Behind the Sofa - The Collaborative Doctor Who Blog

Making it a good one

Doctor Who: The Big Bang

Review by Paul Kirkley

The Big Bang is very possibly the greatest episode of Doctor Who ever made. Here are 50 – count ’em! – reasons why:

He’s back – and it’s about time. No, it really is this time. It’s incredible how little this ancient TV show about a time traveller has actually exploited the fantastic, fairytale possibilities of time. This episode does its best to make up for half a century of neglect in 55 minutes.

We got a total story reboot. All those Dr Who Monster Book baddies gathered together at the end of last week’s episode was undoubtedly an OMG moment, but having them all standing around chatting and shuffling would inevitably have diminished everyone involved. As an idea, it peaked before it even got started, so it was the right decision to just let it go.

Instead, we got a brand new mystery for the young adventuress Amelia Pond - like getting a whole new bonus story when we were least expecting it.

A world without stars. Or the Doctor. I don’t know which is the more unthinkable.

The museum scenes have a real filmic quality to them. Beautifully shot by Toby Haynes and scored by Murray Gold in a manner that wouldn’t have disgraced Steven Spielberg and John Williams.

A stone Dalek. Uh-huh-u-huh, that’s pretty cool

“Okay kid – this is where it gets complicated.” Yep, you got me. Wasn’t expecting that.

Rory needs a ridiculous miracle, and he gets one: the Doctor, in a fez, with a mop. Given that the last time we saw our man he’d just been locked away for eternity by an alliance of all his greatest enemies, this sudden comic, vaudeville reappearance – with props - totally subverts our expectations.

“Echoes. Fossils in time. Footprints of the never were.” You never got this stuff with Robert Sloman, did you?

“Your girlfriend isn’t more important than the universe.” “She is to me.” Ouch, I felt that. Still, you go gallivanting around the universe with a jaw that big, you’re gonna have to take the occasional slug.

Rory’s vigil. The lonely centurion, performing one last act of devotion to the box he had pledged to protect for nearly 2,000 years. Now that’s what I call an epic fairytale.

It’s reassuring to know the Doctor only changes history for the most important of reasons. Like getting a little girl a drink.

It’s all jaunty, timey-wimey caper one minute and then, bang: there’s a dying Doctor from the future. Breathless – and breathlessly inventive –stuff.

Things you can do in 12 minutes: Suck a mint, buy a sledge, have a fast bath. See Sidney? This show’s still educational.

“Today, just dying is a result.”

The lone Dalek powering up in the darkness echoes the latent menace of 2005’s reputation-rescuing Dalek (you know, before before it was pissed away again in various camp runarounds)

The Doctor against the London skyline and the exploding sun-TARDIS burning up the sky: it’s the sort of shot that makes you feel justified in using poncy terms like mise en scene. See, I just did.

And then a Dalek rises up above the roofline. A decade ago, that would have been an iconic moment in itself. Here it seemed positively throwaway. I guess we’ve just got spoiled.

“It's a fez. I wear a fez now.”

The Doctor getting frazzled by the Dalek is still a shock, even with all the warnings we’ve had. Maybe I should have been keeping count.

“I’m River Song. Check your records again.” Blimey – we’ve come along way from that Dalek being Rose's new BF in series one, haven’t we? This one was petrified in more ways than one. And then it died.

Rebooting the universe: not so much jargon as anti-jargon, bringing the biggest Event of all down to the level of everyday Windows frustrations.

And for all its crazily epic scale, the idea that all you need is a few atoms to grow a universe is a very elegant sci-fi concept; after all, yer basic periodic table of elements provides all the building blocks you need. (Okay, so recreating a specific universe - stars, planets, Mr Kipling’s French Fancies and all - is a bit more tricky. But hey, it's still better than that bloody Paradox Machine, right?)

The Doctor in The Pandorica: so weak, so broken, so utterly defeated. Have we ever seen him this vulnerable before?

“He wants to talk to you before he goes.” It’s the “before he goes” that gets you: a deathbed farewell.

“Amy Pond. All alone. The girl who didn’t make sense. How could I resist?” How could anyone?

And

"You'll have your family back - you won't need your imaginary friend any more." As if.

And

“Nothing is ever forgotten.” This is what Michael Praed’s Robin Hood said just before he died. As a kid, it broke my heart. And so did this.

That kiss. We’ve had our fair share of Doctor-companion lip-lockery in recent years, but that tiny, chaste, blink-and-you-miss-it kiss to the back of the hand was the most beautiful by a mile.

“Geronimo!”

Look at the pain etched on the Doctor’s face as he pilots The Pandorica into the heart of the explosion. In the flying final sacrifice stakes, it beats even Davison’s heroic effort at the end of Androzani part 3. I have never feared for my hero more. If this had been his final end in the final ever episode, I wouldn’t have felt cheated.

Flashbacks: to Aickman Road and then, oh yes… the Byzantium. Hah! That jacket! It’s a measure of the quality of this show that we would immediately assume some clever timey-wimey trickery over a mere continuity blunder. And then be proved right.

Amelia asleep on her suitcase in the garden. The girl who waited.

And then, because Moffat is really spoiling us now, another impossibly lovely goodbye. “When you wake up, you’ll have a mum and dad.” Now that’s a Doctor with a bedside manner.

“You’ll dream about that box. It will never leave you. Brand new and ancient at the same time. And the bluest blue ever.” This was lump in the throat stuff, even before we knew it was clever coded message.

The Doctor shedding tears not for the loss of himself, but for the loss of his friend. And then the way his expression turns to real fear as he turns to look at the crack. “I don’t belong here any more.” It’s difficult to know in which of these Doctor-Amy farewells Matt Smith is more extraordinary. But if Tom Baker ever starts guffing on about “Well of course Doctor Who isn’t really an acting part…”, can someone bung a DVD of this in his gob? Cos, don’t get me wrong, I love Tom Baker – we all love Tom Baker - but there’s a lot more to playing this crazy, raggedy man in a box than the ability to walk through a door interestingly.

Twinkling lights in the sky: Amelia’s reward for wishing upon a star. Then the sun comes up and…

It’s Amy, all grown up. How many little surprises can one episode throw at us?

And Amy has a family. With a little tiny dad! In The Doctor Dances, everybody lived. Here, even people who were already dead get to live.

Amy the bride: how traffic-stoppingly beautiful does Karen Gillan look?

Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. But of course. With the benefit of hindsight, how else was this series ever going to end? If you didn’t cry or laugh out loud or punch the air at this point, you might want to ask yourself if you actually genuinely like Doctor Who. The most glorious, utterly transcendent moment in the show’s 47-year history? Today, at least, I’m saying, Hell yes.

“Raggedy man, I remember you and you are late for my wedding!” The tremble of glasses. The wind. A wheezing, groaning sound. And there it is: that iconic blue box. The bluest blue ever.

The Doc in his dapper new duds. “Hello everyone. I’m Amy’s imaginary friend. But I came anyway!”

The Doctor Dances. Really, really badly. (“That’s it, that’s good, keep it loose!”)

“2,000 years. The boy who waited. Good on you, mate.”

“Hang on, did you think I was asking you to marry me, or asking if you were married?” The wise and ancient hero who saved the universe. And still a little boy lost when it comes to women.

Who is River Song? We’re going to find out very soon. And she’s sorry, because that’s when everything changes. Ooh ’eck.

An Egyptian Goddess loose on the Orient Express. In Space. Somewhere in a parallel universe, Russell T Davies is still writing the Christmas specials…

But not in ours. In ours, Steven Moffat is the man with the power to make and break realities, to reboot universes and give little lost girls the gift of stars. He is the custodian of the greatest story ever told, with the greatest hero who ever lived, and died, and lived again. And in Matt Smith, he has found his perfect muse, and given us the perfect Doctor Who.

“I’ll be a story in your head. That’s okay – we’re all stories in the end. Just make it a good one, eh? Because it was, you know. It was the best.”

The Memory Cheats

Doctor Who: The Pandorica Opens

Review by Paul Kirkley

Expectation is a slippery biscuit. Because, clearly, this was brilliant. Amazing, in fact. And yet, on first viewing, I couldn’t help but feel a tiny bit short-changed, possibly because of all the tweeting and blogging that had been going on since the BAFTA screening about how it was the greatest thing since, well, the Big Bang. (Or, at least, that’s what Ian Levine said. But then he probably said the same about Take That’s first single. And we can only guess how much the bloke who wrote Attack of the Cybermen must have got off on a continuity porn-fest like this.)

Anyway, I’m not going to do my usual nitpicking about plot holes and lapses in logic because the plotting is so dense I suspect that, on this occasion, it might be a case of, it’s not you, it’s me – i.e. it made sense but I simply failed to understand it. One thread I will risk a tug on, though, cos it’s quite fundamental, is the whole idea of the trap built from Amy’s memories.

So how does that work, exactly? It’s a terrific concept but hard to get a handle on in any real, practical sense. River says the Doctor’s enemies have used Amy’s memories to construct a scenario he will believe, in order to get close to him. But, as Neil has already pointed out, surely the Doctor was delivered to Stonehenge by van Gogh’s painting and River’s graffiti? The only bits from Amy are the Romans – and they’re little more than window dressing who could have been replaced by any old army – Rory, who makes cock all sense anyway, and the Pandorica itself, which the Doctor appears to have known about since his own childhood and which, I’m pretty sure, he’d have come and taken a shufty at whatever it was called. Unless I’m missing the obvious, this actually turned out to be an even more nebulous concept than series one’s much-derided Bad Wolf arc – which at least made a kind of sense, if you sort of squinted and tried not to think too hard about it.

(Incidentally, I bet it was the Daleks’ idea to construct the whole “Amy’s memories” scenario. They seem to have been taking a lot of inspiration from The Anthony Ainley Book of Hopelessly Convoluted Traps lately. You can imagine the scene when they outlined the plan to all the other Big Bads, with much awkward coughing and shuffling of feet from the Cybermen, while the Sontarans insisted it would be a more effective martial strategy to just poke the Doctor on Facebook.)

My other big irritation was with the cliffhanger. Not because it wasn’t brilliant, but because it was teetering right on the verge of Best. Cliffhanger. Ever. until the Doctor ruined it by blabbing too much. The idea that our hero is a more dangerous force than the combined evil of all his enemies is a pretty powerful one, and would have left us with much to chew on over the next seven, agonising days. Instead, the Doctor kind of blew the whole gaff by revealing it wasn’t actually him that was the threat but the TARDIS, and that the Daleks et al had basically not bothered to check their facts about who could pilot it (sloppy, as there’s a whole list of people who have in the new TARDIS Handbook, available at all good galactic bookshops, etc).  I couldn’t help feeling this revelation undermined the moment somewhat: instead of the terrible, unknowable powers of The Oncoming Storm, it was basically reduced to the equivalent of a misunderstanding about who was at the wheel when a vehicle got flashed by a speed camera.

Fatty wouldn’t be the first to have one off the wrist from Captain Jack

There were a couple of other little niggles – I thought the reveal of the vandalised cliff face was a bit chucked away by the director, and the silence falling at the end still feels less like a dramatic flourish and more like Murray Gold’s just mis-timed his cue. Also, though I don’t usually trust anyone who uses the term “fanwank” – it smacks of a lazy reflex response ming-mongs use to try to prove they’re too cool to care about old monsters and stuff – the Evil Alliance did push credibility to breaking point. Then again, if the Lib Dems can hook up with the Tories, I guess anything’s possible.

But enough griping. On the whole, The Pandorica Opens rocked like a stone Dalek (hmmm… interesting idea: someone should write that down).

Some things to note:

The pre-titles sequence was so Alias it hurt. But hurt in a good way.

River’s contact got his vortex manipulator from “a handsome time agent”. Anyone we know? Still, Fatty wouldn’t be the first to have one off the wrist from Captain Jack.

Speaking of which, the Blue Man Group have really let themselves go in the 52nd century, haven’t they?

The Cyberhead: Sweet Jesus, have those metal muthas ever been more terrifying than when skittering across the floor on their own spidery innards? And that was before it opened up and popped a big grinning skull out.

Joke of the week: “You graffitied the oldest cliff-face in the universe.” “You wouldn’t answer your phone.”

It’s been mentioned elsewhere, but look at Matt Smith’s face when he first hears the Daleks. Look at the eyes: that flicker of doubt, of fear, of weariness. Then the mask comes on, and he’s instantly back to his quipping, larky self. (Interestingly, David Tennant pulled off exactly the same trick, in another exchange with River Song, in Forest of the Dead. Maybe Moffat puts this stuff in the stage directions.)

The last time we saw a plastic boyfriend, it was Noel Clarke with a champagne cork stuck in his bonce. This, I believe, is called progress.

And the Comedy Award goes to… Matt Smith and Arthur Darvill, for their beautifully awkward reunion exchange – especially Smith’s “How’ve you been?” and the way Darvill, when prodded, slowly rocked back on his heels, like a Weeble.

Loved the Doctor’s “come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough” speech, especially the taunt about “your silly little spaceships with all your silly little guns”. That'll learn 'em.

The scenes between Rory and Amy: how can something be so simultaneously ridiculous and heartbreaking? Only in Doctor Who... It certainly rescues the Autons from burping bin ignominy; the last time we saw a plastic boyfriend, it was Noel Clarke with a champagne cork stuck in his bonce. This, I believe, is called progress.

Toby Haynes’ direction was impressively cinematic, and not just in the big money shots: River exploring Amy’s darkened house was just as beautiful. (Hard to think this is the same show where directors once had to fight to get a dimmer switch put into TC3.) And the decision to go slo-mo in the climactic moments was spot-on: we’ve had pomp and bombast before – Russell the T loved a bit of that – but has Doctor Who ever been more grandly, more thrillingly operatic than in those climactic shots of our defeated hero being dragged, Christ-like, to his final humiliation? Stunning.

In summary, then: Stephen fry can fuck off.

Flat's entertainment

I absolutely loved this episode.

So here is a picture of a terrible tragedy:

 

And with that image now burned on our retinas, let's move on to happier times with

Doctor Who: The Lodger

Review by Paul Kirkley

Look, I’m not one for scurrilous gossip – much – but all I’m saying is, it must have been one hell of a pre-season writers’ party this year because, somehow, Richard Curtis ended up going home with Gareth Roberts’ celebrity historical, Toby Whithouse got off with Mark Gatiss’s Gothic comedy and Roberts, the dirty bugger, found himself sharing a cab with both Curtis’s romcom and Simon Nye’s flatshare caper. With the result that, while The Lodger may not be the greatest Doctor Who story ever made*, it’s difficult to remember a more thoroughly irresistible 45 minutes of shamelessly showboating entertainment.

Just as a Yeti sitting on a loo in Tooting Bec is scarier than one in the Himalayas, so a Time Lord in a flat in Colchester is more alien than one in the Panopticon on Gallifrey

The real masterstroke here is that, in exploiting the comic potential of the Doctor’s total bewilderment at lives less extraordinary than his own, Roberts has delivered a format-stretching bottle episode that feels new and fresh and different, but which is also fundamentally true to the spirit of Doctor Who. In fact, its alien-among-us premise is thematically not that much of a stretch from the show’s own ground zero, An Unearthly Child – except we never saw William Hartnell in a small bath towel or scoffing biscuits in a call centre. I can't help thinking all that grunty stuff with the cavemen would have been a lot more fun if we had.

So this was the perfect showcase for everything that's special about the Doctor - because, just as a Yeti sitting on a loo in Tooting Bec is scarier than one in the Himalayas, so a Time Lord in a flat in Colchester is more alien than one in the Panopticon on Gallifrey. But, more than that, it was the perfect showcase for this Doctor. Ironically, given its origin as a Tenth Doctor comic  strip, I’m not sure this story would have worked nearly as well with David Tennant; with all that blokeish charm, he’d have fitted in far too convincingly. But Smith’s angular, awkward young fogey is a more obvious outsider, ripe for mining fish-out-of-water comic potential in the spirit of Mork and Mindy, My Favourite Martian, Third Rock From The Sun and A.L.F – with whom, let’s face it,  Smith bares more than a passing resemblance (at the very least, they're using the same barber).

Matt Smith is just adorable here. There's no other word for it.

And boy does our man seize the opportunity with both hands: Matt Smith’s performance is a comic tour de force, from the bit of business with the toothbrush to his hilarious regurgitating wine act, from the Oncoming Storm warning to his bonkers take-over of the call centre ("Hello, Mr Jorgensen? Can you hold, I have to eat a biscuit”), he's just adorable here. There's no other word for it.
 
