More Power of the Daleks

Sunday 11 December 2016

I am most encouraged to learn that I am not the only lady of a certain age who watches Doctor Who of her own volition. None other than Theresa May, Prime Minister (yes, we know who she is) enjoys watching the Doctor Who Christmas Special after she has cooked her goose. I just wish I could get away with wearing leather trousers...

Anyway, we have finished watching Power of the Daleks. There are definitely parallels with Victory of the Daleks - yes, we have Daleks in a servile role, bringing drinks. Why doesn't an enterprising Cardiff restaurant try that?

There are a lot of other familiar elements: lots of running up and down corridors; the Doctor being mistaken for someone in authority (psychic paper would have saved a lot of time; the Doctor being locked up; his companions being kidnapped; a misguided scientist; a rebel force and a scheming security chief. As this is the 1960s, the female companion has little to do apart from be kidnapped, although Polly seems to know quite lot about Daleks considering she hasn't actually met any before. Ben and Polly's initial suspicions of the new incarnation of the Doctor are soon forgotten.

The animation is strange in that the human characters are not particularly well realised, but the Daleks look almost photo-realistic.

Overall I enjoyed it.  Now we are on to the end of the Troughton era with The War Games.

Revisiting the Classics

Sunday 23 October

My other half has celebrated earning a bonus at work by investing in a lot of DVDs of old Troughton stories.

As a result we have been enjoying The Invasion, The Moonbase and The Ice Warriors, all with animation filling in for missing episodes.

The last two are definitely of their time. Poor Polly spent most of The Moonbase making coffee.  Whilst I didn't like Clara that much, she wouldn't have stood for that - the Doctor had to fetch his own coffee!  The Ice Warriors was a  reminder that not so long ago we were more worried about a returning ice age than global warming.

Revisiting some old faces

The UK Drama Channel (Freeview channel 20) is currently showing some classic Doctor Who stories, one for each of the pre-2005 Doctors on Sunday afternoons at 4.00 p.m.  Just the thing watch whilst doing the ironing!

They started with The Aztecs, which is watchable enough, but not one of the best surviving Hartnell stories, in my opinion. This was followed by Tomb of the Cybermen, which is one of the classic Troughton stories, and one which actually manages to make the Cybermen creepy and scary.  (In general I think Doomsday was quite right and that Daleks beat Cybermen any day.)

Last week it was the turn of Pertwee, and Spearhead from Space.  I enjoyed this so much that I followed it by watching Rose on DVD in order to compare the effects of two very different new Doctor stories/series reboots starring Autons.  In both cases the shop dummies work much better than the Nestene Consciousness, which is slightly disappointing in both its felt tentacle and orange CGI guises.

This Sunday the channel will be celebrating the Doctor's 51st birthday with one of my all-time favourite stories, and one which genuinely terrified me as a child, The Pyramids of Mars. Between that and Sexton Blake and the Demon God (broadcast in the Sunday teatime slot in1978), I was definitely traumatised by all things Eygptian.

 It won't stop me from watching on Sunday though, even if I'm hiding behind the ironing board.