Who Notes - The Complete Doctor Who Reviews

New Doctor casting - I'm delighted

Saturday 3 January 2009

Having just learnt that Matt Smith will be the new Doctor, I'm delighted. Which means that every single one of the predictions I made earlier was wrong, including how I'd react, how opposed I'd be to another white bloke, and everything else. Already I like him.

Plus he scans. In the Socks video I recorded and uploaded yesterday (see previous page), they sing the names of every Doctor Who actor to the tune of Frere Jacques, leaving only three syllables at the end for the 11th Doctor's name. And Matt Smith fits. All's right with the world.

(This post means nothing to you if you haven’t watched the Scottish Falsetto Socks video to which it relates. There are a lot of them on Youtube, dating back all this way and further. I may have to leave it to you to research those yourselves. So when they’re mentioned in occasional posts, just type that into Youtube and you can enjoy, or ignore, them at your leisure.)

In praise of Doctor Who Magazine's comic strips

Tuesday 15 September 2009

Re Dr Who Magazine (in response to email for fanzine)

I used to write & draw The Comic Assassins strip in Dr Who Magazine and I now do the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre, as well as dreaming of writing Dr Who (though I'd have to do more actual writing to make that become a reality).

As someone who bought Dr Who Weekly No 1 and still has it, complete with stickers, I have to say it's meant a very great deal for me for longer than most people have been alive. The Wagner/Mills/Gibbons strips still stand the test of time, and in fact I was just enjoying reading the Steve Parkhouse/Mick McMahon strip in an IDW reprint last weekend. A high watermark for our artform.

The John Ridgway illustrated strips for Colin Baker's era still remain the one period where the strips were genuinely better, in pretty much every way, than the TV show itself at the time. I wish more fans were aware of them and considered their canonical status, instead of wittering on about novels and audio dramas. I recently re-read the Peter Davison era strips and was struck by just how many ideas from there had clearly left their mark on the young Russell T Davies. Half a dozen planets joined together in a big planet-joined-together doom machine, anyone?

I fear I lost touch with DWM when the show went off air in 1989, which coincided with me no longer working for the mag, and I felt being a Dr Who fan to be a bit sad and nerdy for a decade or so. When it returned, and John Ross's brilliant strips began in Dr Who Adventures, it was like a second childhood, and I find those strips to be some of the most exciting work being published today. I comic I can give an 8 year old to read is a rare thing these days. One which is brilliant and stars the Doctor, doubly so. If we could only sort out some comic strips with Daleks and Cybermen in, all would be perfect with the world.

Planet Of The Dead - by the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre

Monday 13 April 2009

The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre's take on the Dr Who Easter Special. We travelled all the way to bloody Weston Super Mare to film this, for no obvious reason. The first time we've ever devoted a video to a single episode of a programme, hope you like it.

New Dr Who logo verdict

Tuesday 6 October 2009

I like the new Doctor Who logo. It will become iconic so soon you'll forget you ever hated it (if you did).

And, for the fun of it, my fave Dr Who logos, in reverse order

8 - McCoy - even the blind don't like this logo

7 - Davison/C Baker - That typeface is an outline drawing of a metal tube so making the black lines white and glowing is a visual anomaly and jarringly ugly

6 - 2005-09 - It looks like the light on the front of a London taxi cab, and no-one has explained why

5 - Pertwee (no diamond shape) - Not a nice typeface on its own

4 - Pertwee/T Baker (in diamond) - A bit busy, but iconic

3 - McGann movie + Classic merchandise - Best treatment of this typeface

2 - Troughton - Keep it simple, but the serif face not as strong as my favourite logo...

1 - Hartnell - Keeping it simplest, on an enigmatically eerie background

And once it's bedded in, I see the Smith logo creeping into the top half of my faves, rather than the bottom half.

The End Of Time

Friday 25 December 2009

Unfair to judge an episode of Dr Who when it's only halfway through, and maybe every question I've got will be answered in part 2, but having watched The End Of Time part 1 I must confess to being a bit disappointed.

The first half took a long time to get anywhere, then the second half seemed to be on fast forward. So Lucy Saxon's saliva, months or years after she last met the Master, can be used to resurrect him? And a bottle of liquid can be used to destroy him in a scene that looked like an outtake from Harry Potter. So he's destroyed? But just as quickly he isn't? So why should we care?

Then he turns up again, with a flickering metal skeleton inside? What's that? And because he appears to be part robot, he's a very hungry cannibal? What sense does that make? And why is there a burger van in the middle of a deserted industrial site, its only two customers being two homeless blokes? Huh??

