....but Mark Gatiss?

[selenak]

My feelings, they're just a biiiiiiiiit mixed upon reading the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who will be honoured a drama about the beginnings of the show . On the one hand: great idea, and I hope for Verity Lambert (first producer, and as a young female producer in the BBC in the early 60s a pioneer in more than one way) as the central character.

Comments

[ponygirl2000]

I'm with you on Mark Gatiss. Wonderful actor, devoted fan, so-so writer. I suspect that Moffat, given Gatiss' status as co-producer, doesn't really give much input into his scripts, maybe with this new project there'll be more notes from all sides.

[selenak]

Here's hoping!

[airie_fairy]

But I liiiiiiiike multi-Doctor affairs. They are a hilarious staple!

I will still be curious to see how this turns out, of course. I particularly want to see who they cast as Hartnell.

While I have nothing, nothing positive to say about Invaders from Mars, The Great Game is my favorite of the first season of Sherlock (it has the least in the way of glaring, obnoxiously blatant plot holes and general stupid, and also I like the pacing).

[selenak]

I freely admit my preference for Study in Pink is due to the better Lestrade content. But I also find Moriarty nail on chalk in The Great Game.

Hartnell: um, Christopher Eccleston, she says not entirely jokingly? He has the right age!

[airie_fairy]

Well, yeah, Moriarty isn't great, but he's hardly there, so it's okay.

Christopher Eccleston's like ten years younger and ten feet taller than he should be! XD

[selenak]

Well, Ecclestone was also 26 years too old to play John Lennon (AND to tall), and yet he did.:) plus Hartnell wasn't that old. Jon Pertwee was the oldest actor to take the role, actually (though far fitter than Hartnell); as far as I recall Hartnell was only in his 50s. What gave me the idea was Gatiss saying William Hartness was known for tough guy roles before and thus an unlikely choice for the role...

[kalypso_v]

Well, you know, could have been Steve Thompson...

They obviously want to recreate the success of The Road to Coronation Street, which was really good (David Dawson was stunning as Tony Warren), even if I got a bit bored with the recurring plotline "no one but actor X could have played character Y and they managed to find her!"

(No Hartnell icon so I've had to fall back on Troughton.)

[selenak]

:) true, though I can't make Thomson jokes anymore since the Reichenbach Fall was actually good.

[ide_cyan]

Jessica Hynes playing Verity Lambert would be lovely meta, but she'd be too old to play Doctor Who-era Lambert, who was 27 when she took the job and no older than 30 when she left. (Hynes is 39.) Waris Hussein, the show's first director, was even younger at 24, and Delia Derbyshire was 26. They were young creative people.

[selenak]

Well, in a world where 30years olds regularly play teenagers for the movies and tv... I mean, I get your point, and getting across how young they all were is important (one of my few problems with Me and Orson Welles was that the excellent Christian McKay playing Welles looked as if he was in his late 30s at best, when Welles being all of 21 at the time he staged Julius Caesar, onky five years older than the main character of the film and younger than almost everyone else in the cast he directed was an important part of the story). But while they are undoubtedly gifted young actors around to embody our DW pioneers, I'll regard Jessica Hynes as my dream Verity until the casting is announced both because of the meta and because she's such a good actress.

[stagbeetle]

Oh, boy do I share your feelings. I want to like Mark Gatiss, because the enthusiasm is delightful and we share many fandoms. His "History of Horror" documentary series was terrific, and I rejoice that he's doing second series of it. But as a writer of fiction he often falls into parody. Devoted, knowledgeable, clever parody, but he forgets you need actual new content between the many loving references.

I blame the production team for the iDaleks, and assume Gatiss was writing the brief he had been given. But I do blame him for Churchill, who was shockingly underwritten even for a patriotic cartoon. A bad decision, badly executed.

[selenak]

Devoted, knowledgeable, clever parody, but he forgets you need actual new content between the many loving references.

Indeed. And then you get bubbles and nothing remaining.

I blame the production team for the iDaleks, and assume Gatiss was writing the brief he had been given. But I do blame him for Churchill, who was shockingly underwritten even for a patriotic cartoon. A bad decision, badly executed.

*thinks of Fenris as an example of what DW CAN do with a WWII era story and weeps*