Dr Who.
The Doctor returned and I have to say I am not a fan of the new style. Eccleston's doctor is great but the format and the direction are trying to be trendy and some of it comes off as childish, some of the cgi looks worse than if the special effects had been mocked up by hand. I am a great believer in improvisation, the show never had a decent budget so the techies had to mock stuff up from what was around, it often looked cheap and homemade but it's better than middling cgi which just looks careless.
I still can't accept Bilie Piper as an actress, everyone says she is fantastic, I just don't see it.
I won't go on about what I disliked about the show, safe to say that Eccleston is such a fantastic actor he sibglehandedly redeemed it. I can put up with the rubbish to watch this Doctor. He's not quite what anyone might have expected but he's so charming you don't care.
Sylvester McCoy was the Doctor I grew up with and loved, there was an undercurrent of darkness in every pore, a hint that nothing was as it seemed, that even though events may appear out of control the Doctor was behind the scenes of every aspect, even if he wasn't. I loved that. He wasn't the funniest, smartest, most human, or even darkest of the Doctors but more than any of them he was the one I would have followed to the ends of the universe. The Doctor never ran, he strolled, nonchalently. Eccleston's Doctor never strolls, he always runs. I think that is why he won't displace McCoy's Doctor in my affections.
The producers of this series should look at the revamped Battlestar Galactica as to how to effectively update a series. Another show I loved as a kid the remake has, within a season, established itself as the premier SF show. It's just fantastic.
The eighties were all about machismo on TV and while it was insane fun it lacked any reality at all, which is perhaps where late nineties to modern American Television has made incredible strides. I think it must have been The X Files which drew the boundary.
British Telly is different. In America and other countries such as Australia, if you have an idea that can be pitched succesfully then you get to make a show. If your idea is good enough then it will pick up viewers. Of course this isn't enough to keep a show on the air, great series such as Millenium, American Gothic, Farscape, Sliders, and Crusade have all been axed after a few seasons or even midstory but there is potential for these to live on in other mediums, although there is the danger of turning into another Lexx, originally a fantastic show with some absolutely brilliant actors and characters it's budget was repeatedly cut and it's writing degenerated into the insanity of man eating carrots.
But the net has allowed these stories to carry on.
In Britain however it is almost impossible to get an original idea on to TV. We may be the best in the world with our period dramas but we do have great writers today, not just from the past. When was the last time Britain created a classic piece of original Science Fiction telly?
Ok, after actually trying to answer that question I've come up with Red Dwarf and the Tomorrow People both of which began in the early nineties, one as a sitcom in space, the other a kids program and itself a sequel to an eighties kids program.
Compare this to America which has so many brilliant SF shows the ones it has to cut are in fact brilliant.
Can you imagine the BBC taking a chance on a pre Buffy Joss Whedon? As much as there are problems with America, it is not with it's telly, even outside of SF there are shows as diverse as Ally McBeal, Sex in the city and The Sopranos. What do we get, endless make over shows, endless.
Ok, BBC 2 is doing quite well at the moment, there's an opera on. At least it's cultural, but exciting new shows, in the vein of thinking which created Dr Who and Blake's Seven, you must be joking. I don't blame the BBC for not taking scripts for Who, they'd be buried under mailbags, but for some reason British born new Science Fiction has become a rarity if not a taboo. It simply doesn't exist and that's a sad state of affairs.
Ooh, remembered another piece of SF that got made, around about 1996, Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. So that's three then.
While I'm on the subject of Telly, saw an absolutely brilliant short japanese film a while back on C4 called Bus 46 (or 45?) I might have mentioned it before. A really beautifully acted piece. A man gets on a bus which gets attacked by some hoodlums, the female bus driver is dragged off and raped. Only the man goes to help but gets stabbed in the leg. The other passengers watch the event or ignore it, but they do nothing. When the driver returns to the bus, the man asks if she is ok. She tells him to get off the bus. He is confused having been the only one to try to help but does so and the bus drives off. Confused and hurt the man hitchikes further along the road, he is passed by police cars. He reaches the scene of the incident and overhears a policeman talking about the accident, a bus drove off the bridge, the driver must have been crazy, no survivors.
