The 800 Day Project - Never The End

Once upon a time, I decided to watch every episode of Doctor Who in order. One a day. Every day. All the way through from "An Unearthly Child" to "The Time of the Doctor". 800 episodes, including reconstructions. The "800 Day Project" was born...

Yes I know I did that same intro last time, but it's worth repeating just to let that big old number sink in. Eight hundred episodes. Eight hundred days. The longest running science fiction TV show in history - and now I can say that I've watched them all, because on 10th March 2016 I finally made it.

I've finished watching "The Time of the Doctor". Goodbye Matt Smith. Hello Mr Peter Capaldi and his new kidneys. "The 800 Day Project" is complete.

I'm going to save my more detailed thoughts for individual posts, but what have I learned over the last 800 days?

• Well firstly, the greatest challenge challenge wasn't keeping my interest from waning during the lows of the Hartnell years, or even the huge swathe of reconstructions. No strangely enough it was the midst of the "Trial of a Timelord" season and the second David Tennant series with Martha Jones. Eyelids growing heavy...
• That if Tom Baker is *my* Doctor - the one I grew up with and made me fall in love with the programme -  then Matt Smith is *my* New Series Doctor.  I just loved everything he did with the part and even the lesser stories were made better by his performances. 
• That "received fan wisdom" is often wrong. I quite liked "The Sensorites". "The Celestial Toymaker" has some redeeming qualities. "The Dominators" has Ronald Allen. "Horns of Nimon" is unashamedly bonkers yet brilliant. "Fear Her" is still terrible though. 
• That I never would have guessed that "Enemy of the World" would be a better story than "Web of Fear".
• That the rose-tinted wonder at a story from childhood can be wiped out when you are forty-eight. "Invasion of Time" I'm looking at you.
• That Mary Tamm really deserved a second season. Dodo maybe deserved one less.
• That Colin Baker's Doctor definitely works better on audio. It's not the costume honest.
• That Richard Briers really isn't that terrible in "Paradise Towers" and Alexei Sayle in "Revelation of the Daleks" is far, far worse.
• That at some point I'm going to go back and do it all again except with the commentaries and production notes turned on.

If I'm forced at gunpoint to choose just one (and I really, really don't want to but it's kind of an old tradition or charter or something...), these are my "favourite" stories from each Doctor:

1. Marco Polo
2. The Enemy of the World
3. The Claws of Axos
4. The Robots of Death
5. Mawdryn Undead
6. Vengeance on Varos
7. The Curse of Fenric
8. The Movie
9. The Empty Child
10. Silence in the Library
11. The Impossible Astronaut

So what now? Well it's not really the end is it? There's tons of stuff sitting there looking at me from my groaning shelves. I've still got the mighty "Shada" to watch (at least two different versions). The animated stories, "The Infinite Quest" and "Dreamland". The apocryphal webcast serials like "Scream of the Shalka", "Real Time" and "Death Comes to Time". The unofficial spin-offs like "Wartime", "Downtime", "P.R.O.B.E", "Auton" and "Shakedown". The sideways universe of "The Stranger". Let's not forget the charity specials "Dimensions In Time" and "Curse of the Fatal Death". Plus of course the official spin-offs: "K-9 & Company", "Torchwood" and "The Sarah Jane Adventures".

Then there's the extras from the official DVD releases - the 'Value Added Material' (VAM). I tried to keep up as I was watching the episodes - I really did -  by adding in some extra viewing time at weekends, but I just couldn't maintain the pace by the time I got to "Vengeance On Varos". I think it was because by that time the serials were only a couple of episodes long so that would have meant watching two or three DVD's worth of VAM at weekends. Too much even for me.

Oh and there's the little matter of 36 further episodes of the series starring Mr Peter Capaldi. I don't even own those ones yet. I know - bad fan.

Loads to look forward to. But you know what? I feel that I'm going to save Doctor Who for the weekends for now. I need a change. Saying that, I've found that 30-45 minute slot every morning before work a really good way of watching something regularly without subjecting my wife to the kind of genre TV she has no real interest in. My Sky+ hard drive is groaning under the weight of all the other thing's I've recorded but not got around to watching yet, let alone the Netflix / Amazon Prime series I want to see - like "Daredevil" and "Sense8" and "Ash vs The Evil Dead", etc, etc. So I think that will be the agenda for the next few weeks at least. Catch-up time.

But after that? Well I've got a hankering for some shorter runs of series. There are shiny new Blu-rays of  "The Prisoner" and "Space 1999" that have been sitting on my shelf since Christmas. Then there are those series which I bought on DVD, started watching but somehow never finished - "Carnivale" and the Richard O'Sullivan "Dick Turpin" for example. Let's not forget the classic short series that I haven't watched in their entirety in an age - "Firefly" and "Star Cops" and "Sapphire and Steel". Alan Bleasdale's "GBH" for a little non-SF flavour. Incidentally, I'm saving "Twin Peaks" for a special re-watch leading up to the new series in 2017...

