Yeah. There’s a reason ar Chris said “sack Russell T. Davies, sack Jane Tranter, etc.”
Given that the rest of the cast and the writers and directors have all been positive about Millie, I suspect she’s a perfectly nice person and just got on the wrong person’s bad side, probably for good reason.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately…
I have to admit to having very similar thoughts and worries. I don’t want to think ill of the team that brought back Doctor Who and Russell always seems friendly and open, but I do also get the sense of the story being spun and of egos being managed. I’d love to find out what really happened to Christopher Eccleston, as he strikes me as an honourable man who will not speak out of turn but who was pushed to his limit. I also have some misgivings about things like why Stephen Fry was announced as a writer with much fanfare for season 2 and then abruptly pulled out with only a very garbled explanation about not having time to do it. All very intriguing. Unexplained drama does appear to be a running thread.
I always wonder, though, why we make such a big deal out of ‘people who worked together didn’t get along’. There’s plenty of people I work with that I love and a few that I can’t stand and wouldn’t be able to work alongside without constantly having to bite my tongue. That’s just a workplace, isn’t it?
We don’t really know what happened and either side could be exaggerating or playing down the events because they’re coming from an emotional perspective.
But I just think we assume ill intent of people who may just not have managed to find a good working relationship.
Yes, that’s true. Everyone has people who they have difficulty working with and that’s got to be doubly true in an industry where egos rub up against one another. But I have some niggling worries about the similarities with which some of this has been dealt with, but, in the absence of other evidence have tended to give the benefit of the doubt. However, when the problems have clearly affected the end product, maybe it’s more than just another case of some people not getting along at work? It’s all speculation and I guess we’ll never know.
Bad things happen despite their being no ill intent. Power imbalances and spinning the story of what did happen rarely help though. Having come up against work place bullying, I’m sensitive to signs that it might have crept into the mix.
In the case of Eccelston it wasn’t just “people who worked together didn’t get along” & there’s also all the Barrowman stuff & how that wasn’t taken seriously.
The big thing I thought was that the crew wasn’t treated well, with very little done about it, and Eccleston had a huge problem with that. He and Barrowman had very different work ethics we could say, and they didn’t get along, but his shenanigans I didn’t think was a huge part of Eccleston wanting out.
But just because there were definitely problems with how things were with Eccleston, doesn’t necessarily mean something similar happened here.
I think I remember there was a stunt in the first episode where a sofa (on fire) came out of a window when Rose’s work blew up without any safety precautions. Hard to know if that was part of it or not, though.
That was definitely cited as one of the issues but like all things, we have pieced together bits of information from here and bits of information from there, added in things that are probably unrelated (like rumours of issues involving Millie) and more obviously egregious stuff like Barrowman’s behaviour and it all conflates into making certain people into villains and I just don’t think, in a real life workplace, that it can be as cut and dried as that.
Well yes and no. We know Gardner (I think) reprimanded him.
I’m just not convinced we are getting a balanced account of what occurred from Eccleston or anyone else, and conflating it with rumours about the current production don’t really hold water with me. I imagine people think I’m naive but that’s how I consider all of this.
Maybe this isn’t the thread to go down this particular rabbit hole but it was all halfhearted & he carried on. They even mentioned it jokingly in the song ‘The Ballad of Russell and Julie’.
Is there a similar toxic working environment now? We’ll probably never know but I don’t blame people for making those assumptions.
I think people have made assumptions about how half-hearted it was or wasn’t. I don’t think from what I’ve seen we really know 100% what was said, how he reacted etc. It isn’t really any of our business how it was dealt with. We can all agree it was wrong and lets face it, Barrowman is pretty much out of the Whoniverse now.
But indeed, this is probably the wrong place for this rabbit hole.
When it’s jokingly mentioned later in a comedy song I don’t think anyone is making assumptions about how halfheartedly it was dealt with.
So I take it we’re villifying Tennant and Tate for being complicit in the half-heartedness too then? Shall we demonise the entire production team of the RTD era except Eccleston?
I’m being hyperbolic but I still maintain it’s none of our business and I just see it being used as ammo against the show to make dislike for it objective; as in ‘I don’t like the show AND the production team are bad people so that’s why I don’t like it obviously’.
This era will make for a fascinating documentary one day, I’m sure, but let’s not do any undue speculation
I don’t see anyone being demonised just being held to account. We are all free to separate the art from the artist. Many of us do it all the time. But it’s a personal choice. As for Tate & Tennant, their involvement in the stupid song does leave a bit of a sour taste for me tbh. But I’ll leave it there. We’ll agree to disagree. I’m derailing the thread somewhat.
He should have said gimme the lovin’ to Sarah.
If they really dropped her for complaining about night shoots, then it’s ridiculous and she should sue them for wrongful dismissal. Saying you don’t like working nights is not ‘being a diva’ in my book. I work from home doing customer service, and everybody in my work shift complains about the night shift.
The only difference I can think of is if she kept repeatedly complaining about working nights and was being disruptive. There was someone in my workplace who got sacked for constantly moaning about the new rota we were put onto, for instance, and I just work customer service so if someone does it repeatedly on a TV shoot I could see why that might become more of a problem.
I figure there’s no point speculating, since we don’t know.
Just watched it again with my mum (who, despite having watched a lot of classic who due to reruns etc, is a very casual viewer and I had to explain to/remind her who the Rani and Omega were) since she hadn’t gotten around to it yet and her review is: “what the actual ■■■■”