Graeme Harper Returns to Doctor Who; Millions of Fans Die of Pleasure
The official BBC website announced that the first group of directors for next season are James Hawes (whose direction of The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances caused many fanboys to wet themselves seeing their childhood dreams of a version of Doctor Who that was cinematic with tons of night shooting completely fulfilled), Euros Lyn (who impressed everyone with The End of the World and The Unquiet Dead—partially just by demonstrating that he wasn’t Keith Boak, but mostly by exacting such great performances)...
...And four episodes will be directed by Graeme Harper.
Hear that sound? That’s the sound of millions of old time Doctor Who fans dying of anticipatory pleasure.
Harper, of course, directed what many consider to be one of the best Doctor Who episodes ever, The Caves of Androzani and followed that up with Revelation of the Daleks, highly regarded as Colin Baker’s best story. Both are considered to be two of the best-directed Doctor Who stories ever.
So far, the production team have a trifecta of great directors for season two. Rumours that Russell T. Davies and Phil Collinson are consulting the Necronomicon to bring Douglas Camfield back from the dead are as yet unconfirmed.
Posted by Graeme on Wednesday, June 15 at 12:14 pm
4 Comments...
What about the rumours that Graeme Harper is insisting to the production team that one of his episodes be The Dark Dimension, the ill-fated 30th Anniversary special that he was slated to direct in 1993?
Just kidding folks.
Posted by Luca on 06/15 at 10:56 PM
Revelation of the Daleks, highly regarded as Colin Baker’s best story
Oh really? By whom, exactly? Not that “Revelation” is in any way a bad episode - it is quite good, in fact - but it could easily be retitled “Irrelevancy of the Doctor.” Colin spends the entire first episode trying to get inside Tranquil Repose, and then, once he succeds…does absolutely nothing to advance the plot. Until the very end with his suggestion that they process the weed plant as their replacement source of protein. Big whoop. If the Doctor spent the entire episode wandering outside the walls, nothing in the story would be in the least bit different.
I realize this is a matter of taste, but I would submit that for a Doctor Who story to qualify as any particular Doctor’s best, the Doctor should actually be in it.
Unless, you really did not like Colin Baker’s Doctor, so you feel that the story he was the least involved in was his best.
But you wouldn’t think anything that evil, now, would you?
Posted by Tom Beck on 06/28 at 02:19 AM
Revelation of the Daleks has been Colin Baker’s top -ranked TV story—by a wide margin, in fact—in DWM polls and in DWIN’s own 40th anniversary poll. I think that counts in my books as ‘highly regarded’.
Posted by Graeme on 06/29 at 09:43 PM
Harper didn’t write Revelation he directed it.
Posted by Mike on 06/29 at 09:48 PM
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