Is there a "Doctor Who for Dummies"? (More important, SHOULD there be one?)

Don't ask me to explain, 'cause I don't care. I just know -- from watching Graham Norton last night -- that in Britain they're counting down to David Tennant's final episode as Doctor Who, "The End of Time."

by Ken

I admit that I watch my share -- okay, just possibly more than my share -- of stuff on TV that might be judged by the Supreme World TV Council as, well, "crap." (Heck, it's not all Michael Palin travel films.) But I have to say, I just don't get this whole Doctor Who thing.

SIEDBAR: IS IT A BRITISH THING?

It's not, is it? It would be easier to deal with if it were. Then I could just write it off as, well, one of those British things. You know, like maybe it's something in the water over there. Or all that driving on the wrong side of the road.

(Parenthetical aside: Many, many years ago I had the pleasure of introducing a friend -- one of the smartest people I've ever known, in both the commonsensical and book-larnin' senses -- to the pleasures of the British-style Times of London crossword puzzles that appeared in New York magazine. Of course he picked up the basics pretty quickly, but for a while there would always be a set of clues in each puzzle which he couldn't puzzle out, and being really smart, he quickly figured out the dodge: that those clues, surely, related to idiosyncratic Britishisms. Of course a certain number of them would be, and would thus be heavy going for us non-Brits. However, there weren't nearly as many of them as my friend Bruce made out. Still, it made for a tidier, more soul-satisfying explanation for not being able to solve those final clues. It's a British thing.)

So could the whole Doctor Who thing be, you know, a British thing? I'm not optimistic about this. Americans are subject to infestation, aren't they? In much the same way that it's not just trees in Holland that are subject to Dutch elm disease.

I bring this up now because one of the guests on last night's Graham Norton Show -- last night on this side of the pond, that is (but then, we're only, what?, a week or two behind the mother ship on Graham, aren't we? how often do we get that close on entertainment programming?) -- was the departing Doctor Who, David Tennant, whose final episodes, after four seasons, are rolling out now, with the last ones scheduled for around Christmas and New Year's.

In the U.K., I gather, this is a big deal, the changing of the Doctor Who guard. The new Doctor, Matt Somebody, has already become an icon. I don't know exactly how many Doctor Whos (Doctors Who?) there have been, but from the way the Brits argue over their Doctor Who preference, I get the impression that Matt Whoever is, like, No. 23. I don't know, and I don't care. (If you care, the BBC has a Doctor Who website. You'd figure the info would be there somewhere. Knock yourself out.) I get the impression that the way they cast the role now is to send casting people out like truant officers -- if you're caught home with no excuse, you have to do it.

David Tennant himself, by the way, continued to insist to Graham, as he apparently has in all his interviews, that he is a lifelong Doctor Who aficionado. (The show appears to have been going on since the days of Mary, Queen of Scots.) He swears he has always loved the show, that he could have gone on doing it forever but didn't want to risk it becoming just a job he has to go to, and that yes, he will continue watching the show with Matt Whatshisname. (Graham had asked whether deep down he didn't wish that from now on the show would be a disaster without him. He said he understood what Graham was asking, but no, he doesn't feel that way at all.)

I tried to watch a few episodes, I believe during David Tennant's residency. (He looks kind of familiar.) Every time I thought I was beginning to make sense of any of it, it fell apart. I couldn't figure out who those people were or why they were doing the stuff they were doing. What's more, and more important, I couldn't figure out any reason for caring.

I know they're big on monsters, or should I say alternative galactic life forms. But they strike me as even cheesier, and less believable than the cheapie jobs on the original Star Trek series.

Obviously I am Doctor Who-challenged. I'm not really asking to have any of this explained. I'm just looking for confirmation that when it comes to Doctor Who, it should really be Doctor Who Cares?


GRAHAM NORTON ISN'T JUST ONE OF THOSE BRITISH THINGS

In this new season, in case you didn't know, Graham has been promoted to BBC One, the big show. (He was pretty funny about this.) And while admittedly I have to be in the right frame of mind (though sometimes, if I'm in the correct wrong frame of mind, he can get me to the right frame), but I love Graham. It has nothing to do with gayness, although that's obviously part of who he is. A lot of the pop-culture references go over my head -- British things, you know -- but what I love is his wonderfully sane feeling for the zany, even preposterous side of the way we live. How many interviewers, for example, would have asked David Tennant the question about hoping that the show would go in the crapper without him?

Here's the start of a 2007 Graham show -- still on BBC Two, of course -- with David Tennant, then midway through his Doctor Who run (the clip is posted as "Part 1 of 4," so you fans can have a ball). The other guest is funnylady Jo Brand, who was just a guest in the new series.

#