This Week on DVD (11/03/09)…

I totally agree that Davison’s refusal to kill Davros, when he had ALREADY killed Daleks, in RESURRECTION OF THE DALEKS does not sit well, and almost spoils an otherwise terrific, dark episode. That scene is horrible, not in keeping with the Doctor’s personality (whom we know for a fact does not favor humanoid over non-humanoid life), and I really totally hate it. The rest of the episode is good, though, and he has other excellent shows. Just pick that cockroach out of your salad and keep eating, Ken.

When are they going to friggin’ release Terror of the Zygons, though?

Not soon enough, that’s for sure.

well I like Davison a lot, and it might be because I wasn’t watching Dr. Who back in the Tom Baker days so the change-over wasn’t an unpleasant surprise. I also liked Davison from ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL. For the best-case Peter Davison argument, I recommend seeing THIS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7boeBf5pbQ

One the Fifth Doctor’s traits was that he had generally awesome companions, like Tegan “Legs” Jovanka, or the fascinating and ever-treacherous Turlough. I even didn’t mind Adric, whom I felt was excellent in his first appearance FULL CIRCLE as well as his last EARTHSHOCK. And Nyssa was very watchable. Compare to the dull lot that Jon Pertwee got stuck with.

@Sandy Petersen: Oh, another Turlough fan! [cheers] And, yeah, thinking about it, I really think that Davison’s era is almost more defined by his companions than the Doctor himself (not necessarily a bad thing, imo). I will say, for the record, T. Baker was my first Doctor (our PBS station showed all his episodes. A LOT. I was so happy when they started showing other Doctors), yet I still find Davison plenty enjoyable. Though I can kind of see how his… low key approach can be off-putting, especially when contrasted to both his predecessor and his successor. Let’s face it, both Bakers played the character very… enthusiastically; so a quiet, mellow (almost timid) take on the character can easily be drowned out. And in Davison’s defense, he was specifically told to play the Doctor the way he did. T. Baker was very popular, and after seven years (still the longest run of any Doctor), he’d very much made the role his own. When it was time for Baker to move on, the producers of the show decided that the best way to break with Tom’s version was to go the exact opposite way with the character.
Oh, and my two pfennig on the “he wouldn’t kill Davros” thing: The show’s always been all over the map with the Doctor’s morality. He hates guns, but will blow shit up all the time (cuz that’s LESS violent than using a gun?), he’ll kill off one-shot villains, but give long-time enemies who’ve killed countless billions–and will gladly keep doing so–“another chance”… Sheesh.

The basic problem with RESURRECTION OF THE DALEKS is that everyone is being killed – a lot of good people die – and Davison goes after Davros with the intent to shoot him. In that same exact episode, he kills Daleks, who are in fact less a threat to the universe than the unrepentant Davros. The only visible reason to spare Davros is, really, because he is humanoid, and the Daleks aren’t, and that seriously violates the Doctor’s ethos. I mean, I LIKE Davison, but I don’t like this part of the episode. I fear I sound like a bit of a hammerhead on the subject, but it bugs me no end. Esp. compared to how awesome he could be. And figures Fish Eye would prefer Turlough in a speedo to Tegan’s glorious gams. Must be a gender thing.

The whole “no guns thing” is mostly a product of the Tennant years. Before then, he didn’t often carry a gun, but he didn’t seem to have moral objections that much. I assumed he was just a lousy shot.

For amusing, pithy, and insightful reviews of almost every Doctor Who story available on video or DVD (past and present), I recommend spending some time at

http://www.androzani.com

It’s run by a trio of ladies in New Zealand who are clearly Doctor Who fans but are not afraid to point out the faults in the stories, as they see them. Even if you disagree with them, they’ll probably get you to consider things about each story in a different light.

Edit: I meant ‘not adverse’, of course. Why are the words my brain skips over always the ones that completely change the meaning of what I’m saying?

Sandy Peteresen said: “And figures Fish Eye would prefer Turlough in a speedo to Tegan’s glorious gams. Must be a gender thing.”

