2000 AD Online Forum

Well, Room 101 was interesting, and confirms what I've always believed to be the case about the cancellation of Doctor Who.  

Basically Grade didn't like it, so undermined it by keeping JNT in place when it was obvious that the show desperately needed a new approach.  Instead of trying to fix the perceived weaknesses, he ordered Colin Bakers sacking out of spite for the rumpus he caused in the press, and hired a deeply unlikeable buffoon to replace him, thus sealing the show's fate. I seem to recall reading an interview with JNT where he said that whenever Who got bad press or falling ratings, he'd get treated to lunch or some other perk by Grade!
Interesting to see that he attempted to "cancel" rather than "rest" the show, as was the story put out when the Beeb had to back down.  Of course, after three years of Bonnie Langford, Ace and McCoy, it was no trouble to axe it....

Now if Grade thought it was cheap, why didn't he put more money into it?  If he thought it was out of date, why not bring in fresh blood?  The fact that Who, while admittedly well below par when first cancelled was pulling in more viewers than Wogan and Match of the Day is amazing.  The fact that Grade didn't care one jot when this was put to him proved how utterly unsuitable he was for the job.


AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Strong argument there, but if you've ever been on the inside of those hallowed halls (as I was - for a year and a half) you'd realise pretty soon that he's not the only Grade A tosser in there. The place is full of them. What you saw on tv was the BBC attitude. They all think they're gods. Even the receptionists.
No decent sci-fi suggestion of any incarnation will get serious airtime or exposure/budget as they can't see past the  Holy Grail of tv:
- hospital programmes
- animal programmes
- vet programmes
- cooking programmes
so unless the Doc gets reinvented as Dr Jamie Oliver with a sick rabbit or two in tow, he hasn't got a prayer.

I saw that.  Basically there was someone with a grudge and he was in a position of power so he fecked the program.

It did grate.

Why is there so much dr who on this site?

Oh and he fecked tripods too, the dirty fecker!

By now you'll have noticed that I have created an uncanny TARDIS-like effect with this message - it's wider on the inside than on the outside!

Very clever. Almost as good as PVS's impression of Finnigan Sinister...

Yes, that's very annoying watcher, did you do it my shrinking eveyone to the size of a doll?

NO, it fecks me off rotten and boils my goat that eastenders is on all the time.  

Don't forget the fecking house makeover shows!

TV for fecking morons!  Morons!

...or maybe it's a Father Jack impression.
Now THAT would make a good comic strip....
Dredd: "You're under arrest, vagrant!"
Father Jack: "Arse! Feck!"

Script Droid! Damn, there's never one around when you need one.

Then again it could be just that Dr. Who is crap!!!!!

If Who is your thing and you like Who fiction take a look at:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jay.eales/

La Placa Rifa,
W. R. Logan.

Link: Class Of '79

Coming from someone who's just admitted to liking Simon Coleby's art, thats a little rich IMO, Logan :)

Just repeat after me

Horror of Fang Rock.Horror of Fang Rock.Horror of Fang Rock.

What Grade should have done is film the Wagner/ Mills stories - they were bloody great, some of the best Who stories and some of Mills/Wagner and Gibbons best work (esp. the one with the Bloodbugs!!)!  Now if Titan want to reprint them, I'd have no objection.

Wagner/ Mills stories

I take it they're in the Dr Who comics yeah?

It is a shame that they never put more money into it. Some damn good sci-fi that was, almost as good as Blake's 7 :-)

Ah, but Eastenders was a haven for aging sci-fi stars. Well, not entirely but Mels dad had been in Blake's 7 AND Star Wars!!

Is Grade still in charge over there?  As long as he and his friends have their run of BBC, Doctor Who will never come back.  They hate it, the public loves it, they (beeb) just don't care.  
Feckin season 26 was (one of) the best ever if you ask me, then there was no 27.

If you'll excuse me, I'm off to cry into a glass of milk while watching Caves of Androzani for the Nth time.

You're right there, as long as all the poncy upper/would-like-to-be-middle class tossers get their feckin tennis, everything else can... I dunno, rant rant, DIY, cooking, pets, bloody hospitals. Used to be great for sport too, but all that's being slowly leeched away. Used to get live coverage of the British Touring Car Championship, then it slid to just highlights (if the feckin poncy bastard tennis wasn't on). Now, of course, it's become (some parts of)England only ITV, only on Granada/Carlton, so unless you've sold your soul to Sky, you're fucked, unless you've got a mate with Sky, which I do, so it's ok really, it's just good to let off steam at the BBC instead of you fine people here. Don't even get me started on the feckin english nationalist BBC webshite!!!!

