Who's For Sunday Afternoon

Saturday night has always been Doctor Who night in my mind. However, my regular rentals of classic series DVDs from LoveFilm have rather made it a Sunday afternoon thing. I started off by renting a couple of disks that I had fondly, but faintly, remembered from 40 years ago and watched them with the children on the big TV screen (far removed from the 16” sets we had back then). There are usually a few documentaries on the disks that are usually of more interest to me than the children but there is typically a “coming soon” feature which is whatever the BBC restoration team was working on at the time. More often than not, it is entered into LoveFilm’s wish-list  and the DVD arrives through the post a few weeks or months later.

I was looking though the list of series and we have covered quite a bit. We have rented all the surviving Second Doctor with the exception The War Games and over half of Jon Pertwee’s output. What surprised me is how well the children took to the Black and White episodes. The early series were rather stagey in their presentation. This was mainly due to the limited nature of video editing at the time but they seem to take quite well to these (although possibly more to the Sci-Fi than the historicals). I’ve also shown them some of the later 1980s episodes which they seem to enjoy but to me they look more low budget than the early 1970s episodes and don’t have the advantage of monochrome to hide the cheap sets.

Last weekend I rather messed up on the disk rentals and ended up with two of the longer Pertwee stories: 1970’s The Ambassadors of Death and 1973’s Green Death (for some reason, “Death”, “Terror” and “Doom” seem to feature quite heavily in the titles.) Ambassadors was new to me and is one of the DVDs that have been re-coloured from a Back and White tele-recording. To be honest it shows on the picture quality but this is made up by a cracking 7 part story. I showed this to the kids in 2 sessions, worrying that they may get bored, but the episodes don’t drag and there are plenty of action scenes which appear to have been made in the days before health and safety (in fact the documentary confirmed this as quite a few accidents ended up in the final cut). I saw the Green Death when it first came out and have seen it since on video. It’s regarded as something of a classic and it’s easy to see why. Its ecological sci-fi story was more typical of the Doomwatch series and with hot topics like fracking in the news it feels as contemporary as ever. It also has one of the most heart-wrenching final scenes as the Doctor says goodbye to his assistant Jo – the actors were good friends so I think it was somewhat more than just good acting.

With the children having seen quite a bit of Doctor Who I asked them who their favourite Doctor was. Raymond, who is now 11, chose David Tennant. He was really Raymond’s first Doctor so that is understandable but when I pushed him on the classic series he did say that he preferred the 2nd, 3rd and 4th incarnations. Jake is almost 8 (his birthday is next month) and he said, without a doubt, Tom Baker. He hasn’t seen as much of the new series as Raymond so he has gone more with the classic episodes that we watch but it’s interesting that he should take to the darker tone of the 4th Doctor. Sophia is 5 and she went for John Pertwee’s 3rd Doctor. The interesting thing is that he was really my first Doctor and I was a similar age to her when I watched him. Aside from that, the 2nd Doctor, Jamie and Zoe appeared to be very popular.

As for me, it’s difficult to say. In terms of the classic series I think it splits very much into decades and I would say I prefer the 1970’s followed by the 1960’s episodes. The 1980s was a bit of a mixed bag: I thought Peter Davison’s Doctor was very good but the script writing went drastically wrong for Colin Baker – having seen some of those episodes again I can, at least, appreciate his performance. I think it picked up again towards the end although it was obvious that the BBC bosses were looking for any opportunity to kill the series off. Having now seen more of Patrick Troughton I really love his portrayal but I suppose your first Doctor is you favourite. Jon Pertwee really is "my" Doctor.