Saving Doctor Who: Introduction

Doctor Who seems to have dematerialised for the forseeable future. The Disney deal fell through, Russel T Davies is no longer involved, and the next Christmas Special has been cancelled - or rather, once the news of RTD's departure came out, he was forced to admit it had never been commissioned in the first place. Worse still, the last few seasons hadn't made the slightest bit of sense, and the last episode wrote the story into a corner that RTD's successor will have great difficulty writing their way out of. (Presumably RTD was not expecting the Disney deal to fail or the BBC to lose patience with him when he wrote that). It looks like the show will be off air for some considerable time - RTD hinted as much in an interview with Newsround after the Disney deal fell through, in which he said

The viewers of Newsround will grow up.

It's likely that he already knew he was going at that point (a drama he'd written for Channel 4 came out just before it was announced that he was leaving Doctor Who, that didn't happen overnight, and he wouldn't have done it if he had other commitments) , and he seems to have been envisioning a gap of at least 5 years before the BBC tried to revive the show again. But what should Doctor Who be like when it does return? The last few seasons have been as divisive as they have been incoherent. How can it become a show that matters again? Can it regenerate into a show that people love? What do we want from Doctor Who? I've got my own ideas, and over the next week or so I'll be putting them forward in a series of articles. Each will address a different aspect of the making of Doctor Who, and I'll try to analyse what went wrong with it, how it has been done right in the past, and what I think should happen going forward. I'll be referring a lot to 20th Century Doctor Who, which I think generally had better stories. The esssays I'm planning are:

1. Pace and Structure
2. Tone, Morality and Politics
3. Worldbuilding
4. Visual Effects
5. Behind the Scenes
6. Conclusions

Together, they will comprise my manifesto for how to recreate Doctor Who better than ever. I welcome feedback, as long as it aims to improve my ideas, not shoot them down. As the fan community is so divided at the moment, I can't expect everyone to agree with me, and some of the things I think were mistakes are likely to have vociferous defenders. I'm also aware that the more divisive storylines of recent years have attracted knee-jerk reactions from the more obnoxious elements of the fanbase. However, just because there are people who object to something for stupid reasons, it doesn't mean there are not intelligent reasons for criticising it. If I get sufficient constructive feedback, I'll add a postscript discussing the points raised, but I won't engage with people who accuse me of prejudice, or claim to agree with me for prejudiced reasons.

The Trouble With Chris Chibnall

Chris Chibnall's writing for Doctor Who has generally been of poor quality. Dinosaurs on a Spaceship was basically silly. It was never explained why The Doctor would want to get together a posse including Nefertiti and a big game hunter (people who kill for pleasure aren't The Doctor's usual choice of friends), nor why Nefertiti would chose to elope with the big game hunter (who seemed the sort of man who'd treat a woman like another trophy) at the end. The Power of Three started with an interesting premise (the Slow Invasion), but ironically the ending was rushed - The Doctor just waved the Sonic Screwdriver at a control panel and everything was all right. 42 revolved around a gimmick and doesn't stick in the mind. Even his best story, The Hungy Earth / Cold Blood was a by the numbers Silurian story (human activity awakes the Silurians, they want to reclaim their planet, The Doctor attempts to broker a peace, negotiations are botched, Silurians forced back into hibernation) with no original ideas in it.

He was even worse as the showrunner on Torchwood, the "adult" (as in very, very childish) spin-off from Doctor Who which followed the misadventures of an alien-hunting squad so top secret that everybody in Cardiff knew who they were, apart from the heroine's boyfriend. Said heroine was granted immunity from character development, as this was a terminal disease in Torchwood. The show never really found a tone that worked. Two episodes written by Chibnall personally made you wish you had a vial of Retcon handy. Countrycide was a nasty cannibal hillbillies story, transferred to Wales. Cyberwoman's premise contained a massive plot hole - Ianto Jones has supposedly smuggled a cyberconversion unit containing his partially-converted girlfriend (this was before Ianto was gay) into the Torchwood Hub without anybody noticing. Even worse, while Doctor Who consistently portrays cyberconversion as a painful and dehumanising process, Torchwood portrayed it as fetish.

WARNING: YOU CANNOT UNSEE THIS

I did warn you.

