Are you excited about this year's Christmas Special?

Was wondering because I'm completely indifferent about it. Which, in some ways, concerns me.

Actually, I sort of am. I didn't particularly enjoy this last season, far too relentlessly bleak for my tastes despite liking the team very much indeed, but the Christmas special is reliably cheerful and upbeat. Plus, riffing on The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe sounds fun.

Anyway, by 7pm on Christmas Day I shall be thoroughly off my tits on sherry and won't really care about the finer plot details, so as long as it looks pretty I'll be happy

Over the years, I've been conditioned me to have very low expectations for the Christmas specials, so I'm not excited about the special per se.

However, we may be hosting a little post-Christmas viewing party here where it airs at 9PM so that could make it fun. It's gotten so that we now know several people we know in the real world who are Doctor Who fans.
The girlfriend of our neighbor down the street is a fan (though he is not) as are the new next-door neighbors that moved in over the summer and we had converted our best friend a few years ago.

We've also recently started getting the BBC America channel in HD, so I'm finally at the point where it's less trouble to just sit through adverts than fart around with internet pixies.

What do we know about this special anyway? I haven't been paying attention.

Excited? Not really, but I'm not indifferent to it either. I'm sure when I sit down to watch it, whenever that will be, I'll be plenty happy to take in some more Who. The ads for it on BBCA look pretty interesting.

"Excited" is a relative term. I'd describe myself as interested to see how the Moff adapts the premise of Lion, Witch & Wardrobe into a Who setting. Beyond that, I tend not to build up a lot of expectations.

lucy_who wrote:Anyway, by 7pm on Christmas Day I shall be thoroughly off my tits on sherry

I would expect nothing less!

i'm quite looking forward to "great expectations"

Perhaps the next companion will be called Pip.

What the dickens are we talking about here?

I'm quite looking forward to it as I am all of the Christmas/New Year break. Just got to somehow survive one more week at work first!

I used to count the days to the excellent Xmas specials, until last year put me off. I'll watch it this year, of course, but I have low expectations and haven't even bothered to watch the trailer.

Rich Flair wrote:haven't even bothered to watch the trailer.

Likewise.

I've watched the prequel and trailers but still don't have a good feel for whether it will be any good.
The Christmas Carol one was less bad than the Kylie on the space Titanic one. That was my least-favorite of the bunch.
They try too hard to be Christmassy. I'd settle for a good old formulaic base-under-siege that happens to be set at Christmas. Maybe with Ice Warriors at the North Pole. And no pop singers.

I never watch the trailers cos I'm a spoilerphobe, but caught a little bit by accident. There's lots of snow...

I wrote an article for Celestial Toyroom recently about the Christmas specials, and it comes down the formula used by the two Exec Producers at the time.

With RTD, what you had was a deconstruction of Christmas traditions, so as to find something that could be turned nasty: Christmas trees that turn into buzz saws, floating ornament bombs, Santa bands that turn out to be hired assassins, a traditional Victorian Christmas with a well known Who monster shoved into it. Even Mr. Copper's fractured Christmas history ("they eat the people from Turkey," or "Just be careful, any day now, they start boxing.")

The Moff, on the other hand, takes a theme found in a traditional Christmas story, and adapts it to his own version of the Whoniverse. He borrowed Dicken's theme of the redemptive value of Christmas for his story last year, with heavily borrowed elements from his own short story, "Continuity Errors." This year, he's adapting C.S. Lewis's first tales of Narnia novel, and I think should prove interesting to see how well he succeeds.

I love the Christmas specials! Last year's was a magical, dreamlike story - an example of what The Moff can do whilst freed from the shackles of his overarching grand scheme.

I quite enjoyed last year's. Actually I've quite enjoyed them all, but last year I was completely sober too.

Hard to believe............

The Co=Ordinator wrote:Hard to believe............

:p

I saw it on repeat (Boxing Day?) cos I was in hospital over Christmas last year - I'd just been released and was on a pharmocopia of antibiotics. Not the best Christmas evah, that one...

I sincerely hope this one is a quinitillion times better for you Supreme One.

The Co=Ordinator wrote:I sincerely hope this one is a quinitillion times better for you Supreme One.

Short of being deported to North Korea or getting poo in my stocking, I can't see how it could be worse

My sister did accuse me of going to extreme lengths to avoid going to our parents for Christmas though...

A good fertilizer manure in the stocking wouldn't be so bad, would it?

Yes. Yes it would.

It's a little sad that there isn't the same level of giddy excitement for a new episode that there has been for the rediscovery of old episodes, especially when the old episodes in question are known to be of... questionable... quality.