Then again, scrabbling to meet deadlines, especially when they're coming at me like trains down a tunnel, is fun for me. Always has been. It's like playing chicken. Which, I am going to say, I never did.
I think, given the circumstances, I'm just going to ramble and the first thing (Might be the only thing if I really get into it...) I'm going to ramble on about is Dr. Who.
I grew up watching Dr. Who. I'm fairly, although not completely, sure I saw the first episode when it was broadcast in... I think it was 1963? Maybe 1964? Hang on, have to fact check that...
Yep, 23 November 1963. I would have been five.
I have the faintest memory of watching that episode and not finding it all that engaging. Five would have been to young, I guess. I'm not at all convinced I watched much more of the first season but I know I got a Dr Who annual every Christmas from the first onward because I still have them all. I guess I must have been interested enough to ask for one from the start.
By the time the second season came along I was I definitely into it. I vividly remember the storyline with the Zarbi, the giant ants. They turned up in Episode 17.
I think I was so taken by them (And the Menoptera, the bee-people.) because I was one of those kids who's fascinated by all kinds of wildlife, including insects. A lot of kids like insects because they're generally the easiest to get your hands on. Some schools and educators call them Mini-Beasts now to make them seem even more exciting.
I didn;t need any encouragement. We had a lot of garden where I grew up and an orchard and we lived by a river so there was no shortage of insects and bigger animals to watch.
Not that I left it watching. I'd catch them if they couldn't get away fast enough. I caught plenty of toads, the occasional frog, a couple of slow worms, a bat, a hedgehog, a poisoned wood pigeon that we nursed back to health and which then flew straight into a window when we released it and broke its neck... Oh, and some voles...
Short-tailed voles must be the easiest small mammals to catch. Well, after dormice, but you don't see many of those.
Dormice are very rare and now protected, although I doubt they were back when I caught one. It didn't take much catching. I was going down a long path to a rocky beach on a day out at the estuary about twenty or thirty miles from where I lived. It was a warm summer day and there it was, sitting by the path, half asleep in the sun. I picked it up and it just sat in my hand, quite happy, until I put it back down. Then it wandered off into the bushes. No wonder the Romans used to eat them.
Voles aren't quite that easy to catch but it's close. I used to put a piece of galvanized metal down in the long grass in the orchard, wait a week, then pick it up and often as not there's be a vole or two looking up, dazed by the light, wondering where the roof had gone. I 'd just pick one up (With gloves on, just in case it bit, which they never did.) and voila! Pet vole.
They domesticate incredibly quickly, too. They'd feed out of my hand the next day. They acted like they'd had a stroke of luck, finding themselves magically transported to somewhere with comfortable bedding and free food. I didn't keep them long, just a few days, then I'd put them back.
I only really did it a couple of times Interest wanes quite quickly where voles are concerned, I've always found. They don't do a lot.
Hang on. Wasn't this post supposed to be about Dr. Who? Hasn't been much about him so far, has there?
Well, that's what I get for starting at the beginning. I don't know why I bothered going so far back. It's not like I need to explain who Dr. Who is to anyone reading this, I'm sure. Why don't I just get on with what I was going to talk about?
Peter Davison. That's what it was. Or who.
Peter Davison was the fifth Doctor. I watched most of his three series when they were first shown, from 1982 to 1984. That was right after I left college. It was right after my favorite Doctor, Tom Baker, had left and I didn't think a lot to seeing Peter Davison in the role, unsurprisingly.
Worse was to come with Colin Baker, although obviously I didn't know that at the time. And, honestly, I don't know it now, either. Not until I get to his stint, anyway. Who knows? Maybe I'll find out he wasn't crap after all.
Last year, I think it was, or it might have been the year before, I started re-watching, or in some cases just watching, the entire run. For reasons I can't exactly recall now, I started in the middle of the Patrick Troughton years (He was the Second Doctor.). Now I'm almost at the end of the first Davison season.
