Quotulatiousness

June 7, 2025

Doctor Who fades further

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I still have vague affection for the British TV show Doctor Who, but I certainly wouldn’t call myself a fan of more recent times. “My” Doctor was William Hartnell and then Patrick Troughton, with a few look-ins from Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker later on. I certainly haven’t been closely following the show as it became more and more woke, so I can’t comment on the news that the show is being, if not technically cancelled, at least given an indefinite pause in production:

“This wasn’t a finale it was a funeral, and the undertaker wired the corpse to be giving his mourners two middle fingers“

The show isn’t canceled because technically it has never been canceled, it’s just being given another “rest.” Besides you couldn’t possibly use the word “canceled” when you go as far off the Woke deep-end as Doctor Who did. That wouldn’t be an admission of failure, it would be an admission of complete rejection.

Disney Doctor Who felt like a parody from the start. It was Doctor Who as written by Jon Waters. It genuinely felt like Russel T. Davies was making fun of his own time on the show, in the 2000s. Truth be told I don’t think he has anywhere near enough talent for that. In 2005 he came to the show wanting to use it as a platform to tell his stories about the Doctor. In 2024 he returned to it to use it as a political platform.

This season of Doctor Who was so politically driven that even leftie newspapers were saying, lay off the Woke crap.

When you have a show that is this far off the rails it means that the company that bought it, while financially obligated to keep paying for it, has written it off so completely that no one is bothering to read the scripts anymore. The last three episodes were so bad that I’m not sure anyone was bothering to write them either. It had all of those weird little ticks of verbal dyskinesia that strongly indicate the script was mostly written by an AI that Russel T Davies had trained with last season’s scripts. It’s a pity he didn’t use his first season’s scripts; it would have been a much better show. This season was purest clown world. If I was making a sarcastic, mocking sendup of what I thought a completely Woke Doctor Who would be like, I am not sure I could have done better.

I’m in this really bad position of trying to make fun of something that is so bad that nothing I can say will get more laughs than what I saw. I can’t even make jokes about him being gay because it’s old hat at this point, the last four Doctors introduced have been gay. Whitaker, Tenant (2), Gatwa and they brought back Jo Martin for one scene to make her a lesbian.

This season did have an objective; to attack the longtime fans of the show, it was the Joker II of Doctor Who. That is what the final eight episodes of Doctor Who did, attack the long-time fans of the show who hated the fact that people like Russel T. Davies and Chris Chibnall had utterly ruined it. Granted, Davies is now by far the more hated.

Even the BBC, you know the company that actually owns Doctor Who, condemned it as “nothing but an intolerant program”.

[…]

This wasn’t a finale it was a funeral, and the undertaker wired the corpse to be giving his mourners two middle fingers.

In the end, this wasn’t just bad Doctor Who — it was anti-Doctor Who. A shrill, directionless, AI-scripted fever dream written by a man who now seems to loathe the franchise’s history and its fans. What was once clever, charming, and strange was in the end loud, smug, and hollow. The Doctor hasn’t just wandered back into the wilderness — he’s been abandoned there to be eaten by Bad Wolf.

I never thought I’d say this about Doctor Who but given its raw hatred of its fanbase and blithering narrative incompetence I have no choice but to pronounce my doom upon it.

The Dark Herald Says Avoid Doctor Who Like the Plague. (0/5)

As you might expect, The Critical Drinker also feels the show needs to take a nice, long regenerative vacation. Ten years? That might be enough.

May 23, 2025

Bill Bailey – The Doctor Who theme re-imagined as Belgian jazz

Filed under: Europe, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Royal Ballet and Opera
Published 29 Jul 2021

Comedian Bill Bailey re-imagines the Doctor Who theme as Jacques Brel-esque Belgian jazz. Taken from his DVD Bill Bailey’s Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra.

December 26, 2024

Historian Reviews the Best and Worst Depictions of the Roman Empire in Film and TV

Filed under: Europe, History, Media, Middle East — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

History Hit
Published 9 Sept 2024

Tristan Hughes, host of “The Ancients” podcast, reviews scenes from famous movies and TV shows set in the Roman period.

