h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Let me see. We live on an incredibly small and fragile world with an eco-system that is permanently in the balance. We have the capability to make the world a better place for everybody to live in. Yet we choose to bomb and pollute and generally screw it up for oursdelves.
I don't think that just because the TARDIS offered the ultimate in holidays in any reason to suppose that people would not bicker and argue about destination, outlook on life and the like. It would probably excacerbate them, if anything. Maybe that says more about my life and choice of friends than it does about Who?
And soap opera's, on the whole, are pretty well written. I don't see that Who and realistic charcterisation are mutually exclusive, which is what you seem to be suggesting here?

I'm not saying that DW and realism are necessarily mutually exclusive, I'm suggesting that mixing the two isn't always a good thing. It isn't a realistic series, when it comes to the crunch, nor is it primarily about the personalities and motivations of the regular characters.

Having them squabble a lot just distracted from the places they visited and the adventures they had (which is surely what the series is really about).

Now you see what I said in the other thread about criteria? My mind "tends" to work better (if it can be said to work at all )in the linguistic stuff rather than in visuals.
I like words and I like them to mean something. The visuals of Who always look cheap and nasty to me, no matter how hard I try...
Which is no denegration of your reasons for watching, obviously, as it is equally valid.

Well, obviously I don't look at the programme and think 'Wow, it's all just so convincing!!!' either...

Like you (I think), I enjoy the scripting and acting and inventiveness of the series. But the shaky production values don't spoil these things for me, and in fact I think they were greatly liberating for writers and directors - in the knowledge that *nothing* they ever did would be totally convincing, they could relax and really experiment with big ideas. If the series had been big-budget from the start the chances are we'd never have got the wondeful phone-box exterior of the TARDIS (they could've afforded a proper chameleon circuit). Big budget DW might look better but it would probably be a lot dumber.

Well it is certainly true that bigger has tended to equal dumber when it comes to science fiction, that's for sure. And you are probably right about the liberating effect of having total rubbish to deal with in terms of technical support. But there are exceptions, and I'd just like to see a mid-budget approach. Babylon 5 was comparitavely cheap to make but each episode still cost more than and entire series of McCoy era Who, I'd guess.
And let's be honest, at least they weren't in the same quarry every week, like Blake's 7...

Hmmm. I'd argue that B5 was pretty much unique generally and - in that it was solely the vision of one man, preplotted entirely in advance, and designed with its' own in-built expiry date - pretty much the exact opposite of DW in every way. But you accept the point that the low budget was a creative spur - if they'd had the money the team would've gone for a TARDIS exterior with a lot more dazzle and a lot less charm - cf the wormhole in Sliders, which serves exactly the same function as the TARDIS in early DW.

B5 may not have been the best example I could have chosen. Maybe the X-Files would work better-still cheap by American standards, but still loads better in terms of technical support. I just think that a balance can be struck between intelligence and budget that doesn't mean dumb tv all round.
Part of Who's charm has always been that it produced a wonderful line in dotty English surrealism. Certainly towards the end, a huge number of "celebrity" actors seemed to be queing to get onto the show, attracted solely by the cult status of the programme. Joan Sims, for example was clearly relishing the opportunity to eat every piece of furniture on the set. A memory I shall treasure forever.

About the early shows being viloent...look at nursery rhymes. The orignals not the "revised" editions in books today.
Plenty of viloence in those.
Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after.....when the wind blows the cradle will fall and down will come baby.....what the woodcutter REALLY did to the wolf....Grettle pushing the witch into the stove....

As for my fave companions?
Sarah, Leela, K-9, Tegan, and Harry Sullivan.
I thought it was a shame that Ian Marter (Harry) left the show. I liked him a lot. And although I don't want to be morbid, did you know he died quite a few years ago?

Diabetes-related complications, if I remember rightly, in 1987. Harry was a fine character (I'm watching Season 12 at the moment) though rightly removed as TB's Doctor made him a bit irrelevant.

I must confess to thinking that Mr Marter made a greater contribution to DW through his writing than his acting, though.

You are watching season 12? I don't keep track of what season each show is in, what episode are you watching right now?

My local PBS station is broadcasting Tom Baker episodes which right now are nearing the end of his years as the Doctor. I think the episode being shown now is something like "The Creature from the Pit" or something like that.

Pity, cause that means they'll be done soon and they won't be showing any of the ones with the other Doctors.

Go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A658244 to see the Doctor Who Episode Guide. The Seasons are on that, and it is a good way to find out when episodes happen when. If you don't want to do that now then I can tell you Season 12 is is the first Season of the Tom Baker era, when Harry is the Doctor's assistant. He leaves in the first story of the next season.

spook

Creature from the Pit! One of my favourites!

At the start of August I sat down and watched An Unearthly Child. Then I watched The Daleks. Then Edge of Destruction. At a rate of a bit more than an episode a day, on average, and as a result of the gaps in my collection, I've just reached the start of Tom Baker's era as the Doctor, and am two-thirds of the way through Genesis of the Daleks.

I'd highly recommend doing this to anyone with a fairly substantial tape collection... I've seen whole chunks of the series in a new light and it's prompted me to fill a few holes in the collection...

I just watched the whole cycle on UK Gold lol. But it does put a lot of things into perspective, I must agree.
Anybody here ever had the pleasure of seeing the original test tape of Unearthly Child, complete wth bloody awful TARDIS droning? A laugh a minute as one attempts to imagine what the hell was going through the director's mind-if anything at all was...

Is that the same as the pilot episode with flapping doors?

Didn't think it was *that* bad...

I don't remember flapping doors-though I could be wrong.
This was a test tape, never broadcast. The BeeB don't let it out of the vaults, so how I came to see it is perhaps best left unsaid (it wasn't my tape, and still isn't, for the record.). They shot it with the control room making a sort of high pitched hum, which rendered all conversation in the TARDIS next to incomprehensible.

Ah, the one I saw was the actual pilot episode which has even been broadcast on your actual BBC2 (28 years after it was recorded).

I once met a guy who claimed to know a guy who had a 'lost' episode of Daleks' Masterplan on tape, while we're on the subject of dodgy videos...

This was before the Beeb and Who fandom declared their truce, going back some 15-20 years now. The chap who owned this tape had a more complete set of Who episodes than the Beeb did, at the time.
It wouldn't surprise me that people still have copies of episodes the Beeb don't, they made themselves very unpopular with the fans at one point and people weren't admitting to having missing episodes.

Hmm. The Masterplan thing would've been over ten years ago, and I think they've only found about five episodes in the last decade (Tomb and the Wheel of Fortune). So, always assuming it was genuine (which I don't for a second), it's still out there...

Well, the latest bid for more Doctor Who episodes has turned up some episodes of Dad's Army, so you never know... I'm sure we can get the total of missing episodes below the 100 mark...

And as someone born in 1980, the worst companion for me has to be Sarah-Jane. Appalling acting, and she never actually seemed to do anything - even worse than Mel and Barbara. The best would be Ace, The Brigadier and Harry, although Jamie and Victoria weren't bad.

<BB<

I suppose it depends on whether you want a likeable, believable, down to Earth foil for the Doctor, or some sort of insane cartoon character with no relation to reality whatsoever...

I really can't recognise Sarah as being either badly acted or ineffectual...