View source for Game for a laugh, they're the stuff of fantasy

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| publication = The Sunday Times
| file = 2013-04-14 Sunday Times.jpg
| px = 650
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| date = 2013-04-14
| author = A A Gill
| pages = 16
| language = English 
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In November, we will pass a milestone, or, perhaps, a police box: 50 years of Donor Who. People now ask where were you when you heard the Doctor had landed? I remember it well. The first episode was about cavemen, and I was frightened. I also remember it because the news was all about Kennedy being shot. It's a telling high/low culturally relative signifier that the death of JFK and the birth of the Doctor arc now somehow equivalent. The new series has kicked off to sorry ratings and twittering complains from its devotees. The audience is down to something under 6m, though the with-it Tristrams say they're cool with because. you know, the kids watch on their computers and phones. Ratings arc strictly for ilk. suits, than: they only apply to Foyle's War.

I try not to watch Doctor Who, but I did look in at the second episode. It's desperate. The reincarnations of the Doctor have never been a thespian hall of fame. The urrent one (Matt Smith) is just annoying like a gawky boy trying to impress his first girlfriend. The story is a knowing farrage of sentiment, vaunting poetical correctness and bits of cut-and-paste from Brian Cox and Richard Dawkins, doused in a leaden morality. Doctor Who has become the thing it always against. 

Used to light against. It started small as a home-grown, quirky entertainment for ...made out of silver paper and smoke machines, that di. take itself too terribly seriously. but took its audience quite seriously. It has morphed and mutated into a megalomaniac monster set on world domination. It consumes vast amounts of the BBC drama budget and spawns exclamatory spin-offs. It commands the attention of every corporate Tristram, but isn't made for anyone a self-justifying brand paid for by the Danegeld of the licence fee, to generate capital for BBC Worldwide. There's precious little to celebrate after 50 years other than its obesity and Dalek aspirations. 


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