Tuesday 30 January 2018

Chips and the Doctor

By Danny Nicol
University of Westminster

Making, serving and eating chips (fries or French fries in the US and Canada) is something which recurs in Doctor Who.  An important dish in Britain (not least as part of the famous fish and chips), chips have been used in the post-2005 programme to project the closeness between the reassuringly familiar and the humdrum. 

Chips have their downside
Thus in “The End of the World” (2005), the Doctor and companion Rose Tyler witness the final moments of the planet Earth.  The TARDIS then transports them back to contemporary London, as the Doctor grimly reflects on his own dead world and on being the last of his kind.  Rose’s response to this trauma is: “I want chips!”  “Me too!” adds the Doctor.  Chips are therefore something cheering: the familiar after the unnerving.  Two years later in “The Sound of Drums” (2007), chips again represent a clinging-to-the -familiar when companion Martha Jones buys them for the Doctor and Captain Jack Harkness, the trio having returned to Britain only to find it is being governed by despotic Prime Minister Harold Saxon, in reality the Doctor’s arch-enemy the Master, who is hunting them down.

Bill Potts winks at her love interest whilst serving her
a generous portion of chips
A decade later in “The Pilot” (2017), chips serve to make banal something previously rare in Doctor Who: a romance between two women.  New companion Bill Potts, a black lesbian, tells the Doctor a yarn in which she favoured an attractive woman with extra chips when working in the university canteen, unintentionally fattening her: “Beauty or chips.  I like chips.  So does she, so that’s OK”.  The Doctor questions whether she really came to university to serve chips and promptly offers himself as her personal tutor. 

Yet the reassuringly-familiar can blur into the dull.  In “The Parting of the Ways” (2005), the Doctor deliberately separates himself from Rose to save her from the Daleks, sending her back to present-day London.   Her mum Jackie and friend Mickey take her to a chicken-and-chip shop to have chips.  Rose mentions eating chips as part of the routine of the mundane life, contrasting that to the better way of living shown by the Doctor where “you make a stand and say no”.  Here, therefore, eating chips is not cheering but depressing.  As Ken Chen observes, the scene provides the misery of banality contrasted with the escapism of adventures with the Doctor (K. Chen, “The Lovely Smallness of Doctor Who” 2008-01 Film International 52).  Again, in “The Doctor Falls” (2017), Bill Potts’ girlfriend Heather, having saved Bill’s life by turning her into a water-based being, offers Bill a choice:
“I can make you human again…I can put you back home, you can make chips, and live your life; or, you can come with me.”
Bill seemingly opts for life in her new form with Heather, rejecting the reassurance of her previous existence in favour of adventure.  It is worth noting that the two Doctor Who companions particularly associated with chips - Rose Tyler and Bill Potts - are (alongside 1960s companion Ben Jackson) the Doctor's only working class companions in the Doctor's largely middle class cohort of TARDIS fellow-travellers.  


Companion Rose Tyler shows her fondness for chips
One instance of Doctor Who’s use of chips disrupts the simple spectrum of the comforting and the familiar shading into the humdrum.  In “School Reunion” (2006) chips are deployed in something of a metaphor for privatisation.  Set in a secondary school, chips loom large in the school dinners served by Rose Tyler.  The Doctor, posing as a teacher, complains that the chips are “a bit…different” whereas Rose thinks they’re gorgeous.   Most of the teachers (who are alien Krillitane posing as humans) attach importance to the children eating the chips.  It becomes apparent that there is something odd about the oil in which the chips are cooked.  It is Krillitane oil, which boosts the children’s intelligence, enabling the alien Krillitane to use them as a giant computer.  The idea of unwholesome school dinners and the ulterior motives of those who arrange them corresponds to concerns over the contracting-out of school dinners and the way in which they contain too much processed food, leading to programmes like Jamie’s School Dinners (2005).  Yet “School Reunion” fashions a science fiction mirror image of the British problem in which poor nutrition adversely affects school performance.  Obesity, including childhood obesity, remains a major problem in Britain.  Even when it comes to chips, therefore, Doctor Who does not evade the political. 


Announcement: lecture in London on Doctor Who's politics and law: all welcome

Professor Danny Nicol will be delivering a lecture on the themes of his new book Doctor Who - A British Alien? on Tuesday 6 March 2018, 5.30pm-6.30pm at the University of Westminster, Regents Street, London.  All welcome.  Obtain your ticket via the link below.

The lecture will explore the political dimensions of Doctor Who, the world's longest-running science fiction television series, arguing that the programme is just as much about Britain and Britishness as it is about distant planets and monsters.  The lecture interrogates the substance of Doctor Who's Britishness in terms of individualism, globalisation, foreign policy adventures and the unrelenting rise of the transnational corporation.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ssh-professorial-lecture-doctor-who-a-british-alien-tickets-41943051797

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