Doctor Who?

To my wife’s astonishment, I revealed a few days back that I was never a big Doctor Who fanboy.

Not sure why it came up. However, I have borrowed, twice, a couple of Doctor Who DVDs from a local library over the past few weeks. Maybe she saw them lying around the house.

I do remember the series as a boy. When I was in my tweens, my parents refurnished the attic for my brother and me. The result was quite the swanky pad, I have to admit. And one Christmas I got a small black-and-white teevee, which I plugged in all over that rather large second-storey room: by my bed, by my desk, by the window. I would even haul it into the side storage room and watch the black-and-white sitting among the rafters, dirty insulation, and stacks of unused toys and games and books.

There are lots of shows I remember watching, quite vividly, on that little television set. The Night Stalker was always a scary treat and led to many sleepless nights. Space: 1999 reruns were always a big hit. For some strange reason I also watched The Jackie Gleason Show a lot, probably because it was on at a regular time right after bedtime and I’d sneak on the teevee. While all my other fifth grade friends were wondering what this strange this called SNL was, I occupied my evenings with Ralph Kramden skits.

Anyway, I did view a few Doctor Who episodes in that storage room. Just a handful, though. For some reason, I would always catch something like the final 30 seconds of the show dramatically cutting to that Doctor Who logo descending down the time tunnel or whatever with those phenomenal synthesizer effects. In other words, I always caught the last minute of the show. Like a twenty or thirty times.

I did see maybe a half-dozen shows in somewhat their entirety. Doctor Who for me will always be Tom Baker (who was also the evil wizard in one of those Sinbad movies – something I only recently found out). I don’t know which number doctor he is, but I’m thinking he’s the fourth. So I would watch these shows kinda confused and uncertain as the Doctor scurried away from these giant fire hydrant robots and jumped into these weird phone booths all the time.

About two years ago I watched a pair of episodes of the latest incarnation of Doctor Who on the awful Syfy channel and they were really, really good. Those fire hydrants were back, and man were they evil. The newest doctor was a skinny goofy Brit who somehow had a lot of charming charisma. But still I didn’t become a fan.

Now I’ve read there’s another Doctor, the eighth or ninth I would guess. From the article I read the new season has potential. It’s a lot more creepy and atmospheric. There are really neat baddies called “The Silence.” There are aliens that reside in your shadow; if you’re infected and your shadow touches another person, they become infected. And there are statues that move when you are not looking and monsters your memory completely forgets when you turn your gaze away.

But, the article stated, there’s also a lot of PC garbage thrown in.

So I picked up two DVDs of Doctor Who from the Tom Baker years of the late 70s. I liked ’em. I watched ’em at the writing desk, on this little DVD player I set up next to my computer. The production value struck me as very much on the level of soap. Then I realized that these are soap operas for sci fi geeks. The script of one was written by Douglas Adams of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy fame, and Monty Python John Cleese had an unacknowledged cameo in the other. It was a pleasant way to spend two hours.

But still, doggone it, I’m not hooked!