When QUEER AS FOLK creator Russell T. Davies restarted the DOCTOR WHO franchise in 2005, there were lots of big question marks. The multi-multi-part storytelling style that the series was known for had gotten incredibly long in the tooth; special effects that in their heyday had seemed either innovative or adorably hokey now appeared just cheap. And the later generations of the show had gotten darker and less resonant. The last iteration, in 1996, had lasted all of one TV movie. The one before that, ten years earlier, had hemorrhaged viewers. Maybe the whole concept was of an age now gone.
The biggest question, though, was who they would get for the Doctor himself. He's the main character. He's the madman in the box. Everything turns on him.
Davies would find fantastic leads in both Christopher Eccleston and a year later David Tennant. He also completely renovated the storytelling style, made it lean, often scary and very clever, with season-long subplots that were paid off in surprising ways.
But what truly made the restart a hit is his choice about point of view. Instead of accepting the conventional wisdom that the Doctor is the main character, Davies told the story through the eyes of Rose Tyler, a shop worker who meets this strange man when she's nearly kidnapped by bizarre living mannequins, ends up working with him to stop them, then agrees -- as we do each week -- to go with him on his madcap adventures.
Putting Rose in the center gave the audience a way to see itself, the Doctor's most faithful companion, as the hero of the story. And at the same time it allowed the Doctor to become more than he had been, not only the object of our fascination, but someone mysterious, unpredictable, even dangerous.
In some ways the kind of change in point of view Davies brought makes for a small distinction; in its fundamentals the story of DOCTOR WHO remained the same as ever. But the experience watching the show was completely different. It feels much more personal and engaged.
It's the difference between setting up a shot straight on and letting the action play in front of the camera, or choosing an angle that itself becomes part of the moment being shot. Either is a way of telling the story. But the latter ends up giving the experience specificity and a voice.
In his most recent work, IT'S A SIN, about the AIDS crisis in the UK, Davies makes a similarly unexpected and powerful choice. There have been many films and TV shows about AIDS and the queer community in the 80s and 90s. But usually those stories are told from the point of view of men in their 20s to 30s. Davies' main characters are instead teenagers, whose eyes are filled with life and possibility. The first episode in fact, while touching in a serious way on the quiet rise of this horrible disease, is mostly about these five kids finding family and joy in one another in London.
Starting from that point of youth and vitality ends up making what happens all the more brutal. But far more than that it makes the storytelling fresh. Even as much of what happens plotwise is familiar--some get sick and die; some get radicalized; some are rejected by family; some are reembraced--in the midst of it all there's a continued sense of discovery that's different than the typical AIDS drama, simply because these are the experiences of a younger generation, for whom everything is new.
And some of the insights they have are not related to the pandemic they're facing. One of the scenes that has most stayed with me concerns the government's insistence that school children not be "subjected" to any reference to homosexuality.
Ash, the schoolteacher, describes the process of being forced to do that work.
So they said it could be six months work as this teacher's replacement, and I'm thinking Great. Proper job. And it's got 2000 people and it's rough as hell but that's okay.
Except, I walk in, I report to the office and I get shown around by Mr. Crane. 'And these are your pigeon holes, check them every day but not too often. We know what you're like, you lot, fiddling with your holes.' How did they know? All I did was walk in, said Hello, best behavior and they just know. Breeders, they can smell it.
And that's just the beginning. Because then he takes me into the library. He says, 'I got a perfect job for you, make a start in here, removing inappropriate material.' Like what? 'Clause 28. We have to remove any books or material that might be promoting a homosexual lifestyle.'"
"So what did you do?," someone asks.
No choice. I could get sacked for saying one gay thing out loud in school, so I did as I was told.
Crane comes back: 'How's it going?'
Great. Fine. Good.
'And what did you find?'
Nothing.
'What do you mean, nothing?'
I mean, nothing. I found nothing. I checked Shakespeare. Nothing. You might get versions on stage that might get a bit fruity with men in togas, but you need to ban the director, not the book because in the whole of Shakespeare there's not one man with a man, not one woman with a woman.
Dickens, nothing. He wrote about the rich and the poor and dwarfs and saints and orphans and ghosts. Not one homosexual anywhere. Jane Austen did not write about lesbians.
I checked the history books. So what if Julius Caesar and Aristotle and Alexander the Great had their odd little fling with a catamite? Not according to the schoolbooks they didn't.
I looked at Asterix and TinTin. I looked at Disney and sport and the Bible. I looked at the Talmud and the Koran and the Guinness Book of Records. I looked at the vast halls of literature and culture and science and art and there's not the slightest danger of any child ever being infected because there's not one gay man or woman anywhere.
There is nothing. There is nothing. That's what you're protecting them from. Nothing.
"But what did you really say?," someone asks.
There's a couple of Mary Renauts.
It's a tremendous monologue, one that probably would have landed no matter what. But coming from a young person who is fully confronting this awful reality for the first time in his life, it's that much more searing.
TOMORROW: ALAN BALL FOLLOWS THROUGH
