Doctor Who: Classic or Dud?

There are too many great stories to count, but my favourite episode is probably The Ark In Space, or whatever that scary one with the sleeping people in the space station that got eaten by giant bees.

Also, the whole season that was the "key to time" story arc, I can't remember the name of any individual episodes, but just the fact that the Sonic Screwdriver ended up being the key on which the whole universe hinged was pretty damned cool. Plus, I had, like, a huge crush on Adrik, the original indie maths nerd, when I was a pre-teen. Though of all the companions, I think Romana was the coolest, just cause I wanted to *be* her. She was smarter than the Dr, after all. :-)

Funny, cause all the things that people point to, saying it's a dud- abysmally low production budget, lack of special effects, socks with googley eyes glued on for monsters- were all the things that made it endearing. And the quality of writing was just AMAZING- the minimal budget that they had, they spent on getting the very best in sci fi writers to come up with concepts and stories so engaging that you didn't care that it looked crap.

I could go on at length, but I've already outed myself as a geek enough on this board for one week...

"Doctor Who" was far and away my favorite show growing up. "The Ark In Space" is definitely high on my list, along with "The Robots of Death", "Kinda", "The Caves Of Androzani", the whole Key To Time season, "Inferno", "The Mind Robber"... Oh, I could go on and on. Favorite Doc is Davison, mostly because he managed to pull off underplaying the role and comes across as even more powerful because of it. Hell, I'm so into it that I've got EVERY book published in the New Adventures series from _Timewyrm: Genesys_ in the Virgin series through _Vanishing Point_ in the BBC series. (I do draw the line at conventions, though. Even when I was a kid, I thought the entire concept of a Doctor Who convention filled with adults dressed as these characters to be really disturbing.)

Best companions? Without a doubt, Leela, Romana I, Tegan, Sarah Jane, and Turlough. Especially Leela. (cf: fictional characters I've had a crush on)

Classic: the (original) Master, played by Roger Delgado.

Dud: all the stuff with Unit (ur-notion for the Initiative in Buffy? Only rubbish instead of good, obviously), and Pertwee himself (to me = Troughton nut). But Pertwee's ENEMIES were often grate (=Devils, Sea Devils: one of the Devils was called BOD!!)

Ten-ton dud: Tom "Overract why fucking don't you" Baker. But the Gallifrey/Time Lord business was often amusing.

Three-ton dud: Peter Davidson. BUT the ing on the first season of stories (esp. CASTROVALVA, abut timewarps and paradoxes, name taken from a lithograph by ESCHER = overlooked classic)

Hundred-ton duds: subsequent Doctors /Peter Cushing movies

Castrovalva! Was that the one where they were trapped in the scarily moebius strip city that Adrik (ah, archetype of all indie mathsrock nerds of my heart...) discovered that he had mistakenly created with his mathematical formulae?

Oh, and here's a question: K-9, what think you? Super-cool uber gadget who always saved the day, or annoying cutesy ploy, the Dr. Who equivalent of Ewoks?

Man, I have always wished that I had a sonic screwdriver!

Castrovalva and Adrik: very possibly correct — of course, this era Who is NEVER repeated (cuz supposedly a decline on Pertwee/ Baker), plus my memory is swirling away like asteroids into a time discontinuity anyway, so I don't recall. Part of my mathrock reason for liking Adrik was that the maths was, erm, not utterly entirely bogus. (mathrock = mathmath in my case...)

Jo = my major crush-assistant, I suppose. Can't be: she always screamed and wuz scared. Who was the one who ACTUALLY DIED? Played by Jean Marsh (later of Upstairs Downstairs). Or am I tripping?

GOT IT! My major crush assistant was Zoe!! (This too is a Wow-factor thing...)

Sub-thread Q: lamest Dr Who assistant?

Mark is right - it's your second. Peter Davison in my case. This theory probably falls down if applied to any post-Davison due to transcendental awfulness.

Jean Marsh played Sara Kingdom in "The Dalek Masterplan" and has the distinction of being the only companion to join and die in the same story. (Of course, "The Dalek Masterplan" went on for 16 episodes or something like that...)

"Castrovalva" is definitely the one where the Master uses Adric to generate a trans-dimensional mathematical construct solely to trap a confused and newly-regenerated Doctor.

