Doctor Who: Classic or Dud?

Doctor Who assistants - Search/Destroy
The Man That Ruined Doctor Who
Doctor Who Weekly/Monthly comic strips - Search/Destroy

MIND FITE!!!

Castrovalva is rubbish though!

The VERY FIRST companion was Susan, who was the doctor's DAUGHTER? No? She was interesting, it being 1963 and therefore pre- pop, let alone pre-Kate Millett: cuz she was SUPER-CLEVER, and the earth-boys were baffled and threatened and intrigued by this. But I don't remember her to look at since (a) B/W episodes never repeated

I remember the surviving B/W episodes being shown on UK Gold when UK Gold first started, in the early 90s. I think Susan told everyone that she was the doctor's granddaughter, but this might just have been a ploy to explain why he was her guardian to boring Earth people.

My favourite Doctor Who related thing is probably Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, a Douglas Adams novel put together from late-70s Doctor Who scripts that were never broadcast. (as was the third Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy book)

Exquisite. Simply... exquisite.

Tico - The BRANE OF MORBIUS should only be attempted after a couple of cans of RELAXANT in my opinion cos it is very silly. Also you will be annoyed by the rubbish assistant who falls over a lot. The priestesses are brilliant. But yes I am up for DOCTOR ACTION.

Secret flame! Secret fire!

Also the invention of real actual computers was catastrophic for Dr Who cos they insist on using them and seeing Z80 graphics on futuristic screens is more horrible than any rubber monster. Castrovalva has a particularly poor eg of this.

It is vvv amusing in Castrovalva when they are reading up on ZERO CO-ORDINATES on what looks like a primitive Teletext reader. I do not like the assistants there cos one of them IIRC tried to SHUN K-9. Bah humbug.

K-9 did a STERLING job in the Sun Makers.

X = reason why someone (who generally does not like Genre of which X is example) started to like Genre

Typical nerd response:

X = RUBBISH!!!

I hate nerds.

This leads us to a question I asked Mrs Tico Tico last night - why exactly was Beryl Reid famous again?

What I am trying to say is that for some people (including HSA) the rubber suits and stupid aliens were a turn-off, which distracted him from being able to appreciate the clever plots and interesting concepts which made Dr. Who so fantastic. Castrovalva had no rubbish monsters, but it did have an amazing concept.

So you get all these nerds going "My appreciation of Dr. Who is superior because I can look past the rubbish rubber monsters" (or even "I *like* the rubbish rubber monsters") which totally disregards the point that it is the concept and plots and writing which makes Dr. Who a cut above the usual rubber monster sci fi rubbish.

Mostly because he could do the thing that still sets great Dr. Who stories apart: a fairly stable system which suddenly has a relentless resourceful force of chaos rampaging through it.

I am a nerd, but I wasn't trying to pull a move of 'oh no that's not part of the canon' or 'oh no that's not obscure enough' - Castrovalva is highly regarded among Dr Who fans I've discovered, but that regard baffles me a bit.

spplutter, I am glad in the US Doctor Who never caught on w/ the fanboy community WHAT??

I have not been to that many conventions, but at the ones I've been to, the Doctor Who presence was miniscule compared to Star Trek, Star Wars, anime, etc.

Did anyone* see the Cruise of the Gods one off drama on telly this past Christmas. A bit sappy, but funny stuff and well observed, obviously from 1st hand experience.

* these people did http://www.delgados.co.uk/dailydiary_1201.htm

if you watch carefully at the end, when Morbius falls off the cliff his claw falls off, revealing the act-or's hand underneath.

As for Dr Who, I liked it as a kid and stopped watching soon after Tom Baker left, and have hardly looked back since. I watched the one off filmed special and thought it was utterly misjudged, same as everyone else.

This is the best one sentence description of Dr. Who ever.

I heart Dr. Who. But growing up I generally preferred UK SF TV (Dr. Who, and all the Gerry Anderson shows) to the tedious American ones.

It is utterly hilarious - if you've ever seen the Rowley Birkin QC drunk character from the Fast Show, then that's what it was like. Dear old Tom rambling away with stories that had bugger all to do with the episodes he was supposed to talk about (eg: "ah! Well, now, I don't recall a thing about this story, but I do know there was a delightful barmaid at the lovely little pub nearby. Smashing").

Towards the shows end he got all maudlin when he went over the fact that apart from a couple of guest spots on things, he's never really been succesful since. It was all rather sad.

Great viewing if you can find it, I wish I could remember the name of the thing.

Actually it *did* look rather ph33rs0m3 cos from the blurb on the back they seem to be taking over the world by controlling MANNEQUINS THE WORLD OVER. Arrrgh!

Why did I not steal this video? It is because I am a FULE. Also I forgot my shopping bags. Groo.

However, I've never seen it, except for the made-for-TV movie.

If I were to start, -where- should I start, and is it on DVD?

ignore the 2 doctors and the varos one

oh no! they are PUSHING THEIR WAY THRU BRACKEN!! oh NOOOOO!!

if i wasn't sitting down already i wd need to

I can't remember how the lowly superstar window dresser managed to make her come to life though. Wasn't she a cursed princess or something?