If you'd not noticed, PVS, Scotland are playing Nigeria tomorrow night, I'm just getting warmed up!

PS I'm NOT getting at all English people here, just in case I get a backlash for being rascist.

I don't know, I reckon these things are all connected, if there isn't popular british SF on TV then it may be harder for people to make that leap to buying a SF comic.  Because at the end of the day the same stigma that gets attched to Dr Who is pretty similar to the one attached to a comic, particularly a SF one.

2000AD and Dr Who have only continued to exist because of their fan base.  Both saw the fans grow up with the show/comic until you had a sizeable adult audience.  There also seems to be a large crossover between dr who fans and 2000AD.  2000AD writers and artists have done Dr who strips and Dr Who fans are now doing Dredd Audio's.  Dr Who and Dredd are essentially the two biggest british SF icons.  Sorry, Dan god bless your pink pyjamas but you aren't in the running anymore.

So I think it does matter what happens to Dr Who for 2000AD, even if that link is somewhat nebulous.  I think it is about time we had a crossover, not a vs, but a crossover and seal that in fictional blood.  Anyone who says you can't make a could story out of that has no imagination.  Better than aliens or predator or lobo or batman!

But that, my friends, does not answer the main problem we face...

What happened to me feckin tripods!  Two series they did and finished it!  There were three books, three I tell you!  And you can only get the first series on dvd!  Give us our tripods you dirty feckers!  Now feckin disney own the rights!

The Tripods!?  Feck!

and isn't there that new version of Randall + Hopkirk (deceased) on the BBC now?  I heard that it had feck-arse effects and Dr Who could be done well on the same budget.

Good point! At least, it looked crap by the 80s. Once a cutting edge show, by then it looked a joke. Colin Baker was awful (McCoy was far more intriguing). The show was on continuously for 25 years or whatever - sorry, but one can hardly complain it didn't have a good run. By the end no-one knew what a police box was. The stories were overlong, the monsters looked crap. After they gave us Red Dwarf, which at least at the time was fresh. Now hopefully someone will pull the plug on that and give something else a chance.

Two words: UK Gold

ADE

Yep, it's time Red Dwarf was laid to rest for sure. I've loved it to bits right up till the end of series 6. I believe that's when Rob Grant left the team to supposedly write Red Dwarf books, butthe only thing he's done since is Colony, a Sci-Fi comedy novel with more than a passing similarity to Red Dwarf. Anyway, the best thing about it was the effects that almost took the piss out of Who and Blake's 7. Why oh why did they 'remaster' them to make them look even more shit? Watched the remastered series 7 recently. there's no audience/canned laughter in it, which goes to show how funny it wasn't!

Yep, it's time we had a NEW British Sci-Fi show. Judge Dredd perhaps? :o)

I saw that programme as well and one of the most telling things that Grade said was that he compared Dr Who to Star Trek and Star Wars and thought that by comparison Dr Who was rubbish. Two points have to come from this:
1) Dr Who never had the budgets of Star Trek or Star Wars. Maybe Grade should have thought of that.
2) Star Trek and Star Wars were American productions anyway. Dr Who's popularity stemmed from the fact that it's Britishness. We all knew that the monsters were mader from foam rubber and that the Daleks couldn't get up the stairs - that didn't degrade the programme it added to it's charm. The worst thing that anyone can do to British SF is to let the Americans muck about with it. The American Dr Who episode was rubbish, despite the budget. DC Dredd and Hollywood Dredd were pale comparisons of the British original (of an American Judge) and I have grave reservations to the upcomming Red Dwarf movie (the American Red Dwarf pilot also died a death).
I'm going on I know, so I'll leave you with this - the BBC are quite happy to make programmes about Dr Who and sing its praises when there is an anniversary of it, but they are even happier to spend our liceince fee money on utter rubbish as long as it involves chefs, vets, or anything else they can churn out cheaply!  

"1) Dr Who never had the budgets of Star Trek or Star Wars. Maybe Grade should have thought of that. `"

Hardly the point - he's hardly going to keep it for it's spirit of improvisation.

