BIBLIO WATCHDOG
DOCTOR WHO TIMES TWO! By Kim Newman
DOCTOR WHO, BBC-TV’s flagship sci- ence fiction program, ran initially from 1963 to 1989, which already makes it the longest continu- ously produced and broadcast genre television show in the world. The format was revived by a one-off TV movie in 1996 and, from 2005, as a new continuing series. The successful revival and reinvigoration of WHO has led to a resurgence of overground writing about the program—the fans kept writing and publishing even when WHO was in limbo.
These two books from McFarland take differ- ent approaches, but are vaguely complimentary: Muir, in an unrevised republication of a 1999 vol- ume, concentrates exclusively on the “old” show, while Schuster and Powers extend the range to look non-exclusively at the “new” version. Both books take an American view—divorcing the pro- gram from its original UK cultural context and position as (for much of its history) part of main- stream British pop culture (rather than marginalized cult item even within science fic- tion fandom). Though Muir studies the three incarnations of the Time Lord (and the show) be- fore Tom Baker took over the lead in 1974, both books are written by people whose first impres- sion of WHO came with Baker, who was the first Doctor to be widely seen in America—and Schuster and Powers seem fairly shaky on the material that came before.
Muir, author of the very useful TERROR TELEVI-
SION and book-length studies of ONE STEP BE- YOND and SPACE 1999, offers some details of the genesis and ongoing production of the show (but doesn’t really try to compete with the many more substantial studies available elsewhere) and devotes the bulk of his book to notes on the individual serials
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A CRITICAL HISTORY OF DOCTOR WHO ON TELEVISION
By John Kenneth Muir 1999/2008, McFarland & Co, Inc.
www.mcfarlandpub.com Box 611, Jefferson NC 28460 504 pages, Softcover, $29.95
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