Doctoring
I've developed the habit of watching the repeats of Dr Who on weekday evenings when I get home from work. Right now it's an especially interesting experience, as we've moved into the mid-80s episodes that I've never seen before, since I spent most of the mid-80s without a television.
So what is one to make of this era's episodes of Dr Who, widely regarded as the worst in the venerable show's forty year history? For a start, the bad reputation is well-deserved. They came quite close to working, in some cases, but they were let down by shockingly, spectacularly, almost willfully bad scripts. It's like every single writer was suffering from crippling clinical depression. The future societies are always dystopias in which corruption, oppression and sadism run amok. The past societies are always threatened by aliens who pick us off one by one in gruesome ways. In more than a couple of storylines, the writers seem to imagine that "dramatic tension" means killing off every member of the cast who isn't a regular. It becomes a joke... as if they were contractually obliged to pay the actors extra if their characters were still alive at the closing credits.
Colin Baker's Doctor is a vain and self-absorbed bully, although he does manage to wrest some charm from the character. His assistant Peri is written as a squawking American, forced by an apparently xenophobic wardrobe department into a range of candy-coloured, cleavage-enhancing T-shirts, vast bermuda shorts and high heels, but she too grows on you.
Unfortunately a very great deal of the time the villain is The Master, who is about as scary as a My Little Pony, especially when compared to the Daleks or the Sontarans. It's hard to take a villain seriously when he spends his time mincing about in a black frockcoat, threatening people with what appears to be a heavy duty steel dildo. And like all mediocre villains, he laughs too much. I don't think he actually says, "I'll get you, my pretty! Aha ha ha ha!" at any point, but he's not far off, and in any case I haven't watched all of the episodes yet, so who knows?
The only other explanation for his constant lame cackling is that only evil people laughed in the mid-80s. Apparently the good people were all supposed to be grimly serious about the threat of nuclear annihilation, pollution, over-population and Sheena Easton records.
So what is one to make of this era's episodes of Dr Who, widely regarded as the worst in the venerable show's forty year history? For a start, the bad reputation is well-deserved. They came quite close to working, in some cases, but they were let down by shockingly, spectacularly, almost willfully bad scripts. It's like every single writer was suffering from crippling clinical depression. The future societies are always dystopias in which corruption, oppression and sadism run amok. The past societies are always threatened by aliens who pick us off one by one in gruesome ways. In more than a couple of storylines, the writers seem to imagine that "dramatic tension" means killing off every member of the cast who isn't a regular. It becomes a joke... as if they were contractually obliged to pay the actors extra if their characters were still alive at the closing credits.
Colin Baker's Doctor is a vain and self-absorbed bully, although he does manage to wrest some charm from the character. His assistant Peri is written as a squawking American, forced by an apparently xenophobic wardrobe department into a range of candy-coloured, cleavage-enhancing T-shirts, vast bermuda shorts and high heels, but she too grows on you.
Unfortunately a very great deal of the time the villain is The Master, who is about as scary as a My Little Pony, especially when compared to the Daleks or the Sontarans. It's hard to take a villain seriously when he spends his time mincing about in a black frockcoat, threatening people with what appears to be a heavy duty steel dildo. And like all mediocre villains, he laughs too much. I don't think he actually says, "I'll get you, my pretty! Aha ha ha ha!" at any point, but he's not far off, and in any case I haven't watched all of the episodes yet, so who knows?
The only other explanation for his constant lame cackling is that only evil people laughed in the mid-80s. Apparently the good people were all supposed to be grimly serious about the threat of nuclear annihilation, pollution, over-population and Sheena Easton records.
posted by Blandwagon at 6:52 PM
1 Comments:
His assistant Peri is written as a squawking American, forced by an apparently xenophobic wardrobe department into a range of candy-coloured, cleavage-enhancing T-shirts, vast bermuda shorts and high heels, but she too grows on you.
You say it like it's a bad thing!
You know, given that the Doctor has had quite a few assistants who look as if they might enjoy "doing it with blokes", as it were, he doesn't seem to get much. Mind you given his dress sense and campy overacting that's probably not much of a surprise.
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