Doctor Who original series (1963-89) ballot poll voting thread

http://cdn.artofthetitle.com/assets/sm/upload/5z/5v/bi/nm/dw_1963_c.jpg?k=8d3d4eaace

Aka ‘Who’s Pollin’ Who’ (not an Aretha Franklin thread)

OK, going to give this a go

Please send your ballot to ilxwhopoll at yahoodotcom

Provisional closing date for votes is 24th November 2015 (this might be extended if people want more time and depending on how many ballots are received)

Only stories from the original 1963-89 run are eligible
You can vote for up to 20 stories, ranked in order of preference. Your first place story will received 20 points, your second placed 19 points etc, down to 1 point for a story placed at #20. You don’t need to use up all 20 places if you don’t want to though! No unweighted ballots please. Please list the stories you are voting for with your favourite/number at the top, going down in order of preference.
I’ve put a list of the stories here:

who list

For the purposes of the poll I’m counting ‘An Unearthly Child’ and the following three episodes about cavemen as two separate stories, with the latter called ‘The Cave of Skulls’. Trial of a Timelord is counted as four separate stories titled ‘The Mysterious Planet’, ‘Mindwarp’, ‘Terror of the Vervoids’ and ‘The Ultimate Foe’ respectively. ‘Shada’ is also eligible.

4 Optional side polls:

Worst story: vote for between one and five stories, again ranked from top to bottom in order of worstness. First choice will get five points, second choice four etc.

Favourite Doctor: from the seven TV doctors of the 1963-89 series, you can rank all seven if you want, or just put one or however many you like. Again, ranked with favourite at the top.

Favourite companion: just one choice per ballot, define ‘companion’ as broadly as you like.

Favourite ‘villain’: again, please just vote for one here, define villain how you wish.

Hopefully that’s everything, please let me know if I’ve forgotten something or made some fundamental error, ty

sent

Worst story was very tough, personally I'd take the worst Hartnell over anything of Baker & McCoy's reign. Casting my mind back to those sullied years was painful.

*Colin* Baker obv

Time to get thinking! Thanks for doing this!

Colin Baker seemed to be a better actor than the material for a lot of it and McCoy was saddled with some naff stuff, that holiday camp one for one.

BUt at least neither had to contend with a hobby horse as Davidson did.

I think there are some bits of all 3 that are pretty watchable though but I'd never put them in my favourite doctors list, were I to make one.

Yeah, I lasted about one episode into the Colin Baker and thought no thanks. and it wasn't even his fault.

I was sort-of interested in Paul McGann's go, but I was out that day.

Peter Davidson's stories really suffered from the surfeit of companions.

personally I'd take the worst Hartnell over anything of Baker & McCoy's reign. Casting my mind back to those sullied years was painful.

McCoy's last two years are the most consistently great period of the show FYI, only one dud story, most of the best scripts in 26 years, and a production office that was re-energised and trying to do the best with the slashed budgets since Season 18

The problem I have with McCoy's final years is that most of the time the ambitions of the stories outpace the budget and the time allotted to them, leaving something that seems like it's on the verge of being a great story but falls spectacularly apart in the final act. I think Remembrance is the only one I'd call an unqualified success; many of the others make fantastic novelizations but don't work as televised stories.

(For example, I thought Ghost Light was completely incomprehensible until I read the novelization, which I loved; I then went back to the televised story after getting the back story from the novelization and realized that half the characters' motivations required internal monologues that aren't present in the televised story in order for it to make sense. Then, you have the total nonsense ending of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, the deus ex machina "this was my plan all along" of The Curse of Fenric and the wholly misconceived "The Doctor was Merlin" setup for "Battlefield"... Honestly, I'd rather watch Paradise Towers than any of these stories.)

Battlefield is a ton of fun to watch though!

To me, the seventh Doctor didn't actually work until the Virgin book line, where people were allowed to go deeper into the stories and flesh out motivations more as well as do a better job of sowing the seeds of the Doctor's manipulations (as well as do a bunch of stories about how the master manipulator's schemes went wrong and the desperate improvising he has to do to win, or the fallout from when his schemes worked but he wasn't able to manage the collateral damage).

