Ive watched the DR since it first began, I may not have really known what it was all about (I was five or six) but I did watch it with my older brothers

Over the years my brothers lost interest but I never did even when I went through my 'out every night' stage Dr Who was recorded, my three children were brought up with Dr Who and out of the three I have a thirty year old who knows Dr Who inside out
in all our lives we have all hidden behind the sofa at least once

This month I will be 59 and a lot of people will be thinking so what if Dr Who loses a 59 year old woman viewer but I just wonder how many other older viewers are switching off

I dont like PC as the Dr or Clara as a companion but I didnt like DT and Donna either but I didnt switch off
I switched off on Sat night three quarters of the way through, I was bored with long winded sermons and all the rights and wrongs of war

wheres the stories of baddie of the week/weeks just getting whats comming to them

Im getting older but Im not over the hill yet, Im quite young at heart and still love all my SiFi but Dr Who is getting a bit too namby pamby IMO

Ive been rewatching the old Drs on the Horror channel and I must say that I think they are far better than what Ive watched this year on BBC1

I just think I may have grown to old for it now and that makes me sad

Thats it don't think about something ekse when watching just relax and say this episode will be good, open up your mind, try that.

How on earth did you cope with Doctor Three then? That was three long years of sermons (intermingled with luminous maggots of course)!

Well, I'm older than you, and I've not gone off it yet.

But I do know what you mean.

I agree that there's a lack of tension and danger in DW these days. I think that came in with Moffat, though I know some will disagree. Since series 5, stories might be interesting, but rarely edge-of-your-seat gripping. When they start off as gripping, they fizzle out.

Monsters are a bit useless on the whole (Fisher King).

But the anti-war speech in the last episode brought tears to my eyes. I loved it. It shouldn't be the norm, though; just an occasional occurrence. The norm should be the Doctor defeating baddies at the last minute through extreme cleverness, not through appealing to their better nature (or threatening them with youtube exposure). They shouldn't have a better nature.

I used to be glued to the screen when DW was on - the 45 minutes went so quickly. Now I find myself looking at the clock to see how long we've got.

But I won't stop watching. Because sometimes there's an absolute gem that takes my breath away.

And I do like Peter.

Well I'm only 58 and I still love Dr Who and am really enjoying Peter Capaldi's take on The Doctor. I agree to a certain extent that some of the episodes over the last couple of years have been naff The Rings of Akhaten, Kill the moon, In theForest of the night to name but three, but on the whole I still enjoy the series. So I say "Stick with it".

As usual, Granny, I have to agree!

The only difference between this Series and Series 5 is that it's ok but dull rather than just plain dull. What you say about the edge-of-your-seat stuff is so true(imo), I really miss those types of fast action, thriller type episodes.

Saturday's episode was so lacking in excitement it was unreal. Just felt it plodded all the way along. But that's been the same since Moffat took over. I thought the opening two episodes proved that you could go slow if you told a decent story and they were thoroughly good episodes but since then it's been back to the dullfests again.

However, it's never been so bad that I want to switch off(Though Rings Of Athaken came ruddy close!)

As with the opening two episodes I like it when episodes are better than I'm expecting but I really want an episode to just blow me away and leave me craving for the next one. Been a while since I've felt like that.

I do also like Peter Capaldi but at times he has been very ill-served by the scripts. When they are right, he is just amazing.

I'm not enjoying it as much as I used to, though I think this series has been a slight improvement on 7 and 8.

I think Moffatt has been there too long now. it's a bad idea to have someone in charge for too long.

I feel that New Who in general just doesn't have that spark that the classics did, with Pertwee, Baker, the Brigadier, Sarah Jane, Romana, the 60's Cybermen, the effectiveness of the lower budget, etc.

That said, however, I've loved the revival from Series 5 onwards (though Series 7 was a bit shakey, it did have some brilliant individual episodes) because it's a lot closer to that spark and has had some excellent concepts, monsters, characters, and so forth. Series 9, in my opinion, is of the highest quality of the modern series so far.

