Beautifully written and researched, funny, thoughtful, insightful, Exterminate! Regenerate! The Story of Doctor Who (or sometimes Exterminate/Regenerate) by John Higgs is an outstanding book. It takes the reader from William Hartnell to Ncuti Gatwa in a piece of outstanding media criticism and it thrills with love of the programme.
Exterminate! Regenerate! isn’t a retread of previous histories of Doctor Who: there is much new material. Higgs writes illuminatingly of the varying conditions in which the show was made and consumed over 61 years, including the BBC’s varying attitude to it: from indifference, to hostility, bafflement, enthusiasm, hatred, to seeing lots of dollar signs. He wittily equates the BBC in the “real” world to the Time Lords in the programme’s narrative, who have a habit of interfering and intervening in the Doctor’s life when they dislike or disapprove of the path he or she is treading.
Higgs also furnishes new biographical detail on all the actors who have played the Doctor, and on many of the production team. He has, for example, interviewed Chris Chibnall and gently gets him to justify his creation of the Timeless Child.
Higgs relates the different periods of the show to changes in society and broadcasting. For example, he writes of the current difficulties of drawing people’s attention to Doctor Who in the noisy, digital, social media age of the present, when audiences have fragmented and all content is niche content. As Higgs points out, Doctor Who in the 1960s was one of the only genre shows in the UK – if you wanted to watch science fiction in the UK, there was only Doctor Who. Doctor Who in 2025 is one genre show among many and has to draw attention to itself: Davies’ solution, Higgs writes, is to make the programme as noisy as possible. Higgs writes with critical insight about the Chibnall and second Davies eras of Doctor Who, employing gentle and sympathetic criticism of some of the assumptions made by both showrunners.
Exterminate! Regenerate! is also an intellectual treat. Higgs muses about the nature of identity and storytelling, writing about how we respond to fictions, and fictional characters, as though they are real, and real people. The same part of our brain empathises and sympathises with fictional characters like the Doctor and his companions, as it does with real people; we therefore get as upset if bad things (like bad writing) happen to these fictional characters as we do if bad things happen to real people. This psychology explains fans’ real grief at the wrenching changes made to Doctor Who under the reigns of John Nathan-Turner, Chibnall, and Davies.
If all this sounds too cerebral, these intellectual (and stimulating and thoughtful) diversions only make up a fraction of the book. There is much fun with new behind the scenes information and gossip. Exterminate! Regenerate! is full of treats and, much as I want to share them, I don’t want to spoil the surprises to be uncovered by reading the book yourself. However…
To give you a flavour of the treats in store, there is a wonderful treatment of the aborted Patrick Troughton story, The Prison in Space. Far from being an outline that passed across the script editor’s desk, The Prison in Space very nearly got made. The Prison in Space was a sex comedy (a bold new genre for Doctor Who) in the mould of the Carry On and Confessions Of… films of the late sixties and early seventies. It featured a society run by women, policed by ladies in microskirts called Dolly Guards (oh dear). Jamie infiltrates the ranks of the Dolly Guards himself: only he can do so, the Doctor muses, because Jamie, used to wearing a kilt, would be able to walk comfortably in a microskirt. Higgs rightly observes that, although the story as written might bore children, Jamie in a microskirt would be “a treat for all ages”. Zoe is hypnotised and becomes a Dolly Guard herself: the hypnotism can only be broken by Jamie giving her a good spanking. A director was assigned to this most interesting story, casting had begun, and costume designs were sketched until producer Derrick Sherwin came to his senses and cancelled The Prison in Space at the last moment. (Didn’t we get The Krotons as a last-minute replacement? Now there was a high-quality story…)
Exterminate! Regenerate! is a profound book, an intellectual treat; it is beautifully written and very funny. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Exterminate! Regenerate! The Story of Doctor Who is available now.
