Behind the Sofa - The Collaborative Doctor Who Blog

Voyage of the Damned Commentary Podcast

'Is there a chimp on the bridge?'

A brand new Tachyon TV podcast is now available to download.

Topics up for discussion in our special Christmas commentary of Voyage of the Damned include: brutal dictators, student common rooms, Robot Wars, old queens and monkeys. Lots and lots of monkeys.

Plus! Win Kylie's latest CD or a Doctor Who DVD or your choice by identifying 25 Kylie songs hidden inside the commentary. The closest entry wins! Closing date: Feb 14th, 2008

Visit Tachyon TV to download our podcasts and for details on entering the competition.

Carry on Cruising

Voyage of the Damned

News broadcasters. They're a strange sub-strata of humanity. Charged with injecting current affairs into our brains at regular periods after meals, like some super news drug that needs to be taken with food, often imparting the worst information in the world that any of us are likely to hear. Is it any wonder they all go a little queer, if all they do day-in-day-out is dole out misery and despair to an already confused and terminally frightened populace.

And if that's not enough, those unlucky enough to anchor a broadcast have to sit there in the middle of what looks like a Bond villain's nuclear bunker, ducking random CGI headings as they're blasted around the studio, whilst the most inane, dumbed down, mushed-up facts are spoon fed into us by a Powerpoint jockey presenting pointless packages from ridiculous locations. Whether it's Huw Pym using a Quantel effects box jacked up on stoat tranquilisers to describe to us what a house is, or a Robert Peston piece on how the credit crunch really happened - presented using nothing but glove puppets whilst wearing only a thong, they really do have it bad. Open wide, here comes the aeroplane with this evening's headlines on it...

So you can almost forgive them for diving ankle first into any sort of camp frothy nonsense without a second thought. Usually it's the latest dull but worthy charitython. Back in the day it was Morecambe and Wise, or The Goodies. Now it's Doctor Who.

Grappled with protesting lesbians.

And the next cab off the rank is Nicholas Witchell. Or course, St Nick, is no longer to be found seated behind a desk - although he's been there and done that. And you've got to admire a man who famously grappled with protesting lesbians live on air as Sue Lawley continued telling us about the decimation of the south Yorkshire cheese industry. Probably. And he plays a lead role in my second favourite audio clip of recorded out-takes to have made it online. All damned good grounding for a staring role in a Christmas edition of Doctor Who.

What on earth is Mrs Overall doing in this?

Who next then? Moria Stewart's out of a job at the moment. Too old to front a news broadcast apparently. Yet even she doesn't look as old as Kylie did in the Christmas special. Seriously how much did they spend on the prosthetics to make her look that old? I know she's been through one hell of a year but she's standing there in a maid's outfit with stockings and knee high boots and all I can think of, when she's holding a drinks tray, is what on earth is Mrs Overall doing in this? It was the Titanic that the show crashed into, not Acorn Antiques.

At the end, it felt like I'd just sat a BTEC Diploma in BBC Sitcoms.

Although as the comedy stars (and someone from Tittybangbang - which isn't, despite Radio Times billing to the contrary, a comedy show - it's an expose of high altitude breast implant explosions) troop through the set and onto the rotating knives of death you might be forgiven for thinking otherwise. It's a case of, "oh! it's him from that thing who's married to that woman who can't cook", then it's "oh! it's him from that thing who's married to that woman who pretends she's posher than she is" etc... At the end, it felt like I'd just sat a BTEC Diploma in BBC Sitcoms.

Profiteroles and honey glazed racks of Kerry Katona.

In early December I predicted Voyage of the Damned would be "all teeth, tits and tinsel - it'll be spectacle and little substance - it'll annoy the hell out of us and be loved by the masses". Of course, it got 12M plus viewers, but almost half that number had consumed such an excess of food that their body mass just fused with the sofa they'd slopped down in after eating their way through 4 Iceland stores worth of Profiteroles and honey glazed racks of Kerry Katona. They'd barely register as sentient life, let alone viewers. DFS could make a fortune from these new sofa people.

I'm off to Dawlish now with a pack of crayons, 40 stone of lard and a camera crew to put together another stultifying inane package for a flagship news programme on the global obesity epidemic.

Happy Bloody New Year.

Frankly, I Don't Give a Damned

Voyage of the Damned

It's like old times.  I'm full of cold, dosed-up on Day Nurse and close to hallucinating. And so here is my Voyage of the Damned review.

It takes a strong will and an angry mind to apply criticism to Voyage of the Damned.  The show itself was so lightweight, fluffy and sloppily written that the overwhelming instinct is to shrug and say “Why bother?”. And since Neil vented his spleen so entertainingly and accurately a few days ago, there's even less of an impetus to waste electrons on a similarly-minded review. Worst of all there are the majority of massed denizens of the Doctor Who Forum standing on the sidelines waiting to wag their collective finger while saying "Well eight billion people watched it, and it had an AI of 2 x 10¹⁰ so by all means have your crazy opinion but don't for a moment think it actually counts for anything".

