Doctor Who: Classic or Dud?

Hmm should probably have changed my DN there.

irl giggle

This is sorta an extension of the Louis CK discussion

Sometimes bad things happen to art you like, and it's okay to let it go

You can take my Tintin books out of my cold dead hands though

(Let it go, as in, stop reading/watching/caring about it)

I should add that I don't have much patience for a lot of classic Who serials, but that's because of how much slack their stories have. "Talons" falls into this category for me, but this issue also happens to be subsumed by that other thing.

Bung a dung bung a dung bung a dung
Bong a dong
Bung a dung bung a dung bung a dung
Bong a dong
Ooo-weeee-oooooh
Ooooooh-wee-oooh-ooh
Doctor who-we-ooo-weooo
Ooh-wee-ooh

Vrrrm vrrssm
Vrrm vrrsm

BBC load German iTunes with start date for new series.
British websites report those facts from the public domain.
BBC send legal letters to said websites telling them to take down the information.
It's still on German iTunes.

more of a Whochurch thread post imo

Fair point.

I should add that I don't have much patience for a lot of classic Who serials, but that's because of how much slack their stories have. "Talons" falls into this category for me, but this issue also happens to be subsumed by that other thing.

never seen talons, but this is very much my feeling when i watch old Who from my youth - too much "assistant wanders off, gets kidnapped, lots of runaround, etc". would be up for skilful edits that pared serials down to the stuff that's actually compelling and not padding.

you could edit out entire seasons

I watched a bunch of Hinchcliffe era Who last year and felt the same. Pyramids of Mars is wonderful but it's bloody draggy and repetitive, even at four parts.

Outside of that period, Inferno and Androzani felt like the most "modern" episodes - Inferno surprisingly so, as it's a seven-parter (!) and the story is all over the shop. But it's never boring. And Androzani's relentles grimness creates its own energy.

Curse of Fenric and Ghost Light have *issues* but they're also pretty fast-paced, if only because they both demand a lot of concentration to figure out what the hell's happening.

the re-edited Fenric on DVD barely adds any scenes, it just doesn't have to cut frenetically from scene to scene to remove reactions, and is vastly superior

desperate for* a Ghost Light that does edit back in the excised footage, timecode and all

would be up for skilful edits that pared serials down to the stuff that's actually compelling and not padding.

I watched Genesis sometime in 2016 or early 2017, and then the 90-minute version in the cinema in June, and the only thing I missed was Harry getting his foot chomped by a giant clam.**

** and it was absolutely the right decision to cut it

* I mean I'm unlikely to ever own a blu-ray player and in all probability will live my life without ever rewatching S26 again, but if I were to...

Sapphire and Steel may be the true champion of timestretched sci-fi television

"Inferno" is one I really like! Don't remember it being in 7 parts, so it evidently kept my attention.

Just seen that the first episode of Jodie Whittaker is going to be October 7th which is a Sunday

The advantage of Inferno is that there’s no need for the doctor to prevent the foolish humans from making catastrophic decisions, so things can just steadily get worse in a more natural way.

Inferno (if I remember right) has constant white noise in the background of some scenes, like some kind of J-Horror movie. Very disorienting.

Just seen that the first episode of Jodie Whittaker is going to be October 7th which is a Sunday

Doctor Who: Classic or Dud?

I'll rep for The Seeds of Doom as a pretty taut six-parter.

I know Colin Baker has called out fans who talk about how much they love the not-very-good aspects of Who, and he has a point, but I still am a little bit of the opinion that the padding is a lot of what I love about Doctor Who. Maybe it's nostalgia for childhood - watching a show where nothing particularly happens and I don't have to pay very close attention and I can fall asleep halfway through (I grew up on the omnibuses) without missing much. I wasn't so much into the show for the great plot - a lot of the time the plot wasn't very good at all - but I really enjoyed a lot of the meaningless goofing about. Cutting the dross out of old Doctor Who is a lot like cutting the White Album down to one LP - people's idea of what the "dross" is differs, and a lot of its appeal is that kind of shaggy dog ramble it had to it.