I think they work really hard on it but overdo the anxious tension - there's always an undercurrent running thru the whole season about whether the Doc or his companion is gonna die .

I've lost a lot of interest in the current version of the show. Not completely but to the extent I have only watched each episode once apart from last Saturday when I had to rewatch Sunday morning as i had a little bit much to drink Saturday and could not remember it. It's not been the same since Tennant left to me. He nailed the part in the way tom baker did for me as a child. Peter capaldi is a very good actor but i just can't warm to him as doctor who. There are other things like what they have done with the master and characters who die and come back to life and long running arcs that are not resolved satisfactorily. I could go on but life's to short.

It's far from perfect at the moment...but it never has been. Lots of things they could improve and lots of things that they could stop/start doing. But anyone who thinks what the show needs is for it to become the quaint weekly adventures of the Doctor and his passive dolly bird assistant where they fight 'baddies' on a cheaply rendered alien planet and then fly off again with no consequences and the kind of cookie cutter moralistic simplicity that would insult a three year old is deluding themselves. RTD knew such a show would bomb. So he chucked out all the arcane and outdated nerd rubbish, retained the good bits and made a Doctor Who for our times. Moffat has for the most part continued that formula. There always seems to be a scorched earth policy with Doctor Who fans...if somethings not working then 'get rid of it!'. Arcs. Two parters. Political messages. No. That's not the point. They need to be done well. Not abandoned.

Hate it or not but one thing Doctor Who isn't anymore is a laughing stock. It used to be. Because it had a laughably inhumane attitude towards emotion and relationships and the kind of things people that don't attend Babylon 5 conventions watch TV for these days.

Also I think some people need to stop mistaking their own weariness of the show and its format for inherent problems with the writing. I know people who only started watching with Matt Smith who are still utterly enthralled by the show week in week out. Maybe the funs not there because youre ten years in and there's a slight sense of seen it all before.

This explains why a lot of the critcims hurled at current Who could objectively just as easily be applied to the RTD era. But back then it was new and novel. Fatigue hadn't set in. I expect if Moffat and friends produced an episode like The Shakespeare Code or The Unicorn and the Wasp now it would get torn to pieces.

That's why I think a resting of the show would be good. It's utter nonsense when fans and Moffat pretend DW has some divine right to be on TV. No it doesn't. And the argument that regressing back to the RTD era to recreate the shows 'glory days' of nine million viewers overnight and Kylie Minogue is the answer is laughable. Those days are gone. They were great. But theyre gone.

I'm 57. I was so scared by the very first episode I didn't watch again until Patrick Troughton.

I've drifted in and out of Dr Who in my life,watched Troughton, Pertwee , Tom Baker and Peter Davison. Didnt really watch Colin Baker or Sylvester McCoy, hardly watched Chris Eccleston but loved David Tennant and Matt Smith.

There have been a few good episodes with Peter Capaldi - and last Saturday's was brilliant. But I have to admit my enthusiasm has been waning, and I dont know if thats me or the show. My gut instinct is that they are trying to do too many 'high concept' episodes , and some of them dont work.

I'm hoping that this Zygon two-parter was a a sign of better things to come.

'New' Doctor Who will NEVER be as a good as ''old who'' , anyone with hope that it will may aswell give up now.
I like you was close to giving up last year, this was nothing to do with Capaldi or Jenna Coleman though, as i think they are great in their roles, however the writing was just appalling, and whoever thought up the character of Danny Pink and his mind numbing storyline needs sacking on the spot!
I have seen hope this year though, i think the current series is more like 'old who' than it has ever been, so i dont see how you can think its tailed off in the wrong direction?
I have also found the writing has gone up 10 notches, and i have actually enjoyed every single episode of this series so far, i dont think i have said that of any of the series since 2005.
i have hope.

For me it isn't fatigue. I did actually think that until a few weeks ago I listened to a couple of Big Finish stories and for me they were far more interesting and exciting than anything that's been produced in the last few years. I even listened to one this morning and it really gripped me, haven't felt like that with the TV Series for a long while.