That's a good point, even the Targets do a good job with the Seventh Doctor TV stories... I read those long before I ever got to see the TV versions, and remember feeling kind of let down.

Yeah... thanks to the aforementioned budget cuts, a lot of the Doctor's "master plotting and manipulation" comes across to me as "the writer didn't have space to show or even hint at the Doctor's plotting abilities so they all happen off-camera and are revealed deus ex machina-style to the viewer and Ace in the final episode, usually in a super-irritating way"

I read Ben Aaronovitch's novelisation of Remembrance of the Daleks recently and enjoyed it so much that I decided to watch the tv serial for the first time in years and ... 'disappointment' is maybe too strong a word, but there are so many sequences that were really impressive in the book that felt like they should have been accompanied by a sad trombone 'wah wah wahhh' sound effect on the televised version

isn't it the case that a lot of the McCoy era stories overran badly and had to be heavily edited before transmission?

I read Ben Aaronovitch's novelisation of Remembrance of the Daleks recently and enjoyed it so much that I decided to watch the tv serial for the first time in years and ... 'disappointment' is maybe too strong a word, but there are so many sequences that were really impressive in the book that felt like they should have been accompanied by a sad trombone 'wah wah wahhh' sound effect on the televised version

The only mitigating factor is that you could say the same for most of the classic era so it doesn't stick out as much if you are watching a bunch of those stories (is it The Daemons that devotes almost an entire episode to the third Doctor driving Bessie up and down the road? I know there was a lot of Hot! Bessie! Action! but there's one story that was just ridiculous with the long tracking shots of Pertwee driving a car and I can't remember now which one it was)

there was some discussion on the other thread as to whether it would be best to extend the closing date for ballots until some time next year- would people prefer this? when would be best? I'm fine to do it whenever, really, so I just wanted to see what the consensus is about closing date and roll out

maybe see how many ballots you get in the next couple of weeks? if it is a lot, then there might not be a need to keep it open for a really long time.

the "problem" of the mccoy era was that the show (as part of a lengthy, concerted effort to kill it) was entrusted to people who had no idea about how to make a proper tv show, resources (already scarce) were allocated wrong, some episodes vastly overran while others underran, and as a result those episodes are not very fun to watch casually, because they are bad television. however, at least the mccoy era had the decency to fail in interesting ways, which actually almost brings it full circle to shows like "the web planet", and the mccoy production team's insistence on being interesting is arguably directly responsible for the show's ultimate survival.

xxp Theres an awful lot of driving in The Daemons between the village and the heat barrier so you're probably right in thinking its that story.

On McCoy, I think the stories are at least fun in concept but the execution of them is often dreadful. But then my favourite of them is probably Ghost Light, which is nearly impossible to understand if you don't know what's supposed to be happening.

Sent!

Did 3 of the side polls, but can't rank Doctors--too hard. At various times all but Six are my favourite.

I read Ben Aaronovitch's novelisation of Remembrance of the Daleks recently and enjoyed it so much that I decided to watch the tv serial for the first time in years and ... 'disappointment' is maybe too strong a word, but there are so many sequences that were really impressive in the book that felt like they should have been accompanied by a sad trombone 'wah wah wahhh' sound effect on the televised version

This is the case with books all the way through the Target line though - Malcolm Hulke's, David Whitaker's and Donald Cotton's novelisations all do so much better than the TV show was able to in terms of spectacle and interiority and motivation. It doesn't mean the TV stories were shit, just that they were able to be revised for the medium. And Remembrance is one of the most successful TV productions of the show's history, barring the constant sad trombone of Keff McCulloch's tin synthesiser. They built a fucking spaceship and landed it in a schoolyard!

isn't it the case that a lot of the McCoy era stories overran badly and had to be heavily edited before transmission?

Not so much - in the past, Who episodes had been able to range from about 23 minutes to about 28 if really required (or 19 mins in the case of The Mind Robber); the McCoy era was locked into a 24'30 (iirc) max running time per episode. So overrunning by 20 seconds became a massive problem that earlier eras had never had, rather than the stories being wildly out of control.

