Hello, my dearest audiences, welcome to Doctor Who Experience! I appreciate your attention a lot for my blog about Doctor Who. In my first blog, I will try to gently introduce my website and the show Doctor Who if you have not seen it yet.
1. An Introduction to the Doctor Who Experience
A few things about myself first. I am Huang Ziheng from China, you can call me Alex. Currently, I live in Poland. This website is a school project, however, I do plan to update this website afterwards as Doctor Who is a genuine interest of mine along with Mathematics, Music and Physics. I named the website as “Doctor Who Experience” due to three chief elements of my website.
The main focus of the website is my analyses and thoughts of televised Doctor Who stories. Feel free to comment and share your opinions below under each review. Please be kind enough to correct my factual mistakes when I make one.
After reviewing the story, I would rate it according to my arguments in the corresponding analyses. The results are collected in a list that is simultaneously updated with the blogs. People who haven’t seen it can use it as a reference.
My original thought for the third feature of the site was a narrative reconstruction (with some pictures and the original audio) of the Doctor Who missing episodes. Loose Canon is a popular form of reconstruction but is unfortunately barely watchable. A bit more about the missing episodes are mentioned later. Long story short, I abandoned this idea because I found some narrative reconstruction issued by Doctor Who officially. It is a better idea to create a separate page of resource a viewer need to experience Doctor Who.
2. Why was Doctor Who chosen to be the theme of my website?
First of all, what is Doctor Who even about? Well, it is about the encounters of an alien who is known as the Doctor travelling through time and space in the TARDIS. The TARDIS is his time machine which looks like a police box that is bigger on the inside than the outside.
Doctor Who is a unique show considering its potential. I know it is already quite a successful show, but just to clarify this a bit, I mean its potential in new stories which it can deliver to us. Any intriguing scenarios can be constructed to explore human nature, or the morality of the Doctor, or just really anything the screenwriter deems fit. While generally classified as a science-fiction TV show, Doctor Who possesses the ability to cross genres with ease.
What keeps Doctor Who alive for decades is its courage to take on new ideas from time to time. These experiments aren’t always successful. But the failures can provide you as much insight as to the successful ones. To observe and experience Doctor Who, I have decided a blog may be the best way of doing so. There are some questions which I want to discover the answer myself like the following.
Does it stand the test of time? Many episodes are even in black and white, a little bit of logic will tell you the special effect then must be cheap-looking (even silly to some extends). Is it outdated by our modern standard of television?
Why do I like a certain story? What elements does it have? Is it executed well? There is a deep relationship between scenes, characters and so on that I want to discover on this journey of blog writing. Other than having a dive into the stories, I wish to practise my writing at the same time. This is a great skill to have in the future… That sums the motivation up basically.
As a warm-up, you will see my first actual text regarding Doctor Who below. The history of Doctor Who. If you don’t know what kind of show it is or are simply interested in the history, then please keep reading. Knowing the history of Doctor Who certainly adds a level of appreciation to it. If you are familiar with it, then I guess you can get straight down to business into exploring my site.
3. A Brief History of Doctor Who
Doctor Who is a British science-fiction TV series which has been running for 56 years since its first transmission on the 23rd, November in 1963. I have a little quiz here for you: can you recall an event which happened a day before that? (Hint: it was quite important and uh… depressing.)
It was the JFK assassination.
After Kennedy had been assassinated, the news spread over all media of various type. And, not surprisingly, viewing figure of most television programmes at that time dropped drastically.
As a new, experimental show, Doctor Who was impacted severely. Thanks to the first producer, Verity Lambert, An Unearthly Child which is the first transmitted episode got a rerun on TV.
That certainly caught the attention of many. Afterwards, it grew quite popular gradually. Many important events have happened in Doctor Who since then. The first regeneration of the Doctor, the first appearance of the nemesis (the Daleks, the Cybermen and the Master), the first usage of the sonic screwdriver to name a few.
It shone for 26 years and then something terrible fell upon Doctor Who. It was the cancellation of the show…(How come it is still running?). After that, an attempt, more specifically a movie, was made in 1996 to revive the series, but it failed to do so.
Fortunately, the Whovians (If you are not familiar with this term, it simply means the fans of Doctor Who ) did not give up. The second attempt of revival was made in 2005. Finally, Doctor Who came back to life from its grave. Actually, an unusual feature of the Doctor facilitated the show’s revival and enabled it to connect to the “classic version” seamlessly.
While new episodes are produced annually, BBC is trying to find some lost episodes or complement the Doctor Who archive by animating the lost stories (luckily, we do have all soundtracks which made the full-scale computer animations possible). Contemporary shows before the mid-70s faced the same fate. BBC claimed there wasn’t enough room to store all stories, so some tapes had to be wiped and reused.
Recently, a different approach to the lost stories was employed in addition to the usual computer animation. We currently have one and possibly will have only one of those: a remake with actors who look similar. It is a special case, so I do not expect more of it.
A question may have arisen in your head. If the mother-tapes were wiped (and they didn’t have DVDs, right?), then it must be impossible to find them anywhere on earth. In fact, stories were found worldwide. For instance, the Third Doctor’s era is now complete as a result of those discoveries, and the existence of much of the first and second Doctor’s era as well. The sources of copies vary. That increased the difficulty in recovering them. People are looking for them in junkyards, in Africa, everywhere. Searches for those copies usually end without any result.
Fans weren’t exactly sitting around neither. Loose cannons is a reconstructed version of the missing episodes using surviving footage and pictures with the help of basic computer animation.
Many novels, audiobooks, comic books, issues of magazines and even spin-off series were produced since its first transmission. Numerous menacing yet iconic villains, curious planets were introduced ever since. Doctor Who has grown into a massive franchise. Doctor Who is now an integrated part of the British pop culture.
There is so much to talk about in greater detail, which is what I will do in my blog. I am thankful for your attention. See you in the review of An Unearthly Child!
Doctor Who Experience 
