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Dr. Who To Come Back To The BBC
-douggy writes: "According to the BBC news site, the world's best-loved time traveller, Doctor Who, is returning to the BBC -- this time to battle evil aliens in cyberspace. This is along with an audio stream of a special 30 min. ep later in the year. It looks like there will be an air of interactivity in the show as well."
There have been many Dr Who audio adventures made by Big Finish Audio Productions since 1999, sold on cassette and CD. "Death Comes to Time" was comissioned by the BBC speach network Radio 4 from Big Finish as a pilot episode for a proposed new radio series.
This pilot episode was rejected and never broadcast.
This pilot episode is now being webcast. There are still no plans to broadcast the episode on radio.
There are no official plans for a new Dr Who series on TV nor radio, nor another film, although as always with Dr Who there is plenty of speculation.
If you have digital terrestrial TV (OnDigital), cable or satellite you can catch old episodes of Doctor Who on UK Gold at 8am on Sundays (last Sunday's episode was Invisible Enemy which featured Tom Baker, leather-clad Leela and the first appearance from K9).
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Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
First of all, there is the matter of special effects. When I was a kid, the low-cos special effects of Doctor Who did not bother me, because I had rnough imagination to pretend that the special effects were not so cheesy. Also, the level of expectation people had for quality special effects in the 1970s and 1980s were not the level of expectations people have today.
While computer graphics can do much to minimize the cost of special effects, it is still more expensive to do the level of special effects today's TV viewers expect than it was when Doctor Who was made in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.
The other is that Doctor Who ran for nearly 30 years, with a wide variety of different actors playing the lead role, and a variety of producors producing the show. Needless to say, the "flavor" of Doctor Who has changed greatly over those years.
Doctor Who has many different fans: Some expect the Doctor Who of the Pertwee years, others expect the Doctor of the early Tom Baker years, and others yet expect the doctor of the late Tom Baker years.
When the TV movie came out, many were shocked that it included a car chase scene, saying that this was not a part of Doctor Who. Of course, the John Pertwee and early Tom Baker eras had plenty of car chases (the one from Planet of the Spiders comes to mind), but there is a large group of fans who were not aware of this.
No matter what the BBC does, it will be impossible for them to make a Doctor Who that meets the expectations of what all their fans want. Even if they make an excellent TV show, and I believe they could if they threw the money at it to give it decent special effects, a lot of fans will complain, no matter how excellent it is. Look at the number of fans of Dune who complained about the excellent recent TV miniseries for an example of this.
Do I want to see Doctor Who come back? Yes. The BBC can not expect to make many long-standing fans of Doctor Who happy.
As an aside, anyone know what is happeneing with the new TV episode of Blakes' Seven that they have been talking about?
- Sam
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This is along with an audio stream of a special 30 min. ep later in the year.
Wrong. This isn't along with anything: the entire episode is 30 minutes long, broadcast as six real audio files. There is only one episode, singular, and the audio stream you mention above doesn't accompany it, as the words along with imply. The audio stream (although in six parts) _is_ the episode.
It looks like there will be an air of interactivity in the show as well."
Sort of. The listeners will be able to vote on whether they want the Doctor to return. There isn't any interactivity in the show, no outcomes to be decided pertaining to the episode, but a simple vote by listeners as to the Doctor's return.
You would think that this one would be a no-brainer: do we resurrect one of the most popular SF franchises in the world?
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As far as audio adventures go, this is nothing new, either; the BBC has licensed a company named Big Finish to produce a series of audio adventures available on CD (website here) featuring the fifth through eighth Doctors, accompanied by most of their companions. They're also in talks to bring in Tom Baker, as well as Anthony Ainley (the Master), but nothing concrete has come out of them yet.
This is news, but it implies Doctor Who has been dead. It's not; it's still alive and kicking...
(or the ones they used to have)
- Decent writing
- Engaging characters
- Mixture of Baroque/High Victorian charm and high-tech
- Some clever sci-fi/horror hybrids
What they need to get rid of is:
- "fanboy" writing (dear God - let us forget the TV movie! The horror! The horror!)
- Overacting (RADA's finest, at their worst.)
- Reducing people to set pieces
- low budgets (they should remake it with Fox money)
- cameos where the people are demonstrating it's a cameo (e.g. that Richard Briers twit in a Hitler Moustache doing his usual set piece)
Let's face it - there was nothing engaging about the final series nor the TV movie. It was an attempt to do a more action oriented piece without the money. I'd take Tom Baker in a pirate shirt taking someone on in a dimly lit fencing duel in the Phillip Hinchcliffe era, than someone taking out a Dalek with a magic softball bat.
The show had atmosphere and tension and a curious interplay with high tech themed High Victorian Gothic/60s modernist and a main character who was Old World in style but McGyver and the Lone Gunmen when it came down to it. When they started dressing up the doctor in bright tartans and playing the same old "kill the menacing alien" routine, it was over. Where was the Green Death of the 90s? The Brain of Morbius of the 80s?
I think the USA and the BEEB should reconsider a merger, cause Who in its heyday was a GREAT show. They should do the Fish Called Wanda and do it American Money, British writing and acting, not American acting and writing, British money.
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I really would love to see how the pull off more of their fine tradition of cheesy special effects.
I don't know about anyone else, but I watched Dr. Who as a small kid, and was really scared by lots of it. Mostly I think it was scary because the props and special effects were so bad. You'd see some monster that was just a guy dressed in green garbage bags, but you KNEW that it was just a guy in green garbage bags. I used to sit in front of the TV at my grandmother's eating french fries going: "oh geez! that's a guy shambling around in cut up green garbage bags trying to take over the universe! That's really freaking me out!"
Ahh - the memories...
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
>As an aside, anyone know what is happeneing with the new TV episode
>of Blakes' Seven that they have been talking about?
I don't know about a new TV episode; AFAIK the movie is about curently in pre?) production, starring Paul Darrow as Avon... set five years PGP (p[ost Gauda Prime.) Dr WHo I can take or leave (although I gre up withit); it's B7 that I've obsessively collected on video. 25 tapes at $25 a pop... worth every penny. I'm a fan, does it show? ;) (google for my username for further evidence...)
Some random B7 resources from my bookmarks:
http://ernie.bgsu.edu/~sclerc/Blakes7.html
http://www.horizon.org.uk/
http://lcw.simplenet.com/b7lib.html
For the benefit of anyone unfortunate enough to miss out on on B7, it absolutely rocks, being a cheesy low-budget BBC take on Star Trek - except the Federation are an evil repressive authoritarian state and the good guys are outlaws on the run - and they all argue/distrust/betray each other. A refreshingly cynical worldview...
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