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Old Doctor Who

Started by TJ, May 11, 2005, 09:20:24 AM

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TJ

If, like me, you're not that taken with the new series but have been sufficiently inspired to dig out the old stuff again, fire away...

Gazeuse

For those with UK Gold, there is a Dr. Who omnibus early on Saturday and Sunday. They're currently on the Peter Davison period which doesn't do much for me, but the Tom Baker reruns were great...The one I saw most recently was the one where they were trapped in N-Space (Lalla Ward/Romana and Adric were the assistants).

Jemble Fred

Quote from: "TJ"If, like me, you're not that taken with the new series

Wow, I didn't know such thoughts could exist. Still, carry on, sorry.

TJ

Quote from: "Jemble Fred"
Quote from: "TJ"If, like me, you're not that taken with the new series

Wow, I didn't know such thoughts could exist. Still, carry on, sorry.

Yeah, well, y'know... but debate about that belongs in the 'New Doctor Who' thread.

Hell, I love the old show with the same obsessional devotion as I do the new. I've always said though that the best overall season of Doctor Who was Season One, which began broadcast in 1963. The Hartnell years in general are massively underrated- Hartnell was a gifted screen actor and was lucky to have able support from his companions and Verity Lambert, who was as far as I know the BBC's first female producer. The black and white photography really gives the show a very mysterious edge which it undoubtably lost when it switched to colour. The first episode of the show, "An Unearthly Child", hasn't really been bettered in terms of opening a new TV series- it's by turns spooky, funny, and poetic. Of course it was the Daleks that made the show but there's a lot to enjoy in the other Hartnell stories, such as "Marco Polo" (now sadly lost along with much of the show's 60s output) which sees the TARDIS crew join the explorer on a journey across Europe. Or "The Edge of Destruction", set entirely in the TARDIS where the Doctor and his companions are psychologically attacked by something strange...

In DWM they have a feature called the Time Team, where four fans have to watch the whole of Doctor Who, from the very beginning to the very end (although now they've got the new series to add on to the list). One day, when I've got every episode, and every recording of the junked stories, I may just do this myself, it sounds like great fun.

I watched my Tom Baker years video on Sunday.  Great fun!  I could sit and listen to Tom Baker's vague waffling for hours.  I also bought The Pyramids Of Mars dvd recently.  Cracking story.  Haven't  got round to watching the extras yet, but if they're as good as the ones on 'The Leisure Hive'  I'll be in for a treat.  The commentary on The Leisure Hive is superb, Lalla Ward is on particularly good form.

Old Doctor Who is brilliant - but thankfully, I love the new show too.

Ambient Sheep

Seconded Pyramids of Mars.

The Daemons.

That'll do for starters, I'm in a rush.

Jemble Fred

The only time I ever recall being genuinely scared of Dr Who was the episode with Hale & Pace in it (and no, not because "THOSE UNFUNNY MEN WHAT DID THAT PROGRAMME WAS IN IT") I seem to recall it was a vampire spin on the Sea Devils or something. Put me off paddling for a long time. Was it also the episode with Nicholas Parsons?

Hale and Pace were in Survival, the last ever Doctor Who story ever made by the BBC until this year. No vampires or Sea Devils, but there was the Master and a race of cat-like aliens called the Cheetah People.

However, vampiric creatures emerging from the sea occurred in The Curse of Fenric, which guest-starred Nicholas Parsons as a vicar enduring a crisis of faith (and very good he was too). Fenric was in the same run of episodes as Survival, way back in 1989. It's also one of my all-time favourite Who stories- it's out on DVD and is well worth getting.

Jemble Fred

Ah. Well I was a nipper, so no wonder they all got muddled up in my head. Perhaps that whole series terrified me and I've blocked it out.

Deadman97

I believe I was just at a formative enough stage for Doctor Who to have made a massive impression on me- not the individual epsiodes as such (I'm a child of McCoy, and liquorice allsorts just aren't scary), more the concept of this traveller, free to go anywhere and charged to do good throughout the whole of time and space. Wonderful concept, which is why I'm so jazzed now to see it made more credible. Example- the school where I work is full of Doctor Who chat on Mondays, from all types of kids (in fact I've not seen a single spoddy looking kid talking about it) from years seven up to thirteen. To older Whovians I ask: was this always the case? Was the Doctor's appeal ever as broad and all-inclusive as it is now? Were cool kids always into The Doctor, or is it just this time round?

TJ

Quote from: "Deadman97"Were cool kids always into The Doctor, or is it just this time round?

Definitely not the first time round. The words 'laughing' and 'stock' were pretty much invented for old-skool Who fans, no matter how much of a sense of humour you might have had about the whole thing yourself.