If it had just been a straight knockabout comedy in the spirit of the unfairly maligned The Unicorn and the Wasp, then, The Lodger would have more than earned its stripes. But the horror element was also surprisingly effective, from the plaintive, disembodied voices luring hapless passers-by through the intercom – for some reason, it reminded me of Rex Harrison taunting Doris Day in Midnight Lace – to the shadowy figures at the top of the stairs. Why are things at the top of the stairs intrinsically more scary than things at the bottom of the stairs? Is it because there’s no escape? Because it’s where we sleep, and are thus most vulnerable? Or because it suggests the malevolent presence has already taken deep root in the most private rooms of our homes? I don’t know, but I do know there’s nothing more sinister than a creepy child looming down at us from the darkness above. In this respect, The Lodger was probably as Sapphire and Steel as nu-Who has got and, as any fule no, Sapphire and Steel remains the gold standard for creepy British fantasy television. (Incidentally, was it just me or did the hologram at the end look suspiciously like Sven Goran Eriksson in an Arthur Fowler cardie?)

For once, the secret of the top of the stairs actually turned out to have a satisfying pay-off. We’re always banging on about how this show successfully mixes the domestic with the fantastic – well here’s the physical manifestation of that: a huge, impossible time machine hidden inside a flat in Colchester. And what a time machine – a beautiful, cathedral-like chamber that I imagine the Eighth Doctor’s TARDIS would have looked a bit like without the set-dressing from an All About Eve video. After so many disappointing reveals over the years – It’s a giant Ood brain! It’s a giant Metal Mickey Cyberman! It’s  really, really rubbish Human Dalek! – it was refreshing not to feel short-changed by the money shot.
 
The manner in which the romcom element was hardwired into the sci-fi resolution was also extremely elegant: love literally saving the world courtesy of some well-seeded gags (and there was me thinking that joke about the sofa was just a cheap shot about Corden's weight). Who needs biological metacrises or Whitepoint stars when the only words necessary are: “For God’s sake, kiss the girl!” Brilliant.
 
I also really like James Corden. There, I’ve said it. Maybe it’s because we’re such hopelessly late Gavin & Stacey adopters in our house (for some reason, I never got beyond the opening episode when it first went out, and have only recently caught up with what I’ve been missing). So, as far as Corden is concerned, I’m mentally still somewhere around early 2007, in the first flush of Smiffy love, before Horne and Corden and Lesbian Vampire Killers. Here, he proves he’s big enough to play the straight man and let Matt Smith get on with the crowed-pleasing stuff (though he still got the biggest laugh of the night in our house with “Sorry, are you going to live with monkeys now?”). As a gesture of solidarity, I should also admit I feel a bit ashamed this week to be related by marriage to that miserable, pompous old bastard Patrick Stewart.

So there you go. I loved it. Some people hated it, but I loved it. But that’s okay because, if we’ve learned anything from misfit flatshare comedies over the years, it’s that the world don't move to the beat of just one drum, what might be right for you, may not be right for some, because it takes, diff'rent strokes to move the world, yes it does, it takes diff'rent strokes to move the world.

And, for what it’s worth, I don’t like cats.

Random observations:
 
I loved the Doctor’s vocal tribute to his only previous shower scene. Though perhaps he should have gone the whole hog and got a naval tattoo as well. Fantastic hair, too: maybe he’s from the same branch of Smiths as Robert?
 
Interesting choice of past Doctor clips during the psychic headbutt. For those not paying attention, the order went: 9, 10, 8, 4, 3, 2, 1. No doubt the conspiracy theories are already mushrooming all over the interweb. Here’s mine: Ten is just a figment of Nine’s imagination and Five, Six and Seven have been wiped out by the crack in time. Maybe this will be the terrible choice the Doctor faces in The Big Bang: restore the timeline and you get The Caves of Androzani back; leave it as it is and Pip and Jane Baker will never have existed. Tempting, isn’t it?

The Doctor dodging the spindles of his non-technological technology gizmo really reminded me of Alan Partridge’s legendary World Cup Soccermeter. As it’s topical, let’s take a moment to enjoy it again here.

Daisy Haggard = Lovely. I think I could even forgive her for her terrible dwarf-baiting in Psychoville.

But Karen Gillan needs to calm down sometimes. Not all the time, but there are occasions when she could take on Tom Baker and David Tennant in a boggling contest and win hands down.

Next time on Doctor Who: Am I the only one who thinks The Pandorica Opens looks a bit, you know, meh? Still, I’m sure the Mighty Moff won’t let me down. And at least those big stupid multi-coloured Daleks aren't in it, right?

*The Lodger may not the be the greatest but, as I'm feeling bullish, here are 10 much-admired stories it is better than: Tomb of the Cybermen, The Daemons, Carnival of Monsters, Genesis of the Daleks, The Deadly Assassin, Earthshock, The Christmas Invasion, Gridlock, Utopia and The Waters of Mars.

Onwards and Downwards

Doctor Who: the Hungry Earth

Review by Paul Kirkley

Steven Moffat was nine in 1970. From his infamous appearance as a precocious, freckled-faced stripling laying into Pip and Jane Baker on daytime telly in the late 80s, I’d put Chris Chibnall at about a decade younger, and thus serving his Who apprenticeship at exactly the time the Third Doctor’s era was at its most fashionable (i.e. just before it started appearing on video, and we could actually watch it).

For those who were really paying attention, there was the odd tip of the hat to Doctor Who and the Silurians in there, too

The Hungry Earth, then, is the current production team’s love letter to the vision of Barry Letts, Terry Dicks, Derek Sherwin and John Devon Roland Pertwee, adoringly riffing on everything from Inferno (big drilling project) to The Daemons (remote community cut off by force field) and The Green Death (Welsh mining village). Oh, and for those who were really paying attention, there was the odd tip of the hat to Doctor Who and the Silurians in there, too.

Okay, so it virtually  was Doctor Who and the Silurians. And that’s a significant departure for 21st Century Doctor Who: Steven Moffat has explicitly acknowledged the timeless brilliance of Malcolm Hulke’s basic premise, and the result is the first nu-Who story that feels less like a re-invention and more like a re-make for a new generation of viewers.  Which is fair enough, but it does leave us old-timers frequently asking “Yeah, and?”. For anyone even on nodding terms with the original, none of the mysteries presented here are very mysterious at all: Why are people being dragged underground? That’ll be the Silurians, then. Why are there so many empty graves? Yep, Silurians again.

I’m assuming we’ll get an explanation of why Alaya started out wearing a B.E.M. mask, unless she just got it free with Doctor Who Adventures

Not that you’d necessarily recognise them, as they’re the latest deign classic to have undergone a radical makeover. Sydney Newman would no doubt approve: the Silurians are no longer bug eyed monsters; now they’re just, erm, eyed monsters. (I’m assuming we’ll get an explanation of why Alaya started out wearing a B.E.M. mask, unless she just got it free with Doctor Who Adventures.)

I really enjoyed the first 20 minutes or so of this. How lovely to see rolling valleys and country churchyards in Doctor Who again . Some people complained that RTD and co didn’t make Wales look enough like alien planets; I don’t think they made it look enough like Wales. But here it was in all its lush, bucolic, picture postcard glory. The idea of focusing on an ordinary family was also a nice one, especially in the economically written pre-titles teaser, which managed to make us care about Mo in the very short time before he met his grisly fate. It does raise the question, though, of why the world’s most ambitious drilling operation is being project managed by a group of people who look like they should be running the village post office instead. It’s as if a couple of EastEnders families have clubbed together to roll back the frontiers of subterranean exploration (“Ere, mind me drill for minute, will ya?”).

That’s not a story, it’s a see-saw

For me, things started to fall apart when the main plot kicked in. Or, rather, when I realised it wasn’t really going to. Back in 2005, Russell T Davies warned that, in the new era of 45-minute stories, a single billing was in danger of giving away the entire plot. That’s never been more true than here: We knew it was about humans drilling down into the Earth while something else… okay, while the Silurians were drilling upwards and… yep, that was pretty much what it amounted to. That’s not a story, it’s a see-saw.

And so it was that the main set-piece of the episode involved waiting for three mysterious blips (oh no, hang on a minute, isn’t this the story with the Silurians in? That’s probably what they’ll be) to reach the surface, while our heroes rushed about rigging an A-Team-style lash-up that would allow the Doctor to watch it all on telly and then zap the enemy with his Time Lord version of the Red Button.

