5 Reasons to love Doctor Who

With two and a half weeks to go until the start of the latest series of Doctor Who (very exciting!) I thought it might be nice to have a quick look at what makes this programme one of the best and most enduring on television.

Potential
All of time and space, let's face it, that's pretty big. What this show has is absolutely limitless potential, restricted only by the limits of the writer's imagination. You only have to look at what Steven Moffat has so far done with the series to realise how limitless it really is.

Of course, with limitless potential comes limitless ways to go wrong (the Doctor's meeting with The Kandy Man in The Happiness Patrol springs to mind here), and so the limitless becomes limited by the show's own rules. The Doctor is essentially a man of science and the show sticks to this concept. Even the Carrionites' "witch-craft" is explained simply as a 'word based science'. Yet within these rules there is plenty room to manoeuvre; from endless timeloops and spacial paradoxes (thank you Mr Moffat), mysterious and epic time wars (thank you Mr Davies) and robots that happen to be racial purists (thank you Misters Nation, Davis and Pedler). The survival of any show depends on its ability to change and unlike almost any other show Doctor Who has the freedom to go in almost any direction it wants.

Regeneration
Carrying on from my previous sentence ('the survival of any show depends on its ability to change', in case you've forgotten) we have the concept of regeneration. There is no bigger and bolder change that you can possibly make than to periodically change the actor playing the leading man. A bold move but one that has ensured the show's survival. Each actor has brought his own idiosyncrasies to the role, and yet remained faithful to the essential character of the Doctor (see below).
The joy of it is though, is that you can watch one episode of Doctor Who after another, each with a different actor playing the Doctor, and yet happily accept each of those men as The Doctor. How brilliant is that?! Two minutes into The Eleventh Hour Matt Smith was the Doctor, finish watching that episode and watch, say, Castrovalva and Peter Davison is also the Doctor, as if no change has taken place. Equally impressive, is that when you watch an episode such as The Five Doctors each actor completely inhabits the role, whilst at no point stepping on the toes of his fellow actors. Now you have to admit, that is an impressive and pretty much unique trait.


The Sad Clown
The Doctor is the archetypal sad clown, moving from a cheesy grin to the darkest melancholy with an almost effortless ease. It takes a very special lead character to be at once an excited little boy and a lonely old man. Yet it is this divide that gives the Doctor such depth. In the latest trailer for Doctor Who series 6 (which can be viewed here) there is one line that demonstrates this perfectly:

Unknown monster: Fear me, I've killed hundreds of Time Lords
Doctor: Fear me, I've killed all of them

This is a brilliant line, wonderful in it's comic timing (Matt Smith never fails to impress), and a brutal reminder of the tragedy of the man. The inclusion of the Time War into the Doctor Who mythology was a bold move by Russell T. Davies, and the revelation of the Doctor's act of genocide, and the guilt he carries because of it, add a vital emotional depth that was lacking pre 2005. That being said, the hints of the Doctor's dark half were still present in earlier series, with characters such as the Valeyard becoming a prominent foe of the Sixth Doctor, or Tom Baker's precursor to the Time War with his attempted genocide in Genesis of the Daleks, and the dark, mysterious and conniving nature in the First Doctor's early serials. The emotional depth and the comic ability of the Doctor is what keeps us watching, we laugh with him and we cry with him, but whatever happens, we stick with him until the end.

Eternal Optimism
Despite its darkness the real nature of Doctor Who is its optimism. If the Doctor had a motto it would be 'fight the good fight'. This is the key theme of the show; when all else fails, whatever the consequence, the Doctor still fights. This makes the Doctor a fantastic role model for the younger viewers of the show; the Doctor embodies the virtues of kindness, intelligence and bravery. He may be a flawed character, but he is essentially a good one. More than this though, the show's entire ethos is based around the ideas of tolerance and kindness, the Doctor never fails to show compassion when it is needed (Revelation of the Daleks and New Earth, to name but two), and never fails to do the right thing (Doctor Who, 1963 - present). This optimism is what keeps us Doctor Who fans coming back for more. In today's world of gritty reality and doom and gloom, a bit of optimism is just what the doctor ordered.


The Doctor
Ok, this last one is definitely a bit of a cheat. This whole blog post has been about the Doctor, because, essentially he is the show. Everything else revolves around the Doctor, friends and foes fly around in an endless vortex and in the middle is that funny man in his little blue box. The show, now in its 47th year, would not have lasted anywhere near that long if that man hadn't been exactly what his audience needed him to be. He is universal, everyone can find something in the Doctor to relate to. He is old and young, happy and sad, silly and smart and everything in between. He is everything we would like to be and everything we should strive for. What more could you ask for on a Saturday night?


So there you have it. Five reasons to love Doctor Who which for the most part boils down to the sentence 'I love the Doctor' (he is, after all, the mother of all man crushes). If you're not a fan, and have found yourself reading this I really hope it motivates you to go away and find reasons of your own to love this show. If you already love it, well then, it's time we go back and watch it all again!