It's doom o'clock.

Londoner working in the NHS. 43, which makes me one year older than the answer to the ultimate question of Life, the Universe and Everything. I love Doctor Who, all of it, but especially the Matt Smith era. And I still don't know what I'm doing here.

[a-manic-pixie-dream-journal-dea]

I’VE MET SO MANY PEOPLE WHO HAVEN’T SEEN LABYRINTH WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE WORLD

[fuckyeahlabyrinth]

You gotta fix that!

[musicofthenightphantomoftheopera]

This does need to be fixed immediately tho. Such a good film!

Jim Henson’s puppetry,

A good story,

80’s weirdness,

A young Jennifer Conilly,

And DAVID FUCKING BOWIE!

What more could you want!

Anyone who’s ever seen the movie, sound off by reblogging with magic dance lyrics!

I’ll start!

*ahem*

“You remind me of the babe”

[fuckyeahlabyrinth]

WUT BABE

[anie-r]

The babe with the POWER

[labyrinthmuseum]

What power?

[itsdoomoclock]

The power of VOODOO

[itsdoomoclock]

I’ve been away from Tumblr for quite some time. Hello, Tumblr!

So it seems that the BBC are looking for a new Assistant Script Editor for Doctor Who. This week, I shall mostly be trying to figure out how to write an application for the job of Assistant Script Editor for Doctor Who when I have no experience at all in script editing. Wish me luck!

[itsdoomoclock]

Shockingly enough, I didn’t get an interview.

[itsdoomoclock]

Does anyone else sing along to the Doctor Who theme song like this?

Oooh weee ooooh

Ooooh ooooh

La la la

Doctor Who

[itsdoomoclock]

I’ve been away from Tumblr for quite some time. Hello, Tumblr!

So it seems that the BBC are looking for a new Assistant Script Editor for Doctor Who. This week, I shall mostly be trying to figure out how to write an application for the job of Assistant Script Editor for Doctor Who when I have no experience at all in script editing. Wish me luck!

[some-people-call-it-tragic]

[itsdoomoclock]

A Short Poem About Doctor Who

The Doctor and Bill Are 100% brill.

[huxblush]

oi british followers, we’re getting a surprise election 3 years early so you guys better fucking register to vote and get out there on june 8th. i’m sick of having to wake up after major votes to see that our futures have been decided by elderly racists and that turn out for 18-24 year olds was low. it’s your fucking future lads. this shit is important. 

[lyrabelacquas]

here’s all the details on how to register

[strangehorse]

here is an excellent guide on how to best vote to keep the tories out

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19_yf4RL133fBKscvSbID4eRKwztzY9KSI_2BMaI1bU8/htmlview?sle=true#

[itsdoomoclock]

Wouldn't it be amazing if we could get the Tories out. Vote, everyone!

[robdelaney]

