Doctor Who is my favourite piece of media bar none. Seriously, it’s part of my life like no other piece of media is. I am a [i][b]proper[/b][/i] nerd about it. Books, DVDs, Blu-rays, CDs, figures, posters, official spin-offs, unofficial spin-offs, documentaries, interviews, fan-made reconstructions of missing episodes, fan-made analyses of specific stories and accounts of how they were made. You name it - I’ve got it, or want it, or have considered getting it. I’m currently trying to hunt down all of the the 90s and 2000s official novels and novella collections pre-Ecclestone. Preferably digitally because physical copies can be prohibitively expensive. And yet… -The basic format of the original show is pretty misogynistic. For most of the original 26 years, the central character of The Doctor is portrayed as the man with all the answers; the hero that people are supposed to look up to. His assistants are there to hand him space spanners, ask dumb questions for the benefit of the audience and get locked up and attacked for The Doctor to rescue. Now there are plenty of specific instances where this isn’t the case, however this is a reflection of the character or story itself calling for a change in direction, not a change in the overall brief the writer starts out with. Moreover, in the words of former companion Janet Fielding, seeing someone in a miniskirt and high heels trying to climb a rock face, “you don’t think ‘poor actress’, you think ‘what a *****’”, which again diminishes the role of the women onscreen even if they’re written as smart, independent and capable; which they often weren’t. -A lot of the plots are daft and just don’t make sense. In one serial, there’s a war conference on earth involving a number of planets, and the Cybermen hijack a space freighter to crash it into Earth to kill a bunch of their enemies at once. That makes sense right? It’s a little bombastic but hey. But what actually happens is that when the Cybermen try and lock the navigation controls by integrating their own tech with the ship’s (why would you need to do that?), there’s a malfunction and it… sends the freighter backwards through time… somehow… so when the freighter hits earth it becomes the asteroid that wipes out the dinosaurs. There’s no mention of the Cybermen having time travel tech before now (or at all tbh) and if they did, they wouldn’t need this convoluted method of winning a war… The kings of daftness have to be the Daleks though, who decide at one point its a good idea to invade the Earth, hollow out its magnetic core and replace it with a massive engine so it can be flown about like the Death Star. When you think about it, a lot of this stuff is downright embarrassing 😅😅 However I am taking this opportunity to defend some particular casual criticisms of aspects of the original show itself. -[url=https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/effects_2057.jpg]the visuals. [/url] For much of the show’s run, it was on a shoestring budget. This meant that prior to making a serial, the money had to be pre-allocated for the whole season, so some stories had to be prioritised over others. Usually the curtains-and-blank-walls sets come near the end of a season as earlier productions tended to overspend, but even the ones that did overspend had very little money. There were hardly ever more than about 3 or 4 Dalek props for example, so in the studio they had to make those 3 or 4 look like more by having them do circles in and out of doors and shooting them so it doesn’t look like that. In one instance where they wanted a shot of ‘lots’ of daleks at once in a room, they put cardboard cut-outs behind the real ones. Yes, it is really obvious on film, and is actually one of the few remaining sequences from that particular story. -[url=https://youtu.be/WFFvNcgS45g]production quality generally[/url] The show was mainly made only a week before transmission, so deadlines were extremely tight. In the studio itself there was no time for lots of retakes if you fluffed your lines, as the power went off at a certain time and you had to get special permission to run even a few minutes over, as all the other crew had to agree to stay on. And in the early days it was shot as-live with barely any post-production process. Meaning that the sets for the entirety of that week’s episode were in the studio at once, and in a single session you ran through the whole thing from start to finish, with the only breaks being for costume changes and setting up special effects shots. That was your week’s recording session, other than location work or special model shots which were done separately. So that meant that a lot of mistakes had to be left in. Fluffed lines, bad effects shots, people knocking into bits of the set; if they were running out of time then it just had to be there.