Tico I would love to borrow the episode. I sense it is something that should be watched under AMBIENT LIGHTING and clutching teddy bear/blanket/bottle of GIN, yes?

a great Dr Who thread would be S/D Minor Characters In 3rd Doctor Stories Who Exist Only To Get Killed At the Beginning.

Search: Pigbin Josh (eh, is he the one from Spearhead From Space? or is he from Claws Of Axos?)

also it was based on the legend of pigpygmalion

yes, it is total classic. I love the bit where he looks at his ex-wife on the screen and says "Oh, that's Lalla! I remember... we became very close".

apparently the catchphrase in Tom Baker's autobiography is "we had the most terrible fun... and then I never saw them again".

I think the Gunfighters works really well in how it combines humour and grimdark stuff, it does something kind of like The Three Amigos, where Stephen and Dodo think they're in this light-hearted Roy Rogers romp, dressing up in silly outfits and doing bad American accents and not realising that the cowboys they've met are the historically accurate violent sociopath kind. It's unfortunate that some of the cowboys unintentionally bad American accents are as bad as Peter Purves's intentionally bad American accent, though

lol maybe this is my European education but I couldn't imagine showing Doctor Who to a 3 year old at any moment in the show's run. that's surely when you introduce them to sesame street, or within a 60's bbc context, maybe zoo time?

I think the Gunfighters works really well in how it combines humour and grimdark stuff, it does something kind of like The Three Amigos, where Stephen and Dodo think they're in this light-hearted Roy Rogers romp, dressing up in silly outfits and doing bad American accents and not realising that the cowboys they've met are the historically accurate violent sociopath kind. It's unfortunate that some of the cowboys unintentionally bad American accents are as bad as Peter Purves's intentionally bad American accent, though

― soref

when i was growing up with the show "the gunfighters" had a reputation for being The Worst Doctor Who Story. i learned this from peter haining's "the doctor who file", actually, a book that received inexplicably wide distribution in the US in the '80s that solidified a lot of my ideas about the show

i think a lot of his unpopularity speaks to the biases of '80s fandom, which was very... let's say that "attack of the cybermen" didn't reflect the unique fan biases of ian levine. the approach taken to that episode reflected a lot of fan beliefs about the show at the time.

fans (and to be fair the audience at large) wanted monsters, not historical stories, and if the stories had to be historical stories, they should be Serious Historicals. also, by that point the show had finally broken through in the us (the 20th anniversary saw the show really start getting picked up by a lot of united states public television stations). a comedy historical featuring terrible american accents punctuated by a comedy musical number was pretty much the antithesis of what fans wanted from the show. also not helping the show's reputation: it existed in full. it's pretty easy to overlook a story's flaws when you can't actually _see_ those flaws. fans didn't want to watch "the gunfighters", they wanted to watch "the celestial toymaker"!

except that "the gunfighters" is _significantly_ better than "the celestial toymaker". getting cotton to write for the show is probably the best thing tosh and wiles ever did. doing historical stories that start out as comedies before taking a turn at the end to radically deconstruct historical myths is... i'll stand by my statement, it's not really the best approach for a show with an audience of three-year-olds. that's about the only criticism i have to make about cotton's writing. cotton is an _extremely fucking funny_ writer. i understood this from before i had any idea who he was. he wrote a piece in "the doctor who file".

god, cotton was even funnier than robert holmes, who also wrote a piece for the book, about five minutes before he died. it was a self-deprecating comedy bit. the guy who, as script editor, extensively re-wrote the show's scripts for three years, brought the show to new creative heights after having spent the past five years writing stories that established key elements of the show's character, in the process burning himself out and turning himself into an alcoholic wreck of a human being who had maybe one more truly great script in him ("the caves of androzani", 1984) - one of this man's only published prose works is a comedy bit about what a lazy writer he was. that comedy bit is literally all i knew about the man, for ages. i wasn't sure why the book had bothered to get the perspective of such an obviously marginal figure in the show's history.

knowing this now makes the piece even funnier. donald cotton was still funnier, though. god, y'all need to read the man's novelizations for target books. they're just really exceptional pieces of work. he did them for both of his scripts for the show as well as for dennis spooner's "the romans". some fans like to praise the historicals as being high-minded and elevated, but honestly, they're fucking bad history.

lucarotti was a good writer. i like his writing. unfortunately, "the aztecs" really does say a lot about doctor who's approach to writing history. there's the germ of a good idea here - barbara comes in and wants to end human sacrifice, and the doctor says that "you can't change history, not one single line." admittedly, the show was still in its first season. there wasn't sixty years of evidence directly contradicting that assertion. the thing is, there is _tons_ of room to morally critique barbara's liberal "reformer" point of view, her belief that is she can just end human sacrifice, she can keep the aztecs from being destroyed. this belief is nonsense, is what it is. it's her refusing to take accountability for the role imperialism and colonialism played in the extermination of indigenous peoples. doctor who, an alien, is in a unique position to point this out, to point out it wasn't human sacrifice that destroyed the aztecs, but european culture. he could point out the very specific role christianity played in destroying a lot of the best historical sources of indigenous people, with missionaries declaring their works "heresy" and destroying them. instead, lucarotti's scripts seem to implicitly make the doctor a member of the church of england!

