Dr Who

This article first appeared in the Age on May 21, 2005

Here I am all in a lather about the Time Lord as played by Chris Eccleston and Eccleston has already announced he wont be coming back for the second season of the new style Dr Who (Saturday, 7.30 p.m, ABC). So you had better enjoy this season, which is just fantastic as testified to by the fact it is already being illegally downloaded across the globe, and probably across several dimensions of time and space. The first episode screened in Britain (where 10 million people tuned in) was beaten to the punch by an illegal net broadcast and was one of the triggers for the Movie Pictures Association of America to attempt to close down sites which enable such downloading.

Can Dr Who be too sexy? While hardly one of the pressing questions of the era, it has been troubling me since I watched the first few episodes of the new series. I grew up in the Jon Pertwee era (1970-74), and he was about fifty years older than me. It is conceivable that such thoughts may have crossed my mind if I was more attentive to Tom Baker’s charms (1974-81) but I was starting to get (I thought) too grown-up for the show. Now we have the manic and maniacal Eccleston and I suddenly find I am not too grown-up to watch Dr Who at all. I was going to argue that the sexiness wasn’t deliberate until I got to the bit in the second episode where Jabe of the Forest of Cheem, who is a tree 5 billion years in the future, wants to have sex with the good doctor. That’s right folks, even trees are not immune to his charms. The series was written (and produced) by Russell T. Davies who wrote Queer as Folk, a show that is not backwards in coming forwards, on the sexiness front.

I watched the first episode with my half- brother who, though 20 years younger than me, understood my concern about excessive sexiness. He also thought that there might be a problem on that front concerning Rose (played by ‘pop sensation’ Billie Piper). Certainly Piper is a terrific performer and she’s very good looking. I am predicting much URST between them. Or, God forbid, RT (resolved tension) which would really blow the show out of the water on the children’s television front.

I suppose more serious Dr Who fans might want to know whether the show is true to the original spirit. Has it managed to update the effects while managing to maintain the charms of tinny and obvious special effects? Yes, it has excellent effects with a strong dash of retro as we see in tonight’s opening episode when shop dummies reanimate and try to kill Rose, the girl destined to become Dr Who’s new companion. As well, a green council bin eats her boyfriend . According to the press release, Dr Who has exactly 800 special effects. (The Gladiator, apparently, had a mere 100.)

Next week we get to see an array of aliens, including the last human on earth, as the planet is about to be eaten up by its dying sun. And just so we don’t think time is all about the future, the third episode takes us back to Victorian England the final month of Charles Dickens life. It still silly, but also deadly serious and quite scary. There are some of the old monsters returning as well as many new ones. The daleks will be back by the sixth episode. I reckon the die hard fans will be more than happy.

Permanent Link for this Article