Chameleon Circuit

Camouflage

"It’s camouflage. It’s disguised as a police telephone box from 1963. Every time the TARDIS materialises in a new location, within the first NANOSECOND of landing, it analyses its surroundings, calculates a 12-dimensional data map of everything within a 1000-mile radius, and determines which outer shell would blend in best with the environment. And then it disguises itself as a police telephone box from 1963" - The Doctor

Everyone knows that the Doctor's TARDIS is a 1960's British Police Box, when we hear the word TARDIS that is the image that appears in our head.  However it wasn't meant to look this way, not permanently anyway.  The Doctor stole his TARDIS from Gallifrey,  it's a now obsolete Type 40, mark 1 and very early on in their travels the part of the TARDIS that creates the camouflage, The Chameleon Circuit, broke leaving it stuck in this shape. What I find absolutely amazing now is that if you show a child a picture of a police box they know that it is a police box...they know that it is a TARDIS, if it wasn't for Doctor Who, this is a piece of British history that would be long forgotten.  You would show a child a picture of a Police Box and they would say "what's that" but Doctor Who, this long running, science fiction show has kept the Police Box alive in our memories.

So there's also a band called Chameleon Circuit  listen here 

C is for Camouflage

Why Matt Smith is the Best Doctor Who Ever.

Unless you’ve been living in the North Pole for the past few months, and let’s face it, in this unusually warm British summer it’s feasible you may have moved there to cool off, you can’t fail to have heard that Matt Smith is leaving his role as The Doctor in Doctor Who to be replaced by someone as yet unnamed.  Worry not though at 7.00pm on Sunday the BBC are hosting a live, yes that’s a live broadcast fronted by Zoe Ball, with actors who have been previous Doctors, Matt Smith and the Moff (that’s Steven Moffat, series Show-runner to the un-initiated) all in attendance. Although I am a huge fan of Doctor Who, and have been since Tom Baker and his unusually long scarf I find this a somewhat odd occurrence.  Yes, I am aware it’s the fiftieth anniversary, and that the changing of the Doctor is a huge event to both fans and press alike, I am just not sure it warrants a show all of its own.  As a fan, I’d much rather have half an hour of some Classic Who on my screen, or a nice little Documentary, or indeed anythingother than a programme about an announcement, as I do feel we have been somewhat short changed on this most auspicious of years.  However this won’t stop me being glued to my television at 7.00pm. Neither will it stop me gaffataping my kids mouths so they won’t talk over the main announcement of who is going to play the twelfth Doctor.

As I’ve already mentioned I’ve been a fan for quite a number of years, I can remember  Jon Pertwee but  Tom Baker is ‘my Doctor’ I watched religiously for years, ignoring wobbly sets, and bad make-up, right up until the eighties, when boys and  weekend jaunts to The Hacienda became somewhat more appealing.  I survived the wilderness years with no Doctor Who, mostly unscathed.   Then, much to my trepidation in 2005 Doctor Who returned to TV with an episode called Rose, and Christopher Eccleston as The Doctor.  I was nervous for this new Who, this was going to have to be something very special to win back the press and fans. Doctor Who had become something of a joke before it was cancelled. I wasn’t really convinced about this new Doctor Who when watching Rose, the Autons have never been my favourite monster; I did however love Eccleston as an actor.  I have always liked his earnest face and of course he’s Northern, always a bonus in my book, being Northern lass myself. The End of The World was better and then by the time Dalek aired, a brilliantly written and acted episode I was hooked again, merchandise began to creep back into my home, conventions were attended. Eccleston stayed for one series and then came Tennant.  I loved David Tennant’s Doctor, I loved everything about him and am not ashamed to say I fancied him a little....ok, I fancied him a lot. I was absolutely and completely devastated when it was announced Tenant was to leave, and when they declared Matt Smith as number eleven I knew for certain I wasn’t going to like him.  I discussed this at length to the amusement of family and friends.   He’s too weird, he’s too young, he is NOT the Doctor, who is he? And then came The Eleventh Hour, a wonderfully comedic and touching episode that introduced us to Matt Smith’s Doctor and instantly in his first few minutes on screen I knew he was The Doctor.  The writing is so perfect, so attuned to the nuances of the actor’s personality that within minutes I had quite forgotten the previous regeneration, so consumed was I by the story.  Within minutes I loved the new regeneration just as much if not more than the last.  

