Remembering the Muted Doctor Who 40th Anniversary

Paul McGann as the Doctor

In our continuing but loosely-defined run up to the Doctor Who 50th anniversary, we cast our minds back 10 years in this week’s podKast to the 40th anniversary. Yes, there was a 40th anniversary of our favourite show, but you’d be hard-pressed to recall anything particularly significant about it.

Christian Cawley, James McLean and Brian Terranova give it a go, however, mentioning Big Finish audio Zagreus, Scream of the Shalka and even 35th anniversary novel The Infinity Doctors by Lance Parkin.

Before we make it there, however, we mull over Peter Davison’s recent comments about companions.

Look out too for this week’s recommendations, including Summer Falls and Other Stories, as featured in the past two runs of Doctor Who.

Ready? Hit play!

Shownotes

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4 thoughts on “Remembering the Muted Doctor Who 40th Anniversary

  1. It would be nice to watch Doctor Who on the big screen, as I’ve seen Star Trek and Star Wars that way, so round out my sci-fi cinema trifecta. But sadly the closest theater I know of that’s will be showing it is in Altanta, Georgia, which would mean hours and hours of driving, just to go see a movie. I have to wonder how they decided on the theater distribution here in America. I mean, Orlando is only an hour away from me, why can’t one theater there have got it?

    You guys do make a point, that peter was probably referring more to his own era. They definitely put a lot of constraints on the Doctor ans companions then that didn’t allow them the freedom to expand much on the characters, but you still don’t need sexual tension to create chemistry. While the Eleventh Doctor still flirts with people sometime, I enjoyed that Moffat scaled the romance elements back so that the Doctor still sees human stuff like that as scary and embarrassing (hence his trying to escape Amy’s advances early on and being flustered at the idea that his companion had sex aboard the TARDIS).

    I remember listening to Zagreus back in the day, and while it was fun at the time, I’m not so enamored of it anymore. And for me, it wasn’t really the idea of the previous Doctors playing other characters, it was more how it tried to make the Time Lords more villainous. I remember Colin’s vampire character saying that they were peaceful and fed on cattle blood, and the Time Lords were the aggressors in the vampire war, which is in complete conflict with how they are portrayed on screen in State of Decay. Its this kind of radical revisionist history I don’t like. Yes, sometimes its good to blur the lines and say some alien species is not necessarily evil, but to make vampires that sympathetic is something I think best left to others like Joss Whedon. It doesn’t fit in Doctor Who.

  2. The main thing I remember about the 40th (apart from Shalka ) , was watching the Doctor Who weekend on Uk Gold , not so much the repeats but the mini documentaries in between the episodes which ranged from the interesting to the completely fatuous.

  3. I remember enjoying the Webcast of Shada that year as well as part of my 40th celebrations. Was that not considered a 40th special as well?? Or was there a reason that was just viewed as a ‘normal’ Big Finish Web release?

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