Peter Davison is better than I remember but he's not great. Troughton, Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker were all, in their own ways, excellent. William Hartnell probably was, too, although since I skipped his era I can't say for sure. Davison had a lot of expectations to live up to and I think it shows in his performance, which seems oddly tense much of the time. He seems perpetually worried, which isn't really what you want from the Doctor.
Where Troughton was whimsical and puckish, Pertwee confident (Over-confident, really,) and Baker just a pure force of chaos, Davison is... not dull exactly, as I remembered him, nor bland but oddly frustrated, trapped, locked into what looks very much like a performance he's not wholly at peace with.
There's a bit - and it is a bit in the Vaudevlle sense - in the his first episode, where he tries on various looks and appearances, eventually settling on the cricket whites he wears for the rest of the season and very probably the entirety of his time as the Doctor. It's a decent attempt at a signature look and he's almost obligated to have one, since all the Doctors before him did, but not only does it feel inauthentic, forced even, but by the end of the first season he looks like he knows it.
With the benefit of post hoc foreknowledge, I can say, without even having got there yet, that Davison's "Victorian" cricketer shtick (I thought it was supposed to be Edwardian until I watched the video above.) is going to look positively naturalistic compared to whatever the hell Colin Baker is going to think he's wearing but at the moment it's just adding to the sense that Davison is uncomfortable in the Doctor's skin.
It doesn't help that he's inherited probably the worst set of companions in the entire run up to that point - and this is the 19th season so there have been a few. All three of them were passed down to him by the outgoing Tom Baker, who would probably have been glad to get rid of them, if by that point he hadn't clearly lost interest.
Nyssa, played by Sarah Sutton,is fine. She doesn't have a lot of personality but she at least adds a much-needed element of stability and calm. Tegan is well-enough played by Janet Fielding but her personality is wearing and that's being polite. She complains almost the whole time and shows very little sense of either humor or proportion.
She's a positive pleasure to watch, though, compared to Adric, who is just unbearable. Not only does he have a gratingly self-centered personality with a chip on his shoulder a mile wide but Matthew Waterhouse is deeply unconvincing. I won't say he can't act but if he can he certainly doesn't appear to be doing it in any of the episodes I've seen. And he died in the last one, so I guess that's that.
Even more unfortunately, he's not the only one whose acting is less than convincing. A few months back, when I'd watched all the Troughton and Pertwee and about half the Tom Baker episodes, I made a point of telling Mrs. Bhagpuss how consistently very much better the standard of acting was than I expected or remembered. And it wasn't just the principal actors, either.
Almost every supporting actor, even in the smallest roles, seemed to be taking it as seriously as if they'd been cast in Play for Today. It was evident the standard was far higher than a half-hour sci-fi series, primarily aimed at children, needed to be and it went a good way towards explaining why the show broke out of that niche and became so widely watched by adults.
The same, sadly, cannot be said for the Davison era, or at least not the first of his seasons. There's still some committed and skillful acting going on in places but there's a lot of pretty obvious going through the motions too. It's not bad but it does feel a little tired and sometimes perfunctory. Knowing how much longer the show had to go, it's not hard to see why it ended when it did.
Apparently there was a deliberate move to make the show more serious following the anarchy and sometimes silliness of the Tom Baker years. I'm not sure how apparent that was at the time. I remember feeling the it had just gotten a bit dull. Watching it now, it looks strained.
And that, while by no means all I have to say about it, is all I'm going to say for now. If and when I ever get to the end of the whole first run, which is to say the end of the Seventh Doctor, I might attempt an overview of the whole thing. Maybe even a ranking. I do love a numbered list.
For that, though, I'd have to get through another two seasons of Peter Davison and three of Colin Baker and I'm not at all sure I can do it. It's so tempting to skip straight to Sylvester McCoy, who I remember as doing a very good job with what looked like zero budget.
If I stop this post now, I might just have time to fit in one more episode before I go to sleep. Or, if the last few are anything to go by, I'll get about ten minutes in before it sends me to sleep.
Season 19 really is very dull.
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