Mind you this only goes so far. The glacial, stagy pacing of Hartnell's stories is beyond me. I love the hell out of "Enemy of the World", though, and you know that's a story where NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENS in the third episode (which may have something to do with its former poor reputation...)

the cinema in June, and the only thing I missed was Harry getting his foot chomped by a giant clam

at least I’m consistent

xp Old-Who is good ambient television. I think when I watch stories from the 1963-89 series the enjoyment comes more from 'experiencing' them rather than from following the narrative in the way that you might do with something more tautly plotted. I watch them in a similar way to the BBC4 repeats of old episodes of Top Of The Pops, soaking up the ambiance, attention wandering between the dialogue and the sets and the outfits and period details and the style it's shot in etc.

I think this is partly because I've already seen pretty much all of the surviving original series stories before and know basically what happens in them already - in fact, in most cases I'd read about the stories in episode guides and books before seeing them for the first time

Any old TV show takes on this stylized aspect with the passage of time, where every element of the production down to the smallest detail looks achingly 1987, or 1973 or 1965 or whatever year it was made, and this gives them an odd glamour - and at the same time Old-Who was often kind of a mess and an odd ragbag of different styles and genres thrown together - so the old stories are interesting because they're simultaneously all over the place and have this unifying aesthetic because they manifest era they were made in every aspect (and also because Dr Who was already very stylized and non-naturalistic to begin with?)

Absolutely, in the late 70s I devoured guides and novelisations of old series knowing I could never see them. Seeing them is kind of like live footage from ancient Egypt. And the Baker and Pertwee eras - on endless rotation mid afternoon in the Australia of my youth - are the furniture of my mind.

Wow, last three posts are great

interesting comment soref - for me, as an american, a lot of the "alien-ness" that initially appealed to me about the show was just that it was, well, british.

Yeah, the slowness tends not to bother me unless I’m watching with someone less familiar with the show and thinking about how this looks to someone who didn’t watch this episode at age 12. But generally I’m happy to watch the characters wandering about and having chill conversations while locked up and waiting for the villain to return to kill them. I do find that I have less tolerance for Pertwee being a patronizing asshole these days.

Cutting the dross out of old Doctor Who is a lot like cutting the White Album down to one LP

agree, obv a lot of the enjoyment comes from the cast having fun; also agree that as a grown-up Pertwee just comes across as a prick most of the time, whereas I accepted his wafted superiority on first viewing.

Mind you this only goes so far. The glacial, stagy pacing of Hartnell's stories is beyond me.

see this is tarring 30 stories (and 200 eps or w/e) with a v broad brush! good writers & directors or both get snappy, pacy stories even with the "as-live" taped set-up. An Unearthly Child (not 100,000 BC), The Aztecs, Inside The Spaceship, The Time Meddler, The Rescue, The Romans, The War Machines and even most of Dalek Invasion Of Earth from god-lord of useless padding Terry Nation rattle along in terms of plot, character and action.

love the hell out of "Enemy of the World", though, and you know that's a story where NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENS in the third episode

tsk! one of the very great things about Enemy Of The World is that Whitaker is doing something different in every episode: after establishing the fucked-up geopolitics of 2018 in episode 1, he shows more of the intra-factional divides within Salamander's administration in episode 2. Then ep 3 reduces further, showing a tight focus on different ways of dealing with life directly under occupation: loyalists vs poisoners in his cabinet lead you to the Upstairs Downstairs contrast of the kitchen, where Griffin the chef is making best by carrying on as if working a regular kitchen job - grumbling about the bosses and the customers, regardless of who those are. Meanwhile Fariah, Whitaker makes as clear as possible in a kids show, has been broken and sexually subjugated by Salamander, perhaps only as a hazing/recruitment process rather than an ongoing role, which tells us more about his sadism than we would otherwise fully know.

