Frustrated Conscience

I think it is good to be a somewhat cynical Doctor Who fan, even -- or perhaps especially -- with the series as successful as it has ever been.

One recent observation I read complained about some of the guest appearance in Last of the Time Lords. But Ann Widdecombe and Sharon Osbourne weren't Friends of The Doctor -- they were friends of Harold Saxon. That's even funnier the more you think about it -- this is show able to convince real "enemies" to play themselves. It would have only been better if they could have had Fred Thompson playing the President.

But then, I don't know about you -- but I've found the Utopia/Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords to just get better as time passes. I was a bit disappointed with Last of the Time Lords on first viewing -- but no more, now it's just the end of one of a long, brilliant era of Doctor Who.

That all said... it's probably good to be cynical about what Russell does at the same time. His instincts have made Doctor Who bigger and more successful than ever -- even here in the US, where Doctor Who is probably the biggest British television import. And who know what will happen when Series Four starts -- and everything else on television is a repeat, game show, or reality television due to the US writers strike.

New Doctor Who to Public Television

Iowa Public Television -- just south of where I am here in Minneapolis -- is going to be airing the Christopher Eccleston Doctor Who episodes.

It's nice to see that Doctor Who is being made available to Public Television Stations, especially those that have been airing Doctor Who for decades like IPTV. I'm also hopeful that some of the other stations that used to air the classic series will pick up the new series as well now that there is a Doctor Who with a more modern look and feel.

I'm very nostalgic about Doctor Who on public television -- it's one chance for it to be aired without commercial interruptions, and it was a part of a time when public television was a lot more dominant in the television landscape than it is today with the multitude of stations available on cable and satellite.

The Horror of Max Headroom

In one of the stranger footnotes in North American Doctor Who history, during a Chicago broadcast of The Horror of Fang Rock in 1987 a bunch of people broke in with a strange Max Headroom-inspired sequence. This was one of those stories that of course spread around like crazy Back In The Day, but this is perhaps the first chance for many people to see what happened. I'm not sure how long this will stay around -- but really, I wouldn't see any reason for it to go away.

Sketch

Back in the old days of the 1980s, along with your fifteenth generation copy of Paradise Towers, you'd also occasionally get a clip from some other British television show that had a Doctor Who reference. Now that the TV series is back in production, we're seeing more of them (though they never totally went away) -- but these clips -- which are unlikely to find any other sort of international distribution -- are now showing up on YouTube.

Like this one from The Friday Night Project: