Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Agreed! I'm a big fan of Rogue One as evidenced by my review!

<https://www.generationstarwars.com/2016/12/rogue-one-is-star-wars-prequel-your
e.html>
  

    
I have one of those reviews of my own! I really, really liked "Rogue
One" and actually remember thinking "this is the next Star Wars
movie that I've been waiting for since 1983" because it felt like
going home as I watched the AT-AT walkers arrive and stride across
the atoll. I may even have had a little tear in my eye in the
theatre.

> But I can't get Mom to watch Doctor Who with me

My mum always tried to take in interest in my hobbies, but science
fiction was a step too far even for her. I wonder if the 2005 series
might have won her over if she'd seen those? As for my dad, he never
did get into sci-fi and his lip still curls when talking about Dr
Who or Star Wars or Star Trek, but he has got into crime/murder
mysteries since he retired and we now have long discussions about
the latest authors we've read which is really nice.

> I would like to register a complaint with the universe and
> the BBC about the literal title of this topic

Yikes! I thought that was a complaint at John, Jon and I! I was
relieved to read on, I'd hate to be guilty of false advertising. 

One of the reasons we tried launching the <whovians.> conference now
was that for the first time there seemed to be universal access to
new episodes at the same time all around the world (at least,
wherever Disney is). Before it's been all over the place, across
different channels and platforms and airing months apart. I was
hoping it would be a lot better now so It's a shame that finding Dr
Who is as tricky in places as it ever was.

We're a bit spoiled here in the UK because every single episode of
the show (with one exception) and the spin-offs is available for
free for streaming on BBC iPlayer. The new episodes air on BBC One
on Saturday evening. And every DVD or Blu-ray is available from the
shops; I have them all with the exception of "Legend of the Sea
Devils" (urgh) and the most recent RTD specials which I've yet to
buy. I think we Brits take that for granted.

I find it wild that the one story made in the US by an American
network - the Paul McGann movie - is the one you can't get. It has
its faults but is better than people give it credit for, a crucial
stepping stone from Classic to Nu eras.

(And I have a database programme for keeping track of my DVD
purchases too! We'll have to organise a viewing club for reruns.)
  

    
I did like the Paul McGann movie well enough when I watched it.  But
currently, it's only available as DVD if you can find it.  I'd have
thought my Los Angeles Public Library would have a truly great film
collection on video, DVD, super8, etc.  After all, Hollywood is
literally a neighborhood of Los Angeles, part of the city, and no,
their video collection is not great, and they don't have this one. 
I think I got it from Netflix as a DVD before I quit that part of
their service.

Hmm....suddenly wondering how the BBC funding changes when people go
TV-free and only use streaming services viewed on devices that are
not dedicated TV screens (computers, pads, phones).  Is that part of
the problem with the BBC funding Doctor Who without outside
partners, or is it just that producing Who to modern standards of
sets and effects and cinematography makes it so much more expensive
than the endless parade of police and detective programs?

PBS (the US Public Broadcasting Service) does produce some original
programming, but a lot of it is various sorts of talking heads, or
nature shows.  Not a lot of scripted shows period, and nothing like
the effects on 2005+ Who.
  

    
The whole issue of how the BBC will be funded in future is a live
hot potato, unfolding as we speak. At the moment the law has been
adjusted so that anyone using streaming devices to watch live or
nearly-live programmes is also liable to pay the license fee; you
get challenged when you access the iPlayer. At the moment it's an
'honour system' but there's no reason why they can't require your TV
Licence Number to sign in just like Netflix.

The BBC's funding has been squeezed for some time now. The current
government imposed a freeze on the cost of a TV license and siphoned
off some of the licence fee to pay for other things, and for that
reason the BBC's budget has shrunk. A lot of shows have been
cancelled and there are more repeats and bought-in shows (BBC One
just started showing "Suits" at the weekend from the beginning for
example.)

So yes, I think that was a reason behind the Disney deal: either
slash budgets, cancel the show, or find a production partner. If RTD
hadn't stepped forward with the Disney deal I doubt there would have
been a post-Whittaker series. As it is, RTD himself says that the
BBC model is doomed to obsolescence in the very near future which is
why he wanted this new set-up, to ensure the show's long term
survival post-BBC.
  

