Sea Devils And Die: GeroniMoffat's Doctor Who In The 2010s

the sheer implausible scale of that rumour (assuming it's the one that's been going for the last two months and keeps being denied by the main episode-hunter-guy) makes it ludicrous to even consider.

can you imagine getting just Evil Of The Daleks ep 1 though? The Doctor and Jamie go antiquing for 20 minutes!

3/4 Beatles not impressed

https://fbcdn-sphotos-a-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/p480x480/375572_512458492142180_1924225807_n.jpg

part of me hopes it's true just to see sic speechless <3

Yeah a lot of people have been pointing out many of those episodes never aired in Africa... but damn, if it were true!!!

um apropos of nothing except: this happened today on twitter and it was awesome

http://i412.photobucket.com/albums/pp201/sharonjoy666/1F3D4BAE-B106-49F6-AFE5-8A8E91B59E1A-10538-000006B9D15C86D4_zps731dc5b2.jpg

http://www.private-eye.co.uk/sections.php?section_link=media_news&issue=1342

eeeeesh

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-23267085

I can't tell if that's cool or horrible. Leaning towards cool?

That's pretty convincing actually.

The likeness is uncanny! I just mean the overall "the story of the creation of Doctor Who" thing; I like watching the actors talk about their time on the show but watching a fictionalized step-removed account of the show's beginnings isn't as instantly appealing to me.

Oh I quite like behind the scenes dramas, and the BBC tends to be rather good at them.

Though with Gatiss' involvement who knows...

I was going to say that I didn't quite get why ppl were so down on Gatiss, largely because I think Nightshade is something of an underrated classic from the Virgin books of the 90s, but then I saw he wrote "The Idiot's Lantern" and "Victory of the Daleks" so um yeah

I like the man generally, big fan of League of Gentlemen of course, but his Doctor Who related projects don't tend to come out too great.

I really liked "The Unquiet Dead" and "Night Terrors", and most of "Cold War" and "The Crimson Horror" though

The Unquiet Dead was fantastic, granted.

Crimson Horror ok, Cold War had some good bits and some awful bits, I can remember next to nothing about Night Terrors. Something to do with a doll house?

Yeah, that was the one with the terrified kid and ppl getting zapped into a dollhouse populated with creepy mannequins that would hunt the trapped ppl down and mannequinize them

Rings a bell, I suspect I watched it drunk.

Was about to tap out why I don't like Gatiss involvement in who and then realised it's more or less the same reason why I don't like Gaiman

Actually:

There's a whole vast population of psychogeographers and people who read Fortean Times and people who like Iain Sinclair and people who like Doctor Who, and the problem with these people getting their hands on a franchise is that they're not actually weird, they're just interested in weird things, and what they produce often looks like a checklist of things you'd expect to see.

Gatiss is one of these people.

The League of Gentlemen TV show was a patchwork of references to Hammer Horror, The Wicker Man, Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Who, and when it worked it worked because it was written at a cultural-historical position - 1999 - where

a) a sense of dark millennial horrors was not out of place, but also

b) it was possible to look back on the whole of British 20th century horror-sci-fi-pop-cult and have an awareness of all these things as fitting a pattern, a pattern that might not have been so obvious actually *in the days of* Hammer, old Who, etc. And be able to laugh at them as being weird and old fashioned but also to be charmed by them and cherish them (and find in them a refuge if you were, in some way, queer).

The problem is that this stance of ironic distance is parasitic on earnest production. Even ... vampiric ... one might say.

It struggles to stay fresh, more than ten years after the first League of Gentleman tv show, as evinced by the piss-poor Psychoville and the annoying Gatiss contribution to the MR James Christmas Ghost Story and A Field in England (zzz). Gatiss and friends goofing around with their allusions and knowing winks seem thoroughly dated in a way that even Christopher Lee being the dark lord of Summerisle surrounded by grainy 70s nudity doesn't. The people putting together monster costumes for old Who out of bubble-wrap were sincerely trying to scare us.

Daleks used to be a reference to actual Nazis which, if not the kids watching, then at least their parents would have real, vivid memories of; this is why they were scary; now Daleks are merely a reference to Daleks; this is why they are not scary. Oh, and the too-quick schizo editing of new Who (qua new TV in general) really, really shuts down any attempt to lovingly recreate the atmosphere of old, weird, horror sci-fi pop cult, which relied on slowness and credulity to get its creepy effect. It leaves room only for knowing winks and chuckles.

Interesting! But also Gatiss's stories have just been a bit, you know, crap. Look at his Sherlock episodes, too - he's a really clunky writer.

Are X-Files and Buffy the last shows to successfully do both irony and earnestness? It does seem like a very 90s thing. Even those shows both kind of ended up combusting from being pulled in too many tonal directions at once.

You mean with X-Files being to the Twilight Zone and B-Movies and popular alien abduction and conspiracy theories, as League of Gentlemen is to Hammer Horror and etc?

I think I'd agree if so. Fringe, for example, probably is to the X-Files what Psychoville is to League of Gentlemen and there's a similar dilution going on in each transition

I preferred Psychoville to LoG, overall. It was the more focused Fawlty Towers to LoG's scattershot Flying Circus.

That's a great analogy and yep, I definitely agree.

