Doctor Who: Classic or Dud?

Now I want to dream of what Wualjty is, what kind of planetary society exists on it, and when the next Doctor will visit.

Wualjty sure, quality no way

Some pics of Tennant/Tate on set have leaked, prob why they made that announcement on their return earlier

I don’t know, does any other franchise have an disaster equivalent to the Chibnall years? I feel if this were American TV he would have been hooked offstage at the end of his first season, but here everyone is being awfully diplomatic about it.

Loads of Star Trek series, both vintage (TOS and TNG) and ongoing, have had a lot of creative upheavals and behind the scenes drama.

Interestinger and interestinger

https://www.doctorwhonews.net/2022/05/yasmin_finney_joins_doctor_who.html

cool!

Huh, she actually looks a little like Billie Piper!

>Loads of Star Trek series, both vintage (TOS and TNG) and ongoing, have had a lot of creative upheavals and behind the scenes drama.

Yeh - I don't have much production-side knowledge of Trek (enjoying the current show a lot tho!) - but I remember there was a lot of creative stagnation around Voyager/Enterprise era. Maybe analogous to the mid-JNT/Saward era of too much fan service and not enough influence from outside the franchise bubble?

Would be fascinated to read an informed critical post-mortem on the Chibnall era though. I can see why a lot of decisions - including hiring the guy - would've looked good on paper. But surely alarm bells should've started going off after that first season? I know that the Capaldi saw a decline in ratings but it was clearly sparking creatively. Ultimately there's no getting around that Chibnall's previous DW (and Torchwood) episodes were all pretty uninspiring. And while acknowledging the diversity gains during his tenure, maybe an ultimately more meaningful and renewing diversity hire would've been a non middle-aged white TV journeyman showrunner?*

*Having said this, I still endorse the Return of RTD as a much-needed course correction/salvage operation!

Broadchurch being such a massive hit is probably the major reason why Chibnall got the job, I suppose?

Yeah, I do have to give Chibnall some credit as a producer - he very meaningfully moved the levels of behind-the-camera diversity forward, to often excellent effect - his run has often LOOKED amazing, and we've had some great new directing talent on the show. Also, the guest casting has been very diverse and also excellent - to the point where the guest cast were basically the only thing that kept pulling me back to Flux week-on-week.

It's the sloppy bargain-basement first draft writing that sinks it, and often craters everyone else's efforts (cast/crew etc). And the sense that his overall approach to Doctor Who was to treat it as a (often very worthwhile) to-do list - female Doctor, less London-centric, greater topicality to stories, some genuinely brilliant decisions about where to set historicals - all overdue and necessary, but with no accompanying creative vision or storytelling inspiration as to what to do with those things. All that effort, expended on... telling a story where the Cybermen invade Gallifrey.

The move to bring more diversity into the series was laudable, but it's just gesturing towards wokeness unless the writing is on point to back it up, which all too often under Chibnall it hasn't been. All too often his episodes have been hesitant to take a political position on anything, and when they have it's usually been in an incredibly ham-handed way - like having a villain that's basically just Trump who likes telling people "You're fired," (do you see?), or doing an episode inspired by Amazon which basically comes out on the side of the corporations. This kind of cowardice unfortunately is reflected in the writing of the Doctor, who in this era rarely takes a moral stance in any situation, which is pretty much antithetical to any version of the character that's come before.

It's so frustrating, because this could've been the most radical and challenging era of the show, but was stuck with a showrunner who was completely incapable of realising it.

Oh yeah, 100% agree it's a bust on a creative level - to the extent that the 13th Doctor seems quite comfortable taking right wing positions on a whole range of issues!

I just think it's worth putting on record that from an industry point of view * the push to diversify the off-camera talent is significant and worthwhile in that a whole bunch of people will have had their careers jumpstarted or boosted by working on a show with the scale and budget and prominence of Doctor Who. It's not an easy thing to do given the pressures of making the show, and largely why previous show runners tended to a "get your mates in" approach that kept the writing and directing teams whiter and male-r for longer than that should have been.

