Reading, Listening, Watching

[purplecat]

Reading: Doctor Who Magazine (which I still think of as Doctor Who Monthly even though it has been Magazine for decades). I was two issues behind because my habit of putting it in my bag to read on the train is no longer effective. The train was also when I used to read fanfic which is now backing up on my ereader. Given I hope never to commute by train ever again, I'm going to have to think of a new way to integrate fanfic reading into my routine. I'm not keen to include it in my bed time reading since - well - there is always more fanfic and I like to read professionally published work too.

Listening: Currently listening to the All new Doctor Who Book Club Podcast discussing Una McCormack's The Way through the Woods. Given how few of the NuWho tie-in novels I've read (or at least think I have read), I'm surprised how often they discuss the one's that I have.

Watching: I watched Dimensions in Time which I have never seen before, but I felt the whim last night and found it on YouTube. It's an Eastenders/Doctor Who crossover for Children in Need. I was expecting it to be bad in a "bemused Eastenders actors" kind of a way. I was not expecting it to be bad in a borderline incoherent/random events happening too fast/badly cgi-d floating heads of the first and second Doctors kind of a way. It's quite something. Not in a good way.

Comments

[ffutures]

Dimensions in time was supposed to be watched with special 3D glasses, which you can simulate by holding sunglasses over one eye, using the Pulfrich effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulfrich_effect

You then got really crappy 3D which gave a lot of people motion sickness and so far as I know was never used again by the BBC. Unfortunately they were so obsessed with making the tech work that they spent nothing on giving it a coherent script.

[purplecat]

Oh Wow! I'd either forgotten or never picked up on the 3D thing. In retrospect it makes sense of some of the visual effect design (lots of swirly whirling things).

It's a shame its so bad given it obviously had a lot of good will with all those actors agreeing to turn up and pitch in.

[daniel-saunders.livejournal.com]

These haven't been copying over to Livejournal for a week or more, so I've only just seen them!

I haven't seen Dimensions in Time since original transmission, but remember it as being awful, probably my first taste of the "New Who is always awful" rule, except that in this case it was probably really objectively awful. Still, it made Steven Moffat want to make a decent comedy Who with The Curse of Fatal Death which ended up being a try-out for half the good ideas in series five to eleven.

[purplecat]

Yes, crossposting has been borked for about 10 days now. I keep hoping it will get fixed, otherwise I'm going to have to start cross-posting a link round-up or something. I refuse to cut and paste all emails to both places!

It is really terrible! It feels amateurish even by the standards of late-80s Dr Who despite, I suspect, having fairly state-of-the-art effects. But the script is terrible though I suppose, in a way, it shows how good Terrance Dicks was to create something decent using more or less the same shopping list albeit with more time to fit everything into.