Re: An attempt to be relevant
The episodes with Sophie Aldred were Ace!
Okay, coat, door: Got it!
Jodie Who-ttaker? The Doctor is in
The timelord of Doctor Who, a man since 1963, will be portrayed by a woman – actress Jodie Whittaker – for the first time. Peter Capaldi, Doctor number 12, will regenerate after four years in the BBC's Christmas 2017 special to take on his new, female form. We last saw Capaldi's Doctor fighting his regeneration in Series 10, …
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Tuesday 18th July 2017 11:28 GMT MacroRodent
Wading in late
Given the Missy/Master gender discussions in "The Doctor Falls", this should really have not surprised anyone. The interplay of the two incarnations of the master was really the most delicious acting I have ever seen in Dr Who.
I got into Dr Who a few years ago, at the tender age of about 52 (my Missy found some disks for our son to watch, and we were all hooked- in Finland, the Doctor was not on TV when I was a child). Probably a heretical opinion here, but I find the "new" episodes better than the classic ones, which frankly are quite dated, and not just because of their cardboard sets and primitive special effects. The acting is usually better in the new ones, which makes the totally implausible stories fly.
Eagerly looking forward to seeing where the thirteenth Doctor takes us.
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Tuesday 18th July 2017 12:11 GMT Charlie Clark
Re: Wading in late
Probably a heretical opinion here, but I find the "new" episodes better than the classic ones, which frankly are quite dated.
Not really fair to compare all of the new ones with all of the old ones. The programme started to change from the first episode and had to invent "regeneration" when William Hartnell decided to quit. Continuing the series with a new actor who looked and acted a lot different than Hartnell was at least as controversial as any of the more recent casting decisions.
The programme was initially about using the Tardis to explain some science to children. Only later did it become part of the science fiction genre it helped create. It was traditionally also produced for immediate consumption, which is why so many of the episodes went missing when the BBC wiped the tapes. Now, it's a medium budget co-production. The budget was a notorious problem throughout the earlier episodes. Don't have the budget for expensive locations? Then you get lots of episodes in shitty sets, quarries and abandoned factories. Filming outside with 16mm and in studios with huge U-Matic cameras was also hugely limiting. The tech was starting to improve by the 1980s but the poor writing and cynicism of the production team really started to show: casting Nicola Byant as an ingenue American student wasn't a bad a idea but having her run around in little more than a bikini all the time was just desperate.
But, nearly all the good ideas (Daleks, Cybermen, etc.) and tropes for the series were established in the original episodes. This includes a tendency for hamming up the acting and treating the companions as sidekicks: Doctor Who took some of its subjects very seriously but itself less so.
I haven't seen much of the newer episodes but those I have seen have high production values, including generally good acting. But I haven't found the stories very engaging. I think the biggest pity is that Christopher Eccleston only got the one series. Without him turbo-charging the restart I don't think it would have got very far.
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Tuesday 18th July 2017 13:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Wading in late
A few points:
When Hartnell morphed into troughton they hadn't even come up with the word "regeneration" - they were originally going to go with "renewal". They had started thinking about replacing Hartnell a while earlier, as his health was failing and he was having trouble getting his lines right (in those days it mattered more, as they couldn't spend time doing a new take unless the first go was completely messed up). It's the need to produce the show quickly and with low cost that gives the earlier series an unpolished feel.
The educational focus of the show was more on history, not science. Pure historical episodes were a feature of the first few seasons. Later on they realised that just dropping the doctor and friends into the past didn't really generate much interest, so the pure historicals were dropped in favour of "Doctor goes back into earth's past and finds that <historical_event> was actually caused by ALIENS!". They still regularly fall back on this latter idea now (Shakespeare with alien witches, Robin hood with alien robots, and many, many cases of byegone Zygons).
The show was originally recorded on tape, it wasn't just produced for immediate consumption and ditched straight after transmission. Unfortunately, the magnetic tape of the time was horrifically bulky and expensive, so archiving rather than reusing tape was very costly. Episodes of the early series were lost because they needed to reuse the tapes for something else, that's all. A lot of the surviving episodes of the older series were actually sourced from copies that had been transferred to film so they could be shown by overseas TV stations. In many cases the soundtracks for these episodes were recovered separately; apparently some fans used to record the soundtracks off the air onto reel to reel tape so all the soundtracks still survive. If you really feel the need you can even watch the missing episodes in "slideshow" format alongside the recovered audio - they had someone who took a series of photos through each and every episode and these photos still exist. There are people who are still looking through old cupboards in foreign TV stations looking for film copies of the episodes where the visuals are still lost - amazingly they still make (re)discoveries from time to time. The amount of effort that's been expended to reconstruct the earlier series is mind boggling, and a testament to the show's cult appeal.
