Okay, so after thinking Doctor Who was a low-budget, cheesy sci-fi series not worthy of my attention for my entire life, I've become interested in the BBC's latest 3 series of the show. Torchwood also premiered on BBCA this week and I'm willing to give it a shot.

Who was the best Doctor? I've seen three of them--Tom Baker, Christopher Ecclestson, and the current David Tennant.

The Baker era was too cheesy for me. Tennant is too jolly and about as edgy as Richard Hammond on Top Gear. I prefer Eccleston. He seemed to have the best balance of seriosness and irreverance.

Your thoughts (on Doctor Who, not that I'm a nerd).

I prefer Tennant, the tenth doctor to all the others, though he does suffer from bouts of melodrama. Eccleston (the ninth) was also excellent, but didn't get a long enough run to develop his version of the character. After that Sylvester McCoy (the seventh) wasn't too bad, but the show at the time still suffered from cheesy writing and poor effects. Baker (the fourth) was enjoyable, but if you didn't grow up watching doctor who he wouldn't be.

I never saw a lot of the others.

Peter Davidson was the Doctor for two years after Tom Baker (who I liked a lot), and he was pretty good. A good point about not growing up with them, as I saw some of the earlier ones recently and they are truly shite.

I'd go with Ecclestone. Torchwood is terrible, by the way.

Yeah, I got called away before I could mention that Torchwood is shite.

The new Doctor Who is completely different from all the older shows, if you didn't like it with Tom Baker, you probably won't like anything before 2005. The 1996 movie with Paul McGann was done in a more modern fashion though, but played more like an American 'made-for-tv' movie than British sci-fi (to the extent they had Eric Roberts as The Master).

The other option is to look out for the Dalek/Cybermen themes, which I've always preferred to the stand alone stories.

The recent three (I think) parter with the Cybermen taking on the Daleks (series 1 of Tennant, I believe) is the best Dr. Who I've had the pleasure to watch, it was brilliant. The fact that it was written by a gay bloke really shines through, the bitchy dialogue between them is really funny. I haven't watched any of the latest series on BBC1 over here, but I'll catch them on DVD soon, hopefully.

In fact:

 /comics/Smurph/406191/

Hi everybody!

I reckon the Doctor Who you grow up with is always your favourite, which is why I have fond memories of Peter Davidson and to some extent Sylvester McCoy even though the scripts were going to the fucking toilet walls at that point.

Give Tom Baker a chance, watch the one with Sutehk in it. Sure he's thesping it up a lot but he is the benchmark Dr. Who, simply because he made a lot of those laborious 70s scripts watchable with his "acting". None of the others until the relaunch could really act round the tired scripts.

Some of the Jon Pertwee ones are good, I seem to remember liking Planet of the Daleks if you can catch that one.

And as for Russel T Davies, class writer, bottom line, and it needed one to bring the whole concept back up to speed. Watch "The Second Coming" mini series (it's not Doctor Who) - funny enough starred Christopher Ecclestone for an example of how good his writing is, without having the clunky camp references he feels he has to throw in all the time in his sci-fi work.

 

To be honest I think the RTD written episodes of Dr Who are some of the poorest. He seems to overreach himself trying to make his season enders really "big" and then coming up with crap cop-out ways of resolving them.

The best one this year was the one with the creepy statues which had it's own internal logic and stuck to it.

 

 

Ah, yes, that's the one I remember.

The scarf, that is.