Doctor Who: Classic or Dud?

idk Time Warrior seemed like a let down

(I didn’t mention this but I’m watching in order and I’m only two seasons in, so my favourites are only my favourites so far. Just finished The Colony in Space and that was shit).

Terror of the Autons isn’t great as a story in itself, but as a collection of disturbing visual set pieces it’s amazing.

I did enjoy Claws of Axos but Jesus, that poor guy having to fall off his bike into the pond in the middle of winter! It looked bloody freezing.

Aldo perhaps I didn't recognise him with hair! Altho maybe I have only seen Spearhead From Space, my memory of Terror is pretty unreliable.

was looking for an image of all the various dalek variations over the years. instead i found this - http://www.dalek6388.co.uk/

it identifies and numbers all the individual daleks ever made and tracks their appearances throughout the tv shows and films. originally there were 4, 2 were given away to bernados (but loaned back if needed). the film daleks were a different set, the second film another distinct 19... seems like a momumental task even before they start swapping heads in april '67...

The name of, and title music to this channel gives me heartburn, but I enjoyed this -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLgAnCv5YlY

I just read an AV Club article talking about the rampant outrage that followed Donna’s exit from the TARDIS and how RTD is undoing it to correct his biggest unresolved plot point. The entire article seems to be wrong? Like, this wasn’t an unresolved plot point, it WAS the resolution? It was tragic and awful on purpose? People still talk bc about the emotional impact of it?

The hilarious thing is that the vast majority of the comments also say “wtf is the premise of this article, all of this is nonsense”

I keep meaning to unbookmark the AVClub, it's such a dire and depressing shadow of its former self (and has been for a while), but it's useful for "oh yeah, that exists" reminders

a terry nation army couldn't hold me back

y'all i love some of the art US PBS stations used to promote the show, these drawings are better than the ones on the pinball machine

https://broadwcast.org/images/6/65/1984-11-27_Ottawa_Citizen.jpg

"you told me i was supposed to meet Chancellor Goth, I wanted to make a good impression"

https://broadwcast.org/images/3/3f/1985-07-30_Centre_Daily_Times.jpg

you will never convince me that this picture of was not modeled on this

https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/5929a7d5ea9e61561daa569e/master/pass/e03be0cc.jpg

and here's the flip of Davison's

https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xJL-AiJT15Y/VaAyH0rFnoI/AAAAAAAABHE/PaMRrC9TfUI/s1600/Hats+Front.jpg

am cherry picking the Cybermen episodes at the moment because i love the creepy look of those early Cybermen

porting over from the new-nu-who thread because it's not really about RTD2:

so glad you're watching again kate!

― bae (sic)

glad to be able to watch again!

my whole thing about doctor who is that i have been in love with this show since i was 11 years old. i love it with the same enthusiasm and intensity that i did when i was 11, despite now knowing that... a lot of the stuff i loved just wasn't very good. for me, the ideal way to watch classic who is in omnibus format, half-asleep, not really able to comprehend what's happening on screen and not terribly bothered by the fact that nothing really happens for long stretches of time. and watching it like that for an hour and falling asleep sometime around the time dick larosa comes on to do the new jersey lottery pick 3 and pick 4. and then the next morning waking up and having your brother tell you excitedly "he changed his face!" and being like "no way, he can DO that?"

...anyway i have the classic blu-ray set of season 19, which i loved when i was a kid, and i look at it now and realize "oh wow this was actually terrible, all of jnt's run was shitty, wasn't it?"

and yes, it was, and i still love the show, even when it's terrible. sometimes, though, sometimes i can't defend it. six episodes of completely cringe high-concept sci-fi as represented through the medium of modern dance? it's awful and probably unwatchable and i will defend it to my dying breath. six episodes of yellowface? no. fuck that. that is bullshit. i have not seen that story and i _never will_.

there's nothing that overtly _offensive_ in chibnall's doctor who, but it's just... indefensible. i don't hate-watch. i'm not going to watch that five hour video about how shit chibnall's who is. i couldn't. it would be too painful for me. chibnall got the character, the themes of the show, the subtext - my favorite things about the show, the most important things about the show - so wrong, on such a basic fundamental level, that i had to walk away.

i have _lots_ to criticize about RTD, particularly the way he treated christopher eccleston, but i fucking love this show and always will.

OK, the story on the 1964 Cadet Sweet Cigarette cards is kind of weird:

" Dr. Who " and Voord find Daleks and hear their plan -- there is a certain type of mushroom, which was used by Inca Priests. It gives superhuman powers. " Dr. Who " realises that if the Daleks take the juice of these fungi into their brain cells, their brain power will be so great, they will outwit any power used against them.

God dammit, Carlos Castaneda was a fucking Dalek double agent all along!