Deadman97

That's really interesting. Something's gone really right with this update, then, if the core concept is identical but now I'm hearing "awesome" in the corridors and classrooms every Monday. This is new-Who, sorry, back to the topic...

When I was a kid, and again I was a child of McCoy, I don't remember anyone in the playground talking about the show, although I am talking first/second year primary school though. But, I do have a distinct memory of having a load of school friends over for an afternoon party type-thing and all of us watching The Robots of Death. The following day we were all chasing each other round the playground trying to strangle each other, so I think when the show was good it still had the ability to grip children's imaginations.

In secondary school I barely mentioned my Who fixation, convinced it would lead to mental and physical abuse. Now as a student, almost everyone is talking Who on a Saturday night, and I must admit I can't help but feel a little smug when friends come up to me and ask my opinion of the latest episode.

When I was a kid I got my Mum to knit me a 10 ft multi-coloured scarf and my bedroom door was painted like the TARDIS door - remarkably I never got beaten up.  Infact the local kids used to come round to see my bedroom door and gawp in fascination.  At least that's how I remember it.  Maybe they were staring in disbelief at how one kid could be such a giant wank, I don't know.

Des Nilsen

I love Doctor Who to bits for it's charm-oozing central concepts and the range of the original series. (I love the new series too, as it really nails the tone/feel of it for me).

I honestly think the format of Who beats the crap out of every other popular bit of sci-fi around for sheer flexibility - Time travel (in a brilliantly concieved ship), humour, ideally good stories, plenty of villians and above all a hero who doesn't use knives or guns and who also takes companions on fantastic journeys. Ideally the companion is the viewer's way into a potentially bewildering universe.

I've got lots of favorite stories but my absolute favorite is 'The Talons Of Weng Chiang', because it's just so perfect. Brilliantly staged, shot, acted and written. There's also some lovely, lovely lines in there.

"Well, dash me' optics!"

:D

Who was always a family show, though for some reason (likely post-modernism and nostalgia for certain aspects like Daleks, iconic bits and darker books) there are people who want it to be a fully grown-up, deadly serious and flawlessly believable piece of sci-fi as well as titilating something in them for the sake of it, which it never could be without losing something quite special.
It's never too knowing or tongue in cheek, hardly at all actually, but it's light and sometimes camp in just the right way. I love it for that special something and don't quite get the folks who've taken so long to realise it was never what they thought it was.

(Long may it continue, by the way. In the right form, that is).

-

oceanthroats

They're playing them all out here in Australia at the moment, and we're up to the Tom Baker period, The power of Kroll.
Looking at a lot of these episodes, I think sometimes people look at the old series with blurry rose tinted glasses, because a lot of them were really bad. The Pirate Planet, which I thought might be really good, wasn't very good at all really, but on the other hand The Stone of Blood was really excellent. Had a few flaws but it seemed, unlike a few of the others I've seen over the last few months, to have a reason to be spread over 4 episodes. It had some great great moments. Doctor Who seems to work best when He's running around nighttime english fields and hanging from dark cliffs and finding dark passages in old tudor mansions and is getting chased by witches or glowing throbbing stones. It was a great atmospheric episode that I enjoyed more than the new ones because it had atmosphere and darkness and even when it fell down in hyperspace on a spaceship it still worked wonderfully. The new ones seem to all be better than the general run of the mill average to bad episodes that haven't been put on DVD for good reason, but the old episodes that were really special, they seem to be a whole other thing.
Well, Stones of Blood appealed to me anyway. Beautiful.

Talons is grand, isn't it? A flawless script from the mighty Robert Holmes (Who's best ever writer- no one nailed the format as well as he did). So many great lines, and the giant rat isn't half as bad as fans make out.

QuoteWho was always a family show, though for some reason (likely post-modernism and nostalgia for certain aspects like Daleks, iconic bits and darker books) there are people who want it to be a fully grown-up, deadly serious and flawlessly believable piece of sci-fi as well as titilating something in them for the sake of it, which it never could be without losing something quite special.

