Exterminate! Regenerate!

Yes, it’s one of those posts where the author contrives to wring lessons out of a hot cultural reference. But this isn’t LinkedIn. And this one’s about Doctor Who.

I started sending books to clients at the end of projects to say thank you for hiring me. One lucky person got Exterminate! Regenerate! by John Higgs, which prompted me to flick through my copy again.

Higgs doesn’t skimp on his research and he’s a dab hand at joining dots. I loved Love And Let Die , in which he joins the dots between James Bond, The Beatles, and British culture. This book is super-saturated with nerdy goodness too.

There’s a lot to enjoy in these pages, Doctor Who fan or not: culture, media, commerce, politics, human frailty, storytelling. And Daleks.

The flicking wasn’t idle for long. If the book has an overarching theme, it’s a quest for the essence of Doctor Who; the narrative elixir that’s the source of its longevity. Higgs has several stabs at pinning it down. He also describes the different styles in which fourteen actors have played the leading role. So my brand truth ears were pricked and my brand style nose was twitching.

Doctor Who is an instructive case study because it shows that, while the essence of a brand is fixed, the character of a brand, its style, can evolve or mutate. The meaning and the value stay the same but the presentation changes. In the case of Doctor Who, the style is all over the place.

Utterly alien and absolutely lovely

I’ve collected the words that Higgs uses to describe the style of each Doctor and put them in the table below. It’s a jumble of adjectives, phrases, personas, and archetypes. His words not mine.

Every Doctor is stylish. And every Doctor’s style is their own. While ideas like charm and vulnerability are common to several incarnations, the style of Doctor Who is a bundle of contradictions:

Callous versus kind
Sarcastic versus sincere
Joyful versus irascible
Flamboyant versus emotionally repressed

And yet they’re all the same person Time Lord. Contradictions are part of the Doctor’s DNA. As Higgs says of William Hartnell:

He was the first, the original and the initial imprint of the Doctor, gifting him his mercurial temperament with its mass of contradictions.

John Higgs, Exterminate! Regenerate!

You can see the impact of that legacy below.

There are contradictions of style between eras. There are also significant changes of style within eras, as the character of a particular Doctor is reformed by the arc of their story. Higgs calls out the before and after versions of the William Hartnell and Peter Capaldi portrayals.

Higgs also quotes a Doctor Who writer in whose opinion there is no Platonic ideal of the Doctor. To them the character is a graphic equaliser of character traits that different actors and writers dial up and dial down. For this one let’s have more “godlike being” and less “excited little boy”; now lets turn up the charm and tone down the alien awkwardness. But somehow all of these variations are still unmistakably the Doctor.

Style keeps things fresh and interesting and, as long as it stays within certain boundaries, it can change significantly without hurting the brand.

You see this with brands that have changed spokesperson for an unchanged positioning. Jack Dee’s delivery for John Smiths was wry and dry. Peter Kay was blunter than blunt. But both styles worked well in support of a fixed No Nonsense positioning.

Two hearts beat as one

The Doctor has two hearts. This quirk of Time Lord physiology is written into Doctor Who canon. It’s also true of how the character is written and performed.

Katy Manning, who played Pertwee’s companion Jo Grant, has suggested that the reason why the Doctor has two hearts is because one comes from the character, and one comes from the actor playing him.

John Higgs, Exterminate! Regenerate!

On occasion, the Doctor actually has three hearts: one from the character, one from the actor, and a third from the showrunner.

When a producer or showrunner casts their first Doctor, they pick a person who is exactly what the show needs at that point in time in order to be fresh and relevant. When they come to cast their second Doctor, however, they essentially just cast themselves.

John Higgs, Exterminate! Regenerate!

Here, again, there are parallels for brand management. It’s entirely valid to refresh a brand’s presentation in order to move with the times. But I’ve also witnessed the blurring of the lines between a brand and its custodian; where the foibles or predilections of a self-important marketing director have unduly influenced the personality of a brand.

When the actor changes, and the writer changes, and the programme responds to shifts in culture and society, it’s little wonder that the Doctor’s style varies so wildly. But somehow the core essence of the character has been kept intact for more than sixty years. In the world of brand management this would be a minor miracle. The temptation to tinker is usually irresistible. The irresistible temptation to mess around with the irresistible truth.

The irresistible truth of Doctor Who

What is it that doesn’t change? What’s the constant, innate, secret sauce of the Doctor’s enduring appeal? Higgs returns to this theme several times in the book, approaching it from different angles and from the perspectives of various expert commentators.

