Design for Doctor Who: Vision and Revision in Science Fiction Television

The long-running popular TV series Doctor Who is, Piers Britton argues, a ‘uniquely design intensive text’: its time-and-space-travel premise requires that designers be tirelessly imaginative in devising new worlds and entities and recreating past civilizations. While Doctor Who’s attempts at worldbuilding are notorious for being hit-and-miss – old jokes about wobbly walls and sink plungers die hard – the distinctiveness of the series’ design imagery is beyond question. And over the course of six decades Doctor Who has produced designs which are not only iconic but, in being repeatedly revisited and updated, have proven to be an ever-more important element in the series’ identity and mythos.
In the first in-depth study of Doctor Who‘s costumes, sets and graphics, Piers Britton offers an historical overview of both the original and the revived series, explores theoretical frameworks for evaluating Doctor Who design, and provides detailed analysis of key images. Case studies include the visual morphology of Doctor Who’s historical adventures, the evaluative character of cosplay, and the ongoing significance for the Doctor Who brand of such high-profile designs as the Daleks and the TARDIS interior, the ‘time-tunnel’ title sequence, and the costumes of the Fourth and Thirteenth Doctors.
Building from a chapter on Doctor Who in a prior book on design for television, Reading Between Designs, Piers Britton examines the role of costumes, sets and props, and graphics in both the classic and new Doctor Who series. The overarching argument of this book is that design imagery defines Doctor Who to a much greater extent than generally acknowledged. Britton's approach is threefold. First, he surveys the whole history of Doctor Who on television, situating changing design idioms for the series in both the institutional context of the BBC and the wider realm of screen sf. Second, he addresses the complex issue of how the work of design, and its effectiveness in doing this work, can be assessed in a genre-hopping, idiomatically unstable narrative such as Doctor Who. Rather than adopt a single, overarching approach to evaluating design for Doctor Who, therefore, Britton turns to some of the ways in which fans – not least the fan professionals now responsible for the Doctor Who brand – confer value and new meaning on design imagery from the series. In the third and final section of the book, Britton moves from wide-angle to focused inquiry, reflecting on thirteen key designs which have helped to define the Doctor Who aesthetic, in some cases playing a central role in the tonal or narrative reorientation of the text. In conclusion, he emphasizes the generative role that ‘iconic’ design imagery has developed in storytelling for Doctor Who as for other, similarly long-lived sf and fantasy texts.