Jonathan Baldwin

This is the full text of a talk I gave as part of the University Of Dundee's Discovery Days 2011.

Doctor Who first aired on Saturday 23 November 1963, the day after the assassination of JF Kennedy. The opening episode introduced us to the Doctor, played by William Hartnell, and his grandaughter, Susan. They were described as exiles from their own people, wanderers in the fourth dimension.

By the time I was born, in 1970, Jon Pertwee had become the third actor to play the Doctor (who, it transpired, could "regenerate" if he was seriously wounded or his existing body grew old or infirm).

My earliest memory is of the end of a Doctor Who episode. I have a clear memory of Jo Grant, the Doctor's companion, hiding from Daleks, while the Doctor is locked in a room with another group of Daleks cutting through the door.

Many years later I was able to watch the episode again and worked out that I was two and a half years old at the time. Even now the sequence reminds me of being scared, but also fascinated, with what I was seeing on screen.

In 1974, Tom Baker became the Doctor and remained in the role for seven years. These years were ones where I became what is known as a "fan" of the show, but whereas a fan is simply someone who follows a programme or a team, and a fanatic is someone who may be more obsessed with it, my interest lay somewhere in between. Looking back, it's clear to me that as well as enjoying the stories I was also learning something else.

Freudian theories about our personalities suggest that our surroundings when we're growing up shape our personalities. Usually this is assumed to mean our parents, neighbourhood, school and so on. Some take it further to suggest that violent games and films make people violent in turn. I'm not a huge believer in that - I assume that people who are already violently-oriented are likely to want to watch things that tie in to their approach to life, while those who aren't won't suddenly be transformed in to psychopaths. Indeed, if that idea were true, then watching Doctor Who would have turned me into a weird man living in a blue box. But it didn't.
I do think, however, that it had other effects on me. For reasons I won't go in to, I was a quiet, introspective child who read a lot, watched a lot of TV and spent a lot of time on his own. (In other circumstances, reading those words would probably confirm me as some sort of serial killer!) As it was, the Doctor was a sort of fictional uncle and big brother rolled in to one. A role model in many ways. Whether I was watching the show behind the sofa, or on it, it was having an effect.

But unlike many people who have heroes, I didn't want to be the Doctor. This is one of the questions kids get asked a lot: what do you want to be when you grow up?

I'm one of those people that likes the end credits. They're not really a big feature of TV anymore - the BBC has some policy about end credits not lasting more than 30 seconds or something, and ITV long ago standardised all their programmes' end credits and the names whizz by in a flash. Which is a shame because it was the titles of the jobs that people did that fascinated me. The composer, the assistant director, the designer, the director, the writer. What did they all do? How did they get to do it?
When I told people I wanted to work in television, they would smile and laugh condescendingly. Why? Because working in television wasn't something anyone we knew actually did. It was all done in London, or Manchester, or Leeds. And people like writers were rare. You didn't just become one. TV was what happened in a box in your living room.

This isn't uncommon. We are often limited in our ideas of what we can be by the opportunities around us. Children of doctors are more likely to become doctors themselves than children of postmen. It's the "idea" of being one, and the knowledge of how to go about it, that is important. As the saying goes, it's who you know. If I'd lived in Shepherd's Bush, or Ealing, I'd have been as likely to work in TV or films as I would become a miner if I lived in Nottingham.

The laughter wasn't meant badly, it was just a response to an ambition as crazy as wanting to be an astronaut.

But there was another side to the problem as well. Being a Doctor Who fan was the cause of a lot of bullying (or "teasing" as we used to call it). There are all sorts of reasons for that, one of which I'll mention in a moment, but the odd thing was that while Doctor Who was the cause of (or excuse for) a lot of this bullying, it also provided an escape from it. I didn't lose my ambition to be a writer, a director, a composer or a designer and the moment I could, I left school to try and do something about it. That's another story.

