10 Things Doctor Who Should Never Have Got Away With
10. Britney Spears
Before Series 1 screened, ageing fans were aghast at the news that former teen pop singer Billie Piper was to be playing the new companion. It sounded like the most foolhardy possible piece of casting. No doubt they would have had their suspicions confirmed had anyone leaked the fact that current teen pop singer Britney Spears would have a cameo in the revivals second story. The recurring joke in The End of the World centres around an old-fashioned 20th century jukebox which Cassandra, five billion years later, believes is called an iPod. Declaring it filled with classical music from humanitys greatest composers, she proceeds to play Tainted Love by Soft Cell, much to fellow Lancastrian Christopher Ecclestons evident pleasure. Later in the episode, the iPod activates again, this time treating the assembled dignitaries to Britneys 2003 number one hit Toxic. The moment works because its funny. The incongruity between the pop song, then only two years old, and the effects shots of the space station and the dying solar system is rather wonderful and exemplifies an irreverent attitude which would stand the Russell T Davies era in good stead. Its not even the first time Doctor Who had featured contemporary music, either, as viewers of The Chase (1965) and The Evil of the Daleks (1967) could have attested.
I teach literature of all types but when I write, it tends to involve "Doctor Who". My fiction can be found in unofficial anthology "Seasons of War"; my non-fiction in the "You and Who" books as well as the forthcoming "Hating to Love" and "Blake's Heaven".