US vs UK healthcare

I am not the smartest person in the world, nor even close to the smartest person I know. Nor have I visited the vast majority of countries on this magnificent planet. But I did happen to move from the US to the U.K. two and a half years ago at the age of 37, i.e. after almost four decades of inhabiting an incredibly hairy human body. Thus I’ve had a good deal of experience as a patient, or as they call you in the US, a consumer of American healthcare before moving to the UK to experience the NHS for two-plus years as a father of three, a husband of a woman whose reproductive system is more glorious and has more complex needs than my own, and as a person whose own body is subject to the ravages of gravity, time, and secret Oreo milkshakes from Five Guys. What I’m getting at is that I’m in a pretty good position to speak with some degree of clarity on the NHS as it compares to the American healthcare system. And here’s the verdict: the NHS is superior. That isn’t to say it’s perfect; no healthcare system is or can be. People (myself included) have and will continue to complain about their healthcare, wherever they receive it, because medicine is treating your body, or your loved one’s body. It is not performing the far less important and less fraught tasks of selling you a car or fixing your mobile’s broken screen or painting your house or making you a sandwich (though to be fair both the NHS or UCLA Santa Monica Hospital in Los Angeles will make you a reasonably good sandwich if you have to stay in hospital.) Medicine is treating your body! Your hearing, your intestines, your tits! Sometimes even your… nodes! The delicacy of this, and the emotions involved are going to leave you with a mixed bag of feelings, even if you achieve the optimal results of whatever it is you went in for. ​I should also make clear that I’m comparing the US healthcare system with the NHS of today. The NHS constantly in the headlines for being cash-strapped and worse than it was in the past. Is it? It sounds to me like it is, but I don’t personally know, and that’s not the purpose of this piece. The purpose of this piece is to tell you that the NHS of this exact moment in 2017 is better that the private healthcare systems in the US. (I have to pluralize “systems” because there is, sadly, no one unified “system” in the US, much to the detriment of so many millions of Americans. I must also make clear that most Americans receive their healthcare privately, unlike the U.K.) ​How is it better? I will say right away that just like in the U.K., my loved ones and I have received generally very good medical care in the US. The American doctors and nurses are mostly kind people, working hard, sincerely interested in helping others. Unfortunately these doctors and nurses are paid with money the hospital receives from health insurance companies. And health insurance companies are motivated by profit, not by successfully setting your broken shoulder or curing your daughter’s leukemia. Those results aren’t discussed in their shareholders’ calls. And insurance companies don’t pay for all your care either. My wife and I, who had what’s considered excellent insurance in the US, received bills for about $1,300 after each of our first two kids were born. When we were in the US on holiday recently, our youngest required an emergency ultrasound on his kidneys. As we’ve been in the UK for years now, we don’t have American health insurance anymore and I had to pay a $500 deposit before they would do the test. On my baby’s kidneys. In the richest country in the world, in which I still pay plenty of taxes as a citizen. Also it was my baby’s kidneys if I haven’t already said that. ​As an aside, that same baby was our first to be born in the UK, with the help of a young Scottish midwife in a hijab. A midwife who, I’ll add, did a better job than both the doctors who delivered our first two kids at UCLA Santa Monica Hospital. If there are better people than British midwives on this planet, I have yet to meet them. ​I’ve digressed a bit, or perhaps not, but I suppose thefse anecdotes only bolster my case. The main point is this: if our bodies and minds are connected as modern medicine insists, the stress one feels as an American worrying about how you’ll pay for your healthcare – or whether you can even get it – shortens your life and reduces its quality much more than the wait for knee replacement surgery on the NHS does. I used knee replacement surgery as an example because if you need emergency surgery on your brain or your heart, you won’t wait on the NHS; you’ll have world-class doctors doing their best to fix you right away. ​Fifteen years ago, I had to max out two credit cards and borrow a third from mom to pay for surgery to put a pin in a broken wrist after a car accident. (My insurance company had dropped my coverage after the accident because I was generating too many bills for them. That was 100% legal before the Affordable Care Act, aka “Obamacare” came into effect. The Obamacare which President-Elect Trump and the Republican Congress have pledged to repeal, mind you. ​Now before you send me flowers because you agree so vehemently with what I’ve written, or alternately, to tell me via Twitter to make love to myself because an NHS doctor once sewed your arm back on upside down, nobody asked me to write this and I have nothing to gain from it. I’m just a (nearly) forty-year-old comedian who does a graceful, elaborate jig every time my wife or kids or I visit a GP, an A and E, a birth centre, or an operating theatre and don’t have to worry if we’ll A) receive the care we need or B) be able to afford it, even if we have insurance. ​Americans forego care and medicine that their physicians prescribe, because of cost. They also commit suicide because of medical debt. It’s hard to hold in one’s mind the idea that those things can and do happen in a country as wealthy as the United States. ​I hesitate to end this piece with a call to action, though I know what I’d do if I were a U.K. citizen and something as remarkable as the NHS were under threat. I pay taxes here too, but I’m not British, so it’s up to you, if you care. I wouldn’t wish sickness on anyone, but you might consider imagining yourself or your child moving or traveling to the US and getting sick or being in an accident. Then imagine that already miserable experience magnified because you’re marinating in the fear that you won’t be able to pay for your care. Or maybe you can with a credit card, but then you can’t keep up with the payments so you begin to receive aggressive phone calls from the company the hospital sold your debt to. Maybe you get taken to court. ​If that’s not something you’d like to experience, and you think the NHS of today is closer to that scenario than the NHS of ten years ago, or if you think that there are those in government or on the boards of private healthcare corporations who might be okay with that sort of future unfolding, what might you do about it?

