About Time

I have enjoyed the About Time series published by Mad Norwegian Press from the beginning and have commented on it before.

One of the interesting things is watching the book series evolve along with the new television series -- one thinks that there is nothing new to be said about classic Doctor Who, but this book is identifiably of its time. You can tell -- while reading it -- that the book was finished between The Last of the Time Lords and Time Crash.

The volume that just came out -- Volume Six -- is about the end of the classic series. One change with this book -- as opposed to the others co-written with Lawrence Miles -- is that by having only one voice, it is much more one person's view. And with the end years of John Nathan-Turner on the line, that is definitely something that this volume lacks -- though they try to recover with Rob Shearman rising to the defence of The Two Doctors.

One of my other complaints is that in Tat Wood's desire to demonstrate how much Americans don't know about the UK, he also frequently shows a lack of understanding about the USA. It's a bit odd for a series that was published by a company in the middle of America --- but perhaps that is why this is so present in the book. For example, it was perfectly logical for the producers of the TV Movie to assume that the FOX movie of the week audience wouldn't be familiar with Doctor Who.

Of course, many of the problems with the TV Movie are still very well identified -- and the TV Movie is interesting in so far as it influenced the new series; both in "this is what you do now" -- romantic tension between the leads is more or less inevitable now -- but in also all of the ways that the new series avoided the traps of the TV Movie.

One of the nice things about the new TV series being such a massive success is that both the final phases of the JN-T era and the TV Movie can now be looked at with some perspective -- neither are "the end" of Doctor Who. And this book takes advantage of that perspective -- you can see it pointed out how much the last era of the classic series was struggling to become something not at all unlike the television series made in Cardiff today. While the TV Movie is slated in About Time, I think it shares with the Cartmel era that sort of struggle -- of trying how to make a "modern" Doctor Who series.

One of the things with the modern era of television commentary is that we're of course already seeing loads of commentary on the new series. But the really relevant commentary about the Russell T Davies era of Doctor Who will come when we move on to the next era. I suspect we'll start to see the first works covering multiple years of the new series era after Series Four, or perhaps after the specials to follow. It certainly feels like we'd be moving to a new era after that point, even if both Russell T Davies and David Tennant stay on past the specials.