    
The BBC is increasingly co-producing series. For example, His Dark
Materials was a co-production with HBO produced by Bad Wolf Studios.
  

    
Bad Wolf are busy boys. They've also made a big new drama for ITV
called Red Eye currently airing on that network on Sunday nights.
They might be the biggest independent producers in the country
today. They've certainly come a long way from a slogan RTD dreamt up
with to daub on the side of the Tardis in 2005!
  

    
And Bad Wolf Studios is now owned by Sony!
  

    
Talking of studios, I thought I might make use of this brief pause
to say something about the production side of the show, if you'll
indulge me. One of the gifts of Doctor Who has been the amount of
making-of material that's been unearthed and subsequently released
on DVD and Blu-ray. There is enough content out there to base a full
university course about the changing methods of television
production in the UK from the 1960s onwards.

Despite the BBC's global reputation, its production standards at the
time were extraordinarily primitive. American networks had Hollywood
studios making content for them and benefited from all that
know-how, skilled craftsman and huge studio backlots, and the whole
of southern California to film Westerns in. By contrast, British TV
in the early 60s had none of that. TV studios were mainly converted
theatres barely fit for purpose, and actors and directors were used
to working on regional repertory productions. It was more like
Hollywood thirty years earlier: you can see the cast line up in a
fixed position, no space to move around, no cuts and close-ups
because that took too much time and cost.

At the start, Doctor Who shot one episode a week (with a 3-4 week
gap to broadcast). The cast would rehearse in a local church hall in
west London with sets 'blocked out' using masking tape on the floor
to show where walls and desks would be in the studio. Then they
would go in to film the full 25 minute episode in one afternoon and
evening, done 'as live' like a traditional play. In the first story,
"An Unearthly Child", almost the only actual cut in the whole thing
(rather than switching between cameras on the soundstage as actors
rushed to hit their marks in time) is the moment when Barbara and
Ian step into the Tardis and have the seminal "it's bigger on the
inside than on the outside" moment, which obviously had to be done
by stopping filming and moving everyone to a new set.

Only if something went badly wrong was filming stepped and begun
again. There's lots of fluffed lines that were kept in because the
was no time to go again. A famous example is the Doctor referring to
'anti-radiation gloves' rather than 'anti-radiation drugs' in the
first Dalek serial. But there were limits to what could be
overlooked: in the next serial Hartnell fluffed the line "check the
fault-locator" and told Susan to "check the fornicator". That did
have to be reshot! Overall the technology involved in filming was
ancient: the camera equipment is said to have given off so much heat
that it even triggered the fire sprinklers at Lime Grove during one
scene.

It was ages before they started being able to do even basic outside
location filming, in fields or quarries getting there by commuter
trains. The huge success of the Daleks meant they did finally get to
shoot some scenes in the early morning showing invading Daleks in
the middle of London in Trafalgar Square and on Westminster Bridge,
but it wasn't until Patrick Troughton's time in 1967 that they
finally got to head off for a week to the Welsh countryside doubling
for Tibet to hunt to film "The Abominable Snowmen". Unfortunately,
there wasn't a single bit of snow and they might just as well have
stayed in Surrey.

Just a few years later in the 70s location shooting was a standard
component of most dramas, Doctor Who included with studio scenes
being filmed at the much more advanced, state-of-the art BBC
Television Centre in Shepherd's Bush. One of my favourite games
watching TV as a kid was spotting which bits of a show were shot on
16mm film (meaning on location) and which were video tape (meaning
they were shot in the studio). It was so obvious! But my parents,
oddly, could never see a difference. People watching now would
probably ignore it too. I guess you had to be a certain age to 'get
it', and I was. One of my earliest life skills, now sadly no longer
useful.
  

    
(If anyone does have any questions about Doctor Who or anything else
we've been talking about in this discussion, please do send them in
to inkwell[@well.com]. We'd love to hear what people are interested
in. WELL members can of course post directly into this topic, as
well as having access to the full <whovians.> conference.)
  

    
That's an excellent primer for anyone who may be interested,
<draml>! 

I'm looking forward to seeing how ILM's StageCraft (originally
developed for the Star Wars spin-off series on Disney+ and
subsequently used on Star Trek, Fallout and more) is utilised on
season one and beyond. It does have its supporters and detractors,
but has the benefit of scalability and frequent updates from Epic
Games.
  

