Yeah. I don’t think the character was all that well drawn to start with. Apparently Ian Marter was the first choice for Yates, but he backed out when he found out it was a recurring character as he had other commitments. It would have been very interesting to see what a difference that casting made, because my not-really-very-controversial-opinion is:
Harry is amazing and a big part of that is… So is Marter.
The game thread is in slow-mode, but here’s a controversial one for ya;
Terry was not instrumental in getting Doctor Who onto television and making it big. He wrote a script, and everyone else worked very bloody hard to pull it off.
And as we know, the reason The Daleks was produced second was that it was the only workable script at the time. It had the bug-eyed monsters that Sydney Newman disliked, but they had nothing else ready, so they had to go with it. The actors, directors (mainly Barry), designer and composer did a great job of making it all work.
Also, Terry making bank off the Daleks while the actual designer got nothing is massively unfair - even worse than Delia not getting songwriting credit for the theme.
And the way this thread led me to look up Richard Franklin on Wikipedia and find out he was a Brexiteer way back in the 90s… 
Trust me, that is not uhhhh…the worst thing you’ll hear about Richard Franklin on the internet.
100% agree. Terry Nation, money for old rope. Complete chancer who got lucky. Well done I guess.
genesis isn’t even good
EDIT - except for the bit where Harry gets stuck in the big clam
So this probably is the biggest controversial opinion I have so here goes:
I don’t think Nick Briggs should be executive producer at Big Finish anymore, simply because of the way his behaviour has been lately in regards to using his power to rewrite entire ranges because they weren’t good enough for his master plan of how the box set should be despite the writers already having written them looking at you guys 2nd doctor adventures, UFO, Space 1999.
He’s also not that great a writer once in a blue moon we’ll get a banger like creatures of beauty but the rest is dull as dish water.
What do you mean by this? How is saying that, for example, Gallifrey is presented one-dimensionally indicative of someone’s imaginative ability?
If Briggs was a character, he’d be over-powered and oversaturated lol. He is inescapable.
Most of the time the criticism of Gallifrey is paired with the “there’s nothing interesting you can do with them”, and that criticism is levelled from both fandom and certain prominent writers, to which my answer is, “No, there’s nothing interesting you can do with them.” It seems ridiculous and immature to discount one of the fundamental pillars of the show (The Doctor is a Time Lord, who are the Time Lords?) off the back of people not having done a particularly good job with them so far (which I honestly also dispute, I don’t think they’ve ever been boring outside of the fact that “boring” is a primary Time Lord feature, and that’s what makes the Renegades so out of the ordinary). It’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater, when I think anyone with a halfway decent grasp of science-fiction writing could find interesting things to do with them.
Okay, yes, I agree. I don’t understand how anyone could speak in absolutes in saying there’s nothing interesting one could do with Gallifrey. Although I am with @captainjackenoch in saying that the planet is extremely underused. There’s so much the writers could do, but no one seems to want to explore it. Gallifreyan politics bores me intensely, and I’d love if we could get a glimpse into how the non-elites live (or, at the very least, show the elites out of the office for once).
Even the politics can be made interesting, he said, indicating in the general direction of BF Gallifrey. There are even justifications in-universe to be made over why there are only Time Lords left on Gallifrey (all to do with Rassilon’s space racism) but I think there’s just such a fear of going back into Invasion of Time/Five Doctors camp territory that no one is willing to take much of a stab at it, and now with the foundling stuff we’re just re-hashing the “last of my kind thing”, which I think is infinitely more boring.
I don’t know if this is controversial or not, but Unleashed sucks.
I find the presenter annoying, and while the Work Experience segment is a cool idea, it always seems to be played for laughs, which ruins it. It also feels like it’s shallow and made for people with tiny attention spans, epitomized by those horrid obnoxious “SPOILERS!” teases for the upcoming clips, and the totally unnecessary mid-episode “later on Unleashed…” breaks. (Which would make sense if they were positioned before commercial breaks, but … there aren’t any.) And unlike Confidential it never goes that deep into the actual craft involved (whether that be writing, acting, set design, or so forth), just the typical “oh Steven is amazing” sound bites.
Like, if you’re going to do short-form Insta-/TikTok-/Snapchat-style videos, do short-form videos. (Which they have, and I like them!) If you’re going to do a behind the scenes series, do it properly.
I feel I want to disagree but it’s taken me a while to actually get through the series (and I’ve still got the Unseen to watch). I can get bored fairly quickly with the episodes but I do like Stefan - he’s a good presenter and very natural.
I’ve realised I’m not as interested in the behind the scenes of the modern series as I am the classic. I just don’t seem to have the desire to know much about modern TV production. I enjoy the features when I watch them, or the DWM articles when I read them, but find I often put it off. There are still entire episodes of Doctor Who Confidential I’ve never watched.
Yeah I stopped watching these after the first few because I felt like I didn’t get much out of them. Which is a shame!
Oh I really liked Unleashed. I always watched it straight after the episode.
I think Stefan is adorable and funny.
It’s definitely aimed more at kids, which may be why you think it’s a bit shallow.
But RTD wanted to encourage kids to get more involved with creating television and that’s what Confidential did, and I think Unleashed is doing that too.
But yes I disliked the work experience bits, they were played for laughs but not very funny. I’d rather he spent that time interviewing the cast or something.
Get Andrew Cartmel on the line!!!
I agree.
About the target audience of the show, I myself do get a bit irritated by it but it sort of isn’t for me and I’m fine with that.
I briefly met Stefan at Euston station and he seemed incredibly nice so it’s also keeping a nice guy in decent employment which I’m all for as well.
It feels like a decent successor to Confidential (which also used to wind me up a bit). Although the times have changed since Confidential and so it’s quite noticeably a different approach. It’s a bit more in your face with a bit less substance for sure but it’s a show being made which offers an insight into the making of TV, which feels incredibly rare for British television these days.
Having popped into this thread this morning it got me wondering if I’ve got another controversial opinion and having just posted in the Chibnall era audio thread quite positively about the Timeless Child I thought there must be a controversial opinion lurking there somewhere.
So, because on my last marathon a couple of years ago I was ranking each story and jotting down averages for seasons and Doctors as a whole, I went back and had a look at the numbers to see if there was anything which surprised me…
So here’s another controversial opinion from me - the Chibnall era is, numerically, my favourite era out of the RTD1, Moffat and Chibnall eras.