Search - The Doctors- 30 Years Of Time Travel And Beyond on DVD

Introspective approach serves a particular audience well

tropic_of_criticism | 06/15/2004

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Other reviews have tended to emphasize the lack of production value this piece offers--and on that point I can hardly argue. I could improve "The Doctors" a hundred-fold with an hour on an old iMac. Still, all the editing in the world isn't going to help some fairly basic flaws with the source material: microphones are obviously in frame for many of the interviews, there's been no attempt to color balance shots, and there's really no narrative thread stringing the interviews together. To call this a "documentary" would make Ken Burns embarrassed of his craft. But, to me, all that's hardly the point.THE DOCTORS works because it answers a question I've had for two decades: "What the hell happened to DOCTOR WHO?" In the early 80s I actively watched the show on my local PBS station. I was thus very much a child of the Baker/Davison years. By the mid 80s, it was only sporadically shown on my local PBS station. Eventually word came through that the show had been cancelled. By the late 80s-even before the show was cancelled in Britain-it simply became too much work trying to find a station that still broadcast it. DOCTOR WHO faded as a memory of childhood. But I had always wondered what happened to the show. How could the longest-running science fiction show ever made-indeed one of the longest-lived shows of any kind-simply whimper out of existence without so much as a farewell episode? Given the furor over "final" episodes of much shorter American series like CHEERS and M*A*S*H, it seemed utterly incomprehensible that a show well-loved around the world could just fade away. This DVD-which doubtless would be better-reviewed were it more properly called, "Death of a Time Lord: Reflections on the End of DOCTOR WHO"--goes a long way to giving candid answers to that nagging question. While I can well imagine that hard-core fans would be unsurprised by most of the content of this disk, I found it fascinating stuff. Far from being disillusioned by the lack of technical sophistication involved in the production of the piece, I found it evocative of its source material. The raw, low budget nature of the footage is vintage DOCTOR WHO. I especially enjoyed seeing actors returned to locations where they'd filmed particular episodes, as if they were being sent to "holy ground" on some sort of nostalgic pilgrimage. Yet the places are barely distinguishable from one another. For Americans, this was always one of the great charms of the show. It was always delightful seeing the British delude themselves into believing that one part of their country looked sufficiently different from another so as to masquerade as completely different planets. THE DOCTORS succeeds with its low-budget approach because it's exactly what the producers of DOCTOR WHO would do if they were asked to film a series of interviews in the style of DOCTOR WHO. More importantly, though, THE DOCTORS gains much from its "unofficial" status. Sure, being able to have access to the copyrighted material of the BBC would have given them clips from the series, and maybe interviews with the upper echelons of BBC management, but the price would have been a BBC-paid editor. It's unclear how different these interviews would have been had they been conducted by the participants' former paymasters-but one can well imagine that the bits most critical of the BBC would not have survived. Nevertheless, material from the upper BBC management-even a summary from contemporary news articles--would have neatly balanced the interviews present here, and indeed SHOULD have been present to give the piece more journalistic balance.In the end, the limitations of the piece make it usable by only a particular segment of DOCTOR WHO fandom-and perhaps not at all to the general public. I liked it simply because it succinctly answered a lot of questions about the Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy years. While I learned something from almost every participant, I was literally taken aback by the demeanor of the now-late John Nathan Turner. Far from being the egotistical producer I had always imagined, he came across as sympathetic, willing to admit his mistakes, and protective of the actors he'd cast as Doctor. While tighter editing and a more "controlled" interviewing environment might have made for a technically better show, the "raw" format of the show allows personality and tone to emerge from the interviewees in a way that a more "polished" production might have failed to elicit. Thus I consider THE DOCTORS a useful addition to my collection-even if I'm glad I got it at a bargain basement price. Whether you'll find it valuable really depends on how much or how little you know about the Doctor's travels. It's not at all a place to start for an overview of the series. Nor is it a place to come if you're well-versed in DOCTOR WHO lore. But for that middle range of fans-who either ignored or couldn't follow DOCTOR WHO in the 1980s-you'll doubtless find something here you didn't know. It would be fascinating to return to this video after the new DOCTOR WHO series starts in 2005 to see if any of the nostalgic warnings given here were heeded by the new production team."