Patrick Troughton rocked the house as far as I can tell. The only stories of his I've really seen are "The Mind Robber" and "The War Games", though, so I don't have enough evidence to knock Davison outof the top spot. The Yeti were SORELY underused, though.

Frasier Hines, who played Jamie, was also on "Upstairs, Downstairs".

The Doctor had three companions die during the television series; Srar Kingdom, Katarina, and Adric. The books added Liz Shaw and Roslynn Forrester to this list, plus the Brigadier is now living out the rest of his life in an alternate dimension populated by faries. (No, really.)

The misfortune of the Peri character was teaming her with the sixth Doctor. Either forceful, grating personality could have worked, but both together were a SHOCKINGLY bad idea. Interestingly enough, the new fiction line has managed to not only completely salvage Peri and the sixth Doctor, but also the hideously misconceived Melanie Bush, who has gone from being a chirpy nightmare to one of the more capable people the Doctor has travelled with.

Worst companion? Victoria Waterfield, aka the extremely wet Victorian girl whose sole function was to scream, "Help me Jamie!" at every opportunity. They replaced her with Zoe for reason, folks...

No, but that would have been awesome! More sad fannishness:

Sixth Doctor, "Trial of a Timelord". The Doctor gets taken outof time by the Timelords and put on trial for being a general menace to the universe. As it transpires, he was pulled out of time as he was rushing to rescue Peri from having her brain sucked out and replaced with one from a slug-like dictator. Therefore, he wasn't there to save her and she was killed, becoming an evil pod person. The companion who ended up replacing her, Mel, was played by Bonnie Langford.

(At the end of the trial, it's strongly hinted that Peri was actually saved by one of the people fighting the evil slugs and ended up marrying him, which is why I didn't list her amongst the dead.)

And he had a soft spot for Jo. There's a scene in "The Green Death", at some point after she announces her engagement to Dr Jones, where he glances at her as if to say 'if I were ten...fifteen years younger'. Quite touching really.

The VERY FIRST companion was Susan, who was the doctor's DAUGHTER? No? She was interesting, it being 1963 and therefore pre- pop, let alone pre-Kate Millett: cuz she was SUPER-CLEVER, and the earth-boys were baffled and threatened and intrigued by this. But I don't remember her to look at since (a) B/W episodes never repeated; and (b) her character/look is overlaid by things I much later read in ancient second-hand TV comic-books and by the very repeated film with Bernard fucking Cribbins in it). (BC = cool, just not appropriate to this story...)

But I do remember a scene with her in it, which is poorly revisited in the film, when the white bedford van she is in (driven by a dalek-resistance soldier) is strafed by the giant dalek ship. Cuz where I lived and where my dad worked the staff van was a white bedford van, and when I was in it, I often used to check out that there was enough foliage near enough that I could jump out of the van — as Susan had — and roll to cover into it, shd the dalek ship appear and begin strafing.

That is all. (That is enough...)

An episode of Fireball XL5 gave me the all- time nightmares-for-week spooking, though.

My memory of this is hazy, despite being told this story dozens of times in my youth, but by all accounts he was very nice, askign K9 why he wasn't in the tardis, who his friend was and so on. What a nice chap.

Best series Genesis of the Daleks, but only cos a friend did it as a one man show. His interpretation of Davros was jumping around in a frying pan, tom Baker was a pan on the head.

tom Baker was the best imho.

Ace was very annoying though, and janet what's her name from Blue peter

Anyway, Jo (Katy Manning) destroyed and stomped on my pre-adolescent heart by marrying the dull Sgt. Benson in the Pertwee/Unit days. I've never ever recovered, never will and don't want to. A goddess.

Great call on Roger Delgado. A scary mutha in a very English way.

Mark: my school library also always had the Mail. The librarian was a self-described "true blue" Tory, hmmm, what a surprise ...

Taking sides: Peanuts vs The Perishers

Did you all see the mid-90's TV movie with Paul McGann and Daphne Ashbrook? Any comments?

There's a great Doctor Who book floating out there called _Interference_ where the Doctor runs into an enemy who completely FUBAR's his past timeline. I love that idea and I'm kind of bummed out that the show never really exploited that aspect of time travel (ill-conceived Valeyard aside).