(Incidentally, this series has a very odd concept of time. Not the time-wimey stuff, but actual time, which tends to shrink or contract according to the needs of the plot. In Victory of the Daleks, Professor Pinocchio takes space-faring Spitfires from the design concept to physical launch stage in the time it takes the Doctor to eat a jammie dodger. In Flesh and Stone, Amy risks opening her eyes for “less than a second”, during which she finds time for a leisurely conversation. And here, Team Doctor gather all the camera equipment in the village and rig up a CCTV system in a minute-and-a-half. God help Steve Moffat if he ever goes on Countdown.)

Drag me to Heck

Random narks:

• What did Alaya do to Elliot? And, even if her unfeasibly long Gene Simmons tongue was conveniently on 24-hour re-charge, why didn’t she do the same to the Doctor? Or just Do One from that particularly un-secure looking crypt with the big window, for that matter?

• How come it took Ambrose such an eternity to realise her son was missing? Did she not think to check for him at any earlier point as she huddled in an isolated church under attack from rampaging creatures?

• That “Star Trek lurch” acting as the TARDIS was pulled underground. Very lame.

• The way Matt Smith – otherwise a God, obviously – said “So don’t insult me”. Not sure why – just suddenly sounded less like a 900-year-old Time Lord and more like he was admonishing his fag at Norhtampton School For Posh Boys.

Random cool stuff:

• Alaya’s graveyard pursuit of Elliot – especially the bit where he tried to get through the door. So close to sanctuary, but so far. Chilling.

• The Doctor’s heat sensor Ray-Bans. Those Doctor Who Adventures free gifts just keep on coming.

• Poor old Amy being dragged to Hell. Okay, maybe not Hell – but Heck at least. Someone’s really got it in for that girl, haven’t they?

Malcolm Hulke, Colin Thor and Alan Punisher.

Of course, we didn’t really need to watch this to know that Chris Chibnall is no Malcolm Hulke. (Have you ever stopped to think what a brilliant name Malcolm Hulke is? Like Colin Thor, or Alan Punisher.) Fortunately, though, Matt Smith is no Jon Pertwee (on the contrary, he’s still a Troughton man through and through – check out that bandy-legged run at 28:22 for further proof) and I’d take the prospect of Eleven exploring an underground city with Meera Syal over Three rubbing his neck and arguing with the man from the ministry any day. (By the way, if next week’s plot resolution to doesn’t involve the dyslexic kid managing to read something vital at some point, I’ll eat my copy of Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters.)

So the script and story may have been below par, but there were enough button-punchingly traditional Doctor Who trappings – it looks like the sort of cosily familiar Who we haven’t seen much of in recent years – to make it curiously charming, despite itself.

Humans – we’re so nostalgic.

Spoilt For Choice

Doctor Who: Amy's Choice

Review by Paul Kirkley

We Doctor Who fans come pre-programmed with a litany of stock words and phrases so ingrained in our bones we sometimes forget that ordinary people don’t also pepper their sentences with terms like cosmic hobo, Edwardian roadster and pseudo-historical. I mean, what the hell is a roundel anyway?

And so it was that, when anyone dared to take the piss by invoking wobbly sets and squeezy bottle special effects, we would draw ourselves up to our full height and declaim, with an air of smug self-satisfaction: “Ah yes, but the lack of budget actually works to the show’s advantage, because it means the writing has to be better.”

Chaplinesque

Which was true – up to a point. Of the class of ’77, I’d take The Talons of Weng Chiang over Star Wars any day and, fast forwarding a few years, even Tom Baker dressed as a giant cactus offered more food for thought than the empty pyrotechnics of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century Disco. But, as I mentioned last week, if money really is too tight to mention, as in the hyper-inflationary Williams era (name of producer+era: there’s another classic fan idiom for you), you actually end up undermining whatever qualities the script had to start with. And, let’s face it, the quality writing argument was never really going to fly in the days of Terror of the Vervoids and Silver Nemesis anyway.

Ironically, though, it’s only now that Doctor Who has the budget (or, at least, the technology has become sufficiently affordable) to bust a few blocks of its own, that we start to see how right we were all along. And as evidence I give you Amy’s Choice – a bottle episode clearly made with whatever loose change was found down the back of the Upper Boat sofas after they'd spent all the cash on the season finale, but which, at the midway point, is seriously challenging those Weeping Angels for the best story of the season so far.

Reckless innocence

Seriously, compare how much money they must have spent on this compared to, say, Voyage of the Damned of Journey’s End. And now consider their relative entertainment values. Maybe I’m just too old and curmudgeonly and out of step with today’s breed of young Who fans, many of whom, I’m willing to bet, will have found this something of a patience-testing irritation, but this is the Doctor Who I have always loved: quirky, funny, mysterious, inventive and, above all, character-led. Starship Titanic plummets towards Earth? Booooring. Daleks versus Cybermen at Canary Wharf? Meh. Doctor bashes old lady off a roof with a lampshade? Now you’re talking.

Random violence perpetrated by and against old people was just one of the highlights of this little gem (I loved Amy’s gleefully enthusiastic “Whack ’er!” while Rory was hesitating to beat a granny about the brains with a chunk of wood). Of course, there’s nothing funny about granny-bashing, but… okay, there is something quite funny about granny-bashing in the right context, the context being when they’re not actual grannies but homicidal aliens with eyes where their dentures should be.

Infinitely flexible format

As a comedy zombie romp, I actually found this a lot funnier than the oddly overrated Shaun of the Dead. As we might have expected from Simon Nye, this had a relentless gag rate to match The Moff himself. I won’t waste your time reeling off the many, many killer lines – you might as well just check out the quotes thread on Gallifrey Base; suffice to say if anyone in old-skool Who had come out with a gem like “If we’re going to die, let’s die looking like a Peruvian folk band” I’d have choked on my Space Raiders.

If all if this had just amounted to a bit of knockabout fun – a sort of Old Men Behaving Badly - it would have been more than entertaining enough. In the event, though, the comedy turned out to have a bit of a razor-blade inside it, with the sly reveal that all that bile and hatred flung at the Doctor, all those tawdry quirks and forgotten friends, was a product of the man himself. This rare insight into the doubt and jealousy and self-loathing (“Nobody else in the universe hates me as much as you do” – blimey) in the hearts of the Time Lord was all the better for being done with such a light touch; it was certainly a lot more subtle than all that “Time Lord Victorious” bollocks. It also means we effectively get two episodes for the price of one: like The Sixth Sense, Amy’s Choice proves to be a very different animal when viewed second time around.

The other ace up the sleeve was Toby Jones as the Doctor's puckish Zelig of a nemesis. By turns playful, sinister and waspish, The Dream Lord proved to be one of the most memorable villains in years, with Jones even threatening to upstage Matt Smith, and there was nothing shabby about his performance, for sure.

Windjammer captain

Niggles? I have to admit I didn’t pick up on Amy’s rather casual sacrifice of her unborn child until I read the various comments on this forum, and it’s a point well made. But the show’s famous mix of the (idiom alert) fantastic and the domestic is always going to make it a hostage to fortune to this sort of thing. (The worst example I can recall is in Rose, when our eponymous heroine runs across Westminster Bridge grinning her head off at the sheer excitement of it all – ‘exhilarated’ is the word Russell uses in his script – literally minutes after she’s learned her boyfriend has been murdered.)

Catherine Morshead’s direction also seemed a bit lifeless in places, with some pedestrian camera choices and a lack of urgency in the action scenes, though neither can have been helped by the clearly atrocious weather. She directed her cast well, though and, let’s face it, it’s hard to do too much damage with a script as lovingly polished as this.

So here we are, past the half-way mark and, on my score card at least, there's only one duff dayglo Dalek debacle spoiling the boy Moffat and the lad Smith’s clean sheet. That’s a healthier ratio than at the same point in any of the previous four series (bolstered by the only early season two-parter so far not to stink the place out) and, if the past trend for changing up a gear in the race to the finish continues, we might need to rip up the fan phrasebook and find a whole new set of cliches worthy of a new golden age.

City of Death in Venice

Doctor Who: Vampires of Venice

Review by Paul Kirkley

A refugee alien disguised as a human cooks up an elaborate plan to avert the destruction of its race while hiding out in a romantic European capital. The Doctor makes himself comfy in a fancy chair and engages in some sparky banter with a haughty bit of aristo-crumpet. There are many – oh, so many – good jokes, and the whole thing is eventually resolved in a matter of seconds.

