Oh dear, Dr Who has sunk even lower than the Sylvester McCoy years. I now find myself really rooting for the daleks to finish off what the BBC has done to it, exterminate, exterminate.
If poking about Doctor Who's TARDIS in VR sounds like fun to you, better luck next time
Doctor Who fans, faced with waiting until 2020 before the blue police box appears on their screens once more, were thrown a virtual reality bone by the BBC today. As arguably the biggest nerd at Vulture Central, this correspondent was assigned the task of strapping on a Rift and firing up the BBC Digital Drama Team's 13-minute …
COMMENTS
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Thursday 16th May 2019 09:58 GMT Chris G
Since I was a kid watching the original Dr Who William Hartnell, I have always found it to be a bit too cheesy and the effects amateurish. The best series was the first with Roger Delgado as the Master otherwise I can take it or leave it.
Maybe they should get some input from any of the excellent British Sci-Fi writers to bring it up to date and I am talking about from a sci-fi perspective not a pc perspective.
For Space Opera, Peter Hamilton would be interesting, for whacky and bizarre fantasy, China Mieville could put a whole new slant on it.
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Thursday 16th May 2019 10:45 GMT Peter2
This assumes that the BBC care about it being either sci-fi or entertainment. It appears that pushing the producers PC agenda is now their no. 1 objective and entertainment is irrelevant.
Which is why the viewing figures have dropped by 40% as even hardened Dr Who fans give up watching it, despite a huge nationwide advertising campaign to drum up new viewers.
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Thursday 16th May 2019 12:44 GMT STOP_FORTH
Role reversal
This is quite a common complaint about the last series but I think it is mistaken.
I have been watching this entertaining tripe since the first episode. I will admit I may have missed a few episodes, especially McCoy and after, but I must have seen a good percentage.
During the Sixties, I distinctly remember a story where the TARDIS landed on a planet where women had all the positions of power and high status jobs, but the poor old men were at home looking after the nippers and doing the washing up. (Can't remember if they were supposed to be human or some other species, but they looked human enough.) The male "companion" thought this was all a bit off and against the natural order of things.
I wouldn't give some of the recent scripts full marks for subtlety, though.
(Was going to go for alien, but chose nearest thing to a Cyberman, looks-wise.)
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Thursday 16th May 2019 13:53 GMT STOP_FORTH
Re: Role reversal
I can't find the name of this episode, it was probably Hartnell or Troughton era and he had two companions.
It's quite possible it was wiped, but luckily there was a documentary about the planet in 1980 (in colour!) called "The Worm That Turned" on the News and Current Affairs show "The Two Ronnies".
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Thursday 16th May 2019 21:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
Dare I say it, I liked Sylvester McCoy's doctor. He was better than the previous two as far as I'm concerned. The plots he had to work with, however, were pretty terrible putting it mildly.
Of all the "new" doctors Peter Capaldi has been my favorite. I wish he'd stuck around longer, but it seems like all Doctors in the new series never stick around for more than three seasons. The writing in his last season definitely took a big dive from the first two seasons, and that's continued if not gotten worse with Jodie Whitaker's Doctor. If they can't fix that, it won't matter who is occupying the role, bad writing will sink the series like it did the original run.
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Thursday 16th May 2019 09:13 GMT Baldrickk
Sounds to me like the TARDIS VR fan project has a lot more going for it. And that's from two years ago.
Could have gotten this guy on board and done something great. That said, they could have ruined his work too, so ymmv
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Thursday 16th May 2019 09:18 GMT Christian Berger
Well at least there's currently a spin-off on TV
Challenge UK, one of the few UK channels you can get in Europe, currently airs a Doctor Who spin-off, following the life of Graham O'Brien way back into the 1990s when he earned his money by telling people to spin a wheel with numbers on. It's called "Wheel of Fortune" and like the early Doctor Who Episodes it was done pseudo-live on Video. I don't know if it's considered cannonical.
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Thursday 16th May 2019 10:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
What didn't happen?
Step right up! Step right up!
With just one Goggles, we can cure all ills. You can see the future. Become beautiful!
The best to ever be conceived.
Ok, it's not entirely snake oil, but it's more marketing than product, and may be stuck in limbo for a long time, then release existing rip off/generic hardware passed of as developed in house at a massive markup price and overhyped/pretend specs.
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Wednesday 10th July 2019 03:25 GMT DiViDeD
Re: What didn't happen?
"release existing rip off/generic hardware passed of as developed in house at a massive markup price and overhyped/pretend specs.
Why not? It seems to have worked well enough for Water Seer, the 'self filling water bottle', the Snorkel and all the other snake oil startups.
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Thursday 16th May 2019 12:55 GMT Rich 11
Re: If...
I'll never understand why the BBC spends so much on things that aren't news, tv or radio while cutting funding to those things.
I imagine somebody once said back in 1936 that the BBC should stick to radio, and they couldn't understand why any money would be spent on television broadcasting instead.
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Thursday 16th May 2019 13:22 GMT Timmy B
Re: Spoiler Alert!
"In this episode, the Doctor travels almost to the end of time itself, where she meets the last human being alive, who is holding out in a decaying subterranean base and still insisting that the future of technology will be all about VR and AI."
and..... Linux on the desktop....
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Thursday 16th May 2019 14:00 GMT Ali Dodd
Not on Windows Mixed Reality headsets but is on Vive and Rift?
Considering pretty much anything that supports Rift will work in WMR with no changes either they have
A) buggered the programming so it's break in 5 minutes when someone does and sdk update
B) Have no clue about Vr systems and really just mean you don;t get it from the WMR store (which is rubbish anyway)
Have to say IF samsung release the Odyssey Plus in the UK and when HP release their new headset WMR will be looking pretty damn good. I have an imported Odyssey and it's excellent, sorry Zippy.
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Wednesday 10th July 2019 03:39 GMT DiViDeD
@ mji Re: Not interested
I think I'd probably add Silence In The Library/Forest of the Dead and The Time of Angels/Flesh & Stone and a couple of other Stephen Moffatsto that list, myself.
That's the issue I have with the latest series. There was no absolute stand out, 'must show this one to people who don't watch Doctor Who' episode as there has regularly been in each series of the reboot so far.
Although Vinay Patel's Demons of the Punjab was probably the strongest of the last lot, it was still no classic.
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Friday 17th May 2019 10:58 GMT Timmy B
Re: It's Children's TV
"It's Children's TV
Some people around here seem to forget that..."
That doesn't mean it has to be badly written, badly acted tat so totally full of it's own wokeness that nothing else matters. The RTD and SM series were children's TV - good children's TV that appealed to adults too. Because it was good. The CC episodes are simply dire.
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Wednesday 10th July 2019 03:44 GMT DiViDeD
Re: It's Children's TV
Actually, the original intention was for a programmes that could be enjoyed by something they had in the 1960s called a family. As such, it was supposed to keep adults and kids alike interested.
And I've found that, generally, children's drama on the Beeb has always had much higher standards of writing, acting and production values than most of the tat that's put out for a supposedly adult audience.
Check out The Queen's Nose, or The Box Of Delights. Hell, even the Narnia series was a couple of steps above Eastenders!
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