Dr Who

^ You can't beat a good man-wrapped-in-green-bubble-wrap monster

I remember being bitterly disappointed when I first saw it on VHS, after having really liked the Ian Marter book and imagined something much more creepy.
The Doctor and Harry pinned down by an automatic laser defence system...turns out to be much less impressive when you see Tom Baker and Ian Marter's bottoms in close up as they slowly shuffle across a studio floor under a balsa-wood-looking table.
But it's grown on me.
If they made it now, the spacestation interiors would be much less brightly lit, and all shadowy, so that the less-than-impressive "space grubs" larvae stage of the monster wouldn't be quite so cruelly exposed and funny.

An Adventure in Time and Space - I liked it when I watched as part of the anniversary celebrations and thought Jessica Raine was good as Verity Lambert - and absolutely stunning too

Winter is coming to Dr Who
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/doctorwho/ent...7ecd727f86

Doctor Who Actor Arthur Darvill who played Rory will joining the Arrow/The Flash spin off show .

Horror Channel still churning out Classic era repeats - we seem to be back in Colin Baker era : Mark of the Rani etc.

It was The Two Doctors most of last week. Hadn't seen it since it was first shown in the mid 80s. All 30 year old TV is going to look creaky but I think the kindest thing I could probably say is if it was re-made now it would benefit immensely by being trimmed down to two 50 minute episodes (at most). There seemed to be a lot of padding.
Some potentially interesting ideas not given full potential in the execution : if you had the Doctor now turning up on a deserted space station with flashbacks to a previous version of himself, say a Tenant or Smith being tortured and possibly killed; and then being operated on to turn him into an alien hybrid it would be done in such a way as to pack a heck of a lot more punch in the creepiness stakes ? The camp bloke chasing moths and owning a restaurant seems to have walked out of another Robert Holmes script set in Victorian times and did not appear to me to be at all creditable as a 1980s character, even as comic relief. And the less said about the Androgum/Doctor comedy double act the better. More fundamentally, people in Sontaran costumes walking around in blazing Spanish sunlight aren't scary? : they seem to have forgotten there was reason Dr Who worked best when it was in caves and cellars and other dark confined situations ?

That said, if it was remade now I'm sure Moffat would manage to ruin some of the tension equally well as the 80s version does, with his own inimitable comedy Sontaran moments - he has form in that direction after all.

All that but no words on Nicola Bryant? For shame!

(18-04-2015 18:33 )Doddle Wrote:  no words on Nicola Bryant? For shame!

I seem to remember watching as a disenchanted teenager feeling that I was "growing out" of Dr Who and that the first scene with the Colin Baker Doctor and Peri fishing was by far the best scene in the whole thing, and that it was disappointing that she put her shirt on during it, and didn't take it off again for the rest of the show, despite the presumably boiling hot Seville sunshine .

Horror channel now (and +1 at 19:50) : omnibus edition of the whole story "Logopolis".
Probably repeated tomorrow morning, Saturday's showing often is; but I haven't checked.
End of an era : Tom Baker's last story.

Still don't understand the "TARDIS within the TARDIS" bit :
OK, the Master materialises his TARDIS around a real police box, and disguises his TARDIS to look like it.
The Doctor then materialises his police box TARDIS around the Master's thinking it's just an ordinary police box.
But then when the Doctor and Adric go inside it from their TARDIS control room, they enter another TARDIS control room, also with a police box inside it. And this goes on and on : when they enter the police box, they again come out into a TARDIS control room with a police box inside it. But why does it go on and on ?
"How many more of these are there?" Asks Adric. Well, quite.

It's quite spooky but then you start to think well, why does it go on and on, and how do they actually get out, why doesn't it just keep going on forever ?

When the Doctor enters the last one, he actually emerges from round the back of the original police box on the roadside, he doesn't come out of its doors. How does that work ? Police boxes don't have back doors ?

And that's all before we get to the bit where the Doctor decides the way to get the Master's TARDIS out of his one is to materialise underwater and "flush it out". The TARDIS is supposed to be dimensionally enormous inside - wouldn't it just absorb all the water and still not even have been remotely full ?



(They did a vaguely similar thing in Jon Pertwee's "The Time Monster" - the Master's TARDIS disguised as a computer ended up inside the Doctor's TARDIS; I forget how. But there wasn't any of this "infinite regression" of TARDISes (TARDII ? ). And there it was established if two TARDISes occupied the same point in space and time - BANG! "Time Ram".)

Oh well, I guess that's the Dr Who bore post over for another few months.

Was gonna mention Time Monster, but you already did.

Police boxes might not have back doors, but the TARDIS clearly does (just this once )

This --> was on the Horror repeats the other night, one of the most emotional bits they ever did (and certainly a whole lot more real emotion than we've had in the past 10 years):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veI1_9rulGY

(can't seem to embed YT vids any more )

^ Ah, but that's all old-fashioned British and understated.
We live in a post Princess Diana funeral world where hyped-up blubbing and overly-manipulative & manufactured emotional journeys are compulsory (everywhere, not just Dr Who).

EDIT - but then I'm probably the only one who thought grumpy Helen Mirren in "The Queen" had the right idea, and it was the British public and tabloids who were being completely unreasonable and hysterical.