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VH1 News The Sixties Pad Feeds The XChange / Published NewsWhen Doctor Who was created, the dramatic structure of the program’s cast was rather different from the hero-and-sidekick pattern that emerged later. Initially, the character of the Doctor was almost an antihero, with uncertain motives and abilities. The protagonists were schoolteachers Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, who provided the audience’s point-of-view in stories set in Earth’s history and on alien worlds. Ian in particular served the role of the action hero. The fourth character was the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan, who was initially presented as an “unearthly child”; the program’s makers intended Susan as an identification figure for younger viewers.
<Rose Tyler played by Billie Piper
Carole Ann Ford, who played Susan, became unhappy with the lack of development for her character, and chose to leave the series early in its second series. The character of Susan was married off to a freedom fighter and left behind to rebuild a Dalek-ravaged Earth, establishing two scenarios to which the series would later return. Doctor Who’s producers replaced Susan with another young female character, Vicki. Similarly, when Ian and Barbara left, the “action hero” position was filled by astronaut Steven Taylor. This grouping of Doctor, young heroic male and attractive young female became the program’s pattern throughout the 1960s.
When the program changed to color in 1970, its format changed: the Doctor was now earth-bound, and acquired a supporting cast by his affiliation with the paramilitary organization United Nations Intelligence Task force. The Third Doctor, more active and physical than his predecessors, made the role of the “action hero” male companion redundant. In the 1970 season the Doctor was assisted by scientist Liz Shaw and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, along with other UNIT personnel. The intellectual Shaw was replaced by the ditzy Jo Grant in the 1971 season, and as the program returned to occasional adventures in outer space, the format shifted once more: while UNIT continued to provide a regular “home base” for Earth-bound stories, in stories on other planets the Doctor and Jo became a two-person team with a close, personal bond. This pattern, the Doctor with a single female companion, became a template from which Doctor Who rarely diverged. The “heroic male” type occasionally returned (for example, Harry Sullivan and Jack Harkness), but the single female companion was Doctor Who’s staple.
Companions have assumed a variety of roles in Doctor Who, as involuntary passengers, as assistants per se (particularly Liz Shaw), as someone to whom the Doctor is a mentor, as friends, and as fellow adventurers. Modern companions tend to be invaluable in helping the Doctor out of tight situations; for example, the Doctor credits both Rose Tyler and Martha Jones with saving his life in their initial adventures with him.
The Doctor regularly gains new companions and loses old ones; sometimes they return home, or find new causes - or loves - on worlds they have visited. Some companions (notably Katarina, Sara Kingdom and Adric) have died during the course of the series.
There are some disputes within Doctor Who fandom about the definition of a companion, but most fans agree that at least thirty (including K-9 Marks I and II) meet the criteria for “companion” status in the television series, with others being established in the various spin-offs. Most companions travel in the TARDIS with the Doctor for more than one adventure, although there are exceptions; see Disputed companions, below. Sometimes a guest character will take a role in the story similar to that of a companion: one recent example is Lynda in “Bad Wolf” and “The Parting of the Ways”.
Despite the fact that the majority of the Doctor’s companions are young, attractive females, the production team for the 1963-1989 series maintained a longstanding taboo against any overt romantic involvement in the TARDIS: for example, Peter Davison, as the Fifth Doctor, was not allowed to put his arm around either Sarah Sutton (Nyssa) or Janet Fielding (Tegan). However, that has not prevented fans from speculating about possible romantic involvements, most notably between the Fourth Doctor and the Time Lady Romana (whose actors, Tom Baker and Lalla Ward, shared a romance and brief marriage). The taboo was controversially broken in the 1996 television movie when the Eighth Doctor was shown kissing companion Grace Holloway. The 2005 series played with this idea by having various characters think that the Ninth Doctor and Rose Tyler were a couple, which they vehemently denied. Since the series revival, the Doctor has kissed companions Rose, Jack and Martha, although each instance not in a romantic context .
Previous companions have reappeared in the series, usually for anniversary specials. One former companion, Sarah Jane Smith (played by Elisabeth Sladen), together with the robotic dog K-9, appeared in one episode of the 2006 series more than twenty years after their last appearances in the 20th anniversary story The Five Doctors (1983). The character of Sarah Jane also heads up a Doctor Who spin-off, The Sarah Jane Adventures. Another companion, Captain Jack Harkness, appears in the spin-off program Torchwood.
The new series (2005-) has slightly altered the significance of the companion status, partly due to a strong focus on the character of Rose Tyler and characters connected to her. For example, although Adam Mitchell was a companion by the standard definition, he appeared in only two episodes and was arguably a less significant part of the 2005 series than Rose’s sometime boyfriend Mickey Smith, who was not technically a companion but appeared in five episodes (or six, including a brief appearance as a child in “Father’s Day”). Mickey later gained full-fledged companion status when he joined the TARDIS crew in the 2006 episode “School Reunion”. In that episode, Sarah Jane Smith referred to Rose as the Doctor’s “assistant”, a term to which the latter took offense. This exchange might be regarded as indicating a deliberate shift in approach for the new series.
The character of the Doctor was initially shrouded in mystery. All that was known about him in the programme’s early days was that he was an eccentric alien traveller of great intelligence who battled injustice while exploring time and space in an unreliable old time machine called the TARDIS. The TARDIS is much larger on the inside than on the outside and, due to a chronic malfunction, is stuck in the shape of a 1950s-style British police box.
However, not only did the initially irascible and slightly sinister Doctor quickly mellow into a more compassionate figure, it was eventually revealed that he had been “on the run” from his own people, the Time Lords of the planet Gallifrey.
As a Time Lord, the Doctor has the ability to “regenerate” his body when near death, allowing for the convenient recasting of the lead actor. A Time Lord can regenerate twelve times, for a total of thirteen incarnations. The Doctor has gone through this process and its resulting after-effects on nine occasions, with each of his incarnations having his own quirks and abilities:
For more on the history of Dr Who visit The Old Hippie
Freaks
is a Pre-Code 1932 horror film about sideshow performers, directed by Tod Browning.
The movie was adapted by Al Boasberg, Willis Goldbeck, Leon Gordon, and Edgar Allan Woolf from the short story Spurs by Tod Robbins. Browning, famed at the time for his collaborations with Lon Chaney and for directing Bela Lugosi in Dracula (1931), took the exceptional step of casting real people with deformities as the eponymous sideshow “freaks,” rather than using costumes and makeup. Director Browning had been a member of a traveling circus in his early years, and much of the film was drawn from his personal experiences. He intended to portray the classic moral of how outer beauty does not necessarily equate to inner beauty. In the film, the physically deformed “freaks” are inherently trusting and honorable people, while the real monsters are two of the “normal” members of the circus who conspire to murder one of the performers to obtain his large inheritance.
Reaction to this film was so intense that Browning had trouble finding work afterwards, and this in effect brought his career to an early close. Because its deformed cast was shocking to moviegoers of the time, the film was banned in the United Kingdom for thirty years.
In 1994 the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.
Video clip from “Freaks”
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