Friday 27 June 2014

Time, Space and Saturday Teatime prologue

This is a project I've been meaning to get around to for years: a full watch-through of classic Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child to the 1996 TV Movie stopping at all stations.

Why am I doing this? Well, I'd bet my view of the new series would be different if I'd watched it in random order over the course of over half my life. I saw my first Doctor Who story (Planet of the Daleks, as it happens) in 1992 when I was nine and watched the recently rediscovered The Enemy Of The World three weeks ago. Aside from that one unreleased episode of The Underwater Menace it took me 21 years to experience the complete canon in no real order and at the whim of the BBC's video and DVD schedule.

So now I have the chance: the very-nearly-almost complete canon of surviving episodes on shiny disc and a full set of Loose Cannon missing episode reconstructions. As I say, I've seen it all before but never in order, the way a series is supposed to be experienced.

As a project this is, of course, inspired and indebted to those who have gone before: Robert Shearman and Toby Hadoke's Running Through Corridors (which someday might even reach its second volume), Hannah J. Rothman's Twitter Who (which recently did), Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood's About Time and Philip Sandifer's TARDIS Eruditorum (currently hosted at his blog Philip Sandifer Writer). I heartily recommend all of them.

Much as I love Sandifer's essays its Rothman's approach I intend to imitate. This here is one fan's journey through 697 episodes of Doctor Who, seeing how I experience it as a series rather than as isolated stories.

And tomorrow we begin, at that mysterious junkyard at 76 Totter's Lane...


Next Episode: An Unearthly Child

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