DOCTOR WHO: WATCH THE SHOW, READ THE BOOK
Nov. 24th, 2013 09:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
defrogI understand a few of you are interested in this Doctor Who bloke.
As you may have heard in passing somewhere, the Doctor Who series is now 50 years old as of Saturday (albeit that includes 16 years of inactive service, interrupted once by Paul McGann in 1996).
And what with everyone posting all kinds of Doctor-Who related stuff (even Google and Yahoo are doing it), I thought I’d just toss in a link to this post about the Doctor Who novels:
They were really just novelizations of TV episodes. But when they started popping up in Waldenbooks in the early 80s – by which time Doctor Who was playing on my local PBS station – I ended up reading a lot of them. They were good research for earlier Doctor Who stories.
You see, children, back then we didn’t have these fancy YouTubes and on-demand TVs and Netflixes and Amazons that you have today. We didn’t even have DVD boxsets of TV shows. We had reruns. And in the case of Doctor Who, we didn’t even have that, because PBS generally does not do reruns. In Nashville, they started with Doctor No. 4, so if I wanted to watch any of the previous shows, there was really no way to do it. At all.
But I damn well could read them, thanks to the cheap Target novelizations of the episodes. That was my version of Catch-Up TV. And I have to say, they were well written – which is to say, they were quick and entertaining reads that delivered what my relatively undemanding 17-year-old self expected. I’m not sure what the current 48-year-old model of myself would make of them.
I could find out, except that I can’t remember if I ever kept any of them. If I did, they're buried in my mom’s storage shed along with all the other books I left behind when I moved to Hong Kong. I figure there’s a 60% chance they’re still there. And there’s a 42% chance that they’re still in readable condition.
There is another option: some of the novels have been reprinted by BBC Books, and a few bookstores in HK are carrying them. I’m tempted to get one and see what happens.
Back to the future,
This is dF
As you may have heard in passing somewhere, the Doctor Who series is now 50 years old as of Saturday (albeit that includes 16 years of inactive service, interrupted once by Paul McGann in 1996).
And what with everyone posting all kinds of Doctor-Who related stuff (even Google and Yahoo are doing it), I thought I’d just toss in a link to this post about the Doctor Who novels:
They were really just novelizations of TV episodes. But when they started popping up in Waldenbooks in the early 80s – by which time Doctor Who was playing on my local PBS station – I ended up reading a lot of them. They were good research for earlier Doctor Who stories.
You see, children, back then we didn’t have these fancy YouTubes and on-demand TVs and Netflixes and Amazons that you have today. We didn’t even have DVD boxsets of TV shows. We had reruns. And in the case of Doctor Who, we didn’t even have that, because PBS generally does not do reruns. In Nashville, they started with Doctor No. 4, so if I wanted to watch any of the previous shows, there was really no way to do it. At all.
But I damn well could read them, thanks to the cheap Target novelizations of the episodes. That was my version of Catch-Up TV. And I have to say, they were well written – which is to say, they were quick and entertaining reads that delivered what my relatively undemanding 17-year-old self expected. I’m not sure what the current 48-year-old model of myself would make of them.
I could find out, except that I can’t remember if I ever kept any of them. If I did, they're buried in my mom’s storage shed along with all the other books I left behind when I moved to Hong Kong. I figure there’s a 60% chance they’re still there. And there’s a 42% chance that they’re still in readable condition.
There is another option: some of the novels have been reprinted by BBC Books, and a few bookstores in HK are carrying them. I’m tempted to get one and see what happens.
Back to the future,
This is dF
