website devoted to the mysterious alien. Visiting the suburban home of the site’s manager, she’s met at the door by a bored youngster who shouts out, “Da, one of your nutters.”

Mannequins roam the streets of London in an episode of the new Doctor Who series.

Yes, the creators of Doctor Who 2005 have clearly been paying attention to cheerfully sadistic youth-cult hits like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Still, the show does an admirable job of including old-time fans in the fun. For example, while Rose talks to the website manager, her date is parked in a car on the street staring down a free-moving wheelie bin.

Stepping out of the car to investigate, the hapless boyfriend strays too close to the garbage container and is swallowed up by killer plastic. What makes the scene so delicious for veteran Who fans is that the wheelie bin is an obvious knock-off of the Time Lord’s most persistent foes, the Daleks, a mutant race of oversized salt shaker robots from the Planet Skaro.

Doctor Who faithful should also enjoy the fast, funny work of Eccleston, a Manchester actor best known for his striking performance in filmmaker Danny Boyle’s Shallow Grave. Old-time BBC hands, on the other hand, might be tempted to put a stopwatch on the actor as he races like a mad hare through important speeches.

At one point in the first episode, Rose wonders why an alien planet has decided to inhabit Earth’s plastics. “What’s it got against us?”

“Nothing,” a beaming Eccleston shouts. “It loves you. You’ve got such a good planet – lots of smoke and oil, plenty of toxins and dioxins in the air. Just what the Nestene consciousness needs. Its food stock was destroyed in the war, so Earth..." Here he pretends to pick up chopsticks, grinning. “Dinner!”

Just before Doctor Who went to air in 1963, Sydney Newman received a missive from BBC top brass, requesting that the series not feature any “bug-eyed monsters.” Presumably, they wouldn’t have cared for a bug-eyed leading man. Still, the secret to Doctor Who’s success has always been its adaptability. His call-box is permanently stuck in the 1950s, but Doctor Who himself changes with the times. To the show’s credit, a reckless, fun-starved Doctor Who feels just about right in 2005.

Stephen Cole writes about television for CBC.ca.