I felt more of an emotional attachment with Mario in 'Super Mario Galaxy' then I did with either Astrid or Alonso the Chimp Boy.

So I'll keep it brief. I liked the first 30 minutes or so, and I loved Clive Swift. Judging by their on-screen chemistry I imagine that David Tennant was distraught to learn that Mr Copper won't be continuing as a new companion. As a disaster movie fan, I loved all The Poseidon Adventure stuff, but I didn't really see it in terms of an Eric Saward “dark” massacre as disaster movies are just another Christmas staple. Deaths in such films are just not the same as deaths in anything else, and as most of this story looked like a Playstation3 game then I doubt that the kids watching were particularly disturbed either. Certainly I felt more of an emotional attachment with Mario in 'Super Mario Galaxy' then I did with either Astrid or Alonso the Chimp Boy.

Phil Collinson is clearly a man at the end of his tether as he was the only person on the planet who didn't realise that Max Capricorn was going to be the villain.

The last forty minutes have already been demolished by better men than I, but something so unsound only needs a tap with a hammer to bring it crashing down.  What is really odd is how much of this was also revealed by the BBC audio commentary on the programme. It may not seem like it sometimes, but I actually have a boundless admiration for Russell T Davies, Julie Gardner and Phil Collinson and their achievement in bringing back Doctor Who.  But my word they sound tired.  Davies commented on how pained he felt when he read Blink and realised it featured angels, and who wouldn't sympathise with his eventual rationalization about the hosts “They've got nothing in common with weeping angels”.  Of course they haven't.  Apart from being angels.  Phil Collinson is clearly a man at the end of his tether as he was the only person on the planet who didn't realise that Max Capricorn was going to be the villain. Even Davies sounded stunned by that. Later on both Gardner and Collinson murmured supportively as Davies explained his technique for rescuing his original ending “He's got to be a cyborg and she's got to attack him in a fork-lift truck”.  Somebody get them a holiday!

Camp frothy nonsense.

So it's all about context in the end.  A creative decision has been made: “Christmas specials must be about spectacle” and in stretching to achieve that some of the holes show through. The script looked rushed and didn't make sense a lot of the time, and some of the effects (especially Astrid and Max toppling into the engines) looked poor. Apparently the BBC wanted an extra ten minutes, whereas the whole thing would have been better over fifty minutes at most.  But in many ways (despite Davies's weird messiah stuff – I'm not even going there as doubtless we'll be wading through it in series 4) Voyage of the Damned was still an achievement. When it worked it was engaging, funny and spectacular which made its many lowpoints all that much lower. I'd still rather have the nation watching Doctor Who on Christmas night than Holby “It's a Wonderful Life” City, but I suspect, a la Ricky Gervais, a lot of the nation is saying “Did you see Doctor Who on Christmas Day? Just what we wanted – a bit of camp frothy nonsense.” And as between Christmas 2008 and Christmas/New Year 2009/10 we'll only be getting specials, I do hope that they aren't all in the vein of Voyage of the Damned as that'll mean for a whole year Doctor Who really will be nothing but camp frothy nonsense.

Now where's that Day Nurse? None left.  OK – pass the Vosene, that'll do.

Raise the Titanic

Voyage of the Damned

First things first. I would like to begin my review by tackling the spurious argument that you can't expect anything as good (or as challenging) as Blink or Human Nature to go out at Christmas, a statement that gets trotted out whenever somebody has the temerity to criticise this lazy piece of grandstanding garbage. I just don't get it. Is it because you honestly believe that the audience prefer camp and frothy spectacle over plot and characterisation, or is it that they simply can't bear the thought of genuine and complicated emotions invading their post-turkey stupor? Is that how EastEnders ended up with even more viewers than Doctor Who's remarkable 12 million? I'm not suggesting that Doctor Who has to be grim, dark and miserable - at any time of the year - but surely audiences want mystery, suspense, a few laughs and some proper drama. I'm really sorry but Voyage of the Damned falls disastrously short at almost every turn.

Andre Previn wasn't draped in tinsel...

But credit where credit is due: the premise to Voyage of the Damned is great. In fact, the first 35 minutes really touched a nerve with me and I was genuinely enjoying every daft moment of it, especially the sight of aliens reacting to a Specsavers shop front like we would the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. And I can't get enough of disaster movies; as John has already pointed out, it's a genre that has become inexplicably linked with Christmas after appearing perennially on the box during the holidays when I was a kid, and in the case of Die Hard and The Poseidon Adventure, by actively taking place during the festivities themselves. I just hope that they skip the obligatory Christmas theme altogether next year. Having recently re-watched all of Morecombe and Wise's Christmas Specials I was immediately struck by the distinct lack of Christmas trappings up there on the screen. Andre Previn wasn't draped in tinsel. Angela Rippon wasn't a dancing Santa Claus. Somersaulting newsmen were on a bloody beach, for christsake! And the added bonus is that you can watch these shows all year around. Admit it, you can't really do that with a Christmas-flavoured special. Point of fact: try watching The Runaway Bride in early January. Within ten minutes you'll finding yourself feeling ill disposed towards it because you are in the midst of the back-to-work post-Christmas blues. It's a real downer.

