FUTURE TENSE: British Science Fiction Television
Part Six / 2005–2019: ‘We’re all stories, in the end’ — From Doctor Who to Black Mirror and beyond
Finally, here’s the last instalment of Future Tense, my chronicle of British science fiction television. It seems rather apt to present it as the decade comes to a close. Previous instalments are here. I hope you’ve enjoyed the series.
After it seemed Doctor Who (BBC, 1963–89, 1996, 2005 — )was confined to a nostalgic backwater in the public consciousness, the series returned in 2005 under the aegis of writer and producer Russell T Davies. It was, by all accounts, a gamble on the part of Davies and the BBC executives who fought to commission it. However, it paid off and transformed the series’ reputation and the BBC One Saturday evening schedules, underpinning a new approach to science fiction on British television, where the genre was confidently expressed within mainstream, quality drama and scheduled in prime time.
Doctor Who hadn’t entirely disappeared since the unsuccessful mid-Atlantic pilot starring Paul McGann in 1996. It had simply expanded into and flourished within other media, particularly licensed books and audio, and offered a continuation of the series through, in the main, fan-created narratives that reshaped the original format. The media convergence that transformed Doctor Who into one of the biggest global television brands in the 21st Century had its origins in those direct connections with fan communities and fan-producers, who were all busy scribbling in the margins of the original series. Many of them eventually worked on the new series, through writing new scripts or by adapting their novels or Big Finish audios.
… an ‘intimate epic’ that blended spectacle with emotion
Davies also re-established Doctor Who as a mainstream British science fiction series by emulating a number of established television models as well as referencing the established mythology of the original series such as the theme music, the TARDIS, the sonic screwdriver, the Time Lords and the Daleks. Not only was the new series an extension of his socially and politically aware dramas such as Queer As Folk (Red/Channel 4, 1999–2000) and Bob and Rose (ITV, 2001) but it emerged out of a telefantasy broadcasting landscape dominated by Buffy — The Vampire Slayer (Mutant Enemy for WB/UPN, 1997–2003) Smallville (WB/The CW, 2001–11), the revival of Battlestar Galactica (NBC/Sci-Fi, 2003–2010), and HBO’s long-form novelistic dramas which contributed to the redefinition of ‘cult’ TV, such as The Sopranos (1999–2007), reality TV shows Big Brother (Endemol, 2000–18) and The X Factor (ITV, 2004 — ) and the fantasy fiction of J.K. Rowling and Phillip Pullman.
The BBC placed a telefantasy drama firmly in the early evening schedules, something it hadn’t done for quite a while as most broadcasters were then convinced a family audience for drama, and especially science fiction, no longer existed. Quality and scale, engaging characters with emotional depth and a balance of fantasy with realism — by dint of ensuring the audience had a touchstone with characters lives back on Earth — were there to hook the audience. As a result Doctor Who became, in Matt Hills’s view, an ‘intimate epic’ that blended spectacle with emotion. Simultaneously, it retained its Britishness through constant associations with British heritage and culture, coupled with an awareness of the political currency of the day, with episodes in the first series reflecting New Labour’s bid for a third term in power and its notorious use of media spin.
In this vein, the series wryly commented on a variety of topics: health issues, consumerism, slavery, immigration, pollution, technology, mass media, reality television and religion. Within these narratives the relationships between the Ninth and Tenth Doctors and their companions Rose, Martha and Donna explored romance, unrequited love, friendship and identity to a degree relatively unexplored in the original series. Significantly, the Doctor’s impact on each of their families also underlined Davies’s approach to exploring social bonds and the support of extended families. As the series firmly established itself he confidently revived several iconic adversaries such as the Cybermen, the Sontarans and the Master to battle the Doctor through a number of ongoing seasonal story arcs, another narrative device commonplace in long-form television dramas and soaps.
Before Davies’ departure in 2009, Doctor Who had established itself as a transmedia broadcasting phenomenon through spin-off media that ranged from Doctor Who Confidential (2005–11), a behind the scenes series that followed each broadcast of the episodes, and a children’s magazine show Totally Doctor Who (2006–7), to mobile phone based mini-episodes, games and animated adventures. Its availability through numerous platforms on line and off mirrored the expansion of catch-up television, particularly the growing take up of BBC iPlayer, and the brand, supported by tenacious marketing and press, infiltrated books, toys, games, clothing, concerts, exhibitions, cinema showings and conventions on a global scale. Doctor Who’s return not only demonstrated that a family audience existed and wanted to see a well-made, exciting science fiction adventure drama but it also prompted other broadcasters to invest in high concept dramas aimed at the same audience.
