Comments | thinarthur: Age has wearied them

thinarthur

Age has wearied them

Apr 20, 2009 15:07

Am getting towards the end of my Dr Who digitalisation process, am currently making a two pronged attack on Colin Baker by way of Davison and McCoy. In the process of doing so i am getting a potted DW history as I go and at a much faster rate than either TV transmissions or doing the Dr Who ton (watch/listen to everything in order), so I don't have ( Read more... )

Comments 4

thinarthur April 20 2009, 06:32:07 UTC

3/ The Davison shows have not aged well. While there are still individual good stories and moments, the Doctor/companion mix was always wrong, with poor actors with limited characterisations speaking sparse dialogue and there were very few memorable supporting characters, even a wonderful actor like Valentine Dyall just got to stand around with a chook on his head. In terms of plot and pacing there are an awful lot of dull moments and not a few ludicrous ones ( ... )

thinarthur April 20 2009, 06:51:55 UTC

I think the writers of that tome were some kind of fan offshoot who devolved Morlock like so that they could actually enjoy stories like "Happiness Patrol" which bore no relationship to a believable SF drama, or indeed anything. This troglodyte fan race later sank further to the "Missing", "New" and "Audio" adventures but has been largely wiped out by Comet Davies

Davison era. rj42 April 20 2009, 17:29:59 UTC

I think the reason Tom Bakergave for leaving Who, amounted to being heartily sick of arguing about the crappiness of the scripts.

Without Tom there, they no longer had anyone resisting the fall into dross. (Resistance is useless...)

Mark Strickson once said that JNT got the producer job by promising to cut costs. I can quite easily believe he succeeded in that.

However, the BBC should have appointed someone who promised to raise the quality !

Re: Davison era. thinarthur April 20 2009, 22:58:47 UTC

Well I don't know about the last of those statements as the budget did go up in real terms for the JNT stories, those UK inflation afflictied late 70's stories looked very cash strapped, and the series cost was one of the cancelation pretexts (which of course ignored all the money it made in sales).

As for Tom's reason, that sounds like a typical piece of Baker bombast. He behaved quite outrageously during Graham Williams run as a producer and took out production frustrations on scripts, companions and anybody. The scripts were not so much at fault, indeed the 18th season ones have some very good ideas for the most part, really it was the direction and format changes that Iowered the quality