One of my main concerns about Matt Smith was his young age, the youngest actor ever to take on the role of The Doctor.  I wasn’t sure one so young could play the space and time travelled Doctor, this Time Lord who had seen and suffered so much, however, I really shouldn’t have worried about this.  You see although The Doctor is 900 years old, the age of his current face is inconsequential, as long as you believe in his experience and the story is good.  After all what is Doctor Who if not a good old fashioned Fairy Tale, and who is The Doctor if not a good old fashioned hero, a good witch, a knight in shining armour, come to slay the dragon, the Dalek or the Weeping Angel.  So if the age of the face is insignificant therefore is not the actual face insignificant, and do we really need a live show to herald the next actor to take on the role? Personally I don’t think so, but of course, I will be watching, will you?

Bitey

In the episode 'Closing Time' the Doctor revists his friend Craig.  This is another episode with some great comic moments.  Craig is played by James Cordon. This episode's monsters are Cybermen and Bitey is the nickname that the Doctor gave to the Cybermat that he re-programmed to cripple the Cyberman.

Apples

 "Can I have an apple? All I can think about. Apples. I love apples. Maybe I'm having a craving. That's new. Never had cravings before"

One of our families most watched episode of Doctor Who is the 'The Eleventh Hour' this is the introductory episode for the Eleventh Doctor played by Matt Smith. The Doctor has just regenerated and finds himself very hungry with new taste buds.  The first person our newly regenerated Doctor meets is a seven year old Amelia Pond and for the first fifteen minutes of the episode they try to find something that the Doctor likes the taste of, much spitting and throwing of food ensues...much to the delight of my 9 year old son.  I have to be honest I was quite disappointed when this scene finished, it is so perfectly written with brilliant comedic moments and a perfect introduction to this new Doctor who appears to be all flailing arms and legs.  

With regards to the apple, he doesn't like it, Amelia tells him that she didn't like apples either until her mum put a smiley face on for her, she does this for the Doctor and he puts it in his pocket and promises to eat it later...

Rescue me Chin Boy and show me the stars.

You may have noticed that Doctor Who returned to our screens a couple of weeks ago after almost a whole 12 months break, apart from the Christmas Special. When I was a young girl and Tom Baker was my Doctor and the series finished, usually with a cliff hanger it was torturous, the weeks and months of waiting for my favourite show to return to my screen were unbearable.  When I was a girl we didn’t have DVD players, we didn’t even have video players, we had no internet, no downloads, , nothing, nada, not a bloody thing but our trusty Doctor Who annuals to keep us going until the next series.  Therefore although in my very first sentence I stated we had waited almost a year for Doctor Who since The Wedding of River Song aired on our screens heralding the end of series 6 it’s not the same as when I was a girl when it really was a Doctor Who free zone for months, now we have repeats on various channels and of course our beloved collection of DVD’s to stop us going into Who cold turkey. Still the excitement was palpable during the summer months, we knew The Doctor was returning in the Autumn scheduling but the BBC kept us guessing about the date until only three weeks before airing.   BAD BBC.

In the break between series I attended the first ever Official BBC Doctor Who Convention, where we were lucky enough to be shown a small teaser trailer for the new series 7, we have had various announcements regarding the leaving of The Ponds (The Doctor’s current companions) and we were introduced to the actress who would be playing the new companion, information is always very sparse, and this is good, as it builds excitement and expectation and also makes for some very interesting Twitter conversations with people trying to second guess the writers.  I’ve mentioned in a previous post how Twitter opened my world to a plethora of folk who felt exactly the same about Doctor Who as I do, this was a marvel to me, having spent my entire life feeling shunned for my love of Sci-Fi here I was surrounded by like minded people who will talk about The Doctor with me until the Adipose come home.  However over my Twitter life I have come to the realisation that there are fans like me who love the show and then there are fans who LOVE the show to such a degree that they take it personally if they don’t like an episode.  I’m all for debate, in fact I like nothing better than trying to get my opinion across but I am aware that that is all it is, MY opinion. 