Russell plunders from two classic Who stories, and one really shit one...

And of all the Christmas themes you could plunder, like the classic ghost story, the historical period piece (Capra or Dickens?) or even a Christmas future, why does Russell insist on plunging contemporary earth in mortal danger every bloody year? He even has to shoe-horn in a stupid (but ultimately necessary) reference to how everyone in London has done a runner. And if the rumours are true then Bernard Cribbens was playing Donna Noble's granddad, which just makes that scene ten times worse, if you ask me.

Anyway, the initial set-up was pretty engaging. Sure, it was derivative but who cares? The very best Doctor Who's of old were always derivative, it's what they did with the source material that really mattered. And if you are going to steal then you may as well steal from the best, and I don't care what anyone says, The Poseidon Adventure is one of the very best, and I dare anyone to dismiss Gene Hackman's final tirade to God as anything but a classic moment in cinema history.

Russell also unashamedly plunders from two 'classic' Who stories (Enlightenment and The Robots of Death) and one really, really shit one (Delta and the Bannerman). And I loved it. For large swathes of the audience this would be their first exposure to the concept of flying ocean liners, homicidal servo-bots with art deco heads and goofy, ill-informed alien tourists, and I didn't have a problem with that at all.

Strangely, the one thing that Voyage of the Damned doesn't really riff on is the most obvious contender of all - James Cameron's Titanic. Where was the moment where the Doctor and Astrid are standing on the prow of the ship in some sort of sonic screwdriver-ed oxygen bubble, as they stare wistfully out towards the galaxy, just as the asteroids make a bee-line for the ship? It can't have been that expensive - even Barry Letts could pulled that off. It couldn't have been because they didn't have the time either - the episode had more padding than Shelly Winters stunt double - and it certainly can't have been because it would have been too cheesy. Maybe it wasn't cheesy enough, given what's coming...

Anyway, up until the moment when our merry band of heroes set out along that strut I was having a whale of a time. Geoffrey Palmer was utterly fantastic as the affable uncle about to commit genocide for the sake of his kids (why couldn't he have been the villain of the piece?) and the initial disaster was portrayed wonderfully, climaxing in that great moment when the petty officer got sucked out into space. As the Doctor delivered his chilling  'Kasterborous' speech I settled into a mildly euphoric belief that everything was going to be OK.

And then everything went tits up as Russell hit his own personal iceberg: his lack of self-restraint.

Meet Max Capricorn.  The fact that he was the bad guy wasn't surprising to me in the least. No, the real surprise was the fact that he arrived in the guise of a comedy Davros! He looked like he'd been cooked up by a couple of hard-up fans in a garage! Gliding into view as a bizarre cross between the travel machine in Kinda, an ASDA shopping trolley and one of those grab-a-prize cabinets you find in amusement arcades, you just can't take him seriously. A boo-hiss pantomime villain would have been bad enough, but a boo-hiss pantomime villain stuck in a box? Oh dear.

But Max's laughable entrance isn't the worst part of it. No, his arrival also heralds the moment when the plot holes suddenly converge and engulf the entire script. A disaster within a disaster, if you like. I'm not talking about problems with the metallic consistency of asteroids, or whether the Queen's flag should ripple a bit more, or even the miraculous healing powers of the officer who has been shot in the gut. No, I'm talking about the really serious problems, like: why is Max Capricorn on the Titanic in the first place? And why are the Hosts killing witnesses who are all going to die in a nuclear explosion in the next few minutes anyway? It just doesn't make any sense!

Any why bother with a villain at all? You didn't see Gene Hackman investigating the source of the Tsunami that overturned the Poseidon, did you? No, he was content with just getting off the bloody ship! Why not concentrate on that aspect instead? Surely it would have been more exciting and dramatic than facing off against a villain that no one seems even remotely interested in taking seriously.

A disaster within a disaster...

And then, just when you think things can't get any worse there's that moment with the fucking Queen. What was Russell thinking? Has he never seen Silver Nemesis? Is he after a quick knighthood? What? Was there anyone in the audience who didn't groan when that scene unfurled, like a tape-worm, on screen?  Do you think Primeval would stoop so low as to have a velociraptor attacking a Gordon Brown look-a-like? I think I would have preferred it if Tennant had turned to the audience back home and wished us all a Merry fucking Christmas.

And RTD should never be allowed near numbers. Each and every time he hits a numerical key on his keyboard an alarm should go off and someone with a rudimentary grasp of mathematics should rush into Russell's flat so they can check that what he's just written isn't "oh, that'll do" bollocks. Or employ a script editor. Whichever is easiest. Just look at the evidence: he can't get the Doctor's age right, he locates adventures in the year 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,004, and he creates societies where people travel 10cm in 10 years. Why won't somebody stop him?