Yeah, wow, imagine a straight woman preferring to look at a half-naked guy over a half-naked gal. How astounding. Seriously, why did you even feel the need to mention this?

What does Jo Grant offer? What does Jo Grant offer?

Not much. Kind of why I didn’t mention her in the first place. Although, in fairness, she isn’t as bad as I remembered her being.

But both of them could get pretty mouthy with the Doctor when she wanted. Granted, not to the level of Tegan, but then who really could? Granted, it’s been years since I’ve seen Sarah’s Pertwee episodes and she might not have been quite the same as she was with Baker.

This is not to say that they were better than, say, Tegan. And none of them quite compare to Leela or either Romana in my book. I just don’t think they were dull.

As far as Dr. Who goes, Peter Davison made a great Tristan Farnham.

Jon Pertwee with Sarah Jane and the Brig will always be my favorite combination, but I have come to love Patrick Troughton over the years as his few remaining stories got more exposure. The War Games is a personal favorite and I’ve been waiting for it since they started releasing the shows to DVD. Our first view of the Time Lords (though Gallifrey is still unnamed some 6 years into the show’s run), the Doctor’s involuntary regeneration, so much of the series’ mythology really gets going with this story.

I’ll have to set aside next weekend to watch this back to back with Spearhead from Space. This may involve locking the kids in a closet so they don’t whine.

Of course season 2 of Sarah Jane Adventures is out Tuesday too, decisions, decisions….

Actually, since the BBC was a government run operation they should probably be called EEEEE-vil Socialists rather than EEEEE-vil Capitalists.

One the other hand, the BBC did make Doctor Who and kept it on the air for decades. That’s more that can be said for any American sci fi series from those same decades.

Sandy and EricB: I don’t think I explained myself correctly: You’re spot-on that the BBC is publicly-funded and therefore count as Wicked Commie-dogs (in fact, it’s a matter or record that the BBC was not just ‘a bit leftie’ but openly pro-Soviet in the ’60’s, sharing tech research and so on, possibly implicated in espionage, so Eric isn’t exaggerating here.). But BBC Enterprises a different organisation; it’s is most definately a company, which most certainly does care about profits, who do EEEE-vil capitalist things such as **gasp** sell merchandising licenses, sell BBC product overseas, and organise **NOOOOO!!** ADVERTISING!! So in this case, it most certainly is the capitalists we have to thank for any ’60’s BBC output existing at all.

Can I make a terrible joke and say that maybe Conservatives are just better at conserving?

Sandy: It wasn’t that the BBC C.E’s didn’t ‘care’ about re-runs – there were often union agreements prohibiting them. You can read a ton of fascinating stuff about the BBC in the ’60’s at:

http://www.tvstudiohistory.co.uk/old%20bbc%20studios.htm

Miko: I just found it a bit odd that all the Trion officer had to say was something like “oh, we don’t oppress dissidents any more”, and suddenly that made it OK.

I think it was more than just the fact that the BBC was publicly funded that made it communist but the fact that it basically had a monopoly on broadcasting at the time.

I have to admit that Dr. Who geekdom is something that has totally escaped me over the years. I tried watching the show occassionally in the 80’s and early 90’s and was always left underwhelmed. So many other people with tastes similar to mine love the show that I am still tempted to give it another shot. That being said, the show has existed for so long now that it is a little overwhelming (finally, something overwhelming about the show!) to find a place to dive in.

Where would be a good place for a total Who-neophyte to start? Easy access to the material is also a must – I don’t see myself going out of the way to try out a show I couldn’t sit through 20 years ago.

I saw an interview in the 1980s with one of the big wheels at the BBC. Sadly, it’s twenty years later and I no longer remember his name. I do remember how smug he was. The interviewer asked him which was the most popular of all the BBC’s shows, and he answered unhesitatingly “Doctor Who”. He was then asked, “Why, then, does Doctor Who have consistently one of the smallest budgets of all your shows?” The wheel responded that it had the VERY smallest budget of all the BBC’s shows (don’t know if that’s true, but that was his claim), and that this was just peachy keen. You see, Doctor Who was a SUCCESS. So it obviously didn’t need money pumped into it to keep it going. The money needed to go into less popular shows that the British Unwashed were not appreciating properly.