But in between all of that that I've still got the bug to start another massive series marathon. I toyed with "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" as I have all the DVDs. Or the Jeremy Brett "Sherlock Holmes". Or even "Farscape" - I've never seen all of that.

In the end it was a recent television "event" mini-series that made the decision for me - that plus the fact that there is a fantastic new Blu-Ray box set of all nine seasons just out and I've never seen around 75% of the episodes. Yes, for my next trick I am going to attempt to watch every single episode of "The X-Files". All of the way from "Pilot" to "My Struggle II" with a couple of movies in the middle. Don't worry - I won't be calling it "The 210 Day Project" That doesn't have quite the same ring to it.  I'll come up with a better name before I start.

The 800 Day Project is dead.

Except it's not of course. In a typical timey-wimey Doctor Who way, this blog is going to be dealing with my thoughts from watching all of the episodes for a long time yet.  At the rate I'm going I'll have completed watching everything else I've mentioned before I get round to writing properly about "The Time of the Doctor". I don't mind.

There is also the little matter of an essay on the Target novelisation of "The Robots of Death" to come out in the "You On Target" charity book later this year. I've also realised that I've made no mention at all of the fact that I'm now doing monthly Twelfth Doctor comic book reviews for the "Doctor Who Show" podcast. I'll do a separate post about that soon.

Doctor Who is never far from my thoughts it seems.

Onwards...

"Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning" - Winston Churchill

The 800 Day Project - Day 554 to 557 - Metamorphosis

Once upon a time, I decided to watch every episode of Doctor Who in order. One a day. Every day. All the way through from "An Unearthly Child" to "The Time of the Doctor" 800 episodes, including reconstructions. The "800 Day Project" was born...

Yes, this is still going. I've not missed a single day of viewing since I began on 1st January 2014. As I write this, I'm a mere handful of episodes from the finish line. Success is so close I can almost taste it. Sadly it's not been such a good story with the blog, but then the two were never meant to run in tandem - I just didn't expect to get quite so far behind.

So, I've abandoned any flailing attempts to catch up. Forget about covering seasons or eras - instead I'm going to tackle stories as and when the mood takes me in between all the other nonsense I like writing about. It might take me another 800 days to get there, but at least the time pressure is off, which was spoiling part of the fun of the whole thing. I'm also not going to repeat the work of countless others and do insightful critical reviews of a whole serial - just touch on a few points I liked and concentrate more on the memories and feelings I associate with the stories.

The last proper 800 Day Project post (here) was in August 2015 where I said farewell to "my" Doctor, Tom Baker. That means it's the turn of Peter Davison to go under the microscope. It's the beginning of a bold new era for the show, and Davison's tenure was concurrent with another significant moment in my personal history with Doctor Who. This was the first incarnation of the Time Lord where I had every single episode recorded onto videotape.

 I wrote quite a while back (here) about the first episodes I ever recorded on the mighty Philips Video 2000, but by the time the Fifth Doctor debuted, my dad had succumbed to market forces and plumped for a shiny new (albeit rented) VHS machine. Now I can't remember exactly which make it was but it was definitely a top loading, noisy, clunky thing that you had to treat with respect or your precious tapes would be gobbled up by the hungry innards. The first story that had pride of place in my video library was of course:

 Castrovalva

It's probably far to say that this was the most important regeneration since Hartnell into Troughton. It was the first time in over seven years that the show had featured someone other than Tom Baker in the lead. So indelibly had Baker stamped his mark on the role that he *was* the Doctor (and for some he still is). Not only did the story have to introduce a new face for the Time Lord to an entire generation, but it had to complete the loose "Master" trilogy begun with "Keeper of Traken", flesh out the companions that had only been introduced a few sort episodes ago *and* tell a good story into the bargain.

It also has to deal with the now obligatory regeneration crisis. Ever since the first few minutes of Pertwee falling out of the TARDIS in "Spearhead From Space", it has been established that the Doctor never has an easy time of it when he regenerates. Other Time Lords seen to be able to change easily, sometimes even on a whim - but for the Doctor it's always a stressful and dangerous time. Here that theme of confusion and instability is taken to extremes when it looks like the Doctor might not survive the process at all.

Some might complain that this leads to interminably dull scenes set within the TARDIS as the Doctor's personality seems to unravel as fast as his multi-coloured scarf. Personally - I absolutely bloody loved it. Davison is immediately likeable in the role, meandering through the corridors, impersonating his predecessors and referencing previous companions and adventures. Plus - who doesn't want to see more of the rooms in the TARDIS ? It's interiors had been possibly some of the most unexplored areas of Doctor Who lore. I remember at the time being fascinated by every roundel and white corridor. Not to mention the wardrobe and the Zero Room.