Early on he quotes Verity Lambert, the producer of the very first series.

As Lambert said, the Doctor was ‘sometimes dangerous or unpleasant, sometimes kind, sometimes foolish. But, most importantly, he was never a member of the establishment. He was always an outsider.’

John Higgs, Exterminate! Regenerate!

If you’re looking for things about the Doctor that don’t change, the most obvious is his name (lack thereof.).

It is a title with the same direct, no-nonsense, self-explanatory power that superhero names have, like Spider-Man or Batman. There would be a Doctor, and he would be a mystery.

John Higgs, Exterminate! Regenerate!

So he’s a mysterious, anti-establishment figure.

He’s also a highly active protagonist, if not a provocateur.

Beneath that heroic mask, the character is fundamentally a trickster. The trickster is a character archetype that appears in myth and folklore throughout the world. Tricksters have almost supernatural intelligence and wit, and a transgressive ability to not fit into the structures of the world… They mock authority, question power, and they can disrupt society so that it is remade differently.

John Higgs, Exterminate! Regenerate!

The Doctor is a mysterious, anti-establishment disruptor.

But disruption can be a turn-off if it’s just gratuitous acts of grievous havoc. The Doctor’s brand of disruption is attractive because he usually does it with a twinkle in his eye, and because his actions are eccentric, if not unhinged.

We can never erase that which the writer Alan Watts called ‘the element of irreducible rascality’.

John Higgs, Exterminate! Regenerate!

It was safe, it was sane and it was logical. It was not, in other words, the spirit of Doctor Who.

John Higgs, Exterminate! Regenerate!

If I had the temerity (I do) to paraphrase and summarise Higgs, I'd say that the Doctor is a MYSTERIOUS, MAVERICK TROUBLEMAKER. That’s the irresistible truth. That’s the proposition that has enthralled generations of viewers.

Doctor Who is an agent of change. He makes the good kind of trouble, the kind that makes for ripping yarns. He’s a two-hearted, time-traveling, temperamental inciting incident that’s delivered in a telephone box.

If I wasn’t this’d probably never work

The Doctor isn’t the only mysterious, maverick troublemaker at large in our culture. Writing this post called to mind the pirate Jack Sparrow, played by Johnny Depp.

If anything, Sparrow is a more obvious rendition of the Trickster archetype than the Doctor. A pirate is the definitive anti-establishment character after all. But, like the Doctor, Sparrow makes good trouble. Like the Doctor he’s a creature of mystery. The Doctor’s mystery is of the space-time variety. Sparrow’s is supernatural. And, like the Doctor, Sparrow’s modus operandi, more often than not, is improvisation.

This clip from Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End includes my favourite Sparrowism. It’s very Doctor Who.

Admiral Beckett: You’re mad.

Jack Sparrow: Thank goodness for that because if I wasn’t this’d probably never work.

Only Johnny Depp has played Jack Sparrow. So, unlike the Doctor, the Sparrow brand has only been presented in a single style. But you can imagine him being played by other actors. The essence, the irresistible truth, of the character would be the same but the style would be different. It’s worked for Doctor Who and it’s worked for James Bond. It would work for Jack Sparrow.

Archetypes get a bad press in brand strategy circles, but I like them. There’s that Dolly Parton quote about working out who you are then doing it on purpose. Knowing and sticking to your archetype is a good way to pull this off. A strong archetype is a useful constraint. It’s a useful tool for keeping a brand on the rails. The Trickster archetype has helped Doctor Who stay true through fourteen actors across sixty years. How many brands have stayed true through fourteen marketing directors?

Superficial but super-powerful

Every archetype comes with a palette of appropriate styles. As the table above shows, there are many ways to play the Trickster. Just like there are many ways to play the Sage: think Mary Poppins, Dumbledore, Obi-Wan, The Oracle, Rafiki, Miss Honey.

A brand’s style is more superficial than its irresistible truth, but the two are inextricably linked. Or they should be.

Style is the presentation of character for an actor. It’s the presentation of culture or archetype for a brand. Superficial maybe, but super-powerful when truth and style cohere, complement, and thus compel.

And, as Doctor Who has shown, you can regenerate your brand’s presentation without exterminating its core appeal.

I don't know
I don't know which side I'm on
I don't know my right from left
Or my right from wrong
Say I'm a fool
Say I'm nothing
But if I'm a fool for you
Oh, that's something

Two Hearts Beat As One, U2