POST DW 081018

Not smitten... Still processing why. 

Okay, so, on Sunday the 7th of October 2018, at 6:45pm (more or less) the BBC transmitted the first of their latest series of "DOCTOR WHO" this time featuring yet another new lead actor to get used to all over again, in an episode entitled "The Woman Who Fell To Earth".

And, whilst the universe as a whole seems to have embraced this brave new vision of a once-familiar classic, I find, sadly, that I'm just not smitten.

Not yet, anyway.

And I'm still processing quite why this might be.

After all, I've been a fan of the show for as far back as I can remember, and have followed it through thick and thin for over four decades now, whilst coming to love those bits that happened before I was old enough to be able to fully appreciate its general magnificence.

So here I find myself, slightly bewildered as to quite why I'm struggling to engage, despite everything. I know that I'm not one to simply follow the herd without question, even in the face of overwhelming public opinion, but I don't think I'm being particularly contrary for the sake of it. And I'd not want to suggest that it's a case of the "Emperor's New Clothes" and that I feel that nobody else is willing to point out its obvious shortcomings.

I think it's just me. Well, it's obviously just me. I mean, how could everybody else have got it wrong and leave me to be the arbiter of good taste...?

I think the problem is far more deep-seated; I simply don't enjoy the style and scripts of modern TV drama all that much, and somehow I have started feeling that an old friend has finally shifted over to the dark side.

It didn't help that I simply loathed the first five minutes of the because it just felt like they'd made yet another show turn into yet another generic and miserable BBC drama of the sort that has driven me away from watching pretty much any of their output for about five years. So, one of the two things I really disliked was that opening scene precisely because it made it look just like every other TV drama of the past five years. Hey-ho. (The other - FWIW - was the killing of the security guard after he'd said goodnight to his grandchild which really put a nasty taint on the rest of the episode for me).

Okay, maybe that's because many things feel a little too "urban" and too "street" for me, and that's the kind of telly I'd cross several streams to avoid bothering to watch.

Not, I imagine, that my opinion matters very much.

You see, I always went to DW for escapism from the drudgery and ordinary nature of ordinary life not to endure even more of it. To put it bluntly, I don't want to see dull people living dull lives in dull places. I've got more than enough of that in the real world, thank you very much, without wanting to endure more of it in the name of "entertainment".

There's a reason I don't watch programmes like "The A Word", "Happy Valley" or "Call The Midwife" and it's because I don't want to watch shows like "The A Word", "Happy Valley" or "Call The Midwife", so making a once very different show resemble such fare just like them is bound to make me feel more alienated, and WHO was always my touchstone precisely because I felt alienated from the world around me when I was growing up.

Also (and even I'll admit this is probably a bit of a "niche" reason), I'm not all that taken with Sheffield, but that's because the only time I ever went there, I got shot at... and, because of that one unfortunate incident, I've never returned there, and I've never wanted to.

Thinking abut it more overnight, because I found that I did think about it rather a lot, I decided that I wasn't sure what the programme I'd watched was, but it just didn't feel like "DOCTOR WHO" to me. It felt like telly for the "X Factor" crowd, and I've never been one of those, and that's just not the kind of telly that I personally enjoy watching, but there you go.

The thing that really most bothered me about the whole programme, and which barely seems to have been mentioned anywhere else, was that I really did not like that "Goodnight from grandad" sequence.

Personally, I would have cut that because it left such a bitter taste.

You see, I felt that particular scene was unnecessarily nasty and cruel (especially for any kids with grandads who work) and added nothing - we already knew Tim was bad because of how both the garage scene and the salad scene had played out - and I really would have cut it.

That one small scene really ruined the mood for me.

Oh, I know they're trying to make us care, and pointing out the arbitrary nature of existence, and so on, but that felt heavy-handed & a little post-watershed for me... Mind you, you know, I've never much rated flippin' Chibbers as a writer...

Honestly, in our house, the rest of the programme, with all its emotional highs and lows, was watched in grim silence after that one small moment. I may have to go back and rewatch the ending, because my spirits were so low that I couldn't really enjoy it after that.

I suspect that it's an age thing; I find that, the older I get, the less I like nastiness, cruelty, and violence in my films and TV, as well as in the real world, and I find it more upsetting and unsettling than almost anything else.

I could see what they were trying to do, and, like I said, I'd battled through the opening five minutes, and was going along with the ride, but that one scene killed it stone dead for me, and I found that I was really wondering whether or not I wanted to bother with that style of WHO ever again.

Even Laurence Scarman's demise (to my mind maybe the only comparable one in 60s - 80s WHO) didn't feel quite so brutal and cold as that.

When it comes to Mr Chibnall, by the way, we did watch the first series of "Broadchurch" but (maybe because we were watching a lot of Scandi-drama at the time which seemed far superior) it felt derivative, predictable and cliched to those watching at Holmes Towers. After series one, we never went back and, I think, that was the last British Drama Series outside WHO that we've bothered with watching since then.

In the interest of full disclosure, I once spotted the box set of "Broadchurch" in HMV, by the way, and the packaging bore the legend "This is about as good as British TV Drama gets" and my immediate unspoken response was "That's a shame...!" I keep forgetting that "popular" or even "Award-Winning" does not always equate to "Good".

Returning to Sunday, however, the rest of the programme was fine, I suppose, and Jodie Whittaker was perfectly acceptable as the latest incarnation of the Time Lord, and I do offer up many, many points for the "women can build stuff too" engineering sequence, but I'm still feeling rather underwhelmed by the brave new dawn, although I realise that I might be in the minority here. I also preferred the character when she was wearing the Capaldi suit, but that's just a personal style aesthetic thing.

There was a montage of future guest stars at the end which bothered me simply because I only recognised about five of them from anything I'd ever seen ever, and ended up Googling all but those five of them, even the soapy one - but that seems to simply prove once again how little modern TV I bother with.

Also, since broadcast, however impressive those overnights may have been, I did not like the general trend towards slating the sublime Peter Capaldi, especially as those same voices were praising the "fresh new feel" that the previous season featuring Pearl Mackie had only slightly more than a year ago. Since Sunday, (and, to a certain extent even before) there's been far too much Capaldi-era slating going on in WebWorld for my liking, but I suppose that was inevitable.

However, I'm hoping that, like a fine Malt, the Capaldi era will mature once the Prosecco surrounding it on the table goes flat.

And when it comes to whether I intend to return, well, I guess only time will tell.

But love is blind, they say, so I undoubtedly will.