I was having a bath last night (yes, I’m a fairly clean sort of chap) and I was flicking through Doctor Who: The DisContinuity Guide by Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping.
For those of you who aren’t aware of this book, they watched every Doctor Who story from An Unearthly Child to Survival and rated and reviewed them, much as we’re doing on the podcast – with a sense of humour and a lot of love.
While I was reading their introduction, I found a passage in it that, I think, sums us (C2), and Doctor Who fans in general, up perfectly. I’m talking about normal fans here, ones who can seperate fact from fiction and TV programmes from real life. Fans who can acknowledge that nothing is perfect but that that is all part of the fun.
I know I’m shamelessly cribbing but they’ve written it far better than I could hope to…
“…A Doctor Who video is a cheap way of getting back a slice of your youth or glimpsing a world you have never seen but have heard so much about. But the harsh reality is that sometimes the video disappoints: the first few minutes produce a rush of nostalgia, but then a bit of bad acting slips in, or a set wobbles, or the first alien made out of egg boxes and tin foil appears. You feel cheated: its as if your childhood has been made counterfeit.
Such criticism seems to be an inherent component of devotion: to really love something you have to want to take it apart. So we detail goofs and blunders because they’re there, committed for all eternity to the merciless amber of video. We don’t list such flaws because of an ignorance of the nature and development of television. TV drama in the 60s and 70s was almost exclusively ‘event-orientated’, in as much as programmes were designed to be viewed once and then probably never seen again. Certainly, directors in the 1960s could never have envisaged a time when their work would be available for purchase in the High Street, let alone subjected to frame-by-frame scrutiny. Even if they had wanted perfection, the constraints they worked under made this impossible. Most mistakes just had to stay.
We only mock Doctor Who because we are here to celebrate the fan way of watching television, a close attention to detail matched by a total willingness to take the mickey.”
TDG is a very good book and although the original is long out of print, there was a reprint done a few years ago by an online publisher called Monkeybrain Books. Its not updated, its a straight reprint but its well worth getting hold of if you can.
And now, following on from yesterday’s story, The Sun is saying that the cast of Red Dwarf will reunite for a series of new shows to be broadcast on digital channel Dave in 2009.