Agreed, which is why the fan spin-off projects (the New Adventures, Big Finish) have never done it for me, they just take it way too seriously, they don't understand the humour of the show is just as important as the scares and the sci-fi. I always said that Who's greatest asset was its defiant ambition: it was constantly striving to do more than its meagre budget could allow. Just look at, for instance, Terror of the Zygons- the image of a giant sea monster swimming through the Thames and attacking London would be something even the new series, with all its CGI, would find a bit difficult to do, but the production team of 1975 went ahead and did it anyway. With a glove puppet. Now that kind of attitude, "we can barely do it but we'll bloody well try anyway", is what always endeared me to the show. It's just a fantastic adventure.

oceanthroats

Quote from: "Des Nilsen"
I honestly think the format of Who beats the crap out of every other popular bit of sci-fi around for sheer flexibility - Time travel (in a brilliantly concieved ship), humour, ideally good stories, plenty of villians and above all a hero who doesn't use knives or guns and who also takes companions on fantastic journeys. Ideally the companion is the viewer's way into a potentially bewildering universe.


I think the blue police call box time machine, and the dotty older man idea, the fact he's called doctor and so in, the music, is just all total genius. It's a wonderful wonderful heap of ideas, and the fact it was largely a committee thing too apparently (with Sidney newman at the helm most of the time?) seems remarkable, but glorious. It reads like the most inspired perfect almost poetic idea that TV has ever managed to come up with. I almost think everything  - bar a handful of episodes  - that has come after it has let the genius of the original set of ideas down a little bit, but that might be heresy. But all the same, stunning, to me anyway.
When you read about how it came together, and how the other ideas people suggested at the time were just cliched time travellers going through portals and time tunnels and so on, and how Sidney Newman always seemed to direct them back to more interested inspired ideas, it just seems brilliant to me, a better idea than a lot of fancied sci fi writers at the time were able to come up with.

Ambient Sheep

Quote from: "TJ"
Quote from: "Deadman97"Were cool kids always into The Doctor, or is it just this time round?
Definitely not the first time round. The words 'laughing' and 'stock' were pretty much invented for old-skool Who fans, no matter how much of a sense of humour you might have had about the whole thing yourself.
Not true in the 70s - it was very much a mainstream thing and playgrounds were alive with it the same way that they apparently are with the New Who today.  The whole "ha ha look at the sad anoraks" thing came in during the 80s, if you ask me.

I'd agree with that, and it's telling that "Doctor Who=saddo sci-fi geek stuff" came about in the years when the show began to feed off its own continuity and mythology. There's a lot of Davison and Colin Baker episodes that are just so dense in terms of back-references to older stories and Doctors. Obviously that stuff pleased the fans but the casual viewers must have turned off in droves. I still argue that the last two McCoy seasons were something of a renaissance though: the production team at the time was trying to inject more mystery into the show, but was constantly let down by the Beeb's lack of faith in the series (I mean, scheduling it against Corrie, were they fucking barmy or what?).

I have this idea that Doctor Who was seen as even more geeky than Star Trek at the time.  (I have no evidence whatsoever to back this up).  It just strikes me that it was more quaint & quirky than those traditional exploration sci-fi where uniformed crews ride around in big spaceships.  This guy wears Victorian clothes and lives in a blue cupboard for Christssake!
On the other hand, it's something which has developed into quite a "warm" "British" institution.  People seem fond of it even though they're not fans. I suppose that has a lot to do with the "teatime" slot it inhabited, making it more family orientated.  It's the shoe-string eccentricity which gives it a unique charm.  I mean the dude is flashing around time in a wooden box for Christssake!

The race now is to see if this thread can match the 100+ of the other one.

VegaLA

I agree with with Sheep. Back in the 70's I was in Junior school. Dr Who WAS the talk of the playground and classroom, including the Teachers. Actually I recall one teacher was quite upset after the last episode of Logopolis. However in the 80's, in High School, you did'nt talk of Dr Who, kids there did'nt look for exscuses to plant their size 11 DR Martin boot in the back of your head !!

Hugo Rune

Yes.

Dr Who (Tom Baker Who, really) was massive in the '70s.

Visit any primary school playground between '75 and '79 and kids (boys) would be doing one of four things:
    [*]Playing footy (the fools)
    [*]Wearing their coats tied around their necks, hoods-up, running 'round being Batman
    [*]'Running' up and down the playground very slowly, lifiting very large imaginary objects very slowly and generally doing their best to be The Six Million Dollar Man
    [*]Right fist to forehead, left fist held straight in front while screeching, "EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!"[/list]
    I've no idea what the girls did. I was only 7 and didn't fancy girls yet so I avoided them.

    Nowadays it's all Transformers and He-Man and Thundercats.*

    Anyway, yes, by high school Dr Who had to compete with Knight Rider and all those other glossy-but-naff Yank fantasy shows, which despite being 1000x more naff than Dr Who had the budget to hide behind astonishing stunts and effects that kids hadn't seen on the telly before - stuff Dr Who couldn't compete with.

    Now, we're all used to that sort of gloss, it's dead cheap to do and shows can't rely on eye-candy anymore...