Chibnall's defenders will say, "But Broadchurch was good." Well, it was if you like relentlessly depressing contemporary crime dramas. But in terms of tone, story, setting and intended audience, Broadchurch has nothing in common with Doctor Who. It seems that what he's best at writing is stuff that's nothing like Doctor Who at all.

More relevant is Camelot, which I don't think was a great success. I only saw one or two episodes, but the writing on it didn't seem that great. One thing I do remember is that one character (I think it was Guinevere) was introduced in a dream sequence in which she was seen dancing naked on a beach for no readily apparent reason.

So, when this second-rate writer, with a history of objectifying women, is made showrunner on Doctor Who, what does he do to make people love him? He resorts to gimmicks, of course, and his chosen gimmick in the unfortunate Josie Whittaker. She faces the prospect of having to carry an impossible burden of expectations while struggling with ropy scripts and misjudged tone, and possibly an inappropriate costume. It seems like the Tardis is taking us back to 1984.

When Colin Baker took the role, he wanted to portray a dark and edgy Doctor, something along the lines of Peter Capaldi's portrayal. However, the writing team at the time weren't up to the job, and interpreted it as brash, unlikable, and prone to dangerous mood swings. The Twin Dilemma is one of the few stories that can claim to be anywhere near as bad as Love & Monsters. Few of Colin Baker's stories were any good, but instead of laying the responsibility for this with John Nathan turner, where it belonged, the BBC made a scapegoat of Colin Baker, and sacked him. It didn't really help, and while some better writers came along later, Doctor Who was cancelled in 1989.

That's why I've started a petition to remove Chris Chibnall. Please sign it.

Conscripts on Doctor Who

As mentioned before, my interests in conlanging and Doctor Who don't overlap as much as I'd like, due to Tardis telepathically translating everything. This apparently goes for writing too - in The Impossible Planet the Doctor realises that they're in a particularly dangerous situation when they encounter a script that the Tardis can't translate.

However, something odd has been going on this season. Amidst the rumours of the Hybrid, the theme of Truth of Consequences, the story of Ashildr, and the build up to the death of Clara, there's been another, more subtle theme in the background. In Under the Lake / Before the Flood, the Fisher King scratches this on the wall of his hearse.

The Doctor can't read it, and has to get Cass to lip-read what the ghosts are saying before he can work out what it means. The reason that the Tardis can't translate it is that the writing is intended to plant a message in the mind of the reader. Also, in that story we have the use of British Sign Language, which the Tardis can't translate because The Doctor's forgotten it.

In The Zygon Invasion / The Zygon Inversion we see this where the Zygon rebels have been active.

Neither The Doctor, Clara nor the Tardis is present in these scenes, and whatever the poster says doesn't come into the story.

In Sleep No More, we see this Indo-Japanese script (apparently a hybrid on Kanji and Devanagari) on Le Verrier Space Station.

In this case it's not translated because what we're seeing has been hacked from the visual cortices of those who experienced the events, most of whom could read the script to start with. As in Under the Lake / Before the Flood, Ramussen's broadcast is meant to be a vector for mental malware.

Finally, in Face the Raven, we get this.

This is a bit of an oddity. It's the Aurebesh script from Star Wars, which is simply a cipher for the Roman alphabet (Star Wars never having cared about plausible languages). It says Delorean, which is presumably a Back to the Future reference. It looks like this is just an in-joke.

So, is this leading up to something? Might Doctor Who be about to start using conlangs? And if so, please can I make one?

Alan Fridge

"From now on all rumours must be attributed to Alan Fridge!! BBC mole, Cardiff insider—Alan Fridge!!!"
—Steven Moffat (personal friend of Alan Fridge), Outpost Gallifrey Forums, 6 August 2007

Last year, a tabloid newspaper published a rumour that Jenna Coleman (who plays Clara) was leaving Doctor Who. It was, of course, complete rubbish, Jenna was quick to make it clear that she wasn't going to answer the question either way, since it was a goldmine of free publicity - something that the rest of the cast, crew and publicity department got on board with. Just before Christmas, when the fact that Jenna was staying couldn't be kept secret any longer, the rumourmonger tried to save face by claiming that she'd had a last minute change of heart, and that the ending of _Last Christmas_ had been hastily rewritten to accomodate this. However, the ending certainly didn't look tacked-on.

