The Adventures of QueerPenguin

Hell's Teeth, Aunty Vanessa!

FFS - Chris Eccleston has already quit after only one season of the new Dr Who.

I managed to catch the infamous leaked first episode of the new series, and had reservations about it. Being that it was written by QAF's Russell T Davies it was really very, very gay, gayer than Adric and/or Jon Pertwee's maroon velvet jump suits with white frills. And at one point in this ep, a minor character was attacked by - I shit you not - a vicious council bin. The similarity in storyline to Pertwee's opening story, Spearhead from Space, also had me nervous.

What I did appreciate, however, was the new Doctor and companion. Billie Piper was surprisingly likeable and entertaining as Rose and although their interaction was a little less "companionlike" and more "do me on the TARDIS console as the column rises up and down" for DW purists, the potential was obvious.

Eccleston is whining about "typecasting", apparently forgetting that Patrick Troughton, Peter Davison and even Colin Baker had successful and diverse post-DW careers. If you're a good enough actor, and you don't stay in it longer than say 4 seasons, you'll probably escape the evil Typecasto monster. And Eccleston was by far the hottest Dr Who - there was something about him in his leather jacket that really made me wanna boil cute bunny rabbits alive all over the place.

For DW's already extremely fractured narrative, this only makes things worse. Paul McGann was totally wasted in the appalling one-off US telemovie in 1996. This new series opened with an immediate regeneration into Eccleston, forever denying McGann to portray what would have been a memorable DW, providing the Poms stuck to writing the scripts instead of the Yanks. For nerds like me who have waited 8 years - 15 years, really - for the new DW incarnation, this is only more frustrating and anti-climactic. Grrr.

posted by Sam @ Thursday, March 31, 2005