Re-connecting with Doctor Who's televisual past in recent months has given me lots to think about. As of yesterday's viewing of the Black Guardian trilogy, companion Turlough's controversial 'Kill the Doctor' introduction to the series, it has now given me a moral choice to make very similar to that of Turlough's at the end of Enlightenment.
.jpg)
Piracy vs A Pirate Ship: The thematic link writes itself
For those unfamiliar with that classic episode it tells the tale of a race around our solar system by a flotilla of space-faring vessels made to resemble the wooden sailing triumphs of various stages of Earth's history. The officers of each vessel are all mysterious and powerful aliens, each crew hoping to win the fabled prize at the end of the course, Enlightenment itself. The Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison, my Doctor) and his crew, Vislor Turlough and feisty/whiny, Australian air-hostess Tegan Jovanka, become embroiled when the White and Black Guardians - super-powerful beings in their own right - both appear on the TARDIS, the White Guardian warning that the prize may be much more than it seems...
In the end it comes down to a choice between Turlough betraying the Doctor on the one hand, to be rewarded by "ultimate power", or his ultimately freeing himself from the Black Guardian's thrall on the other. Turlough chose well, as we all knew he would. I only hope I can show the same strength of character.
I adore Doctor Who. Very nearly as much as Transformers, which for anyone who knows me says A LOT. Both franchises have been inextricably intertwined with my life since my very earliest memories and continue to bring me enormous pleasure. However ('Who-ever', hehe) my love of Doctor Who was allowed to lie dormant by comparison with those Transforming mechanoids. I avidly watch the new series, of course, but that's pretty much where it stopped...until recently. Until the day I spotted The Five Doctors DVD for a crisp £5 on Amazon and a surge of nostalgic memories overwhelmed me into purchasing it on the spot. Since then, well, I've decided I'd very much like to own the rest of the series, please, thank you very much. In fact, not owning anything more than the first three seasons of Nu-Who is, by my very geeky collecting standards, a bewildering ommission.
Here's where the choice comes in; To Pirate, or not to Pirate!
The entire series is available for download in the, ah, less regulated corners of the Internet. Coming in at an eye-watering 230Gb, it would probably take months to completely download but that's an acceptable effort for a prize of that magnitude, for any fan worth his salty biscuits. The alternative, the 'White' choice, is to slowly and painstakingly track each DVD release down and spend my hard-earned upon them.
Having watched several of the DVDs it really is no contest. I'm going to buy them all. And here's why:
Not my DVD collection, by the way. Not yet...
If there's one thing the BBC know after decades of 'making do'(1) with our TV license fees(2) it is how to give value for money. 2|entertain, the wholly owned subsidiary of BBC Worldwide, have worked very very hard on their DVD releases in two distinct ways.
First, they squeeze in as much extra content as they can conceivaby fit on a DVD. The usual plethora of commentaries and interviews with the actors and programme makers (an overwhelming number of whom are eager to come back time and again (ho ho) to share their memories), short documentaries about different aspects of the Doctor Who phenomenon (Mawdryn Undead came with a fascinating and ultra-nostalgic piece on the rise of Doctor Who on VHS, and the differences between Fans then and Fans now), shooting scripts, storyboards, PDFs...the lists are practically endless. But that's fairly de riguer for this genre, although most companies are perhaps not quite as meticulous or generous about it as the BBC.
The second thing that 2|entertain do with their releases is perhaps the most insipring, the factor that has me convinced into making myself significantly poorer over the coming year: they care for their subject material. As a baseline this means cleaning up the quality to as high a standard as they can, broadcast quality at the very least. Picture and sound are crisped and perfected on every DVD. But for the more special releases, the more popular and succesful stories, they go the extra mile - and then a mile or two even beyond that - by looking closely at what they have, recognising weak points, and in many cases, replacing them with something that works better.
I imagine I can hear a huge cry from assembled fandom, as if a million voices cried out...and were suddenly outraged! Yes, in the modern era of Lucas-ian computer-aided butchery of classic properties ('butchery' is the best word for the damage George Lucas has done to his original trilogy) this could well give cause for considerable concern. But relax, O ye frantic one, the BBC is not driven by the same twisted combination of autistic auterism that Sir Flannel Bullfrog-Neck is. Certainly not in what I've seen so far, anyway. It also helps enormously that where 2|entertain do make these alterations they also never fail to offer the original version in the same package, letting you - the customer - choose which one you prefer! Good lord, the very idea!