So who is Alan Fridge? My theory is that he's a low-ranking member of the production team, a runner or somebody like that. He's around a bit during filming, and picks up things like the row between Clara and The Doctor in _Kill the Moon_, or the old Clara scene in _Last Christmas_, but he doesn't have the big picture. He leaks information to the tabloids to make himself feel important, and probably for a kickback.

Orpheus in the TARDIS

As The Doctor noted in Dark Water, almost every culture has legends of an afterlife, and throughout this season we have seen Missy and her assistant Seb welcoming various characters to it. But which culture's afterlife is it? Despite Missy referring to it as "The Promissed Land" or "Heaven", it's not any contemporary religion's paradise. "The Nethersphere" is a more apt name, as it seems to based on the ancient Greek Underworld.

The plot of Dark Water parallels the Greek myth of Orpheus and Euridice. Clara takes the role of Orpheus, trying to recover Danny from the Underworld. In some versions of the Orpheus myth, Orpheus is unwittingly responsible for Euridice's death, as the fact that his music tames all wild beasts has left Euridice unafraid of snakes. Clara is unwittingly responsible for Danny's death, since her phone call distracted him while he was crossing the road. Volcanoes are often portrayed as gateways to the underworld.

There were various rivers in the Underworld. The most famous was the Styx, which was notably murky (stygian) - it was dark water. Having been bathed in the Styx was what gave Achilles his famous invulnerability - a power he shares with the Cybermen. Another of them was the Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. Those who drank from the Lethe forgot their former lives, and could then be reincarnated. The chance to forget his former life is what Seb offers Danny, although he doesn't explain that he's planning to reincarnate Danny as a Cyberman.

In the Orpheus myth, it is scepticism that proves Orpheus' downfall. Unwilling to trust Hades (who has never given up one of his subjects before), Orpheus breaks his promiss not to look back, and thus loses Euridice forever. Clara, encouraged by the Doctor to demand proof of Danny's identity, allows him to goad her into cutting off the conversation (ironically by repeating what she was telling him when he died), because he does not want her to risk her own life. We end the episode with the threat that Clara may lose him forever…

Ranking Doctor Who stories and writers

What with the 50th Anniversary last year, I thought it would be fun to sort the Doctor Who stories of the 21st Century into my personal order of preference. I wrote a Python script that repeatedly asked me Is Story A better than Story B? and used my answers as the basis of a binary sort that put the stories in order. The following is completely subjective, and I probably wouldn't even get the same result if I did it again, but here it is anyway.