00:00 Intro
00:58 HBO Rome
12:54 The Last Legion
15:55 Monty Python’s Life of Brian
24:32 Centurion
31:40 Doctor Who
(more…)

December 3, 2023

Doctor What-are-your-pronouns

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I don’t watch Doctor Who although I have fond childhood memories of watching William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton’s respective “Doctors” and I caught one or two episodes of Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker in the role. That the show is still running on British TV is a wonder … but it got headlines for a recent installment that had the Doctor being told off for “assuming” an alien creature’s pronouns:

Remember when Doctor Who was fun? Watching it now is about as much fun as being publicly humiliated at work by some jumped-up nonbinary form-filler from HR who thinks he’s amazing because he’s painted one of his fingernails black.

A good example of this joylessness is a scene in the most recent special, “The Star Beast”, which has been treated by right-on broadsheet types as a moment of profound importance. Yet all that happened was a transwoman character – played by transwoman actor Yasmin Finney – lectured the Doctor about pronouns. In a moment of unforgivable Time Lord-cis privilege, the Doctor had assumed a diminutive alien called Beep the Meep used male pronouns. What was he thinking?

It is this sort of banal plot line that encapsulates the shrivelling ambition of science fiction. Once the genre dared to hold up a provocative mirror to contemporary society. From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, sci-fi challenged lazy assumptions. Now it revels in groupthink that feeds the collective self-righteousness of indolent teenagers and adults with teenage imaginations.

This matters, because at its best sci-fi can dazzle and even inspire us with the potential strangeness of the imagined future. A few years ago I made a series presented by William Shatner tracing the cultural and technological influence of Star Trek. In one episode, the inventor of the mobile phone, Martin Cooper, told director Julian Jones how he had been inspired by the example of Captain Kirk’s hand-held “communicator”. Will anyone invent something inspired by the new Doctor Who? A new set of guidelines for pronoun use, perhaps?

You can tell how out of touch Doctor Who has now become by the fact its enormously pompous showrunner, Russell T Davies, seemed to think that the new series would shock viewers with its “progressive” radicalism. The only shock was the alien pronoun scene’s patent stupidity.

I mean, why on Earth would the Doctor assume the gender of any alien? He has been encountering aliens with no fixed gender since the 1960s. The Doctor has effectively been asking aliens for their pronouns for nigh on 60 years.

Davies may think he’s blazing a trail with the new series of Doctor Who. But the truth is that gender-bending in science fiction is as old as the frozen hills of Gallifrey. In The War of the Worlds, published 125 years ago, HG Wells regaled us with Martian invaders who reproduced asexually. And hermaphrodites pepper sci-fi, from the work of Philip K Dick to that of Ursula K Le Guin.

February 23, 2023

Doctor Who – long-term sleeper agent for the WHO?

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I haven’t followed the TV series for a very long time (“my” Doctor was William Hartnell, then Patrick Troughton and by the time I watched another episode there’d been two more Doctors), but I still have fond memories of the show. Along comes Caroline Kaye to suggest that I was an unwitting victim of globalist propaganda:

The BBC science fiction television series Doctor Who has been a part of British popular culture since 1963. It is centred on the Doctor figure, a scientist who works to save civilisations, help people in need and to prevent evil forces from harming people. Remember that description.

A Doctor Who fanatic once told me that the “Who” of the Doctor’s name obliquely refers to the other WHO, the World Health Organisation. There appears to be something in this, however implausible. I find the strange coincidences between fiction and reality curious and uncanny.

The Doctor is a scientific adviser to the organisation UNIT, standing for United Nations Intelligence Unit, which happens to be based in Geneva, home of the WHO. UNIT has its military element in the form of “the brigadier” who liaises with the government and occasionally has to reach out to Geneva to “gain authority” when government does not co-operate.

The most famous Doctor Who monsters will always be the Daleks. In the story Genesis of the Daleks (1975), the Doctor’s nemesis is Davros, the creator of the Daleks. Davros sounds rather like Davos, the home of the World Economic Forum, the WEF.

