The State of Doctor Who in 2006, Part 2

[parma_violets]

Of course, this wrongness in the series’ conception can’t be pinned down to just one writer, and certainly not one who didn’t contribute much writing this year. As Russell T Davies says in the first part of his exclusive interview this month:

That’s branding, basically. I cannot emphasise enough the importance of branding… I thought it was in

Comments

[londonkds]

On an unrelated note, this is the second year in a row that Mark Gatiss’s episode has been completely different in practically every respect from the story in Russell’s original documents. Evidently, a man who knows where the bodies are buried!

Gatiss's interviews on the DVDs for S1 seem to suggest that the major rewrites on Unquiet Dead were driven by RTD's feelings that the initial idea was turning out too grim, rather than Gatiss dithering.

[parma_violets]

The original outline Russell wrote in the Series One outline (he has to submit at least a brief outline of what every episode is going to be about before production starts) seems to outline something a bit jollier than what ended up on screen, a Ghostbustersy romp with a dotty old medium operating an Ectoplasm Machine and accidentally bringing spirits through from another universe. Possibly Gatiss found a way to make this grim and disturbing - he can make anything grim and disturbing - but I suspect the 'darker' draft he was talking about was his first attempt at the story we saw on screen.

Though - having said that - it's surprising how little 'The Idiot's Lantern' changed after its outline, and yet how different it feels. The original was a bubblegum rock 'n' roll tale where people's faces were being stolen by a being that can travel in sound waves - ie. through the radio. Obviously the finished story isn't much different, but the slight shift in milleu makes it feel worlds apart.

[londonkds]

The idea with the medium is what he was definitely talking about.

[parma_violets]

Right, that's interesting. I've got no idea how you could make that idea disturbing, but if anyone can find a way...

[momentsmusicaux]

Runaway Bride was going to be in the season?
And where's Tooth and Claw in that original plan? How were they going to introduce Torchwood?

[parma_violets]

I hadn't thought about the Torchwood issue, actually. Presumably it would have come up in either 'School Reunion' or 'The Runaway Bride', as these were the only present-day Earth episodes scheduled reasonably early on in this draft of the running order. That is a bit of a puzzle.

[gileswl]

It's curious that, being so concerned with the show's "brand", RTD should both depart so dramatically from Who's old formula and make the show less distinctive than it would have been had he not done so - although admittedly the old show looks less distinctive against a background of 70s British television sf.

I'm slightly concerned that brand is a euphemism for "if we found another Tom Baker, he wouldn't get to play the Doctor - he was too old and too ugly".

[parma_violets]

I think he does think that way - after all, ever since Tennant was cast, he's been doing a lot of talking about how young!and!sexy the Doctor is, to the detriment of anything else.

He did, to his credit, say that he'd take his attention off all spin-offs if the show needed more attention, because Totally Doctor Who and the like can't survive without the parent show. Unfortunately, that seems to imply he thinks this season has been fine and dandy, an impression that's reinforced when he actually says there's never been a bad episode of this series so far.

[demona_hw]

or an Andrew Davies crapping out another lazy, clunkingly unsubtle massacre of a classic novel

Completely irrelevant to the resy of your post, but which adaptations did you have in mind? I consider Pride and Prejudice and Bleak House to be some of the finest adaptations I've seen (Bleak House has its problems, but those problems aren't with the script).

[parma_violets]

Pride and Prejudice I don't feel qualified to comment on, since I didn't like the source novel. Bleak House is a book I haven't read, so I approached it merely as a new TV serial, and I struggled through three episodes before concluding I didn't have the vaguest idea what was supposed to be happening in it.

He's terrible with The Gays - I thought Tipping The Velvet was a shrill, irritating pantomime (which Davies admitted in an interview was aimed at lads'-mag readers), but The Line of Beauty was an absolute abomination, full of beyond-parody touches like a helicopter landing in the middle of a picnic for no reason whatsoever. He also destroyed a central plot strand of the novel; in the book, a character suspects that two other characters are having an affair, but in the TV series he walks in on them sucking each other off. But the whole point of that storyline was that the first character didn't know the other two were having an affair, so he neutered the whole point of the story for cheap sensationalism points. For all the BBC'

[jakiri]

"And I know some of us love arc shows - I love some of them - but the cold, hard fact remains; they don’t get viewers, at least not in the UK