The most shameful example of Russell's numerical dyslexia can be found in Voyage of the Damned. I am, of course, talking about the revelation that Shelly Winters' phone bill, the one that will take her 20 years to pay off (yes, 20 years!), is approximately 100 quid. I've seen ming-mongs on the forums desperately trying to wave this away by insisting that Shelly Winters must be on a really low wage, conveniently forgetting the fact that Mr Copper, a glorified tour guide, believes that a million quid's worth of credits is enough to spend on a few trinkets, which therefore implies that 5,000 credits must be worth (factoring in exchange rates and inflation) a couple of quid, tops. Shameful.

But it's not just RTD's grasp of numbers that winds me up, it's his preoccupation with messianic imagery. Just like that other raging atheist, JM Straczynski, he too feels compelled to litter his sci-fi opus with god-like beings of light and resurrected heroes with mystical, magical powers. And it makes me cringe every single time. However, I guess this is counterpointed by the fact that the Doctor isn't really harder than Jesus in the final analysis. He can't stop Astrid from dying for a start; he can only postpone her agony so he can give her a quick tongue sandwich. You know, it says a lot when the Doctor snogging the face of a woman is only mildly irritating when placed next to the image of him being lifted up on the wings of angels. It managed to make his Obi-Wan levitation in Last of the Time Lords look like something out of fucking Akira!

More padding than Shelly Winters' stunt double...

I suppose I'd better talk about Kylie. I'm not a fan of the songstress and the whole thing stank of stunt casting from the very beginning to me. Despite the fact that I may have tapped my toes to a couple of her more recent gramophone records I wasn't exactly sold on her acting credentials. Neighbours and, er, um, Street Fighter?! Still, I decided, it could have been a lot worse - it could have been Catherine Tate again. Or, failing that, another sitcom star with an equity card. This is why Andy Millman being asked to appear in the show during last night's Extras felt so right to me - he's a shit comedian in a low-brow sitcom, of course he's going to be invited to appear in Doctor Who!

Having said all that, Kylie was pretty good as Astrid. The problem is she wasn't given that much to do. OK, so she kills the villain, snogs the Doctor (twice), gets herself killed (twice) and then turns into Tinkerbell (don't get me started on that), which looks like quite a lot on paper, but in reality it's hard for me to really give a damn about anything she does because her character is so two-dimensional. Even Bannanakafka made more of an impression on me and he was a walking deus ex machina! And why make Kylie look so dowdy? She's a glamourpuss in a maid's outfit and yet she still managed to come across as bit, well, meh. That takes some doing. And who wasn't laughing their ass off when Astrid picked up Capricorn on that pallet truck? What should have been a gut-wrenching scene that conjured up images of Ripley taking on the Alien Queen, it had as much dramatic gravitas as a bad French and Saunders sketch.

The fact that the Doctor falls for Astrid within moments of meeting her (despite a distinct lack of on-screen chemistry) is either more evidence of his incessant longing for Rose (Astrid's blonde and a bit feisty, you see) or it's just really bad writing. And then there's the bit at the end where the Doctor dumps Mr. Copper in Wales because he wants to travel alone. You might interpret this a battle-damaged Doctor trying to protect Mr. Copper from further harm, or maybe, if you're like me, you'll believe he can't be bothered with Mr. Copper because he a) isn't blonde b) hasn't got a pair of magnificent tits and c) he hasn't flirted with him for the last hour. Sad, isn't it?

And there you have it. Yet another expensive looking Christmas cracker stuffed with bad jokes, shiny bits of disposable tat and paper-thin, er, hats. Quite a nice bang, though.

If the Doctor Who Christmas Special really is the franchise's shop window then isn't it about time we got the Fenwicks treatment instead of another gaudy sale at What Everybody Wants?

Allons-y!

Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't

Welcome aboard the good ship Tachyonic. Please blog carefully

Voyage of the Damned

Christmas time. Good will to all men. Peace on Earth. Except, it seems, on the Doctor Who spitting boards. Another episode, another ruckus amongst the ming-mongs to claim intellectual superiority in the I love/ I hate RTD and all that sail in him brigades. If Doctor Who is a religion to some then it’s about time that the more fundamentalist of its followers took a deep breath and stepped back.

Me? I cringed for at least half of this bloated seventy-minute farrago of disaster movie clichés and trowel-laden moralising that would make even Steven Spielberg at his saccharin worst blush. But that’s okay. Because if there’s two things I’ve learnt from watching Doctor Who these past three years it’s that a) you can’t argue with the mass majority who probably loved this and b) what’s the point anyway, as they’ve not watching the show in the same way as you are anyway. And thus hangs the eternal dilemma of being a card-carrying Whovian in the 21^st Century: hiding your head in shame as the latest RTD epic rewrites all known laws of logic and narrative coherence, whilst at the same time hearing that it’s the second most watched programme on Christmas day and being unable to wipe the enormously proud grin off your face.

