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
