Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring...

Banana phone.

"Always take a banana to a party Rose, bananas are good" - The Doctor. 

The Doctor (David Tennant) said the above line in the episode titled "The Girl in the Fireplace" a brilliant story involving period drama and some fantastic clock work monsters that were terrifying.  There's a scene with a horse and a mirror that is truly amazing that made me cheer like my home team had won a cup and  of course there are the scenes that made me sob like a toddler who has lost their teddy. In my opinion if you do not laugh, cry and cheer throughout an episode of Doctor Who and preferably experience all these emotions at the same time then it's not a proper episode.  

Click here to listen....

B is for Banana

Paradox

 Photo copyright Lisa Hazlegreaves

As I’ve already mentioned in previous posts in our house there is one member who is not a Doctor Who fan or indeed a fan of anything remotely science fiction.  This would be Father.  One of the main things that makes Father screw up his face in distaste is the complexity of Time Travel, the way a Doctor Who story can make a massive U-turn because of some paradox or other.   The most frustrating thing for me about all of this is, it all just drops into place in my brain as I’m watching and in my head I do that ‘ahhhhh now I get it’  or ‘ahhhhh good plot line’ but, BUT if I then have to explain it to a confused Father who is laughing at the outrageous story that has got our favourite Doctor out of scrape it doesn’t matter how hard I try his brain just isn’t made that way.  I’m not sure if it’s because since being very small I have been a huge sci fi fan, I watched Doctor Who as a child along with Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, I’ve read hundreds of books, all the usual ones, Lord of the Rings, Shannara, Gormenghast, I loved Blakes 7, Star Trek and Babylon 5.  My head has been full of fantasy creatures and time travelling paradox’s since the word go.  Father has come to this unwillingly through the love of his children and finds himself sitting watching with us, confused and dazed. 

Now I know as yet time travel doesn’t exist but there have been some brilliant papers written about the subject and as any good geek is aware you can Google time travel or paradox and hundreds of pages will pop up trying to explain the theory.  I’ve done this, I am that geek that has Googled time paradox as an aid to trying to explain it to Father.  I remember using ‘The Bootstrap Paradox Theory’ to try and explain it to him, let me see if you my reader can get a handle on it. 

The Bootstrap Paradox Theory

This theory has been used countless times in Doctor Who, here goes...

On his 30th birthday, a man who wishes to build a time machine is visited by a future version of himself. This future self explains to him that he should not worry about designing the time machine, as he has done it in the future. The man receives the schematics from his future self and starts building the time machine. Time passes until he finally completes the time machine. He then uses it to travel back in time to his 30th birthday, where he gives the schematics to his past self, closing the loop. (borrowed this paragraph from Wikipedia)

Get it? 

An example of this from Doctor Who is in a Tennant episode called Blink featuring those wonderfully terrifying monsters The Weeping Angels.  In this story The Doctor records a message in 1969, that is one half of a conversation.  The other half of the conversation is completed by a character named Sally when she watches the video in 2007 and her friend transcribes the conversation.  The completed transcript of the full conversation is handed back to The Doctor in 2008 (this is before The Doctor has travelled back to 1969 in his timeline) therefore he can use this transcript to create his half of the conversation later....confused?  Sally was in the story and The Doctor explained it to her by explaining that most people think of time like a ‘swift progression of cause to effect’  when it is actually ‘a big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff’

I think Tennant’s Doctor got it right, and I use this line repeatedly when I see Fathers face getting that derogatory look on it....’shhh I say its wibbly wobbly, timey wimey, that’s all you need to know’

Judged

 Photo copyright Lisa Hazlegreaves

If you have read any of my other posts you may have noticed that I’m quite a fan of Doctor Who and science fiction / fantasy in general.  I have been this way since my late teens, yes,  dear reader  for twenty five years I have been a sci-fi fan.  Now this is something I have always been proud of but it’s only recently I have been so  outspokenly proud about it.   I mean, I’ve had a reputation to keep.  I have a really good job, I’ve partied in Kurt Geiger shoes with DJ’s,  promoters and their bitches. I have not spent all my spare time alone amusing myself with Spok’s Biography and a scale model of The Millennium Falcon.  The attitude to science fiction is definitely softening, it is not thought of as such a weird thing to like now, especially for a female.  This has got a lot to do with Doctor Who, which has introduced science fiction to the masses at peak family viewing time on a Saturday.  I have lots of friends who watch Doctor Who with their kids but who have probably never heard of Terry Brooks let alone read any of his books and this is a good thing, it’s a great thing it is opening minds and getting a whole new generation of kids into science fiction.  Hopefully these kids will love Doctor Who so much they want to go on and read some classic fiction.  Less judging of the sci-fi geek.

 This in turn however has brought up a whole new set of rules to be judged on.  Within Whovianism (wondering if I just invented a new word?  A Whovian is a Doctor Who fan) there is a fraction who will publically sneer at fellow Whovians who know little, if nothing of Classic Who.  Classic Who? I hear you ask.  When Doctor Who returned to our screens in 2005 and became the mighty goliath that it is with its merchandising and experiences  and conventions, the BBC decided that there needed to be a distinction between the brand sparkly New Doctor Who and the Doctor Who that was on our screens when I was a lass. So they re-branded old Doctor Who re-releases on DVD as Classic Who.  Glad we got that cleared up.   There are Whovians like myself who are old enough to remember Classic Who and whose Doctor is not nine, ten or eleven but a number prior to that. But then there are also the next generation of fans like my kids whose Doctor’s are Tennant and Smith and you know what that’s absolutely fine.  They will never ever like Classic Who, its old fashioned to them, the sets wobble and there is no CGI but they shouldn’t be derided for this they should be cherished, brought into the fold of Sci-fi geekdom and nurtured.  They certainly shouldn’t be sneered at nor judged for not knowing the name of the actor who played Tom Baker's scarf or even who Tom Baker is, although my kids know this because he was MY Doctor and I have bored them stupid with tales of him. I’m happy to pass on my sci fi baton to my kids, I don’t care if they don’t know about Classic Who I simply care that in the future they read some great books by Neil Gaiman perhaps, because they heard of him from writing a script for New Who.  I won’t judge them for that.