If Doctor Who is a religion to some then it’s about time that the more fundamentalist of its followers took a deep breath and stepped back

So the only way to view these things seems to be in the spirit of Christmas itself. Accentuate the positive and brush all your misgivings under the carpet where the pine needles are starting to gather. And Voyage of the Damned is nothing if not choc-full of positives, starting with that bombastic new mix of the theme tune which almost blows you out of the armchair with twangy guitars and Keff McCulloch drum bass. Though it’s a bit of shame that they didn’t take the opportunity to revamp the title sequence as well; the stars’ names zooming out at you like in Superman the Movie is already starting to look so 2005.

And still on the positive that opening half-hour pretty much tricks all the boxes when it comes to disaster movie-aping dramatics with a Who spin. A group of broadly drawn clichés each with a secret to hide; some nicely sinister robots who have clearly been watching The Robots of Death too much whilst getting a vocal makeover from Alexander Armstrong; and the Mill going to town with some startling eye candy which genuinely would not look out of place in your modern multiplex blockbuster.

But then the meteors hit and it all goes horribly wrong.

Now, I dunno whether to blame RTD or director James Strong more for this. Okay, the plot of any disaster movie tends to peter out once the proverbial hits the fan; but are they usually as threadbare and head scratching as this? And Strong’s direction at times is so pedestrian that you’d be forgiven for thinking that this was a disaster movie set in a supermarket rather than on board (nominally) the most infamous passenger liner of all time. Tasteless of just fair game? I can’t honestly see how the BBC need to apologise for evoking bad memories for 1912 survivors, myself. Though as for apologising to the campaigners for quality drama, now that’s another matter.

But what’s most mind-numbingly, spirit-crushingly disappointing about Voyage of the Damned is that it’s another RTD script that reaches for the stars and grabs a load of old cobblers instead. I’m all for him having his Christmas fun each year - I mean, would you rather a Moffat or Cornell masterpiece being wasted on the post-turkey indulgers - but for once I’d like to see him try for something within his narrative scope. Something small and intimate, perhaps. And without a shoe-horned-in threat to six billion people. Small is beautiful, Russell. Remember that.

Strong’s direction at times is so pedestrian that you’d be forgiven for thinking that this was a disaster movie set in a supermarket

And then there’s the schmaltz. Now nu-Who has given us some of the most emotional TV of the past three years, but too often in RTD’s hands such ventures into the touch-feely just have you reaching for the sick bag. We know it’s a terrible thing when unsuspecting, innocent people die horrible deaths through no fault of their own; we don’t need the moral equivalent of a sledgehammer around our bonce whilst Murray Gold sets the controls for meltdown. Is it heartless of me to say I felt absolutely nothing at the deaths of Bannakafallata, thingy or whatsisame (though at least Shelly Winters a.k.a. Foon the Balloon fulfilled her remit as doomed fatso)? Or am I just a little tired of TV thinking that it has to slice the emotional equivalent of onions in front of my eyes before I can have empathy for a character? Answers please on a used tissue to the usual address.

And that final twenty minutes is just taking the piss, isn’t it? Astrid does the slo-mo self-sacrifice as Michael Bay takes over behind the lens, followed by arguably the most embarrassing crossover between sci-fi and public figures since the end of For Your Eyes Only. So, our Maj is a Who fan; does that really warrant some sub-June Brown cameo that completely shits over any attempt at gravitas the episode previously had? And what in the name of sweet Jesus is Max Capricorn about? A failed businessman reduced to a Davros wannabe in a power loader, whiling away his time between insurance scams and impressions of Brian O’Blivion from Cronenberg’s Videodrome.

And that final twenty minutes is just taking the piss, isn’t it?

But on the whole it wasn’t all bad, just less than it should have been. Cameos from the likes of Geoffrey Palmer’s hangdog expression were so note perfect as to make you tear your hair out that they were so brief. And as for Ms Minogue, she hardly put a foot wrong; the only surprise coming from the fact that when given the pulling power of arguably one of the world’s most famous women, RTD instead reduces her to the part of bit player when even Catherine Tate got her fifteen minutes. But at least wee Jimmy Vee got something more to do than cement his reputation as the John Scott Martin of vertically challenged bit-parting; even if it was as a Twiki-wannabe with a novelty dildo for a head.

Which only leaves one more question: if everyone bar the Queen and Bernard Cribbens has quit London for Christmas, then who the bloody hell is gonna buy all those newspapers, eh?

Coming Soon: some pulse-pounding snippets of Season 4 set to a Murray Gold musical explosion. Donna. Martha. Sontarans. Agatha Christie. And Raquel from Coronation Street doing the hard-faced Apprentice bitch thing. But what, no Daleks?!?

Give Me Just A Little More Time ...