    I've not only lost my train of thought but it's time to go home now so I'll end here.



    *Yes, I know. Trouble is I kinda lost track of kids' popular culture after 1986.

    Jemble Fred

    Quote from: "Hugo Rune"Nowadays it's all Transformers and He-Man and Thundercats.*

    *Yes, I know. Trouble is I kinda lost track of kids' popular culture after 1986.

    Luckily, you're just in time to be on the button again. Thundercats is the only one of them that hasn't very recently been relaunched and become popular again. And there are new movies of both He-Man and Transformers on the way.

    You should have said The Real Ghostbusters, that's never going to rise again.

    Which is why it was THE BEST.

    23 Daves

    Yes, Doctor Who was my weekday teatime treat in Australia (try saying that in a Tom Baker voice) where they were broadcasting at 6pm daily on ABC.  Back home in Britain, of course, Neighbours would be everyone's teatime treat.  I still find this about-turn rather strange.

    There was some fantastic episodes, which rather sadly I can't name due to my increasingly poor memory, but the one with the computer taking over the world (and its controller Stevens) was so absurd it was captivating.  Ditto the episodes about the Welsh botanist and the overgrown maggot problem in the mines ("Jobs for the Valleys!!!!").

    Virtually every single Tom Baker episode I saw was a gem, quite simply because the man is a captivating performer.  I can't imagine him playing a part too far-flung from his own personality, mind you, but he's one of those people who just deserves to exist and be given work.

    I'd be a liar, however, if I said I took old Doctor Whos that seriously.  I always tend to sit back and watch them with a slightly incredulous smile on my chops, and my disbelief slightly suspended.  And I have to say, almost every single Doctor Who that involves the Doctor going back in time to meet and greet a bunch of Shakespearean rogues (who were all probably got job-lot from the Royal Shakespeare Theatre Company) is utterly rank.  

    "What ho, toadface!  Ha ha!  Have you spied that long nosed rascal we know as the Doctor?" (said whilst chewing on a large leg of chicken).
    "Oh fuck off," say I, whilst turning the television off with the remote.

    Darrell

    Quote from: "23 Daves"There was some fantastic episodes, which rather sadly I can't name due to my increasingly poor memory, but the one with the computer taking over the world (and its controller Stevens) was so absurd it was captivating.  Ditto the episodes about the Welsh botanist and the overgrown maggot problem in the mines ("Jobs for the Valleys!!!!").

    All the same story, 'The Green Death'. You can get it on DVD.

    Worth it just for Jon Pertwee in drag.

    bomb_dog

    What makes little sense, and may show that people are only interested in the here and now, is that most people I know at work have UK Gold. Old Dr Who stories have been on every weekend for as long as I can remember (and this is quite surprising, as UK Nova is to me what UK Gold should be!), and people are talking about the new Dr Who, but no-one seems remotely interested about the older ones, and I don't think they've even considered watching any of the older episodes.

    Nostalgia for old Dr Who is much more palatable cut into tiny clips and all Vernon Kaye 'Dr Who-great! oh it were great when I was a kid...is he dead?' sort of thing. Watching a 1h30m story is perhaps too much to handle. Perhaps its all too much effort.

    I wonder how this series will be seen in a few years time - will people be interested in this or will liking Dr Who it go back to 'sad' status, and people only watch clip shows about it rather than the actual show itself?

    dan dirty ape

    I'm not hugely knowledgable about the minutiae of Dr Who but I remember certain parts of the Davidson episodes vividly .so they must have made quite an impression on me as I haven't seen them since. The one with the Malus in scared the living crap out of me. A GIANT DEVIL FACE STARING OUT OF A WALL!

    Wasn't there a Davidson era one when the Cybermen were mining for something and they had black, blank faced androids at their bidding?

    oceanthroats

    When I was very young I was watching Doctor Who and the end of the episode happened and I completely failed to understand what it all meant, and I seem to recall asking my mother what had just happened, and she told me the Tardis had hit a star. Just sort of bumped into it. Now. Obviously this didn't ever happen. Because you can't really bump into a star really can you. Does anyone remember any (Tom Baker) episode that ended with the Tardis sort of...er...bumping into...something? This seems to be a very very deep strange memory that is buried deep down in the earth of my head somewhere.  Maybe it was some strange dream? Was it something to do with the E-space thing?

    Another memory I have was the lion faced man running through foggy white nothingness towards the Tardis. I remember I found that chilling, and only found ut what episode it came from a few months ago. Was amazed that I was able to find out so easily too. Such an early memory it's all mixed in with dreams and my parents and so forth. I like that.