Doctor Who: Classic or Dud?

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.)

Yeah I mean, I still like the books of his that I read. I just don't like him very much. (I would add "or spend money on him" but truth be told, I haven't bought a Doctor Who novel since... probably The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, which was kind of bad if I'm being honest about it, wtf Miles you were my go-to guy)

Yeah: I very much wouldn’t want to endorse his personal opinions with money, but on the other hand I’d have much more problem with spending £16.99 on a book filled with other people I don’t have any curiosity in reading, than with him getting 5.3 pence in royalties from me somewhere down the line.

his Shada book was good. But now i'm not so fussed he didn't get to do the other two Adams books (which I ahve and haven't read yet)

Three Adams books!

(Roberts was contracted to do Fisher, Williams and Adams’ City Of Death, but returned his advance & notes after several months’ work, deciding he couldn’t crack how to work it as a novel, vs having built Adams’ various drafts of the uncompleted Shada into a coherent story. After James Goss finished it, Goss was commissioned to do not only the full-Adams script of The Pirate Planet, but also adapt an idea that Adams had a) had rejected as a TV pitch in 1976, b) had rejected for a DW feature film in 1980, c) never actually written, and d) already turned into the third Hitch-hiker’s Guide novel 36 years before Goss turned it into a Who novel.)

you're speaking of city of death there?

oh, Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen , which I didn't even know had come out.

Wellllllll ok, fair enough, you’ve convinced me that I should read Shada anyway.

Which are the good Miles books, DJP? At least, the ones that don’t depend on reading six other books with an anti-climatic conclusion…

Highly highly recommend the Moff Target book btw

https://twitter.com/WhoGiants

Alien Bodies is the best one. Down from the Benny Books is also great.

Why do the actors who play companions and Doctors (i.e. regular cast) in nu-Who limit themselves to only a few seasons? If this were a US-produced property, you'd have the leads fighting to stay on for a 7-year run.

Tom Baker’s post-Who career possibly acting as something of a cautionary tale. Especially when contrasted with Peter Davison’s.

Same reasons as they did in the old series, with the addition that the new series is so physically taxing that the leads keep requiring reconstructive skeletal surgery mid-contract, rather than only needing to be on their feet a couple of hours a week

xp

Peter Davison’s an anomaly, in that he was already so busy as a headliner when he took the role, that Who had to shut down production for months mid-season while his dayjob sitcom was taping.

(In 2017 they just wrote around Bradley Walsh spending weeks at a time taping his dayjob gameshow)

Same reasons as they did in the old series

I don't know these reasons!

with the addition that the new series is so physically taxing that the leads keep requiring reconstructive skeletal surgery mid-contract, rather than only needing to be on their feet a couple of hours a week

Wait, who? I don't think I ever heard of say Jennifer Garner needing anything as serious as surgery when she was doing her own fight scenes in for ~20 episodes over 4-5 seasons of Alias.

iirc Tennant and Smith both had knee reconstructions and Capaldi had back surgery? I’m on zing atm

I don't know these reasons!

Because they find a variety of work more interesting to do, and they can earn a lot more money for a lot less work elsewhere, once their profile has been raised on a teatime children’s show about a space wizard.

(Aside from the pay and catering of a Terminator movie, or the pay and comfort of going home from the West End to your own bed with your model girlfriend in it, Smith can now make his yearly Dr Who salary in two weekends’ appearance fees at American conventions.)

a teatime children’s show about a space wizard.

look

lol

completely unfair. doctor who is a teatime _family_ show about a space wizard.