Comments on: Behind the Sofa

By: John Quiggin » Blog Archive » Morphic resonance on Doctor Who

John Quiggin » Blog Archive » Morphic resonance on Doctor Who — Sun, 09 Jul 2006 11:25:18 +0000

[...] The first episode of the new series of Doctor Who was screened in Australia last night, and the preview of coming episode showed our old friends the Cybermen. As my son observed, they’re the least satisfactory of the Doctor’s enemies because they are just second-rate Daleks. Today, I opened my copy of the London Review of Books, to find the exact same observation from Jenny Turner, reviewing Kim Newman who objects to the cliched, but apparently universally true, observation, that children watched the series from ‘behind the sofa‘. Support for Rupert Sheldrake, or just evidence that the series reliably produces the same responses in lots of viewers. [...]

By: Crooked Timber » » Morphic resonance on Doctor Who

Crooked Timber » » Morphic resonance on Doctor Who — Sun, 09 Jul 2006 10:34:31 +0000

By: HK

HK — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 16:11:54 +0000

I still can’t eat licquorice allsorts after watching ‘The Happiness Patrol’ at the tender age of 5. Now I find out the episode was partially intended as a satire on Thatcherism, so there are still terrors to be had from Doctor Who in old age.

By: Nick

Nick — Sun, 02 Jul 2006 18:44:38 +0000

I have a distinct memory of spending most of the Zarbees-versus-the-Menoptera story (The Web Planet???) behind the settee. Skaroth & the Jaggeroth (much later) was great fun though – John Cleese & Eleanor Bron as art-pseuds admiring the Tardis-as-gallery-installation, and the current Mrs Dawkins dressed up in, ahem, school uniform . .

By: John S Costello

John S Costello — Sun, 02 Jul 2006 14:48:34 +0000

I spent Destiny of the Daleks behind my neighbors couch—we didn’t want to pay the television tax, so we didn’t have one. They weren’t very enthusiastic about inviting me back, though I did get to see Logopolis there.

The Daleks were freakin’ scary! (They still are, but I’ve sublimated the fright reaction and I also find them freakin’ hilarious as well.)

By: Brendan

Brendan — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 17:58:36 +0000

‘long and elaborate post about the Tomorrow People is ready to go’. Woo hoo!

By: serial catowner

serial catowner — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 17:22:12 +0000

Bah, young people. When I was a kid we didn’t use artificial substitutes to get scared, we had Curtis LeMay and the A-bomb.

But some of the space opera broadcast on the radio by the Ovaltine company came close.

As did the farm report, if you had a television of the time.

By: harry b

harry b — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 15:08:17 +0000

Brendan—long and elaborate post about the Tomorrow People is ready to go—will post when I get back to a computer I know how to use (sometime late next week!).

By: Phil

Phil — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 09:51:46 +0000

Oops. Top tip – don’t use a single leading asterisk to introduce a footnote. Sorry about that.

By: Phil

Phil — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 09:50:54 +0000

Brendan – that reminds me of the other great Dr Who childhood rite, the nightmare: at the beginning of the new Dr Who, one of the points Russell T. Davies insisted on was that there would be nightmares. It was the Autons that gave me nightmares* – symmetrically enough, my daughter says the same. Apart from the Daleks, the Autons were the only old monsters to be brought back in the first series – I wonder if that was why.

Assisted, I’ve always thought, by a promo clip for the Kinks’ “Plastic man” which was shown on Junior Points of View (Sarah Ward*, where are you now?) – but it looks as if there was a year between the two, so I may be misremembering. Further reports needed.

**No connection with the more famous Lalla.

By: Doctor Memory

Doctor Memory — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 00:09:03 +0000

Brendan: back before they got bought out by MTV and started producing their own programming, Nickelodeon spent most of their time airing old ITV childrens’ shows for their diminishingly small audience in the US. (Ie: anyone with cable TV in the early 1980s) The Tomorrow People was one of them, so a surprising number of people in the states have seen the show.

By: Brendan

Brendan — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 21:35:22 +0000

Er....does anyone remember the Tomorrow People? And does anyone remember the bit where the people's plastic clothes starting creeping over their faces and taking over their personalities? Scared the SHIT out of me when i was mumble mumble very young. It was very similar to the autons on Dr Who.

By: Dimitrios

Dimitrios — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 18:04:50 +0000

Oops, my mistake due to sloppy reading. I hadn’t realised that THAT Kim Newman was being quoted, the great admirer of Doctor Who. Lazy reading, in this case.

By: Dimitrios

Dimitrios — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 17:57:07 +0000

Brett, “Planet of Evil” gave me the willies, too. The dark mysterious pool in the forest (and what rises out of it, the geiger counters going off whenever the monster approached had the same effect in racking up the tension as the motion sensors in “Aliens”. If I remember correctly, at one point the Doctor had to make his way through a dark, abandoned spacecraft to his police box, dodging spooky ghost-things that could turn you into a dessicated corpse in seconds. Extremely creepy and “gothic” (despite the space age setting).

All good stuff, and a standing rebuke to Newman. If the writing and acting wasn’t good, why did theshow have that effect on so many? Was it the expensive special effects:)

By: Ian

Ian — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 15:42:46 +0000

I always thought “Pyramids of Mars” was one of the better stories of that period of the show; there was something very chilling about the villain who’s immobilized but still powerful, and bent on destruction for its own sake. It was the only story where hiding behind the couch made any sense, since the rest of the time the show seemed too silly. I remember that at one point Sutekh/Set says to the Doctor or someone, “Your evil is my good.” It sticks in my memory because my father was walking through the room and noted the reference to Paradise Lost.
Another high point of those years was the story with Skaroth, last of the Jaggaroth, which was hilarious.