io9: peter davison

Davison: I'll Be Back As Doctor If You Want Me

Graeme McMillan — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 08:20:30 PDT

If the internet ever bores of wondering who will replace David Tennant to be the new Doctor, there's now a new possibility: Replace him with an old Doctor. Following his appearance in last November's special episode Time Crash, Fifth Doctor Peter Davison has admitted that he would be perfectly willing to return to Doctor Who if the need ever arose.

In a recent interview, Davison admitted:

I would certainly be able to do it. I'm not suggesting for a moment that it would ever happen. I think it won't happen. But I would have done it anyway. I have two young boys, six and eight, who love Doctor Who, so I sit there and I watch all the new series Doctor Whos about three or four times.

The decider may have been the quality of his short comeback:

'Time Crash' was such a well written piece. It worked on so many levels, commenting on the fact that David watched me when he was young, on the fact the Tenth Doctor had been the Fifth Doctor. It's something that could, if you like, be left in that story ['The Last Of The Time Lords,' the episode it spun out of]. I was very happy and pleased to do it.

If, as is rumored, the writer of that episode, Steven Moffat, takes over as executive producer in the show's 2010 season, then perhaps we'll see Davison again before too long. In the meantime, Davison's daughter, Georgia Moffett (no relation), stars in the upcoming new season of the show, starting next month.

Peter Davison [Digital Spy]

Doctor Who Hits The Nostalgia Crack Pipe

charliejane — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 07:30:00 PST

The new Doctor Who BBC series has a lot of fans who never watched the original. So why do the producers insist on hauling out more and more Thatcher-era crap? It's like they're trying to drain the freshness out of the show. The latest instance is the return of 1980s doctor Peter Davison in a mini-episode for a BBC charity night. When David Tennant tells Davison, "You were my Doctor," he's speaking for the fans-turned-writers. It's another stage in the descent of Doctor Who into self-referential fluff.

Davison starred in the show the first time it started to inscribe itself with its own past like the amnesiac moron in Memento. He had a whole season of stories featuring only villains from the show's previous 20 years, followed by a past-Doctor convention. After Davison left, the show hired a fan to serve as "consultant" on the sixties and seventies backstory it kept referencing. All that self-indulgence helped lead to the show's death in the late 1980s. To be fair, this short skit is the right place to do a fan-service cameo by Davison. And writer Stephen Moffatt finds a cute way to treat Davison's manic doctor as one "phase" in the development of a single person.

But still. The new Doctor Who has been at its best when it's pretended to be a reinvention instead of a continuation. The revamped Autons, Daleks, Cybermen, Master, Macra and soon Sontarans are becoming yawn-inducing. At a time when Star Wars and Star Trek are both doing the autofellatio of delving into their own pasts, Doctor Who should keep moving forward. So this latest clip, harmless nonsense though it is, is another bad sign.

Must See: Doctor Who

charliejane — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 22:29:55 PDT

Must-see TV shows are futuristic classics that shouldn't be missed. Of course, not every must-see is perfect. That's why we've rated them 1-5 on the patented "crunchy goodness" scale.

Title: Doctor Who
Date: 1963-1989

Vitals: A man of a half-dozen (or so) faces travels through time and space in a police phone booth, fighting cyborg thugs, giant monsters and the occasional eco-allegory.

Famous names: Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Peter Purves, William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Colin Baker, Jon Pertwee, Sylvester McCoy, Terrance Dicks, Robert Holmes, Nicholas Courtney, Sophie Aldred.

Crunchy goodness: 5

Memorable product tie-in: The Daleks, mutant nazis in personal super-tanks, spawned a zillion types of crap, from a plastic zip-up playsuit to remote control wheelie Daleks to Dalek Sky-Ray ice lollies. (An ice lolly is like an ice-cicle.) Embarrassingly, a shitload of toy Daleks actually appear in longshot in the story Planet of the Daleks, as an army of super Daleks preparing to conquer the galaxy.

Design breakthrough: Doctor Who pioneered the art of filming in front of a greenscreen — but didn't exactly perfect it. More successful were John Friedlander's latex masks (Davros, the Ogrons, the Draconians) and Delia Derbyshire's pioneering all-electronic arrangement of the theme music.

Life lesson: It's not murder if you trick the bad guys into blowing themselves up (in, like, every episode.)

Outpost Gallifrey