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

I probably shouldn't write this but I'm going to.

I thought I should post something today as a response to a bit of cyber bullying I have been at the brunt of.  However the more I thought about it, the less apt I was to do this, I certainly don't want to draw attention to this man or increase traffic to his site but I still want to at least mention it.

As anyone who reads my blog is aware I am a massive Doctor Who fan, in fact a fan of anything science fiction/fantasy, but my first love was and always will be The Doctor.  I've already blogged about twitter and how this medium introduced me to many other Whovians and has allowed me to discover brilliant blogs like Cultden and participate in live webshows like TalkingWho which all feed my love of the Doctor with facts and pictures and interesting articles.

I'm also a bit of a techie, although this label is dropping slightly as I haven't been in the business for about six years (this is a long time in the technology world)  I have given talks in schools and to my own children about the dangers of being online and the threats that are out there, I have told them the obligatory, never give your real name, address etc. On Twitter before I follow back a new follower to my account or indeed add an account I have discovered, I check out profiles and previous tweets, this is about as much as you can do on twitter to verify who someone is.  My 14 year old daughter loves twitter, it is her window into the world of Doctor Who and Sherlock and the music that she likes (the less mentioned of this music the better, we have differing tastes here)  She is a very sensible girl, not only top of her class but the highest ranking student in her entire school, beating students that are three years older than her in all exams.  She is a published writer and an accomplished musician.  I wouldn't normally divulge this sort of personal information about my kids to the Internet either here on my blog or on twitter as I feel it comes over as bragging and you don't need to know this, but I want to give you, my reader a little background, because lets face it you don't know me from Adam.  My daughter has a phone, an ipod, a laptop, I trust her enough to allow her to use twitter without supervision, from a very early age she has been tech savvy, even now she will come to me before using a new website that hasn't been recommended by myself or school, if she is unsure of anything or finds anything at all suspicious she asks first.  I mention her super brain so that you will see she's not some little girl with no common sense. She also is unaware that when I do her fortnightly 'housekeeping' on her laptop I check everything, she forgets her mum is a techie sometimes.  Therefore I know exactly what she is up to without having her feel untrusted or make her feel like a child when she is becoming a young adult.

So to the reason for this post, a few days ago as is compulsory in our house after work and school we all take half an hour of personal space, to chill out from our days, for my small child this involves Phineas and Ferb, a glass of milk and a few chocolate biscuits, for my daughter and I it's checking our twitter/emails with a cup of tea.  We all sit together in our family room, daughter and I showing each other interesting posts or pictures on The Doctor that the various people we follow have posted throughout the day.  My daughter was a little unsure of a link and asked if I followed the person concerned (we have many of the same people on our feeds as we share the same interests) I did follow this person I remembered adding them many months ago because of the name, I thought it was a good name, I knew that I would have checked out profiles and tweets I said go for it.  This is when I felt stupid.  She was horrified by being directed to a site not of pictures of other Who fangirls like she is but of pornographic pictures.  At this point I re checked the profile of the person concerned and yes, this person appeared from his profile to be a legitimate Doctor Who fan site, this is where I got somewhat angry.  I have nothing against porn, I have nothing against people linking to porn from Twitter what I take massive objection to is a Twitter account that is quite clearly aimed at getting Doctor Who fans to follow it, linked to websites with pornographic pictures of girls. I tweeted to this man to simply ask him to reword his Twitter profile so that young Whovians who came across his account would not automatically add him thinking he was a Whovian, this conversation became increasingly nasty and personal to me so I left the conversation.  I could feel myself getting upset and angry and frustrated by my 140 character limit.  This was not a conversation I was going to win.

Tweeting that I was crying and upset was only going to add fuel to his fire and make me appear irrational, this also isn't the way I am as a rule and don't like the thought of people thinking I'm some emotional woman.  I stayed off Twitter for a day as I knew that I wouldn't respond in a rational way.  I came back onto Twitter to find this man had researched me and other users that had become involved in the conversation and had written a blog about me taking tweets out of context and using other blogs that I follow as weapons.  This initially upset me very much, but mainly because of the emotional state I was in due to a test I had endured that day and nothing to do with this man.  He has copied and pasted a paragraph from a blog I follow (a blog that is Over 18 verified) and used this to say what a harridan I am.  I would like to know how I am responsible for what others write on their blog. He has since written another blog in response to some comments that were left for him.  Not by me, not by anyone I know, saying he will take the blog post down if I apologise to him on Twitter.  I have nothing to apologise for and I've got to be honest since he wrote that blog about me the traffic to my blogs has increased massively. I don't know who reads his blog or mine for that matter.  What I do know is that the people who actually know me personally are the only ones that really matter and anyone who believes anything online, my blogs included is taking a bit of risk with their trust. I do not have to justify myself to anyone, neither do I have to prove or disprove anything this silly man has said.  I did nothing more than ask him to reword his Twitter profile to make the thousands of under 18 Whovians aware of the things he would be posting.  He has turned it into a personal attack of me and my parenting skills and also chastised me because of a single paragraph on one of the blogs I follow.  So dear reader take heed one day someone may hold you responsible for what I have written here.

