2010 - Time To Regenerate

After a fine New Year's gathering which saw me singing in the new year along with Monty Python's "Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life" NYD itself was all about Doctor Who. For me and 10m other viewers the regeneration of Tennant Who into Smith Who was essential viewing.

Number crunching ain't good for much but let's just take a look at this here and now. Total number of people who took active roles in Rage vs Robojoe 1 million. People watching Doctor Who, 10 million. Now admittedly they weren't charging any money we hadn't already paid for us to watch Doctor Who but still.

If you had told me in 2000 that in a decade I'd be joining 10m others to watch the new and much beloved Doctor Who morph into his youngest form yet. And then you had gone on to say that Doctor Who would  become a bigger UK cultural touchstone than it had ever been and I would have told you you were crazy. If you'd have topped it off by saying that the head writer would be a cultural leader for the equal treatment of the gay lifestyle, that he would work these themes into a spin off set in Cardiff and that people would regularly discuss both series round the water cooler and well...

You have to admit, it sounds jolly unlikely.

I'd hate to be in a position where one of my characters had had such a patchy history. It's a matter of personal pride. I have a fairly harsh inner critic and if I finally hit the sweet spot after so long (not, obviously, that RTD et al were responsible for the whole of Doctor Who but you get the point) I would be tempted to reboot.

I don't mind any reboot that's been along so far. BSG was fine and ended so disappointingly that it could even do with another reboot to fix the disappointing end of this version. Star Trek as envisioned by Abrams, Orci and Kurtzman was wonderful. I can't, off the top of my head, think of a reboot that's done any harm.

Of course technically, if you're sticking strictly to canon, apparently, the Doctor only has one more regeneration left (because of burning one up but not actually regenerating during the 10th Doctor's tenure). Rather than cheating and giving him new regenerations wouldn't it be better to reset the whole thing and start again from scratch.

It's something that writing types do all the time, the old etch-a-sketch end of the world routine. I think a reader can accept a reboot more readily than, perhaps, a remake. Maybe I'm wrong.

Anyhoo, that's all from me for the time being. Here's to a 2010 full of hope for the future. After all it might seem to many of us that the only way is up after the last few years!