The Fitzroy Crowd

Pretty much a discussion thread about the cult of fans behind the NA's, The Discontinuity Guide and of course, the remake series.

A cornucopia of cunts who, when handed the keys to the kingdom to show how much better "true fans" could make the program, demonstrated the exact opposite and what a bunch of self-loathing, barely literate assclowns they always actually were. They remade a television classic in their own image - and what a nasty and intellectually bereft image that turned out to be.

Well I think the NAs were definitely a wrong turn for the franchise, and I think they were done with all the wrong priorities in mind.

The Big Finish audios however, I think were on the right track, and I would say for the longest time, actually did vindicate their assertion of being able to do the TV show better.

The New Series seemed to take a few of the good ideas from the audios, but diluted them with a lot of soap shite and Disneyfied deus ex machina endings. And unfortunately, this seemed to influence Big Finish to make their audios closer to the obnoxious style of New Who.

But yeah, they're definitely an unbearably cliquey and sniffy bunch and always were, and judging from some of the About Time books, they really did fancy themselves as a bit of a pretentious Fight Club thing with their own petty, unspoken rules.

iank wrote:A cornucopia of cunts who, when handed the keys to the kingdom to show how much better "true fans" could make the program, demonstrated the exact opposite and what a bunch of self-loathing, barely literate assclowns they always actually were. They remade a television classic in their own image - and what a nasty and intellectually bereft image that turned out to be.

Couldn’t have put it better myself. Although one of the more frustrating aspects of making Who into their own image is that said image has become imprinted on the very psyche of the programme in the eyes of the media and the general public. The output of these self-loathing charlatans is now almost always associated with the Classic series within the media, thus allowing the template and its influence to likely extend even beyond NuWho’s inevitable cancellation. They’ve destroyed what Who always was at its core (a unique science fiction series that stimulated the imagination and possessed an iota of literary and scientific intelligence for the vast majority of its run), and this template is now likely irreversible in the long term.

Bernard Marx wrote:

iank wrote:A cornucopia of cunts who, when handed the keys to the kingdom to show how much better "true fans" could make the program, demonstrated the exact opposite and what a bunch of self-loathing, barely literate assclowns they always actually were. They remade a television classic in their own image - and what a nasty and intellectually bereft image that turned out to be.

Couldn’t have put it better myself. Although one of the more frustrating aspects of making Who into their own image is that said image has become imprinted on the very psyche of the programme in the eyes of the media and the general public. The output of these self-loathing charlatans is now almost always associated with the Classic series within the media, thus allowing the template and its influence to likely extend even beyond NuWho’s inevitable cancellation. They’ve destroyed what Who always was at its core (a unique science fiction series that stimulated the imagination and possessed an iota of literary and scientific intelligence for the vast majority of its run), and this template is now likely irreversible in the long term.

I think the time is better than ever to get the old who style back. The BBC are going bust, and streaming services are allowing for more niche genre series to be made with a higher budget. Streaming services are the best possible place for a 21st century Who.

They can afford to make the stories longer, put more money into it, aim it more at genre fans etc.

The SJWs are also jumping ship like Christel Dee, and Whovian Feminism (who hasn't tweeted at all about this series.)

New Who is also long past the stage of "its successful so you can't criticise it." It hasn't been mainstream since 2013, seven years now. Its glory period, Eccelston to Matt lasted about that long LOL (possibly even shorter as viewers were beginning to tail off in Matts last year.)

If it does go to series 13 then there will have been more flop years than hit years. You can't live off of a brief period of success in the late 00s to the very early 10s, well into the 20s. Added to that everything else the Fitzroy Crowd have done has been a flop for the last few years too.

The chances are that New Who overall will be seen as a failed experiment, in much the same way as all of the JNT era was. Fans can be very harsh. It doesn't matter that the early to mid 80s was popular with viewers, that it enjoyed a greater period of popularity abroad in the 80s than ever before. The final few years cause everyone to somewhat rewrite the past and make out that the entire decade as a flop.

New Who I reckon will be the same, as a larger percentage of it already was a flop.

DW is all about change, the Doctor can be anyone, etc all of these mantras will soon die, but something needs to take their place. With this in mind fans like us need to keep promoting the old show, keep mentioning its continued success etc, to influence fan opinion in our way to go back to more of an updated classic style.

Its happened with other franchises before. Batman was originally a serious and dark charaacter who then became campy and silly, but in the 70s a new generation of Bat fans decided to go back to the beginning and we got the darker Batman again.

Dan Dare famously changed completely in the 70s, 2000AD version, whilst the New Eagle that folowed it went back to the original style.

