Wilderness Years Shite

[Deleted]

Ok I could list, almost without thinking, the crap nuwho has cursed us with over the years, but I'm curious about the horrors of the wilderness years, that strange, nebulas time when Doctor Was off the air. 

I ask you older or more wider of experience members to regale me, and any other poor soul who finds their way to the hive, with your horror stories. 

If it makes you feel better you can throw in any stuff you liked now and then for variety. 

[burrunjor]

Well I grew up in the wilderness years, and it wasn't as bad as people think. There was still a lot of love for Doctor Who. Plenty of young people including yours truly discovered it via video and DVD releases, there were plenty of cool toys, magazines and so on to pick up.

I actually think in some ways my experience was better than the older members here, as I got to see all the Doctors and could jump back in forth between any era I wanted.

However in spite of this I never picked up any of the crappy New Adventure series books. I remember reading about them in DW magazine and thinking they looked absolutely ridiculous. If only I'd known that they were a sign of things to come I wouldn't have become so infested in DW.

I do remember thinking Benny Summerfield looked like a ridiculous character when I first heard about her. She still wasn't as bad as River Song though.

[RobFilth]

The Auton Trilogy, Shakedown, and Cyberon(remastered CGI version)are better than any of the shite NuPooh has ever come out with.

[Brian MK.II]

Jul 3, 2021 11:28:22 GMT RobFilth said:

The Auton Trilogy, Shakedown, and Cyberon(remastered CGI version)are better than any of the shite NuPooh has ever come out with.

I'd throw The Airzone Solution in as well, yes it's clunky and not a proper Doctor Who story in the sense but it's an really enjoyable 30th anniversary tribute, an interesting enough science fiction thriller in it's own right and much closer to 90s Who than the panto dreck that was Dimensions in Time.

P.RO.B.E, Downtime and the Auton trilogy (the first two at least. Auton 3: Awakening was a bit of a shit note to end on) were great and offered fleeting glimpses into what a potential 90s Who could've looked like.

Anyways, the Wilderness era was probably my golden age for me. I had come back into the fold with the last two McCoy seasons having stopped watching after Tom left and although I was f*cked off that they axed it just as it got great, the Wilderness period is arguably was when I properly threw myself into Doctor Who on the whole. 

I have fond memories such as seeing Tomb and many of the other 60s gold for the first time on VHS, having fallen in love with the decade after reading the Target books as a kid in the 70s, On top of that there was re-watching the Pertwee and Tom eras and catching up on the 80s stuff I'd missed, the BBV & Reeltime productions, the comics and BBC2 repeats and I even look back fondly on attending a couple of the conventions and fan gatherings which despite there always being a few cliquey types and arguably being the breeding ground for NuWho's creeps, it was still better than the modern day money grubbing facade that they are. 

[RobFilth]

Jul 3, 2021 14:03:08 GMT Brian MK.II said:

Jul 3, 2021 11:28:22 GMT RobFilth said:

The Auton Trilogy, Shakedown, and Cyberon(remastered CGI version)are better than any of the shite NuPooh has ever come out with.

I'd throw the Airzone Solution in as well, yes it's clunky and not a proper Doctor Who story in the sense but it's an nice 30th aniversary tribute and less tacky than Dimensions but not as self aggrandising as the 50th.

Anyways, the Wilderness era was a golden age for me. Yes, there was no seasons but fond memories such as seeing Tomb  and many of the other 60s gold on VHS, watching the BBV productions and even attending a couple of the conventions and although there was an few cliquey types, it was still better than the modern day money grubbing facade that they are. 

Yeah Airzone Solution wasn't bad, some of PROBE and the Stranger was okay too.

Don't forget the golden age of Big Finish was during the Wilderness Years also, most of those piss all over most NuPooh too.

[Monster X]

I liked Who in the '60s and '70s but I didn't really become a full-blown fan until the '90s - part of the period that's now mistakenly called the 'Wilderness Years'.

I think it wrong to refer to those years in that way - it was a great time to be a fan - I enjoyed the Virgin New/Missing Adventures, (some of them, anyway), the BBC books ( EDAs, PDAs), Big Finish audios, the smashing DWM 8th Doctor comic strip, Reeltime Pictures videos, BBV Productions videos, The Curse Of Fatal Death, The Scream Of The Shalka, the Death Comes to Time webcast, the Destiny of The Doctors computer game, the VHS/DVD release of old stories, BBC2 Doctor Who Night, the BBC2 repeats of selected Who serials (1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 2000) and their wonderful trailers, 'Doctor Who: Thirty Years In The Tardis' BBC documentary (1993), Tom Baker on This Is Your Life, the release of TB's autobiography 'Who on Earth is Tom Baker?', the BBC 40th Anniversary documentary 'The Story of Dr Who' (2003), signings, conventions, merchandise, etc.

It was a time when the term 'NuWho' didn't exist and if people found out you were a fan, they would invariably associate the show with 'him in the scarf' or the Daleks, unlike now, when they'll usually mention David Tennant and/or Billie Piper. 

Horrors of the 'Wilderness' years? - 'Dimensions In Time' - OK, I admit it, that was absolutely bloody awful (but it was for charity, and was still better than the BBC Wales monstrosity).

The combined Davies, Moffat and Chibnall era   - that's the real wilderness.