I can't imagine Star Trek had a budget any bigger, they could probably have churned it out for less - mostly the same set and same cast each week. And even Star Trek only ran for 3 years originally before they decided to call it a day.

I'd also say we might be sentimental about the bad costumes now but the thing is at the start it wasn't meant to be laughed at like that (even in an affectionate way), it was proper drama, people supposedly hid behind the sofa (or so they say), and didn't have any reason to question that space was all like monsters and stuff, just like people thought Dan Dare was what life would be like in 2000. It's kitch fun now but was never intended to be.

It's not so much that Star Wars was so superior, it's just that it gave people higher expectations of that kind of thing.

"it was proper drama, people supposedly hid behind the sofa (or so they say)"

Well, _I_ did.

Well, they brought Star Trek back as an endlessly recycling soap opera.  Star Wars has got progressively worse with each film, after the first self contained movie they have now become a rather stilted collection of set pieces, with endlessly repeated ideas.  The phantom menace seeme like a collection of pisspoor computer games, which it was.

The thing is with Dr Who you have a character who can go anywhere and anytime and having anything as your story you are onto a winner.  It probably was one of the best ever concepts for a show.  Especially when you add in the detail that you can change actors and still have the same character, albeit with a different personality.

People probably wouldn't be so happy if Judge Dredd finished.  if theys aid, well, it's not as good as it used to be and we've killed Judge Dredd off (okay so it won't happen, Judge Dredd only costs a few hundred quid to make a week.), but you'd have the same sense of missed potential that people who want Dr Who back do.

Nobody wants the dodgy costumes and sets back.  CGI is getting so cheap that a Dr Who series isn't such a daft proposition.  This is the age of SF and Fantasy, you can make it look pretty realistic without having to physically build that many sets and costumes.  Considering shite like Andromeda is made, which looks great and has good production values, you'd think someone could be bothered.

And I'm done.

Yeah, that last series of red dwarf I watched was one of the most embarresing things I've ever seen.  I was only a real fan of the first two series, it was nearer dark star (okay, not that near) than the pantomime farce of later stuff.

"Yeah, that last series of red dwarf I watched was one of the most embarresing things I've ever seen..."

Really?  I thought season eight was the best one for a fair while.

Season seven was a bit lame though.

All the weighty topics discussed here eh? :)

I thought the first two series were funny, and or a bunch of guys stuck in space together story very well done.  

I hated series three, gone was the rather sad and sombre music at the start and the central concept that being the last man in the universe was something to be depressed about.  

In came a load of whacky stuff, including that guy in the rubber mask who does the feeble Herman Munster impressions (actual mannerisms nicked, scandelous).  They got rid of norm (or he got rid of them), who genuinely made me laugh.

4-7 all had stuff I enjoyed though.  I thought three was a messy tansition to change the show into something else.

8... 8!  I think there was the odd story, but all the 'I've made a penis out of a toilet roll' and... oh, I'm not going to repeat them :)  Wot a nightmare.

I wonder what the movie will be like? I hope they do it as a serious movie which is funny, rather than just a farce, like some junior carry on movie.  Danny John Jules was good in Blade 2, even if he is now typecast as 'man with fangs'.

Apart from the movie it's all over now isn't it?  I don't mind what they do as long as we can have some SF, but they just don't give a toss do they?  Anyway, I like my SF hard (calm now) so I'm pretty diificult to please with all the cack on the TV at the best of times.

Nor Survivors (the one about the plague, not the reality show) that's what they should be bringing back.  SF about real people haveing a miserable and dangerous existence in a world depopulated and civilisation ruined by plague!  (Osama Bin Laden take note).

The problem with bringing back Doctor Who is not so much the budget but people's attitudes and expectations. It was Auntie's snobbery and fan indulgence that killed the show.

The sad truth is the BBC does not consider sci-fi to be 'serious drama'. It's obvious from all their recent efforts, with the exception of the woeful 'Strange', that anything slightly out of the ordinary has to be played for laughs. Sci-fi is about ideas, concepts, not special effects.

But then fandom is partly to blame also. It was fandom that deified JN-T when he became producer. It's also fandom that endlessly tries to justify itself to the real world and then doesn't understand why the real laughs in its face.

'No, look see, 'Genesis of the Daleks' is all about Nazism. That's why it should be treated seriously and reverentially' Fuck off it is. It's barely an allegory for fascism, nevermind National Socialism.

No wonder the show and its fans are considered a joke by twats like Michael Grade.