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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."
My god, I think I just had a nerdgasm. I've been waiting to hear this for years. :)
-1, "1337" speak
Now if they can just get Tom Baker.... Still, I am not sure if this is going to be successful. People today don't seem to appreciate the 'intellectual' hero, they want action. Maybe they are going to cast Arnold as the new doc?
If it is not cheap then it is not Doctor Who.
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.
Theres an initiative to find lost UK TV treasures: have a look
here
My web domain.
Dr. who is comng back, kill the fatted calf, fetch our finest wine, Horray! I's about time this happened.
I hear with this magical thing called The Internet, you can download TV shows and give those who want to control viewership, demographics, audience, and timed 'rollouts'(ie, UK now, US 4 months later, or vise-versa) a conniption.
I've been watching the BBC's (unedited, ie, stupidified-and-more-commericals-for-us-market) Spooks, aka MI-5. I watched the start of season 2 while A&E was still running teasers for the previous show.
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.
Please help metamoderate.
I don't think we'll need to worry whether we will get to see it in the US, since the original series has a pretty well established following. Maybe BBC America will actually start showing something other than "Changing Rooms" or "Ground Forces" repeats, if not, there's always PBS, and SCI-FI
By reading this sig, you agree to the terms of my sig license.
...Direct from BBC News
BBC News story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_ra dio/3140786.stm
s tm
BBC News discussion: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/3142006.
Persononally, if Paul McGann isn't coming back to play the Doctor then I'd prefer Colin Firth, Sean Bean or Sean Pertwee (Jon Pertwee's, the third Doctor, son) to get the title role.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
And I was just about to submit this too... Still, here are some more links since the BBC and Sky News are covering it too. Looks like they might actually be serious about going ahead with it this time!
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Has it really been fourteen years since the last Dr. Who episode was made for television? Wow. I've missed the old timelord.
I don't think I will ever be as excited as when Star Trek: The Next Generation came back on TV, but that was also, what, sixteen years ago? Time marches on. We get older, get real lives, more responsibilities. Sigh.
Considering the writer's past...
Dr: "Aren't you going to say it is bigger on the inside and on the outside?"
Colonel: "I believe that is bloody obvious!"
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
But if it's written by a gay guy, then we could have a camp Doctor, who dresses is really stupid clothes and doesn't seem particularly interested in women . . .
.
Hang on .
PS Hurrah! Dr Who is back in 2005!
Irrespective of the politics of The Daily Telegraph, the story's quite accurate. So, in the context of this story, your "to be read with a pinch of salt" is as redundant as your lambasting of the paper's editorial slant (and people who rip The Guardian for being a "communist rag" are just as bad, if not worse).
As I pointed out in my other post below, the story's being reported by the BBC too. And given that Doctor Who is a BBC production, that makes it pretty hard to refute.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Russell T Davies also wrote Century Falls and Dark Season, which were pretty good early 90s children's TV series. However, he is a fan of Doctor Who, so as long as he can keep the "fan wank" out of the script, it should be good.
-- oldthinkers unbellyfeel ingsoc
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
What this show is is a quick, enjoyably-written little Sci Fi serial thing. Everything should be done low-budget. The casting always was -- when someone got too pricey the Dr. got a new incarnation, right?
And costumes -- how could anyone ever get a cheap costume device that's as good as Tom Baker's scarf?
Cheap and fun. Concentrate on adapting decent little Sci Fi short story ideas for scripts. This could be a Simpsons, if you get the right mix.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Probably not, as he's proved himself perfectly capable of writing straight characters elsewhere.
The one real piece of importance about his having written QAF is the number of Dr. Who references in the series; its obvious that his statements about being a fan aren't just a new "I've got this job, and now the source material looks good" thing.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Mmmm, Leela... That really wasn't quite *enough* rabbit fur, was it?
The cartoon has already been made, and it was in fact a remake of a (partially completed) set of tv episodes. You can watch the anims (dont expect movie quality CGI) here at the beeb.
ManicHawk - Just because you're manic doesn't mean the walls aren't bouncy
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
With the new improved gay daleks it will more likely be FOR-NI-CATE...FOR-NI-CATE...
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Doctor Who is far too busy making prank phone calls to make a new TV series.
The ABC in Australia is currently replaying the entire Dr Who. All of it. It's on Monday-Thursday at 6pm. It started playing on the 15th of September, and should continue for years :-)
- proton
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!
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
Look. Just because Russell T. Davies is best known for Queer As Folk this does NOT mean Dr. Who is going to be gay all of a sudden. Well, any more gay than before. (An awful lot of Dr. Who fans are gay, and there's nothing wrong with that.)
What this does mean is that Dr. Who is going to be written by someone who is not just an excellent writer of TV drama, but also by someone who is a long-term fan of Dr. Who, and so has a a love of his material!
Give the man a chance, people! Wait and see....
"Information wants to be paid"
You remind me of an American tourist I saw in Scotland recently:
/
"Yeah, Larry Jr's a big Dr Who fan so I bought him a TARDIS!" she squawked, clutching a model of a red public telephone box. Poor Larry Jr, kid must be so disappointed...
Ade_
Big Bubbles (no troubles) - what sucks, who sucks and you suck
Anyways I remember the first time I watched Doctor Who, which is still on sci fi night on PBS btw, I was like WTF?!, but after watching a whole episode I thought it was the tre magnifique. One of these days I need to find it on DVD as well as the Red Dwarf series.
Trust Your Technolust
Damn straight...
I really liked the Cybermen from the Troughton years... they acted like cyborgs, no emotion which creeped in to their later appearances, just business.
Actually, you could say the same about the Borg. But then again, the Borg always were cybermen with better costumes.
We have been hearing this for years. There've been stories of a Dr Who revival cropping up every few months or so. There have been rumours about Stephen Fry, Alan Rickman and others appearing in a new movie/series etc, and nothing has ever come of it. Don't count your chickens till they've hit the small screen. Or something.
Well, the BBC have failed dismally in the last few years to find anything that could count as a fixture of Saturday early evening viewing. So this might be a case of the Beeb thinking 'this used to work, and people keep saying they want it back, so let's give it a go.' So they are hoping it will become a successful programme, rather than just hoping they'll make it this time.
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
Although he's definitely my favorite. I propose Rowan Atkins!
Debunking the "59 Deceits"
Well, it was really one BBC management queer. That was John Nathan-Turner, the show's producer from Baker's final season until the 1989 cancellation. Admittedly, the three Doctors he cast were all straight, but it's been a pretty solid assumption among Whovians for a long time now that Matthew Waterhouse and Mark Strickson got cast as Adric and Turlough, respectively, due to casting couch skills rather than acting skills (Strickson was married but bi, so the story goes).
Nathan-Turner completely wrecked the show, but the gay situation was only a minor contributory factor. The fact is that the guy had no sense of what made for good Doctor Who and ended up imposing his own sensibilities at the cost of the show's credibility and creativity. Add to this the fact that certain members of the Beeb's senior management had a hard-on for the show and let him do his crap for eleven years is what killed it, not the fact that he was gay.
If using Linux is about choice, how come people complain when I choose to use Windows?