The original series wasn't about the Doctor and his sidekicks, instead it was focused on Ian and Barbara, Science and History teachers (respectively) who happened to end up travelling with a mysterious doctor. The specific teaching credentials of these first companions was all about facilitating the show's educational credentials. They were no sidekicks - they were the stars of the show and most of the time were more important to proceedings than the Doctor himself. Hartnell's character gradually took more control over proceedings, particularly after the departure of the two teachers, but it's only really from Troughton onwards that the Doctor really became the main character driving the plots. Even then, it's still a bit churlish to call some of these characters sidekicks - while you wouldn't trust Bonnie Langford's character to change a lightbulb the Doctor has had his fair share of useful companions through the years.
You can blame the solitary season for Eccleston on the man himself - apparently so afraid of typecasting he agreed to one season only, refused to renew his contract, and has done his best to keep away from the show completely since (which is why you only saw him alongside Hurt, Tennant and Smith as a life size cardboard cutout). No great problem for me - I preferred Tennant anyway - but I do agree it was in part his big name appeal that gave the show the boost it needed to relaunch as it did.
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Tuesday 18th July 2017 15:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Wading in late
"Mel Bush was a computer programmer with a photographic memory."
Fair enough, I stand corrected. I guess I just didn't like Bonnie Langford, or maybe it was just that the scripts of the time mostly had her input limited to screaming at monsters. I'll find out when I get around to rewatching that era.
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Tuesday 18th July 2017 15:26 GMT sisk
Re: Wading in late
The educational focus of the show was more on history, not science.
It was actually about half and half. Go back and watch season 1 of the classic again and you'll see it, particularly in The Daleks (the second story), where they go into pretty good detail about the basics of electricity. Considering that they were working with a 20 minute episode format the amount of time spent on the subject can't be anything less than an intentional lesson for the viewers.
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Tuesday 18th July 2017 15:02 GMT lorisarvendu
Re: Wading in late
"Not really fair to compare all of the new ones with all of the old ones."
Difficult one this. Although I'll agree that many Doctor Who episodes between the 60s and 80s were indeed very well acted and produced for the time , they can be difficult to watch after being used to the snappier direction and editing of modern Who.
Much as I love the programme myself, I find them slow and padded in comparison to the sometimes breakneck pace of the new series. Since I was "brought up" on late Troughton, all of Pertwee, and early Tom, I find those the easiest to watch. Whether that is due to them actually being "snappier" than Hartnell's stories, or whether it is due to watching them through nostalgia-tinted glasses is difficult for me to determine, though I suspect it is the latter, because I have made several abortive attempts to watch Davison, Colin, and McCoy, and I just can't manage to get through them.
You would expect that the closer you get to the present, they would be easier to watch, but for me they're not, so I can only put this down to the fact that I never saw them when young, and therefore there is no "inner child" to offset my 21st Century expectations.
This was particularly noticeable with the 1996 release of "Tomb of the Cybermen". I watched it both through the eyes of an adult (who was appalled at the slow pace and bad acting) and the inner child of the 1960s who was still thrilled and scared by it.
To be honest I have the same problem with Shakespeare. I know that it is classic literature, but I just can't sit through all that iambic pentameter.
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Tuesday 18th July 2017 16:04 GMT MJI
Thoughts
The writing has always been variable, but not sure on the new show runner.
RTD did a good relaunch and Moffat did a good takeover.
Some new Who episodes are classics (Blink, the castle one with Capaldi).
Actors variable, Tom Baker still favourite despite starting with Jon Pertwee.
But the last few all worked though. Only odd ones were Tristian Farnon and Silvester McCoy, (not bad, but odd), got to give it to Peter Capaldi to be the Doctor despite a biggish name.
As to woman been there done that with Missie.
However I am not that bothered, more concerned if I will actualy like it. Will it be like the best of the original, the best of RTD, the best of SM, or like the worth of?
Or will it be completely different, I have seen that launch trailer and definatley a bit worried. Style, not keen on.
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Tuesday 18th July 2017 18:36 GMT VinceLortho
Please..
The show is great and so are the choices for Doctor. This should be as excellent a Doctor as ever. Any direction (or time) is good, as long as I do not have the suffer through the 1970's writing where the scribbler's only inspirations seemed to be Tom Mix serials and inventing reasons for the low-budget recycled Macbeth sets. Specifically. the inevitable setup of being trapped with no chance to escape and moments from death and.. K9 blasts a hole in a cardboard/Styrofoam wall, the end.
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Thursday 20th July 2017 19:36 GMT bertkaye
Flaws in this pudding
1. two words: sonic tampon
2. waiting for someone to discover Doctor is bigger on the inside than she is on the outside.
3. angry Daleks switch to chanting 'menstruate, menstruate!'
4. Cybermen claim "once you've had Cyber you'll never go back!"
5. The Master will insist "Let's have a drink and let me show you why they call me the Master".
6. pink Police Box with begonias very conspicuous
7. Doctor's secret weapon: "you may as well give up now, I have PMS!"
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
