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Doctor Who Comeback
ElGuapoGolf writes "According to the Daily Telegraph, Doctor Who is set to return to the airwaves. According to the article, it's going to be written by the same guy who created the series 'Queer As Folk'. Not sure if we'll get to see it in the US, but I guess it's a good time to start bugging your cable company to carry BBC America if they don't already."
Funny, my post to Slashdot was rejected...grrr :(
Anyway, now that the show is coming back, it might be worthwhile reminding fans that the history of the show is incomplete, so while Dr.Who's future is assured, its past is very patchy.
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My web domain.
Sean Pertwee already ruled himself out a few months ago. He said he simply couldn't do it - he said he had very definite ideas about how the Doctor should be, the interviewer asked "You mean he was your dad?", and Sean just said "Yes".
All in The Metro, a London freebie paper picked up my a fair number of commuters including myself.
Cheers
Ian
Dr Who's time is past and this is just sentimental nostalgia. It was fine for children 25 years ago but it's return will be nothing more than a disappointment.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
It's pretty funny to see it put that way: for geeks outside the US, grabbing TV shows on the net is pretty much de rigeur.
But you should hear the laughing fits us non-USians go into when we see discussions about region-code-free DVD players for a north american audience...
On topic: Russell T. Davies (the "guy" referred to in the article) is also a great big fan and an author of Doctor Who fiction. Queer As Folk gives a pretty good indication of his talent when it comes to putting "non-standard" content in a po-mo TV context, which is why Who fans are getting pretty excited about this.
And that would be Tom Baker. 'Nuff said.
I guess I like this iteration of The Doctor the most since he's the first one I ever saw.
I get BBCAmerica. Unfortunately, Doctor Who airs while I'm at work, and its in the digital band so I can't use my PC to "tivo" it. Using the VCR to record it is so "90s".
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
Actually, I'm much more of a fan now than I was then. Don't get me wrong - I used to really enjoy it. It's just that I don't think I was old enough to really understand some of it.
I started watching the reruns on UK Gold and, courtesy of Tivo, I watched from the beginning of the Pertwee era right through to the (merciful) end. Changed my views too - as a kid I remember Tom Baker being the best, but I personally prefer Pertwee and Davison now.
Oh, and real life definitely caught up with me. I'm now working, married, have one kid and expecting another any day now, mortgage, two hungry cars to feed...all we need is a dog and we'd be the perfect TV advert family. I'm pretty hopeful about this - recent TV sci-fi has been very same'ish, and I'm looking forward to the different direction that Doctor Who took.
Cheers,
Ian
If it is not cheap then it is not Doctor Who.
Yes - up to a point. Certainly they won't have a chance of competing with Hollywood whizz-bang effects and shouldn't try. But things have moved on a bit, and expectations are higher. Thery have to be 2000s cheap, not 1970s cheap.
On the other hand, al low budget can be a great stimulator of originality. The TV Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy did very well for cheap, I thought. We need just the right amount of tongue-in-cheek. If they take the great legacy of Dr Who too seriously, it will become pompous, whereas if they take it too lightly, it will become silly.
Having carped on, nevertheless Rejoice!, for the Doctor is returning. Better to try and fail than not to try at all. Daleks on the London Eye, Cybermen in the Eden Project and a blue police box in Downing Street - if we're lucky.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
I've also managed to watch Enterprise about 6 hours before it airs- and I can skip the #$@!ing annoying theme song. They should look on the bright side- with the commercials, I'd loose motivation after the first commercial break.
By "They", I assume you mean the people behind the Enterprise series. I hate to break it to you, but they don't want you to watch the series, just the commercials. The revenue generated by the show(merchandise, etc) barely pays for the toilet paper in the restroom.
They'd prefer to run uninterrupted commercials with no content - this is the whole premise behind free-to-air programming. It's a balance of rewards and punishments, where they supply just enough reward(content) to keep you coming back for more punishment(commercials).
No - Alan Rickman for Dr Who!!
Hmmm, considering how well the BBC have looked after the show in the past, I'd give this news only two cheers. Still, what next - the Goodies?
/
Ade_
Big Bubbles (no troubles) - what sucks, who sucks and you suck
This is great news, as it gives us the chance to have some science fiction on TV that doesn't have to be Yet Another T&A Star Trek Series (TM).
Anyways, good writing will make or break this show. If they're smart (and since it's the BBC instead of some American marketing firm, they might be!) they'll continue the tradition of having DIFFERENT WRITERS do episodes, rather than locking in a team for a whole season and ending up with another Pip and Jane Baker travesty.
Heh, I can't forgive them for what they did to my favorite Doctor (Colin Baker), who is quite a good actor, but had to work with things like "The Happiness Patrol". Perhaps they can go to work writing for Brenan and Braga's new series... Star Trek: Teen Bikini Force!