Sound familiar? What I’m saying, and not very subtly, is that if you didn’t like Vampires of Venice, then you can’t like its 70s spiritual antecedent either. And anyone who doesn’t like – no, anyone who doesn’t love - City of Death is hereby ordered to report to the Behind The Sofa admin office to hand in their psychic papers/library card. And once you’ve done that, you’re free to go and spend the rest of your life looking for satisfyingly grim Nazi parables in Genesis of the Daleks (where a war of attrition lasts a thousand years, but feels like so much longer).

Presumably, if some Who fans had been script editor for Blackadder or Porridge, they’d have sent back a note saying “the gags are great, but there are too many of them"

I’ve never understood people who don’t like it when Doctor Who – gag for gag the wittiest fantasy franchise ever - does funny. It reminds me of that anecdote about the dour Yorkshireman who sat through an acclaimed comedy show and, when was asked for his opinion, declared: "I suppose it were alright for them as likes laughin’”.

As I mentioned last week, some Who fans have a curious habit of measuring comedy in terms of quantity rather than quality. (Presumably if they’d been script editor for Blackadder or Porridge, they’d have sent back a note saying “the gags are great, but there are too many of them”.) In Vampires of Venice, the jokes come thick, fast and, most importantly, funny. Crucially, many of them are also uniquely Doctor Who, exploiting the show’s patented fantastic/domestic USP to bring us a 16th Century Venetian gondolier in a stag-do t-shirt, or deploying words like ‘Ofsted’ to kick the legs from an otherwise wholly convincing bit of Hammer glamour lusty vamp action.

This verisimilitude is important: The comic anachronisms (“So, basically, our mum and dad are dead from getting the plague… Cheers”) only work because the production around them is so handsome, so sumptuously cinematic, so credibly Venetian - paddling pools, cardboard gondolas and all. When the sets, costumes and acting also felt like part of the joke – as in those hyper-inflationary knockabouts of the late 70s – it’s no wonder we started pining for the Gothic chills of the Holmes and Hinchcliffe years. But when witty, vibrant, cheeky scripts get the production values they deserve – as they did in City of Death, or The Talons of Weng Chiang, or Tooth and Claw – that’s when Doctor Who feels properly, treasurably unique.

I’ve seen quite a few comments on Gallifrey Base this week describing Vampires of Venice as a “run of the mill” romp. Oh how quickly a privilege becomes a right. Seriously, if we’d been presented with this five, 15 or even 25 years ago, would we really have responded with a collective shrug and tried to work out whether it should sit above or below Four to Doomsday in the end-of-season polls? True, it may not be an epoch-making, game-changer of an episode, but if that makes it run of the mill, then it’s one hell of a mill they’re running in Cardiff these days, churning out the sort of organic stoneground wholemeal Who we’d have killed for in the days when even the magisterial City of Death was acting as the fancy French filling between two slices of value-brand white loaf.

Like its Parisian forebear, Vampires of Venice wasn’t perfect. In fact, the two share some common faults, including credibility-stretching human disguises for the alien Big Bads and a plot resolved by a simple punch to the head/flick of a switch (though the former was done infinitely more stylishly, as a deliberate gag set up and seeded throughout the story, whereas the latter was literally just switched off at the end).

There were the usual messy plot holes, too: Did I miss the explanation of why simply disguising yourself as a vampire makes you susceptible to sunlight? That’s like a Playboy bunny getting myxomatosis. What happened to that tidal wave that was on the way? How do you transform one species to another through a blood transfusion? (The true purpose of the Signorra’s little academy certainly brought a new meaning to the term school of fish, and its best not to think about the mating ritual of five females thrown to the mercy of thousands of horny fellas - though they certainly won’t be the last Italians forced to sleep with the fishes.)

Did this entire episode revolve around the fact that, like their Earthly, tank-bound cousins, the Fish from Space just wanted some nice underwater ruins to swim around in?

More fundamentally, why go to all the trouble of sinking an entire city on a planet that’s 70% covered in water already? Or did this whole episode revolve around the fact that, like their Earthly, tank-bound cousins, the Fish from Space just wanted some nice underwater ruins to swim around in?. (And if someone wouldn’t mind dropping a few pellets of fish-food into the ocean every couple of days, that would be lovely, thanks.)

The death of Isabella added a note of genuine horror and poignancy to what everyone has already officially declared A Romp, though I felt they bottled out by not showing Guido’s reaction (the first time we saw him after the tragedy, he was calmly sitting round the table indulging his visitors’ wisecracks – though, as it turned out, he was literally sitting on a powder-keg of broken-hearted resentment). But, by way of compensation, we did get the Doctor’s thrilling, semi-flirtatious confrontation with Rosanna, deliciously played by Matt Smith and the excellent Helen McCrory, and ending with our hero promising to “tear down the house of Calvierri stone by stone” (exhilarating stuff, even if, in the end, he managed to do it with a small brass light switch instead).

Despite moving with the natural grace of a camel on rollerskates, Matt Smith once again managed not to put a foot wrong, though this week he faced serious competition from Arthur Darville’s deeply loveable Rory (think Mickey Smith but written and played as a genuinely funny, likeable character, as opposed to the words Long-Suffering Boyfriend stuffed into an anorak). Together, the two of them gave us what must amount to the show’s best pre-title sequence ever ("Lovely girl. Diabetic"). Seriously, no-one does popping-out-of-cake acting like Matt Smith: look at his big daft face as he emerges, or the way he tries to shake off the loose bit of paper. It’s adorable.

In fact, the only major way in which Vampires of Venice didn’t measure up to City of Death was in the ratings. But that’s what you get for showing your biggest show at six o’clock in the middle of summer. City of Death, by contrast, didn’t even have any opposition to go up against it: as the second story to be shown after a Labour government was unseated by the Tories, it was an unexpected beneficiary of nationwide industrial unrest. So here’s hoping for 16 million on Saturday.

Angel Eyes

Doctor Who: Flesh and Stone

Review by Paul Kirkley

Stephen Moffat has spoken of his vision for Doctor Who being inspired by “fairytales before Disney de-fanged them”. Flesh and Stone is a fairytale with fangs, alright, and never more so than when young Amelia Pond – who’s wearing a red hood, just in case we missed the allusion – is left lost and alone in the middle of an enchanted forest. (In fact, the only thing that could have sustained the tone more was if Amy had been confronted with series one’s story arc instead of series five’s.)

Everything about the sequences filmed at Puzzlewood (even the location manager’s sticking to the fairytale brief) was magical, from the moment Amy lays down on the log (see – or rather feel - how Adam Smith draws the viewer into her sense of frightened disorientation) to her heart-stopping blind journey through the (oh sweet Lord, moving) Angels. And has the guiding hand of a writer with Doctor Who in his very DNA ever been more apparent than when the Doctor brusquely tells Amy she’s dying (“Yes you’re right – if we tell her everything’s alright she’ll get all better”). No-one who isn’t a fan and doesn’t have the ability to mentally replay entire scenes from Pyramids of Mars would ever have written something so fundamentally, so thrillingly true to the history of the character.

You can’t help but note the irony at the Doctor’s righteous anger over the Angels putting Amy through hell “for fun”; if you think they're bad, you should see the kicks the writer is getting.

If one thing keeps Flesh and Stone simmering just under all-time, top five classic status, it’s the feeling that it’s less than the sum of its parts: a sequence of ruthlessly, even sadistically, well-engineered scares strung together like the world’s most brilliant ghost train, but which don’t entirely hang together as a story; in fact the story it starts out telling is pretty much abandoned when another, bigger bit of breaking news emerges (“Well, we’ll have to leave the Angels there because we’ve got some details just emerging about that crack in Amelia Pond’s wall. Our correspondent Doctor Who is there: Doctor, what can you tell us?”).