Voyage of the Damned

The original cancellation of Doctor Who dovetailed nicely with the period when I first started to like the girls and the girl I tended to like was Kylie Minogue.  She seemed perfectly attainable despite such impediments as apparently living Australia (or the UK -- it was very confusing), being nothing like her character in Neighbours (at least as far as I could tell from a rather stilted interview she gave on Get Fresh) and being a much older woman (all of six years).  But I bought the all the records, filled scrap books with articles and lyrics from Smash Hits, covered my wall with posters and kissed her calendar every night before I went to bed.  It was a level of dedication which some religions would consider unhinged and yet there I was praying at the alter of Locomotion (see this post at my own blog for further devotional tales). 

Of course, the teenage heart is a fickle thing and when it decided that Better The Devil You Know wasn’t a great single and that Lost In Your Eyes sounded purer, it was down with the Kylie posters and up with the Debbie Gibson ones.  But you never forget your first love so it there was no more curious experience watching the two merge into one another last night.  Post Charlene, Kylie’s not really had a respected acting career (my heart died a little when I sat through Street Fighter – oh yes I’ve seen everything) but she was really good in this, totally holding her own within the ensemble and particularly against Mr Tennant, not afraid to make fun of her height by standing on a box to kiss him.  These one-off companions are difficult because they have to mark themselves out in a very short space of time and make us care and I do think she did that, imbuing Astrid with a likeable wonder but also making her sacrifice entirely plausible.

Plus it’s Kylie dressed as a waitress.  What’s not to like?

Elsewhere, writer Russell T Davies was playing the genre game, tossing the Doctor into a disaster movie to see what that would be like.  Apparently he’s always wanted to do this since The Poseidon Adventure was the only VHS he had to hand as a kid.  Oddly enough, it’s not the first time the franchise has attempted something like this.  Fans with long memories might remember that Christopher Bulis’s Vanderdeken's Children (an Eighth Doctor novel), had many of the same figures you’d expect in an Irwin Allen spectacular eventually scuppered by a far too complex plot.  It’s not an impossible fit though; Doctor Who stories tend to develop through set pieces and that’s exactly what you find in something like The Towering Inferno and indeed that’s exactly what you got in Voyage of the Damned as the Doctor led a band of familiars from one end of the ship to the other, with the monetary scam and villain an added appendage to explain the disaster. 

These were good set pieces, the bit in the corridor, the bit in the stairwell, the bit on the strut.  If anything the template was used too well; disaster films are about death; so is Doctor Who apparently but did this really have to be so unremittingly grizzly? Here’s something being served up as pre-watershed family entertainment on Christmas Day which featured mass murder and suicide.  I shuddered as I wrote that since it’s clearly what Mediawatch UK were thinking too as they scribbled down all of their criticisms in crayon but I can’t lie and say I didn’t cringe a little bit as the Doctor amongst other things failed to save Astrid and provide a happy send off.  Perhaps we should be excited that the show is still willing to bounce off the curve letting the hateful character lives, but the last thing we need at this point is to lose the family audience because parents think the show is too scary, too raw, too ugly, particularly on the holiest of holies.

That said, The Poseidon Adventure is a PG these days.

But as I said in the introduction still managed to raise a chuckle and not just during the closing moments.  As well as Mr Copper’s bizarre verbal mincing of Christmas traditions (which when you consider what we actually do aren’t that odd – apart from the boxing) there was the discovery that the residents of old London town had taken the logical step of deserting the place around the festive period based on previous experience.  It’s not the first time they’ve done this – remember Invasion of the Dinosaurs – but in a way it’s a shame that the episode couldn’t have been expanded to explore that idea instead even if the budget wouldn't necessarily have stretched to 28 Days Later-style empty vistas (pictured); it felt thrown away here but perhaps that’s the big new arc story which will be looked at in the new series, Cribbins included. And wasn’t he marvellous – weren’t all of the guest cast?  Some will say that Geoffrey Palmer was wasted but it needed and actor like that for you to believe that Captain would be capable of what he did, just as it needs George Costigan to turn up at the end and be plausibly villainous.

It’s not the first time they’ve done this – remember Invasion of the Dinosaurs – but in a way it’s a shame that the episode couldn’t have been expanded to explore that idea instead even if the budget wouldn't necessarily have stretched to 28 Days Later-style empty vistas.

It was certainly one of the best designed episodes of the new series.  Some money was clearly spent on the interiors and although the geography of the ship wasn't too clearly defined the strut area may well have been one of the best sets of the series, recalling the propeller room from The End of the World.  The exterior shots of the Titanic itself are majestic too although I had a soft spot in particular for the shots of the TARDIS hurtling towards the Earth.  It really does make a change to see the Earth from a non-North American point of viewing, seeing Europe and UK floating below us.  There’s no denying that the design of the Hosts must have been inspired by some other robots of death – particularly the hair – and it’ll be very surprising if they don’t inspire some merchandise partner to create tree decorations for next Christmas.