This sums up for me everything that can be wrong with publicly funded media.

There is a definite section of the arts community that believes that art is only good if no one likes it. Public Broadcasting sometimes epitomizes that attitude.

Erm… did anyone notice the shameful typo that’s on the DVD box art?

At the bottom, it reads “THE PATRICK THROUGHTON YEARS.” The man’s name is spelled “Troughton,” not “Throuhgton.”

Sandy: The point you raised is a great one, and it would take a textbook to answer. The very short and crude answer is this: in the ’80’s, BBC CE’s hated anything to do with science fiction or exploratory fiction. Now track back twenty years: Doctor Who was regarded as an excellent boot camp (or possibly WOC course) for new hires at the BBC. The budgets were tiny, the schedules ridiculous and the demands incredibly high. Actors would get their scripts on tuesday, rehearse in their street clothes in a rented church hall or something on wednesday and thursday, then do dress rehearsal on friday for recording on saturday. At the same time, the designers and decorators and composers and seamstresses and carpenters were flogging their guts out to make the props and sets and costumes and special effects and sounds that were needed. For 48 weeks per year. Often, monsters were delivered for recording with wet paint and soggy glue. The idea was that if you could survive that crucible for a year or two, you had the chops to really cut it in the ‘real’ BBC world, wherin lay the giddy heights of classic drama or documentary. I think Sandy got it spot-on when he said that it’s everything that *can* be wrong with public broadcasting.

Yes, of course the effects were laughable and the acting was often shoddy, but the whole point is that it was getting done. I’ll get into ‘my opinion’ territory now, but I think that basic, fundamental difference between UK and U.S. TV at that time is that U.S. TV aimed to be ‘cinema in your home’ whereas UK TV aimed to be ‘theatre in your home’. In other words, Star Trek had to actually *show* a planet being destroyed, but Doctor Who could function by having a character say ‘oh my goodness, they destroyed a planet!!’. And that’s a comparison, not a value judgement.

Final point for now: The BBC did *not* have a monopoly on broadcasting in the ’60’s. The ITV network had existed since 1957. ITV was a wholly commercial (advertising-funded) enterprise intended to check-and-balance the government-funded duopoly of the BBC. There’s a whole ‘nother textbook to be got out of this, but the ITV companies were producing outstanding material by themselves; I think it’s widely accepted that “Doctor Who” was pretty much an extension of ABC’s* 1960 series “Pathfinders in Space”.

Now…..on to Reed…..
Now I hate giving recommendations, since what I like is not…erm…..necessarily what everyone else likes. My absolute high watermark is the 1970 season (season 7), but some folks find the pace and structure of those stories a bit slow. Any of the Hammer-influenced early-70’s stories are pretty much unanimously regarded (‘Seeds of Doom’, ‘Talons of Weng-Chiang’, ‘Brain or Morbius’). And if you’re in a very patient mood, by no means discount the early-60’s historicals like ‘The Aztecs’, or the massively-scoped epics like ‘The Invasion’ or ‘The War Games’. And if you want ’80’s….watch ‘The Caves of Androzani’ and marvel at the fact that it was broadcast at 7:00pm. Let’s just say ‘a few arterial spurts short of Peckinpah’. Absolutely heartbreaking.

Getting personal now: I hadn’t watched old ‘Doctor Who’ for years until I got one of them newfagled portable media players. I discovered that this is the perfect medium for watching black-and-white ‘Doctor Who’…..the tiny flickery screen and bad audio just about recreates the environment that the producers expected their viewers to be using. And honestly, watching Episode One of ‘The Web of Fear’ actually in a stalled subway train with the lights out at 11:00pm is incredibly atmospheric.

So…as to advice….I can’t. Be aware that getting amongst Doctor Who fans is like getting amongst French Marxists: everyone agrees that they’re on the same side, but if you can find two people who actually agree with each other, you’re doing pretty well.

Wow. This post went on for a long time. Anyone would think I’d been reading Jabootu or something.

*the UK ABC = Associated Broadcasting. Later Thames TV.

