Whenever one criticizes this show, the fans respond that the show isn't about special effects or action. And yet the science fiction ideas are routine, and the characters are twits.
Just like Battlescar Craplactica, huh?
I was in London last April, and caught one show from the new series. Parts of it were interesting, but their casting was horrible. The latest guy that plays Dr. Who has the most insipid grin on his face at all times, and his "acting" (if you can call it that without laughing) ability is at best second rate...
The stuff may be routine today, but it wasn't in 1963 when the show debuted.
Some parts of the show were just plain silly, granted, and certain production decisions seem pretty questionable, but the show nonetheless provides an interesting glimpse into how television production has changed over the years.
Since the 19th century, people have realized the possibilities for editing film by cutting and splicing. Video, however, was not readily edited. Sections of tape could be cut and spliced together, but such cuts were not precise. Many early episodes of Doctor Who were shot in four or fewer sections. Even when it was necessary to insert film footage, that would often be done "live" during recording. If there was a four-minute film insert, the actors would wait four minutes while the film ran before the camera returned to them.
One of Jon Pertwee's innovations, which some of his fellow actors liked and the producers hated, was swearing when something went wrong in production. This would force the director to stop and reshoot the scene. Otherwise, if not forced to, the director would just keep going right on through mistakes. Even when a wooden sword broke during a sword fight in "The Aztecs", recording continued as the character grabbed another sword off a table and kept fighting (according to the DVD commentary, the sword wasn't supposed to break).
To be sure, the special effects in Doctor Who could be hit-or-miss. This was largely a consequence of doing many of them "live". If tape was rolling and an effect didn't work, too bad. Unless it made a scene unwatchable, it wouldn't be worth re-recording (especially since it may be necessary to redo not just the effect, but scenes before and after).
I will confess to being puzzled by some of the effects, though. Perhaps most notably in "The Dalek Invasion of Earth". In the early days of Doctor Who, each episode's recap of the last episode's cliffhanger would usually be produced by having the actors re-act it. It might not match perfectly, but since nobody had VCRs in those days, nobody would notice. One episode of TDIoE ends with a model shot of a warhead being partially-lowered into a shaft.
The aspect that puzzles me is that when the cliffhanger was shot, the model wasn't completed; it was finished in the week before shooting the next episode. The recap, however, reuses the previous week's shot of the unfinished model, though, which produces a highly-visible continuity error when the continuation of the episode uses the finished one. I wonder why they didn't reshoot the lowering of the warhead since it would only have taken a few seconds and nobody would have noticed the discontinuity from the previous week.
It’s the show that’s most highly regarded by SF writers like Harlan Ellison who hated stuff like Star Trek. The SF Encyclopedia, which is a primary scholarly source on the subject matter, ranks it highly as well.