10 Big Differences Between New And Classic Doctor Who

7. Soapy Storylines

The Classic era of Doctor Who was influenced by the cultural landscape that the writers grew up in. Cowboy movies led to The Gunfighters and literary works such as The Prisoner of Zenda got referenced in The Androids of Tara. When the show returned in 2005, it once again drew on the media to inspire its stories, most blatantly in Bad Wolf/The Parting Of The Ways, wherein Big Brother and makeover programmes were satirised in the sharpest fashion. While this is a similarity, it's also a major difference. Nowadays the show is more in the thrall of fast-paced American output, though it can be said that the main change lies much closer to home. When Sylvester McCoy fled the televisual scene in the TARDIS, sci-fi on the British tellybox dwindled. Commissioners looked to soap operas as an effective and attention-grabbing means of producing scripted content. Viewers were kept on the edge of their seats by overheated relationships, big set pieces and characters who'd die one minute and returned the next. By adopting this approach as a model for everything, a lot of drama became dictated by a fast-paced schedule and a prevalence of situation over character. A generation of writers thus entered Who via the soap industry, filling the series with recurring characters, romantic entanglements, jaw-dropping plot twists and overarching storylines. Stuff that would have boggled the minds of fans back in the 80s, where that sort of thing was relegated to the likes of Dynasty.