Horizon

Graeme, since nobody's commented on your election item yet, can I ask another question related to your self and your self's website? To wit, do you find there's any affinity between your enthusiasms for George Orwell and for Dr. Who?

Not very much. Both are--or should be-- in their own way, quintessentially English, which is part of their charm, though Orwell, I think leans more toward the Music Hall end of Englishness, while Doctor Who leans more toward pantomime.

Speaking of which, I meant to post this to a.b.go a long time ago, but there's a Doctor Who novel by Mags L. Halliday, History 101, that's set in Spain in 1937 and Orwell/Eric Blair features prominently.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/doctorwho/books/history101/

And, of course both of them have people named Peter Davison figuring in somehow!

Thx for this. How does Orwell come into it?

I used to love the old Tom Baker Dr. Who. Especially the ones written by the extremely underappreciated genius Robert Holmes.

But I hated the next one. Peter Davison. Just wasn't the same after that.

Did Holmes write anything else outside the show that could still be gotten hold of?

I disagree Alan. I think Peter Davison's Doctor is wonderful. But I think any kid who grew up with Tom Baker would be hard pressed to see that. But I agree with you entirely about Holmes, whose genius I would not dispute.

Holmes unfortunately was one of those writers that worked on other people's creations--he wrote for dozens of BBC series from the sixties through to the eighties-- and never his own. The closest he came was the series The Nightmare Man, which was, even then, an adaptation from a novel. But just about any of the Doctor Who stories he did with Tom Baker are wonderful-- smart, funny, satirical pastiches with the wittiest dialogue on TV. Bliss.

The Doctor Who fans in my high school agreed Tom Baker was the one and only real Doctor. One girl knitted a huge multicolored scarf like his. It must have taken her months.

Well, perhaps hate is too strong a word for Davison. There were some very good series with Davison as I recall, but after watching Tom Baker for a few years I couldn't adjust to the young, clean cut version of the Doctor.

Let's not forget Holmes's four valiant efforts for the ultra-cheesey but occasionally excellent Blake's 7. If you can get past the Abba-in-space costumes and hideous production values, several episodes from the last season or two are worth watching. Unfortunately, to understand what's going on you have to watch the rest of it.

Speaking of knitting scarves, why do these TV shows attract such dedicateded fans? Even today, maybe 25 years after Blake's 7 went off the air, you can still find dozens of fan sites offering such attractions as a hand-puppet reenactment of an episode in streaming video and a library of songs about the series. Am I wrong to fear these people?

I didn't think Holmes' episodes of Blake's 7 were that good, though the ending of "Orbit" where Avon is willing to dump Vila from a plummeting spacecraft to get rid of ballast was genuinely unsettling.

As to why these shows attract such dedicated fans--of which I am one (to Doctor Who, though I liked Blake's 7)-- I think the answer is simple: British telefantasy's ability to capture that combination of drama, panto, the absurd and the imaginative strikes a chord with people and is hardly ever done these days. That's why I can't wait for Russell T Davies to bring back Doctor Who in 2005.

Dr Who fans are nuts. The actress in my play Virginia Plain had been in about 2 episodes of the show in 1965 but people turned up gagging with autograph books.
In the dressing room one evening she was told there were more Dr Who fans in the lobby.
"Fucking inadequates," she growled. She was good on the BBC at that time: 'everyone was pissed, darling, after lunch, every day.'