N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!
I toyed with the idea of marking the end of the classic series with a post attempting to encompass my thoughts on twenty-six seasons of Doctor Who. After all, this point in Doctor Who‘s history seemed to offer a natural pause after what has ended up being seven years of viewing and blogging (and it is 31 years to the day since the final episode of Survival aired).
“I’m beginning to wish I’d never started all this.”
The Doctor, Remembrance of the Daleks: Part Two
But I resisted such a notion. After all, Doctor Who didn’t end in 1989 and even though it perhaps only entered the general public’s consciousness sporadically between 1989 and 2005, those moments are worth continuing on with.
Besides, the Wilderness Years is where I came in.
I decided I had to have some rules though, otherwise I’d spend decades in the wilderness! With this in mind, I intend to stick (broadly) only to those things that the BBC were involved in directly.
“Here’s to the future.”
Singer, Delta and the Bannermen: Part Three
I’m not going to side-step and read all of the New and Missing Adventures, which for many fans like me were Doctor Who in the early and mid-90’s. That’s a marathon for another day / month / year / decade. That is not to say I might not dip in to them from time to time. If Doctor Who is truly ‘a lovely mixture of science fiction and whimsy’ (as no less than Ken Dodd once described it), then who am I not to succumb to the occasional whim.
The BBC did, after all, publish some of them on its website in the early 00’s, so there’s a case for at least reading the first of these eBooks — The Dying Days — as its online publication made the BBC news website back in 2002. Nor will I wade through the entirety of Big Finish’s output, although again they did work with the BBC so expect something to show up on the blog!
Consequently, my coverage of Doctor Who‘s wilderness years will only scratch the surface of what was around in the 90’s and early 00’s, but I hope it’ll give a sense of what it was like if you were a Not-we viewer in Doctor Who‘s years off-air.
