Why the new 'Doctor Who' irritates me
October 9, 2011 at 5:18 pm
(This post was last modified: October 9, 2011 at 5:23 pm by Cyberman.)
This is going to be a fairly lengthy and somewhat esoteric essay, so out of respect for slower connections and the disinterested I'll tuck the body of it safely away; viz:
First of all, in my defence let me say I am and always shall be a lifelong fan of Doctor Who. I have every surviving story of what has become known as the ‘classic’ series on video and DVD, as well as those that only exist as audio recordings in cassette/CD form. When I was around five years old I met then-incumbent Doctor number three Jon Pertwee on a tour promoting the newly-released Target novelisations of the television adventures; he autographed one of the two paperbacks launched at that time and bought for me by my parents, which I still own. Those books became the seed for a collection that has taken me the best part of forty years to complete, a collection which values at around £3,000-£4,000. In recent years I have been privileged to meet and speak with Tom Baker, ‘Brigadier’ Nicholas Courtney, and several other Who alumni. The series was the main inspiration for my interest in science, especially astronomy with keen encouragement from my Dad. In short, Doctor Who has been a major force in my life and required viewing all through the seventies and even into the eighties.
So why do I find Nu-Who so irritating? It wasn’t always so. When it was first announced that the series was returning I was at first apprehensive – it was only a few years since the Geoffrey Sax abomination with Paul McGann (cloaking devices and a “haff-human” Doctor indeed!), so it was a case of “once bitten, twice shy” for me. However, I was determined to at least give it a chance, not consign it to the flames out of hand. And I was pleasantly surprised. Some of the changes took a little getting used to, such as the single-episode format and the unnecessary spoiler at the end, and why the hell did they kill off the Timelords? However, generally I could appreciate what they were trying to do and after a while I saw a genuine warmth in Christopher Ecclestone’s performance – and just occasionally a glimmer of William Hartnell. Superb stuff. Mostly.
Then all too soon came the regeneration and it all went out of the window. Gone was the subtle intensity of Eccles, in came David Tennant’s mugging for the camera and crying every five minutes. Where once we had the Doctor struggling to pull himself back from the brink of Dalek-like genocidal vengeance, now we got Tennant leaping about like a jet-propelled kangaroo, shouting at everyone and blowing up killer xmas trees with a wave of his sonic screwdriver (of which more later). Subtlety was now a dirty word. The much-derided over-reliance on special guest stars that had permeated the Sylvester McCoy era like the stink of shit on a sock was back, on steroids. I half expected the entrance of each week’s celebrity guest star to be greeted by whooping, whistling and cheering of a studio audience. Doctor Who had become Doctor Woooh!
But I could tolerate even that to an extent, as long as the stories were solid, intelligent and told with conviction; and perhaps around 50-60% of the time, that was what we got. The only real clunkers, with one or two exceptions, tended to emanate from exec producer Russell T Davies himself, whose input can be described as erratic at best, varying wildly from genuinely dramatic to embarrassingly childish.
Was I the only one who breathed a sigh of relief when the initially-promising-turned-increasingly-annoying Rose Tyler left? A sigh that turned to one of annoyed, disbelieving exasperation the moment Catherine Twat showed her talentless fucking face to the camera, a signal to the audience that the only way forward from there was downhill?
Much of the rest of the Davies era consisted of some of the worst excesses of what had gone before, in a sub-CBeebies kind of way. It wasn’t entirely terrible, of course; many tiny gold nuggets are to be found scattered around for those who know where to look. John Simm as the Master was, at the start, a minor stroke of genius (though I’d have much preferred to see more of Derek Jacobi’s interpretation) and little touches and hat-tips such as Roger Delgado’s voice as the Master regains his memory was a delight. However these things were thin on the ground indeed.
Yet still I watched. The series had become overly and hamfistedly preachy, but I watched. Even though I was also thinking “Fucking get on with it! Fuck this prophecy shit, and fuck all this singing Ood and Lonely God bollocks! Do some Doctor Who for a change!” Frankly, when Tennant finally cried his way out of the TARDIS, all I could think of in response to all the tense melodramatic buildup was “Good riddance.”
