Happy Doctor Who Day!

I'm not going to liveblog (don't want to miss something!) but I'm happy I got up in time to say that it's fantastic that evilfuzzydoom and I are here on my couch about to watch the 50th Anniversary Special at the same time as thousands of fans in Britain and around the world.

My expectations of the episode at the moment are that a) David Tennant and Matt Smith will be fun to watch together b) John Hurt will be good and 3) things will explode. Anything more than that is gravy.

The Day of the Doctor

... aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand this is going behind a cut.

( Spoilers! )

Now I am off to have a shower and go to breakfast.

The Five(ish) Doctors

If you are the kind of person who is sad that The Day of the Doctor didn't involve rounding up all the classic series actors (and I was, a little) then I present to you the magical antidote:

The Five(ish) Doctors

( Please leave a message after the tone. )

An Adventure in Space and Time

... and to cap off a perfect Doctor Who Day, I've now finished watching An Adventure in Space and Time with bride_of_lister which just screened on the ABC here.

It was a beautiful tribute to the early days of the show, and to the woman who made the show fly and the first man to play the role. Jessica Raine shines as Verity Lambert, and I do wish we'd seen a bit more of her at the end. (Although I guess they were going for the parallel with Susan leaving and never being seen again. Well, not by the First Doctor ... but I digress.)

I think they managed to balance Hartnell's harsher side and his warmer qualities, without over-emphasizing either. I loved that they showed his firm insistence on understanding the TARDIS controls and being consistent about which button did what. In a lot of ways, he was the show's very first fanboy. Those last scenes are just heartbreaking. He loved it so much, and unlike every other actor to ever play the role, he had no way of knowing that the part would go on without him and take on a life of its own.

As we were watching, I was saying to B. that it made me wish I had a TARDIS so I could do a Vincent and the Doctor and tell him that, in fifty years, people would be watching a show about him MAKING Doctor Who, because it would become that much of a cultural institution. And that thanks to wonderful science fiction inventions such as 'video tape' and 'DVD' people still see his work. It doesn't matter if there are forty-seven Doctors or a hundred or a thousand, he'll always be first.

( Spoilers. )

Fifty years ago, the BBC invented a narrative perpetual motion machine. Fifty years from now, I'm sure somebody will be making Doctor Who to celebrate. Heaven knows if it will be a TV show on the BBC - heaven knows if there will BE TV shows or a BBC in 2063 - but I have no doubt there'll be something. I'll be eighty-three then, so I can reasonably hope I'll be around to see whatever it is. Maybe we'll have a special with Doctors Twenty-Four and Twenty-Five, followed by a half-hour comedy with Eighteen, Nineteen, Twenty and Twenty-One plus all the guests they could round up, then a movie dramatizing how Russell T. Davies brought the show back in 2005 ...