… ‘it’s very teenage to indulge yourself in blood and gore’
Doctor Who created its own spin-off dramas aimed at other audience demographics: Torchwood (BBC, 2006 — ) and The Sarah Jane Adventures (BBC, 2007–11). Both took two popular characters from the Doctor Who universe, old and new, and established them in their own specifically defined dramas, one aimed at an adult BBC Three audience and the other for CBBC’s young viewers. In Torchwood, 51st Century time agent Captain Jack Harkness, introduced in a two-part story in the first series of Doctor Who, fronts a team working for a secret organisation dealing with the consequences of a space-time rift in Cardiff. Meanwhile, Sarah Jane Smith, former companion of the Third and Fourth Doctors, fought aliens in suburbia together with her own team of young companions. There was also much cross fertilisation between the different shows. Companion Martha Jones briefly joined Torchwood and both the Tenth and Eleventh Doctor enjoyed appearances in The Sarah Jane Adventures as Davies and his successor Steven Moffat oversaw an expanding universe.
Davies offered that Torchwood could ‘be a bit more visceral, more violent, and more sexual, if we want to. Though bear in mind that it’s very teenage to indulge yourself in blood and gore, and Torchwood is going to be smarter than that.’ And therein lay one of the problems with the series when it debuted to something of a mixed reception. The first series embraced Davies’ desire to push the boundaries of language, gender and sexuality, something he had committed to with Queer As Folk, to position Torchwood as an edgy, contemporary drama. However, the incorporation of these elements into a science fiction action-adventure format was, as Lee Barron noted ‘abrupt, jarring and even a little uncomfortable.’
It is worth noting that this approach disenfranchised younger viewers who had enjoyed Captain Jack’s role in Doctor Who. Davies recognised this and for the second season Torchwood reduced its reliance on shock value and family-friendly, pre-watershed, edited episodes were broadcast on BBC Two several days after the original versions had been shown. The second season continued to show the Torchwood team defending Cardiff from the hostile flotsam and jetsam emerging from the rift, a science fiction CSI (2000 — )happily indulging in contemporary horror but also offering interesting episodes about the brutality of war, the pain of memory, death and resurrection.
For its third season Torchwood became a five-part event mini-series Children of Earth (BBC, 2009). Davies and his writers transformed it into a gripping character-driven political thriller that abandoned the Cardiff-based format and the adolescent tone of the previous seasons. Underpinning much of Torchwood’s previous series was that the central characters would face, in the series finales, the conclusion to an apocalyptic battle (the demon Abaddon or Jack’s evil brother Gray were their previous opponents) and this continued when Children of Earth paid homage instead to the invasion narratives of Quatermass, A for Andromeda and a catastrophe akin to those John Wyndham wrote about prior to the turn of the century. Aliens revisit the Earth to harvest children while terrorism, government conspiracy and collusion, and the monstrosity of humanity itself, offered an allegory of the disillusionment with New Labour’s Britain.
A final, fourth season arrived in 2011, co-produced by BBC Wales, BBC Worldwide and US cable network Starz. Like many previous transatlantic co-productions, the ten-part Torchwood: Miracle Day attempted to please several masters and ended up disappointing most of them. The co-production deal saw the Cardiff origins of the series supplanted by California locations and the grand narrative — as dystopian and apocalyptic as previous Torchwood series — explored death and mortality on a global scale. In the process of repositioning its format the series lost some of its bold charm and failed in some respects to build on the powerful drama it proved it could be with Children of Earth. The Torchwood concept and characters eventually transfered to a series of radio plays and licensed Big Finish audio stories.
