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