A guy who met PC on set today




"He also said that the tone of colour of his costume variations matches the tone of the episode... and he was wearing all black :O #dwsr"

'There is more evidence I learnt that this episode will be dark... but it's a bit spoilery #d

Hopefully it's a straight forward story.

When is Doctor Who every straightforward?

It's its complexity that's partly the whole reason for its success.

Uh, no it isn't.

Doctor Who's been pretty straightforward for, uh, most of its lifetime.

I wouldn't call the Doctor's character 'straightforward' or An Unearthly Child episode 1, The Edge Of Destruction, The Time Meddler, The War Games, A Good Man Goes To War, The Wedding Of River Song or Blink 'straightforward'. And they're better that way IMO.

How is An Unearthly Child episode 1 not straightforward? Girl at school, teachers follow her home, they find a strange bloke and a box, they discover a spaceship, spaceship takes off. That's pretty straightforward for an episode, DB. If you think that's complex, blimey.

(Are you confusing plot twists with 'being complex'?)

It has a girl who nobody knows is human or alien and a old man who is equally as mysterious. To us, it won't be complex but I reckon it will have been to 60's audiences.

An Unearthly Child episode 1 is not complex, DB. It's one of the most straightforward episodes in the show's history. You're mixing up 'the plot/characters having some mystery' with 'complex episode', somehow.

Bear in mind we're talking about a 60's audience who won't have seen anything quite like it before.

Yeah, it's still a pretty straightforward episode. Would they be curious or bemused by the unusual bloke and his spaceship? Probably. Would they be left thinking "well that was a complex episode"? Probably not. Cos it wasn't, and isn't.

It may surprise you to learn that people in the 1960s weren't actually stupid.

So The Doctor is delivering Milk Tray for the lady.

I was part of the original 1963 audience. I didn't find the episode in any way complex (and I was five at the time).

All the bad bits. Most of the worst stories are the ones where the plot itself is threadbare and linear, and they have to keep adding in pointless digressions to make it fit the runtime.

A 5 year old and an adult won't get the same thing from watching a tv show at all! How could you relate that? A 5 year old will completely miss the complexities of any show... Obviously.

All your statement suggests is that you were an average 5 year old, not that the show wasn't complex.

Indeed, this was the generation that was spoon-fed more SF than any other time of the past century. Their parents were brought up on 1930s-50s pulp SF literature, epic Dan Dare weekly comic strips lasting 18 months, b&w sci-fi and adventure serials, big budget SF films, SF B-movies, complex television plays from kitchen sink dramas to SF anthology series.

The Quatermass Experiment (1953)
Quatermass and the Pit (1958)
A for Andromeda (1961)

All scifi for an adult audience.

Not forgetting Journey into Space (1953)
on good old steam radio.
And it had time travelling aliens in it.

Precisely.
And not forgetting the TV serial adaptation of George Orwell's 1984

... and don't forget Quatermass II.

All three of which "influenced" the Pertwee era.

We might also profitably recall

Target Luna (1960)
Pathfinders in Space (1960)
Pathfinders to Mars (1960-1)
Pathfinders to Venus (1961)

four linked TV series of family sci-fi adventures in a weekend tea-time slot, produced under the aegis of some bloke called Sydney Newman.

Yes, all way too much for the tiny minds of 1963's population.