| Apr. 14th, 2005 @ 11:25 pm Comment: The Mary Whitehouse Experience |
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I notice in today's papers, and specifically, The Times that..
.. Doctor Who is too scary for children ..
Well, I thought that was the idea. Having said that, Saturday's episode, "The Unquiet Dead" was quite possibly one of the most frightening things on BBC One on a Saturday evening ever.
The first scene, featuring a corpse being possessed by the aliens of the story, the Gelth, and then walking out onto the street moaning and spewing out one of these transparent Gelth into the air was, quite frankly, disturbing, even to me. However, this has restored my faith in Doctor Who being able to scare children into submission behind the sofa still.
However, this has prompted concerns from parents who have been unable to get their children to sleep. The BBC has advised that the story, and programme is unsuitable for eight year olds and below. Slightly negates the point of the sticker book, colouring book and Doctor Who toys does it not? Um.
Somewhat unfairly perhaps, this has also linked to the wrath of Mary Whitehouse and the National Viewer's and Listener's Associations' crashing down on a 1976 episode of the series. In "The Deadly Assassin", The Doctor's head was held underwater, as the result of a climatic fight inside the Matrix, a dreamscape (sounding familiar?). The shot cut to a freeze frame to imply the Doctor had drowned. Subsuquently, the master print of this shot was excised, and indeed only recently has this material been recovered.
Indeed, the print of Deadly Assassin Episode Three supplied to the Doctor Who event at the Cornerhouse in Manchester last Sunday failed to have this shot in it, instead the cliffhanger coming in early.
Ironically, this episode to have prompted the biggest mass reaction is the first in the series not to be written by it's principal writer, Russell T Davies. Instead, The Unquiet Dead was written by The League of Gentlemen actor/writer Mark Gatiss.
In that case, god knows what's going to happen with the Rob Shearman scripted episode in Week Six. That has the Daleks in it too.
Ultimately though, it seems that only 50 of the 8.5 million that watched the series were frightened by it. Which isn't half bad for the behind the sofa tradiation.
Afterword: Errata in The Times article. It's Spilisbury, not Silisbury in the deputy editor of DWM. And it's the Gelth, not the Gelf. Dear me. |
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