Blog on the Lillypad
Saturday, September 27, 2003
 | The Return of Doctor Who?
This URL was sent to me by my FFF buddy, browsing: http://www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/TV/09/26/doctor.who.reut/index.html Just in case the link has expired by the time you check it, here is the first part of the article:. |
Doctor Who time-jumps to TV again
LONDON, England (Reuters) -- Legendary science fiction hero Doctor Who is time jumping once more, set to return to British television more than a decade after he disappeared into space, the BBC said.
The cult series that aired from 1963-89 to become the world's longest-running science fiction program will return in 2005, but details about the new shows are being kept secret.
"The new series will be fun, exciting, contemporary and scary," series writer Russell T. Davies said Friday.
"Although I'm only in the early stages of development, I'm aiming to write a full-blooded drama which embraces the Doctor Who heritage."
This last statement by Russell T. Davies concerns me. Doctor Who ran for 26 years for two reasons, overall:
 | These two constraints prompted a lot of originality (and incredibly bad special effects). The creators of the show improvised constantly, but these improvisations created the unique charm of the show---his time machine that had disguised itself as a Police Box to fit in with local terrain, and then gotten stuck that way. The Doctor's Police-box TARDIS (ie, a wooden blue phone booth, for us yankees) is a trademark of the show and nicely sidesteps all the demands for special effects during launch and landing. And it conveys the show's key to success: a lack of pretension in all that is good, and a skill in lashing things together to get a solution to a problem. |
| Doctor Who was cheesy, certainly. At times, it was confusing, owing to short production schedules and hurried scripts. At times the science broke down badly (though one great virtue of the show was that it avoided the canned science of Star Trek and really did discuss some amazing ideas at times). But, until the last years, it was fresh. It was original. Under the unusual stories and, at times, avant garde surface, there was a rock solid idea that the best explorer of the galaxy was a guy in a plain, ordinary Police Call Box, who came without weapons, without plans, without desires to conquer. And he relied on a thorough sense of decency and his wits to get him through his adventures. Whether it was Hartnell's gruff first Doctor, or Troughton's clownish timelord, or Pertwee's conceited but gallant Third Doctor, the Doctor himself had a core that did not change. |  |
Doctor Who now re-enters the television arena with two great disadvantages: The BBC now view it as a cash cow and will pay a lot of attention to how it is developed (with all their lamentable market research and political correctness), and the show will probably have a decent budget for costumes and special effects.
I really doubt that modern BBC writers can recapture what the Doctor is. Will we see stories that explore sexuality, and carry with them the requisite number of gays, cross dressers, deviants, etc? Will we see our current headlines morphed into alien races (ala Star Trek)? If they stoop to these typical tactics of doomed come-back shows, the Doctor will face a death from which he will not regenerate.
I'm hoping that they can avoid these pitfalls and stick with a show that historically avoided such traps in its storylines and focused on adventures, but I doubt it. Still, the Doctor has won against overwhelming odds before, so maybe, just maybe, he can pull it out of the hat this time and give us 26 more years of exploring time and space without self consciousness and without bothering with political correctness.
