Whose Doctor Who?

Started 10-Jul

Can this be ranked? No

As a clip-fest it has faded some.

The early Pertwee clips are weirdly B&W, the 1st/2nd Doctor stuff looks very low fi... it serves to remind what a fantastic effort the DVD range has made to clean up the early series.

The talking heads are baffling and the fashions are out of date.

There is useful historical value in seeing DW being made by several DW famous people. An almost fun game of spot-the-DW producer can be played with some spaces to talk over.

The importance of this is it's the first examination of DW history/legacy in a way that happens every week now. Before this there was the show and that was all there was. (Just about... just a few Target books.)

I wonder to what extent this is an actual response to the "DW is too violent" thing which the Mary Whitehouse group was pushing and was characterised in newspapers by the Jean Rook article.
http://cuttingsarchive.org/images/9/9d/1977-02-11_Daily_Express.jpg

This is not the first "DW is too violent" article ever nor is it the last. But it is pivotal because for some reason the DW producers/the BBC seem to have responded by changing the way DW was made after this.

Jean Rook is clearly a columnist rather than a critic. She's doing what outrage commentators do today. Her frankly strange opinions are squirted onto the page and are ill-disciplined, badly edited and very close to rubbish.

Give her her due she actually visited the DW office and has some real quotes instead of the modern habit of using stuff off Twitter and Facebook found on the net.

But the article is very first draft indeed. Her argument is contradictory when considering Daleks as nostalgic soup cans but modern series rats and mummies as more subtly horrific. Really? How?

Compared to modern media this seems twee. Just wait till you see a 80's video nasty, dear..... what would she make of Isis snuff videos on Youtube? Wow, times have changed.


ABM Rating -/4.00
LJM Rating -/5.00
SPJ Rating --/10


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 Daily Express Fr 11-Feb-1977

THE JEAN ROOK INTERVIEW Who do you think you are, scaring my innocent child ?

AGED THREE my son used to watch "Dr. Who" at mother's knee. At four, he squinted from behind my back. Five, he was under the armchair. Now he Is pushing six.
And when, last Saturday he told me three times before noon that he didn't want to watch "Dr Who" at 6.20 p.m., I accepted that psychologcally, he'd come upon something slimy and monstrous.
And that he would be safer on the other channel, even with Larry Grayson.
I blame myself for not noticing the extremely nasty turn with this cult 14-million viewer TV programme has taken since, I gauge, last year's Sutekh episode. In which, your scalp may stir to remember, Dr. Who's girl assistant was stalked through a snapping crackling autumn wood by two 7ft. grey bandaged Egyptian mummies. Twin Frankensteins who would have put the wind of heaven up Peter Cushing.
At the time. I thought them strong if not fetid for a " children's programme." With wiser hindsight I shudder to think that while I was frying his fish fingers my child alone in a room with programme which could have screwed up and permanently crunched his nerve with one mummified hand.

Monster

What has gone wrong with the innocent teatime thrill of watching " Dr. Who " ?
In the ratings, nothing. This year's average two million up on 75-76. The age average is up ten years. Sixty per cent of all "Who" viewers are now adult and the Doctor's new thigh flashing assistant Leela, is switching on the 16-year-olds in hordes.
Where I have gone wrong - and the time switch to a later 6.20 should have warned me - is in not realising that "Dr.  Who" Is no longer suitable for children. And that it has grown out of a rubber monster show into a full, scaley, unknown horror programme.
Compared with it, an old Hammer movie wouldn't crack toffee.
Bob Holmesl, script editor and the man who gives monstrous birth to the programme content points out that I should have seen which way the chilling wind was blowing months ago.
"Of course its no longer a children's prolzramme," he said. "Parents would be terribly irresponsible to leave a six-year-old to watch it alone."
It's geared to the intelligent 14-year old and I wouldn't let any child under ten see it.
"If a little one really enjoys peeping at it from behind the sofa, until Dad says "it's all right now — it's all over' that's fine. A certain amount of fear is healthy under strict parental supervision. Even then I'd advise half an hour to play with Dad and forget it before a child goes to bed.
"That's why we switched the time from 5.15 until after 6 when most young kids are in the bath."
Mr. Holmes Is tall, grey-haired, and bloodless, in a cape-shaped fawn mac. He looks like Sherlock Holmes playing Dracula. He reads Poe, Arlen and Bradbury in bed.
We met In the "Dr. Who" warehouse in Acton—the size of an aircraft hangar, and creeping with dank, dusty monsters from past episodes.
 And with disused Daleks.
It's 14 years since the Daleks swivelled and pushed what was a "12 week experimental children's programme" into the living television legend which "Who" has become. Today, they are forgotten.
Not by the public. Certainly not by their Who-staff crator Terry Nation (his actual, simple, five line stage direction read something like, on come a pot-shaped gliding thing like a giant moving pepper pot) who has coined a fortune out of Dalek patent rights.
Paradoxically, and perhaps jealously, it's the present "Dr. Who" presenters Torn Baker,
Bob Holmes, and the programme's very updated 33 year-old new producer Graham Williams—who would like to forget them.

Impact

Baker has attempted to scrap them as "dreary, blundering things, moving on one level and talking on one note."
Holmes argues that, from his scripting viewpoint, "They're no great conversationalists.."
 Graham Williams more reasonably, says, "The Daleks have become a TV legend. They're hard to repeat. The odd times they have been brought back, they've made tremendous impact the first night—all the little brothers who haven't seen them, watching with the teenage kids who remember them.
"But after that curiosity show, the ratings soon drop off. So unless we can find a terrific plot to support them they won't be back."
De-activated. the Daleks look dusty and depressing. Like old dustbins. And, after all that, they are only GBP500 pedal cars with lids on.
But there Is haunting, silent power in their corner of the warehouse. In 400 weekly episodes, spanning God knows how many light years, no "Dr. Who  creation has measured up to their all-age, menacing appeal.

Creepy

As Holmes posed, crowded by six of them, for a photograph, it lurked in my mind to will them to swivel on him, tinny-voicing " Ex-ter-min-ate."
Now, of course, "Who" is so much more subtly horrific than soup can Daleks and rubber monsters. In the next episode, there will be 15ft polystyrene rats down plywood London sewers.
But they will be revealed gradually, working from the 6ft tail. " When 'Dr. Who' started, as a true  children's programme, the monsters were rubber and specific and you saw them almost at once," said Mr. Holmes.
"What horrifies far more is the occasional flash of monster — bits and pieces of one. People are frightened by what might came round the corner or in at the window."
Proud as it Is to raise viewers' hair; if not to unhinge their minds. ”Who" takes a high-pitched moral tone about it's killings.
"They're strictly fantasy deaths," said Holmes. "No blood, no petrol bombs. nothing a child could copy."
" We're not in business to harm children," he said. " We learned our lesson years ago with some plastic daffodils which killed just by spitting at people."
" We didn't consider that people actually have plastic daffodils in their homes. They caused screaming nightmares so we scrapped them. You must never attack the security of a child in its home. It you make something nasty you don't stick it in a nursery."
Watching last Saturday's episode, I accept that "Dr. Who" is nerve-wrenching, spine gripping and now totally grown up. Checking, I find I have 40-year old friends who can't watch it.
It's a great TV advertisement. But I wonder If this inflated, ex-children's programme is overstretching itself to 15ft rats. And worshipping its own uninhibited cult.
My son has switched to bionic Steve Austin. After " Dr. Who" he believes Austin is normal.