Answers To Readers' Questions [4]

 “But I rather think that ‘I am special because I met the Doctor’ is generally code for ‘We are special because we are Doctor Who fans’: and there are fewer and fewer ‘boomers’ for whom watching Doctor Who was a formative experience.”

Aristide Twain

” There are fewer and fewer for whom Tom Baker was a formative experience, but the people for whom David Tennant or Matt Smith were formative are just about getting old enough to make their own nostalgic television, and won't that be interesting? Christopher Eccleston has explicitly said at conventions that the only circumstance in which he'd consider returning to Doctor Who for a multi-Doctor special would if the new showrunner were someone who'd been a starry-eyed little girl in 2005-6.

The wider one’s range of experience, whether of media or life, the less significance each individual sensation appears to have: because you have so many others to compare it with. 

Doctor Who and Star Wars were very significant in the 1970s because that was all there was. 

Television had a status and importance for the children of the 1960s that it can’t ever have for the 2000 or 2010 cohort. 

I assume. Do people in their 30s talk about In The Night Garden and Octonauts in the way we grown-ups wax lyrical about Bagpuss and Trumpton? Maybe they do. 

Does the wider range of media mean that each individual bubble is less important?

Was children’s TV simply better in the 1970s. 

Or am I just speaking with the voice of nostalgia? 

“The summers seem so much brighter when I was a kid than they do today.”

“That’s not nostalgia. That’s cataracts.”

It does not follow that it would be a good thing if home cooking were bland and unadventurous and preferably rationed, and if the only restaurants in the average town were Beefeater and Wimpy, even if that is the only way of recapturing the transcendent joy we felt on first tasting garlic.

If you first watched Doctor Who when you were 12, and if David Tennant was your first crush then, totally, you would turn on a new series, especially if David Tennant was coming back for a cameo.

There was some talk of remaking Buffy without Sarah Michelle Gellar or indeed Josh Whedon. I am in no doubt that people who were teenagers between 1997 and 2003 would be quite excited about the idea. But I query how many people there are whose adult identity is “person who grew up watching Buffy.” 

Yes, indeed, Harry Potter. 

The Doctor Who of Russel T Davies and Stephen Moffat seemed very much to be a debate with itself about what Doctor Who meant and the significance of Doctor Who and what it was like to be Doctor Who fan. As we’ve argued, this goes back to Moffat’s silly Curse of Fatal Death, which directly made Doctor Who the character a metaphor for Doctor Who the programme. I don’t think a new series would want to do that. 

But maybe it would. The Marvel Universe, both in the movies and in the actual comics continues to regard the years from 1962-1972 as utterly foundational. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is teasing visual homages to classic comic-book covers: and they are all comic book covers which fans of my vintage would recognise. Fantastic Four: First Steps was an absolute love letter to the Fantastic Four as it was in 1968: as if John Byrne and Mark Waid had never happened. 

Or maybe classics are classic. We say that Star Trek reboots are pandering to people in their sixties but we don’t on the whole, say that Pride and Prejudice adaptations are pandering to bicentenarians.