In the story, the Doctor is tasked with preventing the creation of the Daleks and faces a moral dilemma when confronted with the means to destroy them. He ponders in a renowned scene, “Have I the right [to destroy them]?” Declining to destroy the Daleks, the Doctor escapes, and the Daleks continue on their path of evil.

Doctor Who‘s other famous monsters, the Cybermen, are cyborgs – amoral, unfeeling transhuman creatures of our nightmares; surely the creations of mad or evil persons. Yet the idea of cyborgs and transhumanism is being pushed enthusiastically by the WEF, inspired by the ideas of Yuval Noah Harari who sees human beings merely as “hackable animals” to be augmented as necessary.

The WHO acronym is the emblem of an organisation supposedly formed, like the Doctor, to help people and protect them. Instead, in the last three years we have seen, at the behest of the WHO, the poorest and weakest of the world economically hammered, a swathe of unnecessary deaths from a treatable coronavirus, worldwide harms and deaths through forced vaccination, all of which break every human right established in the wake of WWII. This is outlined in devastating detail by Toby Green and Thomas Fazi in their book, The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor – A Critique from the Left.

Now the WHO is preparing a new treaty which ultimately will result in signing member states becoming legally subordinate to the WHO. It is designed to subsume us all into a malleable collective. In other words, as per the sprawling EU project, our politicians will be able to blame the WHO for mandating medical treatments, lockdowns and prevention of travel, all of which could happen at the whim of the director general. Or more likely, its biggest, unelected, non-medically trained funder Bill Gates.

December 15, 2017

Rowan Atkinson is Doctor Who | Comic Relief

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Comic Relief
Published on 16 Mar 2009

Doctor Who Comic Relief Special starring Rowan Atkinson, Richard E Grant, Hugh Grant, Jonathan Pryce and Joanna Lumley.

April 28, 2017

What is a parallel universe? | Doctor Who Special | James May Q&A | Head Squeeze

Filed under: Science, Space — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 22 Nov 2013

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the very first episode of Doctor Who James has a very special video on what exactly a parallel universe is!

Some physicists believe that in a parallel universe all of our mistakes have been corrected. Rather than taking a take away for one in a cold miserable flat, we are, in a parallel universe, living with our one true love having the best life ever. Outside our own universe, the theory goes, that there are an infinite number of other universes.

However maybe we don’t have to travel beyond our universe to find a parallel. The Schrodinger’s Cat paradox basically is that a cat in a box with a device that can kill at random exists in both alive and dead states. More info on Schrodinger’s Cat here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/google-doodle/10237347/Schrodingers-Cat-explained.html

Thanks to Alyssa Ann for her portrait of Jeremy Clarkson: http://alyssamenold.com/

April 24, 2017

A new anti-censorship tool – Slitheen

Filed under: Cancon, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Register‘s Thomas Claburn on a new tool being developed in Canada to aid internet users in countries with hard censorship access material their governments don’t want them to see:

Computer boffins in Canada are working on anti-censorship software called Slitheen that disguises disallowed web content as government-sanctioned pablum. They intend for it to be used in countries where network connections get scrutinized for forbidden thought.

Slitheen – named after Doctor Who aliens capable of mimicking humans to avoid detection – could thus make reading the Universal Declaration of Human Rights look like a lengthy refresher course in North Korean juche ideology or a politically acceptable celebration of cats.

In a presentation last October, Cecylia Bocovich, a University of Waterloo PhD student developing the technology in conjunction with computer science professor Ian Goldberg, said that governments in countries such as China, Iran, and Pakistan have used a variety of techniques to censor internet access, including filtering by IP address, filtering by hostname, protocol-specific throttling, URL keyword filtering, active probing, and application layer deep packet inspection.

In an email to The Register, Goldberg said the software is based on the concept of decoy routing.