Hairy men are more frightening than Daleks - at least according to Mrs P.C. from Andover (Daily Mirror, 9th December 1965). pic.twitter.com/DChuPGEj37

— Archivetvmusings (@archivetvmus71) December 9, 2023

"a screaming girl held captive by a hairy man" makes it sound silly, but apparently the letter is referring to this scene, which is pretty grim for a kids tv show (featuring Peter Purves!):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpQhlJoD3MY

intrigued by the idea that a 3 year old could have been following the show long enough for this kind of watershed moment to happen

i'm on the side of soref and mrs. p.c. here. also i'm listening to john coltrane now, damn the classic quartet is good.

the tosh/wiles era is sort of a dark age in the show's history. very few of the episodes from that era survive, and even what survives of the episode only hints at the drama behind the scenes, the documentation of which is even less accessible. to the point where the only way i know how to talk about it is by consulting a secondary source, which is my own essay on the topic from late 2020, because god knows i can't remember any of this shit myself. mind you the author of that essay is a notoriously unreliable historian, so take what i say here with a grain of salt.

according to kate, when the show's original producer, verity lambert, and the show's second story editor, dennis spooner, decided to move on, john wiles (producer) and donald tosh (story editor) got the job by impressing donald wilson, at the time head of serials. wilson then immediately quit his position to write "the forsyte saga". this was bad for wiles and tosh because nobody else actually liked them, nor did anyone have much interest in their more "sophisticated" version of the show.

what this means is basically "darker and grittier". from what i can tell they were trying to do grimdark doctor who. this is... a fraught thing to do. i recall much of the '90s consisting of an extended dialectic between the "frock" and the "gun" sides of fandom - the former were more taken by douglas adams, the latter more "grimdark"-inclined. my natural sympathy is towards the "frock" side of the equation... this is complicated however in that the chief advocate of the "frocks" was gareth roberts. i'm not talking about his transphobia, although that certainly _is_ a factor. it's more that adams' writing is, in my opinion, genuinely thought-provoking and interesting, and roberts' writing contains none of that. romps. i like romps. there's a _balance_, though, a balance that that rtd mostly got right. mostly.

anyway, to me, good doctor who has a healthy balance between terror and adventure... not just in that it contains both, but in that both aspects are _integrated_. they're essential parts of a larger whole. davies excels at this.

tosh and wiles did _not_. the main project they worked on was a 12-part dalek epic they were stuck with. they didn't want to do it, but they had to, so they did. badly.

there were two writers, is one of the issue. it's all well and good to do "grimdark" when you're editing terry nation, the guy who wrote "the survivors". when you're editing the work of your previous story editor, dennis spooner, however... this is the guy who wrote "the romans". he would go on to write the avengers episodes "split!" and ""Look – (Stop Me If You've Heard This One) – But There Were These Two Fellers..." his first script idea was to bring back peter butterworth as a secondary antagonist. spooner's surviving episode is very much not "grimdark".

it's not just "the daleks' masterplan" that has problems with tone, though. they tried to do grimdark and then they go in and get scripts from donald cotton. they _liked_ donald cotton. i don't know if they commissioned "the myth makers", but they apparently were like "you know what, donald, why don't you do another one for us", and that's when he came up with "the gunfighters". so they liked him and they had this script for "the myth makers", which was very similar in tone to "the gunfighters", and decided what the script really needed was for them to kill everybody at the end. to make a powerful statement about the futility of war, or something. because you know what three year olds want to see in television it's _dramatic irony_.

anyway, they rewrote a bunch of scripts to make them more grimdark, commissioned a some more grimdark scripts, tried to have the show's lead fired, failed, and quit in protest. at which point their grimdark scripts - the only scripts they had, because tosh and wiles seem to have been fairly bad at running doctor who - were extensively rewritten by the incoming team.

i love doctor who, but the tosh/wiles era is almost as hard for me to defend as the chibnall era. a lot of the senseless killings of the era seem to be motivated less by editorial design and more because they wrote in characters without really knowing what to do with them. they apparently decided they couldn't make sara kingdom work as a compainion and killed her off. then, the next episode, they introduced a new companion, anne chaplet, but then decided that historical companions wouldn't work. instead they introduced dodo, one of the least-liked companions in the show's history. or maybe they didn't. maybe they'd quit by that time. jesus, who the hell knows what the fuck they were doing.

it is, i think, a little easier for me to defend these episodes than the chibnall episodes. it helps that i can't see hardly any tosh/wiles stories. in my head i can envision the grimdark story "the massacre" (probably the most fully-realized tosh/wiles story) as being a genuinely good story. it was written by john lucarotti, the show's best historical writer. (lucarotti had wanted to write a story about the spanish armada; tosh and wiles insisted on doing a story about french catholics massacring protestants.) i look at paddy russell's directorial credit on the show, think of her later doctor who work, and imagine that the direction was probably pretty good. but i don't know, because there are, like, five promotional stills existing from the episode, and that's it. "the massacre" is perhaps the least documented story in the show's history.

