sir_guinglain

Thoughts from the Oxford Doctor Who Society on the most recent series, condensed from several weeks of discussion on Facebook Messenger, are now available in one document downloadable from The Tides of Time blog.

I was asked last week to review The Power of the Daleks for Timelines, the Doctor Who blog of longstanding fan and prolific fanzine editor John Connors, which is worth checking out for its reviews and its material from John's rich archive of fan memories such as convention reviews and photographs from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. The review was published a few hours ago and can be found here.

However, when preparing the link from my own review blog, The Event Library, I realised I'd not mentioned Patrick Troughton specifically, which was something of an omission when covering Troughton's first story. So there can be found a couple of paragraphs on Troughton at that post.

The first part of a series of musings on Doctor Who and British identity, at John Connors's Timelines blog, originally commissioned by John for the fanzine Plaything of Sutekh which he co-edited with Richard Farrell. A short introduction can be found at The Event Library, too.

No essay from me this week, but negatives first. There aren't many of them, and are largely personal in that there's always an awkwardness to me in the Doctor revelling in pop culture or being a rock musician, and yet here I can see it was the right choice. I'm not sure where the Doctor's audience in 1138 went either...

Otherwise, superlatives. Steven Moffat and company projected their most coherent vision of the Doctor Who universe so far; though I did find myself wondering if the Shadow Architect's hairdresser (probably a Judoon, come to think of it) had been killed in action since The Stolen Earth. The Maldovarium is a sorrier place for the loss of Dorium. Clara's confidence as schoolteacher and UNIT's contact radiated and Jenna Coleman's authority in the part was more than a match for Michelle Gomez's calculating tricksiness. The traps within traps were sprung and the Daleks depicted as more detached from human or Gallifreyan values while justifying their fond parent's description of them as children. Barry Norman's comparison of fifty years ago, that they are devices through which children imagine killing grown-ups, was made plain here; as was the realisation most fans have had at some time, that the Daleks are tanks (and I'll link to John Wilson's article on the subject as soon as I've identified the relevant issue of Tides of Time - [ETA it's issue 23, but I can't manage the link at present - search for "Tides 23" at tidesoftime.wordpress.com for the pdf]). Taking up the convincingly-performed but sidestepped 'Do I have the right?' speech from Genesis of the Daleks is a dangerous exercise and we'll only find how well it works next week. Otherwise, a sense of the programme trying something new and Peter Capaldi's most moving and enthralling performance in the role.

Also posted at The Event Library

For reasons clear to anyone who studies his Twitter feed and interactions, veteran Doctor Who fan Ian Levine is keen to make it known that this short series of articles published in DWB in 1992 is available to read online. It's been supplemented and superseded by other work, such as Richard Molesworth's DWM articles and the two editions of his book Wiped published by Telos, and by the ongoing work by the BroaDWcast site, but it's still readable and tells Levine's side of the story as well as convey how horrified first-generation Doctor Who fandom was when they learned that episodes which they often remembered from childhood and which they imagined survived at some BBC vault no longer existed, with anecdotes of early fandom and the dawn of home video.

Issue 37 of The Tides of Time, the Oxford (University) Doctor Who Society magazine, has now been uploaded to the internet. It was published in print form in November 2013 and marks the fiftieth anniversary of the programme. Contents include:

• Crossword - Fifty Years of Villains
  
• Return to Earth. Review of the Wii video game, by Adam Kendrick
  
• The Eternity Clock. Review of the game for PC, PS3 and PSVita, by Graham Cooper
  
• Rusling the Isis. The second part of a look at Russell T Davies's Oxford University media career in the 1980s, by Matthew Kilburn
  
• Fifty Years, Fifty Moments. The scenes which encapsulate Doctor Who's Doctor Who-ness, compiled and written by Graham Cooper and Sara James, with Thomas Keyton, Matthew Kilburn, and Jonathan Martindale
  
• Doctor Who and Philosophy. Jonathan Martindale reviews the 55th volume in the Open Court Press series 'Pop Culture and Philosophy', which turns its attention to Doctor Who.
  
• Lost in Translation? Sara James reports on the status of Doctor Who in Germany with particular regard to pronouns!
  

The magazine itself can be downloaded from this link in pdf form.

In the same magazine as the article which I shared back in August - I'd managed not to notice it... More information here.

Part of the experience of dipping into old Doctor Who fanzines is seeing how fan prejudices were challenged by the experience of professionals. The editor of Celestial Toyroom (March 1980) reacted with some scepticism to a newspaper cutting from The People's Journal (Dundee) in which Katy Manning, seven years after her departure from the series, described Tom Baker's Doctor as "a rather serious, dramatic kind of doctor, whereas Jon [Pertwee] was a funnier character." At this distance, with the doubtful wisdom of age and with the benefit of hindsight, many viewings and DVDs, I can see what Katy means; but I'm not surprised that in a period when very few people indeed had access to video recordings to compare the performances, and with many of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society writing as if they spent their evenings prowling Soho, ready to apprehend Tom Baker for turning 'their' series into a comedy, the teenage (I think) editor doubts Katy's assessment.

Here's the article and picture, with a few addresses removed.
( Behind the cut )

Back in the 1980s David Palfreyman's 'pop videos' circulated fairly widely on the video circuit. Although he lost his master copies several years ago, some have now been found among another fan's VHS collection and returned to David, who has now begun uploading them to YouTube. Here, assembled from the best copies available on the circuit and no doubt juggling with VHS, Betamax and V2000, is 'Doctor Who is gonna fix it' by Bullmakanka. We are promised 'Total Eclipse of the Heart', which I remember watching twenty-odd years ago, soon.

This was the day I actually did some moderating; I apparently deafened people because I kept leaning towards the microphone, and didn't felt as on top of 'Is Doctor Who thunderingly racist?' as I'd have liked. Thankfully I had four responsible and opinionated panellists who knew how to discuss articlately and with a sense of humour as well as an awareness of how to handle a contentious issue.

I couldn't have felt too bad, as I invited myself on to the panel discussing Doctor Who companions, which was hugely enjoyable and moderated carefully by swisstone. In addition, I saw Ian Stewart discuss the Infinite Monkey Theorem, and Ben Aaronovitch, Jim Swallow, Alastair Lock and Andrew Mark Sewell be interviewed by John Medany about the evolution of Blake's 7 towards its hoped-for television resurrection. Oh, and caught up with various and numerous people.

So... I'll always be a looker-on for much of what is now called geek culture, but I will probably at least drop in next year.