That’s one of my fairly recent Matt Smith rewatches. It’s a nice story, though gets away with portraying Venice with remarkably minimal effects. The stand in location work was great! I’d like to see more historicals in interesting places. That feels like something there was much more of in the 1960s Who. We had historicals in Jodie’s era but more about famous people than key places.
Whittaker's Demons of the Punjab was a classic history-plus-aliens story (which was the history style since the Meddling Monk in Troughton's era, with the only other pure historical I can think of after that being Black Orchid).
It's a gem but it's a rare outlier in the modern era. I'd also cite The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances, which also happens to be my favourite Who story ever, and is very much not about famous historical figures (which would rule out Churchill, Matt Smith astronaut one, Vincent and Madame de P). But that's less about the sense of place I'm praising in the Venice story. For that I'm maybe looking more at something like City of Death, which while great for other stuff - and not a historical! - is extremely Paris-centric. To be fair doing a famous place X properly and in depth in the modern era might prove challenging on multiple levels.
I have a vague sense that NuWho has tended to alternative "celebrity" and "non-celebrity" historicals but I don't have the data to back that up. We've got The Unquiet Dead as a celebrity historical in series 1 followed by Father's Day and The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances which don't feature celebrities. Then in series two you've got Tooth and Claw (celebrity), The Girl in the Fireplace (celebrity) and The Idiot's Lantern (non-celebrity). Series three you've got The Shakespeare Code (celebrity), The Dalek two-parter (non-celebrity) and Human Nature/Family of Blood (non-celebrity) and then Donna's series you've got Fires of Pompeii (non-celebrity) and The Unicorn and the Wasp (celebrity) - so RTD, at least, is about half and half I would say.
Nice list, thanks! In terms of a really strong sense of historical place - which I think is what I was wanting most of all - I’d pull out The Idiot’s Lantern, The Shakespeare Code and The Fires of Pompeii. And yes I really appreciate non celebrity historicals, though I’ve pulled out the Shakespeare one here.
There were a few pure historicals after the introduction of the Meddling Monk but the last until Black Orchid was The Highlanders in Troughton's first season. As you and Viv observe though the so-called "celebrity historical" is very much a NuWho thing.
Thinking about it, there are actually a bunch of them - Marco Polo, The Crusade, The Myth Makers, The Gunfighters... not to mention ones with famous historical people more tangential to what the Doctor and co are doing (e.g., The Reign of Terror and The Massacre). I suppose, though, only Marco Polo really focuses on a single historical figure, played by a high profile guest actor, and structures the story around show-casing that figure in the way many of the modern celebrity historicals do.
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