For eg: the "movie" version of Curse Of Fenric on the DVD repairs so much damage that had to be done to the TX version - by trimming a second or two here and there from scenes to get down to the limit, they then had to cut back and forth between different scenes to cover the gaps. The special edition adds only a tiny smattering of footage, but the story gets to flow so much better, and make a little clearer sense rather than leaving things for inference.

and as a result those episodes are not very fun to watch casually, because they are bad television

I'd never argue that they don't show the limitations of being made under extreme pressure with shitty cameras on a children's TV budget. On the other hand, there's the entire history of Who, and every Cartmel/JNT episode is better television than all but two Saward/JNT stories, and every Root/JNT or JNT/JNT episode.

barring the constant sad trombone of Keff McCulloch's tin synthesiser

was just listening to Keff McCulloch's 1991 album of instrumental Prince covers on spotify

he also produced this apparently, from 1987

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9n0WMDYSWl4

This is the case with books all the way through the Target line though

One story I voted for, The Myth Makers, definitely snuck onto my list because of this: the TV version is a reconstruction, but the Robert Holmes novel was hilarious

That's one of the Donald Cottons! Holmes notably never did any of his own novelisations until The Two Doctors, when he was in need of the money

I remember reading the Celestial Toymaker over and over and wishing I could see the TV version. Which I guess nobody can do now?

Weird--I so remember it as being Holmes. In any case, it was wonderful.

The three Cottons are all splendid, and each use that first-person schtick iirc.

Final episode of Celestial Toymaker exists. This is a good blog summary of the rest: http://classicalgallifrey.blogspot.com/2012/10/serial-24-celestial-toymaker.html

I really like to get the DVD of The Underwater Menace that's just come out but it was like 20 quid in Forbidden Planet, for 2 full episodes and two telesnaps, fuck that!

the only reason anybody ever rated the celestial toymaker is because michael gough is cool.

the underwater menace is truly, laughably awful, but the recovered episode has what is actually a really very good troughton scene, one which shows why he's one of my favorites- you can put him in a complete garbage story and he can make it interesting television.

cotton's novels are fabulous and, along with whitaker, examples of the target novels at their best.

I read Holmes' novelisation of The Two Doctors recently as well - he really goes for it wrt the most grisly aspects of the story, to a surprising extent for something that was being sold as a children's book

like 20 quid in Forbidden Planet, for 2 full episodes and two telesnaps

The RT were specifically ordered to (and unsuccessfully argued against) make the recons as shitty as possible, too: just the telesnaps in order, no repeated photos or zooms or other sources, no titles, just 40 seconds of still photos with no text or narration to explain what's happening. They offered to do a Web ep 3 style one for no money at all and were refused.

I wonder why the interest/money ran out, the two recent-ish Troughton DVDs with no extras really stick out

Dan Hall's contract expired and the one person at BBC who had supervised the range previously left

Sent.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/7a/Doctor_Who_and_the_Dinosaur_Invasion.jpg/220px-Doctor_Who_and_the_Dinosaur_Invasion.jpg

just bumping this thread as a reminder to anyone else who wants to send a ballot, I put a provisional closing date of 24/11/15 (1 week from today), but that can be extended if there are people who want to vote but won't have time to do so over the next week, or if I haven't received enough ballots to make the poll viable- I've received 6 ballots so far, so 7 including my own

I’ve put a list of the stories here:

who list

wait I just looked at this properly

the following three episodes about cavemen as two separate stories, with the latter called ‘The Cave of Skulls

wtf?

Daleks' Master Plan

tsk

Doctor Who and the Silurians

grr

working on a list: have had to impose a not-only-Saward rule to spread out the Worst votes

thinking the main poll should have been best non-Holmes stories just to make it easier to winnow down

ok, I've received 7 ballots (8 including my own), which I'm thinking is probably not enough to begin a rollout- with that in mind I'm going to put the poll on hiatus and see if any more ballots trickle in over the next few months - that is unless people would prefer just to do a results thread now with what we have? thank you to everyone who had voted so far

Tempted to see the results now, tbh

Vote, everybody, it's easy and fun

Oh yeah forgot about this, I'll probably throw a ballot together over the weekend.