if this all seems a bit radical for a children's show, well, davies can fucking do that sort of thing. for me it doesn't matter how a story like that would have been received, what matters is that _lucarotti could never have written a fucking story like that_. that's the sort of story doctor who _could_ have done, the sort of story... i mean look, david whitaker wrote radically deconstructive stories, donald cotton wrote radically deconstructive stories. lucarotti's stories, as history, are utterly _whiggish_.

in contrast, the blog Escape to Danger says this of cotton's novelization of "the romans":

He learns from his companions of a passing scholar who they encountered in a nearby town, and who performed ‘a rambling iambic account of the Rape of Lucretia’, which he considers to be inappropriate for ‘a mixed audience’ (a view with which Vicki later agrees).

to try and describe cotton's approach to history, i thought about making a tasteless joke suggesting that cotton is the sort of person who would have done a historical about the rape of the sabine women... only to be reminded that _cotton himself already made a similar joke in 1987_.

i fucking love donald cotton, and it makes me so, so happy that "the gunfighters" is one of the few season three serials to survive in full. really, it's the best possible argument one can make for tosh and wiles' tenure on the show.

he submitted another script for the davis and lloyd production team, but they had no interest whatsoever in his script. which is understandable, except for the fact that their script pile was so low that they wound up filming "the underwater menace". not only is the script hot garbage, but the available historical evidence suggests that both of them knew full well it was hot garbage. thanks to the amazing performances of patrick troughton and geoffrey orme... and yes, i said geoffrey "NOTHING IN THE WORLD CAN STOP ME NOW!" orme. a lot of fans have a hard time with understanding the idea that people could be _intentionally funny_ on the show. orme is fucking _great_ in the callan pilot "a bullet for schneider", nothing at all like his role as zaroff here. just like everyone else, he knows he's playing a stock mad scientist in an utterly terrible script. his performance is not only extremely entertaining, but his character plays _so fucking well_ off troughton's - look at the recovered episode 2 and you can see their dynamic in action.

anyway. i can't blame them for not commissioning "the herdsmen of venus" as a script, but i bet it would have been fucking great.

cotton's only other major work in television is writing the untransmitted pilot of "adam adamant lives". the only bit of it that survives is the 1902 sequence, which was reused at the start of the transmitted pilot. the whole hook of the show is the contrast between the overwrought victorian drama of adamant and the reality of the 1960s, and the only bit of the pilot that survives is the bit where _everyone_ is exactly that overwrought. such a shame. it's just such a great idea for a character. look at this bit about the creative process:

The main character originally went through a number of possible names: "Cornelius Chance", "Rupert De'Ath", "Dick Daring", "Dexter Noble", "Aurelian Winton", "Magnus Hawke" and even "Darius Crud" before Sydney Newman settled on Adam Adamant.

"darius crud"! certainly better than "magnus hawke", which sounds like the name of an internet would-be "dominant" - not remotely dashing. sadly, he didn't write anything else for the show. instead the show commissioned a script by goddamn _dick sharples_. twice. sharples' first-season episode is the only one which doesn't survive in the archives, which is a bit of uncommonly good fortune. his second-season episode was called "death begins at seventy", because that's what passed for wit to the razor-sharp mind of dick sharples. sadly the episode in question no longer exists, which is in fact a bit of a shame, what with it having been directed by _ridley scott_ and all. i really ought to watch "the league of uncharitable ladies", the episode scott directed that does survive...

for anyone wondering i'm procrastinating from applying for jobs. that's why i'm writing novels. gives me an excuse to watch this adam adamant record, which, judging from the opening tag, is in fact _very_ well-directed - clearly a cut above the similar sequences in the b&w episodes of "the avengers", which is no small feat! a delight to watch. if you've taken the time to read all this nonsense, you absolutely _must_ see this scene, at the very least.

(robert holmes) had maybe one more truly great script in him ("the caves of androzani", 1984)

and even then, he was helped greatly that the story happened to be directed by probably the greatest director in all of classic who, graeme harper

to be fair to holmes, john nathan-turner does seem to have put a lot of work into wasting holmes' considerable talent by making putting all sorts of arbitrary restrictions on his scripts that played almost exactly against his strengths as a writer. he hated writing six-parters, so why not have holmes' next script be the length of a six-parter? and put troughton in there. holmes had written troughton! badly! oh also sontarans, there should be sontarans in there, and the show should definitely be set in new orleans. no. wait. the funding fell through on that one. spain! the story has to be set in spain. holmes doesn't necessarily seem to have _liked_ doing endless rewrites on his scripts, for some reason. having a profoundly ignorant producer make him do multiple arbitrary rewrites doesn't seem to have led to holmes' greatest work.

good news, we've just discovered a potentially unlimited source of Stahlman's Gas

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26134722-100-worlds-first-tunnel-to-a-magma-chamber-could-unleash-unlimited-energy/

in other words, we are not in any way, shape, or form in the Darkest Timeline

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIBfUAF9otg

This ruled