Coming out from behind the sofa...

 "Have you ever wondered what it's like to be wanderers in the fourth dimension...?"

 

I'm still reflecting happily on the one-day Doctor Who symposium, Visions from Behind the Sofa, that we hosted at the University of Hertfordshire this week. M'colleague Howard Berry worked wonders to secure a great panel of guests -

Dr Kim Akass (Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at University of Hertfordshire, co-Series Editor of the Reading Contemporary Television series (I.B. Tauris))
Kevin Davies (documentary maker, producer of fan film Shakedown)
Cameron K McEwan (Blogtor Who, Twitter: @BlogtorWho)
Toby Hadoke (comedian, author of Moths Ate My Dr Who Scarf)
Mat Irvine (BBC visual effects artist, stalwart of Who, Blake's 7, and more)
Dr Lorna Jowett (Senior Lecturer at the University of Northampton, author of Sex and the Slayer)
Dr Patrick Stokes (Marie Curie Fellow in Philosophy, contributor to Doctor Who and Philosophy: Bigger on the Inside than the Outside)

- not to mention a Dalek and K9, and the pleasingly mixed audience was glorious in both its enthusiasm and staying power.

My thoughts are now drifting towards the notion of a full 2 day academic conference on the subject... But it's OK, I'll slap myself in the face in a minute and get back to marking!

"It's the end. But the moment has been prepared for..."

Silurians? Eocines? Plasticines?

Watching an old - very old (1970) - episode of Dr Who just now, I found myself pondering some of the questions about realism that were covered in Thursday afternoon's lecture for MSFX and Digital Animation students. The Silurians (who, more realistically, should be called 'eocines') were first known to me as characters in the Target novelisation of the TV serial, Dr Who and the Silurians, then as photographs in issues of Dr Who Weekly in the 1980s. When the creatures returned to the series in the early 1980s, facing Peter Davison's (brilliant, much underrated) Doctor, they impressed me a lot (how!?), whereas their cousins, the Sea-Devils, who feature terrifyingly in my earliest memories of the show, were disappointing in their droopy-headed, mock samurai sluggishness. What had scared the living whatsit out of me in 1973 let me down in 1984... Ah well. Expectations change. Notions of realism change. We grow older. So when the redesigned Silurians appeared in the first series of Matt Smith's doctorhood - well, they are obviously so much more convincing, subtle and sophisticated as a race of intelligent prehistoric humanoid reptilians, the materials for facial augmentation are obviously so much more supple, flexible, skin-like. Even so, against all the evidence of my own eyes and ears, there's a part me which continues to prefer the Silurians of 1970 and 1984. This part of me is willful... And it suspends disbelief... And it is also, oh yes, just a bit nostalgic...

Realism, I suspect, isn't an absolute value. It's extremely subjective. Even a silly old emotion like nostalgia can kink its criteria. And that's rather wonderful, I think. So bring on the Sea Devils of the 21st century - I'm looking forward to meeting them, with their flash-lamp death-rays and their big string vests...