Where I will agree with you was that we can't go back to the RTD days. I loved it to bits but it wasn't perfect by any means. The overuse of modern earth settings and the overuse of news reports to get info across drove me insane and that's one thing I'm glad Moffat has got shot off(bar the odd episode).

Also agree it can't go back to Classic Who either but there will be a time when it can't come back to where it is now. It has to move on and evolve.

I totally agree OP. It's completely lost all its charm and fascination.

Just a creepy-looking shouty doctor now, rattling off boring speeches.

I think it's always tempting, and something of a natural inclination to 'blame the show' (or the creators of the show) when you find yourself losing interest but in truth it is rarely anything other than a personal thing. My own interest in Doctor Who has waxed and waned over the years and it's more to do with changing life circumstances, developing other interests or passions, just generally being pre-occupied with other things.

Doctor Who, like anything else, competes for our attention, our head-space, our personal time with many other things. Growing a passion for one thing can lessen an existing passion for another, either temporarily or permanently. We simply only have so much personal time and so much space to fill in our daily imagination. Interest can dwindle or reignite, and although it can seem like it it's not necessarily through a change in the substance of the subject, rather a change in the perceiver.

I know this will be countered by the objection that one still feels excitement for the older material and therefore is not simply jaded with Doctor Who itself, but one thing that has to be remembered is that the older material has a deeper weight of meaning and memory and resonance for you that new material does not have. You remember the experience that you had watching it and when rewatching that you can experience it again in a weakened, nostalgic form. The point is, although you may feel as though you are, you are not an impartial critic, your perceptions of the show have changed, your expectations possibly. The show is trying to fill a space in your imagination that simply isn't the same shape anymore.

My own experience with Doctor Who is as someone who watched as a child in the 80s and had a fascination for the show and something of an awe and respect. I didn't only watch the contemporary series, I was also very familiar with the older Doctors. The show went off air and Doctor Who generally fell from my consciousness for the most part and other things filled my imagination.

When the series returned in 2005 I watched mainly out of curiosity rather than excitement. Doctor Who was a childhood interest of mine that I respected and had fondness for in a cultural sense but hadn't spent much time with since 1989. I thought the relaunched show was well done and had a generally favourable opinion of it but it didn't really capture my ongoing interest and I think I only watched 4 or 5 episodes of that Christopher Ecclestone series. No criticism of it, it just didn't manage to compete for my attention with other interests. After that, I'd see it infrequently. liking the odd episode.

What really recaptured my attention big-time was Season 5: Steven Moffat and Matt Smith. I happened to catch 'The Time of Angels' pretty much at random and was really sucked in by it. It was exciting, it seemed a little bit different, a bit fresher (to my eyes), Matt Smith struck me as being more like my perception of the Doctor, where Tennant had been good but seemed more to me like a different heroic character than the one I appreciated when I was young. And the writing of Steven Moffat was way above what I expected to see in a mainstream TV show. It was sophisticated and intelligent with imaginative ideas that were a little out of the usual linear format of storytelling. It was funny rather than trying to be funny. The narratives were so tight and clever. As a writer myself I could appreciate the sublime skill with which Moffat constructed the stories.

I will sound like a cultural snob here and I probably am a little bit but I watch very little TV and don't have the highest regard for TV and film as a medium. I think at best it tends to be good popular fiction, but generally doesn't compete with the mental and emotional experiences I've gotten from other forms like literature. I quickly caught up with Season 5 to that point and then was watching the previous Moffat episodes. They were incredible. I was then watching the entirety of new Who to that point and then back to the classic series for the entirety of that, and even selected novels, audioplays etc. Doctor Who annexed my imagination again for a good while. Why? Because of the writing of Steven Moffat (mostly). THAT'S how exciting it was (and is) to me.

