Well, you could try moving to Australia...MerakSpielman said:
The ABC here have just started rebroadcasting the entire series, from the beginning, Monday to Thursday each week. For people like me, it's been a great blast of nostalgia, bringing back memories of growing up in the Seventies with Doctor Who on every weeknight at 6 pm... 
For all the information you could possibly want about the show, you should go straight to the official BBC website, http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/doctorwho/. As you've noted, there's no overarching series-long storyline (how could there be, for a series spanning 26 years?MerakSpielman said:
), so if you're just starting out exploring the series, you should look at a variety of different eras in its history and get a feel for which sorts of stories you do and don't care for.The thing about Doctor Who, as opposed to just about any other series, is how different the individual stories are to each other -- over the 26 seasons, dozens of different writers, directors, producers, script editors, and regular cast pulled the series in every direction, without any real overall plan (beyond "let's hope we make it to the end of the season before the money runs out..."
). If you watch a particular story and don't much like it, just go on to the next -- chances are it'll be quite different.If you have a DVD player, I strongly recommend checking out the range of stories now available on DVD. It's fair to say that there is simply no TV series that's been better treated on DVD than Doctor Who. The stories look better than ever (in some cases, better than they would have looked when first broadcast), and the range of extras (commentary tracks, production notes, documentaries -- both newly-created, and from the time, and lots of other stuff) is second to none. Check out the website of the Doctor Who Restoration Team to find out about the mind-boggling amount of work that has gone into these DVDs.
Having said all that, I do agree though that it adds something extra to watch the series in order, from start to finish (or as much as it's possible to do so, bearing in mind the missing episodes). Unfortunately the only way to do that at the moment (unless you have a Who-friendly TV station
) is on VHS -- the last VHS tapes are only now being released to complete the range (20 years after it began!).Spearhead from Space is the title of the story. It is indeed a good place to start -- being practically a relaunch of Doctor Who for the 1970s, it relies on almost no prior knowledge. It's available on DVD, and it also happens to be a cracking story that still looks good today (partly because it's the only story in the entire series made entirely on film, as opposed to a mixture of film and videotape).WizarDru said:
Actually, it's the other way around -- the fundamental unit of Doctor Who was always the individual episode. A number of episodes (usually 4 or 6) would be allocated to one writer (or writing team) and made under the control of one director and his production team, to make up a longer story. Part of the art of writing a good Doctor Who story was in structuring the "cliffhanger" at the end of each episode, designed to pull the audience back the following week to find out what would happen next...MerakSpielman said:
I suspect you're referring to the season 21 story Resurrection of the Daleks here. That was scripted and made as a standard 4-parter (i.e. 4 25-minute episodes) but ended up being transmitted in 2 50-minute slots due to scheduling clashes with the 1984 Winter Olympics. (The DVD version restores the story to its proper 4-part form.)MerakSpielman said:
Those numbers are correct, assuming you're ignoring the 6-part Tom Baker story Shada, which was never completed, and treating The Trial of a Time Lord (which took up the whole of season 23) as one story rather than as four interconnected stories. And you're also leaving out the one-off 1996 telemovie starring Paul McGann. Of those 695 episodes, 109 (mostly from seasons 3, 4 and 5) are currently missing.MerakSpielman said:
Unfortunately, it's not a question of the missing episodes being "lost" through being mis-filed or something like that. They were deliberately destroyed as part of a general purge of the BBC Archives in the early Seventies, since (at that time) there was a shortage of storage space and there seemed to be no commercial value in keeping them. Needless to say, the BBC have regretted that decision since the rise of home video...MerakSpielman said:
Quite a few missing episodes have been recovered over the years, mostly from foreign TV stations returning old copies, or turning up in the hands of film collectors. (For lots more info, see the Restoration Team website.) However, it's unlikely, to say the least, that the series will ever be complete again.
As luck would have it, though, we do have the soundtrack for every single episode of the series, even the missing ones! Several fans made off-air audiotape recordings of the episodes as they were originally transmitted, and these are currently being carefully cleaned up and released on CD by the BBC. In addition, some fans have produced ingenious "reconstructions" of the missing episodes using the soundtrack married up to pictures from various sources -- as an example, see the Loose Cannon website.
And finally... for a bit of fun with the, er, not-so-classic moments of Doctor Who, may I recommend you check out my own little site...
Steven
