Television seems to milk drama series for all they are worth, these days, literally capitalising on the success of any given parent show. Just look at “Doctor Who”! Running alongside the mother series, there’s “Doctor Who Confidential”, “Totally Doctor Who” (which seems to have dematerialised this year), “Torchwood”, “Torchwood Declassified” and “The Sarah Jane Adventures”… and all from a show which is itself a remake, not an original idea as it was back in 1963. To me, this burgeoning industry doesn’t suggest imagination is alive and kicking in the new millennium! Storytelling, at least in this visual medium, has become stale.
The “creator” of this “Doctor Who” retread (I’m sure you all know his name by now!) has the audacity to claim there was never any golden age of television! If that’s the case, why have the BBC just celebrated forty years of “Dad’s Army”? Hearty congratulations to the Walmington-On-Sea platoon of the Home Guard! “Little Britain” will, hopefully, be forgotten long before it reaches such a landmark. But, why will the chief writer of the Time Lord’s soap opera adventures have spent the best part of a decade, by the time he moves on from his exalted position as show runner, bringing the series back into the public eye if it doesn’t hail from a much-loved era? It’s not a particularly creative move for a supposedly talented writer. The answer is, of course, money.
The present executive producer of “Doctor Who” has, undoubtedly, made enough cash to ensure he can now go off and write whatever he wants and not have to worry whether or not any new project will recoup its investment. Never mind having destroyed a national institution to arrive at that enviable position. The common view is that he has revived the science fiction series rather than completely bent it out of shape! Other than a fat paycheque, why remodel an old show? What would’ve been wrong in having the self-confidence to invent something dazzlingly new, thus proving his worth beyond any doubt, rather than disastrously distorting a glorious twenty-six year history? “Doctor Who”, with one or two small exceptions, would’ve been better left alone, untarnished.
The “creator” of this “Doctor Who” retread (I’m sure you all know his name by now!) has the audacity to claim there was never any golden age of television! If that’s the case, why have the BBC just celebrated forty years of “Dad’s Army”? Hearty congratulations to the Walmington-On-Sea platoon of the Home Guard! “Little Britain” will, hopefully, be forgotten long before it reaches such a landmark. But, why will the chief writer of the Time Lord’s soap opera adventures have spent the best part of a decade, by the time he moves on from his exalted position as show runner, bringing the series back into the public eye if it doesn’t hail from a much-loved era? It’s not a particularly creative move for a supposedly talented writer. The answer is, of course, money.
The present executive producer of “Doctor Who” has, undoubtedly, made enough cash to ensure he can now go off and write whatever he wants and not have to worry whether or not any new project will recoup its investment. Never mind having destroyed a national institution to arrive at that enviable position. The common view is that he has revived the science fiction series rather than completely bent it out of shape! Other than a fat paycheque, why remodel an old show? What would’ve been wrong in having the self-confidence to invent something dazzlingly new, thus proving his worth beyond any doubt, rather than disastrously distorting a glorious twenty-six year history? “Doctor Who”, with one or two small exceptions, would’ve been better left alone, untarnished.