At least, that’s the way the script treats it - though, for the viewer, those blank-eyed bringers of death still seem a much more terrifying and exciting prospect than some heard-it-all-before flannel about “time running out”. After all, how often have you had nightmares where you find yourself running away from a metaphysical space-time event? Show me a statue with fangs, on the other hand…

Throughout, it’s hard to escape the impression of Moffat coming up with the scares first and then working backwards to see how he can fit them into the story (“Why would the Doctor suddenly plunge an entire corridor full of advancing Angels into pitch blackness? Oh, I know! He needs to divert the power to the door!”). Poor old Amy suffers particularly badly from this tickbox terror approach: watching her subjected to various forms of torture across these 90 minutes feels a bit like watching a pre-watershed version of Saw. (“Let’s see, we’ll have her all alone in the middle of a forest full of Angels where the one thing you can’t do is blink… Nah, too easy, let’s also say she can’t open her eyes…” I’m surprised he didn’t tie her shoelaces together while he was at it.)  Nothing wrong with any of that, of course, though you can’t help but note the irony at the Doctor’s righteous anger over the Angels putting her through hell “for fun”; if you think they're bad, you should see the kicks the writer is getting.

Weeping Angels encouraging you to keep your eyes open feels a bit like the Daleks joining a rainbow alliance or The Ice Warriors installing central heating.

By the end of Flesh and Stone, I have to admit I was a bit confused by the whole blinking/not blinking thing. Previously on Doctor Who, we were told the Angels are powerless if you look at them. Now we’re told they want you to look at them. Is this just a difference between Sally’s “scavengers” and Amy’s Avenging Angels? Have they evolved a way to turn a weakness into a strength? Or is the Moff just busking it? Either way, it seems a shame to have muddied such an elegantly simple premise – Weeping Angels encouraging you to keep your eyes open feels a bit like the Daleks joining a rainbow alliance or the Ice Warriors installing central heating. (Though the sight of the statues actually turning their heads was a genuinely thrilling, Dalek-up-the-stairs moment).

Phew, that’s a lot of time and energy expelled on explaining why this story wasn’t perfect. Here, then, are quite a few more reasons why it nearly was:

The jokes. I’ve never understood those weirdos who complain about “too much humour” (like it’s sugar or salt) in Doctor Who. It’s not about quantity, it’s about quality, and whereas until recently “Allons-y Alonso” was considered a gag, now we get: “What if the gravity fails?” “I’ve thought about that.” “And?” “And we’d all plunge to our deaths. See, I thought about it.” Or: “Nobody panic! Just me, then.” Or: “Made him say comfy chairs.” Or: “You’d slow us down.” “Don’t want to sound selfish but you’d really speed me up.”

Amy in the forest surrounded by the Angels, with the light streaming through the trees at the top of the frame, was possibly the most beautiful example of the mise en scene (us reviewers love saying mise en scene – it’s probably our favourite cultural theory term after dues ex machina – and yes, this had one of those as well) ever seen in Doctor Who, run a very close second by the shot of The Doctor and Amy looking out to sea at the end.

Iain Glen’s voice – like a cross between Swiss Toni and Patrick Ryecart in Mindwarp. Fruity doesn’t cover it. Get that man an audiobook now.

Iain Glen’s death scene. “Never mind the Angels – there’s worse here than Angels.” “I beg to differ.” “I wish I’d know you better.” “I think, sir, you knew me at my best.”

River Song warming up to be a genuine mystery. She killed a man! A good man! A hero to many! What can it all mean, readers?

Service hatch – it’s a ventilation shaft by another name! And, yes, an actual, genuine wobbly set (when the Doctor’s trying to open the entrance to the forest). And people say this show has betrayed its roots.

A forest on a spaceship – just like Nightmare of Eden, only not really, really boring.

Amy taking the Doctor to her bedroom to get a second look at her crack was Who’s horniest scene since Nicola Bryant slipped into something less practical in Planet of Fire 26 years ago

Oh, and then there’s the sex scene. Or the nearly sex scene. Do I file that under the good bits or the not so good bits? I genuinely don’t know. Cos, you see, I like a bit of romance and snogging and the hint of sex in Doctor Who. It’s another aspect of its increased emotional maturity these days. A universe without sex – which, lest we forget, sits on the first level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, alongside breathing, food and water – is a bit like a universe without shoes, or sitting down: it’s just silly. And, on a very basic level as a heterosexual male, I’d say Amy taking the Doctor to her bedroom to get a second look at her crack was Who’s horniest scene since Nicola Bryant slipped into something less practical in Planet of Fire 26 years ago.

But I do feel the Smoochy Smoochy Stuff needs to be embedded… sorry, I’ll rephrase that, needs to be seeded in… hang on, that’s worse… What I’m saying is it needs to be logical and consistent. (I adore The Girl in the Fireplace but I’ve never understood why it was plonked in the middle of the Doctor-Rose (deniers look away now) love story arc; it was almost as if doing A Love Story was such a novelty in itself it was enough just to have it there and not worry about the context.)

And while it’s certainly true that increased sexual desire is a common response to great trauma, it still stretches credibility that Amy should treat this mysterious, brilliant, sexy man she has spent her whole life dreaming of, even to the extent of making little Doctor-Amy dolls, as a no-strings casual shag. Which probably puts me in something of a ming-mong minority as I’m actively hoping this won’t be The End of the Matter – especially if the only reason not to have Amy fall for the Doctor is because Rose and Martha already did.

And besides, who wouldn’t fall for this Doctor? In fact, who wouldn’t fall for either of them? I said it last week but it bears repeating: This was the first story Matt Smith and Karen Gillan filmed, and they don’t put a foot wrong between them. For evidence, look no further than the scene where the Doctor (complete with jacket – continuity goof or a timey-wimey taste of things to come? Discuss) presses his wise old head against hers and promises her he’ll come back for her. Even with his track record of vanishing acts, she believes him, and so do we, because he’s a hero you can believe in; a very good man - the best man we’ve ever known.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I have something in my eye.

Angel Delight

FROM: Stephen Moffat, Executive Producer, Doctor Who
TO: Head of Scheduling, BBC Television

Re: WTF?

As I’m sure you were fully aware when you decided to pull today’s shitty little stunt, I’m stuck at LAX waiting for the first flight back to London that doesn’t pass through the middle of an exploding vol-fucking-cano, so I’ll keep this brief:

Basically, there's one thing you never put in a trail, if you're clever, if you're smart, if you value your continuing existence at the BBC, if you want to live to work another shift, there is one thing you never, ever put in a trail: Norton.

I trust I’ve made myself clear. SM.

Doctor Who: The Time of Angels

Review by Paul Kirkley

As Doctor Who is now shown in the middle of the afternoon in British Summer Time, I’m one of the millions who can’t watch the BBC’s flagship family drama because, being a family man, I’m busy doing stuff. With the family. (Honestly, they might as well put it on at midnight for all the sense it makes. Unless the BBC’s idea of “family viewing” these days involves mum, dad and the kids all crowding round an iPhone at Chessington World of Adventures).

Anyway, this week I went one better by totally bollixing up my attempt to record it (I think it’s a law that, as soon as you become a parent, you lose the ability to work the video). But that’s okay, I thought, I’ll watch it on the iPlayer, and I can record it on BBC3 tomorrow night. Except, being the ming-mong that I am, I couldn’t help but feel a fannish twinge of regret about the fact my copy would now be despoiled by that hideous BBC Three logo in the corner. Little did I know the shitstorm that was already kicking off among viewers who’d watched it on BBC One...

The BBC – never happier than when apologising for some trivial misdemeanor – spent the next few days dressed in sackcloth and ashes, rending its hair-shirt and generally mea culpa-ing to anyone who’d listen. Which some people – Iain Hepburn, formerly of this parish, among them – found a bit embarrassing. But you can’t really blame people for being annoyed by the year’s second most irritating Avatar: Aside from the fact this sort of DOGing makes the nation’s premier channel look like a cheap digital backwater – they’ll be re-branding it BeebOne next – the timing couldn’t have been worse, coming as it did at the climactic moment of – yes, let’s say it out loud – one of the greatest episodes of Doctor Who ever broadcast.

If they’d smeared Norton all over Victory of the Daleks, no-one would have cared – in fact it would have been a welcome distraction. (“Dear BBC, there I was enjoying a perfectly good Over The Rainbow trail when someone went and stuck a ridiculous scene with a Scottish robot underneath it. It totally took me out of the moment.) But here? Pah.

It was also, lest we forget, plastered over the first cliffhanger of the Moffat/Smith era - and a doozy to boot. It’s odd how, despite clocking up 46 years as the most quotable man on television, the Doctor has actually had relatively few big, grandstanding speeches to get his space teeth into. This one had obvious echoes of the Ninth Doctor’s defiant declamation at the end of Bad Wolf, but was much better because it didn’t contain the line “I’m gonna wipe every last stinking Dalek out of the sky!” (which always sounds like it should be said in an Brooklyn - as opposed to Salford - accent, preferably preceded by “Why I oughta…”) and because it didn’t finish by quoting Davina McCall.

