"If Jesus was a Sheriff, and I was a Priest"
Falsification is an essential part of many intellectual processes, especially in the sciences. If you have a theory, you should be looking for the evidence against it, not the evidence that goes along with whatever mad idea you’ve cooked up while watching Day of the Daleks on your phone at 3am. (Of which more another time.) That's how you find out how good a theory is. By actively working to disprove your own idea. We're less keen on it in the arts, I think, and I think this newsletter probably qualifies as an example of those, even if simply by virtue of being resolutely unscientific.
But I digress, and also caricature. It's my way.
The point I'm trying to make is, one shouldn't be looking for things that prove one's point. Sometimes, though, sometimes, a whacking great piece of evidence in favour of an idle notion one has can come charging over the hill at you like, well, the desire to watch Day of the Daleks on your phone at 3am.
That’s not just me, right?
It has long been a point of an interest that Sylvester McCoy and Tom Baker both trained for lives within the Roman Catholic Church before their faith waned, and they instead became actors. So long, in fact, that McCoy's revealing of this unbeknownst-to-him-signifiant-to-fans fact from his own biography was being compared to already then long attested Baker anecdotage pretty much as soon as he was cast.
What’s curious about this, is that they’re not (quite) the only ones. Patrick Troughton was interested in theology, and often opined that had he not been an actor he might have been a churchman “although not in the Church of England” of which he was nominally a member. (Troughton did not, it seems have sympathies with the Catholic faith of his successors, but more an unorthodox view of religion entirely his own.)
This, though, is not the piece of evidence of which I was thinking. It was Colin Baker's revelation in the special features for the Blu-ray collection of the 1985 series of Doctor Who that he too was raised Catholic, and also considered a life in the church before turning to acting.
Now, I had no idea about this. I'm not sure he's ever mentioned it before in interview, and while I've double checked many since watching this feature, obviously it's by no means all of the many hundreds the actor has given in the (gosh) forty years he's been Doctor Who. It's probably just one of those brilliant things that Dr Matthew Sweet winkles out of interviewees through skill and technique. But it really rams home the simple fact that Doctors Who are disproportionately Catholic.
Tom Baker, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, Paul McGann, Christopher Eccleston and Peter Capaldi makes it five out of fourteen for Doctors with their own ordinal. Even if at least most of them have since professed to have lost their faith, that’s still massively disproportionate for a country where just 9% of people describe themselves as even nominal Catholics. For half of those to have also considered becoming priests or monks, and for one of the non-Catholic Doctors to have done so as well? I honestly find it extraordinary, and I do wonder what it says about the show and the character that this is true.
Doctor Who is disproportionately Catholic, disproportionately Scottish (4/15) and Liverpudlian (2/15), and these three facts are, let's be honest, probably related. But what are we going to do with them? Well, on top of Troughton's interest in being a Churchman in anything but the CofE, we also have the curious fact that David Tennant and Ncuti Gatwa's fathers were the Moderator of the Church of Scotland, and a man with a theology doctorate respectively. Suddenly the Christian religion begins to look rather important to the show, don't you think? Well, I’m not sure.
Doctor Who is a solidly, casually secular series. Certainly by the standards of the 1960s when it was created. It can be surprising now, the earnest, assumed-to-be-universal Anglicanism of 1960s television. Where anything other than someone being “C of E” is something to be pointed out, but then only when it’s relevant for the plot. (E.g. the recently repeated Dixon of Dock Green episode Green Wedding, an example picked entirely because I have seen it recently.)
One might idly suggest that the combination of Jewish creator Sydney Newman and producer Verity Lambert, and Muslim opening director Waris Hussein meant a series that didn’t reflect the broad “C of E” television culture of time. Between them, they inadvertently shielded the programme from that default cultural inheritance, while not substantially replacing it with elements from their own faith backgrounds, and it’s perhaps this which led to the series becoming orthogonal to the culture it would eventually come to be considered a significant representative of.
It is, if you think about it for more than thirty seconds, genuinely remarkable that Doctor Who is a series in which the lead character is routinely killed, or brought near to death, and then resurrected, and which managed to go though the process six times without, essentially, invoking any Christian imagery at all, when the Easter story is sitting right there.
Now, that might partially be self-censorship of a kind. In 1985 Robin of Sherwood (1984-86), one of ITV’s many short-lived attempts to make Doctor Who type programming for a Doctor Who type slot, drew considerable ire from religious censorship campaigner Mary Whitehouse for “resurrecting its hero” in an episode shown in Holy Week, but the earnest, devout, suburban Buddhism of 1970s producer Barry Letts, who did so much to shape colour Doctor Who, and who coined the term “regeneration” to describe the process of recasting the Doctor, also played a significant role.
