Doctor Who

I love Doctor Who. I adore it to bits.

Or perhaps I should qualify that a little.

I love old Doctor Who. Anything on TV post 2005 with Russell T Davies, David Tennant, Catherine Tate or Billie Piper just grates. I won't go into it, suffice to say half the population seems to love it for some reason. I don't.

I am an eighties child. I grew up watching the 7th Doctor, half remembered memories of Remembrance of the Daleks, Silver Nemesis, Paradise Towers and Survival. My Dad had been a fan all his life and had collected most of the stories available on video at the time so I also knew all of the other Doctors. I loved them all, but the 7th Doctor and Ace. They were my team. Those stories I mention are quite reviled in some ways now, but to a 7 year old kid it was Daleks, Cybermen and Cheetah People. I think the thing in the swimming pool in Paradise Towers put me off swimming pools for a long long time.

When the series ended. I was still only 8 years old. Eventually it was recreated in books, but they were daunting for someone my age. So I lost touch.

Until the new series appeared. I tried, I really did want it to succeed, but it soon became apparent that Davies had cherry picked the wrong ideas of what Doctor Who was. While Doctor Who has always been a children's show, it never talked down to them. It began as history and science - Barbara and Ian being given fantastic trips around the galaxy. The history involved meant Crusaders, Aztecs, the Wild West, Romans and Trojans. Science quickly became technobabble, but it didn't matter because it was futuristic and far more interesting than what science had always appeared to be. And then there were Daleks.

New Who still has history. If you count a round up of famous British Characters. It still has science, if you count a sonic screwdriver and psychic paper becoming a get out clause for every single situation. And it still has drama, if you count a seriously substandard soap opera as drama. It made me depressed.

And so, I decided to revisit old Who. Find the stories I didn't know about. The books. The Seventh and Eighth Doctors. The Missing Adventures and Past Doctor Adventures.

This will, hopefully, be a blog about rediscovering the Doctor as much as reviewing the stories. I'll probably get dissillusioned. A lot of these books and authors have very, very bad reputations, but some are said to be very very good. I'll be going through the NA's and EDA's in order but mixing them up and then throwing in an MA or PDA when I feel like it. Plus anything else that comes my way. I'm still missing around 30 odd of the books, mostly the rarer, expensive ones, but they are the ones way down the list so plenty of time to get hold of them.

I'm also trying my hand at some fanfiction myself. I might inflict that on you sometime.

Well as the Doctor (probably) once said to Lewis Carroll. Begin at the beginning and go right through and when you're at the end. Stop.