Personally, I couldn’t really see the logic of showing us what the Doctor was firing the gun at in that final shot - all it achieved was to hint at how the cliffhanger will be resolved – but, that aside, it was the perfect end to the perfect 45 minutes of television.

Just look at how much Moffat packs into the Bond-riffing pre-credits sequence: From a curiously well-cast Mike Skinner dreaming in a field (and did you spot the irony of River’s hallucinogenic lippy conjuring up exactly the sort of VR world she’s destined to live out her days in?) to some delicious timey-wimey instant messaging (and it bears repeating how under-used the concept of time travel has been for a show about a time traveler) and that hilarious jump-cut to the Doctor and Amy legging it out of the museum with their stolen booty, it was ridiculously entertaining stuff.

According to Moffat, the sparkling Hepburn/Tracy routine after the titles was a last-minute rewrite job, thus joining the noble ranks of classic Doctor Who scenes – and some entire stories – hastily scribbled on fag packets and napkins in canteens and the backs of cars. And if it was impossible to see the join there, who would ever believe that those scenes on the beach were the first Matt and Karen ever filmed, even as the tide moved in on one side and the paparazzi closed in on the other? Have any other Doctor-companion combo ever nailed it so instinctively from – quite literally - day one?

In trademark Moff fashion, the playful, sitcom-tooled exchanges about River’s identity – “Are you all Mr Grumpy face today?” – segued via an effortless key change into full-on horror territory in the Ring-inspired sequence of Amy trapped with the video Angel. Our man is clearly having great fun moving through his checklist of primal fears: Having terrified children with monsters under the bed, creeping shadows and cracks in the wall, here he pulls out the ultimate Doctor Who scare: the monster that comes out of your TV. It’s such a simple, obvious thing to do – and yet no-one else in half a century has thought to do it (and no, Maureen Lipman camping it up on a Bakelite set doesn’t count).

The Time of Angels is one of those moments in Doctor Who when everyone – Matt Smith, Adam Smith, wordsmith – pulls together to remind us why, though our patience may frequently be tested by burping bins, farting Slitheens, Pinocchio androids and, yes, Graham sodding Norton, when this show is firing on all cylinders, it really is TV heaven, with wings on.

Toy Story

Doctor Who: Victory of the Daleks

Review by Paul Kirkley

If Private Eye is correct - and I’ve been brought up to believe it usually is – BBC Worldwide, having saturated the Dalek market by flogging £15 million worth of the buggers over the last five years, recently demanded a re-pimp of the tinpot terrors as a condition for ponying up some cash for the new series.

This, on the surface, is A Worrying Thing, in so much as it suggests much cart/horse, tail/dog confusion. But before we – and when I say we, I mean the Daily Mail – start to get too exercised about sacrificing the artistic integrity of The Show in favour of selling more stuff to kids who already have too much stuff anyway, let’s be realistic. Like every other BBC drama, this year Doctor Who's budget took a hit (at the very same time the suits in marketing blew a million on that 3D trailer everyone hated), and the production team weren’t exactly in a position to look a gift horse (is this enough animal analogies for you?) in the mouth. At the end of the day, it’s all about finding ways of producing a show that’s already proved its integrity – its heart, its soul and its place at the centre of British family life – a hundred times over. So even if this story is true, comparisons to cynical marketing exercises like Transformers – where the Happy Meal comes before the script – are a bit disingenuous, to say the least. (Which is probably why no-one’s made them. Until I did just now. I’ll shut up.)

This is the first script apparently adapted from a 12-year-old boy mucking about in his bedroom with a bunch of Character Options figures

So that’s all fine. If Moffat and co had run their plans by me – and, frankly, I’m a bit offended they didn’t – I’d have said yep, what the hell, go for it. Take the money and run. What I wasn’t expecting, though, is that the entire episode would play like an extended toy advert – you know, like those ones you used to see on morning telly during the school holidays, where two kids would demonstrate the powers of He-Man or Zoids against an impressively big budget backdrop that made your bedroom carpet look a bit rubbish.

Because that’s exactly how Victory of the Daleks felt. In recent years, we’ve had Who stories based on novels, audio plays, a short story and (coming up) a comic strip. But this is the first one apparently adapted from a 12-year-old boy mucking about in his bedroom with a bunch of Character Options figures.

Look at the evidence: The story, if you can call it that, is basically just a series of confrontations in which the Doctor and the Daleks shout perfunctory plot points and empty threats (“I won’t let you get away!”) at each other. There's even a bit where the Doctor physically attacks a Dalek (imagine our bedroom dramatist enthusiastically smashing his figures together at this point), not to mention some good old-fashioned aeroplane action (runs around the room, arms outstretched, going “eeeeooooowwwwww”). And that was about as much as there was to it. You know how fans sometimes recreate scenes from the series with toys and post the results on YouTube? This felt like someone had done it the other way round.

The most hopelessly convoluted trap imaginable - a way of getting the Doctor’s attention that even Anthony Ainley’s Master would have written it off as a bit of a faff

It wasn’t the worst nu-Who story by a long way. It didn’t make me want to dig my way through the carpet in hot shame like, say, New Earth. But it was definitely the flimsiest episode we’ve seen since ’05 in the sense that the story wasn’t so much bad as barely there at all. Give it even a gentle poke and it collapses like a Heston Blumenthal helium soufflé. A hollow Victory, if you will.

For example, it wouldn’t have been so bad if the whole Churchill / World War 2 setting could have been written off merely as superfluous window dressing – plenty of Who scenarios have been guilty of that. Instead, the entire thing was doomed to exist as part of the most pointless plot device / hopelessly convoluted trap imaginable - a way of getting the Doctor’s attention that even Anthony Ainley’s Master would have written it off as a bit of a faff. Surely "the greatest Briton" deserved better than this for his Who debut?

Speaking of Anthony Ainley, this story also featured another unwelcome 80s throwback, in the form of continuity references that only makes sense to the diehard faithful. In fact, the biggie here – a casually dropped-in but really quite crucial bit of exposition about the Daleks’ DNA not being pure – probably only made sense to Andrew Pixley, cos I spend more time thinking about Doctor Who than is healthy in a 38-year-old man and I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. Was it a reference to the “stink of humanity” thing in The Parting of the Ways? Or was it some bit of guff I missed among the sea of guff that was Journey’s End? They might have been talking about a deleted scene from The Sensorites for all the sense it made to me.

Got room for more? The pacing was all over the place. With five minutes to go, I was still waiting for the dramatic final face-off, until I realised we’d already seen it, in the heart-stoppingly dramatic form of the Daleks switching some lights on. Oh, and a Spitfires-in-space dogfight that might have been exhilirating if they’d made even a token attempt at verisimilitude. (As it was, they went from the theoretical concept of hyperspace travel / gravity bubbles / blah blah blah to a manned flight in under five minutes. And wasn’t that ship on the other side of the moon? I’m no astronomer but even I know that’s, like, really far away.) Even the Doctor seemed embarrassed by the lack of a decent climax: “So this is your big plan, is it?” he asked, as his mortal enemies announced their diabolical scheme to, er, bugger off and leave everyone alone.

The Doctor and Amy could make a killing (or, indeed, a bomb) on the self-help publishing market: Be Your Own Man: How To Defuse The Ticking Time Bomb In You

Okay, so they actually buggered off and left everyone with a bomb. But that was such a bury-through-the-carpet moment I’ve tried to put it out of my mind. Especially the “defuse a bomb by showing it its humanity” bobbins, which has to be the single dumbest thing on TV since… well, since the Spitfires in space a few minutes earlier. Talk about the power of positive thinking: The Doctor and Amy could make a killing (or, indeed, a bomb) on the self-help publishing market: Be Your Own Man: How To Defuse The Ticking Time Bomb In You. A vaguely similar scene with Sally the Cyberman worked quite well a few years back, but this hackneyed Tin Man routine had the unwelcome stench of Star Trek about it (and that can be very difficult to get out of your clothes).

