Culture Show: Pics, Summary
Thursday, 17 March 2005 - Reported by Shaun Lyon
Russell T Davies and Mark Gatiss were interviewed on this evening's The Culture Show on BBC2 by fan/commentator Matthew Sweet, who attended the Cardiff premiere of the new series, and was even pursued by a makeshift Auton. Check out the thumbnails of the clip below.
UPDATED 18 Mar 1920 GMT: Now available as well is a summary of the broadcast, courtesy John Bowman; click on the spoiler tag below for details (there aren't spoilers per se but just to be on the safe side...)
The Culture Show (Thurs 17 March, BBC2, 7pm GMT, repeated 11.25pm GMT) devoted ten minutes to the return of Doctor Who, with commentator Matthew Sweet looking at how the programme used to use horror, and asking whether it could scare the children of today, as British culture had changed so much since it was last on our screens.
The very nature of The Culture Show meant a rare air of intellectual respectability was lent to Doctor Who, with references made to Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, HG Wells and 19th-century novelist Wilkie Collins.
Shown being interviewed were Mark Gatiss, Philip Hinchliffe and Russell T Davies, who all held forth cogently on aspects of horror.
Clips were shown from (in chronological order) Spearhead from Space, Terror of the Autons, Invasion of the Dinosaurs, Terror of the Zygons, The Brain of Morbius, The Talons of Weng-Chiang and Rose (well, we were shown scenes of Christopher Eccleston with Billie Piper, so I'm guessing it was Rose), plus brief snatches of the new title sequence, during a segment filmed at the premiere in Cardiff, and excerpts from previous title sequences.
Gatiss referred to how well Doctor Who exploited neuroses such as whether you really could trust those people you thought you could trust.
The show acknowledged that Doctor Who had been influenced by various horror types, and Hinchliffe pointed out that children were encountering these myths and stories for the first time, but conceded that "a more knowledgeable adult audience . . . would . . . if they were being unkind . . . say we were ripping off Hammer horror, or the Mummy stories, or Frankenstein".
Hinchliffe commented, though, that "you are really showing that there are very dark and powerful forces out there [that can] somehow connect or control the dark forces in man - and that's scary".
Davies observed that there had been a growing sophistication in drama and story-telling, and that although kids would always be scared of the dark and the wardrobe door in the dark that might open, story-tellers would be in trouble if they just relied on that; younger audiences wanted more drama, emotion, honesty and truth, and simple pictorial thrills were no longer enough.
Bowling out of the premiere, Sweet announced that the new show had "an amazing velocity to it. It's incredibly fast. It's almost like watching the edited highlights of an old Doctor Who story. It's amazingly spectacular and he[Eccleston]'s terrific".
The feature finished with Sweet saying that suddenly Doctor Who was "cool", and asking Davies: "Can we come out of the closet about being Doctor Who fans?", to which Davies jokingly admonished him by saying: "You should never have been in there!"
The very nature of The Culture Show meant a rare air of intellectual respectability was lent to Doctor Who, with references made to Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, HG Wells and 19th-century novelist Wilkie Collins.
Shown being interviewed were Mark Gatiss, Philip Hinchliffe and Russell T Davies, who all held forth cogently on aspects of horror.
Clips were shown from (in chronological order) Spearhead from Space, Terror of the Autons, Invasion of the Dinosaurs, Terror of the Zygons, The Brain of Morbius, The Talons of Weng-Chiang and Rose (well, we were shown scenes of Christopher Eccleston with Billie Piper, so I'm guessing it was Rose), plus brief snatches of the new title sequence, during a segment filmed at the premiere in Cardiff, and excerpts from previous title sequences.
Gatiss referred to how well Doctor Who exploited neuroses such as whether you really could trust those people you thought you could trust.
The show acknowledged that Doctor Who had been influenced by various horror types, and Hinchliffe pointed out that children were encountering these myths and stories for the first time, but conceded that "a more knowledgeable adult audience . . . would . . . if they were being unkind . . . say we were ripping off Hammer horror, or the Mummy stories, or Frankenstein".
Hinchliffe commented, though, that "you are really showing that there are very dark and powerful forces out there [that can] somehow connect or control the dark forces in man - and that's scary".
Davies observed that there had been a growing sophistication in drama and story-telling, and that although kids would always be scared of the dark and the wardrobe door in the dark that might open, story-tellers would be in trouble if they just relied on that; younger audiences wanted more drama, emotion, honesty and truth, and simple pictorial thrills were no longer enough.
Bowling out of the premiere, Sweet announced that the new show had "an amazing velocity to it. It's incredibly fast. It's almost like watching the edited highlights of an old Doctor Who story. It's amazingly spectacular and he[Eccleston]'s terrific".
The feature finished with Sweet saying that suddenly Doctor Who was "cool", and asking Davies: "Can we come out of the closet about being Doctor Who fans?", to which Davies jokingly admonished him by saying: "You should never have been in there!"
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