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When Lambert sees kids on a bus imitating Daleks and knows this means her show is a hit, my tears of joy were for her triumph, not for the tin robots, except in how, in the larger context, Lambert gets a peek at how iconic the Daleks will become, second only to the TARDIS, in representing the fruits of her work. Much as I love Doctor Who, what moved me here has nothing to do with the fictional character and everything to do with the real people who invented him. And yet… showing up seemingly at random just as an event of momentous historic importance is about to occur is just like the Doctor, isn’t it? A project plagued by bad luck and bad omens and absolutely needed by everyone involved to be a success debuting on the newish medium of television the day after TV has its biggest news event to date - the Kennedy assassination - distracting potential viewers? What are the odds? You couldn’t make that up. And if it avoids the worst of the bad side of first star William Hartnell (David Bradley: The World’s End, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2) - his outspoken racism is nowhere on display here - we do see him mellow from a grumpy old man who is cruel to his own adorable granddaughter to one who eventually delights in the attention of TV-watching youngsters eager to talk to “the Doctor.” Writer Mark Gatiss treats the legends of the show’s creation as only a longtime fan can, with the exasperated acceptance that rose-tinted hindsight brings. This is a tale as ironically funny as it is ironically bitter, full of nods to what the show would become - Newman says he doesn’t envision Doctor Who, the broad stokes of which he developed, featuring “brains in a glass jar” or “tin robots,” both of which the show ends up with. Or maybe that’s just me: I’ve long suspected that only Davies could have pulled off the reboot so successfully.)Īn Adventure in Space and Time isn’t all, or even mostly, serious business, though. Davies, to revive the show if it were to falter. (Left unsaid, but lingering in the ether, is the suggestion that it might take another outsider with a different perspective, such as gay man Russell T. How else?) Lambert is the embodiment of the feminist dictum that a woman has to work twice as hard as a man to get half the recognition - we see here how her work is ignored and the needs of her project dismissed, until it’s time to lay blame for perceived failures, naturally - but just look at what her twice-as-hard gave us! Newman (Brian Cox: Red 2, The Campaign), as a Canadian, was an outsider eyed with suspicion, too, and director Waris Hussein (Sacha Dhawan: The History Boys), as a “wog,” was even “worse,” of course. And I cannot imagine a better valentine to the show and its oddball hero than this lovely docudrama looking at its creation, which has as an underlying premise the notion that only a little band of unlikely outsiders could have possibly gotten it made as something that would endure, because only by forging something incredible would they be seen as having done the job at all.ĭoctor Who was only a bit of calculated fluff to fill a programming slot on Saturday afternoons, after all, but producer Verity Lambert (Jessica Raine: The Woman in Black, Robin Hood) - in 1963, the BBC’s first female producer - had an enormous chip on her shoulder, dumped there by the “sea of fag smoke, tweed, and sweaty men” that made up the old guard at the network, who expected nothing of her, because how could a mere female have snagged such a big promotion from production assistant on talent alone? (She must have been sleeping with her boss, BBC head of drama Sydney Newman. I suspect even many deeply devoted fans of Doctor Who - people who have no problem acknowledging how profoundly weird a show it is, and who know how insanely popular and profitable it is for the BBC today - have any idea how much of a crapshoot it was at its creation. (what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto) I’m “biast” (pro): love love love everything about Doctor Who
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