Effect of the Doctor

Finally finished the other Steve Cambden book: The Doctor's Effect (and I would link to some other page about it, but it seems no-one else on the internet talked about it - and can't see it reviewed in TSV...).

This book is a series of interviews with BBC Special Effects staff about their lives and times on a certain TV program. However, I used "finally finished" decidedly as it definitely took a slog to get through it. Although Steve's other book was well written and full of personality, these interviews are very bland readings with little to lighten them up apart from the occasional half-remembered anecdote.

Most of the staffers interviewed (and not everyone on the series was) related to the earlier stories, so we get lots of stories repeated from different views, but it comes across largely as "I did X", and "he did X". Not exactly riveting reading. And, probably because of the time that has passed, the interviews are mostly "I did this, and then we did that", there isn't any sense of the people connecting with what they did (which, as I say, it probably due to the time between then and now and the fact that they did so much other stuff as well).

Still, there are a lot of revealing facts about the shows given here, with a lot of the jury-rigging behind the effects revealed for all to marvel at. Certainly, while reading, there were some stories I wanted to rewatch just so I could know what exactly I was seeing! This is bound to make the scales from some eyes.

If you are obsessive about the history of Who and really want to know all the details, this is definitely a book for you. However, even with the amount of work Steve undoubtedly put into this, it could easily be missed without being that much the poorer for it...

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