Love and Monsters

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzXotzG-6Oo

I literally cannot get enough of this song, and the video isn't half bad either.

I do feel it's based on one of those charming misconceptions about Doctor Who that has, through the power of anecdote, become accepted by the general public as fact. A prime example of this is the notion of "wobbly sets" - as Toby Hadoke points out in his great Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf routine, he's watched every extant episode of Doctor Who at least two or three times and a set actually wobbles once or maybe twice.

Likewise, the idea that the Who girls were anything but strong, independent women. I think there's one companion from the Seventies that you can remotely level that accusation towards and that's Jo Grant, who admittedly did grace the show for a good long stretch, three years. For the other two-thirds of the 70s though we had Liz Shaw, Sarah Jane Smith, Leela, and two Romanas, all of whom spoke their minds and gave the Doctor as good as they got. And yet Mitch Benn can still cash in on the urban myth that Who girls were just there to look pretty, scream and get captured. (See also "Fiona" in Victoria Wood's late 80s Doctor Who skit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Tbe3W6hWyw)

Tell you what though, I bumped into someone in Seattle last year who, when the topic of Doctor Who came up somehow, launched into the following, seemingly in no way tongue-in-cheek, anecdote: he claimed that 70s Doctor Who, being prior to the age of political correctness, regularly saw Tom Baker's Doctor refer to his favorite sweets not as jelly babies but as n****r babies; allegedly this had been dubbed back for modern repeats and DVD releases. Of course this must be nonsense: there was such an un-PC licorice or chocolate sweet back in the early parts of the 20th century, but even if it was okay to bring them up on 70s TV, and it wasn't, you'd never mistake a jelly baby for one!

Now whether or not The Talons of Weng-Chiang is offensively racist, that's still up for discussion, but still... I think we can see the importance of judging Old Who based on its actual merits, not how the public seems to remember it. Because they remember it in very strange ways indeed!