It’s a childhood favourite in which a wise enigma comes to the rescue via an eccentric mode of transport, takes people on adventures and befuddles everyone with cryptic statements and odd behaviour.
But enough about Disney’s Mary Poppins.
The BBC’s Doctor Who will next year undergo a regeneration in how it is made. It has been pushed into doing so by an old but strengthening foe: industry economics.
The language of its press release is typical corporate fare, yet still striking: “The BBC and Disney Branded Television – two giants of entertainment – have come together to transform Doctor Who into a global franchise for UK audiences and the rest of the world,” it begins.
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“Under a shared creative vision, they will deliver this quintessentially British show to future generations on an unprecedented scale with Disney Plus as the exclusive home for new seasons of Doctor Who outside the UK and Ireland.”
BBC chief content officer Charlotte Moore said the broadcaster was “committed to ensuring that audiences across the globe get the opportunity to enjoy the doctor’s epic adventures with the scale and ambition that they deserve”.
Translated: without Disney’s dollars, the show would have become unaffordable to produce regularly and/or it would have looked increasingly amateur and cut-price in comparison with its competition. Such budget issues have been a perennial sub-plot in the history of Doctor Who.
Retooled logo
To mark the new era, a retooled version of its classic 1970s diamond logo was last week unveiled with the Disney Plus brand emblazoned underneath in a noticeably larger size font than the BBC one above it. To some Whovians, this is all a bit triggering.
They worry that what this “shared creative vision” and talk of scale actually means is that Doctor Who will become one more generic drop in the global streaming ocean, barely distinguishable from Disney’s already expansive line-up of Marvel superheroes and Star Wars rebels.
Their concerns haven’t materialised from nowhere – they are rooted in 10 decades of output, continents apart. The BBC and Disney are similarly aged organisations with distinct brand identities. The BBC is, like Doctor Who, quintessentially British; Disney quintessentially American. These two pioneering beasts appear to differ stylistically, tonally and philosophically.
How the BBC Began, the Beeb’s just-aired two-part documentary about its origins, does a good job retracing the context in which Doctor Who first aired on November 23rd, 1963, during a period when the BBC was striving to be dramatically braver. The assassination of John F Kennedy the day before had left ultra-cautious BBC executives – inexperienced in the art of breaking television news – stuttering. They started making up the schedule as they went along.
With the public in shock, Doctor Who’s first director, Waris Hussein, was sure the programme would be cancelled. The arrival of a mysterious time-travelling alien at Saturday teatime, preceded by an otherworldly theme tune, was not designed to calm nerves. Some fretted it could have a further destabilising effect.
That’s not an accusation often made against Disney. The Hollywood studio has centred its brand around happiness, wonder, magic kingdoms, wishing upon a star, whistling while you work and being practically perfect in every way.
In reality, the lines are much blurrier, at least beyond the gates of its theme parks. Disney can be eerie (Elsa crossing the Dark Sea in Frozen 2), upsetting (ruthlessly killing off various parents, starting with Bambi’s mother in 1942) and educational (take your pick of Pixar).
Licensing and merchandise
The Walt Disney Company is, in any case, bigger than the Disney brand: it is an acquisition-inflated mass media conglomerate that controls Hulu, the US platform that brings us the unrelenting dystopia of The Handmaid’s Tale, and in Europe offers the “superbrand” Star, which houses grown-up fare on Disney Plus from The Bear to The Old Man. “Think you know Disney Plus?” the streamer’s advertising campaign goes. “Think again.”
Nor is the BBC some purist institution, new to the game. At the peak of Doctor Who’s popularity after its 2005 revival, it was filling supermarket shelves with Dalek-shaped birthday cakes and toy shelves with sonic screwdrivers, exhibiting a flair for licensing and merchandise that was Disney-esque. Previous showrunner Steven Moffat went through a phase of describing the series as a “fairytale” – a furrow Disney has been known to plough.
Even before the Disney deal, the BBC was making necessary updates to how it produced Doctor Who, with BBC Studios, its commercial subsidiary, working with Bad Wolf, a production company majority owned by Sony Pictures Television, to make next year’s three anniversary specials with returning showrunner Russell T Davies and returning star David Tennant.
The BBC and Disney are no strangers to each other: BBC Studios, for instance, sold its prized format Dancing with the Stars to Disney-owned US network ABC in 2005. This season – in a sign of the streaming times – it switched to Disney Plus.
The Doctor Who partnership, however, takes the BBC-Disney business relationship to another dimension.
With the BBC celebrating its centenary this year and Disney warming up to mark its first 100 years in 2023, it is instructive to recall just how much each has evolved since their original respective activities – radio and cinema animation – to the point where they have converged upon the same market, underpinned by the same streaming technology. Now that they have united for Doctor Who, it’s as if this outcome was always destined to happen.
Davies, a screenwriter par excellence, speaks of Disney’s involvement as yielding “the best of both worlds”. If anyone can drag Doctor Who out of its recent creative slump and keep it true to its essence, it’s him.
But what the deal shows more than anything is that every funder of audio/visual content today operates in a singular universe. There is only one world, and the BBC and Disney make for powerful allies within it.
Although, who knows? Maybe they both just really fancy time travel.
