Dr Who, BSG and fucking footnotes... So here we have Boag:

the cybermen have always looked shit. they dont look any worse than they always have. you know this, deep in your black, black heart of black, black hearts. and camp? did you grow up watching the same doctor who as me? its the campest TeeVee show ever! well, maybe not ever... dont let your RTD hate blind you to the truth, you professor of playa-hation, you. what would you make them look like? the old ones? ya filthy nostalgist curmudgeon.

I've given a lot of thought as to exactly why the new Doctor Who annoyed me so much. I went back and rewatched some of the better episodes from 1963 onwards to try and work out what was missing. The answer annoyed me. There was nothing missing really. As Boag points out the TV show that he and I fondly remember (despite him being a mere pup) was camp as hell so surely my worries over the new Cybermen being tripped up by double entendres are foundless. And his question as to what I'd like the new monsters to look like is an interesting one that also required a little thought. I watched a couple more Cybermen episodes (Troughton's Tomb of and Davison's Earthshock being my favourites) and then I sat back down and watched the entire run of new Who episodes and it was still like pulling teeth. But I did finally figure out what was wrong with the Doctor's 27th* season. It was his 27th season. Over the last couple of years I've been lucky enough to be treated to some of the most intelligent and thrilling scifi television to come along in a couple of decades in the form of the new Battlestar Galactica. It took the bare bones of the original along with a large portion of its heart and revamped the fuck out the concept. A risk that paid off big time. For years Richard Hatch, the original Apollo, tried to get a continuation of the series off the ground. His plan was to pick up with the original characters some twenty years later and much like the novels he penned, push the story forward. He got as far as shooting a trailer, but then Ronald D Moore came along and delivered the death blow to Hatch's idea with the new series. Hatch later cremated his dead baby by agreeing to guest star in the new version and to be honest not many people mourn that concept. I'd have liked to have seen it but I'm very aware that it would have been all too easy to tap too deeply into the cheese that ran through the original series. I rewatched Lorne Greene and company running from the Cylon menace last year for the first time in more years than I care to remember and I was shocked to discover how lame (and short) the show was. A few things still stood out as awesome - the Colonial vipers, the Battlestar itself and yes even the clunky 'we shoot worse than Stormtroopers' toasters. The vipers were literally dusted off for BSG 2003 and the Galactica itself is just familiar enough to give you a little buzz every time it swings into view - names and plotlines also survived (dodgy monikers were changed to callsigns while a spaceflu that knocked out the boys and finally let the girls have a go at playing space soldier was replaced with an explosion that simply wiped out the Galactica's already chewed up pilots - male and female). Galactica suddenly became the hippest show on TV. That the shiny one eyed silver clumsybots had been replaced partly by naked blonde chicks who snap babies necks also helped a lot. The great thing about the new Cylons is that now not an episode goes by when I don't think to myself well maybe this is the episode when we'll get a glimpse of an old-school toaster. I still have enough fond memories of the original show to get a buzz at that prospect and I think I may have done a little dance when I twigged that the Pegasus was about to come into play... Now let me get back to what I was saying about Doctor Who and it's doddering season twenty-whatever. Yes, RTD revolutionised an old show BUT it's still the same old dead thing underneath with just a few cosmetic sleight-of-hands to distract you from the stench - you know, like Joan Rivers. The FX are crap, the new monsters are laughable unless when they are supposed to be funny** - it's just Sylvester McCoy sexed up the point of being easy to swallow*** (One of the problems is taking that old format cliffhanger show and trying to trick it into a nice new slot - a lot of the bolder ideas in the new season would have benefited from having more time to play with). This is exactly why the new show's 'Christmas Invasion' fits so well, so comfortably between the festive episodes of deadly dull soap opera Eastenders next month. There's plenty here to send the tweenies scurrying behind the sofa (the 'Are You My Mummy?' episodes were fantastic - but let's be honest in admitting they had more to do with Sapphire & Steel than anything else), but NOTHING to upset the lowest common denominator soap fan. I hate the new Who because I want a NEW one. I want a Year One. Imagine a Doctor who doesn't know one end of a Dalek from the other , a Time Lord without the assurance of whipping cyber-ass a million times before over a handful of lifetimes. So to get back to Boag's original question - what do I want a Cyberman to look like at the arse-end of 2005? Well it's easier to tell you what I don't want. I don't want a 1960s Cyberman with the 70s, 80s and 90s overlay and respray topped off with 21st century helmet handles - in short I don't want Windows XP... I want Linux Cyberbastards. With huge metal codpieces. I want a new show that's been built from the drawing board up. I want new writers with a track record in pleasing ME to be given the job and let them give me MY Cybermen. Same with the Master. Same with the TARDIS. Same with the split-tails that get used up in there and spat out like half chewed porn eels. That's what I pay my fucking license fee for... * 28th if you want to add the Paul McGann TV movie. ** then you just want to hit RTD over the head repeatedly with his Bumper Big Book of Fart Jokes. *** The only thing that really changed was the Doctor himself - into a mugging gurning twat with a fetish for running around with big guns and an overly unhealthy attachment to Cardiff. Don't even try and tell me that when you peeled all that crap off there was even a smattering of William Hartnell left. [Music: off]