Day 115: A Holiday for the Doctor

It's another comedy episode as we delve once again into historical events with Donald Cotton (The Myth Makers) but instead of meeting the Ancient Greeks, today we meet cowboys. Now, this is a concept that I've possibly mentioned before, but this is an example of Doctor Who acting as a genre machine. In case I haven't mentioned it before, or you don't want to trawl through 114 posts to find an explanation for this term, then I'll explain. The TARDIS travels through time and space, and it takes its travellers on adventures. These adventures are, for the most part, different from the previous week's. Take for example going from a historical comedy with The Myth Makers, to a science fiction epic with The Daleks' Master Plan to historical drama with The Massacre after which there is a simple space adventure in The Ark and a fantasy game show in The Celestial Toymaker. Through looking at these varied genres, we can see that Doctor Who is a show where we travel to different genres, a genre machine. So why, I hear you ask, is a historical comedy so important for you to mention it here? Well, for a start, it's because it acts as a break from the high stakes adventures that we've had, the characters are allowed to relax and jokes can occur. It also means that the show remains fresh because the average viewing audience will have only recently finished watching 21 weeks of adventure, most of which ended with death and destruction. We've had 8 weeks of progressively nicer stuff, where things are finally allowed to get better for the TARDIS crew, and so a historical comedy is a natural continuation of this, because it has been the peak moment in past times for the crew to be at their happiest. Although, things will get worse quickly, and soon there'll be blood upon the sawdust at The Last Chance Saloon.