1. Blink by Steven Moffat
2. The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances by Steven Moffat
3. The Girl in the Fireplace by Steven Moffat
4. Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead by Steven Moffat
5. The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon by Steven Moffat
6. The Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone by Steven Moffat
7. The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People by Matthew Graham
8. The Crimson Horror by Mark Gatiss
9. The Doctor's Wife by Neil Gaiman
10. The Day of the Doctor by Steven Moffat
11. Cold War by Mark Gatiss
12. Midnight by Russell T Davies
13. The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood by Chris Chibnall
14. A Town Called Mercy by Toby Whithouse
15. Human Nature / The Family of Blood by Paul Cornell
16. Night Terrors by Mark Gatiss
17. Asylum of the Daleks by Steven Moffat
18. The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit by Matt Jones
19. Hide by Neil Cross
20. The Name of the Doctor by Steven Moffat
21. Nightmare in Silver by Neil Gaiman
22. The Time of the Doctor by Steven Moffat
23. The Bells of Saint John by Steven Moffat
24. The Angels Take Manhattan by Steven Moffat
25. The Wedding of River Song by Steven Moffat
26. The Eleventh Hour by Steven Moffat
27. The Girl Who Waited by Tom MacRae
28. A Good Man Goes to War by Steven Moffat
29. Let's Kill Hitler by Steven Moffat
30. The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang by Steven Moffat
31. The Unquiet Dead by Mark Gatiss
32. 42 by Chris Chibnall
33. The Power of Three by Chris Chibnall
34. Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS by Steven Thompson
35. Dinosaurs on a Spaceship by Chris Chibnall
36. The God Complex by Toby Whithouse
37. The Doctor's Daughter by Stephen Greenhorn
38. Planet of the Ood by Keith Temple
39. The Vampires of Venice by Toby Whithouse
40. The End of Time by Russell T Davies
41. The Waters of Mars by Russell T Davies and Phil Ford
42. The Stolen Earth / Journey's End by Russell T Davies
43. The Fires of Pompeii by James Moran
44. Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords by Russell T Davies
45. Rise of the Cybermen / The Age of Steel by Tom MacRae
46. Amy's Choice by Simon Nye
47. The Snowmen by Steven Moffat
48. The Curse of the Black Spot by Stephen Thompson
49. Victory of the Daleks by Mark Gatiss
50. The Rings of Akhaten by Neil Cross
51. The Unicorn and the Wasp by Gareth Roberts
52. The Sontaran Strategem / The Poison Sky by Helen Raynor
53. The Beast Below by Steven Moffat
54. School Reunion by Toby Whithouse
55. Vincent and the Doctor by Richard Curtiss
56. The Lodger by Gareth Roberts
57. Tooth and Claw by Russell T Davies
58. Dalek by Robert Shearman
59. Closing Time by Gareth Roberts
60. The Shakespeare Code by Gareth Roberts
61. Planet of the Dead by Russell T Davies and Gareth Roberts
62. Daleks in Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks by Helen Raynor
63. Rose by Russell T Davies
64. Smith and Jones by Russell T Davies
65. Army of Ghosts / Doomsday by Russell T Davies
66. Partners in Crime by Russell T Davies
67. A Christmas Carol by Steven Moffat
68. The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe by Steven Moffat
69. Turn Left by Russell T Davies
70. The Lazarus Experiment by Stephen Greenhorn
71. New Earth by Russell T Davies
72. The Next Doctor by Russell T Davies
73. Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways by Russell T Davies
74. The Idiot's Lantern by Mark Gatiss
75. Gridlock by Russell T Davies
76. Father's Day by Paul Cornell
77. The Runaway Bride by Russell T Davies
78. The Christmas Invasion by Russell T Davies
79. Fear Her by Matthew Graham
80. Aliens of London / World War Three by Russell T Davies
81. The Long Game by Russell T Davies
82. Voyage of the Damned by Russell T Davies
83. The End of the World by Russell T Davies
84. Boom Town by Russell T Davies
85. Love & Monsters by Russell T Davies

As you can see, there's a lot of Steven Moffat stories at the top, and a lot of Russel T Davies at the bottom. Also, many of Steven Moffat's best stories were written before he was showrunner - a showrunner has to write more episodes, so they're not always going to be his absolute best. I also sorted the writers in order or the median rank of their stories, and got the following results.

1. Neil Gaiman

   Stories written

   2

   Best

   The Doctor's Wife (9)

   Worst

   Nightmare in Silver (21)

2. Matt Jones

   Stories written

   The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (18)

3. Steven Moffat

   Stories written

   21

   Best

   Blink (1)

   Worst

   The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe (68)

   Typical

   The Bells of Saint John (23)

4. Mark Gatiss

   Stories written

   6

   Best

   The Crimson Horror (8)

   Worst

   The Idiot's Lantern (74)

   Typical

   Night Terrors (16)

   The Unquiet Dead (31)

5. Chris Chibnall

   Stories written

   4

   Best

   The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood (13)

   Worst

   Dinosaurs on a Spaceship (35)

   Typical

   42 (32)

   The Power of Three (33)

6. Steven Thompson

   Stories written

   Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS (34)

7. Neil Cross

   Stories written

   2

   Best

   Hide (19)

   Worst

   The Rings of Akhaten (50)

8. Tom MacRae

   Stories written

   2

   Best

   The Girl Who Waited (27)

   Worst

   Rise of the Cybermen / The Age of Steel (45)

9. Toby Whithouse

   Stories written

   4

   Best

   A Town Called Mercy (14)

   Worst

   School Reunion (54)

   Typical

   The God Complex (36)

   The Vampires of Venice (39)

10. Keith Temple

    Stories written

    Planet of the Ood (38)

