Menu
- Podcast
Latest Episodes
N179 The Church on Ruby Road — The 2023 Christmas Special
Inter-temporal infanticide and a divisive song-and-dance number? We spend more than twice its runtime dissecting The Fifteenth Doctor's first big adve...B096 The Fourteenth Doctor Retrospective
Tennant is back, inexplicably yet fabulously, prompting a customary, cocktail-fuelled retrospective... - Articles
Latest Articles
System Notation
"Right now, I’m alone." — A data log was found in a colony in the future. This is what it contained....The Eighth Doctor: An Episode Guide
If you’re hungry for more adventures, you just have to know where to look....It Came From The Backrooms
Zoey Fleetwood finally gets to meet the Doctor! But will her first impression go as smoothly as she hopes?... - Vindex
- Shazam
Shazam!
Do you prefer listening to us rant about episodes we really liked or disliked? Coolio, then head on over to the stats section and find an episode we rated exceptionally highly/incredibly disparagingly!
And there are PLENTY of ways to get involved beyond listening to the show and exploring the article archives. Point your eyestalks at some of these links to learn more! - Merch!
Once upon a time, Toronto-born Sydney Newman had an idea for a kids tv show. He cobbled together the most unlikely group of individuals to make it, and in doing so, transformed generations.
It’s easy to be here now, look back on the history of the Doctor Who series, and comment about what works and what doesn’t. What “An Adventure” has done, is provide us a glimpse, perhaps a bit rose-
tinted, on what it may have actually been like, carving something out nothing. Pervasive racism and sexism, impossible production restrictions, and single-mindedness in the face of colourless
bureaucracy are fully on display in the 1960’s BBC HQ.
Against tremendous odds, Doctor Who became a staple, and when faced with obstacles, it adapted, and
persevered for 26 seasons. It introduced notions and concepts never before considered for the small screen, let alone the big screen.
It laid the ground work for other works to push boundaries and challenge perspectives. David Bradley is a gem, and Mark Gatiss very nicely shares with the audience a thoughtful and considerate homage to
William Hartnell and the team that brought Doctor Who to life.
Score: 4.5/5 Beautiful in all the right ways. And yes, Matt Smith appearing at the end made me choke up a bit. Why can’t Gatiss write like this all the time?
The BBC in 1963 was a terrifying place, where it was frequently impossible to leave a room without making eye contact with the one poor soul you were keeping a poignant secret from. Moreover, homosexuality was illegal, so resident fruits were forced to compress their longings into protracted, blatant ogles across the room with the lustful tension set so high and so thick Captain Jack could have swung from it with both hands. Doctor Who was thus apparently built upon a foundation equal parts telepathy and antipathy.
To be slightly more serious, this film was OK, but I came away wanting more, and rather than craving more of the same it was because I felt a little underfed. Greater parts of this show’s history seem to have been elided than necessitated by the running time constraints. Sydney Newman takes solo credit for a basket of ideas contributed to by multiple others, which creates an odd sensation of his having been almost divinely inspired that serves to levitate the show’s early struggles above its dramatic historical grounding. Similarly, Verity’s status as his third choice of producer, although it might have further accentuated the steepling odds she faced, is similarly omitted. More minus points for not bothering to relate the tragic demise of Stumpy the dog, who fails to appear in the second park sequence.
And as for Matt Smith’s appearance, what can it possibly signify? The tragedy of the increasingly lonely old man struggling with his health is deflated by another glimpse into the supernatural; does he wish he could only have been given the role when younger? The only alternative seems to be celebrating a casting choice he wouldn’t live to see, sucking up to Gatiss’s friend if he wasn’t personally involved. Better to have gathered up Tom Baker and the Five(ish) Doctors, put Sean Pertwee in a CGI wig, used some deleted footage of Ecclestone, and had Capaldi’s eyebrows peep out from behind the curtain of roundels.
Also notable for Gatiss casting himself as Pertwee but then cutting himself from the film, yet retaining an uncredited voice part as the bumbling replacement director who dares to call Mr Hartnell Bill.