Why am I talking about this? Because it's a good example of perception and different taste. Their are people posting above that the show lacks the excitement under Moffat that they felt it had previously. My perception was the opposite. Neither of us are right or wrong of course and that is the point. Any 'lack of excitement' the show may have now is purely a matter of one's own perception, Sure you've seen 10 series of the show now, with much the same format. You may have seen 50 years worth of the show, as I know the posters above have and I have. It's not going to be new and exciting to you again until it hits a changing point, as it does periodically. That isn't a valid criticism of the current show. That doesn't mean that the show needs to make that change now. That's only for you personally. Other people are just discovering it. Other people find Moffat's storylines and episodes just as exciting as 'Blink' or 'The Empty Child' were on first broadcast, because they don't have the built up experience of being so familiar with it so as it has become mundane. My niece got into Doctor Who just last year. There are people for whom the current show is their formative experience of it and whose imagination has been captured.

It's important to have a sense of perspective. I too have become relatively disinterested this season compared to previous ones but it's not because of a lack of quality. Doctor Who has always been hit and miss. In my case it's gotten to the point where I only truly look forward to Steven Moffat episodes and only really get excited by the show, caught up in it (which I think is what some people are getting at when they talk about 'excitement') during his episodes. 'Deep Breath' thrilled me, as did 'Name of the Doctor', 'Time of the Doctor', 'Dark Water'. If Doctor Who was like that every week it would keep its hold on my imagination. But the 'problem' is more that I want more from the show now than I did previously, I'm less interested to watch an average episode than previously, I'm ever so slightly bored of the limits of the format. But it's entirely a personal thing. Impartially speaking I don't think the average episode quality has really changed in ten years. Honestly, they're all much of a muchness, with the odd stinker and the odd standout every few episodes.

I'm crying out for a writer I enjoy as much as Moffat on the show. sadly, I don't think Robert Holmes is coming back to life.

For me personally, I want to see a wild, innovative season but I don't blame them for staying in 'safe mode'.

Jeez... that was long, even for me. Doubt anyone will read it :P

I dont know whether its the writing or the actors are the reason Ive lost interest and we all know that the writing cannot go back to the old DW days

I only know that I maybe looking for adventure and thrills in time and space and not IMO lectures on war, peace and any other fashionable subject to take the writers fancy

I watch DW to escape from the outside world I want to leave my brain at the door and just be entertained I dont look at DW and dissect it saying this cant happen because it would cause a timey wimey thingy
maybe I was never a die hard fan because I am now bored with it and have not accepted the new preaching style Dr

A FM commented

'anyone who thinks what the show needs is for it to become the quaint weekly adventures of the Doctor and his passive dolly bird assistant where they fight 'baddies' on a cheaply rendered alien planet and then fly off again with no consequences and the kind of cookie cutter moralistic simplicity that would insult a three year old is deluding themselves'

well Im sorry I dont think I am deluding myself when I am sitting watching The Curse of Fenric I thought that was a bloody good DW story (and yes its a story about war), it may have dodgy effects by todays standards but the acting was good and so was the story line the only thing I dont like is that it was a four week story
so I dont think its fair to just dismiss past DW shows just because they are older than a lot of todays viewers

Im not steeped in the old DW there are a lot of episodes I love from the last 10 years I just wish we got back to adventure, thrills and spills

59 year old here, checking in - I don't remember any 'dolly bird assistants'!

Yes I know what you mean, Granny McSmith - I had to resort to fan sites to try and work out the chronology of the River Song appearances and her ruddy interminable 'spoilers, sweetie' and I still don't understand it.

I like Clara as the character has now become, but all the picking her up and dropping her off in her own time got rather tedious. What happened to companions who went along for the adventure?

The Impossible Girl stuff went right over my head. And I am also fed up of the constant undercurrent about who is going to die is unnecessary and distracting.

I may sound really thick but I'm not, I just like my drama to be coherent.

You may ask why I still watch it - I don't know really, I like Peter Capaldi as the Doctor and I guess I always hope it's going to get a bit better.

Bravo. I read it and agree with almost every word.

Seconded. Well put indeed Tom.

Thirded, very well put Tom

I agree this is a good post with some really good points and the bit I have highlighted I agree with massively.