I really liked Voyage of the Damned. It wasn't perfect, but as a Christmas Day post everything slice of action adventure with a dash of heart it was fine and in the end I laughed like a drain because sheer audacity of it all.  I mean really what else could you do at the sight of the Titanic dodging the roof of Buckingham Palace with her Madge, in her rollers, thanking the Doctor for saving the world one more time, with Nicholas Witchell reporting on events.  Sure it’s pretty camp and arch and typical of many of the things that some despise nu-Who for, but it’s also hilarious and doing everything which you never thought you’d ever see in a television programme, least of all the one you were brought up on.  If it didn't quite make up for some of the darkness which had gone before, at least it prepared some viewers for the shitstorm that was about to hit them in the episode of Eastenders that followed.

I mean really what else could you do at the sight of the Titanic dodging the roof of Buckingham Palace with her Madge, in her rollers, thanking the Doctor for saving the world one more time, with Nicholas Witchell reporting on events.

If it wasn’t quite as affecting as either of the other two specials it's because it didn’t feel like part of the fabric of the series.  The Christmas Invasion was clearly all about the regeneration and The Runaway Bride dealing with the loss of Rose.  Even though he’d only just dropped off Martha, this felt like a very separate story, rather like an example of spin-off fiction in that you didn’t really need to know about anything else which had happened in the series to enjoy it.  Certainly that was the case for the first two or three decades but it threatened here to make the piece inessential.  Despite all the murder and mayhem there wasn’t anything as gut busting as the moment when the Prime Minister ordered the destruction of the Sycorax ship or the Doctor watched as the Queen’s children drowned at least not with the sense that it’d have consequences.

But then again, for all we know this could have been the most important episode of the lot, especially as it proved that actually even though he is the Doctor he can't do everything.  Roll on the fourth series – “What d’you mean miss?  Do I look single?” etc.

Fuck Me, Who Let Eric Saward Into The Building?

Irwin Allen lives.
Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis are
Pointing and laughing.

Voyage Of The Damned

Honest? I didn't know what the hell to make of that one on the day. Imagine watching Land Of The Giant Earthshock Robots Of Death next Christmas - how silly and twee yet relentlessly grim was that? If like me you were playing 'spot the victim' ten minutes in, then you probably didn't expect (a) so many people to end up killing themselves for the sake of the plot, and (b) the moral to be 'remember kids, fate is a complete c**t'. And has the Doctor ever been so helpless? That's about as Saward as it gets.

Land Of The Giant Earthshock Robots Of Death

The gay subtext 'cyborgs have marriage rights too' was subtle this year wasn't it? And nobody seems to have noticed the junior officer still has a bullet in his gut either.

Tat Wood's 'Things That Don't Make Sense' starts here...

Buckingham Palace is still standing.

I was certain from the trailers, right up to where the physics went straight out the window, that those were missiles instead of meteors and the ship was being shot at. Obviously nobody's going to watch sn episode like this for its scientific integrity, but I feel nerdily compelled to point out: meteors are big chunks of rocks and ice. So how can they (a) burn, (b) leave stupid vapour trails in space, and (c) be 'magnetised' towards the hull of a ship and away from the whacking great planet in close proximity, without dragging the ship itself straight out of orbit (big planet, remember)? No, they don't say 'tractor beam'. And aren't meteorites comparatively rare, so where did these handy ones come from at exactly the right time? Did the Cybermen happen to ionise a nearby star, 'cos it's as daft as anything in The Wheel In Space. You're not going to convince me that a bankrupt travel agency can accurately pinpoint a cruise liner's time-jump to be in the right place and time for a meteor strike either, when just blowing the fucker up or sabotaging the engines and letting it drop would have been so much damn easier, since there's not going to be any 'witnesses' anyway after life on Earth gets wiped out by the impact, thus making the whole subplot with the Heavenly Hosts magnificently irrelevant. As if the mad rampaging robots announcing their intentions by going 'INFORMATION: KILL' the whole time wouldn't be suspicious enough, particularly to the important bloke on board with a mobile phone talking to his investor, who never thinks of phoning back home and letting them know what the FUCK'S GOING ON. Does NOBODY remember 9/11 anymore? And talking of which, how lax is basic security on board this vessel, that Bannakaffalatta can sneak his metal body capable of generating a massive EMP pulse on board without setting off any sensors or security alarms?

(Dr Science is also frothing at the mouth comparing the structural integrity of the ship after the meteor impact with, say, the structural integrity of the formerly flat piece of desert that's now the Grand Canyon, but we'll let that pass.)

By the way, even if you had some kind of magic magnet that attracts rock instead of metal, (NO, they DON'T call it a 'tractor beam'), and couldn't sell the patent for untold billions and save the company that way, then what's the point of installing the device into a crappy old ship that, like the Enterprise and the Liberator, is never intended to take off and land on a planet and would have been built in space, if not for the needlessly overcomplicated Columbo-style murder plot? And since it has all the aerodynamic properties of a giant brick, then how in the name of God can the Titanic possibly pull out of an atmospheric crash dive, the shockwave from which would utterly obliterate everything underneath? Because Buckingham Palace is still standing, and the Royals go 'hurrah' at an unexpected near-miss from an alien spacecraft instead of telling the Doctor to nyaff orrrrff.