I say “six times” above because the regeneration in the 1996 Doctor Who TVM is cast in explicitly Christian terms, at least in terms of its imagery. The Doctor emerges from his tomb, in fact the morgue at the hospital, wrapped in a shroud. McGann’s overall appearance, particularly his blue eyes and long hair recall Robert Powell, at the time perhaps the most celebrated television incarnation of Jesus, and that production’s deep debts to a western visual depiction of Jesus. What is key though is that the Doctor is explicitly resurrected after death, not regenerated prior to it.
When Grace confronts the Doctor saying “You’re trying to tell me you’ve come back from the dead?” and he replies, definitively, “Yes”, before going on to say “I was dead too long this time’” and also referring to regeneration as “…when I die”. The TVM’s religious imagery does not stop there. Later the Doctor is bound by the Master, himself cast in Biblical terms with his earliest appearance in the story is as a kind of snake, and is forced to wear a coronet which resembles a crown of thorns placed on Jesus’ head prior the crucifixion. The mere fact that the female lead of this story, whom the Doctor spends much of it searching for, is called Grace does not seem plausibly accidental, given all the this.
Notably, in a Doctor Who Magazine interview, conducted on set in Vancouver, McGann commented that the responsibility of playing the Doctor was akin to playing John Lennon or Jesus, in that everyone seemingly had a view on what he was really like or should be like.
In another 1996 interview McGann was asked to recall any elements of the series that had stuck with him since watching it in childhood. Like his eventual successor Christopher Eccleston, he had not seen much of Doctor Who as a child, describing himself as being more the kind of boy who played football in the street than the kind who developed a fascination with television series. One image, though, did resonate with the actor after nearly thirty years, a Yeti’s chest opening in either The Abominable Snowmen (1967) or The Web of Fear (1968) to reveal its glowing control sphere. His response is worth quoting in full:
“The monster that did it for me was the Yeti. I was only thinking yesterday that because we were good little Catholic boys, we used to go to church three or four times a week, and in Catholic churches you have these sacred heart statues, the figure of Jesus, you know, holding back his gown or whatever and there’s the beating heart, with a crown of thorns flashing around it, almost like a cartoon heart. Rich stuff. What would happen with the Yeti? His chest would come apart and he’d be sitting there with the golden ball. And we’d be sitting there watching it, going ‘Jesus!’”
The sacred heart is a common Catholic devotional practice, in which Jesus’ heart is visible outside his body in religious art, as a symbol of God’s undying love. There is something interesting in McGann finding the accidental, and in truth not particularly pronounced, resemblance between this recurring image from his daily life and a fleeting moment in Doctor Who the most memorable aspect of the series of which he was about to become the lead.
It seems inevitable, if ironic, that the TVM’s christifying of the Doctor and the process of him changing his face was in part a result of it being the first Doctor Who story produced with significant American creative input; America being a country without an established state church, but a much more overtly Christian religious culture than the country where the programme had previously been created. Albeit one where this attempt to resurrect a dead television series was due to air over the Easter bank holiday weekend.
McGann’s second television appearance as the Doctor, The Night of the Doctor (2013) picks up on both the religious imagery of the first and perhaps the implications of McGann’s own comments, and expands them further. Because writer / producer Steven Moffat’s choice for the McGann Doctor last words “Physician heal thyself” are not merely a direct quote from the Bible, they are the words of Jesus Christ himself. As with the TVM, the identification of the Doctor with Christ is both direct and unavoidable; and to an even greater extent than in the TVM ideas and images pile up around this.
For example, the Sisterhood of Karn have a central altar table, something not true in their previous appearance in The Brain of Morbius (1976) and the cups the Doctor is offered to drink the liquid that will trigger his regeneration are shaped like chalices, as used in Christian celebration and particularly communion. One could even see the Doctor’s death being watched by Ohila and a number of sisters as referencing the ambiguously biblically testified number of women who came to comfort Jesus as he was dying on the cross. This is an interpretation that particularly works given Ohila actor Claire Higgins’ own conviction that Ohila is the Doctor’s Mother, given that one of the women present at the crucifixion is usually said to be Jesus’ mother Mary.
It’s also true that Anthony Coburn, writer of the opening serial of all Doctor Who, was a passionate, if neither orthodox nor coherent, Catholic. Overt religious imagery and ideas, such as those presented in the TVM, are entirely absent from his serial, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he didn’t include any in his drafts of the scripts.
