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
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