WHO'S ON TV: TURKISH DAFFY

Every Video Weekend, we add a 'Doctor Who' clip to the mix, something out of the ordinary to shake things up. This week? It's so far out of the ordinary to be just plain weird.

Turkish TV and movies are notorious for ripping off concepts without regard to copyrights. I own copies of their versions of "The Wizard Of Oz" and "Young Frankenstein", and I know that there are versions of "Star Wars" and 'Star Trek' out there as well.

But this is bizarre. It's the Turkish adaptation of 'Doctor Who'. And the only way you can tell it's supposed to be 'Doctor Who' is by the presence of the police box TARDIS. Otherwise it's just some horny hippie beating up an Apis-Cervidae, an insectoid-ruminant hybrid.

In other words, a "Bee-Deer". Or as the subtitles put it: a "beedeer".

The people who crap-slapped this together didn't even bother with getting the basic principles of the Doctor's character established (which, despite the changes in personality with each regeneration, remained the same.) Why should they, when they couldn't even be bothered to get the "Doctor" to actually act as if he's running down that green screened road?

And yet.... this is still a part of the main Toobworld. This guy will never be an incarnation of the Doctor, but apparently he's a renegade Time Lord who survived the Time War (depending on when this was broadcast in Turkey.) The way I see it, this Time Lord is similar to that alien from Gore Vidal's "Visit To A Small Planet" - maybe more powerful and smarter than the people of Earth, but considered retarded back home on his own world.

This was a Time Lord hopped up on some alien narcotic until his brains were fried and he acts it!

BCnU!