It's so frustrating, because this could've been the most radical and challenging era of the show, but was stuck with a showrunner who was completely incapable of realising it.

Couldn't agree more with this.

* a view I'm perhaps disproportionately interested in cos I work in TV!

Is what is being filmed with Tennant and Tate early Gatwa episodes, I have no idea of timing with this. I was just wondering if it was still too early to tell what the writing teams for RTD would be since it was still something in the future. Am just hoping that there isn't going to be a backward step there.
But would hope if Doctor is black there would also be diversity in the writing team. I'm assuming whoever was writing under Chibnall is no longer under contract when he goes. But not sure of protocols etc. & anybody particularly noteworthy would be likely to be rehired not bound to be retained.

Unrelatedly, Moffat's adaptation of Time Traveller's Wife might be the worst thing he's done, sadly

(I also hated the book.)

@emsworth -

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/grand-unified-theory-chris-chibnall-doctor-who-era-jodie-whittaker/

also, from the same guy -

https://them0vieblog.com/2022/04/18/doctor-who-legend-of-the-sea-devils-review/

So is Yasmine Finney playing a different character called Rose, or the same character that Billie Piper played previously? The reports I've read seem curiously ambiguous on that point. Is RTD keeping it that way deliberately?

yep

I thought I'd heard it confirmed somewhere they are playing Donna's daughter

@emsworth -

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/grand-unified-theory-chris-chibnall-doctor-who-era-jodie-whittaker/

Great article thanks TH - very impressive good faith attempt to engage with the material, with a very dispiriting conclusion.

And soref, 100% agree that Broadchurch would've indicated a "safe pair of hands" to the BBC decision makers - like I say, he would've looked perfect on paper. But I feel like a substantial section of fandom always had misgivings based on his prior contributions? Like the most optimistic take I remember seeing was a hope that he would slough off his mediocrity and rise to the occasion. There have also been various reports that Chibnall was not in fact particularly keen on taking the role? Anyway, I find the whole sorry affair super interesting, and look forward to someone writing a book about it!

Every indication seems to suggest that he grudgingly took on the job after much persuasion, just so the series wouldn't end up going on hiatus again because there were no other candidates willing to shoulder the burden at that point (other more promising candidates like Gatiss and Whithouse having turned it down).

other more promising candidates like Gatiss

sad lol, but like, where's the lie.

Definitely of the opinion that no Who is better than bad just-because Who. I would’ve been curious about Whithouse based on broadly enjoying his scripts - I remember reading somewhere that the failure of The Game tanked his chances with the BBC, but perhaps the other way round - if he turned down Who based on an unhappy experience as show runner. Would be a tough gig for sure.

>Loads of Star Trek series, both vintage (TOS and TNG) and ongoing, have had a lot of creative upheavals and behind the scenes drama.

Yeh - I don't have much production-side knowledge of Trek (enjoying the current show a lot tho!) - but I remember there was a lot of creative stagnation around Voyager/Enterprise era. Maybe analogous to the mid-JNT/Saward era of too much fan service and not enough influence from outside the franchise bubble?

I'd say the current Alex Kurtzman era has been about as bad as Chibnall's Who run. They did TWO time travel seasons that didn't make any sense!

The current era was already in turmoil before they even started production on the first episode of the first series! Which, TBH, is very much a Trek tradition.

Next Blu-ray set has a locked release date, and the contents have similarly been locked in, with 5,889 pages of documents including 4/6 of the scripts for Slipback - 93pp total - and the draft script for what became Attack Of The Cybermen ep 1, which Paula Woolsey apparently turned in at 112pp.