11. Phil Ford

    Stories written

    The Waters of Mars (41)

12. James Moran

    Stories written

    The Fires of Pompeii (43)

13. Matthew Graham

    Stories written

    2

    Best

    The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People (7)

    Worst

    Fear Her (79)

14. Paul Cornell

    Stories written

    2

    Best

    Human Nature / The Family of Blood (15)

    Worst

    Father's Day (76)

15. Simon Nye

    Stories written

    Amy's Choice (46)

16. Stephen Thompson

    Stories written

    The Curse of the Black Spot (48)

17. Stephen Greenhorn

    Stories written

    2

    Best

    The Doctor's Daughter (37)

    Worst

    The Lazarus Experiment (70)

18. Richard Curtiss

    Stories written

    Vincent and the Doctor (55)

19. Helen Raynor

    Stories written

    2

    Best

    The Sontaran Strategem / The Poison Sky (52)

    Worst

    Daleks in Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks (62)

20. Robert Shearman

    Stories written

    Dalek (58)

21. Gareth Roberts

    Stories written

    5

    Best

    The Unicorn and the Wasp (51)

    Worst

    Planet of the Dead (61)

    Typical

    Closing Time (59)

22. Russell T Davies

    Stories written

    24

    Best

    Midnight (12)

    Worst

    Love & Monsters (85)

    Typical

    Turn Left (69)

    New Earth (71)

A surprise at the top of the list - despite having written 7 of the top 10 episodes on my list, Steven Moffat only comes third on the writers' list. This is because his season opener and finale episodes from his time as showrunner tend to rank a bit lower (although still respectable). It also shows how difficult it is to make the comparison when the number of episodes written varies so much. RTD fans will no doubt be howling with rage that he comes bottom of the list of writers, but despite everything he did for the show, he just so happens to have written more of the episodes I find weak than anybody else. Midnight was very good though, and narrowly missed out on getting into the top 10. One thing that's not surprising is that Steven Moffat's weakest episode was a Christmas Special - Christmas Specials are generally weak. You're free to debate these lists as much as you like. However, please don't try to convince me that Love & Monsters has any redeeming features at all.

Doctor Who: The Almost People

The Almost People is a tale of humanity lost and found. As Jen, the Ganger we had most sympathy with last week is driven by her desire for revenge to become more and more monstrous, Cleeve, the human who was most monstrous last week, acknowledges her vulnerability and comes good. The other Gangers reluctantly agree to Jen's plan to destroy the humans, believing it to be their only chance of survival.

The Doctor trusts his Ganger immediately, but Amy finds she can't. She does, however, confide in him about the future Doctor's death, possibly hoping that it was the Ganger who died. She also tells the Doctor about Weird Eyepatch Woman, although the Doctor initally dismisses this as "just a Time Memory". Rory finds two Jens, and a fight breaks out between them, ending with one of them falling into a pool of acid and dissolving, revealing her to be a Ganger. When the surviving Jen shows Rory the pile of discarded Gangers, we are reminded that the Gangers do have a genuine grievance against the humans, but then we discover that the real Jen is dead. Her Ganger, having created another Ganger of herself for the purpose of destroying it to trick Rory into helping her, has crossed a line even by her own standards.

Rory and one of the Doctors have been captured by the Gangers, and base is heading for destruction, with the remaining Doctor and the surviving humans strugging to contain the acid, when Adam's son phones for his birthday. Adam's Ganger goes to get his original, only to find him dying. Being the Human who found it easiest to identify with his Ganger, Adam then hands his life over to his duplicate. The other Gangers no longer support Jen, and help the surviving humans to escape.

At the end, some of the survivors are humans and some are Gangers. We discover that the Doctors had switched boots earlier, so presumably the real Doctor knows about his assasination now. Although the Ganger Doctor and the Ganger Cleeve were dissolved stopping the now completely monstrous Jen, the possiblity that they could reconstitute themselves is left open. But ther's a bigger revalation left to come.

You remember there was a thowaway line last week about how the Flesh could even duplicate clothes? Well, I'd been wondering for a while why Amy, who loves dressing up, had been wearing the same outfit all season. It turned out that since Day of the Moon, the Amy we've been seeing has been a Ganger, and that the real Amy was being held prisoner somewhere. This explains why the Tardis couldn't decide whether she was pregnant or not - the Ganger wasn't, the real Amy was. Now, she's about to give birth, while held captive by the Weird Eyepatch Woman.

