WHOCHURCH: The Chris Chibnall era

I don't recall ever yelling at you for enjoying Dr Who but there's probably some episode I hated that you liked along the way somewhere.

I'm excited for new Who, you guys are all "well we'll see I guess grumble grumble" because of vague Chibnall beefs - I just don't see why the orthodoxy of grumble needs to reign supreme. Me, DJP and f. hazel OTM, the rest of y'all can carry on I suppose.

I don't think it's a radical or unreasonable position to take a cautious approach if you don't like the incoming showrunner's previous work! And that this position can be independent of the new Doctor herself.

That said, "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship" and "The Power of Three" are fantastic! The rest of his Who eps are forgettable though.

most who eps are forgettable except that one with the completely horrifying creatures

damn, ratings absolutely tanked last season! chibnall hasn't written a who episode since 2012? that's more time than bob holmes took off between "kroll" and "androzani". strange.

I guess I just don't watch television for the ideas

wild to have spent the last seven years being

I mean

in this time period I have also

- read 36 NAs and 13 MAs and one QR
- bought nine volumes of TARDIS Eruditorum
- repeatedly paid up to $30 just in postage to get issues of Nothing At The End Of The Lane and Vworp Vworp sent to Australia
- bought issues and specials of DWM in three countries
- bought 11 volumes of the Panini strip collections, plus a bootleg of the first McGann one when it was out of print for a few years
- (also sold off my old copies of the Marvel colourised reprints)
- selected and programmed classic series repeats for the country's largest broadcaster
- paid to see Dr Who in the cinema on ten different occasions, in five cities, on two different continents and one island
- been the only telly person who got in free from BBCWW to the one-off cinema screening of the fancied-up Day Of The Daleks who stayed to watch the whole thing
- stood behind Waris Hussein and his boyfriend to watch an am-dram staging of An Unearthly Child in the basement of a Manchester pub
- repeatedly eaten lunch on other people's office floors to watch episodes before TX
- listened to over a hundred hours of Verity!, a podcast about women enjoying Dr Who whether it's good or not
- bought and read the autobiography of Barry Letts
- bought and read the biography of Robert Holmes
- bought and read and loved the biography of JNT
- bought and read both Cartmel's production memoir and his out-of-print, bad, history-of-Who book
- bought the first three print collections of Wife In Space, and read the blog entries for nearly every serial I've watched and several that I haven't
- talked to Paul Cornell, eating dirty chicken in the street outside a dance party he couldn't be bothered to queue for after the first screening of Day Of The Doctor, about Day Of The Doctor
- listened to hundreds of hours of Big Finish and Nest Cottage audios (most of them not good; some of the good ones 2 or three times)
- rented or borrowed DVDs for 55 of the 139 intact classic stories
-- watched nearly all of these in groups I've organised or with one friend
-- frequently rewatched by myself with commentaries and/or production notes on
-- generally watched whatever else of the documentaries and revisiteds and behind-the-sceneses I could get to before returning the discs
-- streamed half a dozen of the other 84 stories
-- watched a handful of orphan episodes
--- including the first ever, unannounced, public screening of Air Lock after it was recovered
-- watched three or four recons
-- read the Targets for 3 of the missing stories and two of the existing ones
- listened to the Lalla Ward / John Leeson audiobook of Gareth Roberts' novelisation of Shada
- watched an hour of I4n fucking L3vine's animation of Shada

this morning in bed I read the second issue of Ben Aaronovitch and Cartmel's Seventh Doctor Titan miniseries, and I have typed all my posts today in front of the Twitch stream of Trial Of A Time Lord*

last night my Seattle housemate got back from staying on the London floor of someone I met in Leeds five years ago by walking up to them and asking if they posted in the comments section of a Doctor Who blog



but sure, I'm bad at finding enjoyment in Dr Who ...because I think some of it is better than other bits?

I haven't done any of those things, but just wanted to say that so far Chibnall has done a brilliant job in upsetting Ian Levine, and that will do for me.

* within the first few minutes, The Doctor is shouting at ppl that he can't even be brought to trial for malfeasance or unbecoming behaviour, bcz he's the President. hope Tombot was watching too.

truly, the most difficult man alive to upset

oh but this time he's really upset

somebody on this thread seems pretty upset

<3 sic. But the real revelation here is

read the blog entries for nearly every serial I've watched and several that I haven't

Am still proud of the time I alerted sic to a Moffat Q&A series that he'd **never heard of**

Jim - missing episodes!

i once ate a sandwich that looked kind of like a varga plant, that's my fan cred sorted

* within the first few minutes, The Doctor is shouting at ppl that he can't even be brought to trial for malfeasance or unbecoming behaviour, bcz he's the President. hope Tombot was watching too.

― kelp, clam and carrion (sic)

sadly we're at a point where time lord government is better-run than american government, they were at least able to remove their president for gross dereliction of duty

I am to Marvel what sic is to Who except that sic seems to trump me on most Marvel knowledge despite not even liking Marvel much. Don't know how u do it, man.

Twitch is up to Trial episode ten, and if I'd ever know that space robots play holographic Galaga in this, I'd forgotten. I withdraw everything 0.07% of every bad thing I've said about Pip & Jane

wait I just noticed Colin's tie and waistcoat combo, reinstate that percentage even though it wasn't their fault

Have I missed "a megabyte modem!"?

I think that's in ep 14, when P&J come back to write the conclusion to a 14-part story without knowing what happened in the first eight or in parts of the four that they'd already written

I was 8 when Trial was on. Peri’s death is FUCKED UP. That and Paradise Towers are as scared as I can remember DW making me feel.

there's something slightly malevolent feeling about that entire era.

two different eras there

Paradise Towers starts on Twitch in 10 minutes!

Enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEc-OQ_oqDk

I didn't look at Twitch at all until Colin started, and I've now rewatched 7 (or 4) of the eleven worst Dr Who stories ever, in a row, for the first time. It's so hilarious that JN-T only commissioned four scripts ever, and three of them were by the Bakers, all BACK TO BACK.

But in the same way shitty Who is great fun to watch with friends and beer, you can totally see how the chat element of the Twitch run papers over any ups and downs, the #youths watching just taking it all on in the spirit of fun, creating their own injokes and interests.

Case in point: Keff McCulloch's score for Time And The Rani, at 31 years' distance, is not (well, not only) being greeted with horror for its cheap terribleness, but being joyously celebrated as ｖ░ａ░ｐ░ｏ░ｕ░ｒ░ｗ░ａ░ｖ░ｅ

the kids are alright

looks fine, if typically uninformative.

xpost can a mod please zap that trailer ffs

There’s definitely something bleak and nasty about the horror episodes of that period, in a way that’s very different to the darkest stories of the Tom Baker era. The shoddiness just makes everything more horrible by default, like the show’s being mounted on the cheap in the middle of an apocalypse. Maybe Androzani through Happiness Patrol?

the bleakness of Saward is a different tone to the bleaker stories of Cartmel -- Saward's rings of aspiration toward cultural masculinity, but as he doesn't believe in it himself, the stories end up riddled with nihilism. Cartmel is out to actively interrogate cultural attitudes and assumptions, so the bleak stories there tend to be "structured society and authority are bad and tend toward fascism... let's overthrow the paradigm and build a new, inclusive world."

like: Revelation and Paradise Towers are both deeply influenced by 200AD, especially Wagner/Grant and Mills. But the conclusion of Revelation is "LOL EVERYTHING'S SHIT AND LOVE IS A LIE," whereas Towers' is "the oppressors should be overthrown and young women should be in charge of everything. also, spraypaint things pink."

xpost: the brand new idea that the producer of Doctor Who repeatedly teased in the press from 1981 to 1987, and that the original creator of Doctor Who formally advised the BBC to do in 1985 when the show was moribund

they should have strapped the doctor to a rotating wheel and thrown knives at him

they should have strapped the doctor to a rotating wheel and thrown knives at him

― karl wallogina (Autumn Almanac)

if by "the doctor" you mean "michael grade" i agree

Jodie is having too much fun:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eosZSZKo1DM

Switching topics, it seems that the PR is making a concerted effort to use "friends" in place of "companions," like they're spreading out the agency so that it's not just Doctor and Her Assistants?

Note that I'm basing that last observation on a sample size of two.

PR and branding are relentless on calling her The Thirteenth Doctor, which is fucking insane imo

otm, she’s at least 15.5

I wasn't aware that Moffat wrote a Target novelisation of Day of the Doctor (!) earlier this year. I picked it up for a summer beach read - it's basically exactly what you'd expect a Moffat novel to be: too many jokes, too pleased with itself, but with a core of idiosyncratic genius. I expect it'll be living hell for certain type of DW fan, and I might want to throw it out of the window by page 120, but so far so good.

I wasn't aware that Moffat wrote a Target novelisation of Day of the Doctor (!) earlier this year. I picked it up for a summer beach read - it's basically exactly what you'd expect a Moffat novel to be: too many jokes, too pleased with itself, but with a core of idiosyncratic genius. I expect it'll be living hell for certain type of DW fan, and I might want to throw it out of the window by page 120, but so far so good.

― Chuck_Tatum

page 120? a true target novelization would be over by that point

It's a tolstoyan 229 pages

otm, she’s at least 15.5

ha

no it seems incredibly dumb to incessantly imply to new audiences that they need to know anything about the show beforehand, let alone do very specific research about 14.5 actors who have previously acted in the role, which leads to "oh what there's fifty-five years of this I'm supposed to know about already?!"

Jodie Whitaker is Doctor Who, that's all kids need to care about

there are also new Target novelisations of Rose by RTD, The Christmas Invasion by Jenny Colgan, and the final Capaldi special by Paul Cornell.

The Cornell looks like a fairly straight adaptation; the Moffat one is basically "my special plus everything they couldn't afford/wouldn't let me do" and you'll probably like it if you liked "continuity errors"

Also apparently it puts Peter Cushing into contuniuity somewhere

the final capaldi special is the one where nothing fucking happened, right? i can see why one would want to novelize that one.

like: Revelation and Paradise Towers are both deeply influenced by 200AD, especially Wagner/Grant and Mills. But the conclusion of Revelation is "LOL EVERYTHING'S SHIT AND LOVE IS A LIE," whereas Towers' is "the oppressors should be overthrown and young women should be in charge of everything. also, spraypaint things pink."

― kelp, clam and carrion (sic), Thursday, July 19, 2018 9:25 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not sure if Saward was ever really hip to 2000AD, that was more Cartmel's area of interest. Although he did commission a script from Pat Mills that came close to actually getting made a few times, so who knows.

no it seems incredibly dumb to incessantly imply to new audiences that they need to know anything about the show beforehand, let alone do very specific research about 14.5 actors who have previously acted in the role, which leads to "oh what there's /fifty-five years/ of this I'm supposed to know about already?!"

if this is new pr framing, perhaps they’re being ultra defensive because of the whole ~~~lady~~~ thing

Jodie Whitaker is Doctor Who, that's all kids need to care about

100% agree

Me too!

reviving so we can talk here about how close October 7th is

Meant to post this earlier, but Jodes was living it up in July:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eosZSZKo1DM