Doctor Who assistants - Search/Destroy
The Man That Ruined Doctor Who
Doctor Who Weekly/Monthly comic strips - Search/Destroy

MIND FITE!!!

Castrovalva is rubbish though!

The VERY FIRST companion was Susan, who was the doctor's DAUGHTER? No? She was interesting, it being 1963 and therefore pre- pop, let alone pre-Kate Millett: cuz she was SUPER-CLEVER, and the earth-boys were baffled and threatened and intrigued by this. But I don't remember her to look at since (a) B/W episodes never repeated

I remember the surviving B/W episodes being shown on UK Gold when UK Gold first started, in the early 90s. I think Susan told everyone that she was the doctor's granddaughter, but this might just have been a ploy to explain why he was her guardian to boring Earth people.

My favourite Doctor Who related thing is probably Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, a Douglas Adams novel put together from late-70s Doctor Who scripts that were never broadcast. (as was the third Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy book)

Exquisite. Simply... exquisite.

Tico - The BRANE OF MORBIUS should only be attempted after a couple of cans of RELAXANT in my opinion cos it is very silly. Also you will be annoyed by the rubbish assistant who falls over a lot. The priestesses are brilliant. But yes I am up for DOCTOR ACTION.

Secret flame! Secret fire!

Long interview with Moffat about his comedy writing career; he veers from noting that he became more successful when he stopped writing comedy, so he shouldn't return, to counter-arguing with himself that Sherlock is actually joke-a-minute at the script level, and from there to

Russell and I were interviewing each other for Doctor Who Magazine recently and in the process of doing that we suddenly noticed that we made Doctor Who a lot funnier than it used to be. You think of old Doctor Who, it's not very funny. Even Tom Baker takes it mostly seriously. Why did we go so funny?

The modern version of Doctor Who, I think one of its big successes is actually that it's a funny show. If you don't understand the plot - nobody does! If you don't really care about the monsters, nobody over the age of twelve does. If you don't care about any of that, you're there for some first-class gags delivered by some first-class people. There's a lot of comedy in Doctor Who and, from me, that's paying a huge compliment and is not meant to be insulting, though some people even now will be contemplating an inflammatory blog. It is not knocking it, Doctor Who is a funny show and The Doctor is a funny character. Any character played consecutively by Peter Capaldi and Jodie Whittaker is a funny character.

pic.twitter.com/gBHxxKIGCl

— Max Curtis (@MaxCCurtis) January 12, 2021

RTD's new series, It's A Sin (set in young gay 1980s Manchester), will include an episode in which one of the leads gets a part in a McCoy-era Who serial.

https://i.imgur.com/CAbSAPK.jpg

(Davies' Regression Of The Daleks is an imaginary sequel to Resurrection.)

Show starts Friday 22nd on Channel 4 (and maybe HBO Max), with all five eps on All4 immediately afterward.

OK, I'm sold.

Including a Meddling Monk story where he's listening to disco in his TARDIS, goes to 1917 to play "Ra-Ra-Rasputin" for the lols, accidentally buggers up human history, and has to regenerate into Rasputin to set things back on course.
The Meddler to be played by Matt Berry.

Holy shit

ikr

instead we get john bishop

https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/1457800d-0814-44e8-b2b9-d0d92f21cbc9/d3iitcf-62315ba1-5860-4695-83e9-3ccb3447d6fe.png/v1/fill/w_900,h_718,q_80,strp/cubee___doctor_who_arcade_game_by_cyberdrone_d3iitcf-fullview.jpg?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOiIsImlzcyI6InVybjphcHA6Iiwib2JqIjpbW3siaGVpZ2h0IjoiPD03MTgiLCJwYXRoIjoiXC9mXC8xNDU3ODAwZC0wODE0LTQ0ZTgtYjJiOS1kMGQ5MmYyMWNiYzlcL2QzaWl0Y2YtNjIzMTViYTEtNTg2MC00Njk1LTgzZTktM2NjYjM0NDdkNmZlLnBuZyIsIndpZHRoIjoiPD05MDAifV1dLCJhdWQiOlsidXJuOnNlcnZpY2U6aW1hZ2Uub3BlcmF0aW9ucyJdfQ.-746ykDuMUZlbyK-vlMT5hNgjpH6uGPRJgHQrxnWmOU

Make your own model of the Doctor Who pinball table: you have to make your own fun in isolation!

