Speak easy: Doctor Who Will See You Now

In the US, the Little Free Library movement has adopted the TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension in Space), a blue police telephone booth in which the Doctor, a Time Lord, traverses the gulfs of the universe, making friends and influencing people. The TARDIS was not supposed to be a blue telephone booth forever. It was supposed to blend, chameleon-like, into the backgrounds of the worlds where it landed. But the model that the doctor flies, a TT Type 40 Mark 30 (see the episode Let’s Kill Hitler, 2011) had its chameleon circuit fried during a visit to London and is stuck forever in the form of a police phone booth. The UK used to be dotted with these boxes before the advent of walkie talkies and mobile phones. They were places from which cops on the beat and their police stations could communicate with each other. They also offered first aid kits and stationery for police work, and could be used to hold offenders temporarily. Apart from fan collections, Dr Who is the only repository of this icon of 20th century British culture.

But now, it is reappearing in real landscapes in the US, as Little Free Libraries. This movement encourages people to set up large boxes containing a few bookracks on their property or public land. Passers-by are free to take any books they want, or contribute some of their own. Dr Who fans are putting their libraries on the global commons in the form of TARDISes. The idea borrows from the original, which is much bigger on the inside than the outside suggests. It contains a functioning English home and at various times, according to the director’s latest fantasies, has included appurtenances for the good life, like a control centre and a laboratory. The TARDIS libraries expand on the theme: they contain more knowledge than a phone box can be expected to hold.

Dr Who has been on the air since 1963, except for a much-lamented hiatus from 1989 to 2005, due to deteriorating programming rather than falling audience interest. In that period, in fact, reruns outside the UK seeded the beginning of a global cult. The series owes its longevity partly to the idea that the Doctor can assume new forms and personalities as old ones wear out, allowing him to survive frightful holocausts on screen, as well as illnesses or career changes of actors playing him (or her). In the period when he appeared to have gone into a coma, fanfic, parodies, books and audio plays and skits provided the thread of continuity.

Big Finish Productions has professionalised the fanfic approach. Through Spotify, they have put a number of renditions of classic Dr Who stories online, for free. They feature the voices of many actors who actually worked on the TV serial, and six of them played the lead. To access these audio dramas from India, which add up to about 30 hours of pleasurable listening, you would need a VPN. Opera offers an idiot-proof product for free, which just works, and has nice cartoons, too.

Big Finish stayed with the plot for years, but, in 2015, it shrugged off all limitations to imagine Dr Who as it never happened. That means stuff like Winston Churchill featuring in Dr Who: The Churchill Years. Now, of course, the fan base will have to kindly adjust to the idea of a woman Doctor, which is intriguing many and flustering just as many. And, no doubt, some perplexing feminist interpretation of these mixed feelings will soon be forthcoming from an academic press. For the rest of us, who take a simpler view, the issue resolves into a single question: Why not? There are women prime ministers, women bodybuilders, women Warthog pilots, women spies and women mathematicians — the most promising, Maryam Mirzakhani, died before her time last week. What’s the problem with a woman Doctor?