[itsdoomoclock]

I can’t be the only one wondering whether the announcement about John Simm returning was a red herring, to make us all believe we now know what the ‘big spoiler’ is in the trailer at the end of “The Pilot”, when actually the big spoiler is going to be a glimpse of 13?

[itsdoomoclock]

Doctor Who people, get thee to BBC Radio 6 music: Pearl Mackie will be interviewed by Shaun Keaveney after 9am (ie in about an hour!)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music

[itsdoomoclock]

Confirmed: Pearl Mackie is 100% witty, clever, adorable and lovely. I can’t wait to see her as Bill in ONLY TWO DAYS! Haven’t been this excited about a new series of Who for ages. In the words of the Doctor: Bring It :)

[itsdoomoclock]

Doctor Who people, get thee to BBC Radio 6 music: Pearl Mackie will be interviewed by Shaun Keaveney after 9am (ie in about an hour!)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music

[ohyouprettygifs]

Responding to a journo who accused him of ‘cashing in on old songs’ with his Sound and Vision tour.

[itsdoomoclock]

I remember this! I was a 15 year old Bowie obsessive in Australia, waiting for the tour that never came. Now I’m almost as old as David is in these gifs. Damn.

[sequencerider]

Where To Start Watching Classic Who: Advice on Not Panicking, Picking Your First Doctor, and Some External Resources You Can Check Out

First, the most important advice of all:

1. DON’T PANIC! You won’t ruin Classic Who for yourself by watching the “wrong” episode first.

One of the beautiful things about Classic Who is that it’s extremely diverse and has something to offer for just about everyone. So chill! You’re gonna do just fine, and the only people who will judge you are lifeless douchebags.

I know this looks like a long post, but don’t worry! I’m just trying to be as helpful as possible without being too over-complicated. Take your time. Think about what you like, and what you think you’ll want.

2. Most Classic Who stories are very much stand-alone and require no outside knowledge other than the basic Doctor Who mythology with which you’re already familiar.

This means that there’s really no “perfect” or “worst” place to start watching Classic Who. Think upon this for a second: almost all Classic Who aired before the episodes were commonly and easily available for sale. The show understood that no one was going to have the kind of 100% recall a fan would have from going back and watching every episode all over again. So they de-emphasized continuity.

There’s only one exception to the whole mythology-free thing, and it’s really a small one: The Time War and the extinction of the Time Lords occurred after the end of Classic Who.

3. Picking a Doctor

I’m going to give you some general starting-point recommendations for each Doctor. Hopefully you’ll get a general idea of how each era of Doctor Who goes and be able to decide with yourself what you want to stick with in the early days.

Here’s a list of general character traits the different incarnations have. Go through them, decide what character traits you like, and find the Doctor who matches the most of them:

If you prefer your Doctor to be human and vulnerable, go for the Fifth Doctor.

If you prefer your Doctor to be alien and unpredictable, choose the Fourth Doctor.

If you prefer your Doctor to be silly yet intelligent, go for the Second, Fourth or Seventh Doctors.

If you prefer your Doctor to be dark, dangerous, even violent, go for the First, Sixth, or Seventh Doctors.

If you prefer your Doctor to be slick action heroes, plump for the Third or Fourth Doctors.

If you want them to be young and handsome, go for Five.

If you want them to be older and handsome, go for Three or Four (possibly Six).

If you want them to come across primarily as parental figures, go for One or Seven.

If you want them to be cunning manipulators, go for Two, Four, or Seven.

If you like your stories faster-paced, go for anything after the Second Doctor.

Just think about what you’d like.