mind you, that's not the biggest reason why so few of the stories exist. the stories that exist largely do so because film prints were sold to other countries. nobody even bothered to _make_ a film print of one of their episodes, even though it was in the middle of a 12-part epic. they figured they could just skip that one. they were probably right. as for the other 11 parts, they weren't able to sell the story to _anyone_. australia took one look and was like, no, are you fucking crazy? we can't show this story to children. we can't possibly _edit_ this story in a manner that makes it suitable to show to children. it's a fucking miracle that three episodes exist (two of them found in the basement of either a unitarian church or a moonie church - nobody's sure which. in 1983 if you rang up the bbc and said you had some missing doctor who episodes, nobody was going to ask any questions about it.)

i mean the daleks were the single biggest drive behind the show. they were a marketing sensation. tosh and wiles put out a 12-part epic, terrified three-year-olds who mostly knew the daleks from ice lolly packaging, and botched it so badly that they couldn't sell it anywhere else, despite loaning them out at bargain-basement prices as, well, basically a form of colonialist propaganda. you go far enough down the missing episodes rabbithole and you start running into fronts for intelligence organizations. course that's just the nature of rabbitholes. maybe there's nothing more to it than there is to "umbrella man".

my point is that under tosh/wiles, the show was not just dark and violent but pretty terrible. it was wildly unsuccessful, to the point where the last three episodes of "the massacre" had about half as many viewers as the bulk of the previous season's story "the web planet". yes, twice as many people sat through weeks of insect movement by roslyn de winter (now a popular meme t-shirt!)

i note the following excerpt from the wiki article for "the web planet":

Throughout filming of the serial, at the insistence of Lambert, Martin avoided showing much detail for the more brutal visuals, such as deaths; Lambert retrospectively cited criticism that the crew received for a violent scene in The Edge of Destruction (1964) as her reasoning.

as a story, i personally view "the web planet" as a complete failure - but at least it wasn't a pointlessly violent failure. lambert understood that _making pointlessly violent stories would be bad for the show_. tosh and wiles clearly didn't.

how bad were tosh and wiles at their jobs? the folks who replaced them were frequently gratuitously racist and, at the start of their tenure on the show, seemed not to be aware that the character's name wasn't "doctor who". despite this, despite only having access to scripts of the caliber of "the underwater menace", gerry davis and innes lloyd _still_ managed to make the show better. not only that, they managed to get rid of william hartnell, which wasn't actually that difficult because HARTNELL WAS SERIOUSLY ILL AND, AS A RESULT, COULDN'T FUCKING REMEMBER HIS LINES. as much as nobody wanted to see bill go, as much as bill didn't want to go, he had to. they replaced hartnell with another actor without killing the show and, in fact, kept it running for three more years, albeit not quite at the level of popularity it had when "the web planet" was on.

tosh and wiles had planned to get rid of hartnell during "the celestial toymaker", which was an attempt to curry favor with the current head of serials by tributing one of his most popular works. and by "tributing" i mean "ripping off". the head of serials turned out to not be impressed by their plan of getting rid of their show's lead actor in a script that blatantly ripped off one of his stories and replacing him with someone who, according to tosh and wiles' plan, would be very possibly actually evil.

the show tried this approach a number of times in the early years. the idea was to make the character mysterious, and whenever they started to ask why he's so mysterious, the first thing that sprang to mind was "what if he's mysterious because he's actually evil?" there's some hints of that in the early episodes but they dropped that aspect from the show _real_ fucking quick, because a family show about the adventures of an evil time traveler might possibly get the show a lot of criticism. again, verity lambert had some basic understanding of this. so, for that matter, did innes lloyd, who pretty rapidly established in "power of the daleks" that the new doctor was _not_, in fact, evil.

apparently the sole surviving contribution tosh and wiles made to "the celestial toymaker" was the trilogic game. that was it. that was their contribution to the show. "the doctor should be pitted against a cosmic adversary in a fiendishly sophisticated battle of wits. how should we represent that? i know! we'll make him solve a tower of hanoi puzzle!"

to me, this is a perfect example of what sort of "sophistication" tosh and wiles wanted to bring to the show.

i guess that's a pretty long-winded way of saying that mrs. p.c. was right and the show was in fact too violent for three-year-olds, who were an essential part of the show's audience. i just kind of love talking about this era of the show.

-

i could be wrong on any of this. i'm not a historian and there's a lot of information out there i just haven't read. if i'm wrong on any of this, please let me know!

btw, reading more on the cadet sweet cigarette cards, it turns out that the guy from the candy company who wrote the cigarette cards originally wrote that this particular mushroom "gives superhuman powers (this is fact)." so yeah. the guy who wrote the text for these cards seemed to have genuinely believed that mushies give you superpowers. see, this here is exactly why they don't make candy cigarettes anymore.

i also enjoyed reading the production correspondence from within the bbc, as a lot of it strongly implies that they think this person is a blithering idiot and that they want the product to be associated with the bbc as little as humanly possible.

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