Miko: I’m sorry for taking so long to reply, but I had to go back and recall some stuff. There was a very clear idea (so it seems) that the Doctor’s companions would each have lost a ‘loved one’: Adric’s brother, Nyssa’s father and Tegan’s Aunt, thus positioning them to have to ‘rely’ on The Doctor as a protector-father-figure…..which he absolutely failed to be. In the hands of a really good writer, this could have been uranium (and if you’re thinking Joss Weedon, you’re not alone;). The seeds of absolute f***ing genius are lurking just below the surface here: Tegan is on the surface a tough character concealing a very vulnerable interior, wheras Nyssa is a fragile exterior concealing a very strong personality. Adric is a very smart but socially-dysfunctional/borderline-autistic kid who looks up to the Doctor but constantly wants to prove how cool he is (except he isn’t). For me, the thing about Adric’s death isn’t that it’s a Heroic Sacrifice, but that it’s absolutely pointless: the freighter HAS to blow up and the dinosaurs HAVE to become extinct. No-one has to die. Adric kills himself in a display of adolescent hubris, pretty much trying to impress girls. Turlough is everything that Adric wasn’t: a nasty, self-serving SOB who was utterly cynical about everything (which is what made him so interesting!). That’s why the final minutes if ‘Planet of Fire’ rubbed me the wrong way: all it took was for some bloke from Trion to pop up and say “oh, we don’t oppress dissidents anymore” and he’s all “oh, OK then.”. It’s so completely out-of-charcter for someone who we’ve come to understand as someone who Never Trusts Anyone, Ever. Not even the Doctor.

Oops. I wrote too much again.

Sandy said: “I mean, if you don’t know what “telepathy” is, you really can’t do SF. And yet this was the same organization that in the 1950s did Quatermass and in the 1960s did The Doctor. I find it pathetic.”

Even amongst commie-dog euro-trash socialists like me, I don’t think you’d find many dissenters to that opinion. Libertarians like Sandy (may I call you a Libertarian? I certainly don’t mean it be an insult.) could case-study the BBC in the ’80’s as one way that Socialism Fails (and socialists should study it too!). Excessive bureaucracy, not enough accountability, and a mandate to spend monies obtained from taxation with no thought as to whose good it’s being spent: in short, too much paperwork, not enough real work….. The incredible irony is that this took place during the most aggressively new-right phase of government in the UK (it’s a fact that Thatcher was massively influenced by Robert Nozick and other anarcho-capitalist thinkers. That’s the origin her much-misquoted ‘no such thing as society, only the market’ speech. I have my criticisms of Thatcher, but I won’t have her misquoted. I do try to fight fair.) Basically, I think, you have a bunch of scared middle-management types in charge of this huge, lumbering Brontosaurus of an organisation, just hoping to Not Screw Up Too Badly before their pensions kicked in. When the gibbering, senile, old-school BBC was euthenised in the early-’90’s, it wasn’t a moment too soon (maybe ten years too late…). To pursue the metaphor, everyone new that the dying Brontosaurus needed to be replaced with a pack of Velociraptors, but no-one was quite ready to flip the climate.

The thing is, smart people in the BBC saw this coming. As part of a school project, I interviewed a Prominent Producer at Pebble Mill in 1989 (and I was very young and very intimidated!), and he was very enthusiastic about some guy named David something who was about to produce a series called ‘Twin Peaks’. He was effusive that the ‘US model’ (privately funded productions, with post-production syndication) was the only way that really interesting TV was going to get made in the future.

I’m sorry this went on long again, but Sandy dignified me with a long response, so I couldn’t do less.

“The War Games” is a pretty good place to start. Since they had a slighly larger budget for the sets (the serial was as long as 2 or 3 of their shorter serials so they had in effect double the money to spend on sets and it shows) and as there are no monsters (where the cheapness of the effects budget is most glaring) it’s less likely to put someone off for the cheesiness. It’s only drawback is that it kind of drags towards the middle but don’t give up on it until the War Lord show’s up around episode 6. He’s a great villan.

Sandy: correction duly observed and noted.