"Hey everybody! My mother liked it!"

[scarfman]

scarfmom loved Doctor Who last night. In previous tries she'd always found it too "surreal" to watch for long; e.g., the first serial I ever sent her on VHS in the mid 80s was Pyramids of Mars*, with Sutekh's disembodied head being projected into the TARDIS in the first scene for no adequately explored reason. But the first thing she noticed about twenty-first century Doctor Who was the "psychedelically" bright colors (e.g., the pinks in Rose's bedroom, the green lawns in the discussion of the Earth's revolution), and apparently since it looked surreal in the first place she was able to get past any surreality in the narrative that otherwise might have disassociated her disbelief. Then it was so tightly and quickly paced that her attention wasn't allowed to wander. She asked whether all the Doctor's incarnations talk like an Eastender; when the Lots of planets have a north line came up she asked me whether he and Rose have different accents, to which I could only reply, "Am I Henry Higgins?" She likes Rose; Billie Piper looks like Peta Wilson, and Rose has a similar energy even if she's not really anything like Nikita. scarfmom enjoyed it very much and is looking forward to the rest.

*Because it happened to have been the first novelization I picked up in 1981. These days I'd pick some other story to introduce Doctor Who to someone new; Face of Evil, or perhaps Rose.

Comments

[redneckgaijin.livejournal.com]

Christopher Eccleston does indeed have a substantial British northcountry accent, similar to but not as thick as Craig Charles' Scouse accent. I can't pin it down exactly, as per region, by sound; last time I read a linguistics article, it said that England alone, never mind Wales and Scotland, had over forty distinctive regional accents, as opposed to only four or five for the entire United States.

[pedanther]

The obvious guess is somewhere in the Greater Manchester region, since that's where Eccleston's from.