{Actually adapted from the BBC Micro game, before sic leaps in with a correction)

bring back the pink TARDIS you cowards

how it started: carrot juice

how it's going:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLb-rlZQA9k

Cringe but also <333 which I suppose is very Sylvester McCoy

I loved every second of that

I don’t remember that terrifying melting head but I definitely saw Dragonfire first time round, aged 9, and was thrilled that Bonnie Langford was finally leaving. I guess it was the 80s and there were melting heads in everything back then.

Impressive grue fx for bbc of that era

I love these blu-ray sets so much, and the folks they've rounded up for the commentaries and behind the sofa stuff look great on this one

Yeah, that head's one of the best FX of the classic series ever. Or maybe it just stands out because the rest of that serial is absolutely atrocious visually!

Love the idea of Colin Baker watching and making fun of Season 24 as a bonus feature on the Season 24 box set. (Also the "let's not bother watching Time & The Rani" gag in the Sylv & Bonnie coda.)

Effects from that era that I remember as being good from when they first aired were basically the melting head and The Destroyer from The Battlefield, who was wisely mostly kept in the dark. And that creepy hand thing the Chief Clown does, though that wouldn't have cost them anything extra.

That promo video is great. Have they done that for previous DVDs?

Yes, I'll try and chase up some others.

They landed a whole-ass Dalek space shuttle in a real school playground in Remembrance. That still looks like "how tf did they manage this?"

This box will make Mel the second companion to have all her stories out on Blu-Ray, after the almost equally beloved Adric.
Every story in the set has alternate extended editions and optional new 5.1 surround sound mixes AND isolated scores. Also not mentioned in the video: twenty-five hours of studio footage (edited highlights of a hundred hrs!).

Other blu-ray promo videos:

Ace Returns! - Season 26 promo, the first of these

Jo and Cliff Jones return to Llanfairfach - Season 10 promo

The Home Assistants Of Death?! - Season 14 promo (also see the last 30 seconds of this trailer)

Jo Grant vs the Autons... Again?! - Season 8 promo

I liked the Jovanka Airways one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQEvPJC8AEI

from one of the folks who works on the blu-ray bonus features:

My favourite thing about Season 24 is that they wanted to have Sylvester McCoy playing the spoons but his first story was set in space so they had to design SPACE SPOONS. God bless @LeeBinding for including them on the cover, but we should be issuing them as free gifts too! pic.twitter.com/6HrVNRjAE2

— Chris Chapman (@ChrisChapman81) January 22, 2021

and the perils of presenting these programmes in high-as-possible definition, when the makers knew that all the TVs at home would be rounded at the corners so you'd never see anything at the edge of frame:

What makes it worse is that it's such a wonderful, witty shot - and all it needed was a tiny crop to hide the fault!

— Chris Chapman (@ChrisChapman81) January 22, 2021

And some earlier blu-ray trailers I hadn't seen before (lower yr expectations tbh) (also xpost):

Season 18 Announcement Trailer (Galactic Glitter Package Tours advert voiced by Tom)

The Season 19 Safety Video with Tegan Jovanka

The Sixth Doctor is on trial AGAIN!

how come I didn't know about these Blu-Ray trailers until now, this is seriously fantastic

The 24 Carat one has really raised the bar for future seasons.

(accidentally posted the followup on that second Chapman tweet - click through for a Delta & The Bannermen snippet)

Thanks for finding them. I think the newest one is still the best. I have 3 of the blu-ray sets now, but I've only watched half of "Battlefield" on them so far.

RTD's new series, It's A Sin (set in young gay 1980s Manchester), will include an episode in which one of the leads gets a part in a McCoy-era Who serial.

(Davies' Regression Of The Daleks is an imaginary sequel to Resurrection.)

Show starts Friday 22nd on Channel 4 (and maybe HBO Max), with all five eps on All4 immediately afterward.

Bit off-topic, but have just watched the first episode of this and it was really quite good, best thing he's done in ages.

I haven't gotten around to Midsummer Night's Dream yet, but the other three of his last four things were great-to-fantastic.