By the way, did anyone else think that the episode titles should have been the other way round?

Doctor Who: The Rebel Flesh

The Rebel Flesh brought an unusual element of hard SF into Doctor Who. Programmable matter is an idea that nanotechnologists are actively working on. It's role in the story was to explore the familiar idea of artificial people - here, the "Gangers" (short for Doppelgangers were being used to undertake hazardous work (mining deadly acid) as a safety precuation for their human operators. The opening scene brought home how this could dehumanize the operators - when a Ganger falls into a vat of acid, his colleagues are more concerned about the loss of his protective suit than him - and at this point, we don't know that he's a Ganger.

The Doctor is clearly up to something - he's planning to drop Amy and Rory off for chips and deal with this one himself. It also becomes apparent later in the episode that he already knows something about The Flesh, and isn't telling anyone what. Having bluffed his way into the facility with the Psychic Paper (a device that's being used more sparingly of late), the Dcotor inspects The Flesh in its vat, and it inspects him. After the rather creepy sight of a Ganger being created, we get the solar storm that knocks everybody out, ruptures the acid pipes, and makes the Gangers independent of their originals. The Frankenstein reference is obvious, but it reminded me more closely of Short Circuit.

The Gangers now have all the memories of their human originals. As Rory gets to know Jen, we find that they are frightened and confused. So are the humans, who at first think of the free Gangers as nothing but a threat. The Doctor introduces the Gangers to their originals, and at first it seems that there's some sort of understanding developing between the Gangers and the humans. But as in The Hungry Earth and Cold Blood, somebody has to go and ruin everything - in this case it's Cleeve, the leader, who electrocutes one of the Gangers - I think. Since the Gangers look identical to the Humans at this point, it could easily have been a Ganger killing a Human, a Ganger killing a Ganger or a Human killing a Human. At this point, our sympathies lie very much with the Gangers, but as Ganger Jen, the one that we have most empathy with, encourages her fellows to rise up in revolt, the waters become considerably muddier. The humans try to barricade themselves into the safest part of the base, but Rory is left outside, and in with them is a Ganger... of The Doctor.

All the ingredients in this story are familiar - artificial humans, a base under siege, a conflict that The Doctor tries to prevent but can't, sympathetic monsters and unsympathetic humans, The Doctor being cut off from the Tardis, the duplicate of The Doctor. It's the way they've been mixed that comes off really well in this story.

One last detail... Amy saw the weird woman with the eyepatch again.

Fortieth post Wordle

Well, we can see what I've been writing about recently, can't we?
Two interesting things to note - one is that The Doctor's Wife seems to dominate the Doctor Who related writing - I ended up writing quite a big post about that one. However, I'm glad to see that Doctor Who isn't sqeezing everything else out.

Guess what my next post's going to be about?

Musical moods

Some colleagues of mine are running an experiment to find out what you can deduce about a television programme from its signature tune. The experiment is described in more detail in the BBC R&D Blog.

I had a go myself earlier - you have to listen to a number of theme tunes and then answer questions about each one. The questions change from tune to tune - quite a clever piece of experimental design, in that it prevents you from getting into a rut where you're calculating your answers before the music's finished. Hopefully, it will enable my colleagues to train an AI to recognise genre and mood from theme music.

PS - sorry for the lack of posts recently.

Do We Really Need The Moon?

I used to be an astronomer (Ph.D from Leicester, studying Active Galactic Nuclei) so I quite enjoyed Do We Really Need The Moon? on BBC 2 last night. The programme explored the effects the Moon has on the Earth, and how those effects have been helpful to the development of life.

I also found the presenter really interesting. If you look at my profile photo, you'll see that I belong to the same demographic group as most people with physical sciences Ph.Ds. Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock is in the intersection of two groups who are severly underrepresented in the physical sciences. On top of which, she mentioned that she is dyslexic, which is a condition that can limit a person's educational opportunities. Hopefully, people who had thought that they weren't the sort of people who could be a scientist will have seen the programme and realised that maybe they could.