Much of the story continues the Christopher H Bidmead preference for featuring strong science-based concepts - charged vacuum embodiments, the laws of thermodynamics, recursion, the "hydrogen inrush", etc. It also has its fair share of  technobabble too - block transfer computation (although one could argue that maths is basically behind all of reality), a referential differencer, telebiogenesis - and ambient complexity allegedly being the cause of many regeneration failures. The thing is, hard science or made up nonsense, it didn't matter to me. I was a child who grew up in the twin worlds of science fiction and science fact -  equally at home with the hyper-reality of E.E. 'Doc" Smith or the physical wonders of the universe around us, as so beautifully espoused by the genius that was Carl Sagan (although some of Bidmead's stuff is more computer science than cosmology). It was all fantastic.

I also loved the worlds conjured up by my favourite fantasy authors and when we eventually get through the lush fern-covered undergrowth to Castrovalva itself, there is definitely a touch of the fairytale about the city. The production design is uniformly excellent, blending distinctive 18th century Dutch costumes with interweaving corridors, multiple levels and and weird angles to build something truly unique looking. Pervading everything is a sense of peace and tranquillity, edged with a tinge of the unreal. There are also the little touches that paint the idea of a living breathing society - the gossipy women in the square, the put upon Mergreve, the ever questioning Shardovan -  I was quite disappointed when it all turned out to be an illusory trap created by the Master. By the way, this is the one story where the Master's disguise genuinely works - I was actually shocked when the Portreeve revealed his true face, but then again the script had cleverly been trying to convince you that Shardovan was the bad guy.

Of course underpinning all this (and I guess the core of this post) is the work of graphic artist Maurits Cornelis Escher. I was 14 years old when this story was first transmitted and what little art appreciation faculties I had were primarily focussed on the SF work of Chris Foss and Jim Burns (although I'll leave you to figure out why his illustrations in Harry Harrison's huge format "Planet Story" had such an impact on my teenage years...there's an idea for a blog post in there somewhere...). But even at this young age, Escher fascinated me - the way he played with perspective and illusions of infinity and impossible locations - it was mesmerising. I'd seen an image of his "Ascending And Descending" lithograph somewhere (it may have been an SF magazine) and had investigated further by getting a book from my local library. It was like a window opened in my mind...

Escher was born in 1898 in Leeuwarden, Netherlands. He spent most of his formative years at a school in Arnhem, but was a very sickly child and did poorly at most academic subjects. However he excelled at drawing and at age 21 attend the Haarlem School of Architecture and Decorative Arts - also learning how to make woodcuts and studying decorative arts.

In his 20s and 30s he travelled extensively across Europe, living for several years in Rome with his wife Jetta and their first son. It was while visiting the Alhambra palace in Spain, and it's geometric decorative mosaics, that he became obsessively fascinated with mathematical tessellations and  his work began to take on the form that he is so widely recognised for today -  complex, interlocking, slowly mutating, designs that bleed off into infinity.

In the late 1950s this influence was melded with his interest in unusual perspectives and multiple points of view and he began to produce some of his most famous "geometries" - work featuring never ending staircases and unusual gravitational perspectives. He was also deeply interested in impossible objects like the "Penrose triangle" and the Mobius strip, which appeared frequently in things like his perpetual motion "Waterfall".

I poured over the book, absorbing every image - every twisting, distorting, mind-bending drawing. I loved how Escher played with levels of reality with his "Drawing Hands", and "Three Worlds" and I stared for what seemed like hours at the ever-changing tessellations of the "Metamorphosis" series of woodcuts. (Years later, a framed print of "Day And Night" would have pride of place on the living room wall of my first house).  Even today I still get a thrill when I see any of his many works on display. I think Escher's special way of thinking combined all of the things that my young mind was grasping towards - mathematical repetitions, duality, endless sets of things, obsessiveness (is that the 'collector' gene in me?), the idea that what we see as "reality" is possibly an illusion, the sheer power of art to depict the worlds of the fantastic (that's definitely comic books). His art led me onto surrealism - Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte and Max Ernst - and back in time to Hieronymous Bosch. I have a lot to thank him for.

Back in the tranquil world of the television version of Castrovalva, reality is breaking down and folding in on itself. You can see what the production team were aiming for - a televisual recreation of  "Ascending And Descending" - and they did their very best with the technology available. When I first saw this sequence I thought it was astonishing, but time has not been kind and it's far less impressive to my modern eyes. Still, at least they made the attempt and it's sold by the performances of the cast.

There's not a lot more I can say. Castrovalva is one of the best debuts for a Classic Doctor. Davison's "pleasant, open face" and more human-like attitude might be a significant change from the alien kookiness of Tom Baker, but he is still recognisable the Doctor, even at this early stage. I think a lot of my fondness for this story stems from the large number of times I watched it  after transmission, the feeling I had of being old enough to truly appreciate the start of something new and exciting and of course the fact that one of my favourite artists was represented so vividly.

Right, I'm off to stare at some transforming reptiles...