A Doctor Who link and a fannish mini-rant

[wshaffer]

Just listened to a rather lovely Radio 4 documentary, The Doctor And Douglas about Douglas Adams's time as script editor on Doctor Who. It's a really fun little program, and you get to hear Steven Moffat gush about "City of Death", and Lalla Ward talking about how Douglas introduced her to Richard Dawkins.

My one very small quibble is that I wish they'd left out the now semi-obligatory dumping on Adams's successor as script editor, Christopher H. Bidmead. (Whom they don't even mention by name. But they do say things like, "Tom and Lalla left the show the following year. Doctor Who slowly lost it's audience, and was cancelled in 1989." Way to dismiss ten years of show and the work of half-a-dozen script editors in two short sentences.)

Now, I'm not going to deny that Adams was a far more talented writer than Bidmead. And I'm not going to deny that Bidmead often comes across as an utter doink in interviews. And I have to confess that it's been years since I've watched most of the Bidmead-edited stories, so I have no idea how I'd react to them now.

But here's what else I must confess: When I was a kid, I loved Season 18 with a passion. And really, how can you not? You've got "State of Decay", in which our heroes kill a giant vampire by staking it through the heart with a rocket ship. You've got the sheer surreality of "Warrior's Gate". You've got the gorgeous-looking "Keeper of Traken", which brings back the Master to boot. Even in a relative clunker like "Meglos", you've still got Tom Baker turning into a giant cactus. You can't get that in "Creature from the Pit".

Thanks to Season 18, I still get a secret science-fictional thrill every time I say the word "entropy". That alone probably got me through freshman physical chemistry.

So, whaddya say, my fellow fans? Can we show Season 18 some love? Or at least not go out of our way to diss it while ostensibly discussing other areas of the show?

Comments

[nwhyte]

I'm with you most of the way (and you haven't mentioned Logopolis, which is rather extraordinary in its ambition if not quite in its execution). My family was living abroad in 1979-80, so we came back to Season 18 looking at the show with new eyes (and also with the memory of The Armageddon factor too fresh). My brother and I still pick over the hidden meanings of the Season 18 stories.

But, but...

Whatever you and I may think, the fact is that the catastrophic audience decline actually hit right there. The average audience figures for Season 17 were over 10 million; for Season 18 about half that. Not all the fault of Bidmead and Nathan-Turner; rather than being on strike, ITV was showing Buck Rogers. But Season 18 failed to rise to the challenge, and it's not unfair to say (as the documentary does) that the show never really got back on track.

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

Ah, I had genuinely forgotten that the ratings decline was quite so precipitous. It is indeed hard to argue with numbers like that.

Even so, I wish that more people would make the case for season 18 as an ambitious and largely-successful season that failed to connect with viewers as much as it deserved to, rather than as an obviously too-"adult" or too-nerdy example of how not to write Doctor Who.

However, a documentary about Douglas Adams is probably not the place to make such a case. (I think this particular rant has been brewing for some time - nothing that was said in "The Doctor and Douglas" was particularly egregious, but it seems to have been the final trigger for this rant.)