Then with RTD’s departure, Doctor Who regenerated. Into a cartoon. Seriously, if Tom and Jerry were to make a guest appearance I wouldn’t be a bit surprised, though Tom would probably be a killer robot clown psychically controlled by Jerry, the ghost of an alien baby computer from the dimension of dreams and fairy tales who just wants a hug. Not to worry, though; just like his predecessor, Doctor Matt Smith will wish it all away with his magic wand... sorry, sonic screwdriver. Just like Harry Potter. Hey, he’s still cool, right kids? At least when Red Dwarf brought up concepts such as jumpstarting the second Big Bang (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qIkXfxyB-8), they had the decency to recognise it for the piss-taking it was meant to be. I’m sorry, but I fully agree with Sir Terry Pratchett’s comments when he said that the Nu-Who production team were relying on that vital element of narrative structure, make-it-up-as-you-go-alongium.
Ironically, the adventure games available from the BBC Doctor Who site are fairly compelling, intelligent and dramatic in their own way, probably because the limitations of the format preclude all that hamfisted clowning around. Tragically, Murray Gold’s music is still there though.
I remember seeing an interview with resident musician Murray Gold way back when the 2005 series was announced, in which he quite rightly extolled praise for the classic original Delia Derbyshire arrangement of the signature tune that the new series would be using, saying that it was a work of art that doesn’t need rearranging or anything added to it – then unveiled his own arrangement that did precisely that. It was brash, overblown, and not altogether bad; it had nearly the same impact of the original work, setting the tone and putting the audience in the right mood for the adventure to follow. Even the reworked version unveiled for when Tennant killed off Kylie Minogue still retained that sense of thrill. But the latest version... What. The. Fuck. Instead of instilling a sense of wondrous anticipation in the viewer, the new version is slightly less subtle than having Murray Gold himself screaming at you nonstop two inches in front of your face. He can probably be forgiven for that though, as it’s just an inevitable extension of the direction his dialogue-drowning ‘incidental’ music had been going for the last few years. If the drama onscreen is directed well enough, it shouldn’t need clumsy music cues to tell you “this bit’s sad” or “this bit’s funny – ha ha ha”. Thank goodness for subtitles is all I can say.
So this, in a rather large nutshell, is why I find new Doctor Who irritating in the extreme. What a sad, sad way to waste all that promising potential.
Let the flaming commence.
First of all, in my defence let me say I am and always shall be a lifelong fan of Doctor Who. I have every surviving story of what has become known as the ‘classic’ series on video and DVD, as well as those that only exist as audio recordings in cassette/CD form. When I was around five years old I met then-incumbent Doctor number three Jon Pertwee on a tour promoting the newly-released Target novelisations of the television adventures; he autographed one of the two paperbacks launched at that time and bought for me by my parents, which I still own. Those books became the seed for a collection that has taken me the best part of forty years to complete, a collection which values at around £3,000-£4,000. In recent years I have been privileged to meet and speak with Tom Baker, ‘Brigadier’ Nicholas Courtney, and several other Who alumni. The series was the main inspiration for my interest in science, especially astronomy with keen encouragement from my Dad. In short, Doctor Who has been a major force in my life and required viewing all through the seventies and even into the eighties.
So why do I find Nu-Who so irritating? It wasn’t always so. When it was first announced that the series was returning I was at first apprehensive – it was only a few years since the Geoffrey Sax abomination with Paul McGann (cloaking devices and a “haff-human” Doctor indeed!), so it was a case of “once bitten, twice shy” for me. However, I was determined to at least give it a chance, not consign it to the flames out of hand. And I was pleasantly surprised. Some of the changes took a little getting used to, such as the single-episode format and the unnecessary spoiler at the end, and why the hell did they kill off the Timelords? However, generally I could appreciate what they were trying to do and after a while I saw a genuine warmth in Christopher Ecclestone’s performance – and just occasionally a glimmer of William Hartnell. Superb stuff. Mostly.