Time to bump this now that people don't have new episodes to think about?

gonna show Deadly Assassin to a nu-Who fan later this month, after this week's Gallifrey revisit on the new show

"the series itself didn't even invent regeneration until 1974 "

hartnell regenerated in 66!

― akm, Tuesday, September 16, 2014 3:07 AM (1 year ago)

betting AKM won't be voting for Power

Paul Cornell's submitted a ballot.

Oh damn, did I vote for Enlightenment? I hope I did

Okay lol forever at Delta being #7

would it be unethical to treat Paul Cornell's top 20 as a ballot and factor it into the results without his knowledge? or at least take away some of the element of surprise

I thought Delta was utterly stupid when it aired; watched it last year, and one or two budget-related production value issues aside (plus Keff), it's remarkable how confident it is. Like The Time Meddler, it swaggers onscreen with the intention of doing something completely new in Dr Who, using the malleability of the format to make something fun, incongruous and unexpected, and very nearly pulls it off.

I don't if I'll submit a ballot after all, so you can just use his in lieu of mine.

SUBMIT, LEE

Yeah there's so much stuff in Cornell's list that I still haven't seen, it makes me feel pretty unqualified to vote. I mean I think I've watched everything from number five onwards, and nearly all of four (although hadn't seen any of the Key to Time season until this week when I watched (and loved) The Ribos Operation). But before that there's probably more I haven't seen than I have, and that's without including the missing ones either.

having seen every single episode (to the extent that is still possible) needn't be a prerequisite for voting imo, though obviously it's up to you. I've already had one ballot from someone who specified that there are certain eras they are not familiar with

(having said that, the Key to Time season is probably my overall favourite season from the original run, it's maybe a bit front loaded but every story is great!)

You don't need to have seen more than twenty stories to vote, as long as you can put those into an order. (Unless you think 18 of them were shit, I guess.)

I've only seen 9 intact or mostly-intact Hartnells and 7 i-o-m-i Troughtons (there are only 7 wholly-intact Troughtons at all, out of 21 stories and 115 episodes!) - this didn't stop me from voting for ones I like.

Another thought on Delta's accidental revolutionary nature: being the first story shot entirely on OB video, it proved a test case for Greatest Show's remounting, and Survival's (also, obviously, accidental) pointing the way for the show's revival 15 years later.

a ballot can have up to 20 stories, but if anyone wants to do just a top 10 or top 5 or whatever that's fine as well. also, I meant to specify this in the first post, but any interested lurkers are more than welcome to vote if they's like to take part

(having said that, the Key to Time season is probably my overall favourite season from the original run, it's maybe a bit front loaded but every story is great!)

this is pretty generous, I can barely remember a thing about Power of Kroll, and Armageddon Factor entertained me as a kid but it's awful.

Because I worked on the DVD re-releases of a lot of these, I thought I'd go through the list and see how many I remembered seeing at least some of (even if all I can remember is the title). It came to 107! But, no, I can't come up with a list because I can't remember much about any of them. Deadly Assassin*-Warrior's Gate-Logopolis-Castrovalva-Earthshock are the ones that stay with me from seeing them as a kid (* - certainly a repeat, wouldn't have seen it in '76).

probably not going to get any more ballots for this so I'm going to go ahead and do the results next week for anyone who's interested. if there is anyone else who wanted to submit a ballot, it's now or never!

Omg never saw this… Compiling a quick ballot now!

Voted! Thanks for the thread bump. Admittedly I haven't watched as many doctors 1-3 episodes as some of you will have, but hopefully the countdown will help to fill in some crucial gaps.

I've received your ballot! thanks for taking part

looking forward to the results!

Oh, just sent one, hope that's not too late.

no, you're fine! I'll start the results thread on Monday, so anything received before then will be factored in

posting the results of this now for anyone who's interested:

Doctor Who original series ballot poll RESULTS THREAD