Noise to Signal

[Lily]

I’m a very long term lurker and was always a fan of the Noise to Signal site. I know that everyone went and got a life, which to be frank was really quite inconsiderate, as I’ve been bereft of any intelligent reviews of Dr Who ever since.

So, just 8 years late, does anyone have recommendations of where to get a similar fix?

Topic

[Phil]

I used to write for the site, so allow me to burgle this from someone else who used to write for the site!
http://www.dirtyfeed.org/2013/08/noise-to-signal-a-brief-retrospective/

(That’s John, who also managed it and did a huge amount of backend stuff and collapsed daily from the migraines we gave him.)

That’s a nice read in itself, but it also links to the sites the individual contributors have set up since the closure of NTS. Mine is noiselesschatter.com. I don’t review Doctor Who, so your specific request is better filled elsewhere, but I do review Better Call Saul, The Venture Bros., ALF, and a bunch of other things.

I hope the above URL (John’s) helps!

[Ridley]

https://storify.com/ellardent

( http://www.cinematicuniverse.com/ )

[Ridley]

Oh and https://curiosityinajunkyard.wordpress.com/

[Lily]

Awesome, thanks for the links.

[Jonathan Capps]

unlimitedricepudding.co.uk will also give you a good selection of Doctor Who reviews up to and including last year’s series, too.

[Seb Patrick]

Yeah, URP was basically the spiritual successor to NTS’ Who stuff – we had several of the same people doing it, and also successfully completed three further series’ worth of reviews (I think all in all, the ones we managed to do in full across the two sites were 2, 4, 5, 8 and 9? I have no idea why NTS suddenly stopped on series 3 just before Human Nature, however).

The site’s not definitively dead, but I made a decision that having successfully done 9, and with everyone having lives and stuff in the way, it would be foolhardy to try and do 10 as well. I’m still in two minds about whether we’ll do anything for the Chibnall era, but let’s see how it goes. If we don’t publish any more, I am quite pleased that the last article was (accidentally) something called “The Final End”.

I do find it interesting seeing other (more successful) sites that have done the “Write about whatever you want to/love across all forms of media” thing since, though – the most obvious being Den of Geek (and the shittest being WhatCulture). I’m not saying any of them nicked the idea, but I do think we were onto something by coming up with it in the first place, rather than just being a specialist “movie site” or “TV site” or whatever. We were maybe just a bit too early to it to catch the wave, and of course we never had the resources to run a sustainable site that could pay people to justify the time spent on it. But yeah, while it’s totally different people (except for those of us that have written for it), I think DoG is probably the closest thing out there to what we originally set out to do?

[Lily]

Den of Geek was the only one I’d found for myself. It’s so hard to pick up on these sites it seems though, as a casual google for ‘doctor who reviews’ brings up all the boring ones by newspapers etc and not the dedicated reviewers. Even when you do find a more specialised site the standard of writing is pretty lacking, with most ‘reviews’ being little more than a recap of the plot. I know the plot, I just watched it, I want opinions dammit!

Without wanting to brown-nose too much, you guys are awesome and I’m really looking forward to the XII coverage here.

[Phobos And Deimos]

Lily, you’ve hit the nail on the head. I look forward to the coverage as always, but not so much the episodes.

[John Hoare]

One thing that Dirty Feed piece doesn’t say as strongly as it should have done: there are so many times I planned to write something on NTS, and then never got round to it. It was for various reasons – some good, some not quite so good. That didn’t help the site one bit, though. I wish I’d found better ways of managing it all.

I did love NTS, and Seb makes some really good points about the idea behind it that I hadn’t even thought of. Ultimately, I think I became too selfish to work on a group blog. I wanted to do a site which was far smaller, but more me. I’m happier as a result… but I sometimes look at what NTS could have been, and sigh wistfully.

[John Hoare]

(I did once have the idea that we could revive NTS as a group podcast – or even a podcast network. I think that’d work great if we all put the time in… but ultimately, would probably have failed for some of the same reasons it failed originally. We’ve all moved on to our own stuff.)

[Lily]

I’m sorry Phobos, but I didn’t say that at all.

I’m totally hyped for series 12. I rewatched 11 last week and thoroughly enjoyed it. After the cringe of 8, the oddness of BTE and a slightly wobbly 10 I feel that the whole team have found their feet again and are producing good telly.

[Phobos And Deimos]

I know you didn’t, what I meant was you hit the nail on the head in regards to the coverage being excellent.

[Ben Paddon]

(I did once have the idea that we could revive NTS as a group podcast – or even a podcast network. I think that’d work great if we all put the time in… but ultimately, would probably have failed for some of the same reasons it failed originally. We’ve all moved on to our own stuff.)

Considering I have two – two! – podcasts in me right now, just waiting to bust out, I would be particularly and quite selfishly interested in this as a notion.

[Phobos And Deimos]

What are they and can they be combined with my forthcoming weekly podcast about obscure in-vision regional presenters from the 1980s?

[Ben Paddon]

Well, one of them is an episode-by-episode review of Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) starting with the first episode of the ’69 original and ending with the last episode of the surprisingly-good-but-still-occasionally-wobbly ’00-’01 remake, then (hopefully!) moving on to maybe reviewing (or doing a dramatic reading of!) the script for the aborted US remake from a couple of years back. We’ll start that one as soon as our schedules align.

The other one is a Doctor Who one, but I want to do something a little different than just “episode recaps and news,” and it’s not something anybody else is doing in the Doctor Who podcast space right now, so I’m pretty excited about it. Should be recording a pilot for that soon.

[Author]

Replies