Buckingham Palace is still standing, and the Royals go 'hurrah' at an unexpected near-miss from an alien spacecraft instead of telling the Doctor to nyaff orrrrff

Is Max Capricorn's presence on the ship supposed to be a secret or not? The script doesn't seem to be able to make its mind up. Max's whole plan depends on being pronounced dead at the scene of the disaster, but since the dramatic yet blatantly obvious plot twist is that he's responsible for all of this, none of the crew ever acknowledges that he's on board (surely, as loyal corporate staff, somebody's first thought after the impact should have been for the safety of the chief executive?), and he's purposely killing off survivors to remain undetected. And as a cyborg he's kept himself hidden away for years, so nobody would have seen him enter or leave the ship. He must be VERY clever too to have squirreled all his assets away without the rest of the board ever noticing, particularly if he wanted to surreptitiously spend them later after faking his own death without arousing suspicion. Not even Trau Morgus managed that one. But then the board also apparently didn't know or find it odd until recently that the CEO was a 170 year old head in a box, so maybe they're just inept. Incidentally, who else guessed the real twist that didn't happen was that Max's true identity was going to be Taren Capell and not Delegate Arcturus?

And what the hell's that about with the light-up gold tooth ? Seriously, what on Earth's the point?  Try eating dinner with a pen-torch in your mouth and see how quickly the family gets up and leaves.

Exactly how much money was the Captain promised to commit planetary genocide for the sake of his family's financial future, and wouldn't it also occur to him that a boss that ruthless in securing his own wealth could welch on the deal and the Captain would be too dead to stop it? As has been pointed out already, the pound/credit excange rate means it takes about twenty years to pay off a hundred pound phone bill, so it couldn't have been that much anyway.

But perhaps the biggest logical whopper of all is this: Max intends to ride out the disaster in a survival chamber that can withstand a supernova. Not a nuclear holocaust, an exploding sun. The Doctor knows all about it and how it works, suggesting that such things are in common usage, especially if a bankrupt cruise company in a fucked-up economy has got one. So, er.... WHY IS GALLIFREY DESTROYED?? Why couldn't the oldest, most technically supreme civilization in the universe with an Eye Of Harmony at their disposal knock up a larger-scale model to protect their own planet, or at the very least use for a backup to ensure the survival of the race once the Time War started? Come to that, why didn't the Daleks explore the military potential of this technology in the scope of galactic conquest? If you can make a survival chamber out of this principle, couldn't you also make an utterly indestructible battle cruiser or two? Build an armed survival ship, blow up a few stars, and ride out the ensuing holocaust while everything around you burns. Madness.

PS: Buckingham Palace is still standing. Did I mention this already?

And since the TARDIS was in orbit and the shields were down when the Titanic pranged it, why wasn't the Doctor sucked out into space as well?

I could go on. I no doubt would, very vocally, if not for the opportunity to express myself in the upcoming podcast. Thanks lads.

I don't suppose Voyage Of The Damned was ever intended to be more than a bit of superficial seasonal fluff, but therein lies the problem. I'm not sure if I'll ever watch it again (at least not with a straight face); it's over padded, and the tone was just off, even leaving out the monumental silliness of the last fifteen minutes which is just gagging for that podcast (I'd also say "it never decends to Last Of The Time Lords' level" if it wasn't damning with such faint praise which this special doesn't deserve to be tarred with). Surely at any other time of year, we'd all cheer like idiots at its "I CAN DO ANYTHING" gut-punch about the futility of existence, when it looked like it was going to bring Kylie back from the dead as a typically Christmas cop-out, only to snatch her away again in the cruelest fashion possible (I wonder what the Fear Factor kids made of that). But so many people died pointlessly without adding to the plot; Simon Dominguez is likening it with the space bus from Delta & The Bannermen, which is as ironic a comparison as one could ever get. He also doesn't like the new theme remix. I told hm he should be glad it's not Keff's.

Simon also doesn't like the new theme remix. I told hm he should be glad it's not Keff's

Dedicating a disaster movie to the memory of Verity Lambert is just one more example of how intrinsically wrong it all feels, though it's not actually inappropriate in the way that immediately springs to the fan-mind. After all, Verity did give us the equally grim, chaotic and cruel Dalek Invasion Of Earth. But that one was about conflict and hope; the Daleks were a palpable on-screen force for the Doctor to proactively oppose and overcome, almost as his duty, while no matter how bleak things got after episode one, the serial continued to exude a self-belief that human endeavour could eventually carry the day. Neither of those are true for Voyage Of The Damned, which for the most part views more like the untransmitted invasion and razing of the planet before the Doctor and party arrived.

Yet at the end of the day all comparisons with the old series are irrelevant. Despite its source influences, this is a thoroughly modern piece of television for a thoroughly modern Doctor. The Poseidon Adventure was made in 1973. Can you really see Jon Pertwee doing his own stunts for this and bellowing NOW LISTEN TO ME at the whimpering ragtags? He'd be rubbing a damn sight more than the back of his neck, I can tell you.