I’m sorry to say it, but even Matt Smith seemed a bit lost in this one. He’s such a quirky, professorial type of Doctor, he doesn’t suit the running about, frantic action stuff nearly so well as Tennant did. It was also the first time that, for me, his age seemed an issue - but that’s not his fault so much as the script’s, which required him to spend most of the episode shouting petulant Kevin and Perry-style “I hate you!”s at the enemy. But what can you expect when even an actor of Bill Paterson’s experience is clearly struggling with the material? When he wasn’t invoking the spirit of Private Frazer (“They. Made. Me? I'm doomed I tell you. Doomed. ") he was floundering over Mark Gatiss’ failed attempt at some RTD-style thumbnail sketch background colour (“The last war, the squalor and the mud.” Pauses, realises there’s more. “And the awful, awful misery of it all.”) And if the scene where Bacewell confronted the Daleks and got his hand blown off seemed stilted, you try emoting while someone's yelling at you to hold your arms out like… like a 12-year-old kid running about playing Spitfires in his bedroom.

Which I think is where we came in, wasn’t it? For what it's worth, my teenage nephews absolutely loved it, and have already rewatched the episode several times. But like any grown man guiltily hoarding a tacky bit of nonsense just because it's got the Doctor Who logo on it, I think I'll be keeping my copy in its box.

BBC Whales

Doctor Who: The Beast Below

Review by Paul Kirkley

A queen in a red riding hood. A girl who's crept out of bed for a magical adventure in her nightie. Carnival masks. Nursery rhymes. A castle in the sky. Vanishing children. And a journey into the belly of a giant whale.

Blimey, they weren’t lying about the fairytale stuff, were they? By the end of The Beast Below, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the Doctor had ridden to the rescue on a white charger through a magic mirror. Oh hang on, he already did that in one of Stephen Moffat’s earlier stories.

In retrospect, a show about a mysterious man in a magic box was always ripe for this sort of treatment. What’s intriguing is that, in all our years of chatter about Doctor Who’s infinitely flexible format, none of us ever had fairytale on our radar; the usual litany decrees the show can be “anything from sci-fi to horror to space opera to historical romance”, but did any of us ever think of it as a fairytale, until it was presented to us as one?

A 50,000 tonne alien sea cow is going to put a strain on even the most watertight story

No doubt some people will be uncomfortable with this - because fairy stories are for children, right? But the darkness and fear at the heart of most fairytales – babes lost in the wood, brutal punishments from wicked stepmothers, the tread of an approaching giant – is actually the perfect fit for Doctor Who; it just took someone like Stephen Moffat to make us see it.

Of course, if it was actual wicked stepmothers in actual fairytale castles, that would be rubbish. But this show has always taken a gloriously cavalier approach to genre boundaries, and never more so than in the hands of the man who once had our hero ask “What’s revolutionary France doing onboard a spaceship?” So this a fairytale where Little Red Riding Hood packs a couple of shooters and records video messages to herself. Why? Because it’s Doctor Who, and she can.

Let's talk about the whale in the room, then. Last week, in a flush of girlish enthusiasm, I declared that The Moff’s scripts tend to bear up better to forensic scrutiny than Russell the T’s. But a 50,000 tonne alien sea cow is going to put a strain on even the most watertight story and, as it happens, this one was springing holes left right and centre.

What’s the Doctor got as his memory bank homepage these days: Wikipedia?

The most obvious problem was with the geography. We were told the beast was at the heart of the ship but, from the closing shot, it appeared to be just carrying it on its back. How come when the Doctor and Amy got vomited out through its mouth, they didn’t end up in space? And how rubbish are the TARDIS instruments that give the whole history of the Starship UK but fail to mention (or detect) the colossal Cetacean swimming about underneath it? What’s the Doctor got as his memory bank homepage these days: Wikipedia?

Also, you’ve got to love the insane logic of the whole bonkers enterprise in the first place. The UK’s plan for escaping global catastrophe certainly puts the recent bank rescue into perspective. Imagine the overtime the spin doctors must have been putting in to sell that one:

“So basically, we’re going to strap the entire country onto the back of a massive whale and float off into space. Any questions?”
“Erm, yes. Why not just build a spaceship?”
“That’s what we’re doing. A space whale ship.”
“No, I mean, just a normal spaceship. With an engine and everything.”
“Riiiiight. And where would we put the whale?”
“Forget about the whale, there is no whale.”
“I’m sorry, I’m not sure I follow you.”
(Incidentally, what did Scotland fly off on – a space Nessie?)

This entire script appears to be the product of an infinite improbability drive

But all this is forgivable because, hey, whales are cool - any kid who’s ever stood under the blue whale in the Natural History Museum knows that. And they’ve always been the stuff of myth and legend, from Jonah to Moby Dick to The Snail and the Whale. (In fact, The Beast Below has quite a bit in common with Julia Donaldson and Alex Scheffler’s kiddie classic: “This is the tale, of how a nation set sail, on the back of a whale, in the hit TV show from BBC Wales”. Although, thinking about it, the whale it has most in common with is the one in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, as this entire script appears to be the product of an infinite improbability drive.)

Other niggles: They’re pulling punches on the scares again. The Smilers are a very creepy idea but they were woefully under-exploited, especially in the scene where they climbed out of their boxes. This should have been a memory-searing classic monster moment, but they’d only been on their feet for about two seconds – not long enough to even begin to affect a menacing advance – when Liz 10 came along and popped a couple of caps in them. (How cool was that, though? “I’m the bloody Queen, mate – basically, I rule.”)

And Amy was too clever by half at the end – especially when you consider she’d been tucked up in bed at home a few hours earlier; now all of a sudden she’s a genius who can solve a centuries-old moral dilemma in a split second. No wonder The Demon Bernie Ecclestone looked so surprised. (I can’t help wondering, incidentally, why the Doctor didn’t point out the fourth option: “Hey everyone, there’s room for you all aboard my infinitely large, dimensionally transcendental time machine.” Maybe he’s just the sort of guy who needs his own space.) Also, Amy’s speech about the creature being so old and so kind and the last of its race was lovely but, really, we got it the first time, already – we didn’t need her to draw us a diagram.

But niggles are exactly what these are because, at the end of the day, The Beast Below was everything we would want Doctor Who to be: Funny, inventive, scary (okay, ish) and bursting at the seams with more maddeningly inventive ideas and concepts and gags than most shows manage to pony up in an entire lifetime. And even if this wasn’t your style of Who (and was it just me or would the Seventh Doctor and Ace have felt perfectly at home in this one?), who could fail to be charmed by the Eleventh Doctor and Miss Amy Pond?

I bet Matt Smith has no trouble nicking crisps out of vending machines

I was surprised by how different Matt Smith was in this story to the previous one. It almost makes it seem like he played The Eleventh Hour as half-Tennant. Here, as his own man in his own clothes with his own magic box and his own universe to explore, his performance was something new: odder, more angular, more awkward (in a good way) – even his voice seemed to have moved to a slightly higher register. And he has incredible wrists. I can’t stop looking at them. They seem to be about a foot too long, emerging from the end of his (admittedly too short) sleeves like a cross between Jarvis Cocker, a Slitheen and Andrew Marr on Dead Ringers. I bet he has no trouble nicking crisps out of vending machines.

Anyway, it’s just another hypnotic element in this strange, alien, wonderful new Doctor. (Smith was particularly exceptional in the voting booth scene: His response to Amy’s questions about the Time Lords was spookily reminiscent of Troughton talking to Victoria in Tomb of the Cybermen, and his “bringing down the Government” speech (did someone let Andrew Cartmel back into the building?) was utterly thrilling.)

Karen Gillan, too, has really made the role her own. I’ll admit she was the one element I had my doubts about before the series started – not because of anything she’d done, more because of what she hadn’t done (i.e. much). I was secretly worried she might turn out to be a bit Hollyoaks – very young and very pretty, but a bit ordinary. But not a bit of it – turns out she’s a brilliant character actress. It’s just that you don't often find brilliant character actresses peering out from inside the body of a supermodel. What a find.

It’s a measure of Doctor Who's confidence and popularity that it can pursue this magical, even whimsical new direction and carry a huge audience with it (even when it’s shown in an insane timeslot the middle of the afternoon on the hottest weekend of the year). Five years ago, Russell T Davies had to ease his audience in gently with mothers and shopping and Tina the Cleaner and News 24 and chips. And while I’d be reluctant to lose that completely (the mix of the domestic and the fantastic – “Coronation Street meets 2001”, as Timothy Dalton so nicely put it – is the show's USP), the fact no such hand-holding is considered necessary suggests that, like Amy Pond, we feel comfortable letting the Doctor lift our feet off the ground occasionally. Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space.