Peter Davison was at New York Comic-Con recently, and was by all reports as charming and funny as always. And he had a few things to say about current and classic Doctor Who. From Spinoff Online:
Comparing the classic series to the current one, Davison explained the difference in how writers approached the show. “Now Doctor Who is one of the BBC’s premier prestige programs. It really wasn’t in those days,” he said. “It was very successful and it sold to many countries and made the BBC lots of money, but it was never considered a premier drama series. So the people who wrote for Doctor Who quite often were people who wrote for a detective series one week, Doctor Who one week, and then maybe a hospital drama the week after. They weren’t really driven by their love of science fiction. Except my last story ‘The Caves of Androzani’ was by Robert Holmes, and it was fantastic.
“Whereas what I feel now is the difference is largely that [the new] Doctor Who is written by people with a passion for what they’re doing. A comfort for me about that, and the other classic Doctors, is these people were all sitting out there as kids in the audience and watching us do Doctor Who; they’re all fantastic fans. Steven Moffat can tell you, just by looking at one single black-and-white picture of any Doctor Who story from the classic series, not only what episode it is, he can tell you how far into the episode that scene was. I’ve seen him do it! It’s quite extraordinary – it’s disturbing as well!”
There’s much more… including whether Davison might appear in a 50th anniversary special.
(If you stumble across a cool Doctor Who thing, feel free to email me with a link.)