The Doctor is supposed to be hyper-intelligent; Colin Firth and Sean Bean just don't have the depth, I couldn't believe in either of them. Plus Sean Bean has not an ounce of humour about him.
Sean Pertwee... interesting, off-the-wall choice. They could do worse (and probably will - if the rumours about Richard E. Grant, Paul McGann or Rowan Atkinson being the Doctor are to be believed).
Now, Peter Firth (Harry in Spooks / MI-5), I could see...
I would rather not see all the "classic" monsters recycled. These were very much a product of their times, exaggerations of then-current fears. Nuclear war/radiation/mutation --> Daleks. The new field of cybernetics and artificial limbs/organs --> Cybermen. And so on.
... again.
I'd much prefer to see *new* stories with inventive new villians. It doesn't have to be "mystery science bogeyman" *every* week, but there are certainly some more topical lurking fears that could be put to good use. Quantum mechanics, nanomachines, genetic engineering, viruses, various forms of computing and communication technology taken to pathological extremes, and so on.
Let's *really* scare the living crap out of people, eh? A pepper-pot with a plunger just won't cut it any more.
I also think that if you take away the crutch of recycling old monsters and plots, you will get *much* better stories.
As for the truth of the "return", I'll believe it when I see it. I've seen this kind of story turn out to be false too many times. I want it to be true, I really do, but the cynical side of me fears that the BBC just want to drive up DVD sales
I thought the deal behind the name James Bond was that it was just an identity given to whomever happend to be Agent 007 at the time.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
People have rarely appreciated the intellectual hero. Isaac Asimov had a great essay on the subject of pulp heroes, where he pointed out the hero was usually physically powerful but mentally dense, while the villain was usually brilliant but physically weak, and the stories typically ended with the musclebound idiot beating up on the brilliant weakling. He thought it was an ugly idea, and arose from an intense anti-intellectualism in this country based on agrarian philosophies about where the worth of a man lay. I don't think the current time is much worse than the past in that regard; it's probably a little better now than it used to be.
It makes sense to me - for some reason, most diehard Dr. Who fans seem to be gay. I asked a gay Dr. Who fan (or "Whovian" as they style themselves) about the connection, and he said:
Well, the vast majority of high-profile Dr Who fans are big gays, and I've heard at least one lament about the new level of acceptance people have of gaysexuality leading to a boring paucity of furtive, secretive trouser adventure. This is chronologically the reverse of your description of DW fandom. Also, to get all 3/4 angle, "I heart the Dr Who" for a moment, that it was utterly, utterly British, and we're very much engulfed by Americanised telefantasy, ever since the Star Trek revival. The other odd lot is Blake's 7 fans (who tend to be bored housewives who, by adorning eyepatches and leathers, treat the B7 scene as a diversion from the path to fully fledged swinging - a sort of polyamorous swimming pool verouka bath).
Which doesn't quite answer the "whay do gay people like Dr Who so much?" question, but is interesting, anyway.
evil math within Nature's Cubic Creation!
noooooooooooooooo!!!!
Gotta NOT under any circumstances treat continuity as a shibboleth. If this is going to survive its first season it HAS to be a new series for new viewers. Every time it harks back to something from The Dealy Assassin or Genesis Of The Daleks, expect another 10,000 viewers to switch off in confusion and disappointment.
And that also means no regeneration. IMHO one of the key problems with the TVM was the way it spent 15 minutes introducing the McCoy character to a brand new audience (after a bollocks spiel about taking the Master's remains back to Gallifrey from Skaro, puhleaze!) and then killing him to get a regeneration in. Catastrophic mistake.
Doctor Who is a show about a mysterious traveller, generally a good, kind and helpful one, who travels around time and space in a bizarre and mostly unexplained vehicle, righting wrongs and getting into scrapes.
Anyway, Russell Davies already said, with his Doctor Who 2000 proposal and i think on BBC teletext this morning again, that this would be starting well after any theoretical regeneration, with some bloke called 'the Doctor' having adventures. Hartnell didn't start with a regeneration after all. And Scream Of The Shalka will be taking exactly the same approach with the Richard E Grant doctor for the November 29th webcast. The Big Finish 'Unbound' series is showing very nicely that you just don't need regenerations, and you don't need single-threaded continuity. At present we've got TV continuity (which was always patchy and secondary to the dramatic requirements of the meoment. except in the death-throes of the last couple of seasons), Virgin NA continuity, BBC EDA continuity, Big Finish audio continuity, Telos Novellas continuity, DWM comicstrip continuity and so forth.
Doctor Who needs continuity no morethan does Superman.
tomV