Russell T Davies: Visionary

I posted the following piece on crackerwax.com in May 2007. I think it bears repeating though.

Russell T Davies has a wonderful sense of what science fiction can and should be like, read this and you’ll see what I mean.

Whatever you do on Doctor Who, whatever technology or futurism you’re putting on screen, it’s always going to look like it was made now and it should. You know, science fiction in the sixties looks like it was made in the sixties, the seventies, eighties. The worst and most stupid thing you can do is go in to a meeting and say let’s make it timeless.

For a start, why? I think these programs are a record of the year in which they are made and they should be and they should show that off, and plus you can’t fight it that’ll creep in anyway. There’s no such thing as a timeless design, ever.

And I think partly you have to celebrate that.

What a dick. Of course you can have timeless design, it just takes effort. Effort that you’re not prepared to make Russell. Then again it is possibly beyond your capabilities.

Take a look at Star Wars, thirty years old and you’d be hard pushed to definitively tell that it’s a product of the seventies. It was designed to be mundane but exotic all at the same time.

Try Blade Runner. I couldn’t tell if that was from 1982 or 1997, it’s so sure footed of its place within the framework the creators constructed around it. The film believes in itself and this shines through.

How about Firefly? That has a powerful sense of self that doesn’t place it in any particular place but does use a ‘wild west’ motif to reinforce the frontiersman aspect of its particular brand of science fiction. This suits it thematically yet it manages to blend this very strong ‘wild west’ idea with sci-fi technology and does so without it jarring.

Of course the big daddy of modern sci-fi is Battlestar Galactica. It’s a work of art, weaving stories and technology together cohesively to form a strong bond between the two, each driving the other forward.

Galactica’s technology remains believable, allowing the characters space to interact and play out the plot as a whole without having to rely on gimmicks as hinges that join little bits of plot together.

So before you indulge in any more pointless fucking waffle, there just to apologise for your piss poor stories and special effects, think about making a better television series.

I would be amazed if there were a series bible for Doctor Who, it seems that story lines, character arcs and technologies are just created on a whim, without any thought for canon or future progression. There just to solve a particular problem in a particular story.

In Doctor Who the universe is built around the story. That’s the wrong way to do it and it shows.

I think that T must stand for twat.