There is no revisionism. McCoy was awesome. McCoy is still awesome. He did an amazing job with some really terrible writing, and an even better job when he got the material.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwU4WI_V64w

That wasn't my intention - I like McCoy - that scene though.. I almost have to watch through my fingers.

Like any Doctor he has his good and bad stories. Some of them have always been considered great as far back as I can remember so I'm not sure when this supposed 'revisionism' started.
It's all a matter of personal taste anyway as it's only a TV show.

Well, yes and no. They obviously have to take the blame for the terrible stories produced in those last seasons, for the amateur direction, for the cheap and nasty look of the programme, for the dreadful companions (Mel and then – altogether now, jump in the air unconvincingly – Ace!), for the INTRUSIVE! INCIDENTAL! MUSIC! courtesy of Keff McCulloch, for the Wogan-style titles ... but the fact that Sylvester McCoy could neither act nor even say his lines clearly wasn’t much of a help. The Colin Baker era is often slagged off – quite rightly in my opinion, as the stories in that period are bloody awful – but at least there was a lead actor who could actually act.

I’d refute the received wisdom that the McCoy era got better as it went along. It didn’t. If anything, it got worse. I remember watching the clip posted by the OP, thinking "Oh well, it's early days, give him some time" but the fact is he didn't get better. As time went on you realised that you were stuck with a lead actor who couldn't act in a programme that was seemingly taking its inspiration from Rentaghost. OK, some stories were better than others but “better than Paradise Towers” is hardly the same as saying something’s a masterpiece. As a long-time fan, Doctor Who was painful to watch in the late 1980s.

I don't know which McCoy you were watching, but it doesn't sound like the one I know.

Fixed that for you......

I can think of plenty of scenes from all actors to have played the Doctor which this applies. I can think of plenty of Matt Smith scenes which made me cringe and think "Is this something out of Play School?" (See the Doctor dancing at Rory's and Amy's wedding for an example of downright awfulness). There have been plenty of people stating why that scene is excruciatingly bad but obviously you just don't like McCoys (eventual) portrayal. That is fair enough. But don't slate an actor on what he was written and directed to do. Ghostlight has it's faults but the Bus Station speech by McCoy is wonderfully understated and quite chilling ("Full of lost luggage and lost souls" - Now there's a stroy idea wating to be developed!). Yes, he is never going to be the worlds greatest actor but no-one could have made that era any better than it was.

wha?? Matt Smith's wedding dancing is amazing.. foolish mortal

QFT. Honestly, dissing the 'Drunken Giraffe'.....

Personally like Sylvester in the part. The early Time and the Rani scenes are flippin' awful, but thought he settled down fairly quickly in the role and by Delta and The Bannermen I'd quite taken to him and started to find his Doctor quite endearing. By Remembrance I thought he'd really got a handle on the part. He could have his, er, 'moments' in some scenes (like the one in Ghostlight where he pulls some extraordinary faces whilst 'dispelling' Light) but when he did understated he was particularly good.

This isn't 'revisionism' for me; thought it at the time. He's never going to get into my top 5 Doctors but he isn't bottom of my list either.

I quite agree. I know the idea of Doctor Who is to have its young audience watching in horror through their fingers. I watched the McCoy era with horror as an adult, but for very different reasons. The scripts were terrible. Production values were poor, even by 80s standards. And the show had a lead who equated gurning with acting. To be fair, you can't produce a show over three seasons and turn out entire dross. There were a couple of okayish moments in the Dalek and Fenric adventures. But, by God, there was an awful lot of crud to sit through for those meagre moments.

I was up in arms when the show was put on hiatus after Colin Baker. I had a sense of relief when it was put out of our misery after McCoy.

Have to agree with this. As I've said many times, McCoy shines through the dross in stories like Paradise Towers and his performances never fell short for me, even during the comic excesses of his debut.

I often imagine with better scripts what he would have been like. Season 26 gives us a general idea where he put in the best performances of his entire era.

I never believed in McCoy as the Doctor. I remember watching that scene with my family and just cringing with embarrassment.

The show had a lighter, brighter feel by McCoy's first season, but the role of the Doctor still needed some gravitas and (to be honest) some measure of acting ability.

For me McCoy's performance always fell way short of the mark. It was more 'Vision On' than Doctor Who.

This wasn't helped by Sophie Aldred who (in my opinion) wasn't the strongest of actors either.

I know the show was on a downward trend by this point, but it was still surprising the talent pool was so limited when casting the role.

The Matt Smith scene has nothing to do with the scenes previously discussed here. I don't like the wedding dance scene but its a matter of taste. The fact I didn't like it is neither here nor there. It worked for what it was supposed to be and was competently made.

What you see with the scenes in the original posts are not something that is just bad in peoples opinion. They are bad because they fail on every level. They miss the target and don't achieve what they are supposed to do. This is a scene that should be dramatic and tense- the meeting of two Timelords one of whom had just regenerated. Instead it is sub-pantomime level. Anyone who has even worked on a school play can point out the deficiencies here in the staging, the acting, the direction, the 'stunt' work. It is bad television.

Ah, so the problem isn't the tone of the scene - it's having different expectations.