Conversely, The Sarah Jane Adventures went from strength to strength, despite its ever diminishing budget as children’s drama was squeezed further and further from the schedules. It was a fun, light — hearted series that managed to communicate a number of serious, sensitive ideas and darker concepts to a young audience. It only came to a premature halt because of the untimely death of its lead actor, Elisabeth Sladen, but it also proved there was still an audience for well-made drama specifically aimed at a younger audience. Davies would underline this point with another children’s drama he co-created with Phil Ford, Wizards vs Aliens (BBC, 2012–14), that successfully filled the gap left by The Sarah Jane Adventures and, over three series, grew its audience as it wove its story of the conflict between science and magic, wizards and aliens. It was, like the fate of many children’s television programmes, eventually put on hiatus because of a lack of funding.
By 2010, Doctor Who itself changed direction as Steven Moffat took over the show from Davies and Tenth Doctor actor David Tennant, a pivotal piece of casting that had secured a significant audience for the series, bowed out and was replaced by Matt Smith. During the Moffat-Smith era, the series’ narratives grew in complexity and scale. Stories often explored the essence of the Doctor’s character, unpacking his status as a universe-saving hero, while also tying him into a personal story that involved his companion Amy Pond’s daughter, who would become the Doctor’s wife River Song and his potential assassin. Moffat took the time conundrums featured in his episodes written for Tennant and expanded them into complex explorations of the Doctor and River Song’s history in an attempt to explore the central mystery at the heart of the programme — who is the Doctor and what is his real name? The Doctor’s status as a messianic figure or a warrior, his sense of morality and (im)mortality were key themes.
Moffat continued in this vein — big scale, continuity heavy, compressed storytelling — with the arrival of new companion Clara Oswald and, as the series hurtled towards its fiftieth anniversary, she represented the ‘impossible girl’ who would eventually restore the Doctor’s timeline after it was invaded by the Great Intelligence, a foe familiar from the original series, to rewrite all his victories into defeats. By doing so, Clara encountered a forgotten incarnation of the Time Lord and this heralded the valedictory storyline of the 2013 anniversary special wherein Tennant and Smith teamed up with John Hurt’s War Doctor to reconfigure the Time War story arc introduced by Davies back in 2005.
Moffat’s tenure eventually concluded with a further three series featuring Peter Capaldi as the Doctor. Capaldi portrayed a much older man, in line with the earliest of the Doctor’s appearances and a recurring story arc in Series 8 featured Missy, played by Michelle Gomez, who was then revealed to be the latest incarnation of the Master. Again, Moffat oversaw a range of stories, often darker in tone than those featuring Matt Smith, that questioned the Doctor’s status as a ‘good man’ and whether he really is the sum of his actions, memories and capacity for kindness. Capaldi’s Doctor also featured briefly in a short-lived spin-off drama, Class (BBC, 2016) but its confused tone and lack of an audience meant it only lasted eight episodes. Capaldi bowed out in a Christmas special that underlined the themes of his tenure but it was also a story that effectively rounded off the history of the series thus far. It allowed new showrunner Chris Chibnall to start afresh and introduce the new Doctor, the first female incarnation played by Jodie Whitaker, in 2017.
‘reworking cultural myths and implanting them in a post 9/11 landscape’
Doctor Who’s huge success galvanised a renaissance not only in the genre on British television but also in the medium’s ambition, particularly at BBC Wales. The co-production model of the 1990s came of age and broadcasters were able to realise expensive drama projects within a public service broadcasting landscape adapting to massive changes in the digital era and a revival of family TV viewing. There were new shows but, as Lincoln Geraghty noted, past glories were evoked in remakes of iconic science fiction dramas, all ‘reworking cultural myths and implanting them in a post 9/11 landscape’ and offering audiences reassurance and familiarity.
Thus Primeval (ITV, 2007–11), targeted for Saturday night family viewing, tapped into children’s ongoing fascination with dinosaurs and, using state of the art special effects, followed a team of scientists investigating temporal anomalies depositing creatures in familiar British locations and anchored around a scientific project that set out to close the anomalies and keep them, and the dinosaurs they bring to the present day, secret from the public. It grew in confidence over its five series and stood its ground when compared to Doctor Who, with its ensemble of characters caught up in epic adventures fending off creatures and human villains in the distant past and in a nightmarish near future, with more than a passing nod to Conan Doyle’s The Lost World and Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. Again, like many British series, its continuation beyond its third series depended on a production partnership between ITV, BBC Worldwide and Watch and there was a decline in ratings as the series came to an end. The lack of interest from audiences and production partner Bell Media ensured that a British-Canadian spin off Primeval: New World only lasted one season in 2012 and a proposed feature film did not emerge.