So readers after deciding not to write anything I appear to have written a very long winded post about nothing much at all.  I mainly wanted to apologise to anyone who follows me on Twitter for my emotional outbursts the other day. 

P.S I had it brought to my attention that the wonderful SFX Magazine had written an article on this man and his dubious behaviour back in March, you may want to check it out.

Z is

Daughter and I on THE actual TARDIS

...the last letter of the alphabet and therefore the last post in my April A to Z blogging challenge. I decided on blogging about Doctor Who because I love watching it, I enjoy talking about it and I wanted hopefully, to maybe introduce or encourage at least one person who hadn’t seen Doctor Who before, to watch an episode.  If I am to believe some of the comments people have left both here and on the links I have posted to my facebook page I think I have achieved that. 

It wasn’t as easy as I had first anticipated.  I prepared the first week’s posts in advance and the second week I managed to get into a bit of routine with my writing.  It all went horribly wrong though in week three when life started getting in the way.  I missed out S totally (I will do this post soon) This last week has been by far the worst, I feel I cheated on more than a few posts.  I haven’t had the time or indeed the brain capacity to write much more than a few lines, if indeed anything at all.  It’s a good job therefore that Doctor Who not only is one of my favourite things to talk about it’s also one of my favourite things to look at, it was very easy for me to find pictures that I loved and post them.  This dear reader is my way of cheating and I apologise, but without having done this I never would have completed my A to Z Challenge.

I’m not going to stop writing about Who, no, no, no.  I am going to take a little time off though, I shall get this life thing sorted once more and then I most certainly will be back.  I have enjoyed writing about Doctor Who and there is so much more to tell you about.  Thank you to everyone who has read my posts this month and to A to Z Challenge for giving me the focus to actually sit down and write. I have thoroughly enjoyed it. 

Whovians unite.

Yana, Professor

Photo courtesy of BBC

Professor Yana was a genius who when we meet him is an old man working with his friend Chantho as a scientist on the planet Malcassairo. They had been working on the Utopia project for seventeen years on his Footprint Impeller to ensure the survival of the Human race.  Professor Yana had been found as a child on the coast of the Silver Devastation after a severe storm, he was naked apart from carrying a broken fob watch.  He had mysteriously suffered from headaches and hearing the sound of drums for his entire life. 

Doctor Who, Martha and Captain Jack come to Malcassairo and Martha spots the Professor’s fob watch and recognises that it is identical to the one The Doctor owns.  Martha knows that the fob watch is actually a Time Lord instrument used as a receptacle to store the very being of a Time Lord when he uses the Chameleon Arch. When the Time Lord does this he becomes human and has no recollection of ever being anything other.  When Professor Yana talks to The Doctor and they talk about the time vortex, this begins to waken memories in Yana’s head and after Martha brings the fob watch to the attention of Professor Yana he feels compelled to open it. 

I remember watching this episode when it aired and the way that Daughter, Small Child and I looked at each other with eyes and mouths wide when we first caught a glimpse of that fob watch. We were aware of exactly what that watch was used for, having seen Tennant's Doctor use it in a previous episode.  We were also remembering the wonderful Face of Boe’s words “You are not alone” this meant that Professor Yana was a Time Lord.

After he opens the watch Professor Yana realises instantly who he is, he is a Time Lord.  However he is also The Doctor’s nemesis and his name is no longer Professor Yana. His name is, The Master.

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.  

Who is your Doctor?

Photos courtesy of BBC

Vashta Nerada

Photo courtesy of BBC

I simply couldn’t do a Doctor Who blog without dedicating a post to this monster.  The Vashta Nerada appeared in a two part story starring the tenth Doctor, David Tennant and it was also the first ever episode in which my favourite lady River Song appeared, and died. Hence why I have an extra level of hatred for this monster.

The Vashta Nerada are a microscopic creature that live in swarms, in shadows.  They are carnivorous and their name actually means ‘the shadows that melt the flesh’ they normally live in forests but when Felman Lux created a Library the size of a planet in the 50^th century he felled the trees that they lived in and therefore these microscopic creatures found themselves in books, in the biggest library in the universe with thousands of people to feed on. 

I love the idea of this monster, who isn’t a little afraid in the dark?  The Doctor says in this episode that it is these creatures that have instilled the fear of the dark into every species, that they are on every planet.  On Earth they are the dust motes you see in the air, but because they are few they are not a threat.  I definitely think that it is the monsters that you can relate to the most that are the most terrifying, and shadows and darkness instil fear in most of us at some stage.  In this story to find out if the shadow in front of him is simply a shadow or a swarm of Vashta Nerada, The Doctor would throw a chicken leg into the shadow, if it was down to the bone in a second flat you can be pretty sure that the Vashta Nerada are hiding. It did creep me out a bit for a while and not much really does that, but I found myself leaving the light on at the bottom of the stairs and on the landing, I came close to carrying chicken legs in my pocket. Of course put the Vashta Nerada together with The Silence, the monster you forget as soon as you stop looking at it and you would no doubt never move from the spot you were sitting in ever again.