Saw a panel with Pearl Mackie, Ingrid Oliver, Nicola Bryant, Katy Manning and Robert Shearman at the London Screenwriters' Festival over the weekend. Manning is very entertainingly unhinged and still seems deeply passionate about the show.

i agree that episode 3 serves an important role within the broader context of the story, but that's not the model '60s who is based on. as a standalone episode, episode 3 doesn't work very well. sometimes i think we as fans get so caught up in subtext that we give short shrift to the text of the show. i think this may be why an episode like, say, "kill the moon" is so divisive, because it's utterly brilliant on a subtextual/meta level, but on superficial viewing it's confusing and nonsensical.

Just poking my head in to say that Sapphire & Steel is streaming on Amazon Prime now; it came out in a cheap box set a while ago, but for aaages it was only available in the US as an overpriced ($90-ish, iirc) BBC release. It's been huge (UNHEIMLICH) fun digging into it, burrowing through k-punk's archives (RIP) and catching up on Ghost Box releases I let slip by me. Going full mid-2000s over here and I love it

How often has the series kicked off a new Doctor's tenure with new companions as well?

1 - doesn't count
2 - companions had joined three stories earlier
3 - new
4 - one old one new
5 - one companion had joined five stories before, two joined in the regeneration story
6 - companion had joined two stories earlier
7 - companion never actually joined but had been around for six episodes
8 - no companion
9 - new
10 - old
11 - new
12 - old
13 - new

so, 4/13 but most are pretty new

Don’t forget 8.5!

we have to wait for Nick Briggs to be made showrunner before we get to see his first adventure, with John Hurt replaced by a genial theatre student overdubbed by Ingrid Oliver doing a Hurt impression

Been watching the season 18 and season 19 (last season of Tom Baker/first of Peter Davison) blu-ray sets and am pretty much just watching them with the commentaries on and then watching the behind the sofa eps... the Davison/Fielding/Sutton/Waterhouse commentaries are gold. Last night I watched Kinda for the first time in like thirty years and wow it is bonkers... a much better example of what first contact would probably be like than Star Trek, everyone is going insane and nobody knows what the hell is going on. Then... giant snake! K-9 and Company was included on the season 18 set and is pretty amazing start to finish.

you're ready for both of these then

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tza8396fY38

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASWN1N9hteI

hahaha, it helps that the police in Doctor Who rarely rise above the Benny Hill level of interaction

and "yaketyvalva" is I think the most unpleasant coinage I've heard in like ten years?

omg sic, lol

K9 and Company shoulda been on for years and years, the cheek of them to take a prop that everyone on Doctor Who apparently despised and then decide to make him the star of his own show set in the countryside! at least set it on a space station with only smooth floors! or have one you can fill with helium and tie to SJS's wrist

they sorted that out when it went to series

http://news.thedoctorwhosite.co.uk/images/k91.jpg

you're right to be skeptical, big-budget Ace

*crosses Roberts off the list of Who authors I am interested in reading*

https://unherd.com/2019/07/why-the-woke-cant-make-jokes/

tweeting at wokemills

he's made a bunch of transphobic tweets too

I saw that and was like “…wait what”

Yeah that’s a fucking dreadful article but it’s a LONG way from being the worst thing he’s put his name to recently: https://medium.com/@zmangareth/statement-on-bbc-books-and-transgenderism-dd7ad0c9231a

I’ve got his Shada novelisation somewhere and never got around to reading it, unlikely to ever bother now.

(Helpful of him to out all those other terf fucks at the end of his medium piece though, already knew about most of them but a couple were news to me).

His Shada novelisation is great, especially in the audiobook read by Lalla Ward and John Leeson. Roberts' all-day shouting like a prick on Twitter about how everyone is wrong but especially murderous Muslims, young people, TV executives, left-wing politicians, virtue signallers, climate change campaigners, Greta Thunberg, gay men who don't spend all day chainsmoking in a flat & reading 1970s TV listings, and Steven Moffatt appears to reflect a decades-long Toryism that has never stopped him writing warm, funny Who with a humanist perspective.

(Typed four screens of stuff about his attitudes but got xposted by an hour and deleted it, typed the above instead.)