So Wilf goes looking for the Doctor, then he finds him, and holds him up while he's about to catch the Master, then the Dr plays along with some silly old sods taking photos of him, then gives up chasing the Master? So the Dr has a chat with Wilf, has a bit of a cry (despite having run away for years between episode, getting married? Huh????) then nothing happens.

Then they kidnap the Master and suddenly there's green aliens and suddenly there's a big machine, and suddenly it's explained that it repairs everyone on the whole planet (a bit like the nanogenes in The Empty Child but neither so original nor so well introduced) - and didn't you immediately, the second you heard that the machine heals the whole planet, know exactly what was going to happen? And isn't that room exactly the same place where they filmed Silence In The Library*? (*I wrote that then discovered, from DWC, that in fact it's a set. A set that ended up looking like a previous location. Still, I was wrong.) And also I've seen a bit much of Tredegar House now.

Yes I knew he was going to say Master race before he said Master race. Yes I knew they were about to do Being John Malkovich before they did Being John Malkovich. And...

If I'm so clever I should prove it by writing something good, not just criticising other people's efforts. I happen to have found The End Of Time disappointing (from its very RTD title - is it actually literally the End Of Time? What, like it was literally The Next Doctor? and World War 3? and...) although actually the image of everyone turning into the Master wasn't bad. So, New Year's Resolution, write something good or shut up about everyone else's writing.

End Of Time? What was all that?

Friday 1 January 2010

Just watched Dr Who The End Of Time part two. What the bloody hell was that all about? Last 15 minutes great, first hour total nonsense.

Must have been fun directing Timothy Dalton. You'll do one scene sitting down in a blank room and spouting nonsense. Then another standing in a blank room and spouting nonsense. Then a third standing in a white room and spouting nonsense. A couple of times you may have to stick your arm out and wiggle your fingers. Can you do that for me luvvie?

Sigh, I am no doubt in a minority. I just wish there'd been a plot that made some sense at some point.

Oh and Mickey's married to Martha?

So, putting aside the big problem that this story was being watched by all the grans and kids and families hanging round for the holidays, who've never watched Dr Who before and needed it explaining to them, could someone explain it to me?

The Master has been psychotically mad since the age of 8 because the Timelords went back and planted a drumming noise in his head that they could then connect to with a White Point Diamond (sounds like a type of cider) which would enable them to jump from the middle of the Time War (whatever that was in the end) taking their whole planet with them? And the Master couldn't hear this drumming for the first 20 odd years of his Dr Who appearances, then started hearing them again last year?

And President Rassilon throws this Diamond White thing into a holgram floating above a table and it shoots to Earth then they follow it? Taking their whole bloody planet with them?

Then the Dr shoots some machine or other and they go back. The end? What? What the bloody hell was all that about?

And then he gets killed by some radiation, invisible, silent and totally disappointing. Then they milk the goodbyes and... oh hang on, new trailer!

In praise of Doctor Who Eleventh Hour

Sunday 4 April 2010

Last night I watched Dr Who The Eleventh Hour on a hastily arranged TV in the venue I was about to perform my Socks show in. I loved it. Best 1st episode ever, I would contend.

An awful lot of plot to squeeze into an hour, and in many ways it was Moffat's most Russell T Davies-ish story. Big alien invasion, new companion, running round big villages rather than being in his usual claustrophic spaces, and a plot involving the entire world coming together to save the day. But unlike the similar RTD plots, all of Moffat's plotlines are resolved, all the questions are answered, and when you get the answer, you are satisfied.

I loved RTD, he revived Who, he constructed it as an engrossing soap opera that would draw in young, old, male and female viewers alike, and he found the best writers and allowed them to flourish. What I always had a problem with were elements of his writing which could be characterised by the phrase Oh, that doesn't matter or they won't notice that or even I'll explain later.

Though some of my favourite Dr Who shows come from RTD and result from the unfettering of his brilliant imagination - Gridlock, Midnight, Turn Left and Love & Monsters are works of genius that no-one else could have come up with. And he was the master of The Moment, little exchanges between characters that you could watch 100 times (The Doctor and Rose discuss their future in The Impossible Planet, Rose & her Mum discuss Rose's future in Army Of Ghosts), or big page turner moments (I Am the Master, get out of the way, Barcelona, the lines are endless) or big impressive images (from The Face of Boe and the dozen aliens he squeezed into End Of The World's first crowd scene onwards) and cracking concepts that go beyond common sense in a good way (a while planet stuck in a traffic jam? an alien that's just some words repeated? The whole of history changed because you turn left instead of right?).

But it was RTD's plots, and the resolution thereof, that always frustrated me.