As a bit of a further reference specifically for New Whovians:

The Ninth Doctor’s darker tendencies are similar to those of Six, and his cynicism about humanity is similar to that of the Third Doctor.

The Tenth Doctor’s vulnerability is something he shares with Five, but his goofy charm is very much a trait of Four.

The Eleventh Doctor’s manipulative streak when it comes to his own companions is characteristic primarily of Seven. The way bits of personal wisdom are interspersed with the goofiness are similar to Two. And his ability to go up against godlike adversaries with confidence and triumph nevertheless is quite Four.

Once you think you have a couple Doctors you’d like to try out, have a look at the suggestions below. Each suggested season is a slice of what characterizes that particular Doctor’s era, and hopefully contains a sufficiency of good stories.

4. Suggested Seasons to Start With

The First Doctor

Season One (An Unearthly Child - The Reign of Terror). Here we see the Doctor at his beginning: a paranoid, near-villainous asshole. The motto of the day is “If we don’t live together, we’re gonna die alone”. The universe is a dark and dangerous place, and the Doctor has to get along with his unwilling (!) companions to survive - a process which humanizes him.

Alternative: Season Three (Galaxy 4 - The War Machines) gives us an incredibly diverse set of stories. A western comedy, a Dalek time-travel epic, an experimental mindfuck story along the lines of Amy’s Choice, et cetera, et cetera.

The Second Doctor

Season Four (The Power of the Daleks - The Evil of the Daleks). The first “new” Doctor, two of the best Classic Who Dalek stories, a Cybermen story, a companion who’s a dude in a skirt, and the full-blown introduction of the tried-and-true “base-under-siege” format.

Alternative: Season Five (The Tomb of the Cybermen - The Wheel in Space). One of the best Cybermen stories (Tomb), the introduction of UNIT as well as two great villainous species (the Yeti and the Ice Warriors), plus the guy who plays the Doctor also gets to play the villain. Good stuff.

The Third Doctor

Season Seven (Spearhead in Space - Inferno). One of the most consistently good seasons of Classic Who. Here we see the Doctor as an exile on Earth, his free spirit and strong personality constantly clashing with his own imprisonment and his collaboration with a hierarchical military organization. The season has a strong element of moral ambiguity, with emphasis on the humans as being as villainous - or even more so - than the aliens who come to Earth.

Alternative: Season Eight (Terror of the Autons - The Daemons). A season’s worth of the Master, who is introduced here. All sorts of James Bond-esque escapades and more - plus, the Doctor’s wardrobe expands considerably.

The Fourth Doctor

Season Twelve (Robot - Revenge of the Cybermen). The Fourth Doctor in his early days. We’ve got Daleks in one of their best and most important stories. We have another classic in the Ark in Space, which is basically Alien except a few years before. We’ve got Sontarans and Cybermen; and we have Doctor Who Does King Kong, also known as Robot.

Alternative: Season Sixteen (The Ribos Operation - The Armageddon Factor). Ranging from an alien heist to medieval political intrigue with androids to living stone, this is another bit of great diversity. Add to it one of the Doctor’s most memorable companions - the cool, clever Time Lady Romana - and you have a lighter-hearted season with loads of memorable moments and intriguing ideas.

The Fifth Doctor

Season Twenty-One (Warriors of the Deep - The Caves of Androzani). Among the show’s most divisive seasons. The running theme is that of a Doctor whose great humanity, compassion and pacifism often stop him from being able to protect innocents and prevent atrocities. These stories are violent, grim, and offer very little hope to counteract it. It’s arresting viewing for some and hopelessly dull for others. The choice is yours.

The Sixth Doctor

Season Twenty-Two (Attack of the Cybermen - Revelation of the Daleks). An uneven season for an unstable Doctor. There are weak moments, but as compensation we get some great gems. A fascinating Dalek story, a gritty commentary on reality television, and a two-Doctor team-up.