“The basic idea behind decoy routing is that the (censored) user’s computer makes an Internet connection to some non-censored (‘overt’) site, such as a site with cute cat videos,” said Goldberg. “However, it embeds a hidden cryptographic tag in its connection, which only a particular Internet router somewhere on the path between the user and the cute cat site can see. That router, seeing the tag, then redirects the traffic to a censored (‘covert’) site, say Wikipedia.”

As Bocovich and Goldberg explain in a paper [PDF] they co-authored, these tags make the web session’s master TLS secret available to a cooperating ISP. This allows the ISP to conduct what amounts to a friendly man-in-the-middle attack by having a network relay it controls open a proxy connection to the censored website.

May 18, 2015

Doctor Who Theme – PLAYER PIANO

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Published on 21 Apr 2015

Composer/Pianist Sonya Belousova and Director Tom Grey celebrate over 50 years of Doctor Who by paying tribute to its iconic theme.

February 15, 2015

They call it “Great” Britain, after all

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, Germany, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Great-Britain

H/T to Think Defence for the image.

Let’s make no mistake, Great Britain is great, the clue is in the name after all.

Anyone who thinks otherwise is obviously uneducated, or French.

And not only that …

Without Great Britain the world would be a poorer place in every regard.

Lets just remind ourselves why…

We gave the world democracy, common law, the Bailey Bridge, tanks, gravity, the worlds most common second language, Led Zeppelin, fair play, queuing, the backhoe loader, metal bridges, modern economics, the industrial revolution and Hollywood villains.

The Beatles, Morris Dancing, penicillin, HP sauce, Top Gear, the World Wide Web (your welcome), One Direction, Carry On and Simon Cowell.

Tea drinking, chicken tikka masala, Shakespeare, Winston Churchill, battered Mars Bars, the BBC, the mini (car, roundabout and skirt), the Spice Girls, Darwin, football, Marmite, rugby, cricket, golf, tennis, ping pong, pubs, tea, sharp suits, Spitfires and the fact there are homosexuals, lesbians and transsexuals in the armed forces and no one gives two shits.

With our friends and allies stood against the Nazis, invented the railway, sarcasm, MRI scanners, the screw propellor and a proper breakfast, been on the right side of the Napoleonic, First, Second and Cold War and gave the world steam power, the Mexeflote, Wallace and Gromit, roast beef dinners, the Dyson, Doctor Who, television, telephones, text messaging, GMT, electric motors, lawn movers, spotted dick, sewage systems, the thermos flask, the jet engine, carbon fibre, the flushing toilet and polyester (just for the RAF), pencils, radar and the Bank of France (ha ha ha).

February 8, 2015

Refuting the “Golden Age of Television” meme

Filed under: History, Humour, Media, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

A few years back, Livejournal user Squid314 took issue with the idea that we’re somehow enjoying a great era of TV programming lately:

As I mentioned in my last entry, I’ve been watching Babylon 5 lately. It’s not a perfect show, but it has one big advantage: it’s consistent and believable.

Contrast this with Doctor Who. Doctor Who is fun to watch, but if you think about it for more than two seconds you notice it’s full of plot holes and contradictions. Things that cause time travel paradoxes that threaten to destroy the universe one episode go without a hitch the next. And the TARDIS, the sonic screwdriver, and the Doctor’s biology gain completely different powers no one’s ever alluded to depending on the situation. The aliens are hysterically unlikely, often without motives or believable science, the characters will do any old insane thing when it makes the plot slightly more interesting, and everything has either a self-destruct button or an easily findable secret weakness that it takes no efforts to defend against.

[…]

So Doctor Who is not a complete loss. But then there are some shows that go completely beyond the pale of enjoyability, until they become nothing more than overwritten collections of tropes impossible to watch without groaning.

I think the worst offender here is the History Channel and all their programs on the so-called “World War II”.

Let’s start with the bad guys. Battalions of stormtroopers dressed in all black, check. Secret police, check. Determination to brutally kill everyone who doesn’t look like them, check. Leader with a tiny villain mustache and a tendency to go into apopleptic rage when he doesn’t get his way, check. All this from a country that was ordinary, believable, and dare I say it sometimes even sympathetic in previous seasons.