Daleks used to be a reference to actual Nazis which, if not the kids watching, then at least their parents would have real, vivid memories of; this is why they were scary; now Daleks are merely a reference to Daleks; this is why they are not scary. Oh, and the too-quick schizo editing of new Who (qua new TV in general) really, really shuts down any attempt to lovingly recreate the atmosphere of old, weird, horror sci-fi pop cult, which relied on slowness and credulity to get its creepy effect. It leaves room only for knowing winks and chuckles.

This is really well put, and I feel this effect going on in a lot of contemporary film/tv. I associate it with Quentin Tarantino, among others. Maybe I'm wrong in this? I also feel like the trend of excess gore and "torture porn" is a technique to try and get around the distancing effect of referentiality, and to try and reinstate creepiness and horror.

Isn't he actually claiming that referentiality is what they lost, because it used to refer to something and now it doesn't? Not that I really buy that for two reasons:

One is that the kids were still terrified of the Daleks, if they were written correctly - I would suspect that they became effectively "shouting metallic idiots" before the end of the period which cardamon was a nostalgically remembered kid during.

And secondly unless there were "meet a member of the German National Socialist Party" travelling sideshows that I don't know about, their parent are scared of depictions of Nazis in film and TV.

Hah, "shouting metallic idiots" is a quote of mark s being OTM elsewhere, which this piece for Freaky Trigger is a good example of even if it er doesn't include that quite.

Moffatt has done straight-up scary really well on several occasions, but I get the sense that everyone involved only includes Daleks very begrudgingly at this stage.

If I were a kid I'd have been pretty freaked out by the Dalek in the museum coming back to life, but as a general rule one Dalek is scarier than a whole army.

Isn't there some contractual thing that they've got to have at least one Dalek per season or something?

If I were a kid I'd have been pretty freaked out by the Dalek in the museum coming back to life, but as a general rule one Dalek is scarier than a whole army.

OTM. This was the best use of a Dalek since, er, Dalek.

Oooo wheee oooo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loGm3vT8EAQ

Fairly excited despite myself.

That made me far happier than it should

*squee*

Ned, do you actually watch Dr Who?

Not on any sort of constant basis -- marking one of the few clear differences between DJP and myself when it comes to general pop culture obsessions! But besides the steeped-in-it-all crew here and the other threads, both my girlfriend and a number of close friends are pretty dyed-in-the-wool, so I pick up on a lot of it by default, including the recurring characters/species/overall arcs, and I've seen a slew of old and new episodes over time (if anything I still think of Tom Baker as the default doctor thanks to endless PBS rebroadcasts in the late seventies/early eighties, though I do distinctly remember the Peter Davison episode where Adric dies from the first time it ran in America as well). Given how great Capaldi is in general I could well start watching regularly next season, though like a lot of folks here (and my gf et al as mentioned) a little Murray Gold goes a fuck of a long way, and as my sweetie put it the other week, "I think Moffat is hellbent on making the Doctor and his version of Sherlock the same character."

that last is p drastically reductive and inaccurate imo, but I guess it's pointless asking you to expand!

and ah right, I guessed from your view on Web in the other thread that, despite your regular posting and thread-starting, you might not actually have an engagement with the content

sic burn

Completely accurate, though!

The main problem is that Sherlock is keeping Moffat from giving all his time and energy to Dr. Who. I mean it's probably not to blame for the shorter seasons and the big breaks in episode blocks but I can't help but think it doesn't help.

Especially when you're trying to do the 50th anniversary season and only squeezing out the occasional episode

'squeezing out' seems accurate

The main problem is that Sherlock is keeping Moffat from giving all his time and energy to Dr. Who. I mean it's probably not to blame for the shorter seasons and the big breaks in episode blocks but I can't help but think it doesn't help.

He doesn't owe you all his time or energy, so it's not a problem. (And if he wants to see his children sometimes, or make three episodes of another show every two or three years, this is not a major imposition.)

Especially when you're trying to do the 50th anniversary season and only squeezing out the occasional episode

You mean eight regular-length episodes and one 75-minute episode and another one that'll almost certainly be over an hour? What an outrageous shortage, especially when you're having to work around ongoing budget cuts, the loss of facilities, and the non-availability of your lead actor in the title role.

Yes, i know he doesn't OWE ME ANYTHING, it's just a shame that from the start of 2012, through the 50th anniversary year and well into the 51st we get a total of one season, plus one special, and much of that season has been below par.

Three specials!

And he's said he tried to talk Smith into staying, but he wouldn't - they managed to get him to come back for the 50th and the Christmas special, obv, but that's all. It's going to make a far more cohesive 50th year to have the second half of S7 being so full of nods to the past, and then the big event specials, than to regenerate in March, then have the 50th special come shortly into the run of a brand new - and at that point uncast! - Doctor.

So, I guess, blame Smith if you want to hold someone responsible for there being a whopping 60-90 minutes less of new Who on telly in the 50th year than there were in the 20th anniversary year?


[my back-of-an-envelope: S20 = 22x23mins + 90mins, 2013 = 8x45 + 75 +[70?]. Add An Adventure In Space And Time though and we're totally on par.]

plus sherlock

the only affect that I perceive of sherlock having on Dr. Who is that there were a lot of episodes set in some vaguely Victorian era -- even though Moffatt's Sherlock is contemporary, I imagine he is spending time translating the Victorian era stories and characters into the present day

When is Murray Gold going to regenerate?

into Paul Hartnoll please

only two Victorian eps! and one of them was given to Gatiss to autopilot, it's totally Hammer vs Lucifer Box, not Conan Doyle