Take the most recently aired episode for example, Dinosaurs on a Spaceship.  As usual both children were washed and in their pj’s with plenty time to spare, small child on my left, daughter on my right, me sitting in my big cardi in case the small child needed his hiding place.  Now I thoroughly enjoyed the episode, in my mind it was just a jolly good adventure jape, and my Small Child (a boy) well he thought it was the best thing he had ever seen, a perfect boys story, dinosaurs, an Egyptian Queen (who he had just learnt about in school) an adventurer, a daft dad with balls in his pocket and The Doctor acting more silly than ever.  Daughter though, at the end she just turned to me and said ‘well that was a bit rubbish.....still good, but rubbish’  That may sound a bit of a contradiction however I knew exactly what she meant, there are a few episodes that I never ever choose to watch on DVD and some I could act myself I have watched so many times.  However those episodes I choose not to watch, If I happen upon one of those being aired on TV whilst I’m channel hopping, this is where my channel hopping ends.  I know that even though I didn’t like the story very much it’s still Doctor Who and it’s still my favourite show and that there will be nothing on any other channel that I would rather watch.  This is why I found my Twitter experience on Saturday night after airing a little difficult, what I find quite galling and hard to take are people who claim to be fans of the show hurling abuse at writers/directors/producers and other fans.  

Yes, definitely, every single person on this planet has the right to stand up and say ‘I don’t like that’ but during my childhood I was taught manners, I was taught that you should never say anything to anyone that you would not like said to yourself.  There is nothing wrong in going on Twitter and discussing the points in the episode that you don’t like, that’s great, I love debate.   But to go on Twitter and do this and to copy in the writer/director/producer to your tweets, to tell the writer he is rubbish, to personally attack other fans for liking the episode, well put simply that is just rude.  I find that people like this just shout louder the more they are berated, they shout loud and long about their right to voice their opinion, they can not see that their right to voice their opinion does not also give them the right to be personally offensive to others or behave in a bullying manner.  I LOVE Doctor Who with a passion, I can talk about it all day, my house is a veritable delight of merchandise, I love discussing the nuances, the sometimes brilliant writing and the sometimes patchy writing but what I am very much aware of is, that even these patchy stories still totally piss on anything else on television and there is nothing I'd rather watch, and even these not so good stories are still my favourite show in THE world and the bottom line is I am a fan.  

Definition of fan

noun

• a person who has a strong interest in or admiration for a particular sport, art form, or famous person:

Origin:

late 19th century (originally US): abbreviation of fanatic

X is for kissing.

Now considering The Doctor has never had a proper romance in any of his eleven reincarnations he certainly manages to kiss a lot of people.  I have to be honest the past two weeks of blog writing have been a struggle for me, not because I couldn’t think of anything to write but because of things going on in my life that have impeded into what little spare time I have.  Therefore I find myself on the last day of  April and the A to Z blogging challenge with three posts left to complete and very little time to complete them.  Hence my W post was a bit of a cop out with a lot of pictures I fear the last three letters will be in the same vein.  

Back to the kissing...yes, our Doctor certainly likes to throw the lips on people and people tend to surprise him with the odd kiss too.  I figured what better way to show this than well, to simply show it in pictures. 

Photos courtesy of BBC

 X certainly does mark the spot apparently.  

Unbalanced

 

Photo courtesy of BBC

To me the character of Doctor Who always comes across as a somewhat unbalanced, and rightly so given his history.  Unbalanced is good, it adds edge and depth to a character. If you look back over history all of our most endeared and well remembered characters, real or fictional have that eccentricity bordering on madness.  

I think science fiction in general attracts those eccentrics amongst us.  I mean let’s be honest you have to have a brain wired in a certain way to accept without question time travel, monsters that are shaped like pepper pots, creatures made from human fat, a blue box that is bigger on the inside, a sonic screwdriver, regeneration,  living plastic, talking nurse cats, a giant head in a jar..this list is endless but we fans of science fiction never ever think ‘ohhhhh come on, that’s ridiculous’ we simply are drawn into that world without question and let the story telling wash over us like a mothers embrace. 

I for one am grateful that The Doctor is on the edge, it’s a place a lot of us walk daily, most of my friends are unbalanced in varying degrees and I wouldn’t have them any other way.