Emulating the way Smallville traced the high school days of Clark Kent and leaving Kansas to work as a reporter at the Daily Planet, BBC’s Merlin (2008–12) similarly reworked the Arthurian legends as a saga about the young Merlin, Arthur and Guinevere and their personal trials and tribulations as they battled evil magic, in the form of Morgana, for possession of this utopian Camelot’s throne. It emulated the popularity of the Harry Potter saga and placed the emphasis on the figure of Merlin as a teenage outcast during a time when magic was forbidden and disappearing from the Arthurian age. The youth of Camelot matured into adulthood and faced the various complexities and anxieties of modern identity and selfhood, ones filtered through a wonderland of mythological and magical trappings and a glossy costume drama revisioning of the medieval literary romance.
An attempt by ITV to capture a similar family audience for magic, demons and the familiar mythology of Bram Stoker’s Dracula backfired with the abruptly cancelled Saturday night drama Demons (2009). Merlin creators Johnny Capps and Julian Murphy offered a Buffy-like take on the ongoing conflict between descendants of Van Helsing, in the form of great-grandson and student Luke Rutherford, and the growing threat to the contemporary world from vampires, demons and werewolves. Rutherford is aided by a blind Mina Harker, now a vampire over a hundred years old. It received mixed reviews and viewing figures declined over the six transmitted episodes.
The traditional tropes of British science fiction — a pessimistic strain of catastrophe and secular apocalypse — that had been represented on television throughout the previous fifty years of broadcasting drama and plays may have been usurped by a post-modern spin on youth cultures, atypical romance and fantasy but they were not dormant. A blurring of the relationship between producers and fans continued and a powerful nostalgia informed this renewed popularity for science fiction drama and allowed producers and writers to revisit key British SF mythologies, many of which had been kept alive by fan activity and production.
The new decade saw many familiar dramas revived to comment on the politics, science and the ‘war on terror’ of the 2000s. To this end, we saw BBC Four revive The Quatermass Experiment in 2005, in a flawed but ambitious live drama broadcast, and a year later they returned to the British science fiction literary tradition by adapting Fred Hoyle and John Elliot’s A For Andromeda and John Wyndham’s Random Quest. In 2009, BBC One followed suit and invested in a co-production of Wyndham’s ubiquitous British catastrophe urtext, The Day of the Triffids, but with very mixed results. Again, only the barest bones of the novel were retained and the environmental message and contemporary anxieties about genetically modified plants, global warming and biofuels took precedence over the human story of loneliness and survival.
Revivals and new adaptations continued apace. ITV very successfully remounted Gerry Anderson’s Thunderbirds as a dazzling mixture of CGI and practical model effects in Thunderbirds Are Go (2015 — ) after the initial success of their New Captain Scarlet in 2005. The BBC later returned to Wells and adapted The War of the Worlds (2019) and, despite its fidelity to the novel’s period setting and a number of striking sequences depicting the Martian invasion, its attempt to restructure the story, by flashing forward to a barren Earth and introducing a central female character to reflect today’s audience expectations and its current fears about war, climate change and pollution, was only partially successful.
There were also further attempts at science fiction comedy with Hyperdrive (BBC, 2006–7), a short lived sit-com set aboard the spaceship HMS Camden Lock, whose crew had a mission to promote British interests across the galaxy. It was unfavourably compared to Red Dwarf but lacked that series’ brand of wit. On a better footing was BBC Four’s drama based on Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. Dirk solves his cases based on the ‘fundamental interconnectedness of all things’ and by allowing random chance to lead the investigations he undertakes. The pilot in 2010 did lead to the commissioning of three further episodes in 2011 and overall the series was positively received. However, it was the victim of budget cuts at the BBC and was not recommissioned. A revival made by BBC America, with an entirely different cast and filmed in Canada, lasted two seasons 2016–17.
‘broken Britain’
The aptly titled Survivors (BBC, 2008–10), Misfits (E4, 2009–13) and Outcasts (BBC, 2011) represented the exiles, the socially excluded and the forgotten generations created by the political policies of the period and further reflected Alwyn Turner’s observation that at the turn of the millennium, ‘political parties were no longer suitable vehicles for social or political change’ and that, come the apocalypse, it was everyone for themselves.
