Doctor Who sweeps board in SFX sci-fi poll
The Doctor has been voted 'Best Hero' in an SFX poll of its readers; with the Daleks voted Best Monster; and The Master voted Best Villain; with various other Whoniverse characters peppered around various other polls.
I'm biased, but it's tough to see how any other genre character can really compete with the Doctor – eleven faces and personalities; bigger-on-the-inside time machine; anywhere in time and space; mysterious background and abilities. Who could compare?
Blake's 7, Babylon 5 and Farscape, three other series I have big soft-spots for, get a few mentions in the poll too, which is mainly dominated by the Trek franchise and various tedious vampire stuff.
Elsewhere The Master was voted best villain. A right and just result considering the brilliance of Roger Delgado and the sheer evilness of Anthony Ainley. Simm had his moments too. In his less interesting stories, including some of the recent ones, The Master is just a generic pantomime villain.
But gven something more interesting to do, all the actors who played the part have brought something new to the role in the way that every Doctor does. Seven shades of evil. Again, who could compete?
As it goes, I don't really have much interest in the Daleks. Every new appearance since Remembrance of the Daleks - barring Dalek - has been an exercise in diminishing returns and I'm frankly rather bored of them now.
The Daleks, yesterday
Daleks have arguably been rebooted three or four times now, but beyond that original concept there's not a huge amount to them. Most of the best Dalek stories since the 60s have concerned how people react to their presence and existence as much as anything - Genesis, Revelation and Remembrance specifically - although Day of the Daleks is brilliant sci-fi fun.
RTD and Helen Raynor failed completely in doing anything of interest with them in my opinion, and while Victory of the Daleks had some nice moment, it was pretty incoherent stuff.
Nevertheless, Daleks are slightly beyond that now. They're such a massive icon it doesn't really matter any more.
And now, in an SFX poll, they've trumped something called Lorne from Angel, the Aliens, Gollum from Lord Of The Rings, Gizmo from Gremlins, and the thing from, er, The Thing.
I wonder what Ray Cusick, designer of the Daleks, makes of it all. Legend has it he got an ex gratia payment from the BBC that amounted to £50, while Terry Nation bought a massive house in the country and a fleet of sports cars.
Cusick may not be rich, but designing the best monster ever isn't a bad legacy.
Other Doctor Who-related results in the SFX poll include:
• K9 named fifth-best robot
• Cybermen named 13th-best monsters
• Davros voted fifth-best villain
• Captain Jack Harkness voted 11th-best hero
• Donna Noble, Rose Tyler and Sarah-Jane Smith are voted fourth, eighth and tenth as Best Heroine respectively
Ten reasons Farscape is like Blake’s 7
The suggestion that Farscape is a bit like Blake's 7 is hardly a revelation, what with a gang of convicts and ne'er-do-wells roaming the galaxy in an extraordinary ship they stumbled across fighting a collection of S&M fascists and their own dodgy interpersonal relationships.
Crichton, obsessed with Scorpius and wormholes is reminiscent of Blake in terms of the latter's desire to bring down the Federation, and Travis. There's a bit of Tarrant hotshot fly-boy arrogance in there too.
The symbiotic relationship of Pilot and Moya is rather too similar to Zen and The Liberator too; and there are various other archetypes in there too: female mystic; cowardly jester; gun-wielding ball-breaking women; ambiguous leather-clad anti-heroes; and gentle giants.
Blake's 7
There are even set pieces that seem like straight lifts: in Dog With Two Bones the Farscape crew gunned down by black-clad troopers in slo-mo in a end-of-season climax. Not unlike Blake, where the Blake's 7 crew are unned down by black-clad troopers in slo-mo in a end-of-season climax.
What's interesting, though, is that despite so many similar elements, the two programmes could hardly be more different. Farscape is an extremely funny show: self-aware; self-deprecating and not afraid to play with form and convention.
Blake's 7 - despite a lot of grim humour and the odd lighter episode, generally focussed on Vila - B7 tended to take itself fairly seriously, especially in the early days.
And in spite of the odd look between Avon and Cally, or the occasional kiss between Avon and Servalan, romance - or even sex - was rarely in the air in the British sci-fi show.
In Farscape everyone is at it all the time. Chiana is, fairly explicitly, a slut who's only a half-step removed from being a prostitute, albeit one who's quite happy to adopt that, er, position.
Farscape
Time travel, alternate universes, cosmic planes, resurrections, fantasy, animation - Farscape had a go at all of them. But Blake's 7 was a product of its time: of Thatcher and strikes and oil shortages: it was straight-laced and po-faced.
But I love both shows, at once alike and un-alike. Divided by continents and decades and styles and tastes; sharing a set-up but taking them in radically different directions.
If only Paul Darrow had turned up on Moya.
Ten reasons Farscape is like Blake's 7
Aeryn=Jenna or Soolin
Crichton=Blake or Tarrant
Zhan=Cally
Moya/Zen=Liberator/Pilot
Rygel=Vila
Crais=Avon
Dago=Gan
Scorpius=Servalan
Crais=Travis
Peacekeepers=Federation
BBC idiotically sabotages its flagship show
You can always trust the BBC to fuck something up when it comes to Doctor Who. It must come as a constant surprise to them that someone at the Beeb keeps re-commissioning the damn show, as they seem to do their level best to spoil it at every other turn.
Whether it's the Radio Times trying to spoil it for everyone; Graham Norton's appearance half-way through Rose; dicking about with the show in the schedules; or the latest trick of not only squashing the credits to trail the upcoming Saturday night drivel but adding in an animated Norton (him again!) mincing about the screen during the Doctor's climatic monologue at the cliffhanger in The Time of Angels.
I can think of another couple of occasions the Beeb has utterly pissed all over its won programming in the past: once when it had those little animated green blobs that promoted the CBeebies channel during a pivotal moment in one of the last episodes of Farscape; an a not-unrelated moment when the credits of the final episode of Russell T Davies' Casanova, which has Peter O'Toole slowly dancing, were rudely interrupted by a BBC continuity announces shouting about Phil Mitchell's return in EastEnders.
It's hard to think of anything more jarring, or any point in the story more inappropriate. It shows how clueless the BBC when it comes to its flagship show, a show that is a massive money-spinner for the BBC that it has seen fit to cancel on two separate occasions and virtually ignore for the best part of two decades, as if it were an embarrassment.
A show that RTD had to virtually stake his professional reputation on to get it back on the air at the BBC. It makes you grateful that the likes of Davies and Steven Moffat and David Tennant cared so much about and made sure it was ruined by interference from BBC honchos who listened to focus groups that told them that family drama was dead and shite like The Joy of Text was the way forward.
Would it matter if it were over the top of Total Wipeout or Strictly Come Dancing? Probably not. But Doctor Who is not like either of those shows, and it doesn't lend itself to BBC1's current trails for its Saturday night line-up either.
While the Beeb seems to have every idea of how to milk Doctor Who for all it's worth, it seems utterly clueless when it comes to handling Who. The more things change, the more they stay the same.