I found an old diary entry tucked away the other day. It was a Word file that I had carelessly saved and it had ended up in some nondescript folder that I happened to be rooting through. Myself and my two offspring are engaged in that pilgrimage that all Doctor Who fans must undertake at some point - watching every television story in order. It's all been a bit casual so I'd lost track of when we'd actually started. Typically, we'd watch an episode or two when the boys were over and we were having our tea. But here it was - documentary evidence of when it had all started: a viewing plan for the first ever series, episode-by-episode starting on the Nineteenth of May Two Thousand and Six. I don't know how rigidly I stuck to that plan but the end result was we completed the 'Classic' series earlier this year. In a move that I think the Doctor would approve of, we didn't actually watch them all in order, though. No, in order to accommodate weekend/tea plans we swapped the viewing of the 2-parter The Awakening with the 4-parter Warriors of the Deep. I know some of you out there are already gasping at the heresy of Peter Davison's Doctor apparently getting a new jumper only for it to disappear in the next story and then reappear again after that. Don't worry - I've written some fanfic that helps define this as my own headcanon. And an extra biscuit for anyone who mentioned Flower Child's earring appearing before The Greatest Show in the Galaxy aired legitimising this sort of nonsense.
See? This is why I don't normally talk about Doctor Who. Hopefully, the normal people are still sticking with this.
With the "Classic" Series digested we took a short pause. The 10th Anniversary of the revived series was just around the corner and we thought it would be a nice touch to watch the first episode on that date and continue from there. So here we are, about a month later and the that's the first "New" series over and done with and Christopher Eccleston's Ninth Doctor has come and gone.
I hadn't seen some of those episodes in years. To seven-year-old son no2 they were brand new. To fifteen-year-old son no1 they were nostalgia, same as the vague memories I'd had as a young fan watching Peter Davison and recalling Jon Pertwee. And to all of us they were (wait for it...) fantastic. Funny, clever, exciting and scary. There was actual behind-the-sofa-ing! Great jokes that I'd forgotten (my favourite was the Doctor admitting that he enjoyed the gameshow Bear With Me, where three people are forced to live with a bear, particularly the celebrity edition where the bear got in the bath). And the Daleks. We've got a bit blasé about their ubiquity now, but back then the sight of a fleet of Dalek saucers and zillions of Daleks (not to mention the Emperor and his black-domed guards!) was the most exciting thing ever.
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| Not this guy... |
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| Not this fella, either... |
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| Definitely not this bozo... |
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| Ah! That's him! Hello! |
But the real stand out of that first series was Episode 11, Boom Town. (What?) Here's the description for that episode from the original pitch document:
The New Team
The Doctor, Rose and Jax (sic).
A small-scale adventure; character stuff.
That's it. Admittedly, it was always designed as a cheap episode before the budgetary demands of the two-part finale. At one point it might even have been written by Paul Abbott, but in the end Davies was given the opportunity to consolidate everything that had been achieved so far. Having kept continuity with the original series down to a minimum, here he revels in the lore of the new series. The TARDIS visit's Cardiff's rift in time, Mickey returns as does Margaret Slitheen. The team are seen bouncing off each other and unseen adventures are alluded to, including one of the novels that had just been released. Time is taken to establish this as the status quo, before everything is changed in the next story and then the ghosts of the past start to filter through in the next few series. It's a breath taken that puts all the pell mell escapades around it into context - something I wish we'd seen in the last few series (in fairness there are such moments, but they tend to be confined to DVD mini-episodes). It's an extraordinarily confident move in a series that nobody could have conceived of succeeding a few years earlier. I love it to bits.
So the Salford Time Lord has gone on his way and this new bloke has arrived. I wonder if he'll be any good?
Next stop, Barcelona. (Not the city. The planet.)
More soonliest.
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