Godzilla started out as a darker character in the original movies, but then became a cuddly, kiddie friendly hero, only to later go back to the darker Godzilla for the later films.

Look on New Who as being the 2000 AD Dan Dare, and the campy Batman though that's unfair to them, as I rather liked both, but still you know what I mean. This will be seen as the period NOT to emulate by future generations.

burrunjor wrote:

Bernard Marx wrote:

iank wrote:A cornucopia of cunts who, when handed the keys to the kingdom to show how much better "true fans" could make the program, demonstrated the exact opposite and what a bunch of self-loathing, barely literate assclowns they always actually were. They remade a television classic in their own image - and what a nasty and intellectually bereft image that turned out to be.

Couldn’t have put it better myself. Although one of the more frustrating aspects of making Who into their own image is that said image has become imprinted on the very psyche of the programme in the eyes of the media and the general public. The output of these self-loathing charlatans is now almost always associated with the Classic series within the media, thus allowing the template and its influence to likely extend even beyond NuWho’s inevitable cancellation. They’ve destroyed what Who always was at its core (a unique science fiction series that stimulated the imagination and possessed an iota of literary and scientific intelligence for the vast majority of its run), and this template is now likely irreversible in the long term.

I think the time is better than ever to get the old who style back. The BBC are going bust, and streaming services are allowing for more niche genre series to be made with a higher budget. Streaming services are the best possible place for a 21st century Who.

They can afford to make the stories longer, put more money into it, aim it more at genre fans etc.

The SJWs are also jumping ship like Christel Dee, and Whovian Feminism (who hasn't tweeted at all about this series.)

New Who is also long past the stage of "its successful so you can't criticise it." It hasn't been mainstream since 2013, seven years now. Its glory period, Eccelston to Matt lasted about that long LOL (possibly even shorter as viewers were beginning to tail off in Matts last year.)

If it does go to series 13 then there will have been more flop years than hit years. You can't live off of a brief period of success in the late 00s, very early 10s well into the 20s. Added to that everything else the Fitzroy Crowd have done has been a flop for the last few years too.

The chances are that New Who overall will be seen as a failed experiment, in much the same way as all of the JNT era was. Fans can be very harsh. It doesn't matter that the early to mid 80s was popular with viewers, that it enjoyed a greater period of popularity abroad than ever before. The final few years cause everyone to look at the entire decade as a flop.

New Who I reckon will be the same, as a larger percentage of it already was not popular.

DW is all about change, the Doctor can be anyone, etc all of these mantras will soon die, but something needs to take their place. Which is why fans like us need to act. We need to keep promoting the old show, keep mentioning its continued success etc. We need to influence fan opinion in our way in the hopes that the next generation of writers go back to the beginning.

Its happened with other franchises before. Batman was originally a serious and dark charaacter who then became campy and silly, but in the 70s a new generation of Bat fans decided to go back to the beginning and we got the darker Batman again.

Dan Dare famously changed completely in the 70s, 2000AD version, whilst the New Eagle that folowed it went back to the original style.

Godzilla started out as a darker character in the original movies, but then became a cuddly, kiddie friendly hero, only to later go back to the darker Godzilla for the later films.

Look on New Who as being the 2000 AD Dan Dare, and the campy Batman though that's unfair to them, as I rather liked both, but still you know what I mean. This will be seen as the period NOT to emulate by future generations.

I feel like it might be too late. After this gets axed, they should just let the dust settle for a few years and then when the time is right bring it back in the style of the OS.

burrunjor wrote:
If it does go to series 13 then there will have been more flop years than hit years. You can't live off of a brief period of success in the late 00s to the very early 10s, well into the 20s.

I don't know about that. Neighbours is still living off its 80s/early 90s success and somehow limping on.
Granted, it's less expensive than New Poo.

Neighbours really needs to bring back the cursed Aborigine rock that found its way from house to house causing bad luck.

Speaking of Neighbours didn't Harold Bishop get swept off a rock by a wave then turn up in the Salvation Army Band?

Nu Who needs a plot twist like that!

It needs to bring Kiston from Resurrection of the Daleks back from the dead.

burrunjor wrote:
I think the time is better than ever to get the old who style back. The BBC are going bust, and streaming services are allowing for more niche genre series to be made with a higher budget. Streaming services are the best possible place for a 21st century Who.

They can afford to make the stories longer, put more money into it, aim it more at genre fans etc.

The SJWs are also jumping ship like Christel Dee, and Whovian Feminism (who hasn't tweeted at all about this series.)

