Home
Mr. Happy wrote:burrunjor wrote:There has never been any hope of a real continuation of the classic series because the BBC are always going to have a preference for modern populism. They don't want a niche audience.
To be honest I think this is a bit of a defeatest attitude of.
I'd argue that if RTD had actually tried to make it similar to Classic Who then it would be in a better place than it is now.
Yes RTD's era was successful initially, but to be honest it did not work as a long lasting formula.
The reason Classic Who's formula worked was because it was more basic. Just the Doctor goes on fun adventures fighting monsters. Everyone loves that, and if it had some money behind it, the stories were shorter and more digestible, then really I think it would have been okay. They could have cast a big hunk as the companion, and a babe as the sidekick and if they must have a romance between them and got the young audiences in that way, but kept the Doctor as the Doctor.
That way they could have had more variation among the companions, more variation among the Doctors.
However by deciding to make the companion the most important person in the show they dug themselves down a pit.
There is still plenty of call for adventure orientated SF. Just look at Star Wars, Guardians of the Galaxy, War of the Planet of the Apes and the recent Valerian movie. I wish they had gone down this route as it suits my tastes so I don't entirely disagree with you.
But for whatever reason, the BBC just doesn't seem to work like that. DW did become niche in the eighties, however, and the BBC wanted to distance itself because of what I can only assume is snobbery. The BBC famously didn't even want McCoy in the TVM. It was only Philip Seagal's insistence that made that happen as he wanted to produce real who and not a knock-off. I just can't see the BBC wanting to recommission the show in 2005 without modernising.
I think the RTD model did very well and would have continued to do. I don't see Moffat's era as a continuation of that, more of a corruption. I take it you disagree?
Who only became niche in the 80's because the Beeb completely and utterly sabotaged it. I somewhat agree that Moff who is a corruption of it, but I see it like this.
RTD dug the show down a pit first of all by making the companion be the most important person in the show.
In order to make the companion who is at the end of the day usually just an ordinary human more useful than the Doctor is to make her the most important person in the universe. As a result of that every year each companion has to be "more important than the last". If not they will just look lame.
Clara being rewritten into being the hero of every story ever made is the end result of Rose being Bad Wolf, Doctor Donna etc.
Also RTD made the Doctor a romantic, lovestruck, younger character which again made it harder to get out of.
He also insisted on making the companion an ordinary person so they could relate to her, which again limited the type of companion they could have. Gone were the Jamie's, Leela's, even the Brig type companions.
All of this got Doctor Who stuck in a rut where on the one hand people were bored of it, but if it broke out of that rut it wouldn't seem like DW. This is evidenced by Matt and Peter's Doctors.
Initially Moff tried to do something new with them, but after their first series he tries to bring them more in line with Tennat, even having Matt fall in love with Clara (had he not left I am 100 percent convinced that is the road they would have gone down. Just watch Hide.) And Capaldi becoming a hipster.
Of course whilst this may have hurt DW, I still think that Moff by pandering the the feminist "fans" like Whovian Feminism brought the show even closer to the brink, and Chinballs has just pushed it over the edge.