[billpatjontom]

The thing about the so-called "Wilderness Years" is to bear in mind that this was still a time before the so-called success of "New Who" (I prefer to call it "Fake Who" nowadays) would usurp the established Doctor Who brand. There still was a certain amount of optimism regarding the show's future. While the show's repuation had certainly been badly maligned by the BBC's attitude since the mid 1980s (and possibly earlier), for us older fans especially, it was very much an unprecedented time once it became clear the show really was no longer in production. This left us starved of new episodes on screen even if, as others here have pointed out, there was still some new media to wet our appetites for what we hoped would eventually return. Some of this stuff seemed reasonable enough back then and in any case I was just glad to see any kind of new Who. I admit to quite enjoying some of the early Stranger and Auton videos, including Downtime and Shakedown too. Hey desperate times called for desperate measures 

Whatever the limitations of these official and unofficial spin-off products, at least there still was some palpable enthusiasm for sincere attempts to recapture the authentic quality of the classic but now cancelled show. The more optimistic of us might even have hoped Doctor Who was just a "sleeping giant" during these years - a still unrivalled science fiction concept that must inevitably return and might actually benefit from more modern technology to enhance it.


There were of course several setbacks during this long era. I don't just mean Dimensions in Time appearing instead of Dark Dimension - that was bad enough but at least we did get the 30 Years in the TARDIS documentary by way of nostalgic consolation. But by far the biggest disappoinment in this period came with the aborted series we never got after all the build-up promised by the 1996 TV movie with Paul McGann. There's no excusing the many failures of this stand-alone episode - it certainly wasn't perfect although I believe the ratings were respectable enough in the UK at least. Indeed, looking back now, I'm inclined to be rather more charitable towards it because it never actually insulted the original series as much as all the indignities later inflicted by Davies, Moffat and Chibnall. After any chances of a sustained new series during the 1990s faded, I think all this explains why there was so much genuine goodwill -  at least initially - when Doctor Who finally did get relaunched in 2005. I too welcomed the show's comeback at that point so at first tended to overlook whatever flaws were apparent from the beginning because I clung to the (vain) hope it would naturally evolve into something more closely resembling the spirit of the classic series. Such hope was irreversibly dashed once the reverse happened and so I went from being merely disappointed by the new series to actually despising it.


By this point, I suspect there's little enough audience remaining for "New Who" at all. I bet relatively few people now even have much awareness of which actor currently plays the role anyway.

So I think Doctor Who was in a much healthier position during the "Wilderness Years" than it is now. But such is the damage done in recent years by the total bastardization of the original show.

[burrunjor]

Jul 4, 2021 7:25:48 GMT Monster X said:

I liked Who in the '60s and '70s but I didn't really become a full-blown fan until the '90s - part of the period that's now mistakenly called the 'Wilderness Years'.

I think it wrong to refer to those years in that way - it was a great time to be a fan - I enjoyed the Virgin New/Missing Adventures, (some of them, anyway), the BBC books ( EDAs, PDAs), Big Finish audios, the smashing DWM 8th Doctor comic strip, Reeltime Pictures videos, BBV Productions videos, The Curse Of Fatal Death, The Scream Of The Shalka, the Death Comes to Time webcast, the Destiny of The Doctors computer game, the VHS/DVD release of old stories, BBC2 Doctor Who Night, the BBC2 repeats of selected Who serials (1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 2000) and their wonderful trailers, 'Doctor Who: Thirty Years In The Tardis' BBC documentary (1993), Tom Baker on This Is Your Life, the release of TB's autobiography 'Who on Earth is Tom Baker?', the BBC 40th Anniversary documentary 'The Story of Dr Who' (2003), signings, conventions, merchandise, etc.

It was a time when the term 'NuWho' didn't exist and if people found out you were a fan, they would invariably associate the show with 'him in the scarf' or the Daleks, unlike now, when they'll usually mention David Tennant and/or Billie Piper. 

Horrors of the 'Wilderness' years? - 'Dimensions In Time' - OK, I admit it, that was absolutely bloody awful (but it was for charity, and was still better than the BBC Wales monstrosity).

The combined Davies, Moffat and Chibnall era   - that's the real wilderness.

Exactly. 

I see the 90s/00s period as being a true testament to DW's popularity as it showed how much love there was for the show when it wasn't on the air, and how it could still endure to future generations (Like me! Who was born after the show ended, but became a fan of classic who on video releases.)

Sadly however the media push the it was dead to big up Russell. Added to that lots of DW fans buy into that because it became a whipping boy for shallow, talentless hack comedians. Again why people put so much stock in their opinion I don't know, but these c*nts are absolutely responsible for dumbing down the industry more so than reality tv. 

[Deleted]

Well not how I expected the thread to go but it’s good to see that it was actually a very pleasant time to be a Doctor Who fan.

[mott1]

Jul 7, 2021 16:03:10 GMT @palaeoloxodon said:

Well not how I expected the thread to go but it’s good to see that it was actually a very pleasant time to be a Doctor Who fan.

I remember enjoying the McCoy era more in the start of the wilderness years because it ended with dignity, and we learnt to appreciate what videos we could get all the more as they were so rare - who cares if a rat didn't look very convincing in Talons, we still loved the story.

And I got pleasure from seeing former Doctor actors in stuff like Medics, At Home With The Braithwaites etc, proving their versatility. Also the Abslom Daak comics got many of us craving a future spin off.

How would my schoolmates have reacted knowing Nu Who would come along in 2005? Not sure tho...