I know I have posted repetitively(sorry about that) about the lack of pace and excitement in the show but I have never sought to claim otherwise that it's more than my opinion. What I loved about the RTD Era others don't and it's the same with this Era now. (Hence the usual RTD V SM debates)

What I would add to your point is that what the show is now, where I'm not enjoying it as much, is not new thing in some ways. When I watch through Classic Who in order there are many periods of the show I am not so keen on. Season 3, with all it's chopping and changing of companions and really dull historicals which pale by comparison to the previous season.

Season 7, I would have been going nuts if I'd been a viewer back then. No TARDIS, no spacey adventures, just The Doctor stuck on Earth. Plus the Exile scenario as well, always happy when it gets to the later Pertwee Seasons when UNIT is less involved.

Then there's Season 24, off course, it doesn't get much worse than that!

What I like about watching through these less favorable periods is that I know change is coming, the evolving process kicks in and you got something to look forward too. The only difficulty now is not really knowing when that big change is gonna come that will shake the show up a bit and I'll be able to see if Saladfinger's fatigue theory really is true or whether it is just this period(But as I said in previous post I think it's the latter).

The bizarre thing for me is that Classic Who is at times even slower paced and at times less exciting than even what we have now. The trick with Classic Who is that in a large number of cases there's enough content to keep you interested in the story but it's not always the case(The Web Planet for example...yawn!)

What happened with me is that while Who was off air in the 90's, we had edge of your seat programmes like Buffy, Superman and other high octane shows which took TV Drama to a new level for me. Then the '96 TV Movie came along and I was so blown away by the fast pace in that it left me breathless and having to watch it again very quickly to understand what it was about.

Then Doctor Who came back in 2005 and it continued in the same vein as the aforementioned shows. It was pacy, it was action-packed and even when it wasn't(in episodes like Father's Day) it reminded me of those Buffy episodes which were a bit quieter but still told a really good story.

You also around that time had Merlin, Robin Hood and other drama's which were off similar pace and excitement which was of a similar standard to Doctor Who.

Doctor Who at the moment doesn't resemble any of that. I do agree with TomTit that in the last few years especially I have only really enjoyed properly the episodes Moffat has written far more than anyone else's(Not all of them, what a mess A Good Man Goes To War Was)

They still fall short of what I personally expect of a TV Drama, any TV Drama, not just Doctor Who in this day and age but as TT says that's just an opinion and what doesn't work for me works for some.

So to sum it up, Classic Who worked fine for me but my taste's and expectations in modern drama changed significantly in those years it was off air due to those other programmes and Doctor Who did meet those expectations for me while RTD was in charge.

I hope that sort of explains why I am finding it difficult with Moffat's Era at the moment and why I prefer a bit of pace and excitement in the show. It's just what I like. It's just my opinion. I am an adrenaline junkie, can't help that but I do like slow paced stories if they are interesting.

I thought maybe it was better explained than me just saying the same old thing(Guilty as charged!)

This series has been so bad I gave up watching...and then,low and behold, it looks like I missed a good episode with the Zygon Inversion! So you never know. People drift in and out of watching. It goes in phases...but so long as everyones' phases aren't in alignment it should survive the coming and going.
Even though this series has been awful on the whole so far, Russell T and Moffat have done the show proud and produced extraordinary work at times.

I think two very simple improvements would improve the show considerably:

1. Fix the broadcast time. Preferably 6 or 7 o'clock, but whatever, keep it the same time.

2. Abandon the "Next week" trailers at the end of each episode. In fact, abandon all trailers apart from ones that are as oblique as possible. Give us back mystery and anticipation.

I have to agree with Tom Tit. Bravo.

Many people around here really don't seem to "get" that perception is almost entirely subjective which makes any opinions based on those perceptions no more or less valid than any other. Likewise, liking some episodes and not others (while other people like all or dislike all) is not evidence of superior tastes or of any kind of objectivity.

And since mere opinion can influence the opinions of others there are times when opinions can become self fulfilling prophecies.