There doesn't seem to have been any turmoil behind the scenes of Chibnall's Who at all (unless you count COVID, which almost certainly isn't his fault) - it's just plodded along from script to screen without any reported disruption (nb that "made up by misogynist youtubers" /= "reported")


(other more promising candidates like Gatiss and Whithouse having turned it down).

Both Gatiss and Whithouse have consistently claimed that they were never approached (but Gatiss said that he would have turned it down, having seen what the stress did to his friend).

Whithouse would have barely been a step above Chibnall anyway, RIP Jamie Mathieson.


New special announced on rtd’s insta

Nah, RTD doing the 60th anniversary ("and series beyond") was part of the initial press run back in September -- but I wonder / hope if them shooting a full production block now means that he's planning extra specials before then; perhaps for/from NYD, given the non-specific specificity of saying "2023"? It would be great if they get the backwards-looking Tennant/Tate/Wilf stuff wrapped up with holiday special/s and let Ncuti launch properly for the 60th, initiating a new era unencumbered by nostalgia.

-- for Tracer: (Legend Of The Sea Devils) just missed the top ten on overnights, edged out by a repeat of Antiques Roadshow on BBC2

on +7, turned out the #3 for the day, #1 from any BBC channel. The Antiques Roadshow ep ended up outside the top 50.

― beepy fridges (sic), Wednesday, April 27, 2022 4:36 PM (three weeks ago)

+28: 3,698,000 - lowest-rated of nu-Who by about a milli, equal 4th-lowest of all time, #25 for the week.

lol @ the idea anyone on this board would go toe-to-toe with stevolende on fashion bricolage

...toe-to-toe? Tracer, I genially disputed your assessment that Edwardianish clothing was traditional for the set of Doctors up to Jodie Whittaker, and posted some pleasant images reminding us all that there are Doctors who did not initially, did not primarily, or did not ever wear a frock-coat and a string tie.

Someone else then threw out a bunch of personal attacks, unsettling conspiracy theories, wild projection, ahistorical claims of childhood memory trumping evidence, etc, and you're...crowing that I've been physically bested?

(how could Andrew have been "obviously gaslighting"? by travelling back in time to alter the costuming in one or two hundred Who episodes, in between posts? and is it simply thinking true things that makes him habitually creepy on ILX, or is there some other pattern of behaviour being cited as reason for the accusation?)

The extreme personal unpleasantness aside, this is pretty odd behaviour.

RTD’s review of the final Chibnall special:

He said: "It's like a 10-year-old's fantasy version of Doctor Who but with muscle and punch and light and colour."

More gasps and lols in RTDs press statements over the past week than Chibnall's whole run

Re. some of the discussion above - yes, it will 100% have been Broadchurch (a MASSIVE critical, popular and international smash) that will have landed Chibnall the Who gig, rather than someone at the Beeb getting a bit overexcited about Cyberwoman. Simply getting the damn thing made (let alone good) is a titanic undertaking that nearly crushed a veteran like Moffat, so they're always going to go with the safe industry hand over the rookie with interesting ideas.

I always felt you could track who else might be a runner or rider for the top job by who else was being commissioned by the Beeb at the same time to write/exec their own show. Moffat had Jekyll during the RTD era. Being Human must surely have put Whithouse in the frame. I wondered if Peter Harness might have been a possible contender when Moffat was wrapping up seeing as he had his War of the Worlds adaptation (this might be wishful thinking as I generally really like Harness's Who stuff and I think his Zygon script in particular showed a potentially really interesting road forward for the show).

None of the Chibnall era writers have had something similar, though I do give him credit for using newer writers where he did (which might also explain the number of co-writes). Vinay Patel totally the best writer of the era, but none of them were/are ready to take on such a juggernaut.

