Post by Bernard Marx on Jul 21, 2024 11:19:17 GMT
From Points of View, presented by Barry Took, 1st February 1985. Letters on Vengeance on Varos. I think these letters are quite amusing reads.
I have to respectfully disagree with this assessment. As Philip Hinchcliffe once put it on Pebble Mill: “It was never made just for children. It’s not made by the children’s department. It’s made by the drama group at the BBC”. It’s historically been bound up with violence and horror from its inception, even if this process happened organically during its first year instead of within Sydney Newman’s original “education-based” conception.
And “snuff movies”? A snuff movie is when real-life deaths and/or killings are depicted. I’m unsure what this viewer was watching. That said, contemporary Reality TV in Varos is indeed portrayed as akin to a snuff movie, but that’s altogether different.
S.Hitch of Harwell wrote:
See above. The premise of “torture as entertainment” is integral to the serial. The audience is made implicitly complicit in the Doctor's own "torture" in the episode 1 cliffhanger via the editing and POV rendering them voyeurs (akin to the Greek Chorus), but this serves to allegorise the possible dangers of TV as we know it, and to extend Doctor Who’s tradition of taking the everyday and making it extraordinary- and, sometimes, sinister.
This next one is funny. K.A Ginty of Newcastle upon Tyne:
This viewer seems to have not caught onto the fact that the “ventral protuberance” is Sil’s tail, and not his penis…
And a dissenting voice here. Mark Church of Lings, Northampton:
Watching yesterday’s episode of Dr Who with my 7-year-old, I was amazed and very angry. Dr Who is classed as children’s entertainment, yet the story concerned people whose leisure time was spent watching prisoners being tortured. It certainly didn’t seem like children’s entertainment to me, more like a young person’s introduction to snuff movies. I can assure you that this family will not be watching any future episodes of Dr Who.
And “snuff movies”? A snuff movie is when real-life deaths and/or killings are depicted. I’m unsure what this viewer was watching. That said, contemporary Reality TV in Varos is indeed portrayed as akin to a snuff movie, but that’s altogether different.
S.Hitch of Harwell wrote:
There seems little point in our working to prevent video nasties falling into the hands of our children when Dr Who can now provide sadistic scenes of torture paraded for their ‘entertainment’ value.
See above. The premise of “torture as entertainment” is integral to the serial. The audience is made implicitly complicit in the Doctor's own "torture" in the episode 1 cliffhanger via the editing and POV rendering them voyeurs (akin to the Greek Chorus), but this serves to allegorise the possible dangers of TV as we know it, and to extend Doctor Who’s tradition of taking the everyday and making it extraordinary- and, sometimes, sinister.
This next one is funny. K.A Ginty of Newcastle upon Tyne:
I appreciate that the Dr Who Monsters department must stretch their creative imaginations to the limits, but need we really be shown such obscene ventral protuberances, so proudly wriggling about, as were shown on the latest monster, Sil.
This viewer seems to have not caught onto the fact that the “ventral protuberance” is Sil’s tail, and not his penis…
And a dissenting voice here. Mark Church of Lings, Northampton:
I must congratulate all concerned with the latest season of Doctor Who. Attack of the Cybermen was excellent and Vengeance on Varos, though extremely gloomy, was gripping stuff.