    
If I got the right end of this, ILM's StageCraft is basically the
next evolution of green screen, am I right? But instead of having
huge expanses of green material for the actors to work against, they
can have the finished FX projected up there in hyper-realistic
hi-res so that for the actors (let alone the audience) it's
indistinguishable from being in the middle the real thing. And not
only that, but the shapes and lighting play on the actors in a
realistic real-time fashion to prevent that obvious 'uncanny green
screen' flat aspect.

That dovetails nicely with where I was going in <83>. When they
moved into the new BBC TV Centre, and production went into colour,
they discovered the ability to do 'chroma key' which is effectively
the first generation of what became ubiquitous green screen.
Although they had location filming, it was expensive and they'd
invariably run out of time so they'd take what I guess we would call
'background plates' and then back in the studio they would film the
actors against a blue screen; sometimes yellow if the Tardis was in
shot. Into the blue area they would drop the background plate, right
there on the studio monitors, where it would look like the actors
were still standing in the middle of the location and not indoors at
Shepherd's Bush.

The BBC didn't consider this sort of gimmick appropriate for its
proper, prestige dramas but was happy to let Top of the Pops and
Doctor Who experiment with it. Perhaps the most famous scene from
that period was the Doctor and Jo Grant struggling through a disused
coal mine and coming across a sea of giant squirming maggots in
green slime - a close-up of ordinary sized maggots dropped in behind
them. It still looks horrible today, and honestly to a young boy at
the time it was the stuff of nightmares watching these revolting
things squirming around just inches away from our heroes.

Actually to someone of my generation we still kind of knew it was
horribly fake. Not only could you detect the aforementioned switch
of medium from film to studio VT, the chroma key was notorious for
leaving fringing around the actors so they got this blue or yellow
halo around them, making them look like outlined figures in a comic
book panel. And if the key colour was reflected on any part of the
actors then body parts would go missing and be replaced by the
background plate - the giant reflective K1 robot in Tom Baker's
debut story was particularly disastrous in this respect. Plus the
Action Man toy tank.

They also started used it for BBC weather forecasts to put the
presenter against a computer-generated map. Much merriment ensued
should Michael Fish suddenly lose a hand mid-broadcast. We really
did take our amusements where we could find them in the 70s.
  

    
StageCraft is an evolution of Lucasfilm's technology developed for
the Star Wars prequels. Steven Moffat's Boom makes extensive use of
it.
  

    
> making-of material

I found "Behind the Scenes" videos for the new episodes on YouTube:
Space Babies - <https://youtu.be/ar6AHrAlRzc?si=Ti82J9kxIH0H9R4L>
The Devil's Chord -
<https://youtu.be/XbxvewrxaqQ?si=LJGMutf5ZPSt-Zk_>

Loads of others at <https://www.youtube.com/@DoctorWho>...
  

    
Excellent!

One of the things I love about Russell T Davies is that I seem to
share so many of his instincts. He obviously loves all the behind
the scenes stuff from the Classic Era shows too, as much as I always
have, and he probably watches the DVDs all the time as well. When he
rebooted the show in 2005 he was determined to do podcasts, auto
commentaries, and a half hour behind the scenes companion called
Doctor Who Confidential every week.

It was fascinating how those stopped almost immediately once he
left. Moffat clearly didn't share that passion; and they're a lot of
work, and they cost time and money to produce so the BBC went off
them too.

And now, RTD is back and we have podcasts, audio commentaries, and a
brand new Doctor Who Unleashed doing what the old show did, 18 years
ago. It interviews people working on the show today (runners,
assistants, prop masters, gaffers, costume and hair) and so many of
them - when asked why they got into TV production in the first place
- cite watching Doctor Who Confidential in 2005/6/7.

It's that powerful and influential, when a show opens its doors to
fans and lets them see inside and share the magic.
  

    
It's great RTD has reopened the TARDIS doors with Disney dollars!
There'll be new generations of media creatives whose imaginations
will be sparked by these behind-the-scenes series.
  

