Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

UA1: Doctor Why?

Thanks to Nicholas for suggesting this first entry in my new "ten minutes, no references" project, now titled (as you can see) Unreliable Answers. The subject: "Why Dr Who got cancelled. Long term problems, or short-term silliness?", and my ten minutes starts... now.

By the mid-1980s, Doctor Who had been running for over twenty years, and had become as much part of the televisual furniture as the news. John Nathan-Turner had been producer since about 1981, and while pointing the finger at him is a popular hobby for Who historians I don't think he was single-handedly responsible. The reasons were probably twofold.

Firstly, the format was getting tired. While it was a winner, ideas were running thin, and during the Davison years it became alarmingly clear that the series was in a rut. Certainly there were some great stories, but nothing like the outpourings of writerly creativity that marked the Pertwee and Baker years. This rut was mishandled by the producers. Rather than looking at the whole series in a new light (for instance, being stuck on Earth was good for Pertwee's Doctor, as without the TARDIS available most of the time they had to concentrate on writing good stories rather than handwavey science fiction) they tried to get round it with short-term gimmicks and celebrity guest stars. Bonnie Langford's always the person people think of here, but far more harmful were casting decisions such as Ken Dodd in Paradise Towers. When the Happiness Patrol and the Candyman burst onto the scene, you knew things were getting bad.

The series was, in short, taking its continued existence for granted, rather than continuing to justify its production budget and prime teatime scheduling. This was finally realised in Sylvester McCoy's second season as the Doctor, leading to a totally new direction and some fantastic, innovative, thought-provoking stories such as Ghost Light and the Curse of Fenric, but by now it was too late.

Secondly, of course, BBC management was not sympathetic to Doctor Who. Michael Grade made no secret at all of his disdain and dislike for the series, interfering to the extent of insisting on Colin Baker's replacement. Whether Baker was a success or not in the part I'm not going to dwell on here, but when senior management are so openly hostile to a programme it's unlikely to change many minds. The rot had set in - hostile management needed to be appeased with ratings, and ratings were to be acquired.. how? With good stories? No - ultimately with big-name guest stars, as mentioned above.

Ultimately, the series would probably have continued a few years more had radical corrective action been taken by the production team earlier, producing a quality series which would help swing sceptical management minds towards the idea that continuing the series was a good idea. By the end - well, before that epic last season - it simply wasn't very good any more. It wasn't the series it had been, and I think the end of the series was more or less inevitable once Colin Baker got fired. That showed the management wanted an end to a dead-end series, and the producers failed to use the chance to rescue the series before it got canned.

In summary - a bit of both!

Time up! (10 minutes exactly). No time for any editing.

That New Format

As alluded to earlier, I've decided to try an experiment with this blog. I want to keep it moving, but make it possible for me to maintain it in a reasonably finite amount of time. I also want to try something... different. So here it is.

I'll take suggestions for subjects. I'll then either pick one of those subjects or (if enough people vote, which they probably won't) let people choose them for me by voting on them. I think having the subjects chosen by other people has far more potential to be fun, but I guess it depends on how many suggestions come in. Every day (that's the fantasy target, which I have no delusions about my capability to reach) I'll spend exactly ten minutes - no more or less - writing what I know about that subject, based entirely on what's in my head - no use of references or Googling allowed.

Hopefully most subjects will be ones I know at least a little about. I get the feeling, though, that the ones which will turn out much more fun will be the ones I know nothing about and therefore have to bluff frantically.

It'll be factually unreliable, it'll probably be downright silly, but it'll hopefully be fun. I've got a suggestion for the first entry in the series, which will follow... well, shortly.

Enjoy, and please do let me know what you think of the new format.

The Mike Review Of The Year - 2006

Another year, a completely shameful lack of updates here. I guess this is probably a hint as to how hectic this year has been for me - I simply haven't had time to stop and think until, well, the end of the year. It's been a real whirlwind of a year. Since January I've stopped being self-employed (I wasn't very good at it, frankly), started at Google, spent quite a lot of time away from home, got married, gone on honeymoon, and rounded things off by buying a house. That's the short version. I've also visited Greece, been to other peoples' weddings in Wisconsin and Seattle, been rubbish at running but am having lots of fun cycling, and well, the list goes on.

Unfortunately, this insane busyness, combined with the desire when I actually have spare time to just spend it sleeping and attempting to do as little as possible, means that I'm a little tubbier than I was a year ago, something which I'll have to start working hard to remedy pretty soon. If I haven't got myself back into at least a little bit of shape and run at least one competitive (for me) 10k by the end of March, kick me.

As a result of this I haven't seen nearly as much of many people as I'd wanted to. This blog's also suffered, mostly because I've had lots of interesting things which I've wanted to write about but never got around to that either - by the time you finally get to sit down in front of a blank screen whatever inspiration had struck had gone. This is, as you can guess, somewhat frustrating, so I've decided that I'm going to take uffish.net in a new, er, direction as an experiment to see what happens. Details will follow in my next post.

Happy 2007!

Document destruction and the path to nirvana

Like just about everyone else in the civilised world, my life's progress has been marked by the acquisition of pieces of paper. Some of these pieces of paper are the sort which are given out very casually but which are almost impossible to get rid of without fears that your identity will be borrowed by someone who then uses your Mastercard to get 50 toilets shipped to Lagos before opening a bank account in your name and using it to launder a couple of million quid from their business supplying class A drugs wholesale.

What this means is that I've been accumulating bank statements, utility bills (in Britain, a gas bill is for some reason considered better ID than a photocard driving licence by many places), charge slips, all those irritating bits of paper which are pointless after a few months of existence but which are almost impossible to get rid of with confidence. When I finally decided that I really didn't need to keep bank statements dating back to 1998 anyway (fascinating reading though they sometimes make) I gave up and bought a shredder.

And wow, after the best part of a day spent shredding old bank statements and cellphone bills and whatever and blatantly disregarding the rated capacity of the shredder (a home model rated for 8 pages per cycle and about 10 cycles per day) I have a couple of bin liners of baggage shredded and ready to be chucked out. Freedom at last! It'll be weird to be moving house in a month or two without having to schlep along boxes of pointless old documents that I was only holding onto because, well, it was easier to do that than it was to get rid of them.

I guess the next thing is to do a ruthless cull of my book collection, but that'll be a little harder.

It's been quiet..

Yup, this site has been rather quiet for the last few months. But I can't think of anything to write about. What should I write about? You tell me...

(And hey, whaddyaknow? The comment mechanism's broken too. I guess that explains the vastly reduced amount of comment spam recently. Guess I should fix that too.)