I wouldn’t even mind the lack of originality if they weren’t so heavy-handed about it. Apparently we’re supposed to believe that in the middle of the war the Germans attacked their allies the Russians, starting an unwinnable conflict on two fronts, just to show how sneaky and untrustworthy they could be? And that they diverted all their resources to use in making ever bigger and scarier death camps, even in the middle of a huge war? Real people just aren’t that evil. And that’s not even counting the part where as soon as the plot requires it, they instantly forget about all the racism nonsense and become best buddies with the definitely non-Aryan Japanese.

Not that the good guys are much better. Their leader, Churchill, appeared in a grand total of one episode before, where he was a bumbling general who suffered an embarrassing defeat to the Ottomans of all people in the Battle of Gallipoli. Now, all of a sudden, he’s not only Prime Minister, he’s not only a brilliant military commander, he’s not only the greatest orator of the twentieth century who can convince the British to keep going against all odds, he’s also a natural wit who is able to pull out hilarious one-liners practically on demand. I know he’s supposed to be the hero, but it’s not realistic unless you keep the guy at least vaguely human.

[…]

…and then, in the entire rest of the show, over five or six different big wars, they never use the superweapon again. Seriously. They have this whole thing about a war in Vietnam that lasts decades and kills tens of thousands of people, and they never wonder if maybe they should consider using the frickin’ unstoppable mystical superweapon that they won the last war with. At this point, you’re starting to wonder if any of the show’s writers have even watched the episodes the other writers made.

I’m not even going to get into the whole subplot about breaking a secret code (cleverly named “Enigma”, because the writers couldn’t spend more than two seconds thinking up a name for an enigmatic code), the giant superintelligent computer called Colossus (despite this being years before the transistor was even invented), the Soviet strongman whose name means “Man of Steel” in Russian (seriously, between calling the strongman “Man of Steel” and the Frenchman “de Gaulle”, whoever came up with the names for this thing ought to be shot).

So yeah. Stay away from the History Channel. Unlike most of the other networks, they don’t even try to make their stuff believable.

December 30, 2014

How did so many episodes of Doctor Who go missing?

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

At Samizdata, Patrick Crozier explains how the cost of a new technology and the union work rules of the 1960s led to so many great (and not-so-great) British TV shows being lost to posterity:

Something like two fifths of the Doctor Who episodes produced before 1970 are “missing” from the BBC archive. Although it is now 20 years since I found out about it, I still find it difficult to believe that such an act of cultural vandalism was allowed to take place. But it was.

So why are so many missing? In Wiped! Richard Molesworth describes the whole sorry tale in exhaustive (and some times exhausting) detail. It begins with Doctor Whos being recorded on videotape. In the 1960s videotape was a new technology and as such, expensive. Broadcasters were understandably keen to re-use the tapes whenever they could.

Another factor in this was the deal that the BBC had made with the actors’ union Equity. Younger readers may be unfamiliar with this but in the 1960s and 1970s unions were extraordinarily powerful. The deal between Equity and the BBC meant that an episode could only be repeated for two years and after that only with Equity’s specific permission. So, you’d have a situation where after 2 years you would have videotapes that effectively could not be broadcast and an engineering department banging on the door demanding they be allowed to wipe them. As a consequence every single inch of 1960s Doctor Who was wiped. It was far from alone. Episodes of Top of the Pops, the Likely Lads, Not only but also…, Z-Cars, Til death us do part and many others met a similar fate.

In the interests of fairness I should point out that when it came to wiping TV programmes the BBC was far from the only offender. There is almost nothing left of the first season of the Avengers for instance. Or Sexton Blake. About half of the highly-rated Callan (played by Edward Woodward) is also missing. However, all the Saints and Danger Mans are still with us. Meanwhile, my understanding is that most American TV, even from the 1950s still exists.

And compounding the problem … even when the BBC wanted to get rid of old episodes of TV shows, they still held the copyrights:

One thing that particularly sticks in my craw is the fact that even after the BBC did everything in its power to destroy these episodes it still has copyright to them. This has some very peculiar effects as I shall explain.

