4. Technology
They're dated simply by virtue of their age the hair, the clothes, the wobbly sets, the whole black & white thing but part of the reason the classic series remains less dated today than I suspect the new series will seem fifty years from now is through its relative lack of reference to the technology of the day. While there was a certain reliance on alien tech to fuel 'classic' storylines the TARDIS itself being the obvious example the most effective elements of the old show were clearly fictional. Indeed they were quite literally like nothing on Earth which, to my mind, was kinda the point. The scariest aspects of classic Who were completely unexpected. Extraordinary things in ordinary situations. In the words of Jon Pertwee, "there's nothing more alarming than coming home to find a Yeti sitting on your loo in Tooting Bec". In 1970, as now, such a discovery would no doubt have been completely unexpected and, therefore, quite alarming. An extraordinary thing in a very ordinary situation. But where the technology of the time was concerned, the classic series didn't labour the point. Playing on viewers' fears wasn't reliant on wicked things happening whenever someone picked up a telephone handset, or put a record on a turntable, or plugged a Space Invaders cartridge into the Atari console. They could've spun stories about alien evil transmitted by TVs and radios. The latter Tom Baker years could've been littered with references to computers the size of an average house, sucking the intellect out of everyone in the vicinity. The last years of the classic series could've featured hoards of characters poncing about with over-sized handheld communications devices strapped to their wrists, just to show how in touch with the times the show was. In fact, none of those was the case. Today, everyone and everything is online, offline, uploaded, downloaded, mobile and wireless. Technology has essentially become the baseline of our existence. Granted, the concept of being utterly consumed by a virtual cloud via Wi-Fi isn't exactly commonplace but, oddly enough, neither does it seem overly extraordinary. It's just a little too similar to stuff that happens all around us every day. As ordinary 21st century situations go and with technology advancing in leaps and bounds by the hour, surely it's only a matter of time until the notion of servers uploading people to the cloud doesn't actually seem all that alarming? A reliance on contemporary technology or the modern-day ordinary situation to fuel storylines can only work if what happens next the extraordinary thing is utterly unexpected, something nobody would ever have dreamed of. Nobody's going to be too put off by something they actually believe could be on the technological horizon. And while we're on the topic, how come the Doctor's so intimately familiar with early-21st century Earth technology anyway? For someone who's seen everything and been everywhere, including playing a very significant part in ending one of the most deadly wars in the history of the entire universe, it's always struck me as a bit odd that he obviously allowed himself, at some point, to become utterly absorbed in the minutiae of Wi-Fi. His 21st century earth-tech obsession doesn't end there either. Throughout the new series, instead of taking wondrous new technology to his friends, he instead takes bog-standard pieces of contemporary tech and just waves his sonic screwdriver over the top to make it a bit more special that it otherwise would be. He had a landline handset in the TARDIS console at various points. And he always used to have a contemporary cellular device in his pocket, ready and able to call or text anyone - anywhere, any time. So here we have a thousand year old alien, a Time Lord, a man who's somehow learned how to control a time machine that he could never previously control, a man who's been to every conceivable corner of the universe of time and space, a man who seemingly understands virtually everything about everything, and he rigs up a mobile phone to keep in touch with his companions? You know what I think? They might've looked a bit low rent with hindsight, but in forty years I think the idea of communicating via a video-capable wrist-mounted gadget (looking, for all the world, like a 1979 Casio digital watch) will still look more Sci-Fi, less cheesy and far less dated than flitting about the universe making inter-stellar phone calls on a Nokia 8310. Capaldi's Doctor nothing will ever be as scary as coming home to find that Yeti sitting on your loo in Tooting Bec. Please bear that in mind.