I say this because Coburn wrote a second Doctor Who serial, The Masters of Luxor, the scripts for which were published nearly thirty years after the Doctor Who production office decided not to make them, even though they’d been paid for and they didn’t have many other stories banked to choose from. These scripts do have an overt Christian religiosity which is absent from Hartnell era Doctor Who that did make it to screen. While the basic setting and story, a barren, desolate planet which is home to a man, Tabon, who has created artificial life in his own image, is something that you can imagine being part of screen Doctor Who in almost any era, it’s here cast in terms that seem, ironically, alien to Doctor Who as we have come to understand it.
It’s not just that, and this is not an exaggeration, The Masters of Luxor scripts contain the word “God” more times than all Doctor Who actually made for television in the 1960s put together, it’s also a matter of characterisation and theme. At one point Susan (or Suzanne as it’s spelled here) asks “Why are you Earth people afraid of the word God?” while the Doctor bids Tabon, a man the TARDIS crew have literally resurrected from his own grave, farewell at the end of the final episode with a sincere “God keep you”. These are things it’s impossible to imagine the characters onscreen iterations saying. (The Doctor does say “Godspeed” in The Crusade, but in context this is merely rhetorical.)
(The only Hartnell stories to use the word “God” are The Aztecs, The Web Planet, The Crusade, The Time Meddler, The Myth Makers, The Daleks’ Master Plan, The Massacre, The Gunfighters, The Smugglers, and The Tenth Planet. In The Tenth Planet and The Gunfighters, it’s used in “mild oaths”, i.e as sort of rhetorical, family tea time friendly swearing. In The Savages some of the guest characters suggest that the Doctor’s party “Must be Gods”.
In The Aztecs, The Myth Makers and The Daleks’ Master Plan, it’s the Aztec, Greek and Egyptian gods which are being invoked, while in The Web Planet it’s an alien pantheon worshipped by the inhabitants of Vortis being called upon.
Only in The Time Meddler, The Massacre, The Smugglers and The Crusade is the Christian God invoked sincerely, and then only by guest characters; people from Earth’s past, with overt religiosity seemingly a signifier that we ARE in the past. Additionally The Romans, a story in which the word “God” is never used, but the names of some Roman Gods are, shows a Roman official, Tavius, as motive to save lives by his secret Christianity.
To an even greater extent than the TVM, The Masters of Luxor allows us to see how secular almost all Doctor Who really is, by showing us what it would be like if it wasn’t. It reminds me a little of the situation where people see crypto Catholicism in the works of William Shakespeare because of e.g. the ghost of Hamlet’s father dwelling in a Catholic purgatory that, according to a Protestant settlement of religious policy at the time of its composition, definitively did not exist.
Shakespeare did grow up in Warwickshire. Recusant country. His birthplace is less than ten miles from Coughton Court, where the Gunpowder plot was, er, plotted, it being the ancestral seat of the family who actually paid for it, only for Guy Fawkes to get all the credit / blame in posterity.
But one only has to glance at the drama of the contemporary Spanish Golden Age to see, at least in my opinion, how fundamentally mistaken this idea is. There's a strong counter example to Hamlet in Lope de Vega’s masterpiece Punishment Without Revenge (1631), which genuinely is a play that allows one to see how the traditions of revenge tragedy function inside a sincerely Catholic moral universe.
Hamlet is of course also a part played by at least two actors to have played Doctor Who. Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant. Just as both Eccleston and Tom Baker have played Macbeth, Sylvester McCoy and John Hurt have both played Lear’s Fool and Tennant and McCoy have both played Touchstone.
Almost every actor to play Winston Smith in a film, television or radio production of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has also played Doctor Who: Peter Cushing, Patrick Troughton, John Hurt, Christopher Eccleston. Of the others, David Buck is rather a plausible Doctor, as is Andrew Garfield, while Edmond O’Brien is about as convincing an idea for Doctor Who as he was for Winston Smith. Not at all.
So yes, Doctors Who are disproportionately Catholic, but they’re also disproportionately likely to play Winston Smith. In that Easter-y TVM Paul McGann’s Doctor gently mocks humans for seeing patterns that aren’t there. That may very well be all we’re doing here. But is it also possible we’re onto something? Is there something in these overlapping ideas, in the way they interact, and does that clue us in to the essential nature of Doctorliness?
Well, there might be. But I’m not sure anyone could prove it.