But what, if anything, could I claim I was "taught" by Doctor Who? Before I go on I need to clarify something. Doctor Who is the name of a TV series, not the name of the character. All Doctor Who fans know that and it's a really easy way either to smoke out a genuine fan, or annoy one. Call The Doctor "Doctor Who" and see how they react.
So when I say "everything I learned, I learned from Doctor Who" I mean the programme, not the character. But that includes the character. Understood? Good.

Let's start with the biggest and most important thing. I learnt the importance of imagination. Not how to have an imagination, but why it's important to have one. There's a big difference. We all have imaginations, but some people repress them, and I think that's a shame.

One of the sources of teasing by people I went to school with, and adults too, sometimes, was the refrain "they film it in a quarry you know. It's not a real planet!", as if I was being stupid in somehow being able to suspend my disbelief.

"You know the monsters are actors in suits, don't you?"
Really? You don't say!
The irony of these comments was that my interest in the programme meant that not only did I know that it was all fake (I mean, what did they expect? That they'd film on real alien planets and recruit real aliens to star in it?) I also knew how fake it was. Doctor Who fans are, in my experience, set apart from fans of other programmes and films in that they are as interested in what happens behind the camera as what happens in front of it.

When Marvel Comics launched a magazine for the show in the late 70s - which is still going and holds the world record for the longest-running TV tie-in magazine - it meant that readers were able to get an extremely detailed glimpse at how television was made. Those names in the end credits now made sense.

Not only did we know that the creatures were made out of fibreglass, we knew what fibreglass was, and how it was used. We knew how make-up was applied and how prosthetics were made. We found out how the music and sound effects were generated by synthesisers and other electronics.

It's no surprise to find out that many of the people now making waves in film and television production are Doctor Who fans who absorbed the very same information I did. Russel T Davies, who was the show runner when the series returned a few years ago, and Stephen Moffat who runs it now, were avid Doctor Who fans. The recent series Sherlock was created by Moffat and Mark Gatiss, one of the League of Gentlemen and also a fan of the show who has since written for, and starred in it.

But that aside, the issue that got me most annoyed when I was younger was the insinuation that "wobbly sets", "rubber suits" and "cheap effects" somehow made Doctor Who a bad thing. You could say the same thing about theatre. What's more, at the theatre you can see the edge of the stage, and the fact it is a stage at all. Why would it have been okay if I'd gone to the theatre, but not okay that I was watching TV?
More to the point, why was it wrong to have an imagination that overcame my disbelief.
One of the scariest sequences in film history is the scene from Nosferatu where the vampire is climbing the stairs, and we just see the silhouette. Directors have known for a long time that the suggestion of something scary is worse than the thing itself (a technique employed in Doctor Who a lot). Yet today, horror films are judged not on their suspense, but on their realism. The amount of blood, the graphic depictions of people being decapitated, you name it. Any vampire movie that featured a silhouette would be panned, unless it immediately cut to gushing blood, preferably in 3D.

It all points to a lack of imagination on the part of the audience, but it's wrong to blame the audience. Just because modern Doctor Who has access to cutting-edge digital effects doesn't (or shouldn't) excuse a poor story. The story is everything. The emotional impact is everything. The way in which it is achieved is secondary.

To be fair, this isn't new. Take a look at comic strips. The more "realistic" the scenario (here, a juvenile delinquent bullying other kids) the more "unrealistic" the artwork can be.

Yet the more fantastic the scenario, the more detail we demand.

So why do people laugh at people who like Doctor Who? Even now, why was I vaguely embarrassed to tell people what my talk was about? And why did many of you feel that this would be "a bit of fun" rather than, as it turns out, rather serious?
Let's try an experiment.
Imagine I gave you all sketch pads and pencils, and then brought in a life model to pose naked for you. If I asked you to draw her, what would your response be? Many of you would get on with it, some of you would be embarrassed that you couldn't draw, or so you'd claim.

What if I didn't bring the model in, but instead asked to you imagine her, and draw her on your pad? Now how would you feel? What would you do?
You'd probably feel embarrassed about having to imagine a naked woman. Drawing her would make it obvious that you'd been doing it!

What if I asked you to draw an alien? Or a spaceship? From your imagination?

