November 2023 – Simon’s Incoherent Blog

Doctor Who: 2023 Special #1 – The Star Beast

“Why did this face come back? To say goodbye?”

(SPOILER WARNING!)

Now that was more like it.

Don’t get me wrong, I know showrunners are all a matter of taste, and some people really loved Chris Chibnall’s run on Doctor Who. Even I had episodes that I really loved, and moments that stirred my feelings. But generally, for me, it was often clumsy, and incoherent (☹) and too satisfied with cramming in spectacle when character-driven stories would have worked better. And Steven Moffat (who I did enjoy while others didn’t) had his failings too – chiefly that his delight in timey-wimey puzzles often overshadowed his characters, and sometimes drowned the emotional beats of stories.

Happy 60th birthday Doctor Who!

“It all started out as a mild curiosity in the junkyard, and now it’s turned out to be quite a great spirit of adventure…”

And so, on the 23^rd of November, the TV show that has been such a huge part of my life – and of so many of my friends – turned 60. Now, I’ll grant you, ‘60’ seems somewhat less momentous than ‘50’ (despite being a bigger number), but the celebration of what’s now one of the BBC’s tentpole brands was far from diminished.

Doctor Who: Destination Skaro (Children in Need)

“I was never here!”

The smorgasbord of Doctor Who laid on for its 60^th birthday continued last night with a 5 minute skit on the BBC’s annual charity telethon, Children in Need. Monsieur BBC, with these Who specials you are really spoiling us!

Doctor Who at 60 – and me at 54!

“Time is memory, and memory is time.”

When I was a kid, Doctor Who seemed like a really old show. It started before I was born, six whole years before in fact. And to a kid, six years is an eternity.

I first got into it very, very young. Literally the earliest memory I have is of my mother sitting the three-year-old me in front of the big, rented colour TV in our Durham suburban home, presumably in an attempt to get some time off from me, and my being enthralled by what I now know to be Planet of the Daleks episode 4 (it was the bit where Jon Pertwee and Bernard Horsfall shove a Dalek into a lake).