As I said, many episodes no longer exist as films or tapes. But all the audios exist (recorded off-air by fans), as do the scripts and a large number of photographs, otherwise known as “tele-snaps”. Over the years a cottage industry has grown up assembling these disparate elements into what are known as “reconstructions”. Now, they’re not very good and they are really only for the dedicated fan – people like me in other words – but right now they are the best we’ve got. Sadly, these too are affected by BBC copyright. For many years they were only available on videotape and on a non-profit basis. The producers were wary of annoying the BBC. And then one day someone (quite reasonably you’d think) decided to start putting them up on YouTube. Oh dear, the BBC really didn’t like that. Not only did they force YouTube to take a whole load of them down but seem to have closed down the reconstruction business temporarily if not permanently. Bastards.

November 6, 2013

“…the only real Doctor was William Hartnell”

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:33

In the Telegraph, Tim Stanley discusses the original Doctor Who:

Everybody has a favourite Doctor, but the only real Doctor was William Hartnell. No one else came close to matching his authority and scariness. He was genuinely alien.

Hartnell the man was born in poverty to a single mother in 1908. His career took off in the 1940s, playing hard men and soldiers in cop shows and sitcoms. He was spotted by producer Verity Lambert playing a rugby talent scout in This Sporting Life and offered a part in a new sci-fi show called Doctor Who in 1963. Bill was reluctant at first to work on a mere kids programme — but it turned out to be rather more special than that.

The genius of that early series was that it was pitched perfectly between children and adults; it’s a testament to how much more “adult” children were treated back then. The real focus of the plot were two teachers, Ian and Barbara, who follow a precocious pupil home and find that she’s living in a police box. The police box turns out to be a time ship (rather roomier on the inside than out) and her “grandfather” — the Doctor — is less than thrilled to meet them. In fact, he’s so furious that he shuts the doors, presses a button and kidnaps them. Compare that with present-day Who where the Doctor only ever meets young women with regional accents who he instantly wants to bed but can’t because — I don’t know — he’s impotent or something. Everything about 60s Who was way more mature and sinister.

To be honest, Hartnell’s stories can be tough to re-watch. Each serial ran for upwards of 12 episodes a time, some of the scripts were plodding (I challenge you to sit through The Space Museum without slipping into a coma) and the effects shockingly poor. The Web Planet featured a cast of gay butterflies on strings, dancing ants and grubs on rollers that occasionally crashed into the camera. Bill sometimes let the side down by fluffing his lines (When invited to climb a hill: “My dear, I’m not a mountain goat and I prefer walking to any day.” Awkward pause. “And I hate climbing”). There are moments when he looks lost and helpless before the cameras, the line on the tip of his tongue but he can’t remember if it’s “Daleks” or “cabbages”.

October 12, 2013

Not quite as I remember it (from hiding behind the settee in the living room)

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Published on 10 Oct 2013

Trailer for the newly-recovered and remastered Patrick Troughton Doctor Who episode The Enemy of the World. Unseen in the UK for 45 years, and formerly considered missing, The Enemy of the World sees Troughton play the dual-role of the Doctor and also Salamander – the “saviour of the world”. Or is he… Also starring Frazer Hines as Jamie and Deborah Watling as Victoria.

October 6, 2013

Nostalgic Doctor Who fans rejoice

Filed under: Africa, Britain, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:01

According to a report in the Mirror, over 100 lost Doctor Who episodes have turned up in the most unlikely spot:

A group of dedicated Doctor Who fans tracked down at least 100 long-lost episodes of the show gathering dust more than 3,000 miles away in Ethiopia.

It was feared the BBC ­programmes from the 1960s — featuring the first two doctors William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton — had vanished for all time after the Beeb flogged off a load of old footage.

But after months of ­detective work the tapes have been unearthed at the Ethiopian Radio and Television Agency.

A television insider said: “It is a triumph and fans ­everywhere will be thrilled.

“This is a really big deal for the BBC and is set to make them millions from the sale of the DVDs.”

H/T to Tabatha Southey for the link.

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