Doctor Who?

Dinner on Wednesday night with Melanie, over from California for a job interview (still got my fingers crossed...). Over drinks in a genuine historic-ish pub near Russell Square, we fell to talking about TV shows. We are fairly stereotypical in our almost exclusive adherence to imported American drama shows, the good stuff though, frequently HBO. We have been fanatical about The West Wing and The Wire, now we're watching Mad Men, Brothers and Sisters, The Good Wife, sprinkled with a bit of CSI for light relief - only the Las Vegas show, mind, not any of the others...

Melanie was extolling the virtues of British TV shows, a subject about which we were able to say very little (apart from your occasional Agatha Christie production), but somehow Dr Who came up, and suddenly this cultural chasm opened up between us... She had never heard of Dr Who!!! And this from an American who had lived in London for 12 years!! Obviously during the years when it was off...

Not that we watch it very regularly, but trying to explain Dr Who and the iconic theme tune which everyone in Britain instantly recognises and sings along to or Daleks which immediately fill everyone in Britain with fear and dread, and being greeted with utter incomprehension... really made me understand what a unique British phenomenon Dr Who is! Strangely, it has never been exported! It actually filled me with a new respect for the programme...

K drew a diagram of a Dalek (see above) to see if Melanie would recognise it - she didn't. The only paper to hand was a chapter on iconography from Anna's PhD draft which I was reading in the restaurant while waiting for the others to arrive! Iconography seemed an appropriate subject though, in light of our conversation...

I am also reminded of the two guys we saw dressed up as Daleks on the beach at St Ives, when we were there for the fancy dress extravaganza that is New Year's Eve - alas, I didn't catch them on camera. As they went running past us, one of them said to the other, "No - you have to run like this!" and demonstrated a stiff-limbed pseudo-mechanical form of run which of course no Dalek would ever be able to do, seeing as they can't even walk upstairs. It was hilarious though!