Doctor Who: Put It Away!

I remember the time when a Radio Times cover promoting Doctor Who seemed an excitingly rare and desirous thing. Now you can't move for the bloody things, and they seem far less interesting as a result.

Anyway, that's not what I want to talk about. Rather this week's set of covers has prompted a sigh of depression at the seeming impossibility of photographing the Doctor without him waving the sonic screwdriver around like a gun. I know the screwdriver is an omnipresent part of the programme these days, but thankfully it's only taken on the iconography of weaponry once, when the Doctor was sneaking round Canary Wharf at the end of last series, and then you could kind of forgive it as David Tennant indulging himself.

This is too much, however. Look at them both, pointing their weapons at us. Now imagine how much better, how much classier, how much more interesting it would look without the toys. If both men were simply staring out it would make the threat about them; instead, here, it becomes about the gadgets: which is more deadly the sonic or the laser? Frankly, who cares? If this story, this contest, is meant to mean anything, it should be about the characters. And I know I said I was talking about the publicity photographs rather than the programme, but the photos are symptomatic of the role the wretched screwdriver now assumes in the narrative.

For my part, I agreed with Russell T. Davies on an early Doctor Who Confidential when he argued that in a 45 minute story you haven't got time for the Doctor to be trapped in a locked room; however, there's a long way between that and the all-purpose magic wand it's since become - and when I find myself agreeing with Christopher ("H") Bidmead I know something's wrong. The series tries to have it's cake and eat it: the screwdriver is verbally mocked for being a tool and not a gun, yet is increasingly used, passive-aggressively, so to speak, as the Doctor's weapon. Steven Moffat sent it up well in Series One's 'The Doctor Dances', through Jack's incredulity and the Doctor's banana response, as an argument about arms; last week's sight of the Master taunting the Doctor with the size of his (the Master's) own 'laser screwdriver' is not half as funny, and only points up how ubiquitous the gadget has become. Moffat was poking fun at a piece of the series' iconography, celebrating how much it defined the series by it taking the traditional place of a weapon when it patently wasn't one; but that was back when largely all it did was open doors. Now it does everything, and the Master can laugh about his being larger, because everything is diminished as a result.

Last year's otherwise lacklustre 'Fear Her' contained a terrifically weird and typically Who-ish moment, as Rose opens a door and is attacked by a furious piece of pencil scribble; the Doctor then ran round the corner, 'fired' the screwdriver, and 'killed' it; nothing typifies better the sad dichotomy of inspiration and cliché in the series than this moment. By all means, get the Doctor out of a locked room. That would be a dull 45 minutes. But if, once he's out, he's not acting in the ingenious, inspired, and exciting way he once used to, because he's got a wand that does that all for him... well, why bother? I can't see much of a difference between these two pictures and that's really depressing.