The 1996 TV movie is possibly the Time Lord’s most controversial on-screen outing. A heart-warming new documentary follows its writer, as he visits conventions full of the die-hards who’ve criticised him for decades

Next Blu-ray set has a locked release date, and the contents have similarly been locked in,

A/V content:

Attack Of The Cybermen

Audio commentary on both episodes featuring Colin Baker (The Doctor), Nicola Bryant (Peri), Terry Molloy (Russell) and Sarah Berger (Rost)
New! Matthew Sweet In Conversation - Colin Baker
New! Behind the Sofa featuring Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant, Terry Molloy (Russell/Davros), Peter Davison, Janet Fielding (Tegan), Sarah Sutton (Nyssa), Sylvester McCoy (The Doctor), and Wendy Padbury (Zoe)
Making Of documentary - The Cold War
Featurette - The Cyber Story
Featurette - Human Cyborg
Featurette - The Cyber-Generations
Isolated Score
New! 5.1 Audio Mix
DVD Easter Egg - Cybernetic Autonomous Dalek
New! Saturday Superstore clip from 5/1/85 inc. interview with Colin Baker), Nicola Bryant, Mary Tamm (Romana) and Jacqueline Pearce (Chessene)
New! Breakfast Time clips from 4/1/85 and 13/7/85 inc. interview with Faith Brown (Flast)
New! Continuity announcements & trailers
Updated - Production subtitles
Updated - Photo gallery
Coming Soon preview - Vengeance On Varos


Vengeance On Varos - Disc 1

Audio commentary on both episodes featuring Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant and Nabil Shaban (Sil)
New! Behind the Sofa featuring Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant, Terry Molloy, Peter Davision, Janet Fielding, Sarah Sutton, Sylvester McCoy , and Wendy Padbury
Making Of Documentary - Nice or Nasty
Featurette - The Idiot's Lantern
Isolated Score
5.1 Audio Mix
Production Audio Mix
Deleted and extended scenes
New! Points of View clip from 01/02/85
New! See Hear clip from 20/01/85 with Nabil Shaban (Sil)
New! Interview with Ron Jones (audio only)
New! Continuity announcements & trailers
Updated - Production subtitles
Updated - Photo gallery

Vengeance On Varos - Disc 2

New! Extended edit of Episode 1 (53'18")
New! Extended edit of Episode 2 (51'44")
Scene with alternative music score (The Acid Bath!)
New! Matthew Sweet In Conversation - Michael Grade
New! Slipback - 6-part radio story
New! The Colin Baker Years VHS links
New! Studio footage (78'44")


The Mark Of The Rani

Audio commentary featuring Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant and Kate O'Mara (The Rani)
New! Behind the Sofa featuring Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant, Terry Molloy, Peter Davision, Janet Fielding, Sarah Sutton, Sylvester McCoy, and Wendy Padbury
Making Of documentary - Lords & Luddites
New! Documentary - Location, Location, Location
Featurette - Now and Then
Featurette - Playing with Time
Featurette - Those Deadly Divas
Featurette - Rogue Time Lords
New! Breakfast Time clip from 1/2/85
Blue Peter clip from 16/02/78 about Ironbridge
Deleted scenes
Isolated score
New! Alternative music score on episodes
5.1 Audio Mix
New! Continuity announcements and trailers
Updated - Production subtitles
Updated - Photo gallery


The Two Doctors - Disc 1

Audio commentary featuring Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant, Frazer Hines (Jamie), Jacqueline Pearce (Chessene) and director Peter Moffatt
New! Behind the Sofa featuring Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant, Terry Molloy, Peter Davision, Janet Fielding, Sarah Sutton, Sylvester McCoy, and Wendy Padbury
New! Making Of documentary - La Fiesta del Mal
Featurette - Adventures in Time and Spain
Isolated score
New! Re-edited version of A Fix with Sontarans
New! Audio commentary on A Fix with Sontarans
New! Points of View clip from 5/3/85
New! News clips around the hiatus
New! Doctor Who Appreciation Society message feat. Frazer Hines and Nicola Bryant (inc studio footage, 4'13")
New! Continuity announcements and trailers
Updated - Production subtitles
Updated - Photo gallery