Alternative: Season Twenty-Three (The Mysterious Planet - The Ultimate Foe). The Doctor defends himself on trial by the Time Lords. Featuring the Master and one of the show’s most-discussed villains - a shadowy figure from the Doctor’s future who may very well appear in the New Series…

The Seventh Doctor

Season Twenty-Seven (Battlefield - Survival). I love every single one of these stories. Not only do they explore themes like war, faith, evolution, peace, and love, they do so through the relationship between the Doctor and his companion - Ace, a turbulent and troubled teenager who struggles to understand and accept herself. Some of the most painful yet moving moments between a Doctor and his companion occur in this season. Add to that the Master, inter-dimensional predators, Arthurian legend, Nordic mythology, vampires from the future, and evil from the dawn of time, and you have one of the show’s best runs.

Alternative: Season Twenty-Six. It’s a lot weirder - The Happiness Patrol and The Greatest Show in the Galaxy are hardly one’s idea of average Doctor Who - but they go a long way towards recapturing the experimental vibe of the show’s early years.

6. General advice

Don’t just listen to me. There are other fans out there with their own opinions, many of them just as valid if not more so than mine. I’ll provide some resources at the bottom of the post. Take your time. Get some opinions.

More recent stories tend to be more accessible to viewers. Later stories are shorter, faster-paced, heavier on the action and more visually pleasing. Don’t make it too hard for yourself when introducing yourself to Classic Who. There’s no rush to watch everything. Start with whatever feels easiest.

Think of a four-part story as being the same length as a New Who two-parter. Try to favor the four-parters. This is not to say that the longer stories are worse, but you’ll have an easier time with pacing and speed.

Again, don’t panic!

7. Resources for the Prospective Classic Whovian

My own website, kvural.tumblr.com, which has reviews as well as episode recommendations. The recommendations are a little out of date, but they’ll work fine as a very casual resource. I don’t usually self-advertise, but I’m genuinely proud of the reviews I write, and the people who follow me seem to enjoy them too. Additionally, I’m always, always happy to answer questions and go into more detail on certain topics. My ask box is open, and you’re free to write me anything, even if it’s negative or angry.

The Doctor Who Ratings Guide, a fan-run website with reviews on everything Doctor Who - in every medium (TV, film, comics, audio plays, novels, stage performances) and on every subject (stories, Doctors, showrunners, companions). It’s a great place to go for informed yet contrasting opinions.

A relatively reliable wiki is of course the TARDIS Wiki.

The following Tumblr users are absolutely bonkers about Classic Who and I’m sure will have all sorts of loving advice and opinions to give (apologies if I leave anyone out, I have a lot of followers and I can’t remember them all): stovepipehat, grufainia, youre-standing-on-my-scarf, motorcyclecoptor, whatthefoucault, tardiscrash, kaiserpudding, lungbarrows, the-nth-dimension, slythgeek, mosscottage, magsofthemuses, haveievermentioned, brigwife, saphirrewaves, hipsterclassicwho and mystsaphyr. (Sorry again if I left anyone out, it’s a bit off the top of my head.)

That’s about all. Now go forth and watch, my baby Classic Whovians!

[lokidlaufeyson]

[redscharlach]

After this week’s Sherlock, I reckon 221B’s very own bad-ass mother-figure needs her own promotional material…

[itsdoomoclock]

I aspire to be a Woman Who Owns The Place.

[pipistrellus]

Forget the Myers-Briggs fucking personality assessment. I am dead tired of hearing if someone is an INFP or an ESLQ or whatever. I want to know if someone is melancholic or choleric. Bring back the four humors. I wanna see “Kaley, 16, phlegmatic” when I go to someone’s blog. Who is with me. Lets make this happen

[pinejaysong]

here’s a test i found. go wild, y'all. (im choleric.)

[itsdoomoclock]

This is great. Very much not surprised to find I'm melancholic. 

[manicvitriol]

Anyone can pull me to the ground. Kylie could have decked me the night before. I’m the softest person in the world.

Nicky Wire, on Liam Gallagher wrestling him, grinning, to the stage floor the night of the last 1996 Manics gig at the Forum, Select Magazine, 1996. (via manicvitriol)