New Who is also long past the stage of "its successful so you can't criticise it." It hasn't been mainstream since 2013, seven years now. Its glory period, Eccelston to Matt lasted about that long LOL (possibly even shorter as viewers were beginning to tail off in Matts last year.)

If it does go to series 13 then there will have been more flop years than hit years. You can't live off of a brief period of success in the late 00s to the very early 10s, well into the 20s. Added to that everything else the Fitzroy Crowd have done has been a flop for the last few years too.

The chances are that New Who overall will be seen as a failed experiment, in much the same way as all of the JNT era was. Fans can be very harsh. It doesn't matter that the early to mid 80s was popular with viewers, that it enjoyed a greater period of popularity abroad in the 80s than ever before. The final few years cause everyone to somewhat rewrite the past and make out that the entire decade as a flop.

New Who I reckon will be the same, as a larger percentage of it already was a flop.

DW is all about change, the Doctor can be anyone, etc all of these mantras will soon die, but something needs to take their place. With this in mind fans like us need to keep promoting the old show, keep mentioning its continued success etc, to influence fan opinion in our way to go back to more of an updated classic style.

Its happened with other franchises before. Batman was originally a serious and dark charaacter who then became campy and silly, but in the 70s a new generation of Bat fans decided to go back to the beginning and we got the darker Batman again.

Dan Dare famously changed completely in the 70s, 2000AD version, whilst the New Eagle that folowed it went back to the original style.

Godzilla started out as a darker character in the original movies, but then became a cuddly, kiddie friendly hero, only to later go back to the darker Godzilla for the later films.

Look on New Who as being the 2000 AD Dan Dare, and the campy Batman though that's unfair to them, as I rather liked both, but still you know what I mean. This will be seen as the period NOT to emulate by future generations.

That’s true enough, but the high point of NuWho’s popularity is still held in very high regard by my generation and most of fandom as a whole. Regardless of NuWho’s current abundant failings, the Tennant era will likely still be viewed as a high-point (in spite of ageing horrifically and being often bloody awful) due to its overt popularity, and I don’t think it’ll be easy to shake away this notion from fandom. It’ll likely be viewed as the peak of how to produce Who in the modern era due to its mainstream success, and given that TruWho was previously often lambasted by the Fitzroy crowd and media amongst NuWho’s inception due to its occasional superficial failings, there will likely be an embedded assertion within the public consciousness that the Tennant era was the only way to make Who successful in the modern era and thus the best model for future iterations to take influence from.

The early-mid 80s weren’t as successful with the mainstream as RTD’s era and didn’t have the novelty of Who returning after 16 years on hiatus to fall back on, so I don’t know if it’s comparable as such. The idea that RTD’s era is the best template for a modern day version of the programme is nonsense, of course, but it’s a notion I fear people will adhere to.

I’m also unsure if fandom or the general public will perceive TruWho and NuWho as completely separate entities in the long term either- they’ll view the majority of the Moffat era and the Chibnall era as a failure, but I doubt this label will be attributed to NuWho as a whole, in spite of the fact that NuWho’s failings can be traced back to RTD’s template. We can hope otherwise, but at the moment, I remain skeptical.

I think you're very right Bernard about the problem with New Who's future prospects. That the template set by RTD with Tennant, meant that any subsequent era was essentially going to be built on sand.

It had to be consistent with an already flimsy logic set-up, that the audience only really accepted with Tennant because he had enough star-power to hold the episodes together for them and keep them distracted enough.

And I think that's why I struggled with the Moffat era. I kept thinking "okay I guess this is in keeping with the show rules RTD established so I'll probably just have to go with it and say it's probably as consistent as we'll get."

And I could only do that for so long before, well, I became exhausted of making sense of how to feel, and stopped caring.

Maybe that's why the early Capaldi era failed for me even before Missy was revealed. It's not that it was badly written (in the main), it's just that it no longer kept me on my toes enough to distract me from the mess the show had long been.

I suppose what does give me hope is that the new generation of fans who've given up on Jodie, have begun to fall in love instead with the McGann audios, on the strength of Night of the Doctor. And that I think might see them grow up to be the creative generation of fans who want to recreate that spirit of Classic Who that's in the audios.

A bloody brilliant bunch that reinvented the old stale cheap childish junk that was Classic Poo and reinvented it into a more sensitive fast paced sexy series.

I have to agree with Tanmann and Bernard. The Tennant era is a millstone around this show's neck now. A 15 year hiatus might be the only way for the public to shake off this perception, and even then it's doubtful. The massive, iconic popularity of a version of the show that's utterly warped, inaccurate, not very good and incredibly limited to boot may well be the hangman's noose for this show.