You'd still feel embarrassed but not because of the nudity. No. It turns out you're embarrassed about using your imagination! In fact, the way we tend to teach drawing is not particularly effective because we usually get people to depict something that's in front of them, but rarely do we ask them to visualise something that isn't, and yet that's a key skill whether you're a designer, a scientist, an engineer, or even a teacher or politician. The ability to imagine what isn't there, to visualise it in your mind, and to realise it in some way, is something we're not very good at doing because we are embarrassed about our imaginations. They're private things. Anyone who is caught using their imagination is laughed at. It's something we're conditioned to repress.

Yet it's so important. Our current government in Westminster is arguably one of the least imaginative we've ever had, shutting down projects that dared to tackle problems in creative ways. Our education system is having the imagination squeezed out of it. Our television is replacing imagination with "reality". How depressing is that?

Next I want to talk about "curiosity". What do I mean by that?

In the story The Creature From The Pit, the Doctor finds himself clinging to the side of a mineshaft. In desperation he digs a book out of his famously deep pockets: "Everest for Beginners". He starts to read it. "It's in Tibetan!" he cries. So he digs in his pockets again and pulls out a copy of "Teach Yourself Tibetan".
It's a sequence written by the late Douglas Adams and divides fans due to its slapstick nature. But it is genuinely funny. And it characterises one of the features of The Doctor, and the programme itself: the idea of continually learning new things.

In fact in the previous episode that led to the Doctor falling down the shaft, he was asked by a character how it was that he had solved a problem with an answer that another man had missed. "To be fair," said the Doctor, "I had a couple of gadgets he didn't. Like a teaspoon and an open mind". Another Douglas Adams line. But what does it mean?
The Doctor has always been dismissive of seemingly or self-proclaimed knowledgeable people who suffer from closed minds, or the inability to sit back and observe a situation objectively. The teaspoon represents drinking tea and thinking. The "gadgets" are not really gadgets at all, but they are tools.
If there's one criticism you could aim at the current series of Doctor Who it's that The Doctor relies too heavily on gadgets, but the teaspoon and open mind are still there.

I like to think I have these two gadgets myself. Anyone who knows me knows I like my tea. As for the open mind, well my bachelors degree was gained via the Open University and I took a wide range of modules covering everything from maths to music. I later took a masters in Cultural Studies and recently returned to study with modules in statistics and Chinese. When I'm not an OU student I read and watch programmes on a huge range of subjects. I'm not saying this to boast, I'm saying it to point out a personal philosophy: breadth is as important as depth. Because without breadth, there's no context to the depth. I could be the world's expert on statistics, but without understanding the world around me, they're just numbers, not stories.

One of my favourite periods in history is The Enlightenment. One of the aspects of it that caught my imagination was the rise of the coffee shop, where people would gather to discuss the issues of the day. These people would hail from all sorts of backgrounds: science, economics, the arts... And it wasn't just the upper classes. English socialism has its roots in this environment with dissent being fostered in the rooms above alehouses and in the bars themselves.
Scotland made a major contribution to The Enlightenment and intellecuals of the day, people like Adam Smith, would travel for miles to take part in open discussion with peers from other fields.

One of the most famous of these groups was the Lunar Society which would meet near the time of a full moon to allow for safe travel at night. The list of regular and occasional attenders is legendary. Watt, Wedgewood, Darwin, Priestley and even Franklin on one occasion. A lot of contacts and partnerships were forged there, ideas shared and discussed.

This whole period is captured brilliantly by Joseph Wright of Derby in his paintings showing the practice of travelling "natural philosophers" entertaining middle class families with scientific experiments and lectures - here about the effect of oxygen...

... and here on the make-up and workings of the solar system.

Yet today we don't like all that mixing up. We're increasingly being asked to specialise. And the different disciplines exist side by side but don't mix. And as a result the things discovered in one area progress more slowly than if they'd been "infected" by ideas and naieveties from others.

Ideally there should be no division between disciplines. They would mix like atoms of gasses in a jar to create something new.