The remake of Terry Nation’s Survivors returned to its 1970s themes of social and moral responsibility and the construction of new communities in the wake of a pandemic. It also incorporated a conspiracy story about a pharmaceutical corporation’s role in the disaster and an insight into government spin and corruption when the survivors faced a former minister attempting to reinstate authoritarian rule. Outcasts examined similar notions but sent its group of survivors to build a new community on the planet Carpathia after the Earth suffered an environmental disaster. The series struggled to find its way, often looking and sounding like a remake of the similar and, frankly, more enjoyable Earth 2 made by NBC in 1994, but again it did articulate some of the conflicts between domestic and military policy and tried to address the spectres of colonialism and prejudice in a post 9/11 world.
The group of young offenders in Misfits, although transformed into superheroes by a strange storm, still dealt with life in an inner-city estate and the reality of crime, drug addiction and failed relationships. Its meld of traditional science fiction tropes and witty, sharp observations of a demonised teenage culture countered the glossier, more conservative ideologies of Heroes, running on BBC One at roughly the same time. It was a ruder, very British take on an irresponsible underclass, the symbolic other targeted in what was being called ‘broken Britain’ by the Conservative Party, suddenly having to deal with their own decency and honesty despite having their imperfections magnified by the special powers foisted upon them.
Between the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks, in an increasingly deindustrialised country, two police procedural dramas Life on Mars (BBC, 2006) and Ashes to Ashes (BBC, 2008) managed to capture the uncertainty and fragmentation of British nationhood. Life on Mars reflected the differences between what we could construe as the working class ‘Old North’ and the post-industrial ‘New North’ of England, and the nostalgia for certain British cultural ‘traditions’ that lived on pre-Thatcher. It did this by implying that detective Sam Tyler had time travelled from our contemporary world to 1973. Later, in Ashes to Ashes, Alex Drake ‘travelled’ back to 1980. Both were characters in the front line of dramas that explored the concepts of heroism and anti-heroism, individual and collective responsibilities and the evolution of traditional gender roles. Each series carried a religious subtext with their concerns about life after death and redemption from purgatory.
Life on Mars took the police procedural and fashioned it as a Western, with Manchester policed by ‘sheriff’ Hunt, reclaiming the overtly non-PC antics of male characters in successful seventies crime shows such as The Sweeney (ITV, 1975–1978) and The Professionals (ITV, 1977–83) and then critiquing them via the contemporary outlook of a cop from 2006, Sam Tyler. The time travel/coma/afterlife concept of Life on Mars offered a double perspective on the sexism, racism, misogyny and violence of the era, ostensibly in the unreconstructed masculinity of Hunt compared with the more sensitive and sensible Sam. It continued into Ashes to Ashes where the conflict was not between two aspects of masculinity but now between Hunt and a female officer in the form of Drake, with the relocation of the story to London and the dawn of Thatcherism. The series again entered into a discussion about the evolution of the police drama, with Drake offered as a feminist critique of eighties police dramas such as The Gentle Touch (ITV, 1980–84) and Juliet Bravo (BBC, 1980–85) in contrast with the brash, non-PC masculine ‘construct’ of Hunt.
Another detective show with a difference was Paradox (BBC, 2009) described by its creator as exploring the ‘moral and emotional implications of having the ability to change the future’ as Detective Inspector Rebecca Flint and her colleagues investigate images being broadcast to an eminent astrophysicist Dr Christian King’s laboratory, which appear to show catastrophic events in the future. It didn’t strike a chord with viewers, reviews were mixed at best and the BBC cancelled it in early 2010.
a metaphor for the plight of LGBTQ+people marginalised by heteronormative society
BBC Three also dealt realistically with identity, sexuality and gender in its award-winning dramas The Fades (2011), where souls left in purgatory battled their angelic nemeses planning to take over the world, and In The Flesh (2013), about a Northern community’s rehabilitation of the undead survivors of a zombie uprising. Both dramas questioned the hollow political sound bite of ‘we’re all in this together’ and the toll of austerity on families and communities across Britain. An unresolved queer theme ran through In The Flesh, where it was suggested to the audience that the rehabilitation of the central character Kieren Walker was a metaphor for the plight of LGBTQ+ people marginalised by heteronormative society and its often hateful rhetoric and intolerance. However, both series were short lived examples of how digital platforms had expanded their innovative drama production only to have it curtailed by budget cuts.