    
In the "we're saving so much money" theme, the original Star Wars was
an extremely inexpensive movie when it came to props.  Stormtrooper
rifles came from WWII movie props (Sterling submachine guns) and Han
Solo's blaster was a cut-and-paste of another movie prop.  Adam Savage
and Tested did a deep dive in to making a legit copy of Solo's DL-44:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sCReGjfZ_A>
  

    
It was the small coloured plastic squares that were glued on to the
front of Darth Vader's costume that always tickled me. They were
cheap bits of tat that you'd find in local arts and crafts shops in
the British high street in the day, not something you'd expect on a
fearsome Sith Lord.

Wait a minute - don't tell me Chewie's crossbow was just a cost
saving measure and not a deeply thought out design decision?
  

    
Did any of the early Dr. Who designers go on to have a famous career
path?  The now-famous director, Joe Johnston, started his career doing
industrial design for the first three Star Wars films.  All three
books are still available, I bought these as a kid and I suspect it's
part of the reason I ended up in design school.
  

    
They were mainly BBC staffers as I recall. They did their job, but
it was just another TV show, and then moved on to the next one which
might be a farming show or a police procedural.

Of course, Dr Who fans know and celebrate their names - Peter
Brachacki who created the original Tardis console room but really
resented having to spend time on a show so beneath him; and Raymond
Cusick who designed the Daleks from a script description from writer
Terry Nation. He was actually very proud of his contribution and
involvement with Dr Who and should have had far more recognition -
not to mention a share of the royalties!

Of all the behind the scenes talent probably the most celebrated is
Delia Derbyshire who worked for the BBC's experimental Radiophonic
Workshop finding new groundbreaking ways of creating sound by e.g.
scraping a key down cello strings and distorting it to make a
distinctive VWORP! VWORP! sound.

And it was Delia who took legendary composer Ron Grainer's score for
the theme and arranged it using these extraordinary sounds to make
one of the most iconic pieces of TV music of all time. Myth has it
that when Grainer came in and heard the finished piece for the first
time, he frowned and asked: Did I write that?

Delia was a leading light in electronic music and had a very
successful career but sadly all-too short life after leaving the
BBC. Deserves to be as celebrated as Wendy Carlos among others.
  

    
(Actually I should have said that she had a successful career
post-BBC but that it was all too short due to declining health
resulting from alcoholism, which curtailed her professional life
although she lived until the age of 64 in 2001. I needed a bit of
help from Wikipedia with that, if I'm honest.)
  

    
Dr. Who theme also *didn't* use a Theremin "comma but" analog synths
and electronic instruments back then were so simple that I'd argue it
was effectively a Theremin but with different controls.

Also one of the most popular TV themes ever covered?  Orbital released
a cover in 2001 with different versions and titles for CDs released in
the US and the UK:

"Doctor" in the UK:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjRjb3Dfw54>

"Doctor Look Out!" in the US, not so much a cover as a tribute?  I
wonder if there were rights issues related to using the actual theme.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FL6ADbHA2k>

I've seen them play it live and it's been the UK "Doctor":
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YxtPmUaFRI>

If you've never been to an "electronica" or "techno" concert and you
have the chance for an Orbital ticket?  GO.  GO, DAMN YOU, GO.  I have
considered flying to the EU just to see them again.
  

    
(oh, and yes, they really do wear those flashlights on their heads so
they can see their gear in the midst of all those flashing lights.)
  

    
Just for the record .. the original (Thanks Delia!) is at
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75V4ClJZME4>
  

    
I can't imagine what it was like to hear analog synth music as the
opening for a TV show back in that time.  Kraftwerk and Brian Eno were
releasing experimental music albums but what person who watches
popular, evening TV shows bought those albums?
  

    
I love that everyone is so excited and passionate about the original
Doctor Who theme! When he was playing the Doctor in 2010, Matt Smith
went to Glastonbury where Orbital were a headline act, and went on
stage with them 'guest performing' the theme to the crowd; he may
even have been given a headlight of his own for the occasion.

I can say with complete honesty, hand on heart, that the first 45rpm
single I ever bought with my own pocket money painstakingly wheedled
out of my parents over weeks and months was the official BBC release
of the Delia Derbyshire arrangement of the Doctor Who theme in about
1974. My first 33rpm LP album was a collection of sound effects for
alien worlds, spaceships and laser pistols produced by the
Radiophonic Workshop. I was a nerd from a very, very young age.

And yet for all that well-deserved praise, I think we're still
underestimating what Delia and her colleagues at the BBC Radiophonic
Workshop achieved.