All My Love To Long Ago

Another year, another Doctor Who special for the BBC’s annual Children In Need event. These things have a chequered history. The 2005 offering, in which Rose’s first encounter with the Tenth Doctor (played by David Tennant) was touching and believable, did much to cancel out the horrific memories of 1993′s non-canonical Dimensions In Time (slapstick nonsense combining Doctor Who and EastEnders) and 1999′s equally silly Doctor Who And The Curse Of Fatal Death for the Comic Relief organisation.
Nor have multi-Doctor stories typically fulfilled any great artistic purpose other than getting a few familiar faces together for nostalgia’s sake. 1973′s The Three Doctors (in reality mostly just two, due to the failing health of First Doctor William Hartnell at the time) was probably the best of the bunch. 1983′s The Five Doctors was the show’s enormously self-referential and fragmented 20th anniversary special and 1985′s The Two Doctors had a reasonable plot, but would have worked just as well as a single-Doctor story.
It was going to be interesting, then, to see what current producer Russell T Davies made of this year’s opportunity. RTD, as he’s generally known to the fans, has mostly established a reputation as a safe pair of hands over the past few years, as far as the show’s quality and continuity is concerned. I’m not too keen on his occasional and unnecessary goading of the fan base and some of his creative choices can be questionable (Slitheen, step forward), but I was assuming that we were probably in for a treat. Thankfully I wasn’t wrong.
Peter Davison’s Fifth Doctor was absolutely the right choice for this mini-episode. Time has, appropriately, been kind to Davison and he’s still easily recognisable as the character he played 25 years ago. He was always my favourite, until Tennant anyway. He took on the role as I entered my teens and his tenure coincided with the period during which I went from being a regular viewer to a fan. Criticised retrospectively for being wet and uncharismatic, it’s easy to forget the generally high quality of his performances and stories.
As Wikipedia notes, “The Fifth Doctor’s era was notable for a ‘back to basics’ attitude, in which ‘silly’ humour (and, to an extent, horror) was kept to a minimum”. Like the Fifth Doctor himself, during this period the programme moved on from some of its previous mistakes, got its head down and focused on just getting on with the (anti-)matter at hand. Davison deserves more credit for this than he’s received over the years, so it was wonderful to see such high-profile dues being paid via the mouth of Tennant’s Tenth Doctor:

“You know… I loved being you. Back when I first started at the very beginning, I was always trying to be old and grumpy and important, like you do when you’re young. And then I was you. And it was all dashing about and playing cricket and my voice going all squeaky when I shouted – I still do that, the voice thing, I got that from you! Oh! And the trainers! And [takes a pair of spectacles out of his pocket and puts them on triumphantly]… Snap! ‘Cos you know what, Doctor? You were my Doctor.”

I’ve watched Doctor Who for 35 years and I’ve loved pretty much every minute of it, even the worst excesses of the Sixth and Seventh Doctors’ eras. But the part of the classic series I look back on most fondly was the period during the early 1980s, with the Cold War at its height and teenage angst dawning slowly and darkly in my mind, when that vulnerable, frowny, worried-looking Doctor grappled with good and evil in a way that suggested that it all might go wrong at any moment, but nevertheless rarely did. The Fifth Doctor was my Doctor too.
So that’s why I liked Time Crash so much. Writer Steven Moffatt built upon the Fifth Doctor’s underestimated obstinacy and occasional inability to see the patently obvious when it is – literally – staring him in the face. The interaction of the two different personalities was marvellous, with the Tenth’s playfulness undermining the Fifth’s seriousness. Amidst all the nonsense about supernovas and black holes cancelling each other out, the pretext of the time paradox gave rise to some truly memorable dialogue.
“Check out this bone structure, because one day you’re going to be shaving it,” says the Tenth to the Fifth, trying to get him to see who he’s talking to. Which other TV show could carry a line like that? Other sly asides alluded to contemporary popular culture (Fifth: “What have you done to my TARDIS? You’ve changed the desktop theme, haven’t you!”) and gave yet another nod to the homoerotic themes bubbling under the surface (Fifth, of the Master: “Does he still have that rubbish beard?” Tenth: “No, no beard this time. Well… a wife…”).
The conclusion – it’s not too spoilerish to repeat it here, I hope – gave rise to the Fifth Doctor’s wonderful observation to the Tenth that “You remembered being me, watching you doing that. You only knew what to do because… I saw you do it.” Far more original than all that “going back in time and becoming your own grandfather” malarkey. Other than that, there wasn’t a whole lot happening. Just an unexpected conversation between two personalities who should never have met, acknowledging another era when the show was also as popular and successful as it is now.