Perhaps the darkest iteration of these themes was Dennis Kelly’s Utopia (Channel 4, 2013), a very violent but stylish government conspiracy narrative featuring disconnected, dysfunctional individuals who came together to share their intelligence about a dark secret hidden in the pages of a graphic novel. They uncover an internecine collusion between the pharmaceutical research industry and a neoliberal government, run by the mysterious Network, which has decided that the reconstruction of society is only possible via a eugenics programme administered during mass flu vaccinations. Utopia’s contemporary exploration of Francis Galton’s 19th Century ideology of eugenics was not only following in the footsteps of H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley and John Wyndham but referencing current attitudes where, in a speech in 2006, even Tony Blair proposed genetic determinism as a way of preventing social exclusion. Blair was roundly criticised by MP Tony Benn: ‘This one about identifying troublesome children in the foetus — this is eugenics, the sort of thing Hitler talked about.’
‘it’s happening in front of us, now.’
As this current decade draws to a close the various dystopias and catastrophes that embody British science fiction are fast becoming the grains of truth running through the nation’s hourglass. It is still two minutes to midnight according to the Doomsday Clock and British science fiction on television continues to count down those paranoia fueled seconds. Two drama series offered a recent ‘state of the nation’ address to this effect.
Charlie Brooker’s innovative television anthology, the Emmy award winning Black Mirror (Channel 4, 2011–14, Netflix since 2016) continues to prove British science fiction television can still test the boundaries. Emerging from a well-received Channel 4 five-parter Dead Set (2009), a mordantly funny and terrifying horror satire that mashed a zombie apocalypse with the vacuous Big Brother reality show experience, it evolved into a relevant deconstruction of how technology shapes the modern world and the humans living within it.
A social commentary and satire, its early episodes often focused on public humiliation — where a British Prime Minister is forced to have sex with a pig on national television to save a kidnapped member of the Royal family in ‘The National Anthem’— or on the pernicious effects of multi-media game shows, social media ratings, or the after life made possible by AI technologies. ‘Shut Up and Dance’ focused on how hacking social media can be used for blackmail, while the love story ‘San Junipero’ explored simulated realities occupied by the deceased, who can taken on the form of their younger selves at a particular time in their previous lives, and ‘Crocodile’ showed the consequences of the ability to infiltrate and play back memories of those who have covered up a crime. As Terence McSweeney and Stuart Joy suggest, Black Mirror reflects, forgive the pun, Douglas Rushkoff’s assertion ‘that our obsessive reliance on new technologies has led to the new millennial collapse of traditional understandings of the world.’ This dislocation therefore creates anxieties and fears about the nature of reality, the self, desire, and mortality that are featured throughout the series.
While the ‘Britishness’ of Black Mirror may have evolved into more global concerns after the series switched to Netflix, Russell T Davies took up the specific anxieties and fears about political destiny in his own take on what was happening to British society in the exemplary Years and Years (BBC, 2019). It centred on a particular family, the Lyons, and each individual’s plight as their political and personal affiliations were tested by a British election lurch to the far right and the rise of the post-truth politician Vivienne Rook. Through the filter of the impact of new technologies, Davies was able to address, across a 15-year time span in six episodes, Brexit, the gig economy, the refugee crisis, immigration, AI augmented transhuman identity, Trump’s trade wars and fake news, climate change, dirty bombs, the shutting down of the BBC, old age, mortality and the afterlife. And this was before Boris Johnson replaced Theresa May and the 2019 election confirmed Brexit would become a reality in 2020.
Davies acknowledged that ‘It was the night of Trump’s election when I emailed [executive producer] Nicola Shindler and said: “If he gets into power I should write this now.” And I’ve never been more sorry to be right.’ Years and Years, like many apocalyptic British science fiction series, was and is about what is happening today rather that what will happen in 15 years time. Of its predictions Davies admitted, ‘I couldn’t write it fast enough. I couldn’t write it fast enough honestly, it’s happening in front of us, now.’
Science fiction is now.
