My Doctor Who Reviews

[purplecat]

The sharp of eye will have noticed I've not been writing much about Doctor Who lately. I think most people who regularly read this journal are aware of the situation so I'll just say I have a bad case of Real Life. I'm still watching Doctor Who, NLSS Child is somewhat voracious, or as much as she can be given I've been absent for a good deal of the past six weeks. I will write about it all in due course so expect a sudden splurge of stuff after Christmas.

However there has been considerable criticism of my style of reviewing on Facebook - specifically a style that involves assuming knowledge of and interest in the production team, including referring to them by initials only on occasion, and which seeks to draw comparisons to classic Who, discuss how modern stories may relate to or effect our understanding of classic Who, or which assumes any interest in or appreciation of classic Who outside the Pertwee and Baker years. To be honest I think this criticism is mostly aimed at sir_guinglain (AKA parrot_knight) who's reviews are considerably more academic in nature than my own. However the fact remains that I assume a certain degree of fannishness from my readers, assume they are aware of the main behind-the-scenes players in the new series and assume they are at least interested enough in classic Who that if some comparison occurs to me then they'll be interested to know about it.

So this has all made me think about about why I write these reviews and, hence, why I write them the way I do. I'm not particularly interested in the kind of Big Name Fan status (prev. referred to as BNFdom) that might follow from running a popular Doctor Who review blog. I know this largely because making sure I'm linked by who_daily is about the extent of the effort I'm prepared to go to to publicise this blog. What I like is having a little excuse to chat about Doctor Who (current or otherwise) on a regular basis and these reviews serve that purpose admirably. There is frequently modest, but not overwhelming discussion about the latest Who episode both on LJ and Facebook (and even occasionally on DreamWidth) kickstarted by my posts. Given I rarely get to watch Who live and so miss all the reaction posts and early reviews they fill what would otherwise be a gap. I'm also not nearly as good at commenting on the reaction posts and reviews that I do read as those writers tend to be at commenting on mine, which is something I should fix - perhaps a New Years' resolution?

Of course, that doesn't mean I couldn't attempt to write them more accessibly and with less attention paid to the classic series but, well, my primary audience is fans on LiveJournal. Not necessarily Doctor Who fans, but certainly people who are media fans of one sort or another. Someone (in the Guardian I think) recently commented that Doctor Who is to media fans what football is to regular folk, something everyone maintains a passing interest in just because everyone else does and so it eases conversations. It's not, I don't think, unreasonable to assume that media fans know who RTD refers to, and won't feel instantly alienated by a mention of Colin Baker that goes beyond laughing at his coat. I don't particularly want to go to the effort of self-censoring especially since I am interested, at least in a passing way, in how the production team effect what appears on the screen and I have readers who are considerably more knowledgeable about those aspects than myself and often have something interesting to say when I make an observation. The same applies to mentions of classic Who with the added incentive that I am actually actively interested in talking with people about classic Who as well. Excising such references from my reviews would, I think, somewhat reduce the purpose they serve for me.

My posts get automatically cross-posted to Facebook, because I know there are a few people there who are also interested, but I've also got old school friends, cousins and a random smattering of work colleagues on my Facebook friends-list who I assume have no real interest whatsoever. So my assumptions about the audience clearly don't hold there. I could probably figure out how to create a Who fan filter on Facebook to exclude all those people, but I tend to assume that there is so much noise on Facebook that everyone is quite happy to just skip past a Doctor Who review from me, if a Doctor Who review is not their kind of thing.

So, after some thought, I'm not going to attempt to change the way I write these things, because I enjoy writing them the way I do and I get the amount of feedback I want.

I suppose all I can do is apologise to those people on Facebook who somehow feel compelled to read them even though they don't like them.

Though reading this back, I may delete it from my FB feed, it's gone on considerably longer than I think the original complaint actually justified.

And yes, in case you were wondering, I am stuck on a programming problem at work. How could you tell?

Comments

[purplecat]

Thanks! Everyone has been really lovely about this.