It’s incredible, I’m full of anticipation and dread for the next episodes in equal measure.

I missed it, the HEAVILY rotated trailers made it look like every gay drama ever, but I'll give it a shot if people say it's good.

Just bumped across the end of ep 2 of Remembrance on TV (streaming free on Pluto): the special FX of the Dalek starting to teleport into Shoreditch, all transparent and pink-brain-mutant showing first, then the scene of another Dalek chasing and shooting at Ace in the science lab, are also pretty great.

For those that might appreciate some classic-era nerdery, the original Myth Makers interviews have gone up on Amazon Prime, hours and hours of the stuff, and a lot of supplemental episodes too.

It's A Sin has an US premiere date: all five eps on HBO Max on Feb 18th.

(Am up to #4; cried through most of 3.)

Apologies if this constitutes unwelcome self-promotion (and please delete/ignore if it does), but I'm doing a live Doctor Who podcast at 8pm GMT tonight on Twitch (audio podcast to follow afterwards) looking at The Ark, Caves of Androzani and Heaven Sent + asking if they can tell us anything about the Very Strange Times we're living in right now.

Streaming here: https://twitch.tv/illexplainlaterdw

An article about the Daleky bit in It's A Sin, with some poignant details, director interview, and several irritating errors: https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/a35347177/its-a-sin-doctor-who-crossover-scene/

Peter Davison's home audio booth for lockdown recordings.

There was a Love & Monsters tweetalong today, with the special commentary coming from the nine-year-old kid who created the Absorbaloff for a Blue Peter competition.

While Abzorbaloff wasn't originally inspired by the Slitheen, I like the world building and the similarities are obvious. He was actually inspired by boogers, nightmares and the Simpsons. #LINDAunited

— Channel Pup - Objectively Good YouTuber (@channel_pup) February 14, 2021

Ha. That's quite a slab in the face. Poor Ursula. Getting literally stoned in Elton's apartment. #LINDAunited

— Channel Pup - Objectively Good YouTuber (@channel_pup) February 14, 2021

In the spirit of valentine's Day, fun fact: Abzorbaloff gets auto-erotic pleasure from absorbing people. #LINDAunited

— Channel Pup - Objectively Good YouTuber (@channel_pup) February 14, 2021

well i just learned a lot from the "blue peter" wiki

Perhaps the most important revelation from this weekend's newspapers. #DoctorWho pic.twitter.com/NqqAqlWF59

— Nathaniel Tapley (@Natt) February 18, 2021

Haha good god. Course he pretty much got his way with Yrcanos, eventually. That eyeliner was...dubious.

Incidentally, I've been ploughing through tons of 60s and 70s tokusatsu stuff recently, and was very happy to find that the bad guy in King Kong Escapes is an Asian Doctor Who

As pointed out in the comments, Troughton's first thought was to play The Doctor in blackface too:

"My original idea was to black up and wear a big turban and brass earrings and a big grey beard and do it like the Arabian Knights. I thought that would be a wonderful idea, but when I'd finished, I could shave off, take the black off, take the turban off and nobody would know who I was and I wouldn't be typecast."

And of course he did brownface as Salamander in Enemy of the World.

Brian Blessed hated Hartnell and almost decked him once:

I couldn't find this clip of Brian Blessed talking about how he once almost beat the crap out of William Hartnell anywhere on the internet, so here it is. pic.twitter.com/4vqgLOqu1G

— Paul Cornish (@PaulGCornish) August 13, 2020

The makeup aspect / white actors aside, it's notable that both Troughton and Blessed supposedly thought in 1966 "It is FINALLY time for a Doctor Who of colour!"

uh

I suppose that is one way to interpret that

Any day now.

(I’ve never seen any aspect of the Blessed story before; Troughton’s may be an exaggerated ‘80s convention anecdote - he doesn’t seem to have actually pitched doing the show in blackface and turban to the production team.)

"It is FINALLY time for a (white guy to play a)Doctor Who of colour!"

.@Paul_Burgin has spotted Peter Davison in the background as John Lennon performed 'Instant Karma' on Top of the Pops. pic.twitter.com/sN5ex9syaZ

— Jonny Morris (@jonnymorris1973) February 21, 2021