The Two Doctors - Disc 2

New! Extended edit of Episode 1 (47'17")
New! Documentary - Nicola Bryant in the Footsteps of the Two Doctors
Documentary - Robert Holmes & Doctor Who
Featurette - Beneath the Sun
Radio documentary - Wavelength
New! Studio Footage (52'28")
New! Panopticon convention footage with Colin Baker, Jacqueline Pearce (Chessene) and producer John-Nathan Turner
New! Robert Holmes audio interview (90 mins)


Timelash

Audio commentary featuring Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant and Paul Darrow (Tekker)
New! Behind the Sofa featuring Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant, Terry Molloy, Peter Davision, Janet Fielding, Sarah Sutton, Sylvester McCoy, and Wendy Padbury
Making Of documentary - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
New! Matthew Sweet In Conversation interview with Nicola Bryant
Featurette - All's Wells That Ends Wells
Featurette - Was Doctor Who Rubbish?
New! Updated special effects
New! Remount studio footage (20'59")
New! Continuity announcements and trailers
Updated - Production subtitles
Updated - Photo gallery


Revelation Of The Daleks

New! Audio commentary featuring Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant, Terry Molloy (Davros) and Alexei Sayle (The DJ)
DVD Audio commentary featuring Nicola Bryant (Peri), Terry Molloy (Davros), writer Eric Saward and director Graeme Harper
New! Behind the Sofa featuring Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant, Terry Molloy, Peter Davision, Janet Fielding, Sarah Sutton, Sylvester McCoy, and Wendy Padbury
Making Of documentary - Revelation Exhumed
New! Extended Episode 1 (45'49")
Studio footage with optional audio commentary
New! Extended studio footage (65'08")
Deleted scenes
New! Mute film rushes
Interview with Graeme Harper (Directing Who)
Isolated score
5.1 Audio Mix
Updated Enhanced special effects (update from previous DVD vfx option)
Children in Need clip from 22/11/85
Lenny Henry Show sketch
Doctor in Distress music video
New! Breakfast Time clips from 22/3/85, 5/4/85 (inc. exhibition footage), 1/5/85 (Eleanor Bron interview) and 29/5/85 (JNT interview)
New! Take Two clip from 29/5/85
New! Micro Live clip featuring Colin Baker from 2/11/85
DVD Easter Egg - Cast members talking
Coming Soon trailer for The Trial of a Time Lord
New! The Eternal Mystery - S22 Collection Trailer
New! Continuity announcements and trailers
Updated - Production subtitles
Updated - Photo gallery

Big Finish getting jealous of the Blu-Ray trailers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGb3LjElsiI

Never realised Matt Smith was Herbie Hancock's backup dancers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDzqrO78V38

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UaZTZ6qBQo

Seattle, yesterday:

https://i.imgur.com/bwJ7Gkm.jpg

Watched Castrovalva for the first time this weekend - it’s such a good story, is there anything else like it from the original series? Good script and set design, active use of the companions, pacy direction, smart and kitsch and batshit in just the right amounts. And Adric locked in a box for most of the story.

Logopolis and Castrovalva, by the same writer, is my favorite one-two punch in classic who. I wish they had kept going in that direction.

Have you seen The Mind Robber, from the Troughton years?

also echoing the Logopolis / Castrovalva love - particularly Logopolis - such an incredible atmosphere - Paddy Kingsland's finest hour! i was just the right age to find all the weird stuff with police boxes and the Watcher and block transfer computation extremely compelling. but yeah, great fondness for Davison era as well.

