“At that age, it’s obviously the terror, the strongest emotion you will feel when watching television. That and laughter,” Davies answers, later adding, “Most television kind of makes you smile and just burbles along and might make you excited if there’s a chase.”
Those two ingredients, scaring you, and making you laugh, are the things Davies believes make for the most powerful television.
“You feel it more than you would feel anything else,” he tells Tennant. “We all loved the Famous Five or Grange Hill or stuff like that, but you wouldn’t quite feel it in the way you feel terror and you feel laughter. It’s just on that size of things. It’s big, and when it’s frightening it’s terrifying.”
When you put it like that, it’s perhaps not so hard to see why Doctor Who has had the impact that it has. From the start, the show has straddled the line between the genuinely terrifying and the terrifyingly hilarious.
Monsters to Make You Scream… with Laughter?
If you’re a lifelong fan of Doctor Who, somebody who, as former showrunner Steven Moffat says, is annoyed that it’s a kids’ show rather than the serious science fiction drama it was when you were eight, then the chances are you have at least one core, primordial moment of fear that came from watching an episode of Doctor Who.
For me, it’s watching the shop mannequins come alive in “Spearhead from Space” (from a rerun in the nineties, I’m not that old). For younger fans it might be the moment where Richard Wilson’s face morphed into a gas mask in “The Empty Child”, or the entirety of “Blink” (although both my kids insist that’s not scary at all and don’t know what I make such a big deal about). For other elder Millennials and Gen-Xers, it might be the mutant haemovores in “The Curse of Fenric”, or for older fans, the titular “Robots of Death”.