Connections would give rise to that most magical of effects: serendipity.
Over the last few hundred years, the vast majority of the great discoveries have been made by teams, and often because a suggestion from another domain made an answer visible.

Gutenberg's printing press was made possible because he lived among, and knew, many wine makers and saw the presses they used to get as much juice and flavour from their grapes. He didn't dream up the idea alone, but saw it because he didn't sit in his workshop all day refusing to consider anything but metal.

The Jacquard Loom was an invention that revolutionised British textile production. They were controlled by punched cards which controlled the pattern that would be woven.
Meanwhile the mathemetician Charles Babbage drew up sketches for a calculating machine, the first computer, and went to Italy where he met Ada Lovelace who developed the algorithm for giving it instructions - making her the first computer programmer. It's thought that she suggested the machine be "programmed" using the same punched cards from the loom, and until fairly recently these were the way that computers received and output their data. So textiles, engineering and maths combined to produce the programmable computer. Three distinct disciplines which, coincidentally, exist together in the same college in Dundee...

And yet, according to the government, only two of those are worth studying. And should be studied separately. The idea that the arts and humanities have anything to offer us, or that letting people cross boundaries, is an alien one.

Curiousity leads to invention. Like imagination it is essential.

I learnt absolutely nothing about girls from Doctor Who.

The final topic I want to look at is the stories themselves, or rather the idea of stories.

Over the last 50 years there have been a couple of hundred Doctor Who stories on TV, and many more in audio plays, novels - and if you count unofficial fan fiction, the total will be in the thousands.

Storytelling is an important feature of humanity. Today we mainly get our stories from books and TV. When Doctor Who returned a few years ago it was hailed as a reuniter of the family, a return to the tradition of the family gathered around the TV to share in something, after years of fragmentation.

We are at heart a social society and enjoy being entertained or frightened in the company of others.

But we also enjoy solitary story-telling. We might share it in other ways, by talking about the books we've read, or lending them to each other.

But stories aren't only fictional. Teaching - good teaching - is essentially story-telling. The physicist Richard Feynman was famed for his ability to take complex ideas and weave them in to a narrative in such a way that they appealed to novices and experts alike.
In my own teaching I try to tell a story in which the subject is a character, and in which the student, or people they can relate to, are characters as well. There is a power to storytelling that allows information to be understood. It provides a context, it provides drama, and mystery. It also provides resolution, whether it's contained within the teaching or within the learning that follows.
The best teaching, in my experience, is that which can be shared and discussed afterwards, or needs to be. The job of the teacher is to engage, and draw students in to the drama, or romance, or mystery, or sheer awesomeness of the subject.

So that's another thing I got from Doctor Who. There is nothing so complex that it can't be transformed in to a story that will remain in the mind and be shared later.

So that's what I learned from Doctor Who.
The importance of imagination, and the need not to be embarrassed about being caught using it.
The value of curiosity, and the need to take an interest in things outside our immediate circle of specialism. To be open minded, and to accept the input and questioning of those who aren't experts in our area, but whose questions or suggestions might reveal a startling truth we've been ignoring.
Freedom to break away from tradition, to try new things, to experiment and be radical. Autonomy is vital if we are to get the best from our academics, and this is true whether we're talking about the way universities are organised, or the way they are financed. The moment governments try to use universities to manage knowledge, they cease to be of value.
But all this comes with a certain element of risk and our natural inclination is to minimise it. But we shouldn't. Creativity, innovation, radical new ideas don't come from being safe. No one should go to university expecting to be guaranteed a particular type of experience, and no module or course should be delivered in such a way that the outcomes are certain.
And finally, the importance of storytelling, or teaching. Without teaching there is is no point in research, because without dissemination who knows we even do it? Universities need to engage with the communities that host them, and the communities need to be nosey. What are you doing in there? Events like the Discovery Days are a great example, but if two days a year is the most we do, that's a shame. Many of us do get out and talk not just to other academics, but "ordinary people" - schools, business groups, community groups. That should be valued and encouraged. Our role as educators doesn't stop at the gate.