logopolis and castrovalva also come at the tail end of christopher h. bidmead's tenure as script editor. he was script editor for season 18, and that would be my next port of call. caveat is that it gets off to kind of a slow start - it's basically another internal reboot of the show, which the previous season had mostly consisted of tom baker being extremely silly, which worked quite well, but only if the script had been written by douglas adams. bidmead was more into high-concept sci-fi. baker, upon being given instructions to stop being so silly, became bitter, morose, and resentful towards everyone he worked with, which as it happened translated extremely well on screen for the later parts of the season. earlier in the season... well, i _do_ recommend the commentary track for "meglos", which features lalla ward being extremely arch while commenting with one of the scriptwriters, who is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is. what i think is _the_ underrated episode of the season is "warrior's gate", a brooding meditation (well, tom baker spends a lot of time brooding in it) on colonialist exploitation and the cycle of violence sent in a white void between dimensions. paul joyce, the director, wanted to do a brechtian take on orson welles' _touch of evil_ or something like that. in practice this means he blew the budget, pissed off everybody around him, and never directed again. it also meant that much of the actual directing was done, uncredited, by his assistant, a guy named Graeme Harper. this is the guy who went on to direct "caves of androzani". he is an extremely good director.

since "the mind robber" has been mentioned (episode 1 particularly, one of those thrown-together last-minute filler episodes - the previous story, a pro-war, anti-hippie parable by the creators of the Yeti, had been so utterly terrible that it was cut by an episode, meaning episode 1 took the classic approach of throwing together a script randomly over the weekend and filming it), some of my other favorite "surrealist doctor who" episodes include the first episode of "the space museum" and "carnival of monsters" (one of my favorite bob holmes scripts, a batshit insane critique of imperialism). of course there's also the episode of "the deadly assassin" where the doctor enters the matrix... i'm assuming you've seen that one? oh, and it took me _far_ too long to get around to watching guy leopold's "the daemons". i first got into doctor who through the early JNT eps, but of late i've found that pertwee-era who holds up _extremely_ well. the master poses as an anglican priest, but is using the church as a front - underneath the church he's conducting satanic rituals to summon a demon from hell to, i don't know, destroy the earth or something. it's fucking _great_, is what i'm saying.

one of my long-delayed projects is to watch through the stuff bob holmes wrote for series _besides_ doctor who. i've seen the episode he wrote for "spyder's web", one of the last shows of the spy series boom, featuring anthony ainley as an, ahem, _ambiguously_ gay spy. it's an utterly squalid and cynical show, so it's no surprise that holmes' script fit in wonderfully with the overall tone. then there's that miniseries about the vodyanoi he scripted... i've heard good things about that one...

The Nightmare Man - it is very good!

The Slide (a BBC radio drama) is well worth checking out, written by Victor Pemberton and starring Roger Delgado.

Even though it's basically about sentient mud, it has rather stark h*untology vibes, the Radiophonic Workshop in full effect too.

It was an extra on the animated Fury of the Deep DVD/Blu, it seems to be on iPlayer.

Seconding Nightmare Man, it’s a lot of fun.

https://archive.org/details/the-slide for non British folk

I might well be the only fan of Into The Labyrinth here but if you're feeling like watching Pamela Salem and Ron Moody camp it up in some kind of magic-based panto then you couldn't do much better (also this is, of course, probably the only contender).

Bob's second episode, loosely based on a Jekyll and Hyde concept, is maybe as ridiculous as the series got - which naturally I mean in a good way.

His Dead of Night episode is a cracker.

you are not the only fan of into the labyrinth here :)

That warms my heart

I sometimes wish even a fraction of all the Who merchandise stuff had been available when I was a kid in the impoverished Australian '80s, but then if I had been able to wear a shirt like this I would no doubt have bee even more of a pariah than I already was.
https://merchandise.thedoctorwhosite.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/one-day-arts.jpg

We did have Dr Who ice-creams in the supermarket that came with K-9 stencils tho

I wish someone would make a retro style WHO beucase the 70's stuff is all I like.
probably fans could make it with Aftereffects

You might like the new logo then

https://whatsondisneyplus.com/disney-to-be-the-new-global-home-for-new-seasons-of-doctor-who-outside-the-uk-ireland/