Less Money equals better creativity.

[Starkers]

All TV shows reuse locations and effects. Lord knows how many times various alien spaceships turned up on the various incarnations of Trek, each time supposedly representing a different alien species (and often to different scales). Been rewatching the first three seasons of coupling recently and it's amusing to see Patrick's bedroom patently redressed as a bar somewhere!

Seriously would people really rather the BBC spent loads of money location shooting another stable rather than use the one round the corner all for the sake of a tiny portion of the episode? christ people really are spoiled these days aren't they?

 

[wamdue]

Seriously would people really rather the BBC spent loads of money location shooting another stable rather than use the one round the corner all for the sake of a tiny portion of the episode? christ people really are spoiled these days aren't they?

why did End of Time require the use of a stable? I dont recall there being any horses in the plot.

What are you going to say next, that the Doctor should rock up on Albert Square, and claim it to be another place? becasue I dont think changing the street name signs & the pub sign, is going to stop people thinking that is Albert Square.

 

[Starkers]

Don't be silly you're talking about a recognisable set from another major TV show, not a flipping stable that most people won't realise has been used before.

 

[diankra]

Don't be silly you're talking about a recognisable set from another major TV show, not a flipping stable that most people won't realise has been used before.

Well, in Runaway Bride I found myself distracted by recognising the corridor from another episode (or possibly it was a later one reusing the same corridor as Runaway Bride).
But that goes back ages... in Armageddon Factor, the Marshal's ship had a control panel that was also used in Servalan's ship in Blake's 7 at the same time. It wouldn't have been so obvious, but in Armageddon Factor you got repeated shots of the same controls for several weeks (because the Doctor had set up a timeloop to stop the Marshal actually hitting the very identifiable 'fire' button).

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

^The only time reused sets/locations ever really bugged me was in "New Earth," where there were shots of infected people running around these warehouse catwalks that looked suspiciously like the warehouse used for the climactic confrontation with the Nestene consciousness at the end of "Rose."

as for Less money = better creativity, there is obviously a cut off point, that point being when it starts to look cheap on screen.

Agreed. We don't want it to start looking like it was shot in a closet (SEE Earth: Final Conflict Season 5, assorted episodes of Andromeda & Mutant X, hell, anything produced by Tribune Entertainment in the early 2000s).

At the same time, I think that RTD's budget was sometimes too large, giving him too much license to fall back on endings that, even if they weren't good, were at least "BIG!" The giant robot terrorizing London in "The Next Doctor" is the worst example I can think of.

Absolutely agreed. Doctor Who, in a way, benefits from a smaller budget. That's one of the things I love about the classic series. It was constantly pushed into a corner financially and it responded with great stories and settings to overcome the limitations.

One of the things I love about the classic series is that it absolutely refuses to be limited by its budget. Whereas Star Trek or Stargate would often save money by doing more bottle shows, Doctor Who never let a lack of money prevent them from depicting an alien planet. They were boldy going anywhere they wanted in the universe, regardless of how cheap it had to look.

One other example of a budget limitation yielding an icon. Originally, in Back to the Future, Marty McFly was going to get back to 1985 by driving the Delorean into a nuclear test explosion. But when Universal told them they didn't have enough money for that, that's when they came up with the idea of the lightning bolt at the clocktower.

 

[Captain Pike]

1.21 gigawatts!! * falls off chair

 

[C.E. Evans]

I'm actually glad there's still a part of me that doesn't pay too much attention to reused set locations. I tend to lose myself more in the story and don't even notice if a stable or rock quarry was used in an earlier episode. They all look like new sets to me...

 

[Stevil2001]

^The only time reused sets/locations ever really bugged me was in "New Earth," where there were shots of infected people running around these warehouse catwalks that looked suspiciously like the warehouse used for the climactic confrontation with the Nestene consciousness at the end of "Rose."

as for Less money = better creativity, there is obviously a cut off point, that point being when it starts to look cheap on screen.

Agreed. We don't want it to start looking like it was shot in a closet (SEE Earth: Final Conflict Season 5, assorted episodes of Andromeda & Mutant X, hell, anything produced by Tribune Entertainment in the early 2000s).

At the same time, I think that RTD's budget was sometimes too large, giving him too much license to fall back on endings that, even if they weren't good, were at least "BIG!" The giant robot terrorizing London in "The Next Doctor" is the worst example I can think of.

The old show was perfectly willing to do that without the budget to at least make it look good: Robot, Terror of the Zygons, The Power of Kroll...

 

[Starkers]

Of ourse it may be that its supposed to be the same stable. We are talking about a time traveller here

There was probably a lot more obvious repetition in S1, but it was intentional storywise and did make some sense.