The look on the man's face at the end is a really beautiful look, a pleasure of a film to watch and not as disheartening as it sounds.
I still can't accept Bilie Piper as an actress, everyone says she is fantastic, I just don't see it.
I won't go on about what I disliked about the show, safe to say that Eccleston is such a fantastic actor he sibglehandedly redeemed it. I can put up with the rubbish to watch this Doctor. He's not quite what anyone might have expected but he's so charming you don't care.
Sylvester McCoy was the Doctor I grew up with and loved, there was an undercurrent of darkness in every pore, a hint that nothing was as it seemed, that even though events may appear out of control the Doctor was behind the scenes of every aspect, even if he wasn't. I loved that. He wasn't the funniest, smartest, most human, or even darkest of the Doctors but more than any of them he was the one I would have followed to the ends of the universe. The Doctor never ran, he strolled, nonchalently. Eccleston's Doctor never strolls, he always runs. I think that is why he won't displace McCoy's Doctor in my affections.
The producers of this series should look at the revamped Battlestar Galactica as to how to effectively update a series. Another show I loved as a kid the remake has, within a season, established itself as the premier SF show. It's just fantastic.
The eighties were all about machismo on TV and while it was insane fun it lacked any reality at all, which is perhaps where late nineties to modern American Television has made incredible strides. I think it must have been The X Files which drew the boundary.
British Telly is different. In America and other countries such as Australia, if you have an idea that can be pitched succesfully then you get to make a show. If your idea is good enough then it will pick up viewers. Of course this isn't enough to keep a show on the air, great series such as Millenium, American Gothic, Farscape, Sliders, and Crusade have all been axed after a few seasons or even midstory but there is potential for these to live on in other mediums, although there is the danger of turning into another Lexx, originally a fantastic show with some absolutely brilliant actors and characters it's budget was repeatedly cut and it's writing degenerated into the insanity of man eating carrots.
But the net has allowed these stories to carry on.
In Britain however it is almost impossible to get an original idea on to TV. We may be the best in the world with our period dramas but we do have great writers today, not just from the past. When was the last time Britain created a classic piece of original Science Fiction telly?
Ok, after actually trying to answer that question I've come up with Red Dwarf and the Tomorrow People both of which began in the early nineties, one as a sitcom in space, the other a kids program and itself a sequel to an eighties kids program.
Compare this to America which has so many brilliant SF shows the ones it has to cut are in fact brilliant.
Can you imagine the BBC taking a chance on a pre Buffy Joss Whedon? As much as there are problems with America, it is not with it's telly, even outside of SF there are shows as diverse as Ally McBeal, Sex in the city and The Sopranos. What do we get, endless make over shows, endless.
Ok, BBC 2 is doing quite well at the moment, there's an opera on. At least it's cultural, but exciting new shows, in the vein of thinking which created Dr Who and Blake's Seven, you must be joking. I don't blame the BBC for not taking scripts for Who, they'd be buried under mailbags, but for some reason British born new Science Fiction has become a rarity if not a taboo. It simply doesn't exist and that's a sad state of affairs.
Ooh, remembered another piece of SF that got made, around about 1996, Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. So that's three then.
While I'm on the subject of Telly, saw an absolutely brilliant short japanese film a while back on C4 called Bus 46 (or 45?) I might have mentioned it before. A really beautifully acted piece. A man gets on a bus which gets attacked by some hoodlums, the female bus driver is dragged off and raped. Only the man goes to help but gets stabbed in the leg. The other passengers watch the event or ignore it, but they do nothing. When the driver returns to the bus, the man asks if she is ok. She tells him to get off the bus. He is confused having been the only one to try to help but does so and the bus drives off. Confused and hurt the man hitchikes further along the road, he is passed by police cars. He reaches the scene of the incident and overhears a policeman talking about the accident, a bus drove off the bridge, the driver must have been crazy, no survivors.
The look on the man's face at the end is a really beautiful look, a pleasure of a film to watch and not as disheartening as it sounds.
posted by Caractacus at 21:32
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