I too cringed at Time and the Rani when I first watched it, and any time since - but I put a lot of it down to the Doctor being manic post-regeneration, and of the writers/producers trying to get a feel of what the Seventh Doctor should be.

Certainly, the pantomime overacting of the lead characters is absolutely no worse than anything else in the sixties or seventies.

Yes, exactly what he said. I was prepared to forgive quite a lot in Season 24, and under the circumstances I'm not surprised it was a bit rubbish. By Seasons 25 and 26 everyone had supposedly got their acts together, but I still thought it was rubbish.

I suspect that the likes of Jonathan Powell and Michael Grade would have actively interfered to stop anyone with too much acting cred from taking the part. After all, that might have got Doctor Who some attention for being something other than cheap, tacky and silly at a time when the BBC wanted to throw away money on garbage like Eldorado. Powell has said himself that he didn't want to rescue Doctor Who, so I'm sure the laughable casting decisions played right into his hands.

Just out of curiosity, are you in your mid 40s? I ask this because, I felt the same way as you and in retrospect, have put it down to sort of growing out of the programme (I never ever thought I would!) I was 13 when 4 left and 5 came along and 17 when 6 left. by the time 7 came along I was almost 19 but the production seemed to suddenly get very silly and less dramatic, with 7 not being able to, imo, deliver drama and gravitas as previous actors, what with his umbrella, silly cliff hangers and spoon playing.

For me, he tried to be too much like Troughton, the only thing was that Troughton could play the clown very well, but then Troughton had a very impressive cv with Shakespeare and Dickens roles under his belt by this time while McCoy was known mainly for silent slapstick like Vision On and Jigsaw. I never saw the attraction then and still don't. I accept that he has had success since but for me, he was not good enough to play the Doctor. I would probably have view of Richard Hearne had he accepted the role...why oh why did they even consider him!!!

I bet it was Doctor Leonard McCoy from Star Trek: The Original Series!

Ha! Ha!

I see that my last post attracted a few comments but fortunately Saladfingers has pretty much covered what I wanted to say, and probably rather more eloquently than I would have managed. But just to amplify this point: self evidently Matt competently followed the direction that he was given for that scene. Matt Smith has range as an actor and McCoy doesn't.

Comparisons are of course odious in any event but I wasn't starting with a comparison. I was just stating that McCoy favoured the Rentaghost method over the Stanislavski method. And thanks to others for reminding me of the Rentaghost analogy which I seem to recall people commented on at the time.

Last it is revisionism. In the 1980s people did switch off in their millions when McCoy was around (see testimony from many posters who were there) and I was not aware of anybody suggesting at the time that this was one of the best portrayals of the Doctor. The general impression was of people grimly clinging on.

Of course it's just peoples opinions. despite the fact that it seems overwhelmingly unpopular, It can't be stated as fact that the scene in question is undeniably a bad one because someone can always come along and say they liked it. I personally understand what the other poster meant when bringing up the Matt Smith scene - saying that basically every doctor has the odd scene which can be seen as bad, but it isn't fair to judge an entire doctor on such scene's.

This sort of argument does not work unless you are a radical subjectivist. And the thing about radical subjectivists is that they tend to stop being radical subjectivists if asked what sort of object they would like to be hit with- a claw hammer or a feather. The point being that some qualities actually inhere in the object and are not perceptions of the subject- hammers are hard, feathers are soft, McCoy is hammy and Smith is not.

Any which way you insult McCoy and his acting ability you won't convince people who don't already think that way. You obviously dislike McCoy, others think he was good, that's the nature of differing opinions.

I am not trying to change anybody's opinion. I don't think that ever happens on the internet does it? People agree or disagree and generally talk past each other.

I also don't actually think I am 'insulting' McCoy either. I think of it more as criticising his acting but OK that could be taken as insulting. And I also admit to being a recidivist in this regard but really only because I find the revisionism very provoking.

I am not actually anti Mccoy as some are. He was the first doctor I remember watching and later episodes were an improvement.

But I was just echoing your thoughts. Yes opinions are very varied and I'm sure there are even people somewhere...maybe...who think the scenes previously posted are good. I can't imagine who. But there is a point where something is just bad. For me its when it crosses the line into incompetence. Laxyness. There is a real sense of 'oh well this will do' about it.

I don't like some of the scenes between Doctor Ten and Donna because they are not to my taste. But I can admire them as being well acted and directed and scripted.

The scenes above are none of that. As I said before the doctors two 'falls' alone would have the director of a village hall play calling for another rehearsal. I find it inexcusably bad that the production team felt it was ok. That attitude ultimately led to the show being cancelled because even the most fervent Who fan struggles defending the merits of crap like that.

Again with regards the Matt scene mentioned. Yes you might not like it for its whimsical wacky nature but that's what they aimed for and they achieved it. That scene with the Rani was aiming for drama and gravitas and scares. It achieved none of them. Ergo its bad nay awful television.

Now, that's something that's revisionist.
Did they switch off because of McCoy? Or were they already switching off long before that?

As I mentioned in my first post of this thread. I was there and I switched off at the end of the first episode of Time and the Rani.