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If you’re a Whovian — or, even more, if you’re a non-watcher who’d like a way into understanding what all the fuss is about, I’d like to recommend Jill LePore’s “The Man in the Box“:
Behind the door labelled Studio Four, where “Doctor Who” is filmed, it smells of glue and paint. Industrial-gauge steel chains hang from the ceiling, which is painted black and is so impossibly high that it feels more like a night sky than like the underside of a roof, the chains like falling stars. The only light is artificial, slanted, and green. The concrete floor is speckled and spattered. Surrounding the set, cameras, lights, and microphones stand on tripod legs of smeared chrome like an army of giant arthropod invaders, patiently waiting. In the stillness, a stagehand wearing a black hooded sweatshirt and black cargo pants rummages through a Tupperware storage box, making an awful clatter. He pulls out something metal and rusted, cradling in his tattooed hands the part that would roll away if you were to guillotine a robot. “This, this,” he mutters in quiet triumph, “is the head we need.”
“Doctor Who” is the most original science-fiction television series ever made. It is also one of the longest-running television shows of all time. (Virtually every other marathoner is a soap opera.) It was first broadcast in 1963, three years before “Star Trek,” and, with apologies to Gene Roddenberry, is smarter and, better yet, sillier. The U.S.S. Enterprise, for all its talking computers and swooshing doors, is a crabbed and pious Puritan village; Doctor Who tumbles through time and space in the Tardis, a ship that from the outside looks like an early-twentieth-century British police box, painted blue and bearing a sign on its door that reads “POLICE TELEPHONE. FREE FOR USE OF PUBLIC. ADVICE AND ASSISTANCE OBTAINABLE IMMEDIATELY.” Inside (it’s bigger on the inside), the Tardis has something of the character of the reading room of the British Library, if the British Library had a swimming pool and were a pub designed by someone who adored Frank Gehry, Lewis Carroll, and typewriters with missing keys…
Unfortunately, you’ll need access to the New Yorker archive, or a paper copy of the November 11 issue (the one with the ACA joke cover) to read the whole thing, but it’s worth the effort. Late notice, because I just got around to reading my newstand copy.
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Apart from picking over the remains, what’s on the agenda tonight?