The Third Doctor practises his Venusian Karate 'Suck-face' while companion Jo Grant fights a sudden compulsion to strip naked...
Day of the Daleks, a 1970s Third Doctor adventure of some notoriety, recently received a 'special edition' that not only re-edited and shot some new scenes for the ending to include many more Daleks and soldiers fighting and dying in the final battle (including shooting scenes back at the original location!), not only went through the entire serial and tidied up/modernised many of the slightly ropey-looking effects (and some of the very ropey ones as well) but ALSO - and this is the thing that earns a standing ovation from me - used modern Dalek voice actor supremo, Nicholas Briggs, to redo the entirety of the Dalek vocal work! The original Dalek voices were surprisingly awful and had long been derided by fans. The result: this adventure now sparkles and holds its head up extremely high in my small but growing collection.
In the Black Guardian trilogy, both Mawdryn Undead and Terminus were granted new CGI re-edits that replaced many of the dodgy and/or painfully cheap effects from the original production. The result, while not completely succesful, is much cleaner, slicker and less jarring to modern audiences (which has got to be the prime reason behind any such restoration work - hook the young-un's!). Enlightenment, on the other hand, was completely re-edited into a feature-length version of itself - no chapters - with masterful CGI blended superbly to the already gorgeous photography. Scenes were trimmed, re-orderd, and even lengthened as appropriate, all by the original director invited back to give one last polish to her work. What's even more astonishing is that the budgets for these restorations are usually pitiful; the team behind the changes to Day of the Daleks all made that point in their interviews, and you could see them shaking their heads in astonishment at what they actually managed to achieve, bless 'em!
NB: An artists impression of the final battle, NOT footage from the reconstruction!
THIS, George Lucas, is how restoration should be done, with as much respect for the source material and your fans as you can muster. This is also, bizarrely enough, the only proven way to defeat the piracy beast, to ensure consumers continue to open their wallets. Don't give people an excuse to show you their middle fingers and you will continue to make money. It's staggering how few people and companies understand this.
Of course, Paramount did some similar work to its classic Star Trek properties too: the special edition of The Motion Picture only served to enhance one of my very favourite films, and their new-CGI treatments of the original series was apparently well received (not that I've watched them). Quite why Lucas is such a thug to his own babies is something I won't get into today; the subject has been covered in exhaustive detail by many others you'll find in the most cursory of Google searches.
So to bring this post to a close, I would implore each and every Doctor Who fan out there to give serious consideration to not pirating the series. Or if you do, buy the damn DVDs as well! The BBC is not especially well funded, and has been under constant attack from successive Governments who believe an independent voice in the media wilderness is a highly dangerous thing for their tawdry interests. The BBC needs the money to keep working as hard as they can to ensure the legacy of Doctor Who continues for many more years, something I'm sure we'd all like to see. 'The Beeb' is far from perfect, my relationship to it being complicated at the best of times, but looking at the huge range of media now available detailing the adventures of our beloved Time Lord - including the vast range of books and Big Finish audio adventures - they currently work exceptionally hard to keep us rabid fans satisfied. If, like me, you lived through the dark times of the 80s when the Beeb's management actively tried to kill the show you understand that such support cannot be guaranteed to continue forever. We really should be rewarding that effort, doing our small part to help keep the show alive.
Eternally yours, sailing toward Enlightenment. Thanks for listening.
- - - - - - - - - -
(1): They're barred from accepting money from external advertisers so they really do understand how to make every penny work for the greater good.
(2): The tax that every citizen of the UK is required by law to pay for the privilege of being allowed to watch any form of transmitted visual content on any piece of capable technology. Quite how that definition keeps getting broadened to include new technology is exceptionally cunning on their part, and endlessly frustrating for everyone who chafes at being threatened with huge fines for not paying a tax we've never chosen to pay, that the BBC cutely euphemises as "The unique way the BBC is funded".
My Opera