Then all too soon came the regeneration and it all went out of the window. Gone was the subtle intensity of Eccles, in came David Tennant’s mugging for the camera and crying every five minutes. Where once we had the Doctor struggling to pull himself back from the brink of Dalek-like genocidal vengeance, now we got Tennant leaping about like a jet-propelled kangaroo, shouting at everyone and blowing up killer xmas trees with a wave of his sonic screwdriver (of which more later). Subtlety was now a dirty word. The much-derided over-reliance on special guest stars that had permeated the Sylvester McCoy era like the stink of shit on a sock was back, on steroids. I half expected the entrance of each week’s celebrity guest star to be greeted by whooping, whistling and cheering of a studio audience. Doctor Who had become Doctor Woooh!
But I could tolerate even that to an extent, as long as the stories were solid, intelligent and told with conviction; and perhaps around 50-60% of the time, that was what we got. The only real clunkers, with one or two exceptions, tended to emanate from exec producer Russell T Davies himself, whose input can be described as erratic at best, varying wildly from genuinely dramatic to embarrassingly childish.
Was I the only one who breathed a sigh of relief when the initially-promising-turned-increasingly-annoying Rose Tyler left? A sigh that turned to one of annoyed, disbelieving exasperation the moment Catherine Twat showed her talentless fucking face to the camera, a signal to the audience that the only way forward from there was downhill?
Much of the rest of the Davies era consisted of some of the worst excesses of what had gone before, in a sub-CBeebies kind of way. It wasn’t entirely terrible, of course; many tiny gold nuggets are to be found scattered around for those who know where to look. John Simm as the Master was, at the start, a minor stroke of genius (though I’d have much preferred to see more of Derek Jacobi’s interpretation) and little touches and hat-tips such as Roger Delgado’s voice as the Master regains his memory was a delight. However these things were thin on the ground indeed.
Yet still I watched. The series had become overly and hamfistedly preachy, but I watched. Even though I was also thinking “Fucking get on with it! Fuck this prophecy shit, and fuck all this singing Ood and Lonely God bollocks! Do some Doctor Who for a change!” Frankly, when Tennant finally cried his way out of the TARDIS, all I could think of in response to all the tense melodramatic buildup was “Good riddance.”
Then with RTD’s departure, Doctor Who regenerated. Into a cartoon. Seriously, if Tom and Jerry were to make a guest appearance I wouldn’t be a bit surprised, though Tom would probably be a killer robot clown psychically controlled by Jerry, the ghost of an alien baby computer from the dimension of dreams and fairy tales who just wants a hug. Not to worry, though; just like his predecessor, Doctor Matt Smith will wish it all away with his magic wand... sorry, sonic screwdriver. Just like Harry Potter. Hey, he’s still cool, right kids? At least when Red Dwarf brought up concepts such as jumpstarting the second Big Bang (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qIkXfxyB-8), they had the decency to recognise it for the piss-taking it was meant to be. I’m sorry, but I fully agree with Sir Terry Pratchett’s comments when he said that the Nu-Who production team were relying on that vital element of narrative structure, make-it-up-as-you-go-alongium.
Ironically, the adventure games available from the BBC Doctor Who site are fairly compelling, intelligent and dramatic in their own way, probably because the limitations of the format preclude all that hamfisted clowning around. Tragically, Murray Gold’s music is still there though.
I remember seeing an interview with resident musician Murray Gold way back when the 2005 series was announced, in which he quite rightly extolled praise for the classic original Delia Derbyshire arrangement of the signature tune that the new series would be using, saying that it was a work of art that doesn’t need rearranging or anything added to it – then unveiled his own arrangement that did precisely that. It was brash, overblown, and not altogether bad; it had nearly the same impact of the original work, setting the tone and putting the audience in the right mood for the adventure to follow. Even the reworked version unveiled for when Tennant killed off Kylie Minogue still retained that sense of thrill. But the latest version... What. The. Fuck. Instead of instilling a sense of wondrous anticipation in the viewer, the new version is slightly less subtle than having Murray Gold himself screaming at you nonstop two inches in front of your face. He can probably be forgiven for that though, as it’s just an inevitable extension of the direction his dialogue-drowning ‘incidental’ music had been going for the last few years. If the drama onscreen is directed well enough, it shouldn’t need clumsy music cues to tell you “this bit’s sad” or “this bit’s funny – ha ha ha”. Thank goodness for subtitles is all I can say.
So this, in a rather large nutshell, is why I find new Doctor Who irritating in the extreme. What a sad, sad way to waste all that promising potential.
Let the flaming commence.
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
