Every ten years, the British Broadcasting Corporation is given a new Royal Charter,
a document that outlines the broadcaster’s aims and values in the coming decade.
While the wording of this document changes from time to time, and new parts are inserted
to keep up with changes in broadcasting technology, the core values of of the BBC have remained
the same since its creation.
Inform, Educate, and Entertain.
We’ll call this the “remit”.
Inform: BBC News is comprehensive and supposedly unbiased.
It’s available in every language and across the world.
When there is an official government statement or emergency broadcast, the BBC are the ones
to show it.
Educate: Viewers should be treated as citizens, not consumers, and the programming of the
BBC reflects that.
The BBC’s programming is always somewhat educational, high brow, or exposes the viewers
to different perspectives and cultures.
And Entertain: All demographics and cultures in the UK should be able to find something
produced by the BBC that caters to them.
There is an attempt to entertain everyone in some way, through music, drama, documentaries,
sport, comedy, or children’s programming.
One of the most popular, well recognised media properties owned by the BBC is the science
fiction programme Doctor Who, which even if you’ve never seen it you know what it’s
about.
There’s a time travelling alien called The Doctor, who uses a magic phone box from 1962
to teleport through time and space, solving mysteries and helping people along the way.
Originally, the series was going to be an educational family-orientated show; the Doctor’s
time machine would be used to travel into the past to teach history, and then into the
future to teach about science.
The show’s science fiction nature would be to attract children and adults alike.
A family show.
This clearly fits the BBC’s goal and remit of being educational and entertaining.
The TARDIS, as it’s called, would not be the main point of the show, but would merely
be a vehicle for the story and educational aspect.
Of course you know that isn’t true at all.
The original scripts had to be cut down due to budget limitations and eventually the entire
educational aspect was reduced to just two of the characters being schoolteachers.
To attract the parents, especially hard-boiled Fathers, the Doctor’s companions were increasingly...
younger and more athletic.
In reality, Doctor Who is all about a time travelling alien, who can regenerate into
someone new when he gets mortally wounded, and the show is about him and his time machine,
rather than historical fact or scientific accuracy.
And there’s more aliens and crawling around quarries in the midlands and bad costumes.
It’s also for this reason that Doctor Who has always been an embarrassment to the BBC,
but one they have to live with.
Because although the series is insanely popular and now a staple of British culture… it’s
just ridiculous.
It’s just people in rubber masks and foam costumes.
This episode consists of the Doctor and his companion walking around Paris for forty minutes
before something interesting happens.
Perhaps it was entertaining the 1970s but it wasn’t really informative or educational.
Some critics have suggested that the Dalek’s desire for galactic supremacy is a warning
against racial prejudice or something but….come on.
For this reason, the show received smaller and smaller budgets, making it more and more
embarrassing for the BBC.
In 1984, the Doctor regenerated into Colin Baker, who’s characterisation was intentionally
irritating and cowardly as a way of weaning the public off the show so that the BBC could
finally cancel it and never think about it again.
Which they did in 1989.
But surprisingly, there still remained a devoted fan base for Doctor Who, and the BBC continued
publishing the Doctor Who fanzine every month during the show’s 16-year hiatus.
A few hardcore fans with connections to the BBC went as far to actually convince the Doctor
Who cast to star in some bootleg knockoffs called The Stranger, but these are total rubbish.
So the situation the BBC found itself in was that they had an intellectual property, which
they didn’t like and didn’t want to fund, but had a huge cult following who they were
obliged to entertain because the law required them to make programming catering to all members
of society.
If only there was somewhere they could broadcast Doctor Who that didn’t have to provide any
educational content anywhere on television.
[Redneck Banjo Music]
In the United States, public service broadcasting is not as strong as it is elsewhere in the
world.
Americans buy and large have a dislike for large government programmes and higher taxes,
meaning that the two public broadcasters the US has are subject to hostility and funding
cuts by right wing politicians.
As a result, PBS - the largest US public broadcaster – mostly imports programming from Canada,
Australia, and the United Kingdom.
So the BBC could never ask them to fund a new Doctor Who series.
Instead, the BBC approached the FOX network in the hopes of making a Doctor Who series
for American audiences.
As a proof of concept, FOX asked them to make a Doctor Who TV movie that would be shown
on the network.
If it was popular, they’d fund a series.
Because American broadcasters have no remit or obligation to be educational, the Doctor
Who movie was a lot more off the wall.
Violence and gore is widespread, there’s nothing really educational, it’s just your
standard save the world from aliens plot.
This, I think, highlights the main different in British vs American television.
BBC television was set up to bridge the cultural gap between the upper class and working class
of British society.
Even as new, profit-driven channels were introduced to UK airwaves these channels are still required
to remain politically impartial and to treat viewers as citizens instead of consumers.
Meanwhile, American television has always been profit-driven and with the intention
to gain as many eyeballs on sponsors as possible.
In 1961, FCC chairman Newton Minow called US television a “vast wasteland”; a constant
stream of consumerist garbage.
Anyway, on the 14th of May 1996, Doctor Who: The Television Movie was broadcast on the
Fox Network.
9% of Americans watched and most thought it was a bit meh.
In their attempt to create something with the American flashiness and wide appeal while
also trying to stick to the BBC’s remit, it created a weird muddled mess instead, and
the Doctor’s eccentricity was completely lost on Americans who thought that he was
just how normal English people acted.
“WAIT!
Stop!
He’s…um...
He’s British!”
“Well, Yes.
I suppose I am.
Jelly baby, officer?”
“Jelly baby?”
"Just...take it."
FOX declined to continue funding the show, which is a shame because Doctor Who with a
budget the size of, say, Twin Peaks, would have been sick.
But this was not to be, and there would be no Doctor Who revival... aside from a short
1999 charity sketch starring Rowan Atkinson as the Doctor, called Curse of the Fatal Death
where the main take home joke is that the Doctor regenerates into a woman and that’s
funny because something like that would never happen.
In the early 2000s, two successive Director-Generals of the BBC decided to take the company into
a more populist route, taking inspiration from ITV and other commercialised channels.
They decided “To hell with the remit!
Doctor Who is a staple of British culture and we’re bringing it back!
Who cares if it isn’t explicitly educational or high class???”.
And that’s exactly what they did.
Doctor Who returned to British TV screens in 2005, and has been broadcast ever since,
with numerous spin-off series too.
They justify this by occasionally having episodes showing other cultures or the grim reality
of the past and producing educational tie-ins for schools like Doctor Who-themed maths games.
Probably most importantly, Doctor Who tries to remain up to date with current social trends
and be inclusive of everyone who calls themselves a Doctor Who fan.
That means, despite the lack of quality in recent episodes, the show is basically un-cancel-able
and will most likely be on the air for a long time to come.