Bannakaffalatta

 Photo courtesy of the BBC

I have to mention this little guy.  He is amongst the favourites in our house.  He was only ever in one episode.  A Christmas special, which for reasons best kept to myself I didn’t actually get to watch until the following summer on a very sweaty noisy seven hour train journey,  I watched on my phone, even on this tiny screen I loved it, it’s Who, what’s not to love.  I have since of course watched on a larger screen many times with my children or indeed without, I’m not fussy. 

Bannakaffalatta, a Zocci was a tiny spikey red dude in a tuxedo from the planet Sto,  who many years ago had suffered an accident, the details of which we are never made privy too.  Due to the injuries he suffered he was in fact mostly cyborg, a fact he kept hidden because of the terrible shame he felt.  Cyborgs were discriminated against on his home planet.  Now I’m not going to give a run down of the episode, I simply want to tell you of the wonderful Bannakaffalatta and how his selflessness saved the day.  Bannakaffalatta had a crush on Astrid and because of how he felt for her was able to open up to her at a crucial moment about his cyborgness. The monsters in this episode were ‘The Heavenly Host’   robotic servants programmed by Max Capricorn to kill everyone aboard the Starliner, Titanic.  Bannakaffalatta was able to use his cyborg make-up and the very core of his being, an electromagnetic power source to destroy The Heavenly Host thus saving others but sacrificing himself.   This self sacrifice is a running theme with Who and one I’m grateful for, we should have more of this in our world.  It's a credit to the writers that they manage to get this message of selflessness over to the viewers without it ever appearing syrupy.  However, I’m not so grateful to the writers for being turned into a human sniffing, bubbling snot ball on a train, but this is Who we are talking about and not an episode goes by where I am not laughing one minute and crying the next.    I love it, I love every single drop of emotion that is eeked out of me by the script writers.

 Bannakaffalatta I salute you.

Allons-y

Photo copyright Lisa Hazlegreaves

The Doctor Who catch phrase is a very personal thing.  I’m pretty sure when Moffat sits down with his pen and paper, or more likely his laptop to start writing that he doesn’t think right then I must slip ‘Geronimo’ into the script at least once this week and maybe a ‘run’ or two.  These things just happen like jam on toast or a dog chasing a cat.  They evolve over time, like The Doctor himself.  Now I’m not going to start looking back over the many reincarnations of The Doctor and their many catch phrases, because...well,  because I’ve got a blog a day to write for the next 26 and I also have some semblance of a life that involves feeding my children, my cats and sometimes my partner, if he’s been good.
 

But let’s have a little look at the past three doctors, number nine was Christopher Eccleston and if I’m honest I don’t think he played the role long enough to have any solid repeated word or phrase.  I do remember him saying fantastic rather a lot and of course this was the series that ‘run’ became forged into our brains as more of a description of the whole series than a catch phrase.  Number ten was Tennant, his was most definitely ‘Allons-y’ and our current Doctor has ‘geronimo’ Some of my favourite phrases from Doctor Who are never even uttered by the Doctor, my all time favourite being ‘hello sweetie’ from  the lovely River Song, who I don’t mind admitting I have a little bit of a girl crush on,  especially when she’s pointing a gun at my eye stalk.  It would also seem to be the case that the enemies of the Doctor have their own unique catch phrases. A lot of these are so intrinsically programmed into our brains now that even non Who fans can probably tell you who says ‘exterminate’ or indeed ‘you will be deleted’ this shows the gravity of the show, how over fifty years it has become wound into the fabric of our culture, not everyone may love Doctor Who but everyone has heard of it, and everyone can tell you what a Dalek is. 

In my very first sentence I said that the Doctor Who catch phrase was a personal thing.  I really believe this is the case, it’s not like Only Fools and Horses with Del Boy’s ‘this time next year we will be millionaires’ this was a very definite repeated phrase meant to drill into your brain to remind you of the show.  With Doctor Who and the things he says ‘Come along Pond’ for example, the viewers take these for their own, I’m guessing that if I got a room full of Whovians together and asked them for catch phrases we would all come up with the one or two obvious ones but there will always be certain lines that touch people in different ways and that to them is the prhase that reminds them of The Doctor, and that to me is what good writing is all about, the ability to mould to personal tastes, for people to take out of it what they need...I’m hoping for comments after this, lots of angry Whovians aggrieved because I didn’t mention their favourite catch phrase from the show, this is my point exactly.  Doctor Who is personal to you, to me, to everyone.

Allons-y.