DOCTOR WHO

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STARRING: Daphne Ashbrook, Bill Croft, Dolores Drake, D.J. Jackson, Sylveste McCoy, Paul McGann., Eric Roberts, Gordon Tipple, Catherine Lough

1996, 85 Minutes, Directed by: Geoffrey Sax

 
Thanks to the Equity ban on all British television shows during the Apartheid years, I never got to see any episodes from the cult (in Britain at least) Doctor Who television series. There was, however, no ban on the stacks of novelizations which I did devour by the dozens as a kid.

For those who were also raised on a diet of mostly dreadful American television shows, the good doctor is a rather eccentric renegade time traveller dashing across various planets and time zones somehow getting into trouble wherever he goes.

His time machine (called the TARDIS) is actually an old telephone booth (yes, you Yanks - that's where they got the idea for Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure) which is, for reasons better left unexplained, bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Then there's the Daleks and the . . .

And there lies the rub. Watching this movie was like accidentally bumping into an old friend again. And all the minor eccentricities and habits of that old friend are still as you remember them: the predilection for jelly babies, the tendency to solve problems by non-violent means, relying on brains rather than brawn, and so on.

Non-Doctor Who fans might be confused by events (who the heck is the Master in any case?) but I'm sure that Who fans will be just as delighted as I was at meeting up with an old, but not forgotten, friend.

This is not to say that I don't have any qualms with this Doctor Who film. At times its inspiration seems to be glitzy American sci-fi movies such as The Terminator instead of the original series. The Doctor and the other characters come through as rather undeveloped at times.

What made those books so good was that despite their myriad of plot twists and turns, the stories were character-driven rather than anything else. These qualms aside, this made-for-television movie is better than expected and may even convert some non-fans to the Doctor Who cause . . .