Eeesh, did we really get through another season of Who so quickly - all 12 episodes of 2011 gone into a warp tunnel somewhere, soon to be a boxset on HMV’s shelves (does HMV still have stores where you could find a shelf?)
I think I’m going to need some kind of Whofest to get up to speed – what’s involved in a Whofest? – 27 foot woolly scarf - DIY sonic screwdriver made from an old fairy washing-up liquid bottle painted silver - party-sized bag of jelly babies - or a tall ginger-female-eyecandy masquerading as a science-boffins leggy secretary? Well I’d still plump for the scarf, sweets, and Blue Peter craft project - that'll be the child or geek in me making the choice - I’ve never been won over by Amy Ponds acting ‘charms’, is she really just in the show to keep the dads onboard. I can’t put my finger on why her character sticks out too much for me, hmm, she’s a good looking woman, maybe that’s the problem, its all too damn American soapy and not grungy old UK soapy. Can you imagine instead Dot Cotton from Eastender’s as the Docs blue box housemate - Tragicomic Dot always ready with a clever solution at hand for getting out of a sticky sci-fi jam - with an ash-heavy fag hanging out of the corner of her mouth and her mind on rushing back to the coin-op washerette to squeeze a Sontaran into the tumble-dryer for a spin at mark 4, (and its £1.50 for 30 seconds - it’s a bloody rip-off).
What’s with Steven Moffats obsession over River Song then, what’s all of that been about, or rather, what’s his thing about Alex Kingston - just how much does the man fancy her. Is she really sexy, does everyone apart from me find her sexy, c’mon why, does saying
”hello sweaty” (deliberate spelling mistake) supposedly give the older male viewer the hots under the collar. I have this argument all the time with the only other middle-aged Who viewer that I know personally. He insists that Kingstons the business, okay, he’s biased, he watched the entire series of ER, I didn’t, and whenever I tell him that River Song is just too damn ‘mumsy’ and that wielding a dainty siver gun does not necessarily make you a fox he gets very angry and threatens me with being ‘ageist’ and way old enough to be Amy Ponds father - the assumption being that if the older male viewer doesn’t get all soppy over Kingston-Song then he must instead be wanting to dip his toes into Amys Pond, the old fool.
But wait, just to make it even more complicated - (and without having watched it) - I’ve since discovered the ‘Darth Vader is Lukes father’ type secret that the old rogue Moffat has revealed – Mumsy-River is actually twenty-something-Ponds daughter!
That’s time-travel for you - it really buggers things up. Never had any of these problems with Leela when I were a boy watcher of the show, she went around in a leather thong-skirt with a knife strapped to her naked thigh and all I ever noticed was just how good she was in a sewer at getting out of scrapes with an unconvincing giant cloth-bag rat.
Doctor Who is fun, well, mostly, apart from some of the older years, all the boring bits, unnecessary chase scenes, hammy acting, bucket-scraping scenarios, but lets not go into that…
I'd get rid of the overly-symphonic fast-paced score and bring back electronic incidental music – something of which the show has a long association. You only need to look at some of the 1960s episodes, like the Dalek Invasion of Earth for example, and you'll notice that there isn't even any music at all! Just drones and atmospheres – and it's timeless. It still makes an impact and gives a real feeling of unease and mystery. In fact, I'd even throw in some black and white stories!
I quite enjoy the symphonic score, but I know where you’re coming from - the mystery and eeriness has gone forever. I watched the entire Pertwee series on UKGold back in 2002, first I’d seen it since the 70’s, but I found the electronic noodling going on in the background overpowering – but that said, the relentless music in todays Who (and UK produced Torchwood) is far, far worse!
Despite the present-day generic attitude making the show occasionally seem like a Buffy The Vampire Slayer spin-off, I actually feel that Doctor Who
is unshakably alternative – black and white stories - yes please, but this is primetime Beeb Alex and not BBC3, and if it were then we’d need to have comedy, and look where that would get us, we’d be back to the Doc wearing clown-suits and the Tardis looking like Laurence Llewelyn Bowen stenciled its interior to resemble a boudoir.
At least in the meantime, there's an ongoing stream of classic series DVD releases to keep me happy; my most recent purchase being the long-awaited special edition version of 1972's Day of the Daleks, which is just superb, especially to see. Modern CG effects, new Dalek voices and newly-shot footage shot on vintage equipment have finally allowed this story to live up to its potential.
Thanks for bringing this to my attention – I’ve never consider buying old episodes, but Pertwee is a case apart, I love this period, maybe because he was the first actor in the role for me, and the first sci-fi show that completely dominated my imagination. It does look great – yes, there’s a typically unnecessarily drawn out chase scene on a trike – but I believe they’ve doctored that one up!
Matt Smith's closing lines of the last episode – "Time to step back into the shadows" – to me indicated perhaps a (much-needed) reboot for the show, with a darker, more mysterious Doctor back on our screens. Which, let's face it, would be great....
I still like Matt a great deal, and there will be things (and I can’t believe I’m about to use this word) – nostalgic – about his tenure in the show, in fact there’s far less for me with - blink and you’d miss it – Chris Ecclescakes Doc - over so fast, - even David Tennerment now seems to have raced across our screens in a furious high production values glory. Perhaps its just too much, we are way spoiled compared to the past of no repeats, no post-show re-watching via the uninvented DVD/Bluray, or more significantly, the internet to endlessly expose us to product. This makes me sound ‘old’, but then, you need to be a bit old to develop nostalgia and be able to put something in a more valued position than it might actually ever have been in the first place. As I’ve said in an earlier post I’ve only watched the first episode of
The Impossible Astronaut - there’s a short but fantastic scene where a fully suited astronaut walks out of a lake - its beautifully composed, like something from a Hipgnosis Pink Floyd album cover, and for all its brevity - I’d have loved more - it really stays in the mind. I guarantee that its this kind of thing that todays nine-year old will be exuberantly recounting years from now as a twenty-year old over a pint in the Uni bar (that’s if any ‘normal’ people can afford their kids getting an education without selling their grandparents and family pets for medical experimentation - but hey, enough of politics). Where was I, yes - that child come adult will forget about the in’s and out’s of that episode but will absorb its vivid or original moments that
are the spirit of an imaginative show - good or bad may be the other things, but all any story needs to live beyond its limitations are one or two memorable scenes - and in the impressionable young mind something is born that will one day also become a treasure of nostalgia.
