From 1963 to 1989 Doctor Who was a British TV institution. Over the years it developed a uniquely eccentric style, at once cosily familiar and cosmically terrifying. Many of its characters, creatures, and objects have become indelibly iconic: the Doctor and his assistants, the TARDIS, the Time Lords, and a nightmarish universe of monsters and villains. The idea that the Doctor should have the power of regeneration was forced on the show's makers when William Hartnell, the original star, could not carry on. But the changing face of the Doctor became key to the evolution of the series and, for many, whole phases of life are summed up in the casting changes: Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy and, in a one-off incarnation, Paul McGann. Even now, in the shape of Christopher Eccleston, the Doctor is set to return. In this comprehensive study, Kim Newman follows the Doctor's travels through time, examining outstanding stories as well as prominent themes, recurrent characters, and monster types to assess the show as television masterpiece and cultural phenomenon.
Author
Note: This author also writes under the pseudonym of Jack Yeovil. An expert on horror and sci-fi cinema (his books of film criticism include Nightmare Movies and Millennium Movies), Kim Newman's novels draw promiscuously on the tropes of horror, sci-fi and fantasy. He is complexly and irreverently referential; the Dracula sequence—Anno Dracula, The Bloody Red Baron and Dracula,Cha Cha Cha—not only portrays an alternate world in which the Count conquers Victorian Britain for a while, is the mastermind behind Germany's air aces in World War One and survives into a jetset 1950s of paparazzi and La Dolce Vita, but does so with endless throwaway references that range from Kipling to James Bond, from Edgar Allen Poe to Patricia Highsmith. In horror novels such as Bad Dreams and Jago, reality turns out to be endlessly subverted by the powerfully malign. His pseudonymous novels, as Jack Yeovil, play elegant games with genre cliche—perhaps the best of these is the sword-and-sorcery novel Drachenfels which takes the prescribed formulae of the games company to whose bible it was written and make them over entirely into a Kim Newman novel. Life's Lottery, his most mainstream novel, consists